Diggity Marketing

4/27/2026

Matt Diggity Catch up on all the biggest stories in online marketing in this latest edition of our roundup covering late March and beyond. You’ll get fresh news from SEO and AI to PPC, social media, and video marketing. In the top stories from last month, you’ll learn about the outcome of the last big core and spam updates. You’ll also get an analysis of how AI is killing Google ads, and an expert’s breakdown of how one piece of video marketing content was engineered to earn over $200,000. Next, you’ll learn about Google’s alleged “crackdown” on SEO, and a veteran SEO’s take on what he would do if he had to start all over again, and what you can do about Google’s dead call button. In the final stories of the month, what testers are learning about budgeting AI ad campaigns, and how to take advantage of a social media strategy no one is using. Google March 2026 Core & Spam Update, AI-Generated Title Links, Bing AI Reports Update & Much More https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rggEKDGA3AM Barry Schwartz brings you this quick review of some sudden Google updates that landed late last month. The Core Update and the Spam update struck around the same time. The core update (the first of 2026) took 2 weeks and is now complete. The spam update was over the day after it launched in April. Barry takes you through the updates and what we know now.  Google identified this update as “a regular update designed to surface better, relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.” As with the last few core updates, Google didn’t issue new guidance, but given the size of the impact, many site owners may wish they had made changes. The updates sent ripples everywhere. It shifted nearly 80% of the top-three results, and 1/4th of all top-10 pages fell out of the top 100. It’s not yet clear which update is most responsible for all the changes, as analysis continues. Barry also covers news that Google is using AI to generate title links in SERPs. This experiment shocked and angered some publishers because Google went so far as to change the headlines of news stories. Barry covers how this evolved from earlier practices, and what’s changed now. Check out the complete guide for more takes from Barry about other changes to Google, including new citation tests for AI overviews, new ad APIs, changes for merchants, and more. Next, some experienced ad pros have opinions on what AI is doing for Google Ads and your team. AI Is Killing Google Ads (And Saving Your Sales Team) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKCXBlnHg6o Lawrence Mackey brings you this interview with Dan Butcher about how AI is killing Google Ads. The interview, more broadly, focuses on how ad teams handle channel management, and there’s a great discussion on that leading into the talk on AI. Exploring how channel management has changed in recent years, the host and guest touch on the concepts of demand generation (creating interest when nobody’s searching) and demand capture (converting existing intent).  Both agree that Google remains the lowest-hanging fruit for demand capture because even after AI and other changes, it still converts at a much higher rate than channels like Meta, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, or Google. That isn’t to say they don’t think the changes to ads have been significant. They explore a lot of what people mean when they say Google is “killing ads.” They discuss the potential of Ad automation, how AI may be scaled, and how the organic component of marketing may become more valuable when the market is flooded with AI-enabled fake storefronts. Watch the complete video to get some additional practical advice on taking advantage of AI, including how an AI appointment setter via SMS can boost contact rates and book calls even when your team is offline. Next, learn what it takes to build video content worth hundreds of thousands in value. Social Media Expert: I Made $200k With One Video (Steal This Viral strategy!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncqgnK5vMkY Bandman Kevo brings you this interview with IG influencer RealMelaninKing on his explosive growth using video content. In the video, the guest discusses how the brand was built and expanded from 2 million followers in just 2 years to 6 million followers across all of social media. After reflecting on his past and journey into influencing, RealMelaninKing goes into how he first started developing the viral content that made him a success. He had an early talent for Instagram videos and achieved his first $10,000 month only 6 months after starting.  He takes the audience through the thought process he uses to build content. He argues that competitor research should always be your priority and explains how he uses LLMs and other tools to conduct early research. He reminds you to explore which viral format your competitors are using to get attention. They go on to discuss how the “trust deficit” is affecting how social media audiences engage with content. The guest reveals how he’s seen audiences develop a greater hunger for background information, testimonials, and proof of expertise, and how he builds content that adapts to that. Check out the full video to learn more about the small changes RealMelaninKing makes to videos that help them go from thousands of views to millions. Next, Lily Ray thinks your SEO strategy doesn’t work. Is she right? Lily Ray Reveals SEO Truths in 2026: What Works Now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pUMNtq8Bp0 Joy Hawkins brings you this interview with Lily Ray covering Google’s increasingly aggressive crackdowns, carried out through site penalties, core updates, and more. She has some thoughts on what’s happening and on how to recover. Over the course of a wide-ranging interview, they explore what Google is really targeting based on the evidence. Lily Ray draws on a long history of diving into the data to identify the most risky practices, such as creating city pages in locations where your business has no presence.  The conversation naturally veers to what is working right now, including the rewards of investing your time and budget elsewhere. Joy and Lily talk about Google alternatives that interest them and their SEO teams right now, including Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, Threads, and other ecosystems that offer authentic connections and can improve SEO in the long run. They also dig into what’s really been happening with the core updates. Lily identifies several interesting trends, including the increasing likelihood of “aftershocks” that occur after the update is reported as finished. She also tracks the massive amount of movement in the healthcare niche and trends that may signal Google’s internal conflict over the role of user-generated content. They discuss other interesting trends, such as the surprising visibility of Facebook groups and the increasingly iron-clad rankings of .gov sites over competitors. Check out the complete video to learn more about why GBP stays safe, the crackdown on listicles, the new war on AI-generated reviews, and more. Coming up next, a long-time SEO lays out how he’d start over from nothing, knowing what he knows now. SEO in 2026: How I’d Rank in Google in the AI Era https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiW6xRYSXmM Sam Oh feels like he finally has some answers on how SEO behaves in the AI era. He’s using those answers to present a theory on how you can move forward, starting from the assumption that you have nothing. He identifies some key shifts. First, he argues, AI is increasingly learning to be like us when it comes to sources. That means it gathers sources from across the web, citing public information, forum posts, and videos to create a well-supported answer.  Another big shift, according to Sam, is that brand is everything now. It’s not always worth the effort to get attention from Google by writing for Google (even if it’s good, it will get stolen by search features). Instead, you need to work on making your brand impossible to ignore. He also talks about where traditional SEO still wins because organic clicks are increasingly flowing to action-oriented results. AI can explain concepts, Sam points out, but it cannot complete the task. Queries like a backlink checker, a mortgage calculator, or a snow removal service need a single click. Check out the complete video to learn more about fresh ranking strategies and where they’re likely to do the most good. Next up, Google’s call button is now dead, but marketing strategies that rely on phone booking still have options. Google’s call button is DEAD, do THIS instead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVoeAlO-dhE Caleb Ulku brings you these ideas for replacing the Google call button. As he reminds you, Google recently rolled out a new update that removes the call button from all organic map results. The button is not fully removed, but it has been isolated to our profile page and cannot be seen from SERPs. This is not an error or an isolated incident, Caleb argues, but part of a pattern by Google to take greater control of searcher-to-business interactions. The missing call button isn’t Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing News Roundup – April 2026 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

3/30/2026

Matt Diggity First, the latest big core update has finished rolling out, and you’ll learn about everything that changed. Then, you’ll get a long breakdown of why SEO feels harder now, and fresh data on how well ChatGPT traffic converts. In the next set of stories, you’ll learn what happened when one team outsourced all of its marketing to AI. You’ll also get data on how search is being remonitized, and discover why some analysts think the social media era of marketing is at its end. At the end, you’ll get new insights from marketing pros covering, including theories on what hurts your visibility in AI results, and speculation on why Google may be intentionally wiping out top-of-funnel sites. March 2026 Google Discover Core Update Is Done Rolling Out After 3 Weeks https://www.seroundtable.com/february-2026-google-discover-core-update-done-41006.html Barry Schwartz brings you this news about Google’s latest Discover Core Update. This three-week overhaul finished with major changes for sites that depend on news content and the Discover tab. As a result of the update, local articles will be much more likely to be surfaced than those that are published in more distant regions. In particular, Google said the updates were likely to prevent non-US publishers (especially clickbaity ones) from showing up in the US. In a statement posted after the core update, Google stated the changes were meant to show more original content from sites with expertise. This update followed a series of others that penalized spam and general websites. You should check out the changes to the Discover documentation if you have a site in the news vertical. Also, check out the full article for discussions from top SEO communities on how these effects are being felt. Discover isn’t the only place where the SEO game is getting harder. In the next piece, a marketing senior director discusses why everything feels harder now. Why SEO Feels Harder Now: AI Search, Reporting Pressure, and Black Box Rankings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzUSCx_R-Wg Vaenisaa of the AI SEO show brings you this far-reaching interview with Zach Chahalis, Senior Director of SEO and Data Analytics at iPullRank. They discuss the state of in-house SEO and why it feels tougher to get the same amount of attention from search engines.  The talk covers almost everything about the current landscape of SEO and AI. They discuss how SEO has emerged in the wake of AI’s impact and what experts think matters most now. They highlight structured data, schemas, entity mapping, and knowledge graphs as elements that have become increasingly important. They also talk about the nuts and bolts of building agency SEO plans, and how AI can increasingly be used for some of the most tedious tasks, including internal linking and content optimization. Their discussion should be very valuable to anyone who is struggling to improve the value of an in-house team or determine the talent necessary to build one the right way. Check out the complete interview to learn more about how to do SEO right now, including the safest and most boring tactics that are still highly effective, the misconceptions about AI that can now be disproven with data, and ideas on how to explain all the changes to your clients. Next, there’s some new research on ChatGPT traffic, and it may be far more valuable than you thought. ChatGPT Traffic Converts 31% Better than Non-Branded Organic Search (94 eCommerce Sites Analyzed)  https://visibilitylabs.ai/chatgpt-vs-organic-search-conversion-rates/ Jeff Oxford brings you this study of 12 months of Google Analytics data from 94 eCommerce stores (7-8-figure brands generating more than $30 million in revenue). In this massive test, Jeff and his team tracked organic and ChatGPT sessions that occurred across all tracked stores. They intentionally excluded homepage traffic and blog posts from the results. This kept the comparison focused on commercial intent. ChatGPT traffic beat organic traffic for 10 of the 12 months that the study lasted. Jeff and his team did their best to understand why. He suggests the difference appears because ChatGPT users refine their needs before clicking. ChatGPT users arrive ready to evaluate and purchase, not to browse. Check out the complete study to learn more insights the team uncovered, including extra stats on traffic, revenue per session, average order value, and other information that could inform your next big moves. Speaking of big moves, one team outsourced a marketing strategy to AI. In the next piece, you’ll learn what happened. I Outsourced our Digital Marketing to AI. Here’s What Happened https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iNJeArrUu4 Sam Oh brings you this look at the results when you just hand over the marketing strategy to agents. This was just a fun test, but it shows some of the amazing early potential of agents and gives you an idea of what they can really do. For the test, Sam fed ChatGPT a year’s worth of product update blog posts. He built a custom project around the library of information he provided, wrote instructions for the bots, iterated on tone and style, and then tested the system on three deliverables that actually ship.  His team gave the agents responsibility for a product updates blog post, a YouTube script, and a newsletter that goes to tens of thousands of people. They evaluated where AI content shines for speed, where it breaks without context, and what happens when brand voice collides with generative outputs. Sam wasn’t aiming for perfection. He planned ahead to aim for “about 80% there”. He and Tim Soulo evaluated each one based on their team’s high standards. The results were mixed. Tim was able to identify most AI examples and provided some interesting insights on how he applied standards and recognized flaws. Check out the full video for a breakdown of how the AI performed across each content type. Are you building the right content? Search is being monetized in new ways, and the next piece can help you understand how. Search isn’t Just Turning to AI; it’s being Re-Monetized: Text Ads Are Taking a Bigger Share of Google SERP Clicks (Data) https://www.aleydasolis.com/en/search-engine-optimization/serp-shifts-ads-remonetized/ Aleyda Solis brings you this look at where the money in search is really going. While AI is often blamed, she argues that another cause lies in the data. Her hypothesis was that the increase in text ads (as well as organic SERP features) could also be responsible for the decrease in classic organic search clicks across different verticals, potentially even more so than AIOs. She used Similarweb data to analyze the SERP composition evolution across four verticals. She chose the top 5,000 queries for headphones, jeans, and online games (plus the top 956 queries for greeting cards & ecards in the US). For each vertical, she tracked click distribution for classic organic results, organic SERP features, text ads, PLAs, zero-click searches, and AI Overviews. In every vertical, she discovered major shifts. For example, in just headphones, she found that classic organic click share dropped from 73% to 50%. This was a 23% decline in a single year. She also discovered that: She breaks down who appears to be benefiting most from these changes in each vertical. For example, with headphones, she found that YouTube is the big winner. It jumped from #2 (178K clicks) to #1 (244K). Check out the complete article to get data and analysis for all four of the verticals she covered in her research. You’ll also find a lot more about who is winning and losing organic traffic, and who is buying these clicks. Next up, a social media marketer predicts the end of social media. AI is Ending the Social Media Era and What Comes Next https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUvWVF28CNM Sinead Bovell interviews and debates Gary Vee about the possible end of the social media era from the perspectives of creators who need to reach an audience. Their talk covers why social media marketers are saying the end is near, how pros are adapting to AI, and more. Both hosts agree that one of the biggest changes (AI) is here to stay. They acknowledge some struggles with AI creator tools but agree that new technologies are always clumsy before they transform everything.  They also cover some trends that may doom social media. For example, they discuss how younger consumers’ habits are changing, turning away from social media toward real-life experiences or personality-led spaces online. The news isn’t all bad for creators who depend on social media. The host and guest have a lot to say about how brands and creators can continue to break through in a new AI-driven economy. They also speculate on the future of entertainment after social media and how creators can start crafting more immersive experiences. Check out the full video for a spirited discussion about what comes next and how creators should be preparing. If your future visibility depends on AI, you may be making some mistakes you can fix. The next guide will take you through them. 5 Mistakes Hurting Your AI Visibility (With Data-Backed Fixes!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDYq5xlaROY Matt Kenyon brings you this look at some of the simple mistakes that can make AI ignore you. Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing News Roundup – March 2026 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

