ReadingSEO Roundup – February 2020
Posted by Chloe Smith on February 19, 2020
Our third event of 2020 and our first at The Curious Lounge in Reading – and what a fantastic venue! Hosted as always by Matt and Nicky, and with Blue Array’s Tom Pool kicking off proceedings, it was a fantastic way to christen the space.
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Fed, watered (and wined), we were eager to listen to speakers Tom Pool, Gus Pelogia (who had flown in especially!) and Hayden Roche.
Tom Pool, The Massive Growth of Structured Data – what can you do about it?
First up is our very own Tom Pool, with his talk The massive growth of Structured Data – what can you do about it? As Technical SEO Director, Tom is in charge of all Blue Array’s technical output while working on projects such as the Blue Array Academy (another shameless plug).
Tom talked us through the rise and potential fall of Structured Data.
Key takeaways from his talk included:
- The more comprehensive the schema, the better your results will be for users and the better your potential rankings will be.
- Google provides a lot of documentation around structured data, which along with schema.org, saves a lot of headaches! Despite this, the Corporate Contact and Social Profile Markups have been deprecated as Google is now able to scrape sites to find this information.
- As Google advances, the future of Structured Data isn’t clear however tools such as schema review and the structured data reports in Google Search Console suggest it isn’t going anywhere too soon.
- Google has also recently launched a “kickass” codelab, which suggests they are investing a fair amount into this (not that this necessarily means much – RIP Google Hangouts, et al).
Find Tom’s slides here.
Gus Pelogia, F*cking Up Google My Business: how it broke, how we fixed it
Gus is a Senior SEO Specialist at Wolfgang Digital. Hailing from Brazil, he’s lived and worked in Argentina and the Netherlands before settling in his current role in Dublin. In his talk, Gus discussed the potential pitfalls of Google My Business and how to fix them.
Key takeaways from Gus’s talk included:
- All addresses and address pins must be the same across the site – including plugins such as StreetMap. Google will see inconsistencies as an issue, thus suspending the location.
- Multiple addresses (i.e. suppliers, partners, secondary locations) can confuse Google to the point of stating the location is far away from the actual bricks-and-mortar site. Mark it up clearly to ensure the correct site is shown – and prepare for many infuriating emails to Google My Business Support.
- Reviews that reference specific locations or landmarks can impact how Google interprets locality. For example, a listing with reviews including “this is the best coffee shop near 3 arena Dublin” can cause the listing to show up for “coffee shop near 3 arena Dublin” despite it not being anywhere in the vicinity.
- A Google My Business listing can be affected by other business profiles across the web, check the information being displayed and amend accordingly.
- Inconsistent details, such as a telephone number, across platforms can cause confusion – or lead to unsuspecting mothers getting calls from hungry Brazilians!
Find Gus’s slides here.
Hayden Roche, Technical SEO at Scale
Hayden Roche is a Senior Analyst at Red Ventures, specialising in technical SEO and huge amounts of data. His talk gave us an insight into SQL and BigQuery, merging large data sets (that don’t crash the computer) and how to carry out big projects with “minimal-ish” analytical effort.
If you didn’t see it, Women in Tech SEO founder Areej AbuAli gave a fascinating talk on BigQuery and SQL at our first London SEO meetup – the key takeaways can be found here.
Key takeaways from Hayden’s talk included:
- Despite first impressions, analysis on sites with hundreds of thousands or even millions of pages is not impossible – unlike two stars colliding!
- BigQuery allows analysis of hundreds and thousands of URLs without spending decades on the task – or causing Excel to crash.
- Left Join will revolutionise how you analyse data (as will Right Join and Inner Join)
- Discover quick insights by combining data sources such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Pagespeed insights and 3rd party ranking data.
Find Hayden’s slides here.
Not only did the attendees of this month’s ReadingSEO get a ton of knowledge thanks to our three speakers, but they were entered into our prize draw for a free BrightonSEO ticket for April’s event!
Next month’s event will be held on the 12th of March – it’s an extra special one, focusing on Digital PR! It’s not to be missed so we hope we get to see you there!
Chloe Smith
Chloe is an SEO Manager at Blue Array. They were previously a copywriter and editor and they are always noticing things others don’t. In their spare time, Chloe is a performance poet and blogger.