The Pragmatic SEO

A cheatsheet to Google’s advanced search operators

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Every week I share no more than 3 hands-on resources that I carefully handpick from the top-experts and best practitioners in SEO and digital marketing. You won’t find FOMO inducing theories and convoluted predictions in these posts. I want to help you build long-lasting SEO and digital marketing strategies with proven methods you can implement today. Previous editions can be found here.

⏰ #NOW - WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO

As I am writing this week’s edition, I’m on a train coming back from a BIG client presentation in Luxemburg. The kind of presentation I stood way too late to prepare 😅I’m happy to report it all went fine, and that I have missed nomadic working.

I have also been trying to fit in a few hours to renew some industry certificates, and get a few new ones perhaps. I find it interesting to see how the world of certifications has evolved in the past years and their impact for clients and partnerships. I might write a piece on the subject.

👓 #FOCUS - THE ONE THING YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT

Dave Elliott from BuiltVisible put together a very handy cheatsheet about advanced search operators in Google and, more importantly, how to use them to find technical SEO issues and indexation errors. I found the most interesting part of the article was “How to use search operators for technical audits” where Dave explains how to:

  • Check your site with site:
  • Check if filler content has been indexed with site: and indexed:
  • Find duplicate titles with site: and intitle:
  • Check if non-secure pages have been indexed with site: and inurl:http or -inurl:https
  • Finding subdomains that you were not aware of
  • Finding all the non-html content on a site with filetype:
  • Find specific parameters that have been indexed with inurl:?ie=
  • Finding internal link opportunities by combining site:, -site: with the URL where you want to link to and intext: with the relevant search term.
  • Find URLs with a different domain
As you see, there are many easy ways to use Google Search operators to uncover issues in technical SEO and this article is covers a lot of it.

 

Read "How to use Google advanced search operators to find indexation and technical SEO issues"

⚙️ #TOOL – Helping you up your game

Technical SEO audits are the best way to determine if your website’s performance could be increased by upgrading its crawlability, adapting its international SEO tags, or making it a bit faster to load.

As simple as it may sound, conducting a Technical SEO audit means you have to pay attention to what seems like a million details. Benjamin Estes from Distilled created a handy checklist to make sure you won’t miss anything. What I found interesting with this checklist, is that it is made to help you answer questions, not just randomly check items with no context. Each row contains a problem you should check and find a solution for.

Read "Comprehensive Technical SEO Audit"

🤓 #READ - THE BEST OF SEO BLOGS

Lucinda Southern from Digiday wrote an interesting piece on how publishers are reducing the number of articles they produce to grow larger audiences. Publishers like Le Monde or The Guardian cut their articles published by over 25% and saw and increase in traffic.

Read "Publishers are growing audiences by producing less content"

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Do you need help with your digital marketing strategy? Are you planning to work on your website’s SEO? Would you be interested in having me talk at your conference or train your team?

Here are the links to read more about me, check out my former experiences, find out more on the services I provide and contact me.

Latest editions of The Pragmatic SEO

Write Title Tags that Drive Clicks

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Every week I share no more than 3 hands-on resources that I carefully handpick from the top-experts and best practitioners in SEO and digital marketing. You won’t find FOMO inducing theories and convoluted predictions in these posts. I want to help you build long-lasting SEO and digital marketing strategies with proven methods you can implement today. Previous editions can be found here.

⏰ #NOW - WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO

This week, Women in Tech SEO released a list of SEO consultants and freelancers we can share amongst the industry. I’m honoured to be part of this amazing group! 😍

I have been pretty busy lately with a new SEO audit for a client, an on-site consultation for a local business and some on-page optimisations. I feel like I’m sending a quote per day, which is great! 👌

I also participated in last week’s #SEMrushchat on Digital Marketing Conference Tips for 2020 and was featured in their roundup article. If you are planning on joining a conference or meet-up in the upcoming months, you will find a lot of tips to make the most out of the event in the article.

Finally, I got a new plant in my office, and that makes me happy 🌱😊

 

👓 #FOCUS - THE ONE THING YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT

When we write content, we often start with a structure, then go on writing all the paragraphs, creating the graphs, and, of course, making sure everything is SEO friendly. And then there’s the title… Should it be catchy? Descriptive? A bit of both?