2/23/2026

Matt Diggity Catch up now on all the biggest online marketing stories of the last month. In this month’s edition, you’ll get a mix of new research, major announcements, and in-depth analysis. In the top marketing stories of the month, you’ll see the results of a huge LLM study, get advice from an SEO pro on how to start over with a new website, and explore an expert’s perspective on the (new) real source of topical authority. The last month was also marked by earth-shaking announcements from the giants of online commerce. Google, OpenAI, and Meta all released statements that you’ll want to catch up on if you work with these platforms in any way. You’ll find them all here. At the end, you’ll find some thoughtful analysis and think pieces. The first claims that social media is “over,” and the second breaks down what Google revealed about key systems in a recent court case. What 2 million LLM sessions reveal about AI discovery https://searchengineland.com/2-million-llm-sessions-ai-discovery-468115 Jordan Koene brings you this analysis of nearly 2 million LLM sessions his team tracked across 9 industries during a study that ran from January to December 2025. The team examined how several assumptions, including ChatGPT’s supremacy, held up against the results. First, they found that ChatGPT is facing stiff competition, with some competitors growing much faster. For example, ChatGPT grew by 3x over the course of the study, but competitor Copilot grew 25x while Claude grew 13x. In particular, Copilot appeared to rule wherever work is happening. The growth it achieved in the example above seemed possible because of its expansion in B2B verticals such as SaaS, Education, and Finance. The team also identified niches where other LLMs are growing. Perplexity is one of the smallest LLMs, but it has an outsize influence on the Finance vertical. Jordan theorizes this may be because Perplexity is more committed to providing citations to users who need verified facts. Additionally, the team found that Claude was fast becoming the favorite LLM for strategic thinking, research, writing, and analysis. This LLM achieved massive growth with the publisher and education verticals. Check out the complete study to learn what LLM traffic can tell you about where to target your audience. Next, you’ll get some advice on how to direct traffic to new sites from the Ahrefs team. How I’d Get Traffic to a New Website if I Had to Start Over (2026) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs_p21vLp1A Sam Oh brings you this look at how the basics of traffic generation have changed. In this video, he generates the playbook he would use to create a successful site if he had to start over today. First, he assures you that new sites are not doomed, though they may face a tougher fight than older ones. There are still straightforward steps you can follow before you have to start the tougher work.    The steps for early sites haven’t changed much. You’ll need to implement a discovery plan so that both bots and human customers can find you. This step will involve submitting your site to targeted directories and hubs. Sam breaks down how to find the right ones and get the most out of them. Sam also recommends creating value for both searchers and LLMs by providing simple tools that meet common users’ needs. You’ll be taken through how to research tools in your niche, build them, and even promote them when you’re done. In the final part of the video, you’ll learn the new methods that are used for drawing users back to your site. Sam discusses ways to build a site community by engaging with forums, forming partnerships, and more. Check out the full video to get more tips about what it takes to grow a new site. Building topical authority is also a challenge for new sites, and the next piece of the month argues the rules may have changed. Topical Authority Isn’t Blog Posts – It’s This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DuIlUdfY_w Edward Sturm does not believe that topical authority comes from publishing blog posts. In this video, he argues that many SEO strategies fail because they buy into this myth, and that they need to adopt a new understanding of how this authority is measured and built. He starts by sharing a Reddit comment from a fan who shares their experience with revamping their SEO department. The comment discusses exhaustion with recommending “blog posts” to clients, where blogs aren’t influential in the niche.    Edward agrees that blogs aren’t always, or even often, the best answer for topical authority. He highlights several alternatives that appear in the Reddit thread, including links, brand mentions, and bottom-of-funnel pages, public relations actions, forums, reviews, and more. He backs up his arguments throughout the video by referencing case studies, such as what happened to HouseFresh. HouseFresh is a company that eliminated its SEO spending after being hit by a penalty. They marketed through all other means until they were so widely referenced that Google was forced to recognize them again. It’s an amazing example of how topical authority is possible without SEO. Check out the complete video for more theory on how topical authority really works and how some of the biggest sites are building their topical authority in unconventional ways. Next, you’ll explore the first of several big announcements. The first one involves OpenAI’s advertising policy. (OpenAI Announcement) Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-advertising-and-expanding-access/ OpenAI has announced that it will begin testing ads inside ChatGPT. This is a big shift for the company, which has provided an ad-free experience since it launched in 2022. According to the statement they released, the ads will allow the LLM to reach wider audiences and offer “fewer usage limits or without having to pay” as it expands to more countries. Currently, the ads will only appear for Free and Go subscription users. The statement takes some time to address ChatGPT fans who may be bothered by the news. OpenAI lays out the principles that will be guiding the use of ads, including— Despite the careful language of the statement, the reception has been mixed. Users have accused OpenAI of abandoning their first principles, and if you were watching the American Super Bowl, you would have seen Anthropic sponsor a nationwide ad mocking this policy. Marketers should know that these ads cannot be purchased yet. Instead, they will be test ads to measure attention and reception. After this one, the next announcement from Google got the most attention of the last month. (Google Announcement) Our approach to website controls for Search AI features https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-ai-features-controls/ Google has announced that it is exploring ways to let some websites/publishers opt out of being scraped for content by Google’s AI features. The move comes in response to the EU’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) proposal for improvements. As a quick refresher: In 2025, the CMA designated Google with a status that allows the CMA to introduce targeted rules or ‘conduct requirements’ for Google’s business. The CMA published a roadmap of possible measures it might take in June 2025, including publisher controls. Now, it seems Google may be acting on the CMA’s advice and moving forward with new protections for publishers. The changes are supposed to give you more power over how your site is used for featured snippets and other search features. The announcement provides few details, other than to say that sites will soon have the freedom to opt out entirely. Google has not yet provided details on how it will comply with other CMA recommendations on fair ranking and data portability. There may be more news on that later. Meta wouldn’t be left out of the big announcement drops, so they issued their own covering how their ad policy is working and changing one year in. (Meta Announcement) Ads on Threads: One Year In https://www.facebook.com/business/news/ads-on-threads-one-year-in Meta released this announcement covering its first year of advertising and letting its advertisers know what to expect going forward. You’ll be updated on the new, larger rollout, the work on options to reach users, and an avalanche of new ad formats, controls, and features. First, Meta confirms that ads are now launching globally, and advertisers will be able to compete for all of the network’s 400,000,000 active users. This rollout will continue over the next few months, with ads appearing gradually at first and then more often. Many new options and tools are coming too. Threads ad settings can now be managed alongside ad campaigns for any other property, like Facebook and Instagram. You’ll also get access to more ad formats, including the newly added carousel format. The company also expanded third-party verification, already available on Facebook, Instagram, and Reels, to the Threads feed via Meta Business Partners. This new feature will provide independent brand safety and suitability verification for Threads feeds. That covers the big announcements for the last month, but there’s still more news you shouldn’t miss. Consider why one major social media advertiser says the whole thing is over. Social Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing News Roundup—February 2026 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

2/9/2026

Matt Diggity Reddit has become one of the most influential platforms in all of search. It acts as a trusted space where real users compare products, challenge claims, and validate buying decisions. With this much user trust spread across billions of niche subreddits and community threads, it’s little surprise that it has jumped to the front of the line for both Google and AI Search when they’re looking for a trusted source to serve their users. This means Reddit isn’t just another social network, it’s a credibility engine that directly affects both human and AI discovery. In this case study, we’ll show you how we helped a technology company dramatically increase referral traffic and strengthen authority signals by building a genuine presence on Reddit. The result? Referral traffic from Reddit alone grew by 642%. But even more importantly: their monthly AI referral traffic grew by 2,814% In this case study, you’ll learn : To start, here’s a refresher about the site and why they needed our help. The Challenge The client is a technology company specializing in real estate data and analytics, you know, the Ahrefs of real estate from the original case study. We’d already seen great success by reusing their existing content and publishing it on different platforms. But, they had no presence in the online communities where their audience was actively seeking advice, comparing tools, and sharing recommendations. Reddit was a major hub for those discussions, yet they weren’t part of the conversation. As users increasingly rely on Reddit threads to guide decisions, verify information, and influence AI-generated results, the client was in serious danger of falling behind the curve. Competitors with even minimal Reddit activity were appearing in searches, earning upvotes, and being referenced by AI systems. The issue wasn’t the quality of the client’s knowledge, it was that they lacked credibility, visibility, and participation in the community channels that actually shape company perception and discovery. They turned to The Search Initiative to develop a Reddit strategy that would build trust authentically, provide audience value without being promotional, and increase visibility in a way that would drive referral traffic and improve AI search authority. Building Authority Through Reddit Engagement Reddit has become one of the most influential platforms in search today. It helps shape what people see on Google, influences AI-generated answers, and serves as a trusted space where consumers validate their decisions with peers, experts, or fellow enthusiasts. Why is Reddit Key to AI Search Success? Recent research into AI platform citation patterns shows just how central Reddit has become. In Profound’s 2025 study, Reddit emerged as the leading source for both Google AI Overviews (2.2%) and Perplexity (6.6%), and second for ChatGPT (1.8%). This was also supported by a separate study by SEMrush who found Reddit dominating citations across all AI models. Adding to this momentum, 2024 saw both Google and OpenAI strike partnerships with Reddit. For Google, the aim is “to make its content available for training the search engine giant’s artificial intelligence models,” and OpenAI to “bring enhanced Reddit content to ChatGPT and new products.” This means that when people ask AI systems for answers, Reddit discussions are consistently part of the evidence those systems pull from – and, crucially, these tools are proactively looking at Reddit. This means that when people ask AI systems for answers, Reddit discussions are consistently part of the evidence those systems pull from – and, crucially, these tools are proactively looking at Reddit. This visibility translates into three critical advantages: 1 . Search and AI visibility – Engaging in the right discussion communities (or ‘subreddits’, as they’re known) helps boost your chances of being featured in both Google search results and AI-generated answers. For example, a Google search for “best summer fragrances for men” features Reddit content on the very first page: Likewise, ChatGPT cites Reddit for the same query. 2. Community trust – Users see Reddit as unfiltered and credible. Many people actively check Reddit threads to validate claims they’ve seen elsewhere. This makes some of the risks for marketers greater, but also the potential rewards. 3. Defensible authority – Because credibility on Reddit is earned slowly through karma and authentic engagement, competitors can’t easily replicate your standing once you’ve established it. In short, showing up on Reddit authentically and ahead of the competition doesn’t just win over community members, it also embeds your expertise into the knowledge base that powers AI search. How to Execute a Successful Reddit Strategy Here’s a step-by-step playbook for running a successful Reddit strategy. Setting Up Your Reddit Profile Authentically The first rule of Reddit marketing is simple: don’t look like a marketer. A brand-new account with a polished bio, external links, and flashy visuals is an instant giveaway. It shows you’re here to sell, not engage. To win on Reddit (and avoid getting banned), remember this: it’s about value, not sales. Reddit users can spot inauthentic marketing right away. As this 2025 investigation by Hubspot found, nothing gets you downvoted faster than: obvious shilling, using corporate jargon and hard sells. Success is achieved through helpful answers, not ads. That means your profile should be understated: Once you’ve established credibility, you can post under usernames like BrandName_Official or BrandName_YourName. The key is that your name signals who you are, while your contributions and activity prove that you belong in those subreddits and are providing value. Take Nick_OS_ as an example. Their account has no links, no sales pitch, and no flashy profile. But if you scroll through their post history, you’ll see they consistently contribute to health and nutrition-focused subreddits. Their valuable contributions earned them labels like “Allied Health Professional”. Trust is earned through your engagement, not how you package yourself. Build credibility with helpful content first. Your profile can follow later. Familiarize Yourself With Subreddits Before you write a single post, take the time to understand how Reddit works. This is your onboarding phase. Spend at least a week or two observing. Pay attention to how people interact, what gets engagement, and what gets removed. Why? Because the high-energy, self-promotional style that works on LinkedIn or Instagram is exactly what gets you downvoted or even banned on subreddits for not meeting their rules. Success here comes from fitting into the culture first. How Subreddits Work Each subreddit has its own culture, rules, and expectations and there are literally millions of unique subreddits. What works in one subreddit might get you flagged in another. For example, in r/Entrepreneur, you need 10 comment karma (a score showing how well your contributions are received by the community) before you can post, and self-promotion is strictly banned. Whereas in r/Pen_Swap, self-promotion is expected, and people actively buy, sell, and trade pens. Think of Reddit as having two layers of rules: 1. Global norms (Reddiquette) – the platform’s overall code of conduct serving as the baseline for how you should behave. The idea is simple: Following Reddiquette won’t guarantee success, but breaking it almost always guarantees trouble. 2. Local rules – Each subreddit has its own specific guidelines, often pinned in the sidebar or highlighted in a sticky post. These rules govern how the community operates. Some subreddits ban self-promotion entirely, while others allow it under strict conditions. Some subreddits don’t allow external links in posts, like this DIY subreddit, which specially restricts users from adding YouTube links. In most cases, you can still work around this by publishing the post without links and introducing them later in the comments as part of a natural reply. This keeps posts compliant while still allowing interested readers to access deeper resources. Understanding both the global norms and the local rules is key to blending in and building credibility. Learn the Language of Reddit Redditors value plain language, quick wit, and a conversational tone and so if you’re using corporate jargon, it’ll stand out like a sore thumb. Here are some common terms you’ll see everywhere: You don’t need to memorize everything, but knowing the basics helps you blend in. Karma and Voting Karma is Reddit’s reputation system. Think of it as your trust score. While karma might seem like just a number, it’s important as some subreddits require a minimum karma score before you can post. Upvotes and downvotes decide visibility. The best answers float to the top of the thread, attracting more views and more engagement. Downvoted comments sink, making them invisible to most readers. Your goal in the early stages is to earn consistent upvotes by contributing useful, clear, and authentic responses. By the end of this stage, you should feel comfortable in your chosen subreddits, which I’ll show you how to find next… How to Choose & Find Relevant Subreddits The subreddits you choose will directly impact how quickly you build karma. Instead of aiming for the biggest, most crowded subreddits, focus on smaller, niche communities that align with your expertise and a few you genuinely enjoy. This balance helps you engage authentically while reaching the right audience. Broad communities like r/Plumbing (13K weekly Read More Read More The post How We Used Reddit To 30x AI Traffic and 6x Referral Traffic For Our Client [Case Study] first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

1/26/2026

Matt Diggity The last month was an intense one for online marketing. Not content to snooze through the new year, the biggest players in search, ads, and AI were busy posting updates that you may have missed. Catch up on all of them right here. In the top headlines for the month, you’ll find out about the details of the latest broad core update, get some insight on why prompt tracking often fails, and learn what to do now that Google has intentionally cut news traffic in half. After that, you’ll get Rand Fishkin’s perspective on the new search reality, learn why 3rd party content seems to dominate AI search, and get a sneak peek inside a multi-billion-dollar marketing playbook. That’s not all. Read through to the end to learn what it means that Google Ads is dropping the Active Visitor count to 100 (excellent news for some sites), get helpful ad criticism from experienced pros, and hear the latest perspectives from advertisers on agentic AI. Google’s December 2025 Broad Core Update https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hWV3DVSRf0 Glenn Gabe brings you this breakdown of the latest broad core update that launched in late December. This video contains all the insights he’s been sharing in his recent X posts, along with some speculation about the update’s future impact. As Glenn points out, there was some interesting volatility before the update ever dropped. Glenn shares graphs of the sites he was tracking and reveals the pattern of possible tests that may have been underway ahead of the update.  Next, he tackles what’s changed now that the update has landed. First, he notes that it was a big and fast-moving update with a global crater. Massive surges and collapses were trackable across many popular niches the same week the update started. The YNYL niche (and finance in particular) was among the most affected in the early days of the update. You’ll see graphs showing how large sites in this niche fared as the update progressed. There was also a lot of activity in the news niche. In this niche, Glenn reveals a pattern of sites affected by the June Update that were also hit by this one. Check out the complete video for more insights on these changes and all the others. You may need to update your site to prepare for some of these changes. If you’re already planning changes for AI search visibility, you’ll want to hear the advice coming up next. You’ll find out why prompt tracking fails for many marketers, and what it takes to get good data. AI Search Visibility: Why Prompt Tracking Fails and What Actually Works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0WAnyRZs_4 Mark Williams-Cook joins the AI SEO show as a guest to discuss the AI search visibility. He shares his perspective on how to achieve AI search visibility and the practices used at his firm. The wide-ranging discussion covers many AI questions marketers are grappling with, including how brands become what LLMs understand about you, why results are heavily context dependent, and the best approaches to extracting and auditing what models believe and deliver.  Marks also tells you more about how his team is connecting prompts to the underlying searches that AI systems run to deliver an answer. In many cases, you can get the model to explain how it arrived at its answer, and this information can yield valuable marketing insights. What’s next for AI search? Mark argues that visibility in the future will require a multi-site strategy that lets AI gather information on you from many different sources. Visibility will no longer be a matter of ranking a website. The complete conversation covers even more territory, including how to use People Also Ask data to gather intent intelligence and the most common misuses of LLM that Mark has identified so far. Next, you’ll learn how Google cut news traffic in half, what it means, and how you should respond. Google Just Cut News Traffic in Half (51% → 27%) – Now What? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6f9wS_SVcM Edward Sturm brings you this coverage of recent research into news traffic. According to the freshest data, Google Search has been sending 25 percentage points less traffic to news publishers over the past two years. Edward takes you through the research, the chatter, and the responses this news has inspired from the rest of the SEO community. He starts with the exact numbers provided by the research and picks out some interesting details. The news mostly isn’t good.  He notes that while Google Search is a poor driver of traffic, Google Discover is now driving the majority of publisher traffic. Unfortunately for publishers, this isn’t an idea replacement for old traffic. Many publishers report frustration with the process of even appearing in Discover. You still have options if your news site can no longer benefit from search traffic. Edward suggests using your existing domain as a base for topical authority, then launching niche web apps as products rather than content. He explains how products and tools can deliver much more durable revenue than relying on ads ever could. In the following piece for the month, you’ll get even more insights into the new search reality. You’ll hear SEO veteran Rand Fishkin offer his personal vision of where it’s all going. Rand Fishkin On The New Search Reality: AI, Zero-Click & The Pinball User Journey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkdu2oglgSI Sean Barber hosts Rand Fishkin for a deep AI marketing discussion that covers Rand’s audience research and brand visibility tools, and his personal theory for how users journeys because a “pinball machine.” “Pinball machine” is Rand’s alternative to the idea of the classic marketing funnel. Rand argues that the modern user journey more closely resembles a pinball machine because users search and discovers everywhere and all stages of the funnel happen simultaneously.  Rand argues that marketers can no longer silo any topic because user decisions come from more places than they could predict or build an intentional presence on. As examples, Rand discusses how shopping for a wedding suit could come down to sources like Reddit, podcasts, substacks, short videos, social media, or conversations with friends. How do brands build visibility now? Sean and Rand discuss that and many other topics in the rest of the video. They look at AI tool usage trends, the methods of building LLM visibility and the growing role of PR, reputation and native content in getting attention. At the end, the hosts discuss what you’ll need to priortize in the new year as you’re looking to improve your user journey. While you’re thinking about the LLM user journey, you may want to look more closely at the brands that are already appearing. Third-Party Content Owns AI Search for Commercial Queries https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSrnEAnmSEo Kevin Indig brings you his thoughts on some recent LLM/SEO research that showed 85% of brand mentions originate from third-party pages rather than owned domains. The report (you can find it here) detailed some other surprising facts about when and why AI Search rewards brands with visibility. For example, only 30% of brands stay visible from one answer to the next, and 48% of LLM citations come from community platforms like Reddit and YouTube.  Kevin focused on the 3rd-party detail in this video because of what it suggests about how LLMs treat brands. The hosts speculate that most top LLMs may be structured to deliver 3rd-party results (such as reviews or independent tests) the closer the user gets to buying intent. This structure may mean you have to try different strategies to be mentioned. Kevin recommends that you build authority through community and user-generated content. He recommends platforms like Reddit and YouTube for reach niche audiences. He believes that amplifying user-generated content (such as reviews and testimonials) can increase the size of your brand’s footprint in AI training data. Check out the full discussion and the linked research to learn more about what the data says about AI visibility. Next, the Ahrefs podcast looks at one of the biggest marketing achievements of the last few years, and how one marketing manager helped a company achieve a $3 billion playbook. Clay’s $3.1B Marketing Playbook | Bruno Estrella (Clay) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiG6P6RGGIA Tim Soulo hosts Bruno Estrella, the marketing manager of Clay. Clay went from zero revenue to a $3.1 billion valuation in just 2 years. Was it luck or skill? Tim dives in and gets the answers that are likely to be the subject of many future case studies. First, the two discuss the unique and large-scale approach that Clay took toward user-generated-content (UGC). The company massively employed content creators as part of their marketing, but they weren’t really satisfied with the lack of control over that content. So, they went their own direction.  Bruno decided to build an ecosystem out of his network of UGC creators. He and his team supported these creators, and motivated them to build content through incentives like badges that marked them as credible experts. The Clay marketing team also heavily promoted the best content that was created to push UGC Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing News Roundup—January 2026 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

