Episodes

Google Colaboratory is like Google Sheets on steroids. Use it to save bucketloads of time and be terribly productive. Gerry White got very excited about the 6 use-cases Hamlet gave in his talk. For example automating duplication, writing meta titles automatically, Andrea Volpini's dance with machines, mapping redirects, writing alt tags, finding content gaps

We start with the 'soy sauce secret of sumptuous speech'. When you produce a piece of content, create it for everyone. SOme people learn visually, some auditively, some through reading. So one piece of content should be video, audio and text. Make a video, create an audio file and a transcript. And probably a good idea to adapt the transcript to be readable (as opposed to speakable). SEJ make an effort to format for Google with lists and QA etc etc. We get onto baseball and cricket - watching TV...

Cindy and I discuss an awful lot of stuff in a lovely, meandering and super informative chat. Starting with Fraggles, and how powerful they are (top middle and bottom)... Plus some experiments we have done, the risks for Google and the possibilities for the future. And onto Darwinism in search, onSERP SEO, local SEO, not needing a website, branding, offline SEO, ranking without an URL, the new EU directive, social metas. Crumbs. That's a lot.

Louisa is SEO editor at the LA Times and I feel a little overwhelmed by her and the institution that is the LA Times. First thing to know is that Louisa is there to educate the journalists rather than messing with their style. She is the stabiliser wheels for people who have 40 years of career behind them, which is cool. Moving an institution like this to a digital approach is a big, big deal. Then onto the European directive that aims to protect publishers. Louisa looks at it from the publisher...

I quickly state that I won't ask about ranking factors, just the way Bing ranking works (to try to get some confirmation of Darwinism in search). Frederic is the 10 blue links guy. The team in the next office do the Q and A.... and then there is a Whole Page Team, which is an interesting development for me (since my Darwinism theory takes a SMALL hit :( All the rich elements function of the same algorithm with different weightings... but with a master 'whole page algorithm' that brings it all to...

Slightly uncomfortable moment at the start. I then try to be professional. Not sure if I carry it off. Jerry tells me how great UnGagged is. Then we move onto doing something - the small things effectively. And then the 5 things people can start to do to move your business forwards. A lot of it is simple common sense. And we miss that more often than not. Jerry gives me a good lip twitch that is now a 'thing' :) Jerry answers the question as to how much it can cost to flip a switch. Then onto sw...

Eric loves UnGagged. Then we discuss what is things to focus on in what stage of your startup journey, including which keywords. We get onto the importance of branding, brand SERPs and bringing the offline online. And when a query can be a mix of informational, transactional, and navigational. There is a lovely break where we discuss stuff 'off-record', that I left in because we completely forgot to discuss what we decided to discuss during the break.

Along with Greg Gifford, Arsen Rabinovich, Jennifer Hoffman starts with why technical SEO pays. A bit of a discussion about bells, whistles, heavy images and mega comment threads leading to poor onsite experience in terms of load time. Then onto navigation and indexation. And tracking user behaviour, the Knowledge Graph, entity optimisation... and brands as entities. We end with the importance of spring cleaning.

Sitting in two comfy armchairs, looking at the sea in Brighton. We start with a chat about machine learning in Google's search algorithm, PageRank and then onto the Knowledge Graph. There are less entities in the world than webpages. So Google's job is easier. But the Knowledge Graph is biased - the seed set for google's understanding is a bunch of librarians (aka Wikipedia editors) who have little in depth knowledge on the topics they edit, especially in anything that is not within their cultur...

Susan insists that voice search is happening faster than we think. 5 years, not 10. Half life theory comes into play with technology. Don't underestimate "Call mom". Then we have the great debate about the amount of voice data. And Susan nails her argument by identifying what are the fallbacks for these machines? Interestingly, even if we think the answers / system is weak now, that doesn't mean we aren't going somewhere very interesting very fast. Susan acronyms. I keep using them. But they are...

