We've been so busy refreshing videos, updating tools and creating exclusive reports that it means we've gone a while without auditing some new websites inside the training.

That changes today where I, Glen, look at two websites of SEO Blueprint members and share my feedback on what they can improve.

These were a bit tricky to audit since both sites have a lot of great elements in place, but each still had things to potentially work on.

You can find the two videos at the top of our Audits Blueprint page or you can get direct links to the two specific videos here and here. 

Taking advantage of new video player functionality that didn't exist when we first launched this course, we also highlighted issues along the playbar of the video you're watching:

This should make it much easier to skip directly to recommendations if you're short on time. 

In the first video you'll also see me perform a quick check of some new functionality in ScreamingFrog which should make auditing websites that much quicker.

I really hope you find these valuable!

- G

As I write this, SEO Blueprint consists of around 75% video and 25% text.

The text portion has increased massively due to our recent exclusive reports on ranking AI-generated content, competing with digital goliaths dominating Google (Superpixels) and specifically which independent websites thrive during Google updates. 

On top of this we have live website audits, custom tools, and the focus of today, our checklists so you can keep track of updates you're making to personal and client websites, or those you work on in-house.

In May we started adding new checks specifically for eCommerce sites, and now in September we've gone live with a huge update for those who want to rank local businesses higher in Google's search results.

To find it, simply login and click the link to the checklist on your main dashboard page.

Then you can find the new Local SEO tab, like so:

This isn't just any random list of steps, but you'll see notes assigned to most items and links to either the relevant Blueprint training video, or a page on our site with more images as examples. 

The vast majority of updates in the first SEO Audit tab apply to all website types, but we're going to be making more additions to the eCommerce tab in the coming weeks as well. 

I really hope you like this one!

Today I'm very excited to announce that our newest report on AI and content creation is now live. 

We go in-depth on topics like:

• What Google really thinks of AI-generated articles
• What happened when a digital goliath published dozens of articles authored by a bot
• My current philosophy on whether to create content with AI
• Success stories and concerns when publishing AI-assisted articles

You'll also see the tools I'm really not a big fan of, despite the hype they've received elsewhere.

Caption: Showing the Detailed mascot with the leaders in AI right now, Nvidia, felt like a good fit

Once you're logged in, you can read the report here: https://seoblueprint.com/superpixels-ai-seo/

I've put a ton of effort into this and I'm proud of the end result, but it honestly feels like this is just the beginning. 

One of the best parts of running a course like SEO Blueprint is that we're always aiming to stay up to date on what's working, right now, so we'll continue to share new insights on this topic going forward.

- Glen Allsopp

I've been writing about SEO for more than half of my life now and there's no doubt that what's happening in AI is one of the biggest changes to the industry I've seen.

I'm not going to lie, when ChatGPT was introduced (and later integrations with Bing, and the teasing of Google's SGE) I was concerned about what the future of SEO might be.

I didn't want to just rely on what was happening with my own sites or client sites, or those I discussed SEO with, to be my only barometer of how things were going.

With that in mind, I came up with a new idea to have unique insights on who is continuing to thrive, rank well, and make a lot of money.

I've spent months on this idea (you'll see how when you read the link), getting a little obsessive in the process, and I've had a ton of insights along the way.

I've wrote more about this idea and what I've been doing on our Facebook Group, here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/seoblueprint/posts/1226226008065535/

I'll make sure some of those insights will be exclusive for SEO Blueprint members (of course), so I can't wait to share them with you. 

P.S. If you notice the site has been a little slow lately, it's because we've been running a lot of calculations on our latest SERP analysis. We've done a lot of these in the past, but this is by far our biggest ever and it cauased more strain than I expected. There's about 72 hours left until it's finished running, then all will be back to normal.

Future experiments will not be ran on the same server as SEO Blueprint, so my sincere apologies, and this will not happen again. 

I'm very excited to announce that our extension which allows you to massively speed up performing site: searches in Google (and finding issues on sites) is now live 🎉

You can get the direct link, here: https://detailed.com/site-search/

On that page you'll find a video explaining how the extension works, but let me embed it here as well...

Important Note: I set this extension to only show when it's clicked on in your browser bar. It's too distracting if it's enabled for every single Google search you make. At 1m 50s in the video I show you exactly how to enable that. 

This is probably the first and only update here that isn't exclusive for SEO Blueprint members, but because you've seen me use this so many times inside the training I had to share it here. 

Videos explaining the issues and more use cases will always be exclusive to members. 

As I state in the video, this is really for people who are auditing a few websites every month.

If you have SEO clients, want to find sites with issues to pitch services or just like finding problems on websites, you'll find this saves you a ton of time.

Otherwise, and I'm just being honest here, this probably isn't for you.

