Lookin’ for SEO love in all the wrong places? Search Engine Land has a new, creative way to go about SEO projects, research, and search audits.
Sometimes you just have to find weird stuff (FWS) to unlock SEO success.
Ways to FWS for SEO Research:
- The site: query: In Google, type “site:” followed by the domain that you want to review.
- Look into .pdf traffic: Review your analytics. You might be surprised about the amount of traffic coming to .pdf pages hosted on your website because they lack analytics tracking. Converting these .pdfs into HTML pages might be a good solution to making a high-ranking page.
- Do a little time travel: If there are dips in organic traffic after a redesign, you may need to better understand what was working in the old layout. Use the Wayback Machine to see how things used to be.
- Check robots.txt and XML sitemaps: You’ll often find pages that shouldn’t be on the site publicly, orphaned pages, or essential pages that have fewer internal links than they deserve.
- Google Search Console: Google Search Console > Settings > Crawl Stats – Check this out for signs of previous hacks or unknown content.
- Page Speed Insights: You might find things like JS, CSS, or images being served multiple times or tracking pixels that are no longer in use.
There are so many off-page and on-page influences for a brand’s SEO that you are bound to find new insights when you shake up your research checklist and start turning over weird rocks.
Check out the full post by Search Engine Land for more research possibilities.
