Today is Sitebulb's 4th birthday! FOUR WHOLE YEARS!
I remember the day as if it was yesterday, pacing nervously up and down the corridor, anxious and excited in equal measures. Back then Gareth and I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. Honestly, we wondered if we were ready for that level of commitment. It never felt like the perfect time.
I think the truth is that it's never the perfect time.
But here we are 4 years later, and we've never looked back! In order to celebrate this moderately impressive milestone, we're running a modest swag giveaway competition on Twitter. Get involved and you could bag yourself a sweet Sitebulb hoody and be the envy of all your peers.
Enough about us, here's a bunch of words that might appease your eyes:
Recent Tech SEO Stuff We Love
Forget Mobile-First or Mobile-Only - It's Time to Get Truly Responsive
via @jessthebp
A hugely enjoyable post that explains the evolution towards (and past) 'mobile first', encouraging you to think about GoogleBot as a user and to better understand the rendering experience for as many of your users as possible. Quite a lot of words, but very much worth your time!
Multilingual Case Study with 425% Organic Growth in 6 Months
via @KorayGubur
Part guide, part case study, this is a comprehensive post on how to do 'multilingual SEO', going deep into the theory and demonstrating how it was put to use on forexsuggest.com, with great success.
Tackling 8,000 Title Tag Rewrites: A Case Study
via @dr_pete
It was unfortunately impossible for me to COMPLETELY ignore the Great Google Title Tag Switcheroo of 2021, and of the 400 articles that appeared overnight, I liked Dr Pete's the best, offering a balanced perspective with a conclusion that I largely agree with.
Crawl Budget
via @THCapper
While some may consider the juxtaposition of Dr Pete's post (above) with this rather underwhelmingly titled Moz post a titillating irony I was unable to ignore, this Whiteboard Friday video did make the cut on its own merit, and not just because it sounds like Tom is in a cave. He tackles the poorly understood concept of 'crawl budget', explaining how issues with crawl budget occur and what you can do about them.
A Bunch of Awesome SEO Tools & Resources
- Google SERP feature notes - a timeline of significant SERP feature changes, as observed by perennial SERP-observer Brodie Clark.
- Free Keyword Cannibalization Tool for SEO - connect GSC to this free tool and it will identify pages that are competing for the same keywords.
- Keywords in Sheets Title Checker - find out how Google is changing the appearance of your title tags, for any search query.
- GDS Dashboard from Aleyda - designed to help you explore CTR drops over time (possibly due to Google's title change shenanigans...).
- SEOgre - a Streamlit tool from the iPullrank team that allows you to layer lots of different data points (e.g. traffic trends for competitors).
What We've Been Up To
- We launched our new 'Climate Positive SEO Auditing' initiative, which means we now offset the energy usage of our customers' computers by investing in carbon-positive projects. We are also planting trees for new newsletter subscribers (potentially you, in this case!) and new Sitebulb trialists.
- We were joined on our YouTube channel by Cindy Krum and Colt Sliva for an interesting Q & A webinar on Mobile/Desktop parity and its impact on SEO.
- I re-wrote my guide on 'How to Crawl JavaScript Websites', to bring it all up to speed with crawling (and rendering) circa 2021.
We have plenty more webinar and video content planned for the coming months, so please subscribe to our channel, to get notified when we add new stuff :)
