2025
All Roads Lead to Rome2Rio: An SEO Deep Dive
Rome2rio. One of the most helpful A-to-B websites you’ll find. No matter how remote you are, or how little transport is available, if there is something, Rome2Rio will help you out. I used them in Europe to help plan…
SEO at ScaleInsights from Canva.com’s SEO Strategy
Canva’s SEO strategy is one of the most talked-about in the industry. They’re essentially a household name now – provided the households are digital & design-savvy. Their approach has been referenced at agencies,…
General SEOBeating Realestate.com.au (and other portals) with Real Estate SEO
You’re a real estate agency, and you’re keen to rank higher than realestate.com.au in Google. Or maybe you’re looking to compete with the big global players – Zillow, Realtor.com, Rightmove, idealista,…
ExamplesA Breakdown of Booking.com’s SEO Strategy
You know Booking.com – everyone does. They’re the biggest online travel booking platform with a global presence. We know they perform well in Google, but what drives their success? I’m going to break down their key…
ExamplesA Deep Dive Into The AllTrails.com SEO Strategy
If you’ve done a few hikes in your time, you’ve probably come across AllTrails. If not, it’s essentially the app for finding nearby hiking trails. It gives you estimated times, photos, reviews, and maps – not just to…
Data AnalysisSERP Scraping & Keyword Clustering in Google Sheets
Ever wanted to scrape just a handful of Google SERPs inside a Google Sheet? Or wanted to group a bunch of keywords, to better de-duplicate them and isolate unique topics? Well, have I got a Google Sheet for you! My…
General SEOCreate more pages, not less!
Create more pages, not less!🚀📈 Sometimes, creating more pages isn’t just a strategy – it’s a game-changer. For the right type of site, it works wonders. If your site is listing, or product-based (and you’ve got…
2024
Building a Strong Site Structure
A strong site structure should be at the core of any programmatic or larger-scale SEO build. How the value of your site flows around the site is crucial to ensure both key pages ranking, and longer tail pages are…
Technical SEOClient Side vs Server Side Rendering
A debate that’s gone on for years now. Google announced in 2014 they’ve; decided to try to understand pages by executing JavaScript Well, that sent developers wild believing they could build anything and Google could…
Data AnalysisMarket Analysis & Keyword Insights Part 2: Analysing SERP Data
After running through the keyword research in part 1 here, we’re now digging into the SERPs. We’ll be extracting the data, and then looking into a few of the different analyses we can do with it. Extract SERP data…
AIMarket Analysis & Keyword Insights Part 1: Keyword Research
It’s time to dive into my full process of doing SEO market research & analysis. This is something I do for some of my bigger clients when they’re either kicking off their SEO and want to understand the market, or…
2023
Clicks.so Review – An SEO Tool to Rival Others?
I jumped into the beta of Clicks.so to give it a work through and see what’s up. It’s a brand new SEO tool being released by Jaume Ros, with a claim of being an affordable alternative to some of the top tools. Their…
Programmatic SEOThe Top Programmatic SEO Tools
Programmatic SEO has started to kick off a bit, with more and more people jumping on the bandwagon. This is leading to more and more tools being created specifically for programmatic SEO. So what are the tops tools…
Technical SEOSubdomain to Subfolder: The Simple Cloudflare Reverse Proxy
For years, there has been a subdomain verse subfolder debate. One side says this, another side says that. People have run their own tests, shown that moving a subdomain to a subfolder can improve a blogs ranking, yet…
2022
Just Another WordPress Programmatic SEO Build – Part 5
Safe to say this build is progressing pretty fast thanks to sheets & WP. A custom build like this would normally take quite a bit longer! And that would be on data configuration alone. Being able to format stuff and…
Data AnalysisProgrammatic SEO: Tracking & Performance Monitoring
So you’ve got a shiny new programmatic build, and want to know how it’s performing. Monitoring indexation, traffic, conversions, rankings, there’s so much to look at so what should you focus on? Let’s take a look…
