An open notebook of real SEO work

The SEO Lab by Nizam Ud Deen Usman

Most SEO advice tells you what should work. This is the record of what actually happened when I tried it, on real websites, with the real numbers.

I publish experiments while they are still running, and I keep the failures. If I got something wrong, you will read it here first.

How this Lab works

01
Published while it runsExperiments go live with a start date and no result yet.
02
Failures stay publicWhat did not work stays here, in plain sight.
03
Real numbers onlyFrom live Search Console accounts and dated records.
04
No client namesBusinesses are described by type, never by name.
05
Free to readNo email wall and no paid tier.

Five kinds of entry

Something odd spotted in a SERP, a client account or an AI answer. Raw, dated, not yet explained.

A hypothesis with a control, one variable and a start date. Published while running, not only once finished.

What was tried, what happened, why it went wrong and what it cost. No spin.

A named method, only after the same pattern has held three or more times. A free template with every one.

Anonymised data with a readme explaining how it was collected. Free download, no email wall.

Browse by type of business

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Browse by how long it takes

Browse by where it came from

The FAQ was on the page, but the code did not tell Google it was an FAQ

2 days ago

Four pages had a visible question-and-answer section with no structured data behind it.

3 days ago

An audit reported 93 images missing alt text. 88 of them were the same logo, repeated on every page.

3 days ago

The page for the town where the restaurant actually is had been quietly removed from Google by its own settings.

3 days ago

The sitemap was broken and nobody noticed, because a redirect plugin made every error look like a working page.