I used to help out at a bed company selling matresses in their WooCommerce store.
The owner was obsessed with „metadata“ and SEO.
He regularely told me I should copy and paste the meta title and descriptions into a Word document (ugh) so he could edit on them. When he was done I was supposed to put them back in, manually of course.
Now, normally I‘d tell a client that such a task could be easily automated. However he was a very shitty boss and I was getting paid hourly.
So I simply built a crawler that analyzed every site and pulled its metadata, put it in an Excel table (I convinced him it was easier for me to copy/paste) and sent it to him via email.
He then gave me the updated table, for which I simply wrote a script to execute some SQL queries to put them in.
This turned what what’s effectively 2 hours of work each time into 20-30 because of the number of pages.
One time I remember I forgot to update the metadata one of the pages. When he complained and I realized, I quickly ran the script and told him he‘d have to „refresh his cache“ or something.
He never noticed any of this.
He regularely told me I should copy and paste the meta title and descriptions into a Word document (ugh) so he could edit on them. When he was done I was supposed to put them back in, manually of course.
Now, normally I‘d tell a client that such a task could be easily automated. However he was a very shitty boss and I was getting paid hourly.
So I simply built a crawler that analyzed every site and pulled its metadata, put it in an Excel table (I convinced him it was easier for me to copy/paste) and sent it to him via email. He then gave me the updated table, for which I simply wrote a script to execute some SQL queries to put them in.
This turned what what’s effectively 2 hours of work each time into 20-30 because of the number of pages.
One time I remember I forgot to update the metadata one of the pages. When he complained and I realized, I quickly ran the script and told him he‘d have to „refresh his cache“ or something. He never noticed any of this.