SEO
20 Essential Technical SEO Tools For Agencies

Technical SEO tools are plentiful.
However, tools are just part of the equation.
Tools are useless without an experienced technical SEO professional to guide the strategy and ensure successful results.
But, within the hands of an experienced professional, tools can do many wondrous things. From scaling a site’s SEO effortlessly to creating content, it’s possible to improve things with less effort (rather than more hard work).
Tools can increase efficiencies, including:
- Identifying issues on-site, like crawling and indexing.
- Diagnosing page speed issues.
- Identifying missing or duplicate text and other elements.
- Redirect issues.
- And many others.
Your SEO tools arsenal, and how you use them, can mean the difference between great success and failure.
And indeed, there is no shortage of technical SEO tools for agencies.
Here are a few of the best you should consider.
1. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is the crawler to have.
To create a substantial website audit, it is crucial to first perform a website crawl with this tool.
Depending on specific settings, it is possible to introduce false positives or errors into an audit that you otherwise would not know about.
Screaming Frog can help you identify the basics like:
- Missing page titles.
- Missing meta descriptions.
- Missing meta keywords.
- Large images.
- Errored response codes.
- Errors in URLs.
- Errors in canonicals.
Advanced things Screaming Frog can help you do include:
- Identifying issues with pagination.
- Diagnosing international SEO implementation issues.
- Taking a deep dive into a website’s architecture.
2. Google Search Console

The primary tool of any SEO pro should be the Google Search Console (GSC).
This critical tool has recently been overhauled to replace many old features while adding more data, features, and reports.
What makes this tool great for agencies? Setting up a reporting process.
For agencies that do SEO, good reporting is critical. If you have not already set up a reporting process, it is highly recommended that you do so.
This process can save you if you have an issue with website change-overs when GSC accounts can be wiped out. If your account is wiped out, it is possible to go back to all your GSC data, because you have been saving it for all these months.
Agency applications can also include utilizing the API for interfacing with other data usage as well.
3. Google Analytics
Where would we be without a solid analytics platform to analyze organic search performance?
While free, Google Analytics provides much in the way of information that can help you identify things like penalties, issues with traffic, and anything else that may come your way.
In much the same way as Google Search Console works, if you set up Google Analytics correctly, it’s ideal to have a monthly reporting process in place.
This process will help you save data for those situations where something unexpected happens to the client’s Google Analytics access.
At least, you won’t have a situation where you lose all data for your clients.
4. Web Developer Toolbar

The web developer toolbar extension for Google Chrome can be downloaded here.
It is an official port of the Firefox web developer extension.
One of the primary uses for this extension is identifying issues with code, specifically JavaScript implementations with menus and the user interface.
Turning off JavaScript and CSS makes it possible to identify where these issues are occurring in the browser.
Your auditing is not just limited to JavaScript and CSS issues.
You can also see alt text, find broken images, and view meta tag information and response headers.
5. WebPageTest

Page speed has been a hot topic in recent years, and auditing website page speed brings you many useful tools.
To that end, WebPageTest is one of those essential SEO tools for your agency.
Cool things that you can do with WebPageTest include:
- Waterfall speed tests.
- Competitor speed tests.
- Competitor speed videos.
- Identifying how long it takes a site to load fully.
- Time to first byte.
- Start render time.
- Document object model (DOM) elements.
This is useful for determining how a site’s technical elements interact to create the final result or display time.
6. Google PageSpeed Insights

Through a combination of speed metrics for both desktop and mobile, Google’s PageSpeed Insights is critical for agencies that want to get their website page speed ducks in a row.
It should not be used as the be-all, end-all of page metrics testing, but it is a good starting point.
Here’s why: PageSpeed Insights does not always use exact page speed. It uses approximations.
While you may get one result with Google PageSpeed, you may also get different results with other tools.
Remember that Google’s PageSpeed provides only part of the picture, and you need more complete data for an effective analysis. Use multiple tools for your analysis to get a full picture of your website’s performance.
7. Google Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool

Determining a website’s mobile technical aspects is also critical for any website audit.
When putting a website through its paces, Google’s Mobile-Friendly testing tool can give you insights into a website’s mobile implementation.
8. Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool
The Google Structured Data Testing Tool has been deprecated and replaced by the Google Rich Results Testing Tool.
This tool performs one function, and performs it well: it helps you test Schema structured data markup against the known data from Schema.org that Google supports.
This is a fantastic way to identify issues with your Schema coding before the code is implemented.
9. GTmetrix Page Speed Report

GTmetrix is a page speed report card that provides a different perspective on page speed.
By diving deep into page requests, CSS and JavaScript files that need to load, and other website elements, it is possible to clean up many elements that contribute to high page speed.
10. W3C Validator

You may not normally think of a code validator like W3C Validator as an SEO tool, but it is important just the same.
Be careful! If you don’t know what you are doing, it is easy to misinterpret the results and actually make things worse.
For example, say you are validating code from a site that was developed in XHTML, but the code was ported over to WordPress.
Copying and pasting the entire code into WordPress during development does not change its document type automatically. If during testing, you run across pages that have thousands of errors across the entire document, that is likely why.
A website that was developed in this fashion is more likely to need a complete overhaul with new code, especially if the former code does not exist.
11. Semrush

Semrush’s greatest claim to fame is accurate data for keyword research and other technical research.
But what makes Semrush so valuable is its competitor analysis data.
You may not normally think of Semrush as a technical analysis tool.
However, if you go deep enough into a competitor analysis, the rankings data and market analysis data can reveal surprising information.
You can use these insights to better tailor your SEO strategy and gain an edge over your competitors.
12. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is considered by many to be a tool that is a critical component of modern technical link analysis.
By identifying certain patterns in a website’s link profile, you can figure out what a site is doing for its linking strategy.
It is possible to identify anchor text issues that may be impacting a site using its word cloud feature.
Also, you can identify the types of links linking back to the site – whether it’s a blog network, a high-risk link profile with many forum and Web 2.0 links, or other major issues.
Other abilities include identifying when a site’s backlinks started going missing, its linking patterns, and much more.
13. Majestic
Majestic is a long-standing tool in the SEO industry with unique linking insights.
Like Ahrefs, you can identify things like linking patterns by downloading reports of the site’s full link profile.
It is also possible to find things like bad neighborhoods and other domains a website owner owns.
Using this bad neighborhood report, you can diagnose issues with a site’s linking arising out of issues with the site’s website associations.
Like most tools, Majestic has its own values for calculating technical link attributes like Trust Flow, Citation Flow, and other linking elements contributing to trust, relevance, and authority.
It is also possible through its own link graphs to identify any issues occurring with the link profile over time.
Majestic is an exceptional tool in your link diagnostic process.
14. Moz Bar
It is hard to think of something like the MozBar, which lends itself to a little bit of whimsicality, as a serious technical SEO tool. But, there are many metrics that you can gain from detailed analysis.
Things like Moz’s Domain Authority and Page Authority, Google Caching status, other code like social open graph coding, and neat things like the page Metas at-a-glance while in the web browser.
Without diving deep into a crawl, you can also see other advanced elements like rel=”canonical” tags, page load time, Schema Markup, and even the page’s HTTP status.
This is useful for an initial survey of the site before diving deeper into a proper audit, and it can be a good idea to include the findings from this data in an actual audit.
15. Barracuda Panguin

If you are investigating a site for a penalty, the Barracuda Panguin tool should be a part of your workflow.
It works by connecting to the Google Analytics account of the site you are investigating. The overlay is intertwined with the GA data, and it will overlay data of when a penalty occurred with your GA data.
Using this overlay, it is possible to easily identify situations where potential penalties occur.
Now, it is important to note that there isn’t an exact science to this, and that correlation isn’t always causation.
It’s important to investigate all avenues of where data is potentially showing something happening, in order to rule out any potential penalty.
Using tools like this can help you zero in on approximations in data events as they occur, which can help for investigative reasons.
16. Google Search Console XML Sitemap Report