In his very detailed guide, Dominic Woodman gives his insight on all the little things that constitute a good title:

  • The length
  • What it should make people do
  • How to test it
  • How to make titles for templates
  • And some valuable learnings form his own tests

After reading his guide, I recommend noting down a few ideas you hadn’t thought of, and adding them to your checklist of things to do before hitting the “publish” button.

Read "How to Write an Incredible Title Tag"

🤓 #READ - THE BEST OF SEO BLOGS

Managing multiple Google My Business profiles can already be a bit tedious, but how are you suppose to manage if you have multiple businesses at the same address? Miriam Ellis wrote a great piece, in the form of an FAQ, where she goes through most of the scenarios you can encounter, from the case where you work from a co-working space, to having different seasonal business at the same place.

Read "Google My Business: FAQ for Multiple Businesses at the Same Address"

⚙️ #TOOL – Helping you up your game

With over 65 conferences totalling 520 talks from 375 different speakers, SEOslides.page is an awesome resource.  Chris Johnson created a hub for all the talks happening in the industry, with direct links to the slides, recaps, audio or video recordings of each talk. This project is collaborative, which means you can submit your talk via GitHub repository.

Visit SEOslides.page

A little extra piece of info for you

It has been confirmed by John Mueller, if you have an image with an alt tag within a h1 heading, the alt text counts as h1 for Google.

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Do you need help with your digital marketing strategy? Are you planning to work on your website’s SEO? Would you be interested in having me talk at your conference or train your team?

Here are the links to read more about me, check out my former experiences, find out more on the services I provide and contact me.

Latest editions of The Pragmatic SEO

How to Fix your Internal Linking Mistakes

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Every week I share no more than 3 hands-on resources that I carefully handpick from the top-experts and best practitioners in SEO and digital marketing. You won’t find FOMO inducing theories and convoluted predictions in these posts. I want to help you build long-lasting SEO and digital marketing strategies with proven methods you can implement today. Previous editions can be found here.

⏰ #NOW - WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO

There have been a few updates on my website this week, especially on the About page. I hadn’t updates the page since I move back to Strasbourg.

This past week, while rewatching the Silicon Valley TV Show – which I love – I learned about the IPFS protocol. It’s basically an equivalent to the HTTP protocol, but distributed. I just started learning about it so please excuse my approximative definition. If you have some interest in other ways the internet could function, I highly recommend checking it out, along with Tim Berners-Lee’s (yes, the one who invented the internet) project Solid.

In more SEO-related news, if you have some affiliate links on your website, John Mueller recommends using a rel=sponsored tag to indicate to Google this is a paid link.

👓 #FOCUS - THE ONE THING YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT

The SEMrush team conducted a study about common mistakes in link building and Elena Terenteva reported on how to fix them. The whole article is really well made with great infographics for each case and a link to a resource to help you fix each issue.

Why should you care?

If backlinks are a well-known ranking factor, internal links are often forgotten and just as important. They help distribute ranking authority though the website and have an effect on the crawlability of your website.
 
I always recommend to my clients to pay attention to their internal linking because a few, cheap, quick fixes can make a huge improvement on rankings, demanding usually a lot less effort than link acquisition.
Read "The Most Common Internal Link Building Mistakes: A SEMrush Study"

🤓 #READ - THE BEST OF SEO BLOGS

UTM parameters are elements you can add to your URL to track where your users are coming from in Google Analytics. Although Google my Business is a Google product, the traffic sources you find in Google Analytics corresponding to the links you set up on the GMB platform are sometimes listed as direct or organic traffic.

To better unify those sources, you need to tag your URLs. In her very detailed article, Claire Carlile explains how you should tag each link you put on Google My Business: primary links, Google Posts, Google Products. You’ll then be able to track how your actions are performing both on Google Analytics and in the Google Search Console.

Read "Claire’s Guide to UTM Tagging For Google My Business"

⚙️ #TOOL – Helping you up your game

Glen Allsopp, founder of Detailed.com created a Chrome extension for SEOs. It enables you to get insights on a page right in your browser, check out the different tags, see more detailed information from your favourite SEO tool, highlight text and find if there’s any duplicate of that piece of content, and check if the canonical tags and URL match.

I found it’s a very handy tool to get primary information on a page, and correct elements quickly.

