I’m designing a service based on a content audit with ongoing recommendations. I’m looking for sites to help inform and direct what that looks like. This is the culmination of what I've been …
Visualizing a website with Neo4j and Screaming Frog crawl data
This is the absolute path of least resistance I could come up with for running a SF crawl and getting a visual for how pages are linked in Neo4j. TL;DR Download Bulk Export > Inlinks and …
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Solving SEO crawl report issues
Automatic crawl report tools generally give a dump of data. The better ones will seek to prioritize critical issues over items worth further investigation but generally you end up with a dashboard of …
Multiple sites, subdomains, and other bad decisions
I'm designing a content audit with ongoing recommendations product. I'm looking for sites to help inform and direct what that looks like. Because this is a beta, I'm pricing it at $500/month. If …
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Pull your user journeys out of your brain
I’m launching a productized service for graph content audit + ongoing recommendations at $500/month per site. I’m looking for 5 sites to help guide the direction of features, …
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How do you value a page?
Let's say you have 3,000 articles from over the years. And you're ready to get serious about your site being a key business asset instead of a garage full of old stuff that's hard to find. A good …
Thinking through a better content audit process
The way site audits are typically done hasn't changed much in the past five years. New and better tools come out, but they still seek to analyze the same things: content and links as it relates to …
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Neo4j from the command line
Running multi-line cypher script via CLI is a good middle level approach between starting out and a full deployment solution. Quick Start for cypher-shell (TL;DR) Fire up Neo4j Desktop (for Mac …
Advocating for your best ideas
I've owed Philip Morgan a gratis content audit for experts for months now. I'm sure it's one of those things I think much more about than he does, and to be fair, I'm working out a process, but it …
Making internal linking easier
Yesterday I spent a couple minutes looking for an old post to reference. My headings weren't clear. Wordpress site search wasn't cutting it. A site: search in Google wasn't surfacing it. Couldn't …
Content quality [cheatsheet]
If you never read another article about SEO or advice on how to optimize your site for search, this is what I would want you to know. The way SEOs approach understanding SEO is based on: what …
Easier access to website insights with graphs
Loading available data about your website into a graph database can quickly provide deep and actionable insights to improve those pages in search. In this walkthrough, you'll see just one example …
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Your very own… knowledge graph?
When I first heard about knowledge graphs (Facebook's Open Graph and Google's Knowledge Graph), I imagined something like a bundle of scatter plots with little avatars. But the concepts actually …
Types of knowledge graphs
Global knowledge graphs Famous people, well-known books they wrote, their companies and how those things relate are mapped into the larger context of all the life things. Think mapping how …
Uncertainty? More like predictability
In some ways there is a lot of uncertainty, and then in others, things are more predictable than ever. I've been enjoying the time we get to go outside (dog walks), learning the guitar (a couple …
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What’s in a content audit
I'm in the camp that relationships between real world (and web) things is where the value of data and transformative insights live. In working on a content audit process around this idea, I'm …
The moving target of content quality
You can trash six years of branding with a text message right now. Six years ago (I checked) I signed up for a newsletter from an org selling CRM + website + marketing tooling for Realtors. Here's …
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Another COVID email
I just have to get through this email before going back to purely content audit emails because I think it's important to acknowledge what's going on if you have a list and what the ones I respect and …
Less content, more traffic?
The more (unorganized) content an expert's website has, the less search traffic it is likely to get. Unorganized content leads to inefficiency surfacing content for users on your site as well as …
Three levels of experts
The expertise to authority continuum can be quantified by how conversations happen. TL;DR A level one expert has one conversation at a time at a one-to-one level (or one-to-a-few as with a …
Content audit as couples therapy
There's a documentary series called Couples Therapy on Showtime that is worth watching. It follows a handful of couples over 12 weekly sessions with a therapist, Dr. Orna Guralnik, and highlights the …
Content audits for experts
Content audits are traditionally in service of one dimension or heavily skewed toward it (typically search, information architecture, content marketing, user experience, conversion rate …
How audience-based businesses might handle initial success
I'm bought in on the idea that getting to a point of consistency in doing a few important things well gets you to a measure of success. And as I slack on the daily publishing habit I know it's …
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trust as being pervasively consistent
A lot of the algorithms used on graphs in network science are really just aimed to model, summarize, measure, and interpret reality at scale with available data in a way that's useful. When we …
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Three levels of audience businesses
When we think of measures of influence, we see the outputs: number of followers, list members, traffic, sales. Basically what's immediately visible and what we're most concerned with. At this first …
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tiny network effects
I've been spending a lot of time thinking/learning about small network phenomena. Questions like, what characteristics of relationships better predict where outsized returns on relationships …
just an update
Well. It's 11:10pm and I'm digging through untitled drafts looking for the seed of something I can whip off to keep my somewhat daily email streak going. Right now I've been learning/writing about …
Unfunnel your funnels
Unfunnel your funnels, unsqueeze your squeeze pages A lot of audience-first businesses push a lot of their traffic to a squeeze page and then put their best content behind an email wall. If you …
Privacy and trust
The more we know about our audiences, the better we can serve them, right? Without knowing what they want or need, without having as as much data as possible, how can we effectively segment, …
Summarizing reviews at scale for product comparison during user purchase journey
The client was a direct to consumer ecommerce website doing approximately $3 million a year in online sales and $30 million in brick and mortar sales. A key issue uncovered through support chat …
How do you become indispensable to an audience?
If your building an audience around your thinking, how indispensable you become is ultimately a function of the value of your content. The worn path here is to start talking about how you need to …
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The perfect homepage
Determining an optimal layout for your website is not a small exercise. And the homepage as the centerpiece is no different. It has one job, but it's one of those jobs where the employer just keeps …
Example “how to use your new site” tutorials
Bell Works How to add, edit and remove Wordpress UsersHow to Add Partner LogosHow to Add Explore / Cover BoxesHow to Add EventsHow to Add PressHow to Make Press LogosHow to Add a Menu ItemHow to …
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How to quickly find related content to add to your articles
We talked about some plugin or code based options to make adding related posts or "You May Also Like..." type links to articles on Wordpress sites. The most simple option that we didn't talk about …
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Goal driven content organization
How you organize your content is a function of the goals you want to accomplish. But what should guide the process? It really comes down to the master you want to serve. I see a few camps (sales …
Homepage vs “Start Here”
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole when friend of the list Kyle Bowen of SuperHelpful.com emailed a question about "Start Here" pages this past weekend: What are your thoughts on the differences …
Powering your site search with Google search results
There are a lot of reasons to let Google power your site search results. For one, the whole thing is complicated. Even Wordpress' built in method for ordering results in a keyword phrase query by …
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Can we learn anything from Google’s “People Also Search”?
Google's the industry standard in entity-relationship recognition. And as it's added (and gotten better at) more SERP features, often a lot more is revealed and we can use these as better research …
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The authority dump and how you deal with it
If you've ever competed in solo sports, you learn all about the adrenaline dump phenomenon common in competition or races. Excerpted from Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger by Jeff …
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What does writing a book do to your blog?
Following a lot of entrepreneur-author-speaker types over time I've seen some patterns emerge around different inflection points in the journey to authority. At some point you reach a measure of …
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