Julia Logan says: “My additional insight, and that should really be like, ground insight, baseline insight for everybody is use your brain. Whatever tools you're using, any tool is only as good as the person using it and how they use it. Basically, any tool is useless without the proper brain and proper thinking about all the possible uses of that tool, and how this tool applies to your particular situation, your particular needs. How does this tool answer your particular questions. What questions you should even be asking about your particular situation. I mean, if we look at the SEO, there is so much happening. Basically, it's like you have one vertical that has completely specific vertical problems of its own. And if you just read a bunch of articles about some general, you know, ideas of what's happening, and so it might not apply to your vertical at all. So basically, the idea is, every site is unique. And every SEOs problems are pretty unique, and nobody's building a tool, unless you are building it yourself, to address your unique problems. We've got all the commercially available tools and then it's up to you to use your brain and see how this particular tool can solve your problems, and what you really should do and how you should tweak the output of that to really address your issues.

So, a while ago, I did a thread on Twitter, based on actually Majestic. And there I was talking about Majestic, it’s typically been seen as this link profile information tool but not many people probably know or pay attention to the fact that you could also use Majestic with certain filters and reports at certain views, to diagnose some on site, issues of the site that you are investigating. And basically, this is just one example. There's plenty of stuff like that. And I'm pretty sure with any tool, there's plenty of stuff, if you really dig into the tool, and how you can use it, and how you can adjust it.

Everybody's talking about AI these days. For example, ChatGPT, being the total, total winner, a million users signing up in just the first few days of its existence of its public release. And there was this huge discussion going on between the SEOs on all sorts of social platforms about whether or not ChatGPT should be used for SEO purposes, whether or not it should be used for this or that, or creating your content, or doing your keyword research, or something else. What I say to that is use your brain, nobody's going to teach you how to do something with any tool, specifically for your own problem unless you hire some high-level consultant who is very proficient at this particular tool and pay them specifically just to spend the time looking into your business and adjusting the recommendations to your particular business and your particular use case.

I'll give you just one example. So, I went to a conference a couple of months ago, and then after that I had to do a bunch of follow up emails. It was early in the morning, and I wasn't feeling particularly creative. I just fired up ChatGPT, gave it all the necessary inputs regarding the context of the follow up emails that I had to send. Basically, I described it something like the prompt was along the lines of: I need to create a follow up email after conference X to address this and this issue to remind people about that and that, something along those lines. And then what I had as an output was excellent. I then needed to tweak it a little bit, to personalize it for every person I am sending this to. I had to enter the details of probably how we met and what we were talking about when we met, and what's the context, and why I'm sending them this information, but it came out perfect.”

So how do you actually ensure that you're maximizing your use of each tool? Because, I mean, you talk about obviously, using your brain and, and thinking about, I guess how each tool is relevant to your own situation and fits into your own strategy. But I think there are a lot of SEOs out there that probably have access to tens of tools and are probably guilty of hardly maximizing the use of each tool at all. So how do you really ensure that you rinse, you take the maximum output from every single tool that you're using.

“If you have tons of tools, it's about whatever budget you have available for those tools. We are just a small boutique agency, we don't have a lot of budget, but we make the most out of the budget that we have. And we have a certain selection of tools we’re most comfortable with. Basically, if you have 10s of tools, maybe look at them and see what it is that they are really giving you, maybe just estimate the value that they are bringing you. And if you're not sure about the value some tool is bringing in maybe look at it a bit deeper and see if it can actually give you something that you actually need. You might not even be aware of something that you need until you start looking and see that it gives you this something and you had no idea. Like, for example, one of my favorite tools is Sistrix?. Did you know that Sistrix is the only tool out of those I ever used, and I am aware of that gives you the list of duplicate files with the same image? So, like you have the same image with different URLs for that image used across the site, on one site. Basically, helping you be more efficient with your site cache, probably saving you a few milliseconds of loading time. If you already have this image loaded on this page, and then the user goes to the next page, and they don't have to load that image again, but it's already cached in their browser, then every little helps. And that's the only tool I really know. I mean, I did come up with sort of similar methods using Screaming Frog, just by looking at the image sizes, and then figuring out. But that requires either pulling them up in HTML with Screaming Frog or just checking them manually to confirm that they are really the same image with different file names. But Sistrix is the only tool that actually gives you that as a readymade report.”

