Resources

Category: seo

  • What Web Dev Inadvertently Taught Me about SEO

    Zee Hoffmann Jones –

    Before Distilled, I was a Digital Producer (think: front end developer meets project manager) and worked on dozens of web development projects. So when I started my role at Distilled, I didn’t expect to discover that I’d been inadvertently practicing SEO in following guidelines that make websites accessible to most people. This is because, believe it or not, web development best practices map onto SEO guidelines pretty well. Read more

  • A More Organized Approach to Technical Audits

    Sergey Stefoglo –

    A common task that is required of SEOs is performing technical audits. As an SEO, your ability to look at a website from a technical perspective and provide recommendations is essential to your role. The goal of this article is not to show you how to identify these issues. The goal is not to teach you how to fix the issues you find. Instead, this article focuses on outlining a framework that could be used when approaching SEO. My hope is that this framework will help make our recommendations clearer and more impactful. Read more

  • Ways Recommendations Fail and How Split-Testing is Changing Consulting

    Will Critchlow –

    It’s always bugged us that so many recommendations get shoved in a drawer and never seen again. I remember the repeated pain in the early years as we found ourselves getting surprised again and again by the clients who would commission us to create some in-depth audit, and then never make the changes we were recommending. Our obsession with figuring out how to have an actual business impact for our clients meant that this was really troubling for us - after all, a recommendation that never gets implemented can never make a difference. It was so troubling that we ended up crystallising it in our core values. Read more

  • JSON-LD in Real Life: Understanding and Implementing Structured Data

    Stephan Solomonidis –

    Chances are, you’ve already heard of JSON-LD — you might even be using it already. Kudos to you if that’s the case. If you haven’t heard of it, I’d urgently recommend you to read up on what is becoming an ever-more important part of SEO. The good news is that once you have a grounding in it, it isn’t that hard to get right. By the end of this post you’ll understand enough to understand any JSON-LD you come across. Read more

  • Apple WWDC Announcements - What Siri on Mac and Apple Pay for Web mean for SEO

    Tom Anthony –

    Whether you're a true Apple fan or just a dedicated tech enthusiast, the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is one of the year's biggest events in the technology industry. Announcements were made on all kinds of hardware and software (not least a new desktop OS), there were two announcements that stood out for me as potentially very important for the SEO industry. This post will look at exactly what's being introduced and how that will affect the landscape of search. Read more

  • Split Testing Titles and H1s: Do They Still have an SEO Impact?

    Tim Allen –

    Title tags and H1 tags have always been at the centre of SEO - no good site audit doesn’t mention them. However, it is tempting to wonder if optimising these things makes much of a difference anymore? At Distilled we have seen that on large pages, getting these things right really does seem to make a difference. Yet, it has always been hard to prove. However, we’ve been piloting our SEO split-testing platform and one of the tests we’ve run focussed on exactly this type of change. This post demonstrates how improving title tags and H1s can make an appreciable difference. Read more

  • The Technical Audit Checklist Made for Human Beings

    Benjamin Estes –

    Technical audits are one of the activities that define SEO—we’ve all done them. But audits are only as valuable as their impact. Whether you’re a practitioner or an agency partner, your job really begins when the audit is finished. With that in mind, we asked “Can we design an audit that helps make real change happen?” The result is an aware technical audit checklist. It considers the underlying problems we’re tackling (or trying to prevent). It makes technical audits faster, more effective, and more impactful. Read more

  • How to Conduct SEO Due Diligence

    Will Critchlow –

    When a company is sold, or a significant investment is made in the private markets, the process typically reaches some non-binding offer or term sheet relatively early in the process. Before that offer becomes binding, or the deal is sealed, there is a need to validate the assumptions and information the seller provided early in the process. This process is called due diligence. SEO due diligence is a process we’ve run a few times to review digital marketing performance and assumptions about future performance on behalf of investors or acquirers. Read more

  • What is the Personal Index and Why Should You Care?

    Sam Nemzer –

    The personal index is what we at Distilled have been calling search results that are specific to the searcher, and importantly, contain content from their own data. This is as opposed to the public index, the results of which can be accessed by anyone, from any device, although exactly which... Read more

  • Google to Announce that Links are no Longer a Major Ranking Factor

    Will Critchlow –

    Let’s be absolutely clear, when Google does announce that links are no longer a major ranking factor, they’ll be presenting a carefully-tailored PR play, and it won’t actually be true in the way it’ll be interpreted. However, they will say it, or something like it, and people will lose their collective minds. Read more

  • A Beginner’s Guide to word2vec AKA What’s the Opposite of Canada?

    Will Critchlow –

    The idea for writing this post came from a single line in the appendix to a presentation: “what’s the opposite of Canada?”. While this could be the set up for some pretty poor jokes, it’s actually the entrance to a rabbit warren of fascinating geeky distractions. It turns out that while we can typically group similar or related words together - identifying that there is some connection between “Canada” and “snow” for example - we generally have a much weaker intuition for opposites. Read more

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