Thoughts from the SearchPilot team

In enterprise environments, there are some changes that everyone knows need to get done, but that are nonetheless difficult to achieve because they cut across divisions and teams. Moving from HTTP to HTTPS was such a change for many sites, requiring not only changes to infrastructure but also to image hosting, embedded JavaScript and more. This post tells the story of getting a migration done using the Meta-CMS capabilities of SearchPilot.

When Chrome 68 rolled out and highlighted any site not yet on HTTPS as insecure, it made it incredibly urgent for sites that had been putting off their migrations to get them done. One of our customers needed help to achieve this, and we used SearchPilot to remove the final blockers preventing their team getting this critical change live.

We can now 1. Move pages individually or en masse (including redirecting the old pages) 2. Move sub-domain content into sub-folders and 3. Enable easy SEO A/B testing of full page redesigns.

Internal link changes are hard to specify, difficult to evaluate, and most of our ways of thinking about them suffer from a lack of data to support them. In this post, I propose some news to think about internal linking.

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.