The Excel Lesson That Changed How I Think About SEO
How Excel functions translate into web functions, why this changes the economics of enterprise SEO, and the framework you need to make it work in a real organization.
An e-commerce SEO field manual, organized from foundations to execution. Drawn from twenty-five years of enterprise SEO work, including OpticsPlanet, Brownells, Campsaver, and the U.S. banners of Ahold Delhaize.
Why function-driven content matters, the Excel metaphor, the three principles behind every page worth ranking.
How Excel functions translate into web functions, why this changes the economics of enterprise SEO, and the framework you need to make it work in a real organization.
Most product pages aren't content. They're database printouts. Why that matters and what to do about it.
The three properties every page worth ranking has in common, drawn directly from the book.
The diagnostic for SEO teams that are busier than ever but ranking worse.
What replaces it and why most agencies haven't caught up.
A philosophical companion to the Excel article. Why this mental model produces results.
Functions, variables, shortcodes, and conditional logic. The mechanism that updates 5,000 pages from one source.
A non-technical walkthrough of the building blocks of function-driven content.
The most quotable promise of function-driven content, demonstrated end to end.
Why one sentence template can produce 800 unique, accurate, useful sentences.
How to design page templates that perform differently for different categories.
An inventory of the data that is sitting in your CMS, waiting to drive content.
Why "shop," "compare," and "save" are weapons when used at scale.
Title tags, captions, anchor text, schema, social proof. The patterns you apply to specific page elements on real e-commerce sites.
The page-description element most SEOs ignore, and how it builds internal-link equity.
A tactical breakdown of what works on product pages in outdoor and tactical e-commerce.
How to use SKU, dimensions, materials, and capacity to build long-tail keyword coverage.
A page-template philosophy for catalogs where every product is conceptually unique.
Why category-level internal-link strategy outperforms link building 9 times out of 10.
A small change to title tags that consistently lifts click-through rate across categories.
How to signal recency to Google without lying or refreshing content artificially.
Why inventory status is an SEO element, not just a CRO element.
How to surface reviews, ratings, and trust signals on pages that scale to thousands.
A tactical pattern for promotional title tags and meta descriptions.
How to use product identifiers to capture specific-query traffic.
The work that decides whether a function-driven content build actually ships. Convincing programmers, executives, and your own SEO team.
The conversation I have with every programmer at every kickoff, answered before it gets asked.
The agreement with the executive sponsor that protects the project through its invisible first quarter.
Discovery, build, rollout, iteration. The shape of every project I have led.
The specific metrics, dashboards, and reports that protect a long project from cancellation.
Why instruction-driven pages make A/B testing radically easier than hand-coded ones.
The patterns I have seen kill projects mid-build, and how to avoid each one.
A retrospective on the work that produced the case studies in the book.