Merci Larry

Misc

Artificial intelligence: the dangers of turning it into a product for the masses

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is far from new. Still, until a few years back, AI was still the privilege of a minority: scientists & engineers specialized in this field. TL;DR * Lack of regulation. Brad Smith, the vice chair and president of Microsoft wrote in February 2023 "AI developments we had expected

Growth

Planning the Go To Market of my Substack newsletter

The only (personal) brand I launched from scratch is this blog, Merci Larry; and since and I didn't have any plan neither expectations to make it grow, I now want to build a new audience from the ground up and use the Substack's network effects to do so. TL;DR

Growth

The current state of Search

While there's a lot of noise about the future of Search with the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), let's focus on the current state of Search; especially what seems missing from most of the comments and announcements we all had the occasion to read over the Internet in the last

SEO

Current shortage of SEO

It's been almost a year since I published an offer for a SEO Manager position and as you could expect from the article's title, I did not fill it yet. I know I'm not the only one and since John Shehata talked about it in a tweet some months ago,

Growth

Growth marketing: year 2

It's been two years now since that I moved from a Head of SEO position to an individual contributor (IC) and then manager role in Growth Marketing. Last year, I published an article to share my first thoughts after one year and I also had the opportunity to talk about

SEO

How to do log file analysis with Search Console data

Let's start with my favorite tweet of all time: the one from John Mueller in April 2016: @glenngabe Log files are so underrated, so much good information in them. — John Mueller is mostly not here 🐀 (@JohnMu) April 5, 2016 I did tons of log analysis especially while working at Oncrawl

Growth

A guide to intrapreneurship

Obviously, intrapreneurship is different than entrepreneurship because on one side, you have an existing organization in whom you are expected to contribute and on the other side, you can go outside the box and build your own path. I first heard about intrapreneurship in 2018 while working at Oncrawl and

Data

10 advice from a Data Analyst to get your brain on point

As we speak about data from Monday to Friday, either you’re an SEO, PPC specialist, Growth something or whatever else, I decided to partner with my talented colleague Marie Vachelard, Growth Data Analyst at Pictarine for this article. Either it is on Twitter, Linkedin, etc. a bunch of people

Growth

My notes on Tony Fadell's book Build

I'm a big reader and since I joined Pictarine, I started reading a lot of entrepreneur' and business books. Sometimes, it inspires me to try new things and sometimes it makes me see things differently. To put it simple: if you had to read one business book (either you're an

SEO

SEO features in Ghost

I started Merci Larry to share what I like about my job and I would like it to stay the same. That's why I've never cared that much about SEO despite the fact it's been a big part of my daily workload. I don't expect to drive tons of organic

Misc

Migrating from Wordpress to Ghost

I've been wondering for a long time now to switch to Ghost despite two previous failed free trials. The third time is the good one. I literaly spent half a day looking for all the tips and tricks I could use to customize Ghost as I wish. In this article,

Growth

Introduction to the snack (search) engine concept

Earlier this year, just before WWDC22 took place, rumors were trending about Apple launching a search engine. Same as the years before. According to Business Today, it may happen in January 2023 at the earliest. What’s interesting is the first step getting closer to it and it’s a

Growth

Today's dilemma on finding the perfect CMS

I tried multiple times to switch from WordPress to another CMS for Merci Larry and failed as many times. I still didn’t find my CMS fit; the one that will give me the same ability and features as in WordPress. WordPress market-share is still way ahead Despite the rise

SEO

Diagnose your crawl data with a Venn diagram on Data Studio

Sometimes, it is hard to get the big picture of your crawl at first glance. The idea here is to benefit from the use of a specific visualisation to easily diagnose crawl data. Introduction to Venn diagrams Logical relation diagrams existed way before John Venn popularised the concept in the

SEO

Buying an expired domain: generating content at scale with GPT-3

Before going deep into this topic; make sure to read the first two parts of my series about building an MVP. Part 1: Buying an expired domain Part 2: Buying an expired domain: learnings on ranking capabilities If you don’t want bother reading the first two parts, here’s

SEO Featured

Visualising crawl data from Screaming frog

It’s been a while now since I want to share a Google Data Studio template to visualise crawl data from Screaming frog. It’s been hard to keep it simple. The recent release of the URL Inspection API made me recreate the template from scratch and it is now

SEO

Use Google Sheets as a CMS with Next JS

This is the third part of the series “buying an expired domain”. Part 1: Buying an expired domain Part 2: Buying an expired domain: learnings on ranking capabilities If this article is the first of the series you are about to read, here’s a little bit of context. Back

Growth

A year into growth and the culture that empowers it

Last year, I decided to resigned from Oncrawl to embrace new challenges outside the SEO world. I started my career in 2014 as a Traffic Manager in a web agency, dealing with both organic and paid acquisition. Soon enough, I decided to specialized in SEO mostly because I loved (and

Growth

Buying an expired domain: learnings on ranking capabilities

Last month, I published a first article as part of a series dedicated to building an MVP. Part 1: Buying an expired domain Today, I would like to share my learnings on the ranking capabilities: * Does buying an expired domain with years of semantic history helps with the rankings? * Does

SEO

Building a redirect generator on Google Sheets

Recently, I’ve been dealing with Next JS so the free Google Sheets template that comes with this article to help you manage your redirects at scale, is using the Next JS redirect format. In case you need another redirect formatting, let me know and I will update the generator

Data

Choosing the right forecasting technique

Forecast and marketing data are sometimes difficult to match up. Forecast can be scary as we are never that comfortable to rely solely on it. I’m sharing with you some valuable techniques based on my proven experience; ran on Google Sheets. No hard skills needed. At first, when I

SEO

Buying an expired domain

First of all, let’s give some context about having bought an expired domain. At Pictarine, we aim to test a lot of things and to build MVPs to confirm or disconfirm our hypothesis. To test a new photo product and possibly new markets (in addition to the US), we

SEO

Insights from Ahrefs' organic keywords

Here’s a brand new Google Data Studio template to help you get the most valuable insights from Ahrefs’ organic keywords. This template is also designed to backup your decisions with data when it comes to prioritizing your content roadmap. Below are the steps to extract the data and then

SEO

Search Console: Data Studio template to run a risk-free analysis

We often get wrong when analysing lots of information from the same angle. The first data that Search Console gives falls in this case. How many charts are shared on Twitter or elsewhere where the curves are rising? A fortiori, we never know what is behind these curves. The report

SEO

Regex in Search Console

As Google Search Console now allow to use regex to filter both queries and pages, the time has come to get an in-depth introduction to RE2 (the library used in Search Console). 01. A short introduction to regular expressions 02. Google RE2 regex 03. Search Console regex cheatsheet A little