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# System prepended metadata

title: State of SEO at Shuttle & Moving Forward

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*08/03/2023*

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# Key Metrics
- Health Score: 88
    - Crawled: 378
    - Redirects: 22
    - Broken: 4
    - Blocked: 33
- Domain Rating: 47
- Referring Domains: 376
- Backlinks: 2,500
- Organic Traffic: 326
- Organic Keywords: 1,100

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# Keywords
- Our current organic keywords, ranked on Google's first page, bring about 116 monthly users to our site, with a total volume of around 3900 and an average of 84
- If we were to theme the traffic drivers, we'd end up with users interested in:
    - Javascript & Rust (`next js rust`, `rust for javascript developers`)
    - Learning Rust (`rust authentication`, `rust refleciton`, `rust macros`, `rust builder pattern`)
    - Building Discord bots (`rust discord bot`, `serenity rs`, `serenity discord`)
    - Evaluating frameworks (`hyper rust`, `axum examples`, `actix examples`, `axum rs`)

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# Keywords
- An overall finding from our research is that both *jobs to be done* and *rust backend/web development* related keywords have low Volume & low TP which gives us an opportunity to *cement* ourselves on the first page for the most commonly Googled search terms in the field of Rust-related subjects
- Regardless of the fact that the majority of those keywords have low Volume & low TP, we've identified a couple of keywords that do have high volume/high TP which demonstrate the current hot topics in Rust web development. See next slide.

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# Keywords

| Keyword                    | KD     | Volume (US) | Volume (global) | TP    |
|--------------------------- | -------|-------------|-----------------|-------|
| rust web framework         | Hard   | 900         | 4,200           | 1,700 |
| zero to production in rust | Medium | 200         | 800             | 150   |
| rust api framework         | Hard   | 100         | 600             | 2,000 |
| rust for web development   | Medium | 150         | 500             | 40    |
| rust examples              | Medium | 700         | 1,300           | 800   |     |


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# Backlinks & Referring Domains
- We have a total amount of 2,485 backlinks. Out of those, 1,635 are *dofollow* and 830 are *nofollow*

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# Technical SEO
- Lighthouse audit
    - (desktop) Performance score of 95 with opportunities for improvements
        - Names and labels
        - Readers contrast (background versus foreground)
        - Heading elements not in a sequentially-descending order
    - (mobile) Performance score of 57 with opportunities for improvements
        - Total blocking time
        - Largest Contentful Paint
        - Text not visible during webfont load
        - Javascript-related issues

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# Content Strategy
* Our up-until-this-point content strategy was based upon a couple of things:
    - Conducting research with RUst devs
    - Community feedback
    - Try-measure-iterate method
* Low attention was being paid to SEO, both from a technical implementation perspective and content-wise

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# Moving forward
### Enabling Metadata on our website/blog/launchpad  & addressing Lighthouse
* Address the issues pointed out by Lighthouse and get our performance score to 90+ for both the mobile and desktop version
* Create & implement website SEO metadata (currently it's just pulling the first info it finds)
* Implement the ability to add metadata to our *Launchpad* issues since every issue of the *Launchpad* contains, among other things, learning resources & jobs to be done (done)
* Retroactively analyze & bootstrap our existing articles with metadata & more relevant keywords 

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# Moving Forward
### Mapping all stages of developer-search lifecycles
- Determine the complete lifecycles of both beginners and advanced developers and their paths towards Rust, backend development and the cloud together with most commonly searched keywords & jobs to be done
    - Interviewing developers
    - Keyword research
    - Reddit / Stackoverflow research
- Prioritize targetting the keywords & jobs to be done depending on volume & traffic potential
- The results from the points above should also give us enough insights to be able to do grouping based on minor & major leagues

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# Moving Forward
### Mapping examples
*Deciding on a programming language (beginner)*
![w:300, h:300](decide-programming-beginner.png)

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# Moving Forward
### Mapping examples

*Deciding on a programming language (advanced)*
![w:300, h:300](decide-programming-advanced.png)

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# Moving Forward
### Mapping examples
*Learning Rust (beginner)*
![w:500, h:500](learn-programming-beginner.png)

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# Moving Forward
### Build up on our content strategy
- Run continuous experiments with research/mapping findings
- Track, measure & analyze the performance
- Increase our network of "friends" for backlinking/referring domain purposes
- Increase content production to 1x per week

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# Questions
- What's our target volume/traffic for our field?
- How should we interpret the low TP for keywords like `deploy rust` and other jobs to be done, compared to other languages?
- How do we handle data differences among platforms like GSEC, Ahrefs, and Semrush?
- What are common methods/strategies for building backlinks efficently?
- How much should we be looking at demographics in our use case?
- What mechanisms can we put in place to ensure our content remains relevant as Rust's ecosystem evolves?