Episodes

Majestic don't keep Dixon informed about very much. Because he can't keep a secret. When they DID tell him what they have been doing for the last year and a half,., he got rather enthusiastic - context around links by analysing around chunks / blocks / segments / sections / fraggles of content… and so scoring content according the context of the segment it is in… text, semantics, link density, images, alt tags and so on. Cool! The fact that Majestic are doing this (and looking at how well they d...

We start with a discussion about horrid nicknames at school (that were secret until today) Then we move quickly onto local search and near-me information. There are more near me searches now than ever before - both explicitly expressed in words, and increasingly by geo localisation. We are now expecting local results within 500 metres, down from 5km in just 6 years. Local search is all about the answers. And that is increasingly true of the wider world of search. Local search also brings to the ...

Google formalised its reaction to the Link Tax on 23rd September. I was a bit confused. Luckily Within Andrea has already figured it out and gives me the rundown / lowdown on the EU copyright Directive, Google's reaction to it and the practicalities for publishers… Google News publishers are opted in by default, other publishers are opted out by default. Search Console gives publishers he means to control this. Schema markup is the solution if you want to opt-in and yet keep your rich results. C...

Liz was at SMS Sydney to get some extra SEO knowledge - but she knows more than she lets on. She has a Norwegian name, is Australian... but is part Swiss (but she has never been to Switzerland). Liz and her husband (Matt) buy fully functional domains that they can monetise, or sell on - a bit like buying property, apparently. But the ROI on websites is incredibly high. MUCH higher than real estate. She suggests that the due diligence in their industry is simply an SEO audit - and it is mad that ...

Starts with a yawn. Then he forgets one of his jobs. Jono's current job at Yoast and it is his double dream job - his role is to turn up at work and think of fun and interesting things to work on that are impactive. I have never had a real job, and spending a couple of days at Yoast HQ is the first time I have thought it might be nice. Jono could have chosen anything he wanted to work on, and he chose Schema.org (the most boring thing on the web). He is swimming in relationships, philosophy, ......

Three amazingly intelligent and eloquent people help me understand rather a lot of concepts. What is a commonsense Knowledge Graph? Using Schema.org structured data to manage your data layer. Ontologies are containers full of entities that have relationships (use triples !!!). Lots of philosophy around computer science - specifically ontologies. Entity management is the future (thanks, Greg Gifford). We are all becoming data architects. Three levels of knowledge. Databases expressing opinions. H...

Paula had just given a talk at BrightonSEO in (April 2019 edition). This is a great follow-up to Dan Saunder's episode... Amazon is challenging both for PPC and SEO. PPC can become very expensive very quickly, especially as a side business. Reviews are the key, and the step to getting enough reviews is very big. And when you get enough, your competitors will spam you down, and then Amazon replicate successful products with Amazon Basics… double cut-throat. For SEO, brand is vital. Just like Goog...

Jef gets us started with a repeat of his groovy Elvis impersonation. Then gets serious and gives some amazing insights into what machine learning Google is using that affects SEO. Obviously Rankbrain, but also crawling and extracting unstructured and structured data for the web. I love the idea Jeff throws out - that Schema.org is the only thing we are doing ONLY for the search engines. We debate whether Schema.org is needed for understanding or is it really mostly for improving confidence. We m...

On the beach in Tel Aviv, Joel tells me he has Ukrainian roots. Joel has attention deficit disorder, meaning he has trouble achieving long term goals… unless under pressure, or the goals are incredibly short term task-driven or when it is fun. PPC is all three! He was unemployable, but PPC at Wix.com changed that. Learning PPC is easy - just 3 days if you read fast enough - so it is a great career for someone who could have been a lawyer but couldn't remember swathes of detailed information. I s...

Ric is the first guest to ask specifically for the song. Apparently it haunts his dreams! Ric is really into local SEO, and so he is a big fan of reviews. I start on the obvious advantage - reducing Google Ads costs. Ric suggests takes it much further. He gets very excited about the amazing insights we can get from analysing the reviews data we have. Trustpilot have seen a 40% uptick in organic traffic due to the E-A-T updates … Three factors for local search - proximity, NAPS, credibility (and ...

The first guest who is more overexcited and enthusiastic than I am. You can almost hear his arms waving. Very fun conversation, and Patrick is super-smart. The importance of Alexa is overestimated. There are so many devices that we will soon be talking to. All fun for us, but it is still too early to make it the focus of our strategy. Patrick sees a world where we no longer actively search as assistant devices like fridges, stoves, Bose glasses, necklaces, contact lenses become so much part of o...

Google Analytics doesn't clean the data and that makes it **** (expletive). That means in SEO and SEA, you are constantly being driven towards last-click terms. And that is saturated. If you can understand attribution, then you can show the value when you choose target terms earlier in the process of attribution. That makes attribution a critical part of the future of search - bringing the multiple sessions together to reflect how people engage with you before transaction. When I say "what all 5...

