Robin Lord's Posts

In my experience, the most common reasons a website doesn’t rank for a specific keyword are:

1. The site isn’t actually relevant
2. There isn’t any single page which actually uses that keyword
3. There are too many pages which use that keyword. 

It’s true that a site might not rank because of something like authority or some kind of technical issue but for the average SEO team, increasing authority or fixing technical problems are far harder and take much longer than simply looking at the site and making sure we’re not just misusing content. 

So often, I’ve started working with teams who have spent months or years trying to perfect their technical setup, who’ve invested thousands in link building campaigns but haven’t made sure they include the keyword they are targeting on the relevant page. 

I made a Google Sheet that does change detection for you based on two Screaming Frog crawls. I’ll tell you why that’s important. 

Two problems frequently come up for SEOs, regardless of if we’re in-house or external.

1. Knowing when someone else has made key changes to the site
2. Keeping a record of specific changes we made to the site, and when.

Both can sound trivial, but unnoticed changes to a site can undo months of hard work and, particularly with large e-commerce sites, it’s often necessary to update internal links, on-page text, and external plugins in search of the best possible performance. That doesn’t just go for SEO, it applies just as much to CRO and Dev teams.

Keeping a record of even just our changes can be really time-consuming but without it, we often have to rely on just remembering what we did when, particularly when we see a pattern of changing traffic or rankings and want to know what might have caused it. 

You’ve done your keyword research, your site architecture is clear and easy to navigate, and you’re giving users really obvious signals about how and why they should convert. But for some reason, conversion rates are the lowest they’ve ever been, and your rankings in Google are getting worse and worse.

You have two things in the back of your mind. First, recently a customer told your support team that the site was very slow to load. Second, Google has said that it is using site speed as part of how rankings are calculated.

It’s a common issue, and one of the biggest problems about site speed is it is so hard to prove it’s making the difference. We often have little-to-no power to impact site speed (apart from sacrificing those juicy tracking snippets and all that content we fought so hard to add in the first place).

As Adam Mosseri, Head of News Feed at Facebook noted in a post on Monday “There have been a number of reports about a test we’re running in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia.” The test he is referring to is that of moving all content posted by brand pages (not content shared by friends) from the main user News Feed into a separate tab named “Explore”.

What’s changed?

One of the first sources to write about the test was Filip Struhárik with the starkly titled “Biggest drop in Facebook organic reach we have ever seen”. The story has since been picked up by The Guardian (Facebook moving non-promoted posts out of News Feed in trial) and the BBC (Facebook explores, publishers panic).

What makes personal assistants interesting is that Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple are vulnerable and need you to get on board.

Apparently seven years ago Jeff Bezos, inspired by a love of Star Trek, decided that Amazon should build a something that you can talk to, and which would turn your commands into actions. Now Amazon Alexa is competing with a growing number of intelligent personal assistants^[1] from almost every corporate behemoth around. Alphabet (the company that owns Google) has Google Home, Microsoft has Cortana, and Apple, of course, has Siri which was perhaps the best known early on. Viv and Facebook M are also interesting contenders but the state of play for each of those is different enough that we’ll cover them at the end. If you ask any of these companies about investment in this endeavour they’ll say that digital assistants are the next big thing.