1/12/2026

Matt Diggity Search has changed. Consumers no longer rely solely on Google to find what they want: they now turn to ChatGPT, Perplexity, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, and niche communities to find answers, compare solutions, and make decisions. If your content doesn’t appear across these platforms, it’s effectively invisible to their users and AI models alike. In this case study, we’ll show you how we helped a technology company in real estate data and analytics more than double their referral search traffic. How? By building a clear picture of where their audience was actually searching, then repurposing their existing content into the formats and platforms that appealed most to those search behaviors. The result? Their referral traffic grew by 148%. All from repurposed content. In this case study, you’ll learn : If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. To start, here’s some context about the client and why their site needed our help. The Challenge The client is a technology company specializing in real estate data and analytics. Think of them as the Ahrefs of Real Estate. They had been publishing authoritative, useful content and expected that it would continue driving visibility over time. But search habits had changed, and their audience was no longer relying on Google alone to find what they were looking for online. They were turning to AI search tools, YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn to find answers in new formats and through new discovery paths. Because of this shift in search behavior, the client’s content stopped reaching the people it was intended for. Traffic plateaued, visibility declined, and their expertise was being overlooked. Meanwhile, competitors who distributed their content across multiple platforms were gaining attention, appearing in AI-generated responses, and earning greater share-of-voice in the industry. The problem wasn’t the quality of the client’s insights, it was that those insights weren’t being adapted to the places and formats where their audience now consumed information. That’s when they turned to The Search Initiative to help modernize their approach and extend the reach of the content they had already invested in. We began by pinpointing where and how their customers were actually searching e.g. traditional search engines, AI tools, social platforms, and online communities. This helped us understand which channels were as-yet untapped and precisely where competitors had been gaining ground. Next, to make sure we hit these opportunities quickly and effectively, we built a content repurposing plan that turned their best-performing blog posts into short social videos, LinkedIn updates, and formats optimized for AI visibility. This expanded their reach without having to create reams of content from scratch. Here’s how you can follow the same steps to make sure your expertise is seen by the right people, wherever they search. Understanding Multi-Platform Search Behavior Understanding how your audience searches and consumes content across multiple platforms is critical for modern SEO and AI visibility. Search behavior is no longer limited to traditional engines like Google, users now turn to ChatGPT, Perplexity, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Reddit for answers and insights. Getting a full picture of how and where your audience is searching helps you identify where they are active and what content performs best on those platforms. These are insights that will shape the content repurposing strategy in section two of this case study. Why Multi-Platform Search Matters Today Recent research shows that consumer search behavior is rapidly diversifying beyond traditional search engines. Large language models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI search features are pulling answers more and more regularly from forums, social media, video platforms, and professional networks, rather than just traditional websites. Unlike traditional SEO, where content is mainly optimized for Google search, success in AI SEO requires a focus on content types that AI platforms like ChatGPT trust and process quickly – which extends to social platforms like TikTok and trusted advice/Q&A forums like Reddit. A strategy that understands the value in these platforms and what you need to post where will give your content the best chance of surfacing in AI-generated answers. Looking at the data would also suggest that there’s little time to waste. The number of ChatGPT users has doubled from 400 million to 800 million between February and October this year and SEMRush even predicts AI search referral traffic overtaking traditional search visibility by 2028! What does this mean? Success today means optimizing not just for Google, but also for AI engines and the specific platforms your audience is using every single day. If you leave it any longer, you risk being left behind. However, for online businesses, this also provides three key opportunities: 1. Broader Visibility Across Search and AI Platforms – By maintaining a presence on multiple platforms, your content is more likely to be surfaced in both traditional search results and AI-generated responses. For instance, a “how-to” guide on SEO may appear on Google… … but a repurposed YouTube tutorial or LinkedIn post can increase the likelihood of being cited in the AI answer.. 2. Capture Emerging Audience Behavior – Users increasingly expect answers in their preferred format and platform. For example, social media requires more visual elements that grab the attention of the user while scrolling their feed. Showing up in these channels meets audience intent head-on. 3. Competitive Advantage – Businesses that focus solely on traditional SEO are swimming against the tide and risk being lost at sea. Competitors who diversify across platforms and formats are gaining AI and social visibility, establishing authority that’s harder to replicate. In short: multi-platform search isn’t just about being discoverable, the goal is to position your content to be recognized by both humans and AI, ensuring you capture attention wherever audiences are looking today and will be looking in the future. Using SparkToro to Map Audience Habits Understanding where your audience spends time online is the first step in building a multi-platform content strategy. SparkToro is a powerful tool that helps you identify where your audience is active, what they follow, and which content formats they engage with most. By mapping these habits, you can prioritize the platforms that will make repurposing your content most effective (more on this later). Start with Audience Research Investigate the social platforms, websites, podcasts, and influencers your audience engages with most. 1.  Log in or create a free account on SparkToro (where you’ll get 5 free searches per month) and select “Audience Research”. 2. Enter the key terms your audience uses (e.g., for a gardening website, you would search terms like “home gardening,” “urban farming,” “indoor plants,” “organic vegetables”). 3. Select the more relevant target location from the drop down. How to Prioritize Channels for Your Business 4. SparkToro shows a range of insightful information about the topic including: The social networks and search platforms where people are searching for this term. In our example, X (Twitter) and ChatGPT are clear frontrunners. The top accounts followed, websites visited, and podcasts listened to by your audience. The most popular Reddit threads for the topic. 5. Look at audience share by platform and engagement activity by clicking on the individual reports for Social Networks and Search & AI Tools. For example, the graph below shows social platforms ranked by SparkToro’s Audience Affinity metric. This is a score from 0 (not likely) to 100 (very likely) based on the likelihood that a user visits a given website based on the platform. Here’s the same stats for Search platforms. Matching Content Types to Channel Intent 6. Even without the paid version of SparkToro, these insights show that for the topic “organic vegetables”, the search platforms you should prioritize are: By aligning content type with platform intent, you maximize engagement, reach, and the likelihood that both humans and AI will discover and reference your content. Repurposing Content Across Formats You likely already have valuable content sitting in your drive folders just begging to be reused. Instead of creating more from scratch, revisit your existing blogs, guides, and resources to reach new audiences on new platforms. Repurposing not only maximizes the value of what you’ve already created, it also gives AI search systems more places to find, understand, and surface your expertise. The more formats your content appears in, the more signals AI can pick up, improving your chances of being included in AI-generated results wherever people search. For example, a high-performing blog post, can easily transform into: Take a look at how HubSpot is using this strategy with their AI Trends for Marketers Report: They’ve published a report: Which is then reused on their X account: Used for a YouTube video: And posted on their LinkedIn page: Before we go into how, it’s important to know why you should do this… Why Should You Repurpose Content Across Different Formats? Repurposing content not only maximizes the value of your assets but also increases your visibility in AI SEO. By adapting your message across platforms, you increase the chances of your content being recognized by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Read More Read More The post How We Increased Referral Search Traffic By 148% By Repurposing Old Content [Case Study] first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

12/29/2025

Matt Diggity Nothing in the SEO world is slowing down as we approach the end of the year. In this roundup, you’ll get the latest news about Google’s recent big moves, the advance of AI, and more. It starts with some of the top-trending headlines of the last month. You’ll learn how Black Hat SEOs may be responsible for a big hack on Disney’s website, how Google’s AI mode now launches from search results, and why Google is changing how it enforces ads. Then, you’ll learn about the loss of even more schema types and the breakdown of all the AI and search changes that have come down this year. You’ll also read Google’s reaction to recent court decisions and learn how they plan to protect users from “parasite SEO”. After that, there’s even more news. Fresh reporting also shows that Black Hat SEO is back, and may be a larger threat going into the new year. Did Black Hat SEOs Just Hack Disney’s Website? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMvnEGgSVXQ Ahrefs brings you this look at a surprisingly high-profile attack by black hat SEOs that targeted Disney. Host Sam Oh takes you through how the attack appeared to searchers, how it happened, and what’s likely to come next. The attack targeted Google’s search features to make “Black Hat SEO Packages” appear as a link under results for Disney. For searchers, it seemed that this link was part of Disney’s website, and therefore an official part of the company. Fortunately, Disney is not getting into the backlink business. Using both new and old (90’s old!) techniques, the black hats were able to confuse Google into including their result among the official ones. Sam breaks down how it happened. Sam shows you how the SEO hackers directed tons of referring pages to a gated log-in page on the Disney site so that Google would associate that page with Black Hat topics. However, this wasn’t caused by the referring links alone. The hackers also exploited a technical glitch. The issue was that the page was a 302 redirect rather than a 301. A 302 redirect is intended to inform Google that the page is only temporarily redirected, rather than permanently. This keeps the page indexed, and Google continues to try to assess its purpose. Google appears to have extrapolated the topic of the page from the backlinks alone, but Sam is convinced that this is a technical error rather than a real hack. As of this time, Disney’s results are back to normal. Black hats aren’t the only rising threat Google-dependent sites are facing. A lot of search results space has been lost to search features, and now you may be fighting AI, too. AI Mode Can Launch Directly from Search Results https://x.com/rmstein/status/1995572911093289055 Robby Stein, Product VP at Google Search, brings you this X thread announcing that AI mode can now launch directly from search results. As Robby lets you know, the test is starting now, and the new feature will be available to searchers globally (though only on mobile devices). As part of the announcement, he includes a video that demonstrates how you can now use Google’s search bar as an AI prompt field. All you need to do is perform a prompt-style search, and the AI mode will automatically launch and replace typical results. The AI mode appears in the spot where AI overviews do for most typical searches. Searchers will have the option to expand a full AI answer or transition back to typical search results. If searchers choose to engage with the AI mode, they can continue asking follow-up questions for more refined results. “This brings us closer to our vision for Search,” Stein wrote in the post, “just ask whatever’s on your mind – no matter how long or complex – and find exactly what you need.” If it catches on, this could change everything for SEO. Search engines like Google may soon only show results in specific cases. For now, this is only a trial. Advertisers are also getting some attention from Google this month. For them, it may be good news. We’ve Significantly Improved the Accuracy of Advertiser Account Suspensions https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/improved-accuracy-account-suspensions/ Keerat Sharma, VP of Ads Privacy and Safety at Google, brings you this announcement about major changes to advertiser moderation. The company has acknowledged a problem with legitimate advertisers being suspended for incorrect flags or unintentional violations. In the announcement, Keerjat claims that Google has made significant improvements based on the responses they’ve received from frustrated advertisers. Policies have been clarified, AI detection of violations has been improved, and appeals have been streamlined. Google announced some immediate improvements as a result of the changes. The announcement includes a video with some additional details about how the reductions were achieved. If you have been experiencing issues with enforcement actions on your ads, you may find Google to be a more cooperative partner now. Google is making many more changes in the closing months of the year. As you’ll learn in the following piece, they’ve killed some schema types. Google Just Killed More Schema Types – Here’s What You Should Focus on Instead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9cQ5xgC7q4 Edward Sturm brings you this breakdown of the schemas that are no longer supported. As he reminds you, Google has been removing schemas going back several years now. SEOs once devoted resources to marking up their content properly. Some of that work was for nothing. The announcement was made by John Mueller, who is quoted as saying the move was made to “simplify the search results page.” John claimed that features that weren’t being used often were the targets of this action, and that more schema types may be removed in the future. Google has declined to say what types will be removed later, but the following schema types have now been removed: Watch the complete video to learn more about the schema types that are going away. Edward also gives his opinion on where structured schema goes from here and why Google may have acted. Next, with so much happening, it’s easy to forget some of the changes that should be part of your strategies in the coming year. In the next piece of the month, two professional SEOs cover it from the beginning to the end. Breaking Down AI & Search Changes in 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4fIHPtjIMY Vaenisaa Sandrasagren brings you this interview with Britney Muller, former Senior SEO Scientist at Moz. In it, they cover most of the history of what happened to SEO and AI over the last year. The far-reaching discussion covers how AI search really works now that most models are up and running, why ChatGPT doesn’t really have algorithm updates (or an algorithm), and what SEOs should really be measuring if they want to improve. A significant part of the discussion centers on the issue of research and how it has evolved for all SEOs in a relatively short time. Britney discusses how she got into SEO and how she thinks good research can be done in the LLM era. Britney offers interesting insights from her time at Moz for SEOs who are curious about how that team approached SEO research and experiments. She also covers how she is building AI workflows with Google Sheets, GPT for Sheets, and other tools. The discussion goes on to cover prompt injection and the risks that marketers face when working with an AI browser like Atlas. Britney offers some ideas on how marketers can protect their sites. Check out the complete interview to get a great review of the year. It covers most of the topics you’ll be thinking about in your next year’s strategy, including AI citations, Reddit, new KPIs, and more. Next, you’ll hear more from Google. They’re responding to an investigation into their anti-spam efforts by the EU. Defending Search users from “Parasite SEO” spam https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/defending-search-users-from-parasite-seo-spam/ Pandu Nayak, Chief Scientist of Search at Google, presents a statement on the company’s anti-spam policies. In the piece, he explains some of Google’s motivations for developing these policies and argues that interference will undermine the search experience for users. Google is facing an investigation from the EU over its site reputation abuse policy, in particular, and whether it is being applied consistently. In response, Google disclosed new information about how it developed that policy and what kind of behavior it considers to be a violation. Pandu defined reputation abuse as a situation where a spammer pays a publisher to display content and links on the publisher’s website, exploiting the publisher’s good ranking to trick users into clicking on low-quality content. He claims that it is for these reasons that Google updated its policy in 2024 to ban the use of deceptive measures to improve search ranking. The EU is taking issue with this policy, but Google claims that without it, bad actors would be able to displace sites that don’t use those spammy tactics, and it would degrade search for everyone. Read the complete statement to learn more and see some visual examples of how Google defines Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing News Roundup—December 2025 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