The Google Search Console XML Sitemap Report is one of those technical SEO tools that should be an important part of any agency’s reporting workflow.
Diagnosing sitemap issues is a critical part of any SEO audit, and this technical insight can help you achieve the all-important 1:1 ratio of URLs added to the site and the sitemap being updated.
For those who don’t know, it is considered an SEO best practice to ensure the following:
- That a sitemap is supposed to contain all 200 OK URLs. No 4xx or 5xx URLs should be showing up in the sitemap.
- There should be a 1:1 ratio of exact URLs in the sitemap as there are on the site. In other words, the sitemap should not have any orphaned pages that are not showing up in the Screaming Frog crawl.
- Any parameter-laden URLs should be removed from the sitemap if they are not considered primary pages. Certain parameters will cause issues with XML sitemaps validating, so make sure that these parameters are not included in URLs.
17. BrightLocal
If you are operating a website for a local business, your SEO strategy should involve local SEO for a significant portion of its link acquisition efforts.
This is where BrightLocal comes in.
It is normally not thought of as a technical SEO tool, but its application can help you uncover technical issues with the site’s local SEO profile.
For example, you can audit the site’s local SEO citations with this tool. Then, you can move forward with identifying and submitting your site to the appropriate citations.
It works kind of like Yext, in that it has a pre-populated list of potential citations.
One of BrightLocal’s essential tools is that it lets you audit, clean, and build citations to the most common citation sites (and others that are less common).
BrightLocal also includes in-depth auditing of your Google Business Profile presence, including in-depth local SEO audits.
If your agency is heavy into local SEO, this is one of those tools that is a no-brainer, from a workflow perspective.
18. Whitespark
Whitespark is more in-depth when compared to BrightLocal.
Its local citation finder allows you to dive deeper into your site’s local SEO by finding where your site is across the competitor space.
To that end, it also lets you identify all of your competitor’s local SEO citations.
In addition, part of its auditing capabilities allows it to track rankings through detailed reporting focused on distinct Google local positions such as the local pack and local finder, as well as detailed organic rankings reports from both Google and Bing.
19. Botify
Botify is one of the most complete technical SEO tools available.
Its claim to fame includes the ability to reconcile search intent and technical SEO with its in-depth keywords analysis tool. You can tie things like crawl budget and technical SEO elements that map to searcher intent.
Not only that, but it’s also possible to identify all the technical SEO factors that are contributing to ranking through Botify’s detailed technical analysis.
In its detailed reporting, you can also use the tool to detect changes in how people are searching, regardless of the industry that you are focused on.
The powerful part of Botify includes its in-depth reports that are capable of tying data to information that you can really act on.
20. Excel

Many SEO pros aren’t aware that Excel can be considered a technical SEO tool.
Surprising, right?
Well, there are a number of Excel super tricks that one can use to perform technical SEO audits. Tasks that would otherwise take a significantly long time manually can be accomplished much faster.
Let’s look at a few of these “super tricks.”
Super Trick #1: VLOOKUP
With VLOOKUP, it is possible to pull data from multiple sheets based on data that you want to populate in the primary sheet.
This function allows you to do things like perform a link analysis using data gathered from different tools.
If you gathered linking data from GSC’s “who links to you the most” report, other data from Ahrefs, and other data from Moz, you know that it is impossible to reconcile all the information together.
What if you wanted to determine which internal links are valuable in accordance with a site’s inbound linking strategy?
Using this VLOOKUP video, you can combine data from GSC’s report with data from Ahrefs’ report to get the entire picture of what’s happening here.
Super Trick #2: Easy XML Sitemaps
Coding XML Sitemaps manually is a pain, isn’t it?
Not anymore.
Using a process of coding that is implemented quickly, it is possible to code a sitemap in Excel in a matter of minutes – if you work smart.
See the video I created showing this process.
Super Trick #3: Conditional Formatting
Using conditional formatting, it is possible to reconcile long lists of information in Excel.
This is useful in many SEO situations where lists of information are compared daily.
Although Tools Create Efficiencies, They Do Not Replace Manual Work
For any SEO agency that wants a competitive edge, SEO tools run the gamut from crawling to auditing, data gathering, analysis, and much more.
You don’t want to leave your results up to chance.
The right tools can provide another dimension to your analysis that standard analysis might otherwise not provide.
They can also give you an edge in creating an output that will delight your clients and keep them coming back for years to come.
Which of these tools will you use to wow your customers?
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
How To Become an SEO Expert in 4 Steps