Check out the Detailed Chrome extension for SEO

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Do you need help with your digital marketing strategy? Are you planning to work on your website’s SEO? Would you be interested in having me talk at your conference or train your team?

Here are the links to read more about me, check out my former experiences, find out more on the services I provide and contact me.

Latest editions of The Pragmatic SEO

Learning Python for SEO

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Every week I share no more than 3 hands-on resources that I carefully handpick from the top-experts and best practitioners in SEO and digital marketing. You won’t find FOMO inducing theories and convoluted predictions in these posts. I want to help you build long-lasting SEO and digital marketing strategies with proven methods you can implement today. Previous editions can be found here.

⏰ #NOW - WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO

This week I have been working on an SEO audit for a new client, mainly focused on keyword opportunities and link acquisition for the moment. I plan on publishing a more in-depth “Work with me” page on this website with a breakdown of the processes I use and package examples for potential clients. I’m not the best at selling myself, so I’m open to suggestions and advice!

It’s trip planning season! I’ll travel in the upcoming weeks to Metz in the Lorraine region, Luxemburg city to see a client, the French Alps for some winter sports ⛷ and Brighton next April for BrightonSEO. If you are around, let me know and we’ll grab a coffee ☕️

I have been wanting to up my coding game for some time now. I’m proficient in HTML and CSS, and I want to improve my skills in JavaScript and Python. I recently started following online courses on those topics 👩🏻‍🏫 Wish me luck!

I also participated in last week’s #SEMrushchat about the Featured Snippet Update.

👓 #FOCUS - THE ONE THING YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT

As I mentioned, I’m in the process of learning Python.  Python is very useful for task automation, image optimization, scraping websites, analyzing keywords and Google Search Console data, just to name a few. Learning a new programming language, especially when you’re not a developer, can be quite overwhelming. Luckily, Britney Muller made a whole Whiteboard Friday video on the topic, featuring Pumpkin 🐍

Read the transcript of "Intro to Python - Whiteboard Friday"

🤓 #READ - THE BEST OF SEO BLOGS

Link building is a hard game, especially with journalists who receive hundreds of requests each day. Knowing what journalists write about, how they choose their topics and more importantly, what information they need to make an article can drastically improve – and speed up – your link acquisition strategy.

In this article, Laura Crimmons breaks down research she did with collaborated on which they analysed the 1,000 most recent and 1,000 most shared articles in Tech, Travel, Health, Entertainment and Personal Finance. The research unveiled which publishers were more likely to include follow links in their articles, what keywords were more likely to bring links and the topics that were the most written about, as well as publishing frequency data.

Depending on your field of work, you can tailor your approach to increase your chances of landing a juicy link 🙂

Read "How to pitch what journalists want"

Related resource: Link Acquisition Tactics.

🤓 #READ - THE BEST OF SEO BLOGS

Here’s a page you should bookmark for future reference. Fiona Soum from BuiltVisible shared her cheat sheet for data manipulation in Excel. Her post is particularly useful if you have to truncate queries, extract specific words, work on your meta tags’ lengths or categorize cell content.

Read "Excel formulas for SEOs: cheatsheet and cell manipulation"

Related resource: Categorize keywords automatically according to the buyer’s intent.

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Do you need help with your digital marketing strategy? Are you planning to work on your website’s SEO? Would you be interested in having me talk at your conference or train your team?

Here are the links to read more about me, check out my former experiences, find out more on the services I provide and contact me.

Latest editions of The Pragmatic SEO

Get more clicks on mobile results pages

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Every week I share no more than 3 hands-on resources that I carefully handpick from the top-experts and best practitioners in SEO and digital marketing. You won’t find FOMO inducing theories and convoluted predictions in these posts. I want to help you build long-lasting SEO and digital marketing strategies with proven methods you can implement today. Previous editions can be found here.

⏰ #NOW - WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO

This week was all about starting new things:

  • working with a new client 🥳
  • meetings for (I hope🤞) future collaborations
  • planning future trips 💺
  • finally making my Google My Business page 📍
  • and even making bread for the first time! 🍞

I also participated in last week’s #SEMrushchat about Creating Content That Will Drive Results.

👓 #FOCUS - THE ONE THING YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT

Improving CTR (Click Through Rate) is a constant concern of SEOs. Since Google’s big updates of the mobile SERP, and with an ever-growing part of searches being done on mobile, we should pay more attention to the specificities of mobile results, and how it can affect the CTR of our websites.