11/19/2025

Matt Diggity November was a big month in digital marketing, and you shouldn’t miss this roundup if you want to be prepared for all the changes likely to arrive early next year. In the top stories, you’ll learn the real impact AI Mode has had on SEO with 10 case studies, find out how Google’s new exec is planning to “reinvent” search, and hear the latest chatter on an unconfirmed algorithm update. Next, top minds in online advertising discuss whether social media is over, what happens when AI is let loose to run an SEO campaign, and what changed with Google’s big Gemini update. In the final pieces for the month, you’ll get new techniques for managing AI agents, find out the most effective times to post video marketing updates, and hear Google’s latest reaction to the lawsuit against their ad business. Let’s jump in!   The Impact Of AI Mode On SEO – Analysis Of 10 Studies https://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-impact-of-ai-mode-on-seo-analysis-of-10-studies/558816/ Kevin Indig presents these recent AI mode studies, providing insight into what the earliest data can already reveal. He dug up everything the data could reveal, including how AI mode impacts clickthrough rates, how quickly it’s being adopted, and whether it’s giving accurate answers. He focused on case studies that could provide the answers advertisers need, including the real relationship between AIO and AI Mode, and how brands can still benefit from AI Mode visibility. The analysis revealed a number of interesting facts for marketers, including: Check out the complete write-up to learn more about the ten studies that were analyzed, and see some discussion on the implications for the future of SEO. You’ll get even more insight into the future in the next piece profiling Google’s Head of Search, Liz Reid.   The Google Exec Reinventing Search in the AI Era | WSJ’s Bold Names https://youtu.be/XMON7wg0rds?si=rM_qWrQiKZVWYquc WSJ’s Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins bring you this interview of Liz Reid (now VP and Head of Search after more than 20 years with Google). You won’t want to miss what she has to say about what she had to say about Google’s AI shift, ad revenue, and more. Liz starts off identifying AI as one of the largest shifts the company has ever experienced, even larger than the shift to mobile. Across several minutes, Liz covers Google’s history with AI and how it “caught up” after being one of the earliest LLM users.  The ad revenue conversation also covered a lot of territory. Liz lays out how AI may interact with ad experiences in the future. She predicts a bright future. As she and the hosts discuss, Google’s ad revenues are up despite controversies and big changes in technology. Check out the entire interview, with more questions and commentary about winners and losers in the AI era, Dead Internet Theory, and more, directly from one of Google’s most influential voices. Of course, Google doesn’t always announce what it’s doing. That’s why the next piece is about the latest unconfirmed update. Were your sites affected?   Unconfirmed Google Algorithm Update? What SEOs Are Seeing Right Now (October 2025) https://youtu.be/f0-NxVznbl4?si=9HixjC65VGgZC-Xf Edward Sturm brings you this look at an unconfirmed update. He follows reports from Barry Schwartz and other SEOs who tracked a disturbance across multiple reporting tools. In this video, Edward investigates the aftermath of the incident and what it tells you about the future.  First, as he reminds you, these tools have recently undergone changes that make it far more difficult for them to detect activity. Google began generating only 10 results at a time instead of 100. Tools are starting to work around this policy, but it still affects all the data collected during the update event last month. Despite these limitations, the tools detect that something is happening, and so do many website owners on sites like WebmasterWorld and the Local Search Forum. Those users are reporting vanishing traffic, inconsistent rankings, and other symptoms. Edward focuses on Lily Ray’s post on this issue, where she suggests these moves may predict the priorities of the next big update. She thinks this was a test run for an algorithm update targeting a lot of content issues like robotic pages and listicles. Watch the complete video for a deeper dive into what was detected and what may be coming. Next, check out some predictions that even greater changes are coming for social media.   Social Media Is Over — This Is the Future of Content | GaryVee w/ Mick Unplugged https://youtu.be/Ehp0Rjl5wf4?si=JBn2Qv9mhdna1TQ1 GaryVee brings you this look at the future of content if social media is truly “dead.” As a guest on the Mick Unplugged podcast, he addressed a lot of concerns that newer content creators have with the environment in which they’re trying to create brands. He explores the fears and questions they have about creating content when nothing feels original anymore.  Throughout a lengthy discussion, Gary identifies the sources that can still create thriving brands. He discusses what it means to generate random, honest content and what it means when he says that followers no longer matter. He has a lot to say about creating content in particular. In the video, you can see him explain how to build content from the perspective of intent and how to make something original instead of copying the culture around you. Watch the complete video for more urgent advice on how to keep your social media strategy current. Next, what happens when you let an AI run your SEO campaign?   I Let an AI Run my SEO Campaign. Here’s what happened… https://youtu.be/xG9Vu9yrQzw?si=zb4au9gOzZEmIypw Can an AI run an SEO campaign? I gave one a chance and, in doing so, increased a client’s revenue by almost 200% (netting him in excess of $300,000). The AI I built runs the entire campaign, and in this video, I tell you how to make one yourself.  First, I go into how I built a bot that handles all the other bots you’ll need to create a comprehensive campaign. I used a simple no-code automation tool that could connect to GPT and generate the functions I need. You’ll learn how to make one, too. Bots still need a guiding strategy, and mine was to build more (quality) content than anyone else in my client’s niche. The top bot was given my target topics and put in charge of hundreds of other bots, which began to generate all the content for me. To make this bot army and commander deliver good content the first time takes integrating several accounts and tools together, but I go through everything in the video. You’ll learn what tools I used, and what prompts produce the best scaled content. Watch the complete video to learn more about how it all resulted in massive new revenues in my client’s space. In other AI news, GEMINI got a big update, and there are some details you shouldn’t miss.   New Google GEMINI Update is INSANE! https://www.youtube.com/live/SA5NqwUSP60?si=4AsvgudXTXMqchL- Julian Goldie brings you this look at GEMINI’s latest update and what’s coming for creators of video content. In this half-hour video, he breaks down some of the most significant changes, including the improved video detail, the arrival of Gemini 2.5 Flash, and more. He and other video creators found the increased detail in 3.1 to be stunning. Julian creates several prompts live during the video and uses them to demonstrate the difference between what’s possible with the older model compared to the new one. The differences in lighting are particularly impressive.  Throughout the video, Julian tests most of the other new features live as well, giving you a look at what they can do in real tests and showing you where to find them in GEMINI’s expanded UI. Near the end of the video, you can see him compare the latest GEMINI outputs with some of the other top video marketing AI tools. With this latest update, GEMINI appears to be a step ahead of the competition in interpreting prompts and delivering video that makes sense. Video generation technology is only getting more impressive, and it isn’t the only AI implementation that’s improving. Next, Cyrus Shephard talks about the early success of agents and other ways AI is changing SEO.   Agents are early, visibility is urgent: Cyrus Shepard on 2025 AI SEO https://youtu.be/ce_4AR5cx8A?si=2SkqR1ezQfmPjU5_ Cyrus Shephard joins Vaenisaa of the AI SEO show to discuss how AI has really changed SEO based on his decades of experience. He speaks at length about the AI trends he feels are most important, and what strategy changes are necessary to thrive in the new environment. One of the notable trends he observes is that commerce clients are generally adapting well to AI features, whereas information-based clients are losing out to AI alternatives. Those clients are constantly losing out to AI overviews and rivals that can build out comparable content in days.  Cyrus calls on his own personal experience watching many SEO-based businesses fail or close in recent years. He names travel Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing News Roundup —November 2025 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

10/27/2025

Matt Diggity Welcome back to my monthly roundup of the biggest top stories in digital marketing. This month, you’ll learn what happened (and went wrong) with the August 2025 Spam Update, how boring videos can still attract 10k+ views, and what data says about YouTube’s domination of AI Search. After that, you’ll get a deep dive into how AI really weighs your links, the biggest consumer trends affecting social media marketing next year, and a rundown of the most important changes in the massive YouTube update for Creators. In the final stories of the month, you’ll get advice on whether you should use AI Max for Google Ads based on an expert’s latest tests, and some answers about the chaos that happened with Google’s tools in September. Google August 2025 Spam Update Finished Rolling Out – It Ended In A Mess https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ12EEKdmrg&t=28s Barry Schwartz brings you this look into the August 2025 spam update, why it took so long, and what Google said and did not say. As he covers in the video, this update started in August and ran for about 26 days, ending on September 22. Google didn’t provide any clues about what was happening behind the scenes, except to say it targeted spam (not link spam, as Barry clarifies, because those updates get announced separately).    Barry reminds us that most spam updates take only 24 hours. It wasn’t clear what was happening this entire time, but Barry’s volatility tracking tools only showed big spikes at a few scattered points in the three weeks the update was running. It was difficult to track this update at all because it caused serious issues with many tools. Google appeared to be experimenting with injecting fake traffic or queries to see how the algorithm responded. Google hasn’t provided more information so far, but Barry has some ideas you can try if you think your site has been affected. Next, learn how one video marketer reliably pulls in tens of thousands of views on content without any sizzle. How He Gets 40K VIEWS Per Day with ‘Boring’ Videos (Step by Step) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEVx2zZ1jpQ Sean Cannell brings you this interview with a niche channel creator banking up to $65k per video about spreadsheets. Jon Ampora is the guest, and he runs Excel training courses that have grown into a six-figure business.    The two discuss how Jon developed his basic tutorial content and made it better than what competitors were offering by incorporating storytelling and other practices. He describes how he was able to understand his audience so he could publish content that resonated with them. Jon describes in detail the most valuable video he ever created, which only involved him talking over a deck. He discusses how this success was possible even with limited tools. Check out the complete video to learn all the steps Jon followed to make his channel successful. The ranging conversation covers how Jon pulled his first 1000 subscribers, how he plans short vs. long content, and how to package videos the right way. Next, YouTube is becoming a major player in AI search, but its advantage is greater than many people realize. YouTube dominates AI search with 200x citation advantage https://searchengineland.com/youtube-ai-search-citations-data-462830 Danny Goodwin brings you this look at who AI platforms most prefer to cite when delivering video content links. The answer is YouTube, almost all of the time. In the latest numbers, the platform was cited 200x more than any other video platform on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI products. The research suggested that YouTube’s influence made it the only video platform that matters to AI. The results were surprising because even non-Google LLMs showed a significant preference for YouTube. That’s not the only good news for YouTube. The research also showed that YouTube was the top domain overall for all kinds of citations. It showed up for all types of queries, including tutorials, pricing, deal hunting, product demos, and reviews. The implications of this data seem clear for all marketers. Video content is highly visible in AI search, and YouTube is overwhelmingly the source for video content citations. That means you need YouTube content to compete for any term where videos may be recommended. Next, another team takes a deep dive into how AI weighs links. How AI Really Weighs Your Links (Analysis Of 35,000 Datapoints https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-ai-really-weighs-your-links-analysis-of-35000-datapoints/557253/ Kevin Indig brings you this look at how AI decides whether your links are valuable. As he points out, links matter for visibility in AI-based search, but how they work inside LLMs is a mystery. Kevin dove in to find out if having backlinks still made a difference. He analyzed 1,000 domains and their AI mentions against the core backlink metrics of linkbuilding. Along with a Semrush team, he examined mentions across several major LLMs, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AIO, and Perplexity. He came up with four takeaways: Kevin gives you a lot more detail on all of these throughout the piece. You’ll learn how authority supports visibility, how quality compares to raw volume in real-world tests, and why nofollow links appear more valuable to AI than traditional SEO. Check out the complete video for all the latest numbers on linkbuilding for AI. Next, some broader consumer trends may have huge consequences for social media marketing and the ad world beyond. 5 Consumer Trends That Will Define 2026: What’s Next in Social Media & More https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9iDW7Zgv1Q Gary Vee brings you this look at what he considers the top 5 consumer trends that are coming for social media.    He covers some interesting territory including how he thinks 2026 will be defined by… Check out the complete video for trends and more in-depth information about these social media-centered trends. If you are developing video content specifically, you need to know what’s changing with one of YouTube’s new updates for creators. YouTube Launches MASSIVE Updates For ALL CREATORS! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sulz7siwss The VidIQ team takes you through all of the big features, tools, and policies that are now arriving for YouTube creators. First, they cover some of the changes to monetization.    You’ll have a number of new ways to monetize your content, including: Beyond monetization options, a new A/B testing feature is coming for your video titles. You can now add up to 3 alternative titles for your videos, and decide whether the title, the thumbnail, or both will show users all variations. Some new AI features are also on the way. A new auto-tagging feature for brand mentions is one of the first that will arrive. When it’s live, AI will track all your mentions of brands by timestamp and keep a detailed list for you. AI auto-translation and lip dubbing have also been announced. In addition to the new AI feature, YouTube is releasing a security tool called “Likeness Detection.” When it’s live, it will notify you whenever your likeness appears in a video (possibly a generated one). Check out the complete video for all the latest news, including unreleased AI features that may allow you to generate AI videos, turn speeches into songs, and do more on command. Should You Use AI Max for Google Ads? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yafwRFBPU4Y Aaron Young takes a look at the recently released tool for Google Ads and whether you should use it. Right off the bat, Aaron can’t give you a yes or no. He feels the tool is not for every business and that some may be better off not using it for now.    If you missed the roundup where this tool was announced, AI Max is an automated management tool for your Google ad campaigns. You fill in a few fields with data, and Google builds an optimized campaign for you. Aaron reminds us that this tool came down with two main promises: Aaron built several AI Max campaigns to test the new tool, but he did not find the results impressive when he toggled on the tool; but he didn’t interfere with it. This is how Google presented it working in some conferences, but it has a lot to learn about optimizing for niche audiences. He reminds you not to throw out your work refining your message or testing your titles. AI Max campaigns still need to be driven by expertise that only you can provide the tool. This tool has had a stable month, but that’s not true for all of them. In the final entry in our roundup, find out why many of Google’s tools were in a chaotic state last month. Google Kills 100-Result Pages: SEO Tools in Chaos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb9d9pYYmrw Edward Sturm gives you a look at what’s changed for Google and 3rd-Party tools after a wave of major changes. The biggest change, as Ahrefs announced here, is that SERPs are now naturally capped at 10 results. That fundamentally changes how many existing tools read and interpret ranking data.    Ahrefs has warned its users that any rankings that go beyond the top 10 will be inconsistent for the time being. Google appears Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing News Roundup —October 2025 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