With 74.1% of SEOs charging clients upwards of $500 per month for their services, there’s a clear financial incentive to get good at SEO. But with no colleges offering degrees in the topic, it’s down to you to carve your own path in the industry.
There are many ways to do this; some take longer than others.
In this post, I’ll share how I’d go from zero to SEO pro if I had to do it all over again.
Understanding what search engine optimization really is and how it works is the first state of affairs. While you can do this by reading endless blog posts or watching YouTube videos, I wouldn’t recommend that approach for a few reasons:
- It’s hard to know where to start
- It’s hard to join the dots
- It’s hard to know who to trust
You can solve all of these problems by taking a structured course like our SEO course for beginners. It’s completely free (no signup required), consists of 14 short video lessons (2 hours total length), and covers:
- What SEO is and why it’s important
- How to do keyword research
- How to optimize pages for keywords
- How to build links (and why you need them)
- Technical SEO best practices
Here’s the first lesson to get you started:
It doesn’t matter how many books you read about golf, you’re never going to win a tournament without picking up a set of clubs and practicing. It’s the same with SEO. The theory is important, but there’s no substitute for getting your hands dirty and trying to rank a site.
If you don’t have a site already, you can get up and running fairly quickly with any major website platform. Some will set you back a few bucks, but they handle SEO basics out of the box. This saves you time sweating the small stuff.
As for what kind of site you should create, I recommend a simple hobby blog.
Here’s a simple food blog I set up in <10 minutes:


Once you’re set-up, you’re ready to start practicing and honing your SEO skills. Specifically, doing keyword research to find topics, writing and optimizing content about them, and (possibly) building a few backlinks.
For example, according to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, the keyword “neopolitan pizza dough recipe” has a monthly traffic potential of 4.4K as well as a relatively low Keyword Difficulty (KD) score:


Even better, there’s a weak website (DR 16) in the top three positions—so this should definitely be quite an easy topic to rank for.


Given that most of the top-ranking posts have at least a few backlinks, a page about this topic would also likely need at least a few backlinks to compete. Check out the resources below to learn how to build these.
It’s unlikely that your hobby blog is going to pay the bills, so it’s time to use the work you’ve done so far to get a job in SEO. Here are a few benefits of doing this:
- Get paid to learn. This isn’t the case when you’re home alone reading blog posts and watching videos or working on your own site.
- Get deeper hands-on experience. Agencies work with all kinds of businesses, which means you’ll get to build experience with all kinds of sites, from blogs to ecommerce.
- Build your reputation. Future clients or employers are more likely to take you seriously if you’ve worked for a reputable SEO agency.
To find job opportunities, start by signing up for SEO newsletters like SEO Jobs and SEOFOMO. Both of these send weekly emails and feature remote job opportunities:


You can also go the traditional route and search job sites for entry-level positions. The kinds of jobs you’re looking for will usually have “Junior” in their titles or at least mention that it’s a junior position in their description.


Beyond that, you can search for SEO agencies in your local area and check their careers pages.
Even if there are no entry-level positions listed here, it’s still worth emailing and asking if there are any upcoming openings. Make sure to mention any SEO success you’ve had with your website and where you’re at in your journey so far.
This might seem pushy, but many agencies actually encourage this—such as Rise at Seven:


Here’s a quick email template to get you started:
Subject: Junior SEO position?
Hey folks,
Do you have any upcoming openings for junior SEOs?
I’ve been learning SEO for [number] months, but I’m looking to take my knowledge to the next level. So far, I’ve taken Ahrefs’ Beginner SEO course and started my own blog about [topic]—which I’ve had some success with. It’s only [number] months old but already ranks for [number] keywords and gets an estimated [number] monthly search visits according to Ahrefs.
[Ahrefs screenshot]
I checked your careers page and didn’t see any junior positions there, but I was hoping you might consider me for any upcoming positions? I’m super enthusiastic, hard-working, and eager to learn.
Let me know.
[Name]
You can pull all the numbers and screenshots you need by creating a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account and verifying your website.
SEO is a broad industry. It’s impossible to be an expert at every aspect of it, so you should niche down and hone your skills in the area that interests you the most. You should have a reasonable idea of what this is from working on your own site and in an agency.
For example, link building was the area that interested me the most, so that’s where I focused on deepening my knowledge. As a result, I became what’s known as a “t-shaped SEO”—someone with broad skills across all things SEO but deep knowledge in one area.


Marie Haynes is another great example of a t-shaped SEO. She specializes in Google penalty recovery. She doesn’t build links or do on-page SEO. She audits websites with traffic drops and helps their owners recover.
In terms of how to build your knowledge in your chosen area, here are a few ideas:
Here are a few SEOs I’d recommend following and their (rough) specialties:
Final thoughts
K Anders Ericsson famously theorized that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a new skill. Can it take less? Possibly. But the point is this: becoming an SEO expert is not an overnight process.
I’d even argue that it’s a somewhat unattainable goal because no matter how much you know, there’s always more to learn. That’s part of the fun, though. SEO is a fast-moving industry that keeps you on your toes, but it’s a very rewarding one, too.
Here are a few stats to prove it:
- 74.1% of SEOs charge clients upwards of $500 per month for their services (source)
- $49,211 median annual salary (source)
- ~$74k average salary for self-employed SEOs (source)
Got questions? Ping me on Twitter X.
SEO
A Year Of AI Developments From OpenAI

Today, ChatGPT celebrates one year since its launch in research preview.
Try talking with ChatGPT, our new AI system which is optimized for dialogue. Your feedback will help us improve it. https://t.co/sHDm57g3Kr
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) November 30, 2022
From its humble beginnings, ChatGPT has continually pushed the boundaries of what we perceive as possible with generative AI for almost any task.
a year ago tonight we were probably just sitting around the office putting the finishing touches on chatgpt before the next morning’s launch.
what a year it’s been…
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 30, 2023
In this article, we take a journey through the past year, highlighting the significant milestones and updates that have shaped ChatGPT into the versatile and powerful tool it is today.
a year ago tonight we were placing bets on how many total users we’d get by sunday
20k, 80k, 250k… i jokingly said “8B”.
little did we know… https://t.co/8YtO8GbLPy— rapha gontijo lopes (@rapha_gl) November 30, 2023
ChatGPT: From Research Preview To Customizable GPTs
This story unfolds over the course of nearly a year, beginning on November 30, when OpenAI announced the launch of its research preview of ChatGPT.
As users began to offer feedback, improvements began to arrive.
Before the holiday, on December 15, 2022, ChatGPT received general performance enhancements and new features for managing conversation history.

As the calendar turned to January 9, 2023, ChatGPT saw improvements in factuality, and a notable feature was added to halt response generation mid-conversation, addressing user feedback and enhancing control.
Just a few weeks later, on January 30, the model was further upgraded for enhanced factuality and mathematical capabilities, broadening its scope of expertise.
February 2023 was a landmark month. On February 9, ChatGPT Plus was introduced, bringing new features and a faster ‘Turbo’ version to Plus users.
This was followed closely on February 13 with updates to the free plan’s performance and the international availability of ChatGPT Plus, featuring a faster version for Plus users.
March 14, 2023, marked a pivotal moment with the introduction of GPT-4 to ChatGPT Plus subscribers.


This new model featured advanced reasoning, complex instruction handling, and increased creativity.
Less than ten days later, on March 23, experimental AI plugins, including browsing and Code Interpreter capabilities, were made available to selected users.
On May 3, users gained the ability to turn off chat history and export data.
Plus users received early access to experimental web browsing and third-party plugins on May 12.
On May 24, the iOS app expanded to more countries with new features like shared links, Bing web browsing, and the option to turn off chat history on iOS.
June and July 2023 were filled with updates enhancing mobile app experiences and introducing new features.
The mobile app was updated with browsing features on June 22, and the browsing feature itself underwent temporary removal for improvements on July 3.
The Code Interpreter feature rolled out in beta to Plus users on July 6.
Plus customers enjoyed increased message limits for GPT-4 from July 19, and custom instructions became available in beta to Plus users the next day.
July 25 saw the Android version of the ChatGPT app launch in selected countries.
As summer progressed, August 3 brought several small updates enhancing the user experience.
Custom instructions were extended to free users in most regions by August 21.
The month concluded with the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise on August 28, offering advanced features and security for enterprise users.
Entering autumn, September 11 witnessed limited language support in the web interface.
Voice and image input capabilities in beta were introduced on September 25, further expanding ChatGPT’s interactive abilities.
An updated version of web browsing rolled out to Plus users on September 27.
The fourth quarter of 2023 began with integrating DALL·E 3 in beta on October 16, allowing for image generation from text prompts.
The browsing feature moved out of beta for Plus and Enterprise users on October 17.
Customizable versions of ChatGPT, called GPTs, were introduced for specific tasks on November 6 at OpenAI’s DevDay.


On November 21, the voice feature in ChatGPT was made available to all users, rounding off a year of significant advancements and broadening the horizons of AI interaction.
And here, we have ChatGPT today, with a sidebar full of GPTs.


Looking Ahead: What’s Next For ChatGPT
The past year has been a testament to continuous innovation, but it is merely the prologue to a future rich with potential.
The upcoming year promises incremental improvements and leaps in AI capabilities, user experience, and integrative technologies that could redefine our interaction with digital assistants.
With a community of users and developers growing stronger and more diverse, the evolution of ChatGPT is poised to surpass expectations and challenge the boundaries of today’s AI landscape.
As we step into this next chapter, the possibilities are as limitless as generative AI continues to advance.
Featured image: photosince/Shutterstock
SEO
Is AI Going To E-E-A-T Your Experience For Breakfast? The LinkedIn Example

Are LinkedIn’s collaborative articles part of SEO strategies nowadays?
More to the point, should they be?
The search landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, blurring the lines between search engines and where searches occur.
Following the explosive adoption of AI in content marketing and the most recent Google HCU, core, and spam updates, we’re looking at a very different picture now in search versus 12 months ago.
User-generated and community-led content seems to be met with renewed favourability by the algorithm (theoretically, mirroring what people reward, too).
LinkedIn’s freshly launched “collaborative articles” seem to be a perfect sign of our times: content that combines authority (thanks to LinkedIn’s authority), AI-generated content, and user-generated content.
What could go wrong?
In this article, we’ll cover:
- What are “collaborative articles” on LinkedIn?
- Why am I discussing them in the context of SEO?
- The main issues with collaborative articles.
- How is Google treating them?
- How they can impact your organic performance.
What Are LinkedIn Collaborative Articles?
First launched in March 2023, LinkedIn says about collaborative articles:
“These articles begin as AI-powered conversation starters, developed with our editorial team, but they aren’t complete without insights from our members. A select group of experts have been invited to contribute their own ideas, examples and experiences within the articles.“
Essentially, each of these articles starts as a collection of AI-generated answers to FAQs/prompts around any given topic. Under each of these sections, community members can add their own perspectives, insights, and advice.
What’s in it for contributors? To earn, ultimately, a “Top Voice” badge on their profile.
The articles are indexable and are all placed under the same folder (https://www.linkedin.com/advice/).
They look like this:

On the left-hand side, there are always FAQs relevant to the topic answered by AI.
On the right-hand side is where the contributions by community members get posted. Users can react to each contribution in the same way as to any LinkedIn post on their feed.
How Easy Is It To Contribute And Earn A Badge For Your Insights?
Pretty easy.
I first got invited to contribute on September 19, 2023 – though I had already found a way to contribute a few weeks before this.


My notifications included updates from connections who had contributed to an article.
By clicking on these, I was transferred to the article and was able to contribute to it, too (as well as additional articles, linked at the bottom).
I wanted to test how hard it was to earn a Top SEO Voice badge. Eight article contributions later (around three to four hours of my time), I had earned three.


How? Apparently, simply by earning likes for my contributions.
A Mix Of Brilliance, Fuzzy Editorial Rules, And Weird Uncle Bob
Collaborative articles sound great in principle – a win-win for both sides.
- LinkedIn struck a bullseye: creating and scaling content (theoretically) oozing with E-E-A-T, with minimal investment.
- Users benefit from building their personal brand (and their company’s) for a fragment of the effort and cost this usually takes. The smartest ones complement their on-site content strategy with this off-site golden ticket.
What isn’t clear from LinkedIn’s Help Center is what this editorial mix of AI and human input looks like.
Things like:
- How much involvement do the editors have before the topic is put to the community?
- Are they only determining and refining the prompts?
- Are they editing the AI-generated responses?
- More importantly, what involvement (if any) do they have after they unleash the original AI-generated piece into the world?
- And more.
I think of this content like weird Uncle Bob, always joining the family gatherings with his usual, unoriginal conversation starters. Only, this time, he’s come bearing gifts.
Do you engage? Or do you proceed to consume as many canapés as possible, pretending you haven’t seen him yet?
Why Am I Talking About LinkedIn Articles And SEO?
When I first posted about LinkedIn’s articles, it was the end of September. Semrush showed clear evidence of their impact and potential in Search. (Disclosure: I work for Semrush.)
Only six months after their launch, LinkedIn articles were on a visible, consistent upward trend.
- They were already driving 792.5K organic visits a month. (This was a 75% jump in August.)
- They ranked for 811,700 keywords.
- Their pages were ranking in the top 10 for 78,000 of them.
- For 123,700 of them, they appeared in a SERP feature, such as People Also Ask and Featured Snippets.
- Almost 72% of the keywords had informational intent, followed by commercial keywords (22%).
Here’s a screenshot with some of the top keywords for which these pages ranked at the top:


Now, take the page that held the Featured Snippet for competitive queries like “how to enter bios” (monthly search volume of 5,400 and keyword difficulty of 84, based on Semrush data).
It came in ahead of pages on Tom’s Hardware, Hewlett-Packard, or Reddit.


See anything weird? Even at the time of writing this post, this collaborative article had precisely zero (0) contributions.
This means a page with 100% AI-generated content (and unclear interference of human editors) was rewarded with the Featured Snippet against highly authoritative and relevant domains and pages.
A Sea Of Opportunity Or A Storm Ready To Break Out?
Let’s consider these articles in the context of Google’s guidelines for creating helpful, reliable, people-first content and its Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
Of particular importance here, I believe, is the most recently added “E” in “E-E-A-T,” which takes experience into account, alongside expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
For so many of these articles to have been ranking so well must mean that they were meeting the guidelines and proving helpful and reliable for content consumers.
After all, they rely on “a select group of experts to contribute their own ideas, examples and experiences within the articles,” so they must be worthy of strong organic performances, right?
Possibly. (I’ve yet to see such an example, but I want to believe somewhere in the thousands of pages these do exist).
But, based on what I’ve seen, there are too many examples of poor-quality content to justify such big rewards in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The common issues I’ve spotted:
1. Misinformation
I can’t tell how much vetting or editing there is going on behind the scenes, but the amount of misinformation in some collaborative articles is alarming. This goes for AI-generated content and community contributions alike.
I don’t really envy the task of fact-checking what LinkedIn describes as “thousands of collaborative articles on 2,500+ skills.” Still, if it’s quality and helpfulness we’re concerned with here, I’d start brewing my coffee a little stronger if I were LinkedIn.
At the moment, it feels a little too much like a free-for-all.
Here are some examples of topics like SEO or content marketing.