I promised we would have a lot of updates this year and you can hopefully see we are shipping at a rapid rate at the moment. There is a lot more on the way!

You may know that we're behind the popular Detailed SEO browser extension for Chrome and Firefox (120K+ weekly users — which we're very appreciative of) but you may not know we're also behind a little-known extension that makes auditing websites much easier.

We call it 'Remove Breadcrumbs' because that's exactly what it does: Remove the breadcrumbs you see in Google search results, so you can see exactly what you're clicking on, and what Google is crawling for your (or your clients') websites.

You can watch the extension in action below:

The extension is 100% free and always will be.

You can download it directly, here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-breadcrumbs/banhponphmmpnpogmfaahcgkgbgkcoka/

If you don't have time for the video and  just want to see an image of what it looks like in action, check out the Hubspot URL in the screenshot below:

Please don't mistake this as being an insult to HubSpot, but that extreme URL - that you can only see because of our extension - is the exact kind of thing I want to notice that I might not have seen otherwise.

When websites are especially large, even looking through ScreamingFrog, Sitemaps and Google Search Console can still mean you miss something.

This is just one more way to get another view of what is happening on a site.

Google made some changes to their search results around two weeks ago which stopped the extension from working, but we've updated it and all is well again.

If you already have it installed there's nothing you need to do. It will update automatically.

Updating the extension seemed like a great opportunity to let you know about it if you hadn't came across it before.

There is absolutely no tracking of any kind in the extension and it's 100% free.  

I really hope you find it useful!

Today I'm very happy to announce that our new tool for extracting URLs from Google search results is now live inside the training. It looks something like this...

You may recall we previously had desktop software which provided this functionality but as Google are prone to changing how they display search results, the software was prone to breaking and needed to be frequently updated.

We've figured out a far better solution (there's nothing you need to download or sign-up for) whereby we can assign credits to every single SEO Blueprint member using your existing login credentials.

You can find the tool directly, here: https://seoblueprint.com/ranks/ (note that you need to be logged in for this to load).

You can find the video explaining the tool, here: https://seoblueprint.com/how-to-extract-urls/

You won't really "see" any of this but the thing I'm most proud of is how we've integrated this seamlessly with your current login. We've built a hidden credits system which links to your current account and this allows us to roll out even more on-site tools going forward.

I can't wait to share what else we have planned.

Thank you for being here!

Picture this.

You're starting a social media marketing agency and want to make it clear from your homepage exactly what your company does. 

You offer a few different services, so build out pages for each one. But then comes the dilemma: Should your homepage target the "social media agency" keyphrase, or should a service page? Or can both?

Or what if you have a page on the best laptops for 2024. Can you safely create pages on the best budget laptops and the best laptops from Lenovo, or will those pages "fight" against each other in search results?

We aim to answer those questions and more in our brand new keyword cannibalisation training, which you can find here: https://seoblueprint.com/keyword-cannibalisation-top-rankings/

The video is marked with chapters so you can skip to the parts most relevant for your situation.

In it I show two free ways to help identify cannibalisation issues, and how to speed up the process if you have access to a premium tool like Ahrefs or Semrush.

Then we look at the best and most common ways to rectify any problems you might have uncovered.

I really hope you enjoy this one!

- Glen

Just last week Google announced the release of a reviews-focused algorithm update.

Their official documentation on how to write high-quality reviews, which they linked to in the above Twitter announcement, can be found here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/ecommerce/write-high-quality-reviews

There has been a lot of talk of huge ranking shifts recently, with some big winners and some initial losers as well.

Thanks to our tracking of 165 independent affiliate sites we’re in the perfect position to tell you if there are any correlations with sites that are now ranking better than ever, or worse than before.

We're just waiting for things to be a little less volatile, then we’re going to run all of the numbers again for our exclusive report and share our findings inside the training. 

Stay tuned for an update on that at the end of this month / early May. 

Glen’s Thoughts on AI? A Sneak Peek of What’s to Come

In recent weeks a lot of people have reached out to me to ask my thoughts on AI and its impact on search and content creation going forward.

It’s a hot topic, so it’s not surprising people want to be prepared for what’s next, but my answer up until now has been some variation of, “I have 15 pages of notes and I’m writing a big report on all of my thoughts”.

That's still the case. This is an important topic and I want to share a well-researched piece (and I was also hoping Google's Bard would be more present in search results by now). That said, a recent post in our Facebook group did get me to share some initial thoughts...

You can find what's behind the 'See more' link text over here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/seoblueprint/posts/1174729786548491/

Want to Share What You’re Working on And Connect With Other Blueprint Members?

You might not know this but when we first launched SEO Blueprint, we had no plans for a Facebook Group, Slack community or any other type of forum.