Programmatic SEOProgrammatic SEO: Integrating Blog Content With Programmatic
Every website tackling SEO is running a blog. Blogs & SEO go hand-in-hand. For programmatic SEO, blog posts enable the ability to target specific keyword sets that you just can’t efficiently target in bulk. They help…
#BuildinPublicJust Another WordPress Programmatic SEO Build – Part 4
Time for part 4. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out this WordPress programmatic build part 1, part 2, and part 3. Today, we’re spending the entire part on a single topic. Imagery. Like a portion of the…
Excel/Google SheetsDynamic Content Generation with Google Sheets
If you haven’t been following along, I’ve been documenting my journey to a 1,000+ page programmatic site in WordPress using Google sheets. The build is heavily reliant on Google Sheets to generate dynamic content…
Programmatic SEOThe SEO First, Users Second, Approach
The words that designers hate. These words give anyone involved in UX nightmares. SEO first, users second. SHOCK. AWE. Oh, the humanity! But that is exactly how I approach a fresh programmatic build. That is how I…
Technical SEOPrioritising SEO Tasks with Development Teams
Prioritising SEO tasks is key to being able to get work completed by a development team in an efficient manner. Rather than just going “we need them all done”, or “they’re all a priority”, breaking your tasks into…
#BuildinPublicJust Another WordPress Programmatic SEO Build – Part 3
Let’s continue the WordPress programmatic SEO build! If you haven’t already, check out part 1 of the wordpress programmatic build here, and then part 2 here. A little pre-note here is that the next couple of posts…
Programmatic SEOProgrammatic SEO: Self Scaling Landing Page Systems
What do Booking.com, Homeadvisor, Airtasker, Vivian Health, & ZipRecruiter have in common? They’ve all experienced massive growth whilst leveraging a self-expanding landing page system. Coincidence? Self-scaling…
#BuildinPublicJust Another WordPress Programmatic SEO Build – Part 2
It’s time for part 2 of the programmatic SEO build in WordPress. Now that the core data structure and processes are in place, and we know that we can successfully generate a WordPress page, it’s time to extend the…
Programmatic SEOProgrammatic SEO: The Manual Layer
When working on programmatic SEO builds, you’re thinking about the data. Where has that data come from? Have you scraped it yourself? You could also hire a data engineer or software engineer to gather the data…
Data AnalysisUsing Data to Determine What Filters Should be Targeted
Bedrooms, and bathrooms, and price ranges, oh my! There are so many filters that could be used in the pretty URL, but what should be used? What should earn the “pretty” status, and what should be relegated to query…
Excel/Google SheetsExtracting Keyword Templates/Patterns from a Keyword Set
When doing keyword research for programmatic sites, you shouldn’t be analysing each page individually. You especially can’t be optimising an entire programmatic build page by page. You should really be looking at the…
Programmatic SEOProgrammatic SEO: Cleaning Up Over-Indexation of URLs
So, you’ve either done an oopsie or are jumping into a new site/client, and there are a few too many URLs. What do you do next? How do you fix it? Do you even need to fix anything? The URL over-indexation issue When…
#BuildinPublicJust Another WordPress Programmatic SEO Build
Join me on a 30-day journey to a 1,000+ page programmatic SEO build using a combination of WordPress and Google Sheets (with plenty of formulas!). I’ve been writing a heap about programmatic SEO lately…. if you…
Programmatic SEOInternationalisation & Hreflang Management
Implementing hreflang for a programmatic build isn’t necessarily hard, once you understand what content you have. If a piece of content is available in multiple languages and/or target markets, throw up a tag for…
Programmatic SEOProgrammatic SEO: Optimising for the Highest Value, Low Tier Filters
In my post on how search filter pages should work, I talked about not linking through to query parameter URLs. The bulk of these pages would not have value, particularly when you have millions upon millions of…
Programmatic SEOHTML Sitemaps – It’s 2022, do you REALLY Need One?
