Thoughts from the SearchPilot team

There is a time and place for hunches and best practice, but they are not at the top of the hierarchy of evidence in digital marketing. In this post, Sam Nemzer builds on his prior experience in clinical science to explore the different ways we can gather persuasive evidence and which methodologies are at the top of that hierarchy.

Despite the claims from Google, we regularly find that there are still downsides to relying on their JavaScript crawling and processing capabilities. This post tells the story of one of our earliest split tests comparing pages requiring JavaScript for the full experience against the performance of those pages when we removed the reliance on JavaScript.

SearchPilot enables SEO A/B testing on large and enterprise websites. For people just starting out experimenting with SEO testing, you might want to be able to play with more basic mathematical approaches. Before we moved to a neural network model we used an approach based on a modified version of causal impact. This post introduces a free version of a DIY tool that uses the causal impact approach that you can play with yourself using your own data.

One year after SearchPilot launched, Tom Anthony dug into metrics and told stories about the growth of the platform through its first 12 months.

It’s always bugged us that so many recommendations get shoved in a drawer and never seen again. I remember the repeated pain in the early years as we found ourselves getting surprised again and again by the clients who would commission us to create some in-depth audit, and then never make the changes we were recommending. As we spoke to friends and colleagues around the industry, we came to realise that we were far from alone in this.

You’re not writing literature. You don’t need to build suspense in your audience. In fact, that can cause more harm than good.

Title and H1 changes are among the most common recommendations in SEO reports, but do they make a difference? In one of the earliest public case studies from SearchPilot’s SEO A/B testing platform, Tim Allen explains the results one of his clients got from testing changes in these fundamental areas.

The original announcement (at the time on distilled.net) of the Optimization Delivery Network or ODN that would go on to become the SearchPilot platform.

How does Google understand your searches? Well, in this video Tom Anthony and I talk about some of the ways that Google is understanding the web. We talk through how Google is now interpreting our search results and their relevancy rather than just indexing them.

I often get asked about my view on growing teams and managing people. I love chatting with would-be entrepreneurs and up-and-coming managers about the bits and pieces I’ve learnt. I don’t consider myself an expert by any stretch of the imagination but I often feel that I benefit from putting my thoughts down in writing.