9/29/2025

Matt Diggity Google’s AI Overviews now decide which businesses show up in the most valuable search real estate, pulling in data from multiple sources and reshaping how customers discover brands. This case study shows how our agency positioned a client to dominate AI Overviews for competitive keywords and why every business needs an AI search strategy now, before their competitors lock in the advantage. Our client’s monthly AI referral traffic grew by 370% And is appearing for 155 keywords within AI overviews in the U.K. In this case study, you’ll learn how to: To start, here’s some context about the site and why their site needed an SEO boost. The Challenge The client is a home services company based in the U.S.A. At first, the client thought their strong local rankings were enough, but that confidence quickly turned to frustration. Competitors were consistently stealing the spotlight in Google’s AI Overviews, leaving them feeling invisible. They were losing ground, losing patience, and starting to lose faith in their digital strategy. That’s when they turned to my SEO team at The Search Initiative, knowing they needed a new approach before slipping further behind. Their Google Business Profile contained gaps and inconsistencies, limiting trust signals and lacked presence on third-party directories and review platforms, meaning AI models had little external validation to cite. To expand their visibility in AI search, they needed a content strategy that targeted informational keywords, which are the type of queries Google’s AI often draws on to provide context-rich answers. Before outlining what we did, it’s important to understand why appearing in Google’s AI Overviews is important for local businesses. Why AI Overviews Matter for Local Businesses Google’s AI Overviews are becoming a prominent way for local search results to be presented. According to a study by LocalFalcon, as of May 2025, 40% of local search queries now display AIOs, often above the map pack. This means they can directly influence which businesses customers discover first. If AIOs are surfacing your competitors at the very top of search results, they’re getting the clicks and potentially the customers you could be winning. Being present in AI Overviews requires more than just ranking in the traditional local pack. Google’s official guidance for AI features also explicitly tells site owners to keep their Google Business Profile (GBP) information up to date as part of best practices for appearing in AI Overviews and AI Search Mode. This is a strong signal that GBP data is actively consumed by Google’s AI systems and determines which businesses are mentioned in the AI-generated answers. Consistency across other key directories also matters, as AI search tools often pull from multiple trusted sources. How to Get Your Local Business Featured in AI Overviews Let’s look at three different ways you can help get your business featured in Google’s AI Overviews. Optimize Your Google Business Profile Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is the cornerstone of local AI search optimization. It’s a place Google uses to pull up to date information about your business, so that it can be used in AI Overviews. Below is a screenshot from Dishoom in Covent Garden’s Google Business Profile. You can see that this information about its most popular times for a Tuesday, is consistent and pulled directly from the Google Business Profile. If your GBP is incomplete, inconsistent, or inactive, you’re missing out on appearing in AI-generated answers from AI models. What is a Google Business Profile? A Google Business Profile (previously Google My Business) is a free tool from Google that lets you manage how your business appears in Search and Google Maps. It’s your digital shopfront, showing your: Here’s what a Google Business Profile looks like: Google uses GBP data as a primary structured data source. This means your profile directly influences whether your business: Creating Your Google Business Profile Claim & Verify Your Profile Go to Google Business Profile Manager Search for your business. If it exists, claim it; if not, click “Add your business to Google”. Follow the prompts to enter your business details. Choose your verification method: postcard, phone, or email. Complete the Fields 1. Business Name – Enter your business name exactly as it appears to customers in the real world, without any extra keywords or taglines 2. Business Type – Select all of the appropriate business types that apply to your business. 3. Business Category – Choose the most accurate category for your business. This helps Google match you to relevant searches. 4. Service Areas – List the locations where you provide services or deliver products. This is optional. 5. Region – Select the region that your business is based in. 6. Contact Information – Include a main phone number, and if possible, a backup line or mobile. Make sure these numbers are consistent across your website and other listings.You also have the option to add a link to your official website. 7. Services / Products – depending on your selections for Business Type, you’ll be asked to add information about your services/products. Select all that apply, along with any Custom services. 8. Opening Hours / Business Hours – Clearly list your standard operating hours, and keep them updated. Use the “Special hours” feature for bank holidays, seasonal changes, or one-off closures. 9. Business Description – Use up to 750 characters to explain what your business does, who you serve, and what makes you unique. Keep the most important information in the first 250 characters, as that’s what’s often displayed. This is also an opportunity to incorporate some relevant keywords to help further the models’ contextual interpretation of your business. Good Example: “At GreenLeaf Lawn Care, we provide eco-friendly lawn maintenance, seasonal fertilisation, and landscape design services for homes and businesses across Westbrook.” A rich description makes it more likely that AI can confidently match your business to relevant user queries. Bad Example: “We cut grass.” A vague, generic description like “We cut grass” gives no signals about your location, specialisms, or target audience, meaning AI may overlook you in favour of competitors with clearer, more complete profiles. 10. Business Location – If customers visit you in person, enter your full address and position the map pin exactly where your business is located. You can also choose to hide your address if you operate from home. 11. Social Profiles – Link to your social media profiles (Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.). This makes it easier for users to find, follow and/or contact you and provide AI Overviews with more verified brand signals. When completing your Google Business Profile, keep your NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number) consistent across every online mention of your business. That means the exact same spelling, formatting, and details should appear on your website, social media accounts, review sites, and local business directories. Even tiny differences, like writing “High Street” in one place and “High St.” in another, can create uncertainty for these systems. This isn’t just a local SEO issue. Remember, AI Overviews and other AI models pull from multiple trusted data sources to verify facts. If your business details don’t match everywhere, the AI may: Upload High-Quality Images and Videos Adding high-quality visuals to your Google Business Profile isn’t just about making it look good, it’s a critical trust and engagement signal for both customers and search systems. For example, Google’s AI overview uses the same photo… … in its AI-generated answer as the Cover Photo of Dishoom’s GBP. Profiles with rich, professional-looking media tend to attract more clicks, more calls, and more in-person visits. They also provide AI Overviews with visual context to verify your business category, offerings, and location. Include friendly, professional shots of your team to humanise your brand. This helps build trust among your prospective customers and also shows Google that there are real people behind your company. For example, a landscaping company could post photos of a finished garden alongside action shots of staff planting flowers. Customer Reviews Customer reviews are more than just social proof, they’re a strong trust signal for both human visitors and AI-driven search. The more high-quality, authentic reviews you have, the more confidently LLMs and Google can recommend your business over competitors. For example, here’s an AI Overview for best hotels in west London for families. Here’s a breakdown of the number of reviews each of the hotels mentioned has: The Residence Inn Kensington – 1,849 reviews The Athenaeum hotel – 1,330 reviews The Goring – 1,434 reviews Scrolling down to the organic search results, we found this: Despite ranking organically, Google’s isn’t confident enough to recommend this in its AI answer, as it only has 125 reviews. Positive, keyword-rich reviews also help AI understand what your business is known for, which services you offer, and in which locations you operate. After a positive interaction (e.g., completed project, successful appointment, happy customer service call), politely ask for feedback. It’ll give you a link (and QR code) that you can share with your customers. Important: Never offer discounts, gifts, or incentives in exchange Read More Read More The post +3.7x Monthly AI Traffic [AI SEO Case Study] first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

9/22/2025

Matt Diggity Welcome back to another roundup of the top news in digital marketing. In addition to some big stories, this month’s roundup features insightful work from some of the speakers headlining CMSEO 2025. Check out their work here and their presentations at the upcoming conference! First, you’ll learn what’s possible by scaling AI. You’ll also learn how to adapt when Google tries to kill your traffic, and what an insider says about using Google Sheets for more effective SEO. There’s plenty more after that. You’ll learn how one site owner built (and hosted) four websites with one AI prompt, the latest techniques to master on-page SEO, and how to force more engagement with YouTube audiences. In the final set of unmissable stories, you’ll learn how to combine the power of AI and social media, and find out if your current plan is ready for AI search. Let’s jump in! AI Strategy & Scale in SEO: A Real-World Success Story with Tom Winter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM2Mm95LGa4 In this video hosted by Anatolii Ulitovskyi, CMSEO speaker Tom Winters helps you understand what it takes to scale AI strategies. As he mentions, he works to create AI solutions for content research, and he uses this video to reveal some of the most important things he’s learned.  The topic at hand is the real-life example of a furniture brand called Kouboo that embraced AISEO. In a focused 7-day test, Kouboo achieved an impressive 53% visibility in ChatGPT and Perplexity results for high-intent prompts, ranking #1 among all competing brands. Anatolii and Tom examine how this rapid rise in AI-driven visibility happened and what role programs like ChatGPT are likely to play as these strategies become more widespread. Tom applies his experience to answer many of the biggest AI scale questions, including what these strategies look like, how brands can optimize their existing content assets for the changes, and what kind of visibility matters most in a zero-click world. Furthermore, he explains how AI-driven strategies can maintain professionalism and credibility through practices like quality gates, better freelancer hiring, and more. Check out the packed discussion to learn more. Next, find out how to secure your traffic when Google is the threat. Google Will Kill Your Traffic – Here’s How You Adapt | Kevin Indig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQXvbeYF5go CMSEO speaker Tom Soulo hosts this episode of the Ahrefs Podcast and speaks with Kevin Indig about the real impact of AI on search behavior, website traffic, and SEO strategy. Ahead of the discussion, Kevin analyzed over 5 billion search visits and found that while people perform searches more often, they spend less time per session, and often don’t click anything. Together, Tom and Kevin break down what’s happening and what you need to know.  First, they summarize what’s changed. Kevin predicts that 2024 may be the peak year for traffic overall and that it will decline for a long time due to AI overviews and other reasons that Google has no motivation to return clicks. They both seem to agree that a low-click future is coming. AI overviews as a specific obstacle to clicks are a big part of the discussion. Tom and Kevin discuss how these overviews have changed, and where they are going as the number of terms that display AIOs has grown with every update. They cover the troubling fact that AIOs are now creeping into results for commercial queries, and what the existing research says about the pace of changes. That’s just the start of this ranging discussion. Keep watching to see them cover the latest ways to show up in AI overviews, the importance of external validation, whether SEO is dead, and more. Next, you’ll get an insider’s tips for maximizing SEO with Google Sheets.   An Insider Guide to Google Sheets for SEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvo4Y_IJoa0 Greg Gifford is an upcoming speaker at CMSEO, and if you want to know why his talk shouldn’t be missed, watch this talk he gave at the BrightonSEO Conference earlier this year, which was just released to the public. In it, he addresses SEOs who don’t have experience with spreadsheets and reveals what’s possible when you use sheets as a complete tool.  According to Greg, the real power of Sheets lies in understanding advanced formulas and Apps Scripts. Greg teaches you how to move beyond simple VLOOKUPs so you can unlock the power of Google Sheets. Beginners will learn the value of paste formatting, color coding for team collaboration, grouping for organization, and more. He shows you how you can rapidly increase the speed of your work by using features like data slicers, cell range names, and conditional statements. If any of those terms are new to you, this presentation may be just the guide you need to start adding sheet power to your SEO. Check out the full video to learn more. You’ll get real-world examples of various use cases and explanations of the formulas and App Scripts used. Next, you can learn how AI prompts can be used to build a website, or even several of them at no cost.   I Built 4 Websites with ONE AI Prompt (All Hosted for $0) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwoAGlPg95g Upcoming CMSEO speaker James Oliver shares this fun look at how he built and hosted several websites for free using a range of AI tools. He built the sites using Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable, and Vode Dev and then hosted them for free using Lovable’s in-built hosting, Versel, and Cloudflare.  First, he shows you the sites he created using his process. They include a throwback 80s site, an app that automates complaint letters, and a test homepage. While he admits that most sites took an hour or more to create, they were all built in AI and hosted for free. He shows you how. He walks you through the steps he uses to develop the prompts. For each step, he shows you what tools he uses to automate the information he needs and provides you with the parts you need to finish your prompt. In addition to instructions, he provides much helpful commentary on what tools offer the best experience and the shortest path to building spontaneous sites like these. He offers some insights on what tools may be the best, depending on the LLMs you can access. Check out the complete video to find out how you can build and host websites for free using LLMs. Next, you’ll learn what steps make the biggest difference with on-page SEO in 2025.   Mastering On-Page SEO: Kyle Roof Shares The Secrets You’re Missing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWEx2lA6QOM Coming CMSEO speaker Kyle Roof appears as a guest on this episode of the Sterling Sky show. The hosts sit down with Kyle to cover the new basics of on-page SEO and the principles that should be at the foundation of your on-page strategy. They cover many terms you need to be caught up with to diagnose on-page issues correctly, including siloing, URL structures, crawl budgets, and entity optimization. They also review which older strategies, like Guest Posting, may not be as effective as they once were.  As an extra bonus, Kyle and the host also conduct a full live content audit so that you can see the issues that get their attention and how they respond to them using the most recent methods. The problems they cover here could be an excellent guide for your own site. Later, they challenge some old perceptions about on-page optimization by reviewing some surprising SEO test results from recent experiments. For example, one recent test by Kyle showed him that schema is still not having an effect, but purchased links are still (temporarily). Check out the complete video to learn everything you need to know about on-page optimization. Next, you’ll get video marketing advice you can use to drive more engagement from your YouTube videos.   Forcing Engagement, CTR for YouTube to Help Your Rankings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWuFI6peejY CMSEO speaker Craig Campbell shares his tricks for getting engagement on YouTube videos. He explains the engagement methods that pay off for him and how you can start making them pay off for your own marketing channels. He identifies his engagement as mainly coming from one of three sources: his email list, his YT subscriber list, and his wider social media presence. He recommends an email list to attract early viewers and suggests that you use YouTube’s features to push notifications to subscribers.  The advice becomes much more comprehensive. He explains some of the ways he builds engagement using tools you may not have found yet. He also walks you through each screen of the tools he uses so you can see how he gets the output needed for the next steps. For some advanced engagement-driving tasks, Craig recommends that you hire freelancers to help you reach the people that you need to. He describes how these strategies work, and even provides templates for the ads you’ll need to do the same thing. Check out the complete video for some great advice on getting more Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing News Roundup —September 2025 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

8/25/2025

Matt Diggity This month was huge for marketing, with big SEO, AI, and ad changes. In the top stories of the month, you’ll learn about the completion of the last core update, stats on the behavior of AI assistants, and what it may mean that Amazon has stopped spending on Google ads. After that, you’ll learn why AI search traffic is ignoring mobile strategies and see some of the results of some of my own fun experiments with AI SEO. You’ll also discover why brands dominate AI mode but seem to struggle in AI Overviews. At the end, you’ll learn why Google CTRs are crashing and how to avoid penalties with programmatic SEO. Let’s jump in! Google June 2025 Core Update Completed – Did It Destroy Your Site? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNh8_Yl6cPY Barry Schwartz brings you the news that the most recent core update (which ran from July 2nd to July 17th) is now over. As he notes, it was one of the biggest core updates in a long while. In this video, he lays out what he saw from the update and speculates on whether another one is likely this year.  So, what are site owners saying? Barry says many of them are reporting some of the most significant boosts they’ve seen in a while. He takes you through some of the posts made by site owners, including some who reported the return of the results to the front page. Several site owners reported seeing an upward trend for sites initially hit by the Sept 2023 through August 2024 Update. These pages were finally starting to recover with the latest one. Several site owners reported complete recoveries after being hit. While recovery is the story for many sites, Barry is skeptical that most sites can even come back after all of the changes SERPs have undergone. AI Overviews and other news SERP features have captured a lot of traffic that isn’t going back to organic results. Barry doesn’t believe it’s likely that there will be another core update this year. He notes that the pace of updates seems to have slowed as Google focuses more on letting the results cook for a bit before making big changes. The next story may have some good information for you if you’re looking to compete under these new conditions. It contains some hard data on the results that AI assistants prefer.   New Study: AI Assistants Prefer to Cite “Fresher” Content https://ahrefs.com/blog/do-ai-assistants-prefer-to-cite-fresh-content/ Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan bring you this deep look into what kind of content AI assistants prefer to deliver. They analyzed over 17 million citations that were recorded across seven different AI platforms. The team was looking for certain information, including: The results were conclusive. The research showed that AI assistants prefer citing fresher content. The team found that the average age of URLs cited by AI assistants is 1064 days, compared to 1432 days for URLs in organic SERPs. Of the tested AI assistants, ChatGPT was the most likely to cite newer pages, and both Perplexity and ChatGPT preferred to order their references from newest to oldest (giving the newer links a preferred place). The researchers noted that Google SERPs and AI Overviews are the most likely to prefer older content. However, on average, older content is only 16 days older. Check out the complete article for a much deeper look. It includes an analysis of all the major assistants and their behavior. At the end, you’ll also find some helpful advice and caveats. Next, Amazon is making considerable changes to its ad spending.   Amazon Stops Spending on Google Shopping Ads – Report https://seekingalpha.com/news/4474402-amazon-stops-spending-on-google-shopping-ads—report Ahmed Farhath brings you this report from multiple research analytics firms that track Google’s ad “Auction Insights” tool. This tool provides data on the top 10 advertisers and their share of impressions. Amazon typically appears on this list of the top advertisers, but it stopped appearing in late July. Advertising analysts are taking this as a sign that the company is no longer bidding to appear for Google Shopping inventory. Several ad specialists were quoted, confirming the work of the analytics firms. This is not the first time that Amazon has dropped out of these ads. As the author notes, they last did so in the early days of the pandemic in 2020. This time, Amazon is not announcing any reason for cancelling the ad spend. This may create an opening for some new opportunities for you if you advertise in related shopping niches. Next, you’ll learn why mobile strategy may not be the best targeting AI search traffic.   The AI Desktop/Mobile Divide: 90% Of AI Search Traffic Ignores Mobile Strategy https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-desktop-mobile-divide-ai-search-traffic-ignores-mobile-strategy/549122/ Lemuel Park brings you this look at why marketers need to rethink device strategy. He presents some crucial stats from BrightEdge on how AI users are changing the focus for strategies that rely on AI traffic. Mobile-first strategies have been popular for several years, but the rise of AI may be making mobile a lower priority. The surprising reason is that over 90% of AI-powered search referrals originate from desktop devices. As he shows you, ChatGPT leads the desktop concentration, with 94% of referral traffic coming from desktop devices, leaving just 6% for mobile users. It’s not just ChatGPT, though. Perplexity, Bing, and Gemini also have desktop traffic that exceeds 90%. Lemuel has several theories for why this may be happening. First, he points out that AIs work differently when delivering results for desktop and mobile users. For example, LLMs like ChatGPT direct desktop users to other sites when a link is clicked. However, ChatGPT keeps users in the app when the same link is clicked on mobile devices, along with previews and other features. Lemuel also suspects that desktop and mobile AI users have different user intents. He suggests mobile users prefer to look for quick answers, while desktop users are more likely to be engaged in research or other tasks that need attention and focus. He recommends building device-specific AI strategies to serve desktop and mobile users more effectively. He also predicts that mobile will soon be a far more important source of AI traffic. Next, I tried several of the oddest AI-SEO techniques I could find. Find out whether any of them are worth mixing into your own strategies.   I Tried 3 Weird AI-SEO Techniques. Trash or Smash?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EItVZ5W5FUc I bring you this look at some of my most recent AI-SEO tests and how they worked. The written guide is also available here. For this set of tests, I focused on some of the weirdest techniques I’d heard about, but the results were staggering. The tests ended up being worth a 1400%+ increase in AI traffic and 150+ newly-ranking AI Overview keywords. Even organic search traffic doubled!  I cover how these methods can be used to get AI to stop ignoring your content, how to get AI to cite you, and what format makes ChatGPT love your content. First, I cover log analysis. This highly tedious task has recently been simplified greatly with AI assistants. I fully explain these log files and what they can tell you, including which pages AI loves, which content is more important, and which pages probably need to be fixed. I’ve already used this technique to massively increase traffic to one of my clients’ pages. The video contains the prompts I used to search the log files and generate the insights I needed. Next, I experimented with upgrading the schema on lagging pages. AI often needs help to understand the intent of content, and it won’t serve content to users that it can’t understand. In addition to some examples of schema I provide, I also recommend using: Adding these to my test content more than tripled the referrals I received from AI sources. Check out my full video to go deeper into the changes I made and the kind of results that were possible. Next up, there’s more AI research, and some big implications for brands.   Brands dominate Google AI Mode, struggle in AI Overviews: Study https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-mode-overviews-brands-study-459754 Danny Goodwin brings you this look at how brands perform in Google’s two major AI search modes: AI Overviews and full AI Mode search. First, he presents the results of the test. Danny argues that this matters a lot because search is no longer just about ratings but presence. AI Mode gives brands a great platform, but AI Overviews appear far trickier for brands to penetrate. This may be due to a difference in how these modes operate. Danny points out that AI mode is meant to be used as a broad, stable discovery engine. However, AI Overviews are more meant to be quick, selective calculators. Check out the complete story to learn more about what these differences may mean for your brand strategy. Next, Google click-through rates (CTRs) are dropping.   Google CTRs Are Crashing: Position #1 CTR Down 32% Post AI Overview Rollout https://growthsrc.com/google-organic-ctr-study/ Swapnil Pate brings you this study covering the long crash Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing News Roundup—August 2025 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