How did you go about discovering that? Because it can take, I guess, one SEO a long time to figure that out. And some people might know that that exists. Do you have a favorite community, conference to go to find out things like that?

“Not really, it's actually something that I would normally describe as, you know, my drawback sort of, I'm very much into chasing shiny squirrels. So basically, I'm doing whatever I'm doing, and then I see something that sparks my interest, and then I feel like I have to dig into it. But once you dig into it once, you already know it. So, I guess it's still helpful, even though it's kind of distracting.”

I'm just wondering if there is an efficient way for teams of SEOs to pass on that kind of information. And if there's some kind of central repository of information in terms of what each individual tool can do and what tool was recommended as the optimum tool for each individual task?

“I think the best way really, is to get the people inside the team talking to each other, because you can have some central repository. I have a small team. I basically have a team of a few people. We are just talking on Skype. We have a group chat on Skype, and that's how we're doing this. We are just talking on Skype. If I discovered something really important, and I think that my team really need to know about this, I might do a team call and just share my screen and show them that scene that I think they all need to see. And maybe after that, we'll make a note somewhere that's accessible to everyone. And basically, that way, you would have the repository, but if you just put stuff into the repository, nobody's going to check it. Because let's face it, people usually have their own tasks, people are busy doing whatever they are doing in their everyday job, unless you really have some sort of incentive, unless you really know that something exists in that repository that's going to save your time right now, and solve your current issue that you're working on, you aren’t going to go there. So, it's really helpful to just get people talking to each other, sharing the information. I mean, it could be as little as one-line message in group chat. And then everybody is aware. And if people have more questions, then you could talk more about that. And then you just say, I'm adding a note to here and here where everybody could get access to it whenever you need something for your reference. Basically, that's how we do it. If my team members discover something that they think would be of interest to everybody else, they do the same.”

Do you have a formalized way of revisiting what you found, because obviously tools get updated, new features get added? Some aren't as effective as they used to be. So maybe, do you have a procedure where once a year, for example, you go back to that tool and just check to see that that functionality still exists? And perhaps if there is something better out there nowadays?

“I can't really think of something, typically, what we discover is what we use on a daily basis. So, I don't really think there is a need to revisit, because if something changes, we will see it right away, and then we will adjust accordingly.”

So that’s like just in time learning really.

“Yeah, yeah. But if we talk about teams with tens of tools, hundreds of people, much more information flowing about them, perhaps they should have some sort of R&D sub team or something like that. And perhaps they should have some sort of R&D budget, something I dream of having in my company. We do have a certain amount of R&D, we can't afford not to, because we are doing some pretty cutting edge stuff. We're working with clients and top competitive verticals, we need to know what's going on right now, right there. So, R&D is integral part of what we're doing. But we don't really have a separate R&D budget or something like that, or separate R&D person or team or whatever. But for larger organizations, I would say that's a must.”

You've shared what SEOs should be doing in 2023. So, let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. So, what's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive for something that SEO shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“Chasing the shiny terms, I will say.”

“Shiny terms” as in short tail keyword phrases?

“What I mean is more like, you hear everybody talking about, let's say NFT. So, you just go and implemented just to check some sort of checkbox. If you don't really have a reason to do it within your context, within your company, within your brand, within your organization, then don't waste the time on it. It's not worth it. Unless that's part of R&D process. But then again, really depends. Certain things you would understand right away whether or not it's relevant to you. So first, think of whether or not it's relevant. If everybody keeps talking about this, if everybody's buzzing about it, it's a buzz term. Don't chase the buzz term just for the sake of chasing buzz terms. If it doesn't work, if you don't see how it can work for you, if you don't see how it can add value to whatever you're doing, just don't do it.”

Julia Logan is the CEO at Zangoose Digital you can find her over at Zangoose Digital.