Dominic Woodman - SEO, Marketing, Technical Things

Extract day by day data from Google search analytics graph | Dom Woodman

Sun, 03 Nov 2019 17:10:12 +0000

Another quick tool spurred on by a tweet.

Here’s a quick bookmarklet for downloading the search analytics day by day graph.

I spotted this tweet the other day in my feed:

Extract the crawl graph data from seach console | Dom Woodman

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 12:10:12 +0000

This is a quick one.

There is crawl data in the (old) search console. If I’m verifying log data or putting it into decks I often need this data and the table format isn’t very helpful.

Here’s a quick bookmarklet to get it.

A guide for B2B SEO | Dom Woodman

Wed, 04 Sep 2019 09:06:59 +0000

B2C and SEO are a natural fit. If you’re a property website selling houses (like Zillow or Zoopla), it makes instinctive sense that search is a good marketing channel.

Someone wants to buy a house, they search on Google, they buy it.

(Buying a house. Obviously not that easy, you get the idea.)

B2B doesn’t fit quite as well. The sales processes are larger, decisions are made by more people with different criteria, the route from search to success isn’t quite as obvious.

But that just makes a more fun challenge :)

How to get un-sampled Google Analytics data | Dom Woodman

Sun, 30 Jun 2019 12:10:12 +0000

Un-sampled Google analytics data, wherever you need it.

Eventually in your marketing career you might find yourself working a website, where it’s so large that Google analytics becomes difficult to use without sampling.

They also might not have shelled out the hundreds of thousands a year for premium, to get around it.

What is a jupyter notebook and how do I use it? | Dom Woodman

Sun, 30 Jun 2019 12:10:12 +0000

All too often on this blog you’ll be minding your own business and…. BAM jupyter notebook. “I have no idea what those are Dom.” Have no fear. That’s what we’ll be looking at in this post. What is a jupyter notebook? Suppose you’ve written a neat piece of code. It takes all the URLs in a list and changes http:// to https://. It will save you loads of time.

How to install a python library | Dom Woodman

Sun, 30 Jun 2019 12:09:18 +0000

Another nice and basic tutorial for this blog. I imagine you’re here because I linked you from another tutorial, so you could install things and get on with some analysis. So let’s get on with it. What are you seeing? You’re probably seeing an error like this: You’ve tried to load a module (code someone else has written that we can use), but we haven’t installed it yet.

How to make your awful technical SEO audit better | Dom Woodman

Fri, 17 May 2019 09:06:59 +0000

Ok well maybe it’s not awful. I haven’t actually seen yours. But boy there are a lot of terrible tech audits out there and someone is writing them

I certainly was if we cut back 3 or 4 years ago. It’s not that my technical knowledge was bad, but rather that I was missing all the skills around the side, which made audits just… not very good.

Thankfully it’s not just me, pretty much everyone makes these mistakes when they start so let’s unpick some of them and move together towards better work.

How to get regex in Excel - Hooorah! | Dom Woodman

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 11:06:59 +0000

Excel is wonderful. Excel is life. It has everything you could possibly ever want. How could you possibly improve on perfection? You couldn’t suggest anything to even slightly change my mind, I am completely…

Regex you say?

Dang, that would be pretty sweet.

A Wild Guide Appears - How to be a better account manager | Dom W

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 10:06:59 +0000

At this point I’ve now been managing accounts and clients for almost 4 years. I am no longer totally awful at it.

It’s a lot easier to value hard skills so they tend to get taught more, but the soft are just as useful. This post is about the soft.

Here are all the things I wish I’d been told when I started. (I might being uncharitable here, perhaps I was told them and didn’t pay attention.)

Passing headers to a content script chrome extension | Dom Woodman

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 12:00:01 +0000

This was annoying. The solution I talk through below is still not perfect.

A little background first. As a side project to better understand chrome extensions, I built this extension Traffic Light SEO.

As you navigate to a page, it shows a preview of title and meta description as it would appear on Google, and 3 traffic lights which will tell you if a page is indexable by Google.

Rank track Google's hotel search - DIY SERP Research | Dom Woodman

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 20:06:59 +0000

A lot of SEO work begins by digging into rankings.

We pay a lot of money to services that track rankings and for good reason, it’s really really useful.

Sometimes however we need to do it ourselves. I’m going to share one possible way and how to do it on Google’s Hotel Search.

Why has organic traffic dropped? - A step-by-step checklist

Sat, 16 Jun 2018 20:06:59 +0000

The feared traffic drop.

“Hey Dom, why has our website traffic dropped?”

Goodbye good times and hello to immediate stress. You’ve landed on this post in a time of need (or possibly because you’re researching job interview questions), so let’s cut the pre-amble and jump into it.

Differences between F&R, Googlebot and the mobile friendly test

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 20:06:59 +0000

If you spot an issue with the JS on your page in fetch and render (F&R) or the mobile testing tool (MTT), what are the chances Googlebot is actually having that issue?

Do those three different methods render JS in notably different ways? Let’s find out out?

Leave Excel and learn data analysis with pandas (SEO example)

Tue, 03 Apr 2018 12:20:59 +0000

If you find yourself doing a lot of data analysis in Excel, moving to Jupyter notebooks and python is one of the best things you can do for your career. Why bother? When I started I didn’t see the value in it either. Why bother? I was quick in Excel. I knew all the shortcuts. I was fast and code was hard. But moving from Excel to Jupyter notebooks and python has a huge number of benefits, your work becomes:

How to audit content for the mobile first index

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 20:15:33 +0100

With the mobile index coming up on us, I’ve recently had to do a fair bit of mobile auditing. Some of it can be quite a lot of work, so I’m sharing some of the processes I use to speed it up.

We will specifically be looking at auditing content and structured data.

How to set up Python for Marketers

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 20:13:33 +0100

This post will show you to get setup with Python so you can use it in your day to day work.

Why learn Python? Sounds like an awful lot of work. Boy and it’s pretty late in the afternoon already.

That’s not this post. When I’ve written that post, I’ll come back revisit that.

Traffic Light SEO

Sun, 08 Oct 2017 20:20:59 +0100

Traffic Light SEO

Traffic Light SEO, is a chrome extension, designed to show you a page’s indexation and meta data passively as you are browsing around the internet. You can download the extension here.

Setting up a Hugo blog with Netlify

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 00:15:59 +0100

This year before BrightonSEO, I spent a lovely day in the bottom of a dark pub with a bunch of smart people at ohgmcon (a small conference/get together run by Oliver Mason).

Tom Bennet gave a presentation about the JAM stack and his pitch for why it’s the future. I’ve been putting off making a blog for ages and this seemed like a good opportunity to create a static site.

It’s live now (as you may have noticed), so here are my thoughts on the whole thing.