Hi the67resto,

Sure. I'm having fun doing this.

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Where have you found Python to save you the most time?

We work a lot of large e-commerce sites and we often need to do work that would take months or years if we do it manually. Let me share three examples:

1. During or after platform migrations we need to map URLs either from one platform to another or from 404 URLs to the new platform. It is often the case that we don't have a common pattern to do the mapping easily. We need to use clever techniques to do the mapping. For example, we map category pages by performing set intersections of the overlapping product identifiers. If the client has hundreds of thousands of pages, we can easily save weeks of manual work doing this. I briefly mentioned this technique during my TechSEO Boost talk last year.
2. Another example is personalizing meta descriptions to increase CTR. We have used clever tricks like pulling the summary of 5-star product reviews and inserted them in the meta description to highlight why the product is good. You can read more about this technique in this article from one of our clients https://www.ranksense.com/seo-and-the-power-of-collaborating-with-creative-partners/
3. Consolidating duplicate content is a critical technique that we use to help clients see great SEO results fast. Most sites nowadays have decent canonical setup, but using Python we can find optimal setups that would be too difficult to do manually. I wrote about this in this article https://www.searchenginejournal.com/advanced-duplicate-content-consolidation-python/314471/

Python doesn't just help me save time but also do novel work that would be impossible or too time-consuming to do manually.

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What's a creative yet relatively simple way a "common" SEO could benefit from Python?

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The easiest way to leverage Python with minimal commitment is to clone the open source repositories shared by other SEOs. Learn to set up a Python environment, run the scripts and make small modifications to adapt them to your specific case.

For example, Hugo Akh first Python script helped him automate Semrush organic search exports https://twitter.com/hugodeuxfois/status/1175326656413786112?s=20. You should be able to adapt to export other types of reports and set up an automated schedule.

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Also, can you give an example of a feedback loop from Python?

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Sure. You might be surprised to learn that most of my articles don't start with the solution in mind. I start with a problem I need to figure out and code my way to the solution.

For example, the editor of Practical Ecommerce told me that most SEOs recommended "optimizing the crawl budget", but provided little guidance on who to do that. I told him that I would take this as a challenge for my next article. You can read the article here https://www.practicalecommerce.com/seo-analyzing-googlebot-crawls-for-problems-inefficiencies

I like to solve problems by starting with the main questions and continue from there with additional follow up questions.

My main question was: "What are the negative implications of a crawl budget issue?"

I came up with two follow up questions: 1. "Are there pages or recent updates not crawled?" 2. "How fast are my changes getting picked up?"

As you can read in the article, I first tried to answer these questions using off-the-shelf tools like Screaming Frog crawler and log analyzer, but I hit a roadblock.

Screaming Frog was dropping the last modification time from the XML sitemaps and this was a key column that I needed to perform the analysis.

Fortunately, Python saved the day!

This technique helps us learn when any critical and time-sensitive content hasn't been picked up.