Welcome back to the SEO weekly, where queries are weird advice is controversial and everything depends. I’m your host Garrett Sussman from iPullRank and this week we’ve got, well? Seemingly the first predictions of what’s coming for SEO in 2022. Is SEO dead? Find out we’re going to talk about some awesome, awesome, awesome tips that you probably did not know about Google Search Console and RegEx.

Do you use RegEx? People are freaked out by RegEx, but we are getting funky cause we’ve got some great tips on how you can use it in real world situations with Google Analytics. Let’s dive in. Okay. First off really sad news for the industry. John Carcutt who is an OG in SEO been doing it for two decades.

He was the director of SEO at Advance Local. He passed away over the weekend, really tough loss a lot of people were connected to John. There is a GoFundMe set up to support his family. Check out the link in the description notes that you can find that there to donate and support them. Not a lot of Google news this week in relation to the upcoming page experience rollout, that’s going to be happening for desktop.

Yes, it is happening for desktop. It was asked about whether, you know, the old page interstitials that pop up like those ads or, you know, using them for newsletters. Is that going to impact rankings? And it said that yeah it could actually ding the user, the rankings. Now my personal opinion with this is it all comes to user experience.

If you’re doing something like exit intent, I personally don’t think that that’s going to have a negative impact, but if you’re going to a page and you’re trying to read the content. And boom ad, boom ad, boom ad, boom ad.Yeah,you might see an impact on desktop. So that’s something to consider in terms of your strategy ahead of time.

Think about maybe even how you might SEO test that you can reach out to Will Critchlow. A couple of weeks ago, we had him on Rankable talking about SEO split testing, but interstitials, desktop, something to pay attention to. When it comes to Twitter threads. Oh man, there are a couple of really great

actionable Twitter threads put out by Andrew Charlton this week, who has created a really great newsletter best name ever. It’s called the Weekly SEO. Uh, it’s like we’re like brother news newsletter, video companions, but check that out. Great newsletter. So what he did is he had two back to back. But banger Twitter threads.

The first one was all about tips on what you might not know about Google Search Console. The second one was all about Google Analytics. There’s a lot of things that aren’t necessarily explained that you can make it assumptions about, but that aren’t the case. So he went into it and oh man, nine is going to nine.

Number nine is going to blow your mind. He had 10 of them. Here we go. Position is only recorded when an impression is recorded. If you only operate in one country, your data will be skewed by default filter by country. Position is calculated on the left, the primary side top to bottom. And then on the right side, if there’s many pages ranking for the same query search console records, the best position when it aggregates average position, it averages the best position across queries.

If there are elements like a knowledge panel with multiple links, they’ll all be recorded as the same position. This approximation can be misleading on the landing page report, Google aggregates landing page data by the canonical URL. This can paint a different picture to GA. He’s got four more of those, like I said, number nine is awesome.

Check out that thread. Check out the Google Analytics thread as well. Andrew’s putting out some great content. Great follow on Twitter. John Doherty of Credo had a great Twitter thread the other day, talking about agency versus in-house for SEO. They actually put out their digital marketing industry pricing survey that they do every year.

Really interesting to see the way different consultants and SEO agencies, price their services, check it out. There’s 11 chapters it’s free and accessible. Lot of great information. They’re worth looking at some surprising notes. But what did John say when it came to in-house versus agency SEO services?

Well, in the Twitter thread, he said, agencies can be huge leverage for a company. A good marketing generalist will call cost you $60,000 easy. For that spend with an agency, you can get a whole team across multiple channels, no brainer for many. So then he goes on to say, to clarify what I’m saying here, because many have disagreed.

There is a time and place for both agencies and full-time in-house, but realistically, most companies need both. It’s a matter of in what order. Value and hours are not the same thing. We found average for marketing providers hourly, not necessarily how they bill is $112 per hour at 48 weeks a year. That’s $220,000 for an in-house hire.

You should hire an agency outside provider for expertise and scale, not hours. You know, one full-time in-house hire, won’t be able to do all the things an agency can. Realistically, one person ends up with all the channels. If you go that route one full-time versus agency at 40 hours per week, that’s maybe five to seven hours per channel per week, approximately same as an agency, but not focused or core competency usually.

