ABC analysis originally came from the field of inventory management, where it’s used by procurement staff to classify inventory items into three categories - A, B, and C - to...
The Advertools web scraping package popular in the Python SEO community automatically extracts a wide range of page elements, such as the title, meta description, and various schema.org and OpenGraph...
For larger web scraping projects, the Scrapy web scraping Python package is one of the most effective tools. It’s powerful and fast and have a huge range of features. However,...
Adding internal links to articles helps reduce bounce rate by promoting related content site visitors may find interesting, but it also has a powerful impact upon search engine optimisation or...
In ecommerce, it is often difficult to tell whether your search traffic is performing to expectations. What your boss perceives to be caused by an on-site or marketing-related issue may...
The requests HTTP library for Python allows you to make HTTP requests to servers and receive back HTTP status codes, site content, and other data. It’s extremely useful for building...
CountVectorizer is a scikit-learn package that uses count vectorization to convert a collection of text documents to a matrix of token counts. Given a corpus of text documents, such as...
Time series forecasting uses machine learning to predict future values of time series data. In this project we’ll be using the Neural Prophet model to predict future values of Google...
Web scraping is a programming technique that uses a script or bot to visit one or more websites and extract specific elements or HTML tags from the source code of...
Most off-the-shelf SEO tools come with a rank checker that allows you to monitor your position for given phrases in the Google search engine results. If you want to create...
One common task you’ll perform in Google Search Console is to compare the data from two different time periods to see how impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), or average position...
One of the problems with search engine optimisation or SEO is that search engine algorithms are essentially black boxes. They analyse so many on-page and off-page factors, and use multiple...
There are some great anomaly detection models available for Python, which let you examine complex data for a wide range of different anomaly types. In this project, I’ll show you...
One common conundrum in e-commerce and marketing involves trying to ascertain whether a given change in marketing activity, product price, or site design or content, has had a statistically significant...
One of the most useful Python SEO projects you can undertake is to identify the top keywords for which each of your site’s pages are ranking for. Sometimes, these keywords...
Striking distance keywords are those which appear just off the bottom of the first page of search engine results. Keywords that appear on the first page have the greatest visibility...
Google Search Console is a really useful tool for search marketers since it shows what is happening data-wise before organic search visitors reach your website. Google Analytics only shows you...
The Google Search Console (GSC) API is a great source of information for those working in SEO, marketing, or ecommerce. It can tell you which of your pages are appearing...
Meta descriptions are strings of text added to the head of an HTML document to describe its content to search engines and search engine users and are of critical importance...
Although I have never really considered myself a technical SEO, I do need to do quite a bit of SEO work as part of my role as an Ecommerce Director....
Internal linking helps improve the user experience by recommending related content to users, which both reduces bounce rate, and helps search engine optimisation efforts. While there are no hard and...
EcommerceTools makes it really quick and easy to scrape Google search engine results in Python. In this simple project, we’ll use EcommerceTools to search Google for your chosen keywords, use...
There’s often a lot of faffing around required to get marketing and ecommerce data from various systems into Pandas so you can analyse it, or use it within more complex...
Whether you’re analysing content written in other languages using Natural Language Processing, or you want to assist your content team by translating their writing into other languages, machine translating software...
In those ecommerce businesses where relatively few products are launched and products have a relatively long lifecycle, copywriters tend to be targeted on producing unique content that sells the benefits...
Several years ago, in one of my first Ecommerce Director roles, I worked with the ex-Myprotein founder to launch sports nutrition brand GoNutrition. As a “bootstrapped” startup, we were low...
In ecommerce, writing good product copy is both an art and a science. Not only does product copy need to be written in the correct tone and style for your...
If you’ve never heard of Spintax, you’ll definitely be aware of its typical usages. This text string replacement “language” is most commonly used for text spinning or article spinning, but...
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts on web scraping, the most efficient way to scrape data is to identify what Schema.org metadata is in use and then create a microdata...
People Also Ask or PAA boxes have been becoming increasingly common in Google’s search results over the past few years. They show a range of questions and answers related to...
Although I suspect you are probably not technically allowed to do it, I doubt there’s an SEO in the land who hasn’t scraped Google search engine results to analyse them,...
Neither Google Search Console nor Google Analytics gives you access to the data found in both systems in one place. However, with a bit of ingenuity and some relatively simple...
The Google Autocomplete feature, or Google Suggest as it was previously known, has become a part of everyday life for us all. Start typing a search term into Google, and...
One quick and easy way to understand the size of a website, and its growth rate, is to examine the number of its web pages Google has indexed. You can...
The Google Knowledge Graph database includes an astronomical amount of data on almost every topic you can think of, allowing Google to create Knowledge Panels and infoboxes that summarise search...
The downside to building datasets using web scraping is that every site has custom HTML. If you scrape sites in this way, you’ll forever be building bespoke scrapers, and they’ll...
Many websites include Open Graph protocol data in their document head. This structured data allows social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, to access specific elements of the page’s content...
When scraping websites, and when checking how well a site is configured for crawling, it pays to carefully check and parse the site’s robots.txt file. This file, which should be...
Scraping the titles and meta descriptions from every page on a site can tell you a great deal about its content, the underlying content strategy, or product ranges, and many...
Both 404 page not found errors and 301 redirect chains can be costly and damaging to the performance of a website. They’re both easy to introduce, especially on ecommerce sites...
Large, uncompressed images slow down your site, increase bandwidth costs, harm the user experience, and impact search engine rankings. In this project, I’ll show you how you can bulk resize...
XML sitemaps are designed to make life easier for search engines by providing an index of a site’s URLs. However, they’re also a useful tool in competitor analysis and allow...
URLs often contain useful information that can be used to analyse a website, a user’s search, or the breakdown of content present in each section. While they often look pretty...
Keyword cannibalisation occurs when you have several pages ranking for the same phrase, effectively putting them in competition with each other for search engine rankings. Since Google generally only shows...
Unless you’re building a large and complex web scraper using Scrapy or Selenium, it’s probable that you’ll utilise Requests and Beautiful Soup. These two packages are brilliant for web scraping....
Back in 2020, Google introduced Web Vitals, a set of metrics is designed to help site owners to optimise the user experience on their websites, so pages are quick to...
If your site’s pages aren’t indexed by Google, you’re obviously not going to generate any traffic to them, so you’ll want to check that everything you expect to be present...
Google Search Console contains loads of really useful information for technical SEO. However, there are limits to what you can do using the front-end interface, and it takes time to...
Search intent classification has been around for almost 20 years, but has only recently started to move into the mainstream in ecommerce and technical SEO. Here’s a quick guide to...
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is widely used in digital marketing and ecommerce. It provides a user-friendly interface to a powerful site crawler and scraper that can be used...
The things we search for online can reveal a remarkable amount about us, even when viewed in aggregate on an anonymous level. For many years, Google has made some of...