In this article, Ann Smarty gives a breakdown of ways to improve your CTR on mobile.  Here are a few of the key elements I found super useful: 

  •  Learn how to write better headlines and include a call to action
  • Optimise the images that will be featured directly in the SERP
  • Use tools like TextOptimizer to work on your meta description
  • Use breadcrumb Schema

There are loads of other useful resources and guides listed in Ann’s article, so check it out!

Read "How to Make Your Google Mobile Search Results More Clickable"

📺 #WATCH – THE VIDEO YOU SHOULD HAVE A LOOK AT

Luke Carthy shares in this talk from the Optimisey Meetup how to use your discontinued products to your benefit for SEO. 

The products on your e-commerce website will get backlinks through their lifetime. What will your potential customer do if he/she finds a 404 after following a link from his/her favourite blog? Most probably, go somewhere else.

Luke gives many useful techniques to use those out of date URLs for which people may search for, or at least have interest in buying something similar.

⚙️ #TOOL - HELPING YOU UP YOUR GAME

Scraping Google Search features using XPath.

 

… And that’s where I lost many readers. 😅

Okay, keep cool, it’s gonna be alright.

via GIPHY

Let’s break that vocabulary down:

  • Scraping: a little script/robot/program/automated piece of code is going to read through a page, in this case, a result page, and fetch for you on this page the items you need and put them in a spreadsheet.
  • XPath: a syntax that selects items in an XML document.

What’s the point?

In the last few years, Google has added a lot of features to result pages, directly pulled from the websites.  On top of page titles and meta descriptions, we now have features snippets or position zero, the knowledge panel or related questions – the “people also ask” section. Understanding how the SERP is structured for your queries and what information is pulled in is a great way to figure out what the Google algorithm wants from your website and get ahead of your competition.

How do you set it up? How should you use the gathered data?

For the setup part, I will refer you to the article Patrick Langridge, Head of SEO at Screaming Frog, wrote on the subject. He explains in detail how to use XPath and Screaming Frog to get the data from the related questions section on the SERP and analyse it.

This will help you better understand what your potential customers need from you in terms of information.

Read "How to Scrape Google Search Features Using XPath"

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Please select the ways you would like to hear from me:

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Do you need help with your digital marketing strategy? Are you planning to work on your website’s SEO? Would you be interested in having me talk at your conference or train your team?

Here are the links to read more about me, check out my former experiences, find out more on the services I provide and contact me.

Latest editions of The Pragmatic SEO

Categorize keywords automatically according to buyer’s intent

by

Every week I share no more than 3 hands-on resources that I carefully handpick from the top-experts and best practitioners in SEO and digital marketing. You won’t find FOMO inducing theories and convoluted predictions in these posts. I want to help you build long-lasting SEO and digital marketing strategies with proven methods you can implement today. Previous editions can be found here.

⏰ #NOW - WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO

You know how you sometimes put off a task because you feel it’s going to be a complicated one? That’s what I did with adding ReCaptcha to my forms. After months of -often hilarious- spam mail in my inbox, I finally took time to get it up and running. 5 minutes. That’s all it took. 🤦🏻‍♀️

I have also been working on SEO packages for potential clients. I plan on publishing information about them soon.

In other news, you are now 12 subscribers to my newsletter! ✉️🙏

👓 #FOCUS - THE ONE THING YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT

When we work on keywords and try to understand how they benefit our website, we look for volumes, rankings and length. As the algorithms comprehend human behaviour better and better, user intent has become a subtle yet key component to look at.

The idea behind user intent is that the context in which the search is made by the user should impact the result. In other words, understanding why the user is making a query will deliver better results.

For example, if you search for “Strasbourg” you could be searching for the weather in Strasbourg, tourism information, or even historical facts. If you search for “Strasbourg hotel”, then you are probably more interested in booking a room. That’s a transactional query.  If you search for “Strasbourg population”, you are in an informational process. If you search for “Strasbourg website”, you are most probably searching for the exact URL of the city’s website, thus your intent is navigational.

So, know you have all your keywords from Google Search Console (or somewhere else) how are you going to figure out the user intent behind each of them? You could totally do that by hand, but Dan Brooks figured out a formula to automate keyword categorization on Google Sheets!

In his article Dan explains the whole process of creating the *magic* formula and the resources he used to get to this result.

Read "How to Automatically Categorise Keywords for the Buyer’s Journey"

Related resource: Excel formulas for SEOs: cheatsheet and cell manipulation.

🤓 #READ - THE BEST OF SEO BLOGS

What does the perfect blog post look like? Probably not like the one you are reading now 😅

As part of the Global State of Marketing Report for 2019, SEMrush and Alina Petrova researched the key factors that make articles performant. Below are the key elements of the study like the length and type of H1, the depth of headings, if there are lists in the article and, of course, content length.

In encourage you to go further and read the article to get more in depth in each element, especially when it comes to the link between the number of backlinks and the type of H1. 😉

Read "The Anatomy of Top Performing Articles: Successful vs. Invisible Content – SEMrush Study"

🎧 #LISTEN - THE PODCAST YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO

At the September 2019 BrightonSEO conference, Carrie Rose from RiseatSeven gave a great talk about getting awesome links with awesome outreach emails.

I personally assisted to her talk, and I was really surprised by the amount of available resources online that can be used to make the perfect email that will land an article. With a bit of creativity and research, any brand can get a great backlink!

I suggest you follow the episode with the slides linked below 😉

Read "Brighton SEO – Carrie Rose slides on creating sexy AF outreach emails to land sexy AF links"

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Please select the ways you would like to hear from me:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of my emails.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Do you need help with your digital marketing strategy? Are you planning to work on your website’s SEO? Would you be interested in having me talk at your conference or train your team?

Here are the links to read more about me, check out my former experiences, find out more on the services I provide and contact me.

Latest editions of The Pragmatic SEO

Re-optimize your content with the right tools

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Every week I share no more than 3 hands-on resources that I carefully handpick from the top-experts and best practitioners in SEO and digital marketing. You won’t find FOMO inducing theories and convoluted predictions in these posts. I want to help you build long-lasting SEO and digital marketing strategies with proven methods you can implement today. Previous editions can be found here.

⏰ #NOW - WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO

In the traditional French way, I have been sending my New Year wishes to my professional contacts a bit late. Well, in France, there’s no issue to sending them until late January 🤷‍♀️ I’ve had lovely responses from former colleagues and clients, which is great!

I have also been in contact with a few people to take on new projects. 🤞

As for The Pragmatic SEO, the newsletter is up and running! ✉️ It took me some time to figure out a few details. You can subscribe here.

In other news, I had my 30th birthday party this weekend 🎉 Booking a huge manor for a whole 2-day getaway trip with friends and family was definitely a good idea! 🥂

👓 #FOCUS - THE ONE THING YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT

How to determine what content you should re-optimize on your website? How should you re-optimize it? What does content re-optimization does to your rankings?

Based on previous studies, content that is being actualized and completed with new information has good chances to rank higher and quicker.

In his guide, Jeff Baker explains how to find the keywords that are actually important to your business and how to find the right content to work on while avoiding cannibalization. On top of a complete methodology filled with examples, he also share the tools he uses to go through this process.

 

Read "How to Use Tools to Determine Which Content to Re-Optimize: A Step-by-Step Guide"

⚙️ #TOOL - HELPING YOU UP YOUR GAME

The good thing about SEO is that you get a lot of data. The bad thing about SEO… is that you get a lot of data. To better understand this volume of information and turn it into an actual plan of action, the simplest Google Sheets can do wonders.

In her article, Aleyda Solis shares how she uses Google Sheets  for SEO tasks. Learn how to validate your 301 redirections, find which pages need links to improve their performance and validate the relevance of your metadata.

Read "9 Practical Ways to easily use Google Sheets for SEO tasks"

🎧 #LISTEN - THE PODCAST YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO

Most websites are not a one-person enterprise, and as marketers we are bound to work with those strange creatures that are developers. Okay, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. In fact, I live with one, and I came to realize developers were in fact very cool people!

If you are into technical SEO, or if you just want to better understand how the internet works, I highly recommend you have a chat once in a while with your dev team. Not only will you learn a lot, but you will also understand how they function and what their priorities are.

In this episode of Open Dialog, Sam Marsden chats with Jamie Alberico about her work as a Technical Website Consultant at Not A Robot and how she works effectively with developers.