7/28/2025

Matt Diggity You shouldn’t miss anything that changed for SEO, AI, LLMs, and more last month. First, you’ll learn about the most recent Google update, the steps Cloudflare is taking to fight scraping, and the results of a major AI-SEO test. After that, you’ll catch up on why Google has de-indexed millions of pages, and get some perspectives from major SEOs on the future of LLMs, the state of link building, and how Google’s search share is holding up against AI. At the end, you’ll find the headlines on Google’s direction. There are fresh numbers on the performance of overviews, new features for Google Ads, and fresh moves from the company to avoid hefty fines in the EU. These changes may affect you. Google June 2025 Core Update Just Dropped Google June 2025 Core Update Just Dropped Barry Schwartz brings you this look at Google’s latest core update and the changes that arrived with it. This core update was one of the largest in recent history and included many changes that will affect publishers and other online marketers.  “For decades, the Internet has operated on a simple exchange: search engines index content and direct users back to original websites, generating traffic and ad revenue for websites of all sizes. This cycle rewards creators that produce quality content with money and a following, while helping users discover new and relevant information. That model is now broken. AI crawlers collect content like text, articles, and images to generate answers, without sending visitors to the original source – depriving content creators of revenue, and the satisfaction of knowing someone is viewing their content. If the incentive to create original, quality content disappears, society ends up losing, and the future of the Internet is at risk.” First, Barry walks you through the details of this announcement. Google has claimed that the update focuses on content and is designed to surface relevant and satisfying content more effectively. Barry points out that the announcement was very similar in wording to the March 2025 announcement, with one notable exception. Google claimed the March update was meant to surface more relevant content from creators. However, that word no longer appears in the June announcement, suggesting Google may be strategizing to bypass creators and provide “satisfying” results from their own sources. Barry predicts that many sites will see disastrous ranking declines from the update. As he points out with graphs, the number of searchers diverted to AI overviews is only going up with each update, and Google has not signaled any changes in priority. As of July 17th, the core update is confirmed to be over. Data is still being gathered about the effects of this update, and should be ready for the next update. Next, you’ll learn how one hoster is helping publishers fight back against AI.   Cloudflare will block AI web crawlers by default, and introduces new Pay Per Crawl scheme that means AI companies will have to fork out for the privilege to scrape https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/cloudflare-will-block-ai-web-crawlers… Jess Kinghorn brings you this look at how the Cloudflare company is giving site owners the power to fight back against aggressive scraping by AI bots looking for free content. Cloudflare is a domain registrar that offers a range of other network services. It has many website publishers as clients and has been offering those clients more ways to protect themselves from having their content stolen in recent updates. Last year, Cloudflare started by giving customers a one-click solution to block AI bots from their websites. That tool showed users lists of bots that could be blocked, and helped site owners find cases where their content was being republished. Now, Cloudflare has taken it a step further by automatically blocking AI crawlers. In an announcement published on July 1st, the company claims that all users can now decide how they want AI crawlers to interact with their sites. The statement uses surprisingly strong language to describe the intentions of this policy. In it, Cloudflare accuses AI crawlers of destroying the healthy cooperation of publishers and search engines. “For decades, the Internet has operated on a simple exchange: search engines index content and direct users back to original websites, generating traffic and ad revenue for websites of all sizes. This cycle rewards creators that produce quality content with money and a following, while helping users discover new and relevant information.  That model is now broken. AI crawlers collect content like text, articles, and images to generate answers, without sending visitors to the original source – depriving content creators of revenue, and the satisfaction of knowing someone is viewing their content. If the incentive to create original, quality content disappears, society ends up losing, and the future of the Internet is at risk.” Cloudflare calls this new policy a “permission-based model” and has already received many encouraging statements from other major publishers, including ADWEEK, The Associated Press, The Atlantic, and others, which can be found at the end of the statement. This may be just the beginning of publishers fighting back. Either way, we all need to be prepared for a new world. I started by developing my own AI-SEO that I’ve now tested across multiple sites.   I did AI-SEO for ChatGPT and Google AI. Here’s what happened… I did AI-SEO for ChatGPT and Google AI. Here’s what happened… I spent the last 6 months trying to determine how websites get featured in Google’s AI overviews, ChatGPT, and other AI-generated search results. Now, I think I’ve cracked the code, as proven by AI mentions that have jumped by as much as 2,000%+ for my clients! In this video, I cover why you want to optimize for AI, how you can identify all the AI opportunities that are available to you, how to optimize them, and how you can monitor how well your strategies are working.  I’ll show you what I did through the example of one client. This client was responsible for running a website for a high-quality brand. Despite a good reputation, this brand wasn’t showing up for any AI results. As I show you through several examples, this isn’t even an uncommon problem. Many high-quality brands aren’t mentioned in AI answers and are still struggling to find out why. After much testing, I realized that AIs are most likely to link to sites from which they source information, so I started looking for ways to build content that AIs want to use in their answers. The recently launched Ahrefs tool Brand Radar can be very handy for determining which AI answers to target. Just enter your brand name and the names of some competitors to find out how often you’re mentioned, and what keywords are most associated with your brand. With that information in hand, I started developing tactics to get mentioned by AI. I refined 12 of them that were successful, including— Check out the complete video to learn more about how AI learns to trust your brand and the tactics that truly work to get mentioned. Next, you’ll learn what it means that millions of results are now getting de-indexed by Google.   Google De-Indexing Millions of Pages: What’s Happening? Google De-Indexing Millions of Pages: What’s Happening? Edward Sturm brings you this report on Google’s quiet purge of indexed pages. This issue first became known when an SEO in the French market documented the loss of hundreds of thousands of pages for that language last June. Other SEOs soon spotted the same trends in their regions. This may have been going on for a while. First, Edward provides you with a timeline of SEO chatter on the issue, discovering that the issue was causing complaints as early as May. SEOs involved in those cases reported seeing active websites with good content lose page after page to deindexing.  Edward has some theories for why this may be happening. After reviewing a lot of community chatter, it seems arguable that this mass de-indexing is a result of changes in how Google measures topical authority. These lost pages may reflect areas where Google no longer feels you are an authority on that topic. If this is the case, it’s important not to simply reindex all the pages. This may be a waste of time in the first place, but even if you intend to reindex the pages, it’s probably not worth it unless you can prove your topical authority through links and better content. Edward tracked some good news from some site owners. Even when they lost less topically relevant pages, the remaining pages saw improved authority. This suggests that excellent content may benefit overall from the fact that Google is taking this action. Now that you have some fresh insights on how Google assesses content, you’ll want to get the latest on links. The next piece summarizes everything you need to know about the last year.   The State of Link Building | 2025 https://editorial.link/link-building-statistics/ The writers and researchers Pawel Tatarek, Hanna Lebedeva, and Adelina Karpenkova bring you Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing News Roundup—July 2025 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

7/14/2025

Matt Diggity For years, traditional SEO focused on optimizing for the 10 blue links in Google’s SERPs, but that can’t be your only focus now. AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Gemini are now delivering direct answers often without users ever clicking a search result. This case study breaks down how my team at The Search Initiative adapted our already successful SEO strategy with an AI search focus by using log file analysis to understand AI bot behaviour, implementing structured data to boost visibility in AI-generated results and optimizing content for multimodal (text, images, videos etc) support. The results? Our client’s monthly AI referral traffic grew by 1,400% … And is appearing for 164 keywords within AI overviews in the U.S. In this case study, you’ll learn how to: To start, here’s some context about the site and why their site desperately needed an AI-SEO boost. If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. The Challenge The client specializes in providing commercial plant supplies to businesses across the United States, you might recognize them from this case study. We’d already delivered strong results in traditional organic search (and we’ve kept that momentum going), but with AI search rapidly reshaping how users find answers, it was clear we couldn’t afford to stand still. If we didn’t act fast, the client risked being left behind while competitors claimed top visibility in AI-generated results. First, we used AI to analyze their server log files and uncover how platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity were actually crawling the site to reveal gaps, missed pages, and errors. Then, we implemented structured data (like FAQ and Article schema) to improve how AI interpreted the content, boosting their chances of showing up in AI-generated results. Finally, we guided AI systems toward their most valuable content by supporting textual content with multimodal formats like images, videos, and tables to improve how it’s parsed, summarized, and shown in AI-generated results. Here’s how we did it. AI-Powered Log File Analysis In the age of AI-first search experiences, understanding how your website is crawled has never been more important. One of the most powerful, underused data sources that can help with this, is looking at your server’s log files. They reveal how search engines and AI crawlers actually experience your site. This includes what they see, what they miss, and what’s slowing them down. I’ll show you how to extract, analyze, and visualize log file data using GPT-4o to get valuable insights. What are Log Files? Log files are plain-text records generated by your web server that track every single request made to your site by a real user interacting with your site or a search engine bot discovering your pages. Each entry typically includes details like: Here’s what one typically looks like: These files act like a website diary, capturing both user visits and bot activity, and are essential for understanding how the server handles requests. Why are Log Files Important for AI SEO? Analyzing these log files can help you understand exactly how AI systems and search engine bots interact with your site, making it a valuable tool for improving your site’s visibility in both traditional and AI-powered search. By reviewing raw server logs, you can see how frequently different bots (like Googlebot, Bingbot, and AI crawlers) visit your site, which pages they prioritize, and whether they’re running into technical barriers that could impact indexing or AI understanding. For example, as you’ll read soon below, we discovered that a portion of our client’s pages weren’t being visited by AI models due to a lack of internal links. Since making a simple fix by adding more internal links to and from these pages, the number of hits from AI has started to vastly increase. For AI SEO, log file analysis can help you: How to Access Your Log Files You can access your website’s log files directly from your server. Many hosting providers (like Hostinger or SiteGround) offer a built-in file manager where these logs are stored. To download them: Log in to your hosting dashboard or control panel Open the section labeled “File Manager,” “Files,” or “File Management” Navigate to the folder that contains your log files—often named logs, access_logs, or similar Download the relevant log files to your computer for analysis Read on to find out what to do once you’ve downloaded your log file. Using AI to Gain Log Files Insights & Visualization Once you have your log file, you can use it to gain a bunch of insights about your site’s SEO. You’ll need GPT-4o or ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise in order to do this. 1. Upload your log file by clicking on the “+” sign, with the following prompt, making sure GPT-4o is enabled. I have attached raw access log files from my website’s server. Please analyze the logs focusing on both Googlebot and AI crawlers such as GPTBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended (Gemini). Identify all hits from user agents containing any of the following keywords: “google”, “gptbot”, “claudebot”, “perplexitybot”, or “google-extended”. Once you’ve analyzed this, I will ask you to perform a series of tasks. Here’s the result from GPT: 2. Now enter this prompt: Create a chart that shows how these bots have crawled my site over time. The chart shows how frequently the bots have crawled your site over time. 3. Now enter this prompt: Break down the data by HTTP status code (e.g. 200, 301, 404, 410). This will be useful for a later prompt, where we’ll ask GPT to gather any insights where pages are being crawled by bots, but for example, cannot be found. 4. Now enter this prompt: Provide a list of the 10 pages that receive the fewest hits from AI bots and Google and create a visual diagram (e.g. bar chart) of these pages. This will allow you to identify any important pages on your website that aren’t getting crawled by AI and Google. How to Fix (example): Our client has a section on the site with pages showing different use cases for their products i.e. /use-case/scenario/. These pages weren’t being crawled as much as we’d liked. We checked on Ahrefs, and found that they had only 1 internal link pointing to them, from the homepage. To do this, we went to Site Explorer > Internal links > Most linked pages > Filter by HTTP 200 Status code (so we only see live pages) > Filter URL to contain “use-cases”. To fix this, we added internal links from relevant pages on the site, including pages that were getting more hits with AI (see next step). For example, the client had blog posts about how to style their products for various locations, so we added internal links to and from these pages. The pages also had thin content, there was little textual information about how customers could actually use their products in the various settings. We added unique content detailing the various use cases and how the products could actually be styled within the locations. 5. Now enter this prompt: Provide a list of the 10 pages that receive the most hits from AI bots and Google and create a visual diagram (e.g. bar chart) of these pages. These top-crawled pages are often seen as authoritative by bots. They’re your “content hubs”. Here’s what you can do to make the most of these pages that are crawled often: 6. Now enter this prompt: Highlight any crawl errors from these bots (status codes 4xx and 5xx), and flag anything that looks unusual or worth fixing. This prompt helps identify whether any pages of value could be fixed. In this example, GPT identified several blog posts that returned a 404 error (not found) but could still offer value to the end user (and bots). Pages that return 404 errors can negatively impact user experience, leading to higher bounce rates. Bots will avoid these pages if not fixed, because the more broken links your site has, the harder it will be for them to access your site’s content. Use Google Search Console’s Page indexing report to identify 404 errors. And Ahrefs Broken Link checker to find broken links on your website. Here are the fixes: Doing this makes sure that even if some pages don’t actually exist, you’re still providing value to users, and guiding AI models to other relevant content on your site. 7. The final prompt is: I have attached raw access log files from my website’s server. • Bots missing key commercial pages • Pages being crawled unexpectedly often • Sudden spikes in crawl activity Here are some tips on how to fix these: Again, this prompt helps identify any potential areas on your website that need looking to due to pages being crawled too much or certain pages not showing up at all. By tapping into your log files and pairing them with AI-powered analysis, you gain a clear, actionable view of how search Read More Read More The post +1,400% Monthly AI Traffic [Advanced AI SEO Case Study] first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