The old HTML sitemaps hey. Are you still actively trying to create one for large-scale programmatic builds? Crawling? Indexing? Deeplinking? Passing SEO value? Yeah, they can help you shortcut passing values and…
Programmatic SEODeath of Internal Nofollow: Use JS to Stop Google Crawling
Over time, I have noticed nofollow internal links being crawled more and more. It doesn’t seem as easy as it used to, to slap a nofollow tag on a URL and it will keep it from being crawled & indexed. Google’s even…
Data AnalysisBuilding Your Own CTR Model from Search Console Data
Rather than performing analysis using just the bare average rank, you can bring in a keyword’s search volume and add some weighting to the rank. To do this, you estimate SEO traffic for a keyword by multiplying its…
Programmatic SEOProgrammatic SEO: Search Filters & Faceted Search Optimisation
You can make or break a site, just based on how you handle your search filters. The difference between a good & bad search filter setup can mean the difference between a good amount of quality results that are…
Excel/Google SheetsBulk Download Images from URLs – Convert & Rename
Batch downloading images, and renaming them, isn’t something you’ll use often, but when you do, doing it in bulk can really save you quite a bit of time. Why would you want to do it? Well, plenty of reasons. From…
Technical SEOBulk Redirecting URLs in Cloudflare
For years, Cloudflare has had the page rules section where you can setup redirect rules. But you’re only allowed 3 page rules per domain on a free account, which severely limits the redirect options so many don’t use…
Data AnalysisExport Google Search Console Data
When you start doing SEO data analysis, one of the first things you’ll find out is that GSC only gives you 1,000 rows of data. So how do you extract the rest of the data? How do you get more keywords, and more…
Core Web VitalsCaching HTML in Cloudflare for Improved Page Load Speeds
Caching HTML can help you reduce the overall page load speed, as the CDN can hold your HTML rather than have to request it from the server each time. There are pros and cons to doing this, but if you’re a static site…
Programmatic SEOProgrammatic SEO: Handling Search Result Pagination
Pagination is something that should be easy, but when it goes wrong, it can really go wrong, and impact crawling & indexation. It’s one of the first things I go to clean up, as it’s a great way to help reduce the…
Programmatic SEOThe Ultimate Enterprise & Programmatic SEO Checklist
When doing an audit, I just go through the site, flag what I see as issues, and then write them up in a Google doc. I rarely follow the checklists. You won’t get a giant list of “40/54,000 pages don’t have canonical…
Core Web VitalsGTMetrix Review: Top SEO Insights You’ll Get
One tool I will use every single time that I audit a website is GTMetrix. I’ve seen comments about it, and that other speed testers like webpagetest.org provide “better data” and “more insights”, but GTMetrix does…
Technical SEOUsing UTM Tags on Internal Links? Please Stop.
Something I see popup now and then, UTM tags on internal links seem to be one of the more popular solutions for tracking internal link campaigns. They drive me crazy sometimes, as UTM for internal links is never fun…
Programmatic SEODynamic Variable Insertion – Scaling Programmatic Content
I’ve been talking about programmatic SEO a little bit lately, and one of the core features of programmatic SEO is being able to dynamically insert variables. What does this mean though? How does it work? How can you…
Technical SEORemoving the Collection from a Product URL in Shopify
I was doing a quick audit of a friend’s website recently, and discovered something rather annoying about the site. On a collection page, Shopify added the slug of the current collection, to all the product links on…
Core Web VitalsCumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – Causes, Testing & Fixes
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) is one of the fun ones inside Core Web Vitals (CWV), and can sometimes be a bit annoying to find exact causes. Or even exact locations it happens on, as Google can be a little light on…
Data AnalysisAnalysing Brand vs Generic Keyword Performance
Breaking down your GSC into brand vs generic keyword performance can give you a better insight into how an SEO campaign is going. Most SEO activity won’t be affecting the brand too much, as it will be more to drive…
Data AnalysisData Preparation and Setting up a File
Data preparation is the base of any good analysis. Getting it right from the start will just ensure that any analysis you do in the future, will be nice and easy for you. It’s back to basics time! I run through a…
Programmatic SEOProgrammatic SEO: Handling 0-Result Search Results
0-result SRPs are one of the main programmatic SEO issues I look into and try to clean up with clients. Whether it’s an existing build with a large over-indexation issue, or a new build and trying to avoid it from…
Technical SEOInjecting HTML Code “Server-Side” with Cloudflare
I’ve got an older site with a good amount of link value I want to add some links to for some newer sites. Problem is, the site is on 4 year old tech, and hasn’t been updated in 3 years. Dev is long gone. If I try run…
Technical SEOTrailing Slash vs No Trailing Slash – Whats Better for SEO?
When it comes to trailing slashes, some are for them, and some are against them. A trailing slash is the slash on the end of of the URL. No trailing slash:…
Technical SEOCloudflare Crawler Hints & IndexNow
Using Crawler Hints in Google, you can add an additional way to tell search engines about your new URLs and content changes. Yeah, Google doesn’t support it for now. But you never know! That could change. What is…
Data AnalysisBulk Keyword Categorisation & Classification
Categorising a large keyword list in bulk takes hours to do, unless you do it a special way. Learn how to categorise thousands of keywords in seconds through the use of a magical Excel formula. You can categorise…
Excel/Google SheetsCannot Open PivotTable Source File Fix in Excel
When downloading a pre-built Excel dashboard, or moving one around on your computer, you might experience an error and you won’t be able to open your PivotTable. The error will come up and say ‘Cannot open PivotTable…
Excel/Google SheetsCreating Online Excel Dashboard with Onedrive
Turn your file-based dashboards into a link, and let your clients / stakeholders view them online! No more sharing files, just send the link.