Head to 23:57 to hear about working with developers. 😉

Do you need help with your digital marketing strategy? Are you planning to work on your website’s SEO? Would you be interested in having me talk at your conference or train your team?

Here are the links to read more about me, check out my former experiences, find out more on the services I provide and contact me.

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Latest editions of The Pragmatic SEO

Site architecture for SEO

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Every week I share no more than 3 hands-on resources that I carefully handpick from the top-experts and best practitioners in SEO and digital marketing. You won’t find FOMO inducing theories and convoluted predictions in these posts. I want to help you build long-lasting SEO and digital marketing strategies with proven methods you can implement today. Previous editions can be found here.

⏰ #NOW - WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO

HELLO 2020!!  🎉 Happy New Year to all of you. May 2020 be the perfect beginning to a new decade for you, I wish you a many fun projects and great moments to remember.

The past weeks have been dedicated to friends and family. The holidays are a special moment for us as we celebrate Christmas nearly every day for a week with our families, then head on to a 2-day trip for New Years Eve, and finally celebrate my birthday on 2nd January. That’s right, I just turned 30! 🥳

⚠️NEW! ⚠️ You can now subscribe to The Pragmatic SEO and receive your 3 handpicked resources every Tuesday directly in your inbox! Of course, your contact information won’t be shared with anyone, and I will only use your email to send you The Pragmatic SEO. If you’re not happy with it, just hit “Unsubscribe”.

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👓 #FOCUS - THE ONE THING YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT

Site architecture, or how your website is structured, impact the way Googlebot is going to crawl and understand how you organize your content. The more important the information is for your business, the easiest it should be for users and bots to find.

If the concept is pretty easy to understand and implement on a small website, it can create many headaches when it comes to larger sites with thousands of pages.

Richard Baxter is the founder of BuiltVisible, a great agency based in London, with whom I had an interview a few years ago that I really enjoyed. 😉

In this in-depth guide, he gives actionnable steps to understand how your website’s architecture is impacting crawl-ability and your rankings, and how to remediate to common issues you will have identified.

Read "An SEO’s guide to site architecture"
PageRank distribution along a simple site architecture

⚙️ #TOOL – Helping you up your game

Exploding Topics is a cool new tool that analyzes searches and conversations on the internet to understand what topics are starting to trend. Topics are sorted by categories. The idea for this tool is to help content creators come up with innovative and trending content ideas.

The graph above shows how the topic “solo travel” has been more trending this past month compared to the past semester. This tool was developed by Backlinko ‘s founder Brian Dean and Josh Howarth.

📺 #WATCH – THE VIDEO YOU SHOULD HAVE A LOOK AT

Let’s finish this first edition of the year on a lighter note: making fake news for links. In 2019’s SearchLeeds,  Oliver Brett, International SEO Rockstar (his words, not mine 😅) at Screaming Frog,  gave a talk about his team’s original link acquisition techniques.

The idea behind fake news for links, or linkbait, is to create content more or less related to the company that can be funny, unexpected or even cringy. Fake products, unexpected news and incredible offers (where you don’t make any promise of course) are interesting techniques to dig in.

Just remember to be funny in your writing, but realistic in your visuals, so that people want to click and link to your page.

Do you need help with your digital marketing strategy? Are you planning to work on your website’s SEO? Would you be interested in having me talk at your conference or train your team?

Here are the links to read more about me, check out my former experiences, find out more on the services I provide and contact me.

Latest editions of The Pragmatic SEO

Optimize your images for SEO

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Every week I share no more than 3 hands-on resources that I carefully handpick from the top-experts and best practitioners in SEO and digital marketing. You won’t find FOMO inducing theories and convoluted predictions in these posts. I want to help you build long-lasting SEO and digital marketing strategies with proven methods you can implement today. Previous editions can be found here.

⏰ #Now - What I have been up to

As I am now settled in Strasbourg, France, I’m getting back on Meetup to find new networking opportunities and ways to connect with other freelancers. Networking has always been a tricky thing for me so I’m definitely working on it for 2020!

