In partnership with @gosupercritical, @SearchPilot is now carbon neutral.

We have bought high quality permanent carbon removal for our entire emissions throughout our supply chain.

This means... We have bought:

11 tonnes of CO2 capture via biochar
5 tonnes via enhanced weathering
2 tonnes via direct air capture

As we work with more and more large and sophisticated SEO teams @SearchPilot, one of the most common new questions we get is about how SEO and product can work together most effectively. Here's some thoughts 🧵 In context, this is quite often about how SEO *testing* and product (or UX / CRO) *testing* can work together. But it's worth remembering that the question is more general - whether you're testing or not, you need a functional approach.

A crucial part of the ROI of a testing program is the ability to try more things, and try bolder things, safe in the knowledge that you won't roll out losers.

Here are 8 interesting negative test outcomes from @SearchPilot customers (compiled by my colleague @CraigBradford): 1. A whopping *20%* drop (be careful making untested title tag changes, kids) 😱

searchpilot.com/resources/case…

Sometimes when we say "it depends" in SEO, what we really mean is "I don't know" (& that's ok).

But sometimes it really does DEPEND - on other features of your site, on competition in the space, or on technical details.

Some times when our testing has shown that it depends: Adding FAQ schema is one of our most consistently-positive test types (at around 2/3 of tests being positive) BUT it isn't always positive. Adding FAQ schema to a page type that already had review and price schema resulted in a 5% DROP:

searchpilot.com/resources/case…

How can you tell if SEO advice is good or bad?

I think I've probably put more thought into this than most, as it has always mattered a lot to me when programming #SearchLove, that we amplified great advice.

So, a 🧵 Aside from just putting on a good conference, I believe this *really matters* in the real world, because I think that steps back in performance are at the root of a lot of underperforming SEO initiatives:
searchpilot.com/resources/blog…

I wanted to talk this week about one of the most advanced SEO subjects there is: internal linking The big takeaways from our testing are:

1. Internal links are important (these tests are some of our most consistently statistically significant)

2. We have surprisingly often found big benefits to the pages where the links are added, not just to the targets of those links

I found this article interesting: searchengineland.com/search-markete…

I'm not at all sure about the title (the power on the marketers' side is very distributed and subject to prisoner's dilemma-type issues) but the main article got me thinking in a few places. Most notably... ...being interested in @dannysullivan 's previous view that "I’ve wished for years that Google would let site owners have something like a “Yes, I’m really sure I want you to use my title tag” tag."

searchengineland.com/google-title-w…

I know a lot of folks who started out in SEO, and are now in marketing leadership positions.

One challenge is that it’s hard to stay plugged in to SEO news, but you still have oversight of the SEO channel.

Does this sound like you? Here’s what you need to know: As ever, there is a lot of bad information and rumour, so this is all based on the large number of tests we get to run @SearchPilot. Here's what Google is *really* doing:

I stopped complaining about the challenges with understanding how Google parses robots.txt and made (a version of) their open source parser available on the web instead: distilled.net/resources/free… Stopped complaining *for now* I should say

OK. Here we go - thread of answers to questions that came up during my #FOS19 presentation in Amsterdam today - about SEO / CRO / full funnel testing (read more here: distilled.net/resources/anno… ) cc @basvandenbeld Q: how do you test the homepage of a website?

A: although you can run CRO tests on a homepage, SEO (and hence full funnel) tests require a site section with multiple pages with similar template. You can only really do before/after tests. [contd]