Hi Lunch Buddies!

I hope everyone had a fantastic weekend. We reached 40 degrees here in Minnesota which was a fantastic treat. I’m taking one more snowmobile trip this week but then I am 100% team Spring.

Let’s not waste another moment and jump right into this week’s newsletter!

-Nick

How MAGO avoided facing legal action thanks to ContentKing

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A bug on MAGO’s site resulted in many page titles advertising prices at $0.00. But thanks to ContentKing's unique real-time nature, the team immediately received an alert and allowed them to resolve the issue before it became an SEO disaster. 

Amy Leach, SEO Manager at MAGO: “If we didn’t have ContentKing at the time of the page title changes, we could’ve seen legal action against false advertising.”

Learn how real-time alerts can protect your business

Official Search Engine Updates

Video

Why should you want an SEO-Dev Liaison?

What's Important:

Google’s Martin Splitt and Ruth Mesfun (Zillow) discuss how valuable a liaison between SEOs and Devs can be in order to maximize performance.

Nick’s Take:
This series continues to be one of my favorites as it tackles one of the biggest hurdles that SEOs have - working with devs. What I enjoyed most is around the 26-minute mark is the conversation of the middle-person and if they have to be super technical to be successful in that role… the answer may surprise you.

Podcast

Cats, muffins and more: Videos in Search

What's Important:

Google’s Gary Illyyes, Lizzi Sassman, and Danielle Marshak discuss how images, structured data, content protection, and other factors influence how search engines surface content.

Nick’s Take:

If optimizing for video is important to you then I highly encourage you to listen to this podcast. It’s interesting to hear Googler’s opinions on machine learning (dog vs donut example) in addition to some more traditional hints for Google to surface video content across its search results.

Video

Do keyword meta tags matter for Google search?

What's Important:

Google’s John Mueller tackles one of the most common misconceptions in the SEO industry. The answer to this question is still “No.”

Nick’s Take:

As John mentions, the keyword meta tag does not provide any value. However, its important to also note that it will not hurt your websites performance. Google will simply ignore any values you place within this meta tag.

Want an easy way to keep on top of what is happening in the SEO world? 

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Have a look at tl;drMarketing. It's a curated list of stories to give you a birds-eye view of what is going on in the organic, paid, and social media landscape.

You get to drill down and go into the stories that you care about and you are always up-to-date on what is changing in the digital marketing landscape. 

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Top SEO Resources From Last Week

How To Improve The Way You’re Producing Hub And Spoke Content

Andy Chadwick, andy-chadwick.com

Most of us are aware of the Hub and Spoke content model. But how confident are you in your execution strategy? Are you creating the hub first or the second? Andy’s approach to executing this strategy had me rethinking the approach I’ve historically taken. After reading this detailed post, you might too!

How To Debug Missing Pages In A Crawl

Editorial Team, screamingfrog.co.uk

Crawling tools are incredibly helpful to SEOs when diagnosing issues on a site. However, how do you know if the site is error free if your crawl is missing pages? This article covers the “why” behind pages missing as well as a process for debugging the situation.

SEO Best Practices for eCommerce Product Pages

Lindsay Haskell, goinflow.com

Do you work on ecommerce sites? How confident are you in your optimization for product (PDP) pages? This post by Lindsay covers everything you need to know to make sure all your PDPs are meeting SEO best practices.

10+ Strategies for Automotive SEO

Mia Ficken, gofishdigital.com

Continuing on the best practice tend, Mia wrote up a best practice post for automotive SEO. In my 10+ years of being in the SEO industry, I’ve never worked in the automotive space so this was fun to get a sneak peak into an industry I’m not familiar with.

Free Course: Content-Led SEO w/ Brian Dean

Brian Dean, SEMRush.com

Last month, SEMRush purchased backlinko.com from Brian Dean. As a result we now have a course (available for free) that otherwise would have been a paid product. I have not gone through all 28 lessons but from what I’ve seen its well worth the time for someone looking to focus on content strategy.

You Made It To The Bottom. You’re AWESOME!

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Learn About The Guy Behind The #SEOForLunch

Nick LeRoy is a professional SEO Consultant specializing in technical SEO, content strategy, and website migrations.

Nick is also the author of two SEO-focused newsletters: #SEOForLunch and The SEO Freelancer.

You can connect with Nick online through Twitter and LinkedIn.