I tried a hack for Google My Business posts this week. I read about it on Reddit (couldn’t find the post, sorry). Apparently, posting just a photo and no text would be seen by users as a huge image, thus giving more visibility to the post. Unfortunately it did not work for the listing I manage and I believe it was just another UX test from Google. It’s all trial and error, right? Please let me know if you try this too and how it turned out 😉

On another note, I have also been making one gingerbread a week for the past month, and never took time to post it on #SEObread 🤦🏻‍♀️

👓 #Focus - The one thing you should check out

A big part of SEO is content,  and an important part of content are images. They attract users and make your page more accessible and engaging. They are also responsible for acquiring organic traffic, especially in niches where infographics, step-by-step pictures and product photography are essential.

In this guide, Isaac Justesen provides 9 Steps to Optimize Images for SEO, guiding you through tools to resize your images on several platforms, good practices in files names, alt tags and titles as well as ways to improve your captions.

🤓 #Read - The best of SEO blogs

In one of his famous Webmaster Hangouts, John Mueller gave hints on Dealing with Low Traffic Pages.  Roger Montti summed up the key elements in his article on Search Engine Journal.

In a nutshell, there are two approaches to this:

  • Remove non-performing content
  • Improve existing content
Both approaches are valid, but choosing one will depend on your data. Speaking of data, John Mueller also recommends considering other metrics than just Page Views, as those can be misleading on low-traffic pages. 

🤓 #Read - The best of Content Marketing blogs

When it comes to content, quality is king. But that doesn’t mean you should compromise on your formatting, as this will affect how long your readers will spend on your page (and your bounce rate). In her article about 9 Painful Blog Formatting Mistakes That Will Ruin the Best Content,  Gill Andrews goes through the common mistakes in blog formatting and best practices for your content.

Do you need help with your digital marketing strategy? Are you planning to work on your website’s SEO? Would you be interested in having me talk at your conference or train your team?

Here are the links to read more about me, check out my former experiences, find out more on the services I provide and contact me.

Latest editions of The Pragmatic SEO

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Improving Technical SEO Audits

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Every week I share no more than 3 hands-on resources that I carefully handpick from the top-experts and best practitioners in SEO and digital marketing. You won’t find FOMO inducing theories and convoluted predictions in these posts. I want to help you build long-lasting SEO and digital marketing strategies with proven methods you can implement today. Previous editions can be found here.

⏰ #Now - What I have been up to

I recently started working on local SEO for a client and diving deeper in Google My Business. I also made some interesting contacts with last week’s post… More on that in a few weeks. I am preparing an article looking back at my 2019 form a marketing standpoint: things I did, events I participated in and key moments for my professional activities.

On that note, I am looking for new projects! Feel free to contact me if you hear about an SEO/digital marketing consultancy opportunity. 😊

👓 #Focus - The one thing you should check out

Barry Adams explained his methodology for Technical SEO Audits at the Optimisey Meetup. He focuses primarily on the technology and relevancy of the website, meaning how the website is crawled and then indexed. In his presentation, he drives us through the different steps he takes for his technical SEO Audits and what elements are important to take into consideration.

The emphasis is made on how audits are useful to clients, where they come in the process of improving the website, what data sets will actually be useful and what tools you can use to improve your technical audits.

🤓 #Read - The best of SEO blogs

In one of his famous Webmaster Hangouts, John Mueller gave hints on Dealing with Low Traffic Pages.  Roger Montti summed up the key elements in his article on Search Engine Journal.

In a nutshell, there are two approaches to this:

  • Remove non-performing content
  • Improve existing content
Both approaches are valid, but choosing one will depend on your data. Speaking of data, John Mueller also recommends considering other metrics than just Page Views, as those can be misleading on low-traffic pages. 

🤓 #Read - The best of Content Marketing blogs

When it comes to content, quality is king. But that doesn’t mean you should compromise on your formatting, as this will affect how long your readers will spend on your page (and your bounce rate). In her article about 9 Painful Blog Formatting Mistakes That Will Ruin the Best Content,  Gill Andrews goes through the common mistakes in blog formatting and best practices for your content.

Do you need help with your digital marketing strategy? Are you planning to work on your website’s SEO? Would you be interested in having me talk at your conference or train your team?

Here are the links to read more about me, check out my former experiences, find out more on the services I provide and contact me.

Latest editions of The Pragmatic SEO

✉️ #SUBSCRIBE - RECEIVE THIS POST IN YOUR INBOX

* indicates required