There comes a time in every SEO agency’s life when it has to reexamine its audit template, to give the audit an audit, if you will. That time ideally comes every 18 months or so, though some agencies go years upon years without updating their audit templates, owing to institutional stagnation or simply to the fast pace of work typical of SEO. In UpBuild’s case, it wasn’t quite that long a wait, but it was a bit longer than 18 months, and boyyyyyy are we glad we set aside time to do it when we did.
Working from Nowhere Near Home
I spent the entire month of August in Iceland, and I think some of my clients didn’t even know it. If that’s not the ultimate testament to the practicality of remote work, it’s got to be pretty dang close.
A hill we pulled over to hike on the road to Vík.
Reason #1 I was able to do this was because my incredible wife Alissa was accepted to an artists’ residency program in Iceland, and this particular program allows spouses to tag along. Reason #2 is because my incredible job makes it possible for me to work from Iceland. So please count me a lucky guy for the record, and I guess the story can proceed from there.
Keep Checkout Simple
Or: The Easier Your Website Makes It for People to Give You Money, the More Money They Will Give You
I’ll be honest with you: until recently, it had been a while since I’d had an experience in this line of work where a client carried out one of my recommendations and then reaped immediate and enormous success.
Don’t Worry About Rankings. Worry About These Things Instead.
All of us in the agency SEO world have dealt with a client suffering from Rankings Monomania. The symptoms are always the same:
- No matter how often you communicate, or by what means, they ask after their rankings in every exchange;
- They’re usually laser-focused on how they’re ranking for one major keyword in particular, and usually for cosmetic reasons (in severe cases, this keyword will be a nightmarishly broad and competitive one, like “car insurance”);
- They refract every strategic or tactical idea of yours through the lens of rankings, and in severe cases only buy in if specific rankings improvements are included among the expected gains in your pitch.
This obsession does not make RM-afflicted clients bad at their jobs. It’s not their fault. Rankings do matter. The anecdotal but universal understanding that Google search results beyond page one constitute a wasteland still holds true: [Read more…] about Don’t Worry About Rankings. Worry About These Things Instead.
We Need a Real Mobile SEO Methodology
A maddening issue plagues the SEO community, a stone in our collective shoe that we keep trying to ignore, but that at least once a year rolls right back under the most sensitive part of our foot. We keep walking because the fast pace of the industry and the day-to-day needs of our clients make it so we don’t have time to stop, untie the laces, and pop the shoe off to shake the stone out. But sooner or later we’re going to have to, come what may.
I’m speaking of the disconnect between the primacy of mobile devices in search — both in Google’s eyes and users’ — and the desktop-exclusive perspective that we professionals remain locked into. Daily Google search queries on mobile outpaced desktop years ago, and the Google Speed algorithm update promised for July of this year, in which mobile page speed becomes an official ranking factor, constitutes Google’s third big effort to jam home the same mobile-first message in as many years (following the “Mobile-Friendly Search Results” update in 2015 and the “Mobile-First Index” update of 2016, and heck, you might even count AMP here too). But SEO practitioners simply cannot adopt a felt, experienced appreciation for this changed landscape, for the simple reason that desktop computers are still, overwhelmingly, the devices that we use to do the work. [Read more…] about We Need a Real Mobile SEO Methodology