We start talking about building community. David gives some great tips - he has 22,000 people in his genius community who share 50,000 messages a month, so he knows what he's talking about. he points out we all have a community whether we know it or not. We talk about implicit and explicit communities, then have a debate about the word 'crumbs'. But then David turns the table on me brilliantly by asking about the red t-shirt... and the second half is him getting me talk about the digital nomad l...

We start with a delightful chat about New York, Halloween and even get a quick (made up) Broadway ditty. Then onto E-A-T and how this is affecting our approach to digital marketing. You need to get your information more accurate with help from experts. The problem comes from the fact that the returns aren't immediate, which is a problem for a lot of people since their job often depends on fast results and quick returns. Is there a quick-win cheat? And is Google a chicken with its head cut off (t...

We start with an idiotic James Bond analogy. Paul pulls me back to the serious business of 'what is technical SEO'? And the definition is wider than I thought. 4 types of tech SEO. Paul has a plan to tell me the 4 types. Like a child, I keep trying to jump ahead. Paul then looks at skillsets and venn diagrams. And that we should look at (and accept and appreciate) these crossovers. SEO is one giant Venn diagram of skillsets. Then onto the fact that in SEO we are (and need to be) multi-skilled. W...

Marty starts with his musical career and the segues very neatly into why that initial career path helps with digital marketing. And, as we all know, there are a lot of musicians in this space. Mentions for Robert Smith, AC/DC, The Monkees... And we also learn to love our lard pack... and it becomes yet another spur of the moment silly ditty

Once again I get the pronunciation of someone's name wrong. How does James find clients: referrals, conferences, content promotion... and a little SEO :) Keep a good customer base. Never have one single client who represents more than 10% of your income. Next how to hire great staff. Conferences, job sites, Facebook groups... Enthusiasm, a personality that fits in to the team, motivation... I decide we are talking about ranking factors for getting jobs. The first year is always going to be reall...

In the pub, just before the second day of the Takeitoffline unconference. Barry hates AMP and is an attempt by Google to force the web to conform to their vision of the web. Now they are getting involved in Wordpress, and we should be very worried (especially when we get words like PWAMP). A commercial company should not be the organisation that decides how the web works - because they will do what is best for their bottom line, not what is best for the web. Google is an advertising company with...

We discuss pest control, cartoons, and eventually get onto how to get great online reviews for an offline business. It's all about relationships. Oh, and asking nicely. Bribing people doesn't work. Top 3 platforms are Google, Yelp and Facebook

For once someone gets all over excited about brand SERPs. I manage to keep reasonably quiet and let him talk, despite the fact I am over excited about it too. He actually does proper audits on all terms that contain the brand name, and gives some super duper insights we should all be taking note of. So go out and manage your branded searches. Easy win, and vitally important.

Google don't look at author. They look at entities. Google don't look at accuracy of facts. Kristine uses Omegas as an example as to why. Then why linking out is so important. I expound my topic layer theory. They don't use NLP, they use NLU. Which is why we need Schema.org... and we end up with a sulky robot on crutches

Both findability and discoverability = matching user intent with information or content that they want. Quickly. On and offline. Grocery stores, for example. We end up trying (and succeed) to shoehorn the idea into punk music and Dada movement.

Google, Bing and Amazon have a user-centric design perspective, and we tend to forget that. We should pull and analyse the data to discover the real pain points of our potential clients rather than use our instincts since we are all biased, and our content will therefore be biased.

Fabrice us downloading the whole worldwide web every day (even my site). Bing have launched a crawling API, and that is putting Fabrice out of a job (and he wants to be out of a job) - simply ping Bing to have an URl crawled immediately. They also have solved Javascript.

I have to read her name tag to get through the difficult first moments of the podcast. Then we talk about the health industry and getting old (it is expensive). Plus the target audience is not necessarily the people themselves, but their children. And if the audience is the older people, Bing is a good marketing target. She goes on to say that if you do the right thing, Google updates are not a worry, and you sleep well.

Craig explains that I have got the strategy for my podcast all wrong. My plan is to not have a plan, which is not a good idea, it seems. So he tells me what I SHOULD be doing. Hint - have a plan.