So it says, hire an agency for scale to get things done. Hire a consultant to help you form the strategy and start executing on one max two channels, hire freelancers, cheaper, hourly to build a team of workers that you manage yourself. No right answer. Different solutions for different problems. And at iPullRank, we can totally relate to that. I mean, for the most part, we work on bigger projects, but we do have, you know, consulting options. We never really work hourly. It’s always going to be on a project level, but a lot of times when we’re working with our enterprises, our goal is to actually supplement the in-house team, you know, or supplement what another agency is doing because the bigger the company, even enterprises will have multiple agencies doing multiple work, throughout the organization. So really great, um, price survey, really good followed another one, John Doherty. He’s going to actually be on Rankable, I believe in January. So keep your eyes peeled for that. So many great articles came out this week. One a long time industry veteran. Who’s just awesome,

when it comes to analytics, I learned from her back in the day Annie Cushing is back. She put out this, this awesome, like kind of step-by-step tutorial of using RegEx. She put it’s like six real world use cases for RegEx, um, with Google Analytics, obviously it’s more analytics and data reporting, but obviously that’s tied to SEO.

So what did she cover? Well, she, you know, gave you tips on how to group content on the fly. Create a content group using the rule option. Create a content group using the extract option. Generate RegEx from a list using Google sheets. Test your channel Regex with a custom channel group. Create advanced segments.

And just for those of you don’t know, RegEx is a really important way to use different characters to search within, you know, content within strings, pull out exactly what you’re looking for by words. Uh, it’s, it’s incredibly valuable for anyone working with data. Thanks, Annie awesome piece. You know, it’s that time of year that the holidays around.

And prediction articles start coming out and I give a, gotta give a shout out to Serge Bezborodov, of JetOctopus. He rounded up 12 really awesome people. A lot of people in the industry that I admire, I’m not gonna lie transparently. I was on the list. I got to talk a little bit about MUM and visual search, but there’s some great predictions about. what to expect in SEO. A few of my favorites that I loved is for instance, from Lily Ray, she said the leading SEO trend in 2022 will continue to be E-A-T. I know I sound like a broken record, but E-A-T is the driving force behind what makes sites rank in recent years, especially on your money, your life topics. Other SEO tactics, ebb, and flow and importance such as small technical tweaks that Google gets better understanding on its own or even ignores our suggestions over time.

Focusing on E-A-T is the best long-term forward-thinking SEO strategy because Google’s algorithms are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their ability to understand what is truly expert authoritative content. Lily’s always talking about E-A-T. She’s read those Quality Rater Guidelines inside and out. No, that sh she’s absolutely right.

Just establishing yourself as an authority continues to be so critical to rankings and it will, it will going forward. Another one that I love was from Nikki Halliwell. Nikki’s a technical SEO working at Rise at Seven. She said, I think the biggest trend in SEO for 2022 will be Python automation for SEO professionals.

It can save masses of time by automating tech, SEO tasks, and also analyzing massive data sets. As more of us learn Python will be able to do our jobs better and make better informed decisions for the benefit of our clients. Some available Python scripts can help SEOs to map URLs ahead of migration.

Analyze on page elements, internal link analysis, analyze log files, validate a hrefLang competitor analysis and more. So she’s right on it. When it comes to the opportunity presented by Python, if you have someone in house who’s producing these scripts to automate, like for instance, uh, with us Colt Sliva is constantly putting together these scripts, that saving him time so we can be more effective and do more for our clients.

I love it. So going back to what Lily was saying about E-A-T on our own blog, Andrew McDermott wrote an article about, you know, six factors or six ways to use, um, E-A-T, to build your authority as an enterprise. So if you want to start thinking about what you tactically can do to build your E-A-T:those expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness factors. He listed them out. Um, I love where he went with this. Obviously I’m biased for iPullRank, but he wrote, you can audit your external links for authority, making sure that you’re using like authoritative links that you’re linking out to remove spam comments, eliminate negative SEO, include author details, build authority for key figures in your enterprise, and remove or update poor content.

So that’s a super useful tactical way to approach E-A-T if you’re on an enterprise and establish yourself as an authority. So if you’re trying to get, you know, in your vertical, those top two rankings and someone else’s there building your authority can significantly help.

Tom Capper, uh, put out a really great article, you know, is one of those correlation studies, which he caveats throughout it for Moz um, all he explains his methodology, but he found that for links and brands, his ranking factors, that page level performance is important.

However you go about achieving it, raw link count isn’t a great metric. And demand for your brand is at least as good a predictor of rankings as domain strength on the first page. Tom found as always, there’s a correlation between links, quantity, and you know, external link equality connected to your website will help your rankings.

Although he caveats, like I said, correlation, doesn’t call it causation, not shocking about links. It’s hard not to admire when people put themselves out there and build in public. I love what Alice Roussel is doing. She put another article out today as a follow-up to her one a month ago, which was all about buying an expired domain.

