🤖Victor Pan

Understanding search intent is an empathy exercise where there is a dominant intent. The best way to address intent is to consider Clay Christensen's Jobs-to-be-done framework. Great content helps the searcher complete the job they need done in their search. Google/Baidu Trends are examples of tools that help tell you time of day/day of week/day of year, device used and preferred medium (web, image, video) to answer how visitors want their information. Step by step guides, diagrams, or video tutorials are just a few formats that may be preferred. The mistake many make is to copy what Google has as the dominant intent of a query. Go after the job-to-be-done that makes the best customers for your business in a format you excel at.

I work at a publicly traded company. Material non-public information (MNPI) needs to kept to company insiders. SEO data from GSC (crawl stats log, impressions, clicks, keywords) or your website analytics (GA, HubSpot) would be considered material non-public information: 1. Employee legal training - Don't connect/provide GSC/Analytics data unless we are paying customers with an NDA from a reputable provider with legal team approval. 2. Outsource to SOC2 compliant providers - this is a certification for security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. 3. Use good judgement - if the provider can profit from this information outside of the work, it should not be outsourced without the proper legal safeguards.

This is a terribly misleading article with just as bad advice. SEO is not a tactic to address fake news. Fake news exploits flaws in SEO to spread. Fake news generally target what are called “data voids” in search engines. Data voids are queries that lack good matching content from trusted websites. The sources are often fabricated. Fake news is essentially the evolution of the practice of google bombing - filling a result for an uncommon search combination (e.g. miserable failure). These search combinations are often a call-to-action on a different online platform. As a user, the best course of action as a is to report the search result as inappropriate to search engines.

Large websites involve stakeholder management which this article is seriously lacking. Key performance indicators and shared goals and metrics across departments are a must to ship changes that have positive business impact. Large websites often also include tech debt in the form of legacy code, custom development, and employees creating individual hacks around bad experiences to manage the website. Fixing the ecosystem fixes the SEO issues that are a second-order-effect. Large websites don't prioritize by SEO metrics, but rather by the return on investment. With many changes often requiring development or design talent, building rapport with teams outside your org structure is often the norm.

Before you audit a large website, it's important to understand what the website's purpose is. For most large websites, this involves understanding the business model - sell things, sell services, or sell ads. The larger the business and website, the more important it is to understand the business - and how pages on a website ultimately drive business impact. For web documents to rank, search engines have to first discover it, crawl it, index it, then rank it. Desktop crawlers (Screaming Frog) or cloud crawlers (SEMRush) can help identify discovery, crawling, and indexing issues that may be hurting the business. Google Search Console (not a crawler) provides data on crawl, indexing, and ranking.

Meta descriptions get reused as the default description when your URL is shared on different social media platforms. Here's two debuggers you should check to make sure that sharing experience is seamless for X, formerly Twitter, and Facebook. Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ X/Twitter: https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator