Today I want to talk to you about the future of the blog.
Because it’s been a pretty difficult few months for me and I wanted to share some of that with you.
You see…
Over the last few months, I’ve been working hard on a number of changes that are designed to solve some of the most common problems of the blog.
And it was my goal to create the one stop resource for all things SEO, no matter what level you are at!
So, I am happy to announce that today marks the first day of that goal becoming a reality!
Here is a breakdown of the changes and what’s been happening behind the scenes…
What Will I Learn?
Welcome To Your New Home
The biggest change you might have noticed…
…is the homepage which used to look like this-
As you can see, it didn’t really make finding specific solutions for your problems easy.
It was just a list of recent posts and nothing else. It didn’t have YOU in mind.
The new homepage however-
IS designed with you in mind by making it easy to find solutions to your problems.
It also includes a number of testimonials and some key calls to action.
Find What You Need Easily
I also needed a better way to organise content beyond the default tag and category system of WordPress.
When I conducted my reader survey, I learned that you like SEO, Blogging and Make Money type content the most-
So with that in mind I created 3x new portal pages-
Each of these portals cater to a different audience and are designed to make it super easy to find the content you need-
And not only do these portals help users find what they need, they also help search engines find what they need as well.
These portal pages will serve as the content frameworks for the future.
Currently there are another 40 SEO tutorials written and ready to go, including 10x link building strategies. We are just waiting on the final few videos.
Once they are published, the SEO Portal will be the ultimate one stop resources for all things SEO no matter your level of experience.
I felt like the header had become “dated” and that the primary navigation was more confusing than helpful.
So the MyThemeShop team redesigned the header and primary navigation to solve that.
This is how it used to look-
And this is what it looks like now-
As you can see it’s much cleaner and less busy. That is in part to the deployment of the portal pages which made it easy to reduce a lot of the clutter.
Tomorrow I’ll be setting up a split test between showing my cartoon character in the header versus an actual photo of me.
+1000% Content Quality
I revamped the entire content production process on the blog with the support of full time staff including a graphics artist and a video editor.
Before I was just a one man band, but after consolidating last year – it’s time to start raising the bar on what is considered as “quality content”.
You might have noticed that the standards have already increased over the last few months.
Take a look at the new What Is SEO page for example-
Obviously you already know what SEO is, but click through and take a look.
That represents the new “style” of post moving forward.
In fact:
We also went through all 244 historical posts on the blog and updated them!
That included updating a bunch of text and images as well as adding table of contents, optimising for featured snippets and other styling.
Take a look at these posts for example-
That is the standard you can expect moving forward (and for all historical content too).
Oh and no more guest posts!
Faster Than Ever Before
One of the biggest problems that “creeped” it’s way in, was site speed.
Not only was the blog loading slower than ever before, but it was also doing badly in things like Google Pagespeed while delivering an average mobile experience.
This is how it was performing before-
But after a lot of testing and tweaking with various combinations of different plugins…
…I was able to make some significant improvements-
Here are the headlines-
- Average page size reduced by 62% (2,262KB vs 843KB)
- Average number of requests reduced by 59% (166 vs 68)
- Average load time reduced by 41% (6.4 seconds vs 3.8)
- Average mobile Google page speed score increased by 78% (28 vs 50)
- Average desktop Google page speed score increased by 29% (72 vs 93)
A lot of those improvements were made with WPRocket along with image compression from ShortPixel.
Take a look at my full WP Rocket review to learn how to set it up properly.
I hope all of that translates into a much more pleasant user experience for you.
Video Studio Construction (and DEMOLITION)
One of the biggest problems I had last year, was with my living and working arrangements.
I bought a house and made some changes including building an extension for a dedicated video studio.
I mean:
That’s the kind of content you said you wanted-
So I decided to build a dedicated space to cater for that which was a costly decision.
Because after 5 months of delays, I finally moved in.
And that’s when the real problem started, we discovered 3 separate risks to human life.
So after some heavy demolition–
Followed by some construction-
I finally have a space to work again.
If you have ever lived on a construction site, you’ll know that you can’t get 10 seconds of peace because of the constant banging, drilling and vibrations.
That was my daily life for months.
But now:
I have a peaceful working environment, which means I’ve been able to create a peaceful learning environment for you across the blog.
Hopefully I never have to go through something like that again.
Who Are You Again?
I’m just putting the finishing touches the new about page which will be published this week.
BUT:
If you want to learn more about me and who I am, you can take a look at the video below-
You know:
Just in case you forgot!
UPDATE: The new about page is live!
So What’s Next?
So with all of the changes live, you might be wondering what’s next?
Well let me tell you!
SEO Portal Development
Every month for the next 4 months, I am going to publish a new “section” on the SEO portal page.
At the moment, the first section is live which provides all of the base knowledge anyone new to SEO needs-
- What is SEO
- How do search engines work
- What are keywords
- Keyword research: everything you need to know
- The 7x types of keywords
- What are LSI keywords
- Google keyword planner
Next month I am going to publish the on page SEO section, then the link building section and so on.
This content marks the culmination of nearly 14 months of planning and execution and it’s my goal to provide the most comprehensive, organized and highest quality SEO tutorials on the internet.
And most importantly, everything will be FREE!
Google Image SEO Discoveries
Members of my private Facebook group know that I’ve spent the last few months experimenting with Google Images.
After building ~30 test sites and 9 experiments I’ve learned a lot-
- How to control image search rankings for virgin keywords and low-medium competition keywords
- 2x new optimisation factors that no one has ever spoken about (nor can I find reference to anywhere)
- Barely anyone pays attention to Google Images – but for many results, it’s easy to appear as an image result
At this point I can comfortably say that with my final strategy I can rank any image #1 for any medium-low competition keyword.
I haven’t yet failed to rank anything #1 but I am going to try some heavy weight keywords like “mortgage” and “credit card” soon.
In fact, not only can I control the #1 spot – but I can also control the #2 and #3 spots just by under optimisizing the strategy I apply. I can literally choose which image I want to rank in which top #3 positions.
How did I figure this out?
I just built a ton of test sites and test cases, each designed to isolate a single ranking factor.
After finding out the best way to optimise for each individual ranking factor, I combined those learnings into 1 strategy.
I’ll be releasing a free plugin for you to take advantage of my image optimisation discoverys soon.
But That’s Not All…
While that’s all I am willing to reveal publically at the moment.
I also have a number of other things in development like a free desktop based link building tool that will help you to build high quality links from real websites.
And well….
I’m not willing to reveal any of the other plans yet. Make sure you strap in because I’m here to flip things upside down.
The New Generation of SEO
And last but not least…
…I want to introduce you to the new generation of SEO-
He was registered on October 1st 2018.
Naturally:
He already has his own blog and personal domain name.
The new generation of SEO is here.
I want to extend an extra special THANK YOU to all of my readers, without you – this blog wouldn’t be possible.
Please let me know what you think of the changes in the comments below.
