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SEO updates you need to know
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Search with Candour podcast
Improve your content with storytelling techniques
Season 3: Episode 49
Jack Chambers-Ward he discusses storytelling, copywriting, and content strategy with Will Slater, the creative content specialist at 43 Clicks North.
Will uses his experience as a writer and photographer to explain how even bad ideas lead to great ones, the importance of curiosity, and the intricacies of creating content that resonates emotionally with your audience.
Jack & Will explore how storytelling principles from novels, comics, and even music can enhance your marketing efforts. Plus, learn valuable tips for structuring your content, engaging specific audiences, and mastering the art of concise and impactful writing.
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This week's solicited SEO tips:
A good digital PR piece can earn links for years
One of the many advantages of earning digital PR types of links, apart from getting links in places you can't buy them is their ability to scale.
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๐ One of my favourite campaigns I worked on was a "Flights to Mars" April Fool's joke with Expedia. We made a set of interactive landing pages about Expedia launching flights to Mars, along with a phone number that got answered, and even "TV spot" type ads (which I promise you looked good 15 years ago).
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๐ While the campaign was a huge success, attracting hundreds of links, and going viral on both Digg and Reddit - the kicker is, I saw it is still attracting links over a decade later in various "best April Fools" roundups!
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While there are lots of low-effort ways to get links through digital PR, sometimes pushing the boat out on a big idea can reap long-term rewards.
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Nearly 11% of mobile pages have invalid HTML
Having invalid HTML elements within your <head> can be a big deal. Why? ๐ค
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Google's documentation (link in comments) reads: "Once Google detects one of these invalid elements, it assumes the end of the <head> element and stops reading any further elements in the <head> element." - That's a problem when there are things in there you want Google to act upon! ๐ซ
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According to the SEO section of the 2024 Web Almanac (written by Jamie Indigo, Dave Smart, Mikael Araรบjo and Michael Lewittes), a whopping 10.9% of the mobile pages analysed contained invalid HTML in the <head> ๐คฏ
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If you have time, well worth a look through the end of year Web Almanac ๐
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How to catch SEO issues that try to hide from you ๐ฅท
If you read the SEO section of the Web Almanac (see the post ab, you would have seen the invalid <head> issue I highlighted had a different rate of occurrence on mobile vs desktop. ๐ฑ
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If you are only doing an audit with one configuration, it's possible you are missing SEO issues or at least, discovering the root cause ๐
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Here are 3 settings I like to make sure I cover in an audit:
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๐ค User-agent: If possible, I will always crawl as Googlebot, to see what the site is showing Google. I will almost always do another crawl with a standard user-agent to see if the site is purposely making any changes for Google. I've seen huge slip ups in this process (including a big site with millions of visitors showing a 100% blank site to Google).
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๐ฑ Device: Googlebot crawls as a mobile, so this is always the priority, but I like to have secondary crawls as desktop to again see if the site is altering anything between them.
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๐ JS vs non-JS: So important, a lot of crawlers will now automatically do the non-JS crawl at the same time as a rendered JS crawl. Anything on your HTML can be modified by JS, links inserted, <head> added to, redirects, it's vital to know what is happening. Sitebulb gives one of my favourite comparisons here.
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Happy auditing!
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People Also Ask snippets change quite regularly
50% of passages are gone within 6 months and 99% gone within 21 months (about 1.75 years).
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The oldest we have data for is 5 years.
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Don't use ChatGPT for entity analysis
Gloves are off, the people telling you to do stuff like give ChatGPT URLs for entity analysis and keyword research are charlatans. ๐
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Here's a video of ChatGPT giving an "entity analysis" and breakdown of content on..... a URL that doesn't exist and 404s - after "searching the web", of course.
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This tip is inspired by an excellent video I saw by Jess Sankhavaram-Peck. You should also go and follow Jess if you like advice from people who know what they are talking about ๐
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Happy Friday to those not selling SEO magic beans for clout ๐
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