6/20/2025

Matt Diggity In the top stories for the month, you’ll learn about Google’s new AI Mode for search (and whether it’s the SEO apocalypse some fear), the big announcements made at the I/O 2025 Keynote, and the results of a comprehensive test of AI Overview’s brand visibility factors. After that, you’ll learn how to use the new AI Max tool released for Google Ads, get the latest updates on the zero-click trend, and find out the results of the landmark antitrust case against Google. There are even more stories after that. The roundup closes with some early guides for the new tools and features you’ll learn about, and announcements Google has made about the future that you shouldn’t ignore. Google AI Mode Announcement Analysis Google AI Mode Announcement Analysis – The Hottest in SEO News with SEOFOMO TL;DR Aleyda Solis brings you her analysis of the new AI mode announcement from Google.  The announcement, which you can find here, shows off the capabilities of the new mode coming for Google Searches. AI mode has already rolled out across the entire US and may appear for any searches you make in that region. As the announcement details, this mode has several new features, including a Deep Search capability to gather information from hundreds of sources. It also launches with a live help feature and some agentic abilities. Aleyda walks you through this entire announcement with SEO Gianluca Fiorelli, covering all the features mentioned in the announcement and the fallout that has happened since. First, she covers the controversial use of “norefferrer” links in the mode’s sources. This was a discovery that angered many SEOs because it prevented them from tracking referrer data. Many saw their sites listed in sources, but they weren’t being rewarded for it, or able to track it due to how links were used for the mode’s source section. This turned out to be an error. Google says it should be fixed soon. Check out her complete video to learn more about what’s happened, and to see her list of recommended guides to help you catch up for a search environment that includes AI mode and other LLMs. Next, you’ll learn much more about Google’s plans for the future. Google I/O 2025 Keynote in 32 Minutes Google I/O 2025 keynote in 32 minutes The Verge brings you this abbreviated keynote from Google’s I/O conference. The original keynote was hours long, but this video edits out the fluff so you can get all the major announcements in just over 30 minutes.  The video has also been bookmarked by announcement so that you can skip to the most important ones. There are too many to list here, but you can look forward to getting the latest details about all of the following projects: It should come as no surprise that most of these announcements involve AI. These systems will only play a larger role in Google’s operations. In the next piece, you’ll learn how to optimize for one of the biggest ones—Google’s AI overview. An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors (75K Brands Studied) https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-brand-correlation/ Louise Linehan and Xibeijia Guan present this report on how your brand can achieve visibility on AI overviews. Their research examined over 75,000 brands to determine what factors corresponded with higher visibility in AIO. They uncovered a number of interesting correlations over the test, including that: Based on the first correlation and other findings, the team found that your brand’s web presence is “everything.” AI visibility is about how often your brand shows up across the entire web. Other SEOs, including Kevin Indig, have reinforced this finding. Brands that are in the top 25% for web mentions get mentioned by AI 10x more than brands that are in the next quartile (the next top 25). On the other hand, the team found that AI Overview didn’t seem to care about your link metrics. It also didn’t care about your branded search traffic. AIO didn’t care how much money you were throwing at paid search. More than 70% of searches had no CPC data. However, AIO also barely appears for monetized terms and is mainly restricted to informational terms. Louise closes with some tips on how you can track your own brand visibility in search and across the web. Coming up next, Google has launched another big AI product, this time for ads. Google Launches AI Max Introducing AI Max …. [Google Ads Major Update] Aaron Young brings you this look at the launch of AI MAX. Does this feature spell the doom of keyword targeting? Is it just a new paint job on old features? Aaron thinks the truth is somewhere in the middle.  Google’s own announcement calls the feature— “A comprehensive suite of targeting and creative enhancements that brings the best of Google AI to help you take your Search campaigns to the next level”. In real terms, AI MAX includes several features to generate your targeting and ads completely. It leverages AI to handle tasks like correcting headlines, writing ads, and developing visual assets. Aaron starts by explaining how AI Max operates. As you may have heard, you will not launch campaigns using keywords. Instead, you’ll provide the URL for the advertising website, and Google will do the targeting for you. As Aaron points out, this isn’t a new feature. It has existed as something called Dynamic Search Ads, which first appeared as an optional targeting type in 2011. Of course, the latest tools are far more advanced than those. That doesn’t mean you cannot provide tighter targeting. You can add refinements around negative keywords and other filters to generate more accurate campaigns. Aaron takes you through all the other features that interact with your campaigns and analyzes who could benefit from being an early adopter. Check out his complete video to hear what he had to say. For now, there’s a new report about zero-click searches and why the CEO of Cloudflare says it’s destroying the online business model. CNBC Video Marketing Updates Cloudflare CEO on the rise of ‘zero-click searches’: It’ll be much harder to be a content creator CNBC brings you this interview with Matthew Prince of Cloudflare and his predictions of doom for the internet’s current profit ecosystem.  As he points out, 10 years ago, Google sent a ratio of one visitor for every two scrapes of your website content. That rose to one visitor every six scrapes a few years ago. That rose again to 250 scrapes per visitor only a few months ago. Now, Google scrapes website content an average of 1500 times for every visitor it sends. Matthew says the reason for this is that these users now mostly stay on the search page thanks to Google’s own design. The searchers may still enjoy your writing or expertise, but they aren’t doing it on your site. He also argues that this will likely be catastrophic for all businesses relying on ads, subscriptions, or other traffic-related income. He predicts that much of the ad revenue will go to AI engines, and there could be other consequences. He also recommends that content creators charge AI engines to access their original content, including by giving exclusivity deals. Check out the complete interview to see all his predictions for the future. For now, there’s news on perhaps Google’s most significant court case. Google, Justice Department Wrap Up Landmark Antitrust Case Google, Justice Department wrap up landmark antitrust case CBS News brings you the close of the DOJ’s case against Google over violating antitrust laws. As the hosts point out, this case started during Biden’s presidency, and has continued under the Trump administration.  The DOJ and a coalition of states who participated in the case are asking Google to share its search data and end its multibillion-dollar payments to Apple and other smartphone makers to be the default search engine on new devices. Now that the case is being wrapped up with Google losing some claims, there is some talk about what’s possible in Google’s future. DOJ sources have gone as far as to recommend that the Chrome browser be sold, though it’s not clear that the judge is considering that. Google is aksing for a deal that gives them more opportunity for forward recovery. Meanwhile, Google did succeed against antitrust claims in a Mexican court case. There, the court cleared the tech giant from any potential fines, after a multi-year investigation determined it did not engage in monopolistic practices in the country. Check out the complete story for the latest news on the case. For now, there’s some more news about AIO. It may have a major spam problem. Google AI Overviews Have a Major Spam Problem https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-ai-overviews-have-major-spam-problem-lily-ray-go74f/ Lily Ray brings you her personal investigation into the spam that has been appearing for some AIO results. Yes, these results are still supposed to be experimental, but she argues that implementation is outpacing the ability to deal with long-standing spam problems. As one example, Lily points out Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing News Roundup—June 2025 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

5/30/2025

Matt Diggity Stay ready for the big changes coming from all sides for SEO, AI, ads, and more. We’ve got the latest news for you in one place. First, you’ll learn about a major ruling against Google that found it to have an illegal ad tech monopoly. Then, you’ll see some of the latest research on how AI overviews affect your clicks, and find out what the new launch of AI mode for all searchers means. After that, you’ll catch up on the most interesting arguments from the SEO community this month. Is Google stealing your traffic? Is the new ad double-serving policy what it seems? Are those changes really worth A/B testing? The pros have opinions! Then, there’s even more, because this was a huge month for most major platforms. YouTube has launched a slew of new updates, and there are new tools to explore in Google AdWords, too. Let’s start with the one that may someday change the face of search ads forever. U.S. Judge Finds Google Holds Illegal Online Ad Tech Monopolies U.S. judge finds Google holds illegal online ad tech monopolies CNBC news gives you this report on a shocking judgment against Google. According to a recent judge’s ruling, Google illegally dominates two markets for advertising technology.  The DOJ accused Google of maintaining this monopoly by eliminating competitors through acquisitions, locking customers into using its products, and controlling how transactions occurred in the online ad market. In the complete ruling, found here, monopolies were found to have been acquired and maintained for the markets of publisher ad servers and ad exchanges. Google was also accused of having a monopoly over advertiser ad networks, but beat that claim in court. This ruling follows another court decision that found Google had an illegal monopoly on search. What this means for Google’s ad services customers is not immediately apparent. The company claims they are appealing the ruling, so it’s possible that the real outcome may not be decided for a long time. If the ruling does stand, the entire landscape of search and ads could be changed. These two judgments may force the company to sell large parts of its ad business, spinning off competitors who will have completely different incentives when dealing with ad buyers. What it may need to give up will be discussed at later hearings. That’s all we know for now. Next, there’s some very fresh research on the impact AI overviews are having on clicks (it’s bad). AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5% https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks/ Ahrefs brings you this comprehensive data study into Google’s AI overviews and clicks. As they remind you at the start, Google has claimed that AI overviews increase clicks. This new research seems to suggest the exact opposite. The study looked at 300,000 keywords from the Ahrefs Keywords Explorer database. The test was split between 150,000 keywords with an AI Overview present and 150,000 keywords with informational intent and no AI Overview present. The team focused on informational keywords because almost 100% of keywords that trigger AI overviews are currently informational. The test’s results were not good for publishing sites. When the Ahrefs team calculated the difference between the forecasted and actual CTR for AI Overview keywords, the results suggested that the presence of AI Overviews reduces the click-through rate for position 1 by ~34.5%. This follows chatter from across the internet that popular sites have seen clicks reduced by 20-40% with the rollout of AI overviews. The research doesn’t end on a high note. The writers guess that these diminished numbers will probably represent the highest CTRs that will ever be rather than a low point. The next piece certainly makes the case that we’ll be seeing more AI from Google rather than less. Google Launches AI Mode to All U.S. Searchers With New Features https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-mode-us-searchers-455654 Google has officially launched its AI Mode. While this mode was originally only available to those who opted in from Search Labs, this new mode is available to all US searchers automatically. This new mode appears just under the search bar and grants users a new way to search through AI prompts. Its launch came with the announcement of several updates to the new mode, including Deep Search, data visualization, and AI shopping. Deep Search is one of the most interesting features of this new AI mode. This feature provides long responses to queries formatted like reports with expert citations. Google claims you will be able to use it to generate complex reports on any subject in minutes. Another prominent feature of the mode is an AI agent. During demonstrations, Google revealed how this feature could be used to find affordable tickets to sports games and perform other tasks like a personal assistant. Check out the complete article to learn more about the features coming with this new mode, including personal context searches that consider your past preferences and Gemini 2.5. For now, you’re ready to hear why one SEO thinks Google is stealing your search traffic. Google is Stealing Your Traffic (New SEO Plan) Google is Stealing Your Traffic (New SEO Plan) Nathan Gotch brings you this response to Ahrefs’s data reporting, which you read about just above. He takes the next step by speculating how SEOs can respond to these click losses and start doing better with what he calls “omnipresent SEO.” He describes this optimization strategy as one that focuses on your complete web presence (even outside of Google properties) rather than just search engines. He shows examples of how even successful organic page results are easily drowned out by features.  Nathan has many ideas about what might work now, starting with flipping the script on how you approach visitors with the marketing funnel. As opposed to the old strategy of targeting unaware buyers with encyclopedias of content, he recommends targeting the most aware buyers first. The problem with the traditional funnel, he argues, is that it requires you to focus time and effort on keywords that don’t even convert for you. You are also likely to lose out massively to LLMs, which have already become the first resource for basic research. He recommends a strategy of “topic domination” that involves owned (e.g., your website), earned (e.g., PR), paid (e.g., ads), and rented (e.g., Social media profiles) assets combined. He argues that all these assets should be centered around delivering people to the assets you truly own. Check out the complete video to learn how he thinks you can adapt your strategies to the end of traditional SEO. He covers a lot of territory, including what kind of content to build for the most aware customers, and how to make it. SEO isn’t the only area where the pros say the old rules don’t apply. Google Ads’ new double-serving policy has many PPC influencers calling “bullsh*t.” Google Ads Double Serving Policy Google Ads Double Serving Policy – Why This Rule Is BS (Don’t Believe It) ?? The Guaranteed PPC channel brings you this look at one of Google’s ad rule changes, and why ad veteran Corey Ziemen thinks the rule is just BS now.  Corey’s argument? Google does not care if you run more than one ad for your company on the same search page, even if they claim they do. He claims his firm has been putting this assumption into practice for years by letting clients run their internal PPC campaigns alongside the campaigns they hired him for, with both ads appearing together. He claims Google has not interfered with this practice in 10+ years, and the reason, he argues, is simple: Google doesn’t have any incentive to crack down because it wants the most ad revenue possible. Even if you are scared about a crackdown on this practice, he says there are now apparent loopholes in the rules that allow you to double serve legitimately. If you want to run multiple ads without violating Google’s loosely enforced rules, you can create as many LLCs as needed to run the ads you want. Google doesn’t even have a rule against running campaigns. He describes several strategies his firm has used to stay within the rules while running multiple ads for his clients. Selling products at different price points with a slight change in packaging is another easy strategy for placing ads next to one another. Check out his complete insights on the new rule and learn some new tricks by checking out the full video. Next, you’ll get a fresh perspective on data, specifically when you don’t need it. No, I Will Not A/B Test That https://sparktoro.com/blog/no-i-will-not-a-b-test-that/ Amanda Natividad brings you this fresh perspective on A/B testing. Her experience increasingly tells her that it is a waste of time, and she lays out her arguments for why in this piece. First, she says it is a practice that only has value at a scale most website owners won’t approach. She argues that you won’t get statistically significant data unless you have a site with hundreds of thousands of visitors. Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing News Roundup—May 2025 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

