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SEO updates you need to know
Our sponsor: The SEO Mindset & Search with Candour
Live podcast - 9 April in Brighton
How To Build Your Personal Brand
Whether you’re looking to elevate your professional identity, expand your influence, or attract more customers, this event will provide actionable insights and inspiration to help you shine.
Sarah McDowell & Tazmin Suleman (The SEO Mindset) & Jack Chambers-Ward (Search with Candour) are teaming up again to bring actionable tips and advice on authentic personal branding and share their own experiences.
📅Wednesday 9 April 2025 (the night before brightonSEO)
🎫'Pay what you want' tickets
📍Projects the Lanes, Brighton
🍕Free pizza
🥤Free drinks
🎁Giveaways and gifts
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Search with Candour podcast
Pagination best practice & Google's secret weapon against spam
Season 4: Episode 9
In this week's episode of Search With Candour, Jack Chambers-Ward & Mordy Oberstein from Unify Brand Marketing cover how brands can set themselves apart in an increasingly noisy digital landscape.
They discuss how brands can effectively manage their SERPs and audience perceptions as well as the significance of brand mentions.
It’s quite a wide-ranging conversation that touches on everything from performance marketing to pro wrestling and baseball!
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This week's solicited tips:
AI fail English? That's unpossible!
Unless your “AI content workflow” is being fed new information; such as a human creating something, or it’s piped into a proprietary data source, you’re highly likely to be building something you will later regret. 😢
🌈 “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” is some excellent general business (and life?) advice that applies to SEO too.
🪃 “it works until it doesn’t” is generally what we call these strategies that will normally show blistering results at the start, and then end in disaster.
“Steal my content workflow worth $4,900!” - every single one of these I have looked at don’t deliver what they promise, they are usually fake hooks to sell you stuff down the line 🎣
There is so much AI FOMO about, don’t buy into it. Stay calm and have a great week 🦦
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No tech debt, no 'it depends' no shame
Technical SEO is an amplifier of other activities. This means you reap its rewards every single day. Good technical SEO means you can squeeze an extra 5%, 10%, 25% out of everything you're spending on your website - how much is that over 5 years? 💰💰
☝ Technical SEO won't save a bad site. If you aren't ranking because nobody knows who you are or your content is bad (or missing), there are more immediate things you can do to make inroads.
🏃 "Technical SEO should only take days" is an attractive proposition, and is usually the optimal "phase 1" approach for small businesses just starting SEO. Unless they're really unlucky, there is usually more value investing in something else.
🏢 Enterprise. I'm sorry, this dream is probably out of your reach. Business units and priorities mean there is Jira and internal competition for resource. Any SEOs working with large companies will tell you the reality is it can take many months to get implementation completed. That's just how it works.
🏃 Outside of both of these scenarios, there is lots of value in fixing "the root cause". For instance, you've done your "few days of technical SEO" and added your schema manually with JSON-LD in Google Tag Manager. How does that work when you add new pages? Another manual process because of technical debt. The ideal solution is to fix your tooling so these improvements are just part of the process with minimal extra effort.
↘️ Proper prioritisation means you'll get diminishing returns on subsequent technical tasks, so it's also very usual to never "finish" because there are other things of more value to work on.
I did all that without saying ᶦᵗ ᵈᵉᵖᵉⁿᵈˢ 🤠
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That's one fine looking website...
Even if you've done a wonderful job on your SEO audit, it will have no business impact unless it is implemented correctly, so let's talk about some of that process ⤵️
🏁 Validation: Is the process you go through with the client on the issues you have identified to figure out:
1/ "Do we even care about this?": I've completed audits where I've found issues in sections of the site, only to be told the client that part of the business wasn't a priority for them. There is no point trying to force change where it isn't wanted!
2/ "How difficult is this?": Usually a discussion with the devs about the realities of their current systems, priorities, tech debt, and resource. I've been surprised that relatively simply changes have sometimes proved almost impossible, and othertimes significant changes could be made quickly. You can't give a final prioritisation of tasks when you don't know the true cost of implementation.
✅ QA: Regardless of documentation you provide, meetings you have, emails you send, you should check the changes (ideally before they go live). I've caught hundreds of fixes that have introduced other (sometimes worse) issues, or solutions that to be very blunt, someone hasn't understood and is trying to blag. It's not a great look trying to backtrack on things on live, have a process to check. Apart from investigating individual fixes, nne of Sitebulb's features is it can automatically compare to the last run audit, so you can quickly get an overview of how issues tracked there are being resolved on larger sites.
👀 Monitoring: You're here because SEO mistakes were made, and it will happen again. Sites change, things get broken, people that haven't been upskilled will make the same mistakes, new people make new ones. You can't do your audit and then walk off into the sunset. You need a system to flag this Systems like ContentKing when even small things like page titles have changed. Sitebulb also has a cloud version now that we use at Candour to periodically check in on sites.
Finally, for transparency, neither Sitebulb or ContentKing paid me for this post (or sponsor this newsletter!), I am a customer and pay both of them 😅
All of the above is also why technical SEO doesn't usually get done in "a few days" 😉
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Does it make you feel superior to tear down people’s content?
“Well, I think it’s high quality content” - Been there before? You’re always going to be biased about things you’ve had a hand in creating, so take a data-led approach to deciding if the content is good ⤵️
I’ve seen lots of abstract ways people have used to try and infer if content is good; bounce rate, time on page, engagement rates, but….
😲 Have you just tried asking them?😲
For instance, if you’re producing informational content, a simple:
“Was this article helpful? 👍👎” button at the bottom of every page.
Then link this up to your Google Analytics. 📈
While you’ll also have some bias (people more often respond negatively than positively), this will apply across the board, so you have an adequate base for comparison.
If you need to work on improving your content, you’ve got a great data point to start work on outliers that are downvoted, so you can ask:
- Why is this content not meeting user expectations?
- Are we missing some key information?
- Is the current information displayed badly?
- Did they just not like what was served?
You can of course, do more qualitative assessments from there, but there is literally no downside to collecting this data upfront.
All credit to Arnout Hellemans who made me see this incredibly obvious truth a couple of years ago 🤝
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I, for one, welcome our new noindex overlords
For those that subscribe to the "noindex, follow" thoughts and prayers of SEO, it's worth knowing that if you have a "noindex" Google will not attempt to process the javascript on your page. ❎
This means if your links require client-side JS rendering, it doubly won't work 😉
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