Andrea describes a dance between machines and humans that means much of what we see is really a semi-automated approach to SEO. Absolutely brilliant insights. Brilliant enough to stop me talking too much, for once :) A cycle of a machine and humans correcting, stimulating and teaching each other. Never forget that everything comes down to two humans communicating and the machine is simply a go-between. Then we go onto agentive technology, so I now understand what the term means. And Andrea share...

We kick off with a singing duet. David then suggests that I am not so good at preliminaries. We then quickly get onto the five steps. Step 1 is prerecorded audio - make sure that is really good or you will hit problems later on. He gives some great tips on recording sound and getting the audio to sound great. I go off topic by jamming 'All about the Bass', then we get sidetracked by iPhone theft and motorbikes falling on us before getting back on track (which is a very appropriate turn of phrase...

Second episode with Fili. First point - manual penalties are real, but algorithmic penalties do not, just a change in the calculations. An algorithmic updates are not like cars with slashed tyres, they are like navigation systems (or something like that). If you lose rankings after an update, you need to look at your SEO, especially on-page. Onto manual penalties. Link building, doorway pages, structured data penalties (that are more and more frequently) etc. He tells some entertaining (and surp...

Emily has had a varied career. Google aren't playing the game anymore, on-SERP is making SEO harder and harder and featured snippets are having a major negative impact on CTR. Or are they? And what is the type of traffic? I love Emily's Monday morning actions. Google has the route to sale but not the sale and Amazon have the sale, but not the route to sale. Which means they kind of rely on each other. If you are smaller brand and/or a published, fear the featured snippet. I mention the idea that...

Sitting in CitizenM in Shoreditch, we start talking about pizza parties. Then onto horses - should we run like a blinkered horse, and concentrate on what we are doing and focus on the finish line? Or should we look left and right at our competitors? Nik argues the latter, plus think about context and perhaps we should open our horizons by exchanging with other people. We should now be taking into account the rich elements and perhaps look at the opportunities to rank on those and leapfrog the co...

We start with the Sound of Music, move onto the wonderful, sharing SEO community and supportive companies such as Yoast and SEMrush. Peter is a fan of Yoast, and Yoost. Expert is a misnomer - its more about depth of knowledge and experience… with (perhaps) a little magic. Peter then makes an analogy with art, and we get onto the simplicity of Picasso. In the competition between Yoast and WordpressSEO, Yoast wins hands down for Peter. More functionalities, easier, new (rather exciting) Schema mar...

We start with beards - Chris has his in the build stage. Chris tells me not to grow a beard. So that is exactly what I did :) Make your site easily crawlable and use your server logs to optimise the crawl using beautiful spreadsheets. Find the robot holes and fix them using signposting. Intriguingly, Chris uses Screaming Frog for log files and Site Bulb for crawling. He is a fan of equity sculpting, when it it done well, and gets excited about TTFB and sitespeed. Onto music instrument sites (Tho...

Kenichi is a leading SEO blogger in Japan. I put him right on the spot with questions about FAQ and Q&A markup - he sets me straight - Q&A is for user-generated content. For FAQ the debate whether we should have single page for all FAQ or multiple pages. Google is still experimenting, so there is no conclusive answer. Although he makes a great point for putting multiple FAQ on one page. Kenichi goes onto JobPosting, citing Google case studies. Then onto Event markup. And over to which is the #1 ...

Sitting in Google's office in Zurich. We discuss the numerous John Mueller's in Google... and the world. And the problems with the ambiguity inherent in people's names. John cycles to work, eats in the café, answers emails, meets with Google teams, but doesn't play much pool. We then discuss beer, street names and Google offices that used to be a brewery. Then I suggest that SEO is changing at an accelerating rate - John doesn't agree. Then a bit of Javascript SEO and valid HTML. Then the import...

I start by overdoing his surname in the song. Then he tells me that he did 152 events last year. Then onto featured snippets - and SEMrush's study of 80,000,000 featured snippets (with hints as to how to get them). I link the 20th March update with the big uptick in featured snippets on that date. Fernando gives me the lowdown on how featured snippets are evolving. Fernando sees beauty in featured snippets and tells me about the most beautiful tabular featured snippet he has seen (Australian). F...

I am very curious about his name, given that he is from Ukraine (I think). He cites Arnold Schwarz-a-thingy. The onto more serious matters - starting with a definition of 'Long tail keyword' (we mostly get the definition wrong, by the way). Long tail does not refer to the number of words in a query, and Tim proves it. Interestingly, some one word queries have very small search volume. Which ones? In short 'if the query is long it doesn't necessarily have low search volume and vice versa'. Then, ...

We discuss Alina's name and how much we both learn from our respective podcasts before getting down to the nitty gritty. Content and strategy for voice search. Voice search saves time and time is our currency. Brilliant. Dan Shure suggests is a fan of providing multiple formats for content so that you have the right format at the right time for users. Text and audio, perhaps video… then I get predictably overexcited by Dan Shure's name. Speakable content, accessibility (where I do a terrible Sim...