This time she wrote about her learnings on ranking capabilities that it took 40 days to rank. Um, she showed, you know, in the visual of how it looks in Google Search Console. I love that she does that transparently. Some people are scared to put the actual numbers out there. So keep doing the great work.

Alice, check her out, check out that article and she’s continually updating what’s going on with that specific project. Itamar Blauer is Mr. Image SEO. He puts together some amazing articles that with like tactical ways to actually address your image SEO, to make sure your images are ranking and they’re optimized to help your SEO ranking and performance.

He has a little video, but he also in the blog did the step-by-step showing how you can improve the image SEO with an image SEO audit, image resizing, image compression. Image renaming, and image alt text. A lot of it. I don’t think it’s super complex, but you need to do it. It, you know, it’s valuable to update your image SEO.

So check out Itamar’s article. Okay. So Michael Van Den Reym put together this awesome Google Data Studio report using Screaming Frog, making it easier for you to get rid of any sort of spelling or grammar errors on your website. It’s a beautiful laid out report that you can use on your site and just be like, oh, spelling error there, grammar error there.

Thanks, Michael, check it out. He made it accessible to everybody links in the description. Greg Bernhardt put together a nice little script using Python. So if you’re working on Python and you want to learn how to use Python and Google Trends to predict the performance of forecasts, top Google Search Console keywords, Greg broke it down, you know, script by script on what you have to implement, which libraries and then how you can run that Python to give you, you know, what’s trending up, what’s trending down.

What’s flat with those Google search console keywords. Really cool article by Greg. I love how he’s always giving back to the community with various Python scripts and how to tutorials. Awesome. And to wrap things up. Oh man, there was a killer webinar on Wednesday with our very own,Mike King. Uh, we joined with Ryte.

And he put on this Hitting the SEO Charts with an Iterative Content Strategy. Uh, Marcus Tandler hosted it. He dropped some bars which are flipping awesome. Uh, we had so much fun. I loved it. If you want to get the deck, then you can just click on this link right here. It’s also in the descriptions. Well, I guess he can’t click on it on the video.

We’re not setting that up, but the links in the descriptions we’ll send the deck your way. And then as a bonus, a sneak peek, we are launching a modern approach to enterprise content strategy guide. This, this thing’s epic. I’ve been working on this for a few months now with the rest of the team, 70 pages.

Eight experts all about content strategy, content auditing, content creation, content governance, which is like a really big issue in the world of enterprise, where you have to deal with like legal and different departments and, you know, a content team doing this and that. And the other thing in SEO, check out this guide, sign up for the link.

We’ll send that over to you for a sneak peek before we really like launch launch launch, kind of, kind of like a soft launch. And then in the world of Rankable, uh, I had a great podcast interview yesterday with Kristina Azarenko of MarketingSyrup. She is an awesome freelancer. She knows consulting. She knows e-commerce inside and out.

So we talked about technical SEO and e-commerce, especially with Black Friday coming up, like what can you do now to get ready for the next couple of weeks and making sure that you’re visible in the search results. And then next week, elated excited, super jazzed to have Rand Fishkin of SparkToro, joining Rankable.

It’s going to be a 3:30 PM Eastern time episode on Thursday, the 18th, but we’re going to talk about, you know, modern, uh, audience building and audience research. He’s going to tell us all about how SparkToro can help with that. And we’re going to talk about, you know, just what are these unique ways to think about who your audience is and the buyer’s journey.

In 2021, maybe, maybe I’ll even ask him for prediction for 2022. I don’t know. That’s it a lot of awesome stuff. A lot of tactical stuff and really cool people. You know, I said this on Twitter and I mean it, never stop promoting other people. Positivity’s awesome. I know it’s cheesy as hell, but like, It’s, uh, it’s hard to self promote.

So if you see someone else like crushing it, doing something really good share with the world, share out there, let them know that this person has, you know, is putting in the work and creating good and putting good out there. I think it’s valuable. I try to do it every day. I try the best that I can.

Speaking of which, if you’re enjoying this subscribe to the video, to the SEO weekly, like it, share it, um, leave a comment. Tell me what you’re thinking. If there’s something that you think we should change, actually, this is going to be the last episode with this sort of format. I’m changing things up. I’ll explain in a future episode.

Why, but appreciate you all. My name is Garrett Sussman.This is the iPullRank SEO Weekly video show, episode 11. That’s nuts. I’m going to be rambling. How many times did I say basically in this episode, you let me know in the comments I’m out. I catch you next week.