Ron Erdos

Below are three of the many projects I've lead at SEEK: 1) Feature audit My aim was to see which features of the websites I look after were actually generating value for users and SEO, and which were just there due to inertia. To do this, I gathered never-before obtained data by writing custom web scrapers in Python and Julia. Next, I wrote another script to clean this data, and to merge it with existing company data. My analysis showed that the value to users and SEO of certain legacy features were very low. Further, these features slowed down our site. I presented my findings to senior managers, and they agreed we should remove the features. After we removed the features, the site was faster and cleaner. As predicted, there was no adverse effect on users or SEO – a win-win-win. 2) SEO experiments Working together with a manager, we identified an area for opportunity within SEO. I worked with a SEEK data scientist to come up with a statistically correct framework for the experiment. Next, we rolled out the experiment, and later observed a 45% increase in SEO traffic. The experiment was so successful, we rolled it out to other websites in our network, also to great effect. 3) Web development When I started at the company, the blogs often wouldn't load due to server errors – far from ideal for SEO. In addition, they were not the fastest sites I'd ever seen, with a Google Lighthouse score of 54 / 100. I personally coded an alternative – super-fast loading, static site blogs using the open source platform, Hugo. The result? No more server errors, and blog posts which get a perfect Google Lighthouse score of 100 / 100 for all four metrics: performance (speed), accessibility, best practices and SEO. In addition, my blog system allowed our Indonesia manager (a former journalist) to finally start the blog she'd wanted for so long, and to great effect. She generated a huge (commercially confidential) amount of SEO traffic and backlinks from the new blog.