SEO for the CEO:

Here's a simple framework on how to create search forecasts that even beginner SEOs will be able to utilize: This was a great read on @sengineland from Rob Tindula.

This article walks you through a proposed model of creating SEO forecasts when presenting your projections to leadership: searchengineland.com/seo-projection…

Technical SEO Tip: In order to improve your crawl efficiency, Google recommends hosting as many resources as possible on third-party domains: This was a super interesting piece of information that I found in Google's latest "Crawling December" article. They created this article that gives users some insights on how Google crawling works along with some best practices.

If you're newer to crawling, it's a worthwhile quick-read. developers.google.com/search/blog/20…

New Ecommerce SEO article: Use Screaming Frog + ChatGPT to automate SEO text for category pages.

In 10 minutes, this process writes 250 pages: So I debated writing this article for a long time but super excited to collaborate with @screamingfrog on this one.

This process details how you can create that bottom of the page "SEO text" you see on category pages on commerce sites: screamingfrog.co.uk/using-ai-to-au…

Absolutely Epic: 130+ Tips For Ecommerce SEO.

This 20,000+ word post details strategies for technical SEO, product pages, content + more:

This guide on Freddie Chat features advice from different SEOs such as @thetafferboy , @SaraTaherSEO, @garrettsussman , @ViperChill , @Suganthanmn and more: freddiechatt.com/ecommerce-seo-…

SEO Tip: Write hundreds of meta descriptions in 5 minutes with Screaming Frog + their OpenAI integration.

Here's how to create them at scale: This year, Screaming Frog introduced their OpenAI integration. This is one of the biggest SEO integrations all year but really hasn't been talked about that much.

With the integration, you can directly feed your crawl data into ChatGPT, allowing you to automate tedious SEO tasks:
screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/tut…

A must-read SEO article: Forbes Marketplace is the biggest parasite SEO program in the world, abusing the search results for every topic imaginable

This article is more like investigative journalism than a traditional SEO article.

@LarsLofgren takes a deep look into Forbes Marketplace - the company that spearheads Forbes' SEO strategy and content production. @LarsLofgren 1. In 2020, Forbes partnered with a completely separate company for the affiliate side of the business.

This company is called Forbes Marketplace (publicly referred to as Forbes Advisor)

Whoa, very cool SEO article: How to use @screamingfrog custom extraction + a Cosine Similarity Python script to automate internal linking:

This is a really great article from @anaperezbotella. She created a Google Collab notebook that takes extracted text from your website and uses cosine similarity to automatically find internal linking opportunities on the site.

Here's the process: @screamingfrog @anaperezbotella 1. First you'll want to extract the text of each page you want to analyze. Navigate to a sample page with Chrome and right-click> Inspect > Copy > Copy XPath.

This will copy the X Path of the class on the page you want to analyze.

Technical SEO Tip: Not sure how Google is discovering a page?

You can uncover hidden crawl sources by using the URL Inspector tool: If you're seeing pages Google is crawling but you don't want it to be, you need to take action in order to prevent it from happening.

However, it's difficult to know what the best action is if you don't know the source of the crawl.

Fortunately, you can use the URL Inspector to figure out the source of these pages:

Dead-Simple SEO Tip: You can use Screaming Frog + their "Inlinks" feature to quickly identify pages that have very few internal links to them:

It's extremely common that over time as sites get bigger, it gets harder to keep track of all of your assets and the pages that you've built. This is true whether you're a large eCommerce sites with a lot of product pages, or a huge content site with a ton of resources. It's likely that there are pages that just haven't naturally received internal links.

Fortunately, you can use @screamingfrog to quickly identify pages that have very few internal links: 1. Open up Screaming Frog and perform a crawl of your site

SEO Tip: Lost your old title tags during a migration? Don't worry, @ahrefs actually saves historical versions of all of your site's titles.

We know that title tags are one of the most powerful elements in SEO and it's something that we're also changing frequently. Whether it's continual optimizing of a site or going through a complete site migration, changing title tags is one of the most common practices in SEO.

However, there might be instances where you want to reclaim title tags from previous versions. You may have forgotten what the previous title tag was or they may have gotten lost in a migration.

Here's how you find historical versions of your title tags: @ahrefs 1. Run your site through Ahrefs

Local SEO Tip: You can use DevTools "Sensors" functionality + Google Maps coordinates to emulate searches from any location that you want:

Oftentimes when you're analyzing search results, you want to see how they look in a particular location. You might be analyzing search results outside of your particular geography or in another country and want to emulate the search results.

Fortunately, you can use the "Sensors" functionality of Chrome DevTools to do this: 1. Perform a search for the query that you want to emulate

Technical SEO Tip: Screaming Frog will automatically identify the pages you're blocking in the robots.txt file + the matched command causing the exclusion:

This is a really great report in Screaming Frog that allows you to audit your robots.txt file at scale. Often times, site owners will test URLs one by one in order to see if they're getting blocked via the robots.txt file. While this can work for one-off tests, you might want to analyze your URLs to bulk to ensure that the exclusions are working as intended.