We were worried that having comments under every video and a Facebook Group would be too much for us to keep up with, and that we would find ourselves answering the same questions over and over again.

Luckily enough people convinced us to start a Facebook group, as our /gold/ page wouldn’t exist without it.

One of the first posts that went live in our group was a thread where people could share what they were working on so they could connect with other members on the same journey.

We’ve just started a brand new thread for this in 2023, so if you want to connect with fellow members, please do go and share your story over here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/seoblueprint/posts/1173842983303838/

Our First Software Test Was a Success: New Tools Coming Soon

As I hinted at in our group a few weeks ago, we’ve been working on a number of tools to help you with keyword research, getting insights from search results and much more. 

Something I want to make clear is that I’m not building these tools to make money from you. You'll either be able to plug in your API keys from other software or I'll just give you as many free credits as I can. They'll never include any kind of payment option to us.

The first tool will just be me giving you free credits to use with it.

The slight technical challenge has been integrating what is essentially a brand new software project into our current Blueprint membership system.

I would rather not make you have to sign up for something again to enjoy all of the additions, so we've tried to make things work with your current login.

I’m happy to report that the first tests integrating the two were a success, so I just need to make things a little prettier to match our style and I’ll be sharing the first one very soon.

We’ve Been Updating a Number of Videos for 2023

One thing I’m really proud of regarding SEO Blueprint is that it’s not something we recorded once and then just try to promote forever.

The doors to this training are very rarely open (usually just two weeks per year, on average) and we’ve made dozens of updates in each of our four years since launching.

Most individual updates aren't significant enough to send emails about, but I promise they are happening behind the scenes.

For instance, we recently updated our videos on Finding the Most Important Pages on Competitor Websites and How You Can Use InTitle: to Give New Insights to Even the Smartest of SEOs.

The original videos were fine in that they made sense and the ideas inside them still worked, but when Google have made two design changes since the original video, we don’t want things to look dated when they’re working as well as ever.

We have a new system on the way if you want to see every tiny detail we've been changing, though we will of course continue to share any significant changes here as well. 

I'm Not A Fan of Hyping Up the Future, But More Exclusive Reports Are on the Way

If you’ve been following my work (Glen) for any decent length of time then you’ll know that this year - at least in the world of SEO - we’ve published more content than ever. The Detailed blog has not only had a massive design overhaul but lots of new content has gone live as well. 

As we’ve been planning a lot more content for the Detailed roadmap (there are at least a dozen articles / reports in the works) we're pretty settled on the idea that we want to share a lot of value in public, but also keep some really specific insights as exclusives for SEO Blueprint members. 

This means that over the coming months, you’re not only going to see us sharing new marketing concepts and ideas at Detailed, but as SEO Blueprint members you’re going to get exclusive additions to most of the articles that people won’t see on the site.

We’ve already done one report in this way - our deep-dive on successful independent affiliates - but we’re going to be focusing on a lot more than just affiliate sites going forward.

I prefer not to talk about things before they’re ready, but also want to make sure you know your Blueprint access comes with lifetime updates, and I can’t wait to share what we have coming up.

Thank you for being here!

- G

A few weeks ago I wrote an article on what I learned analysing 10,000 affiliate-populated search results for 2023.

It went semi-viral around the web (at least in the world of SEO) and contained a promise: I'm going to share even more insights exclusively with SEO Blueprint members.

9,000+ words later, that promise is now a reality, and the report is live.

Here's the direct link: https://seoblueprint.com/superpixels-affiliate-analysis/

(Note:  You need to be logged into SEO Blueprint to see it)

I genuinely expected this to be a 2,000, maybe 3,000 word report but I just kept finding more angles I wanted to research and write about.

You're going to learn:

• The niches they're operating in
• How much content they're publishing each month
• Whether they rely on redirecting expired domains to succeed
• Whether "superpixels" actually matter for them
• Elements of E-E-A-T they're implementing on site

And a lot more.

Because it's such a large report I've made it as skimmable as I possibly can so you can focus on what's more relevant to your situation.

These reports take a ton of time and effort so I can't publish them as quickly as I like, but we have a few more we're working on behind the scenes. I know many members run eCommerce stores, SaaS companies, service businesses and more, and I have you covered.

My current philosophy is that I'll share a huge, in-depth report on Detailed and then follow it up a few weeks later with additional, exclusive insights just for Blueprint members.

I really hope you get a lot of value from this. There's lots more on the way!

- Glen

P.S. I can't see replies to these emails (there's a link inside the report where you can discuss it) but someone recently said that whoever designs them needs to be fired. It made me laugh because I kind of agree. 

Sadly I can't control how they look as it's part of the announcement software we use which allows us to have the nice widgets in the Blueprint dashboard and navigation bar, but I may revert to using other software just for announcement emails going forward.