Excel/Google SheetsThe Basics of Graphing in Excel
An overview of how graphs in Excel work, and the basic behind customising the look. This is a great starting point if you’re just getting into SEO, and want to play around with a data set in Excel. Yes, Google Data…
Programmatic SEOProgrammatic SEO: Dynamic Content Generation
I recently wrote a post about my experience and strategies for programmatic SEO, particularly with enterprise-level clients. One of the sections was about dynamic text generation, and I thought I would expand upon…
Excel/Google SheetsIntroduction to Pivots & Slicers in Excel
An introduction to using pivot tables in Excel with slicers to be able to better visualise your data. This is perfect for anyone who is just starting out in SEO, and particularly in Excel, that wants to understand…
Data AnalysisEstimating SEO Traffic for a Keyword Set
Estimating your organic traffic will allow you better assess your current performance for a set of keywords, but also allows you to directly compare that performance with your competitors. In this video, I run…
Excel/Google SheetsBulk Generating Keywords for SEO
Discover the easiest ways to generate keywords in bulk using Excel. These formulas are the basis of so much work, and keyword generation really will just give you a top-level understanding of the formula’s use.…
Data AnalysisTop Ranking Domains Analysis for a Keyword Set
Ever wanted to see the top-ranking domains / URLs for a particular keyword set? This analysis will let you do exactly that, and give you more refined performance data, allowing you to dig into the true top…
Technical SEODoes Hidden Content Affect SEO?
Whether or not hidden content affects SEO has been a question that’s been asked for years. There have been some basic tests conducted, but there are quite a few variables involved with SEO test as per usual, and its…
AIGenerate Product Descriptions from Specs with AI
AI content is taking SEO by storm. Some good, some, well, not so good. Whilst it might spit out some junk when not guided, if you give some of the AI content generators a little bit to work with then their output can…
Data AnalysisCategorise GSC Data into Site Sections in Data Studio
I’ve finally started playing in Google Data Studio, and obviously kicking off by messing around with my Search Console data. One of the initial things I wanted to do was categorise the landing page data into site…
Excel/Google SheetsMerging Multiple CSV Files Together with CMD (Windows Command Prompt)
Doing keyword research, and have a million CSV files that you need to extract data from? Well, this is where a handy, and rather tiny, merge CSV files SEO hacks that has saved me plenty of time over the years comes…
Programmatic SEOProgrammatic SEO: How Enterprise & Larger-scale Websites Dynamically Scale Their SEO
During my time as an SEO, I have slowly but surely honed in on my specialty – Programmatic/Dynamic SEO. It’s something I enjoy more so than regular SEO, because the smallest of change can have such a vast impact due…
Programmatic SEOInternal Linking Strategies for Programmatic / Dynamic SEO
Internal links are important. Unless you’re just starting out in SEO, this should be known as a fundamental part of optimisations done to ANY website. Whether a little local business site, a niche content site or a…
Programmatic SEOSEO Case Study: Jobs Portal
Vivian Health (previously NurseFly) reached out to me in early 2020 with the goal of expanding their SEO strategy. Just over 12 months later, ahrefs shows their SEO est. traffic had increased 236%. This then…
Programmatic SEOSEO Case Study: Child Care Portal
In April 2020, the Toddle team reached out to me with regards to SEO strategy for their recently launched child care comparison brand. Just under 2 years later, their ahrefs shows 5200% growth. (No approval to share…
2020
2019
Bulk Generating Page Titles in Google Sheets (and Excel!)
Yeap, chances are that if you’re working with a large enough client that you’re contemplating bulk-generating page titles for, you’d be working with a dynamic system. Ideally, you can just give the developers your…
Excel/Google SheetsStripping and Rebuilding a URL Structure for Migration Testing
Some clients have recently required a migration mapped out for 10’s to 100’s of thousands of URLs. To do this, we needed to capture all the different URLs, build out the migration rules, and then test the redirects.…
Data AnalysisExcel Formulas Every SEO Needs to Know
As an SEO, you really can’t escape Excel. Almost every month a new SEO tool pops up, that can do so much, but will never seem to replace those little things you can do in Excel. You find yourself using a tool for 75%…
Data AnalysisBuilding a Keyword Research Dashboard in Excel
An extremely large table of all their keywords, isn’t going to give the insight some clients would want. Some would like more a bit more insight into the data they’ve paid thousands for. Building a keyword research…