Fortunately, Screaming Frog allows you to audit this directly in the tool: 1. Open up Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog's "Rendered Page Screenshots" allow you to get screenshots of how your JavaScript content renders at scale. Here's how to use it:

While Google's testing tools are useful for seeing exactly how Google renders you content, there's no way to analyze content in bulk. Instead, you have to review page one by one in order to see how they render.

If you want to analyze how your JavaScript pages render in bulk, you can use Screaming Frog's "Rendered Page Screenshots": 1. Open up Screaming Frog

Whoa, this article shows how SEOs can use Screaming Frog's Embedding Extraction + Google Collab to identify related pages at scale:

This is a really great article from Gus Pelogia that showcases how you can use Screaming Frog to create embeddings for each page on your site. The embeddings serve as numeric representations of the page. You can then compare use these values to understand what pages on your site are related to each other:

To run this process, you'll need to perform the following process: 1. Ensure you have an OpenAI API Key. You'll need this to connect to Screaming Frog: help.openai.com/en/articles/49…

Want to get data on how Google's switch to pagination has impacted your site? Use Search Console to compare the performance data of "page 2" URLs:

If you're curious about whether Google sunsetting pagination has impacted your site or not, you can get data behind this.

Use this process to analyze the impact: 1. Use your rank tracker or Search Console to identify pages that are generally appearing on page 2.

Vector embeddings are probably one of the most important concepts in SEO today.

Let's talk about what they are and why all SEOs should learn about them:

Search engines are tasked with the incredibly complex task of understanding the web at scale. They're not only charged with the task of discovering the content on the web, but also understanding it and determining if it's relevant to the query users are searching for. This means that Google needs to find a reliable and inexpensive way that they can understand content.

Since machines operate better off numeric values, that's exactly what vector embeddings seek to do. Vector embeddings allow search engines to translate textual content and convert them into numeric representations that machines can better understand. Once your content is translated it's then plotted in a multi-dimension vector space.

Once the numerical values are plotted, machines can then directly see semantic relationships between them.

SEO Tip: Before any site migration, always save a crawl of the historical version of the site. This one action will make your migrations go 1000x smoother:

This has saved me so many times during large site migrations.

What many people don't realize is once your migration goes live, it can be VERY difficult to see what the site was like pre-migration. I can't tell you how many times earlier in my career I was forced to used The Wayback Machine to check on what the site's pervious URLs were and then manually reviewing if they were redirecting.

Exporting crawls before migrations made the migration process so much easier and gave me a lot more peace of mind. What I'll generally do is save a crawl a month before the migration is slated to go live: 1. Open up Screaming Frog

SEO Tip: You can see the next eligible site for a featured snippet. Simply filter out the winning domain to see Google's "next choice" for the snippet:

This is extremely helpful when performing research around how to optimize for a featured snippet. By being able to see the site that's "next in line", you can determine if the content on your page is even being considered for featured snippet inclusion. As well, you can get more data on what types of descriptions Google is pulling into the snippet for a given query.

Here's how you do it: 1. Search for the query that's returning a featured snippet

Ecommerce SEO Tip: Use Screaming Frog's Custom Search to discover "Out Of Stock" product pages accessible in your sitemap.xml:

On ecommerce sites, inventory is one the elements that's most prone to fluctuation. If not regularly managed, it's extremely common to have products still listed on the site, even though they're been sold out, are unavailable due to seasonality or more.

From an SEO perspective, you don't want to be including out of stock products in your sitemap.xml. You could be telling Google to crawl a large number of pages that actually aren't available.

Fortunately, you can use Screaming Frog to find out of stock products in the sitemap.xml: 1. Perform a "site:" search on your site for "Out Of Stock".

Identify the text that's associated with a product that's not available.

Show this to your boss the next time they question the short-term results of SEO. Even the most successful sites experience periods of decline:

In SEO, the path to success is rarely ever completely linear. Oftentimes, there's periods of decline that happen along the way. Sometimes they're short, but they can even happen over months or even years at a time.

Even the sites that dominate the search engines aren't immune to it:

The Home Depot: +238% growth and net +50M organic sessions in the last decade.

During that time have experienced drops of -37% and -31%. The latter drop lasted nearly a year.

Technical SEO Tip: You can use Screaming Frog's "Content Area" feature to only crawl the main content sections of your website:

Oftentimes when crawling sites, sections like your navigation and footer will add a lot of extra noise. When evaluating how much content is on a page, these sections can skew the numbers if you have robust navigations that have a lot of text.

Fortunately, Screaming Frog allows you to use the Content Area feature to filter these out of your reports: 1. Identify the HTML associated with your main content section. You can open up a page and click "Inspect" and then analyze the HTML classes in the bottom bar.