2. Thin Content
To a degree, some contributions seem to do nothing more than mirror the points made in the original AI-generated piece.
For example, are these contributions enough to warrant a high level of “experience” in these articles?


The irony to think that some of these contributions may have also been generated by AI…
3. Missing Information
While many examples don’t provide new or unique perspectives, some articles simply don’t provide…any perspectives at all.
This piece about analytical reasoning ranked in the top 10 for 128 keywords when I first looked into it last September (down to 80 in October).


It even held the Featured Snippet for competitive keywords like “inductive reasoning examples” for a while (5.4K monthly searches in the US), although it had no contributions on this subsection.
Most of its sections remain empty, so we’re talking about mainly AI-generated content.
Does this mean that Google really doesn’t care whether your content comes from humans or AI?
I’m not convinced.
How Have The Recent Google Updates Impacted This Content?
After August and October 2023 Google core updates (at the time of writing, the November 2023 Google core update is rolling out), the September 2023 helpful content update, and the October 2023 spam update, the performance of this section seems to be declining.
According to Semrush data:


- Organic traffic to these pages was down to 453,000 (a 43% drop from September, bringing their performance close to August levels).
- They ranked for 465,100 keywords (down by 43% MoM).
- Keywords in the Top 10 dropped by 33% (51,900 vs 78,000 in September).
- Keywords in the top 10 accounted for 161,800 visits (vs 287,200 in September, down by 44% MoM).
The LinkedIn domain doesn’t seem to have been impacted negatively overall.


Is this a sign that Google has already picked up the weaknesses in this content and has started balancing actual usefulness versus the overall domain authority that might have propelled it originally?
Will we see it declining further in the coming months? Or are there better things to come for this feature?
Should You Already Be On The Bandwagon If You’re In SEO?
I was on the side of caution before the Google algorithm updates of the past couple of months.
Now, I’d be even more hesitant to invest a substantial part of my resources towards baking this content into my strategy.
As with any other new, third-party feature (or platform – does anyone remember Threads?), it’s always a case of balancing being an early adopter with avoiding over-investment. At least while being unclear on the benefits.
Collaborative articles are a relatively fresh, experimental, external feature you have minimal control over as part of your SEO strategy.
Now, we also have signs from Google that this content may not be as “cool” as we initially thought.
This Is What I’d Do
That’s not to say it’s not worth trying some small-scale experiments.
Or, maybe, use it as part of promoting your own personal brand (but I’ve yet to see any data around the impact of the “Top Voice” badges on perceived value).
Treat this content as you would any other owned content.
- Follow Google’s guidelines.
- Add genuine value for your audience.
- Add your own unique perspective.
- Highlight gaps and misinformation.
Experience shows us that when tactics get abused, and the user experience suffers, Google eventually steps in (from guest blogging to parasite SEO, most recently).
It might make algorithmic tweaks when launching updates, launch a new system, or hand out manual actions – the point is that you don’t know how things will progress. Only LinkedIn and Google have control over that.
As things stand, I can easily see any of the below potential outcomes:
- This content becomes the AI equivalent of the content farms of the pre-Panda age, leading to Google clamping down on its search performance.
- LinkedIn’s editors stepping in more for quality control (provided LinkedIn deems the investment worthwhile).
- LinkedIn starts pushing its initiative much more to encourage participation and engagement. (This could be what makes the difference between a dead content farm and Reddit-like value.)
Anything could happen. I believe the next few months will give us a clearer picture.
What’s Next For AI And Its Role In SEO And Social Media?
When it comes to content creation, I think it’s safe to say that AI isn’t quite ready to E-E-A-T your experience for breakfast. Yet.
We can probably expect more of these kinds of movements from social media platforms and forums in the coming months, moving more toward mixing AI with human experience.
What do you think is next for LinkedIn’s collaborative articles? Let me know on LinkedIn!
More resources:
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
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