5/21/2025

Matt Diggity AI SEO is no longer optional, it’s the new frontline of search. In 2025, the way people discover information online has fundamentally shifted. With the rise of AI-generated search results, like Google’s AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, and ChatGPT, businesses need to rethink how they show up online. This case study reveals how my agency, The Search Initiative, leveraged AI optimization tactics to generate consistent AI traffic growth from AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini and keyword visibility within AI overviews, and why every business should be thinking about AI SEO today. Our client’s monthly AI referral traffic grew by 2,300%. … And is appearing for 90 keywords within AI overviews, compared to 0, before we started working together. In this case study, you’ll learn how to: If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. To start, here’s some context about the site and why their site needed an SEO boost. The Challenge The client is a manufacturer of industrial products and provider of software solutions. Although the client was ranking well in traditional organic search, they weren’t showing up much in AI Overviews. Their competitors, some with inferior product offerings, were being summarized, cited, and surfaced for key informational queries. This was frustrating as the client knew they had the expertise and authority, but AI-driven platforms weren’t reflecting it. They came to us to help turn that around, and capture the missed opportunities for traffic, credibility, and brand awareness in emerging AI-driven spaces. The objective was to get them appearing in AI Overviews and grow traffic from other AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini. We needed to first analyze the AI search landscape within the client’s industry and identify what keywords competitors were appearing within AI search for. Then, we executed an SEO strategy that involved improving informational content for natural language queries, strengthened trust signals across their site, structured content for better AI readability and managed their AI brand reputation. Here’s how we did it. Understanding AI Overviews If you want to stay competitive, read on to learn how AI Overviews work, where your brand currently stands, and how to position your content to appear within these results. What are Google AI Overviews? AI Overviews (previously “Search Generative Experience”) are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of Google search results, often before traditional organic listings and sometimes even above ads. The new search feature, which officially rolled out in May 2024, is Google’s way of providing quick answers to certain queries by consolidating information from a range of sources. Here’s what an AI Overviews looks like: And this is what it looks like when expanded: The search feature is made up of two main components: The Answer – written by Generative AI (Gemini) The Links – to sites that corroborate the information from the Answer AI Overviews (AIO) are designed to give users quick answers to their questions—just like featured snippets and instant answers—so they don’t need to sift through multiple websites How Does Google AI Overviews Work? I like to think of AI Overviews as letting Google do the Googling for you. But how does it work? The AI-generated answers displayed in the search results are created using advanced generative AI technology powered by Gemini, Google’s Large Language Model (LLM). A LLM is a type of AI model trained on vast amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like language. The main concept is illustrated by the graphic below: Process the Query– When you enter a search query, Google’s AI interprets the search intent behind the words. This is similar to how tools like ChatGPT work, where the AI understands natural language and generates a relevant, human-like response based on what you’re asking. Select Relevant Documents – Once the intent is understood, Google’s algorithm searches the web and its index for a small, high-quality set of relevant documents.These are web pages, articles, or resources that provide trustworthy information related to your query.This set of documents is carefully chosen based on factors like relevance, credibility, and freshness. Generate a Draft Response – The AI generates a draft response using its training on vast amounts of general knowledge and web data. However, this response isn’t final—it’s more like an initial summary that still needs verification. Fact-Check Against Sources – The draft response is compared with the content of the selected documents from step 2.If any part of the initial summary conflicts with the information in these sources, the AI will revise its output so that the final overview reflects accurate and up-to-date information. These verified sources are typically linked in the overview, allowing users to see where the information came from. Display the Overview – Once the summary is complete and verified, it’s displayed at the top of the search results page as an AI Overview. It aims to give you a quick, reliable answer to your question, along with links to explore more if needed. How to Analyze AI Overviews in Your Industry AI Overviews is now prominent across global search results pages. In keeping with the developments of AI SEO, Ahrefs recently launched a new tool called Brand Radar. It lets you find out what people and AI are saying about your brand, a topic or niche. From the drop down, select your target location After you’ve selected the location, the tool will display the number of AI Overviews that it’s found within the location.         For the U.S.A. that’s currently over 19.7M. Fun Tip: If you leave the rest of the fields blank, and hit Explore, you’ll see a graph detailing the rollout of AI Overviews within your target location. Enter your brand name, product or service and hit enter. You can add multiple searches which the tool will compare. For example, you can add your brand name along with your competitors to see who’s showing up on AI Overviews the most. On the next drop down, select “AI Overview” so that you’ll see results where your chosen terms appear within AI Overviews for your target location. After hitting “Explore”, you’ll see a graph showing the number of mentions of your brand and your competitors within AI Overviews. In this case, you can see that Nike is ahead of the pack with over 10,000 mentions within AI Overviews compared to 2.9k and 1.5k mentions for Adidas and Puma respectively. Scrolling further down reveals all of the keywords where these brands are mentioned within AI Overviews along with the links that Google uses as a source.         These results are quite broad, so let’s narrow them down. Navigate back to the Market scope section at the top of the page and this time, select “Filter dataset”. Make sure “AI Overviews” is selected once more and add supplementary keywords or phrases that you’re interested in seeing AI Overviews for. For example, I’ve gone with “sneakers” and “best”, because I want to see whether my brand (Nike) gets mentioned at all.         This has narrowed down the results significantly to 45.         And you can now see which keywords have AI Overviews mentioning the brands. You can also check which ones don’t include your brand by changing the filters to only show AI Overviews that do not contain your brand name, but do contain your competitors’ names. In this case, there are 5 keywords where Nike isn’t mentioned, but Puma and/or Adidas are. This tool is great for investigating and identifying keywords and areas within your niche where you’re likely missing out on being mentioned within AI Overviews for relevant search terms. How to Monitor Your Current AI Overviews Visibility In addition to analyzing the AI Overviews for your industry, Ahrefs’ Site Overview now also allows you to monitor which keywords that you’re ranking for, and has an AI Overviews SERP feature. Enter your domain into Site Explorer and navigate to the Organic Keywords report. At the top, open the remaining filters and select “SERP Features”. From the drop down, select “AI Overviews” and click Apply. This will show you every keyword that you’re ranking for that triggers an AI Overview SERP feature. To find the keywords your site appears within the AI Overview, go back to the filter and select “Where target ranks”.         You can see that Nike.com ranks within AI Overviews for 13,695 keywords. And for the ones you’re missing out on, go back to the filter and select “Where target doesn’t rank”. How to Track AI Traffic in GA4 AI tools have emerged as new traffic sources that are important to track and monitor. Read on to find out how you can do this in Google Analytics. Navigate to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition. This is where you’ll find your general traffic stats. Click “Add comparison” at the top of the page. Set the filter to show only Referral & affiliate traffic and click “Apply”. Add a filter at the top of the page. Under Dimension search “Session Source/Medium”. Under Match Type, select “matches regex”. Copy and paste this regular Read More Read More The post [AI SEO Case Study]: 2,300% Monthly AI Traffic Increase By Cracking AI SEO first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

4/28/2025

Matt Diggity A major core update is just the start of the SEO, AI, and Google Ads news that came down this month. SEO is changing in big ways, and you’ll need to know how AI and other players are involved. Catch up in this month’s update. In the top three stories, you’ll get confirmation that the March update is finished, find out what the latest updates mean for content publishers, and get some insight into why Google may now be discouraging small forums. That’s just the beginning. You’ll also get the latest news about Google’s new Ad rules, the outcome of their big advertising lawsuit, and how AI is a growing presence in site traffic. Then, you’ll see some shocking proof that SEO isn’t dead, and learn about Google’s big ad deal with Roblox! Let’s jump in. Google March 2025 Core Update Finished Rolling Out Google March 2025 Core Update Finished Rolling Out – Here’s What We Saw Barry Schwartz brings you this quick report on the big core update that started on March 13th. Google updated its status dashboard to announce that the update had ended on March 27th. First, you’ll get some context for the update. As Barry points out, Google released some guidance about the update, claiming that it is not a penalty and that the changes have been designed to promote good content. They also informed us that the update would affect all regions globally.  Barry claims that this update did not seem to affect as many sites as previous updates. He compares this to updates like the March 2024 and December 2024 updates that caused turbulence for significantly more site owners. However, Barry admits that you were likely hit very hard (if this update hit you at all). He noted that multiple website owners had experienced devastating changes. The next piece may offer some more insight on that. The biggest changes seemed to come around March 18th when volatility peaked. However, volatility was difficult to track overall because this update included a change that temporarily broke many tracking tools. Check out the complete video to learn more about how to respond to a core update, or whether your site will ever recover if you’ve been hit by an update. For now, you’re ready for a deeper dive into these changes that looks at what they’ll mean for small content site owners. What Google’s Latest Update Really Means for Small Publishers What Google’s Latest Update Really Means for Small Publishers Jared Bauman and Thomas Smith of Niche Pursuits bring you their analysis of the latest update and its implications for publishers.  They gather charts and newly released information posted by top SEOs like Glenn Gabe. You’ll then be taken through a series of these charts to learn what internal site data is saying. Thomas notes that sites with a growing reputation for hosting AI content seemed to have been among the hardest hit. They review the data of core update winners and losers and find a pattern of programmatic SEO on the sites that received the most negative attention from the update. That research found that these content sites were among the biggest losers. Thomas also discusses his own experience with the effects of the recent update on the news niche. He found that news aggregators seem to be targeted in some way. Among the cases he’s looked into, drops in “Discover” traffic were notable after the update. Sites that provided more thorough content pieces seemed to benefit from the update. Both hosts note the evidence that forums will no longer be rewarded like they were in the past. Many smaller, niche forums saw declines during the update, while huge forum sites like Reddit seemed to do well. Check out the complete video for nearly an hour of discussion that covers the update’s impact, new search innovations, Google AI product launches, and more. For now, the next top piece of the month dives even deeper into what is happening to niche forums due to the update, starting with a Parasite SEO story. New Findings From the Google March Core Algorithm Update New Findings From the Google March Core Algorithm Update Edward Sturm takes a close look at what is happening to independent forums with the latest updates. Forums have been a focus of SEOs and link-building strategies as Google has appeared to favor user-created content in recent updates.  As Edward points out, forum strategies are becoming riskier with recent updates. He shares a story about a website with a highly lucrative parasite SEO asset destroyed at the whim of a single Reddit mod. The company in this story was generating around $300k on the referral power of a single Reddit post that had also become the top result for major search terms. The owner of this company and post was projecting income up to 1M for the next year. Instead, a mod deleted the post without explanation (mods exercise significant power over subreddits, and there is usually no way to appeal a removal). The company’s main traffic source evaporated, and they don’t know how to engineer a post of the same power. Edward uses this story to examine how many independent forums are losing Google’s support after a couple of years of strong support. He links to an example provided by Lily Ray on X. Lily found a dog breed forum that had been running since 1997. In 2023, Google suddenly made the tiny forum hundreds of times more visible than it had been in previous decades. Now, Google seems to have taken almost all that growth back in this update. Edward found many other examples of surging forums that had been devastated, including some that he had featured as successes of past episodes. It may be that the age of building forums for SEO may be coming to an end. Google appears to be coming down on small forums across the board. For now, there’s news on the Google Ad front. A big policy change means ads can now be “double-served.” Google To Allow Double-Serving Ads In Different Ad Locations On Same Page https://www.seroundtable.com/google-to-allow-double-serving-ads-39150.html Barry Schwartz brings you this Google Ads news about the Unfair Advantage Policy. Months ago, you may have heard that Google was experimenting with double-serving ads. Now that it has passed out of the experimentation phase, the policy has settled like this “…our prohibition on showing more than one ad at a time for your business, app, or site applies only to a single ad location.” Google has justified this decision by saying that they have different ad locations that work for different auctions, so this won’t create an unfair advantage for ad buyers. As Barry points out, Google has changed the rules for ads several times recently. It first changed the definition of top ads, and then started mixing ads and organic results together. Check out this complete news story for more information and links to discussions around the web. Next, you’ll learn how some previous actions by Google’s ad division led to a massive settlement for ad buyers. Google to Pay $100 Million to Settle 14-Year-Old Advertising Lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/news/638630/google-100-million-settlement-advertising-class-action-lawsuit Emma Roth brings you this look into a $100 million settlement that Google is paying to end a class-action suit by advertisers. This lawsuit has been in the works for almost 15 years. When it was first filed in 2011, Advertisers claimed that Google Adwords (the old name for the ad service) was breaking California’s Unfair Competition law by misleading them about where the ads would be shown. They also claimed Google was not giving them the promised “smart pricing” discounts. Despite paying a massive sum to resolve the case, Google’s spokesperson reported satisfaction with the agreement. In his quoted words, “This case was about ad product features we changed over a decade ago, and we’re pleased it’s resolved.” This case caught the attention of SEOs and advertisers because it generated almost 1 million pages of discovery. Researchers are still looking through all the released records for clues on internal Google processes. Read the complete story to learn more about the history of the case and how the plaintiffs became eligible for the payout. Next, you’ll learn more about AI traffic’s growing role and the consequences. AI Makes Up 0.1% of Traffic, but Clicks Aren’t Everything https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-traffic-research/ Louise Linehan and Xibeijia Guan bring you some fresh data covering AI as a referral source. As you might expect, it’s growing. However, it has a steep hill to climb with competitors like Reddit (which out-refers the current top 3 AIs). The authors studied the traffic of more than 30,000 websites to determine how much of it was made up of AI. So far, AI accounts for 0.1% of all referral traffic. The top referral sources so far start with Search Engines. This channel delivers around 44% of all referrals, followed very closely by Direct Referrals, at 42%. Social, paid, and email channels also currently deliver more referrals. The researchers broke Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing News Roundup—April 2025 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

3/24/2025

Matt Diggity The Impact Of AI Overviews On SEO [Analysis Of 19 Studies] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/impact-of-ai-overviews-on-seo/539982/ Kevin Indig brings you his personal analysis of 19 other deep appraisals of AI overviews and compares the outcomes. He synthesizes what the experts found into key points you can apply to your SEO. He organized the insights he compiled according to how they answered the following questions: He takes you through how the collection of studies answers these questions. For every claim, you’ll see a list of what each relevant study found so that you can compare them against one another. Kevin also dives deep into the details. For example, when answering the first question, he shows you the industry distribution of AIOs and covers the implications of the data from every study put together. For other questions, you’ll learn whether long or short-term queries are more likely to trigger AIOs when they appear in featured snippets and how often they appear next to PPC ads (not often). Check out the complete guide for dozens more insights about AIO compiled from nearly all available studies. Next, you’ll find out what it feels like to go from a Google “success” story to feeling targeted for destruction. The Google Update That Destroyed 4 Of Their Websites The Google Update That Destroyed 4 Of Their Websites Recent updates have destroyed many small business sites. The Ahrefs team shares one couple’s story of what it’s like to lose four successful sites without any explanation from the Google team. This video covers the McBrides, a couple that has managed a series of craft websites in the DIY and woodworking niches. The entire business started as just one blog that was monetized through ads and SEO.  At its height in 2023, the site was collecting more than 300,000 in ad revenue. It followed a strategy of providing content that directly answered current trends and developed a strong following for woodworking instructions. With a highly effective formula for meeting demand, the couple expanded to several additional websites covering children’s toys, home painting, and other topics. This was when Google pulled the rug out from under them. The Helpful Content Update destroyed 80% of the traffic from the three new websites overnight, and the couple claims that this was matched by an equivalent drop in revenue. This shocked the couple because they had once been proudly featured on the Google website as a “success story.” The couple was featured as recently as May 2024, a feature for which Google sent a photographer to take a photo. The next day after the visit, the new February Update landed, and the original craft site lost 75% of its traffic. This traffic loss affected the couple’s entire income stream from the site. Several ad partners withdrew, and many pages with well-selling items stopped getting traffic or generating sales. The couple was shocked to receive an invitation to a creator’s summit. There, they were told they had done nothing wrong and that the effect was unintended. Otherwise, they were told that the traffic was not returning due to the addition of many new SERP features. Check out the full video for the whole story, along with some in-depth advice from Ahrefs on what went wrong and how to restore lost traffic. Next, you’ll discover what one team learned from examining tens of millions of ChatGPT records. Investigating ChatGPT Search: Insights from 80 Million Clickstream Records https://www.semrush.com/blog/chatgpt-search-insights/ Brenna Kelly and Luke Harsel of SEMRUSH bring you this analysis of tens of millions of lines of global clickstream data from ChatGPT. Clickstream activity refers to the digital trail of a user’s journey through digital platforms. This data covers what they did, how much time they spent, and more. All of this data was analyzed to give the SEMRUSH team serious insights into what prompts people were most likely to use or where they were more likely to go after an interaction with ChatGPT. From this, they were able to look at whether users chose to keep ChatGPT on or off or how long ChatGPT prompts typically were. The team found that ChatGPT users behave differently when SearchGPT is on or off. When it was on, prompts tended to be short and direct, like those used in Google. However, when the search was off, prompts were far more detailed—stretching to 2000 words in some cases. The SEMRUSH team also found that ChatGPT users tended to have different intent than search engine users. As the researchers put it, search engines like Google typically serve four types of intent, typically organized as Navigational, Informational, Commercial, and Transactional. Only about 30% of all queries in the ChatGPT data set fit into these categories. The other 70% represented a new kind of querying, which may represent new problem-solving approaches by AI users. It’s not surprising that users are speaking to AI differently. ChatGPT encourages users to address the engine in a new way, giving suggestion queries on the main page that include: The Semrush team also found that some sites benefited more than others from these changes. ChatGPT has started becoming a major driver of traffic toward academic publishing and research sites. It’s already driving more traffic to some technical documents and universities than the entire Bing search engine. Check out the complete study to learn more about ChatGPT demographics and what they may mean for your online operations. We’re back on the topic of AI overviews, and it turns out they may seriously threaten the viability of some web pages. Google AI Overviews significantly harms webpages: Study https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-harms-webpages-study-452605 Danny Goodwin brings you this study into the effects of AI Overviews across a variety of queries. He found that sites excluded from AIO can suffer significantly in clicks. Being mentioned in AIO can result in significant traffic increases regardless of organic position. If your site is included in AIO for top-ranked queries, you can expect around 3.2x more clicks than any results on your page that were not included. Danny found that, for some queries, AIOs are likely to divert traffic from the top 1 and 2 positions but deliver increased traffic to the results appearing in positions 3-10. The results seem to suggest that organic dominance is less reliable as a traffic driver than it has ever been. AIOs, like most other SERP features before them, appear to discourage interaction with results, even the “best” ones, according to Google’s own judgement. For some website owners, this has been a frustration. For others, it has become an emergency. Many content-providing sites have had their traffic battered by AIOs, and at least one of these sites is convinced that they have a case in court. The education company Chegg is suing Google over a number of complaints, including several involving AIO. In the next story for the month, you’ll learn about this case, and what it could mean for the future of SEO. Chegg Sues Google Over Ai-Generated Information Blurbs in Searches Chegg sues Google over AI-generated information blurbs in searches CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin brings you this story about how Chegg is blazing a trail as one of the first companies to ever sue over a search feature. Near the end of February, Chegg filed an antitrust lawsuit claiming AIO had hurt traffic and revenue while acting as a monopoly.  Chegg claims this is a legal matter because Google is using that monopoly power to coerce companies into providing site content (produced at great cost, according to Chegg) to be scanned by AIO for free. The company accuses Google of scraping its site for the content it provides in AIO summaries. In a statement, Chegg said they were taking a stand for the publishing industry and the future of internet search. Google has responded to the lawsuit. A spokesman insisted that the company sends billions of clicks to outside websites daily and that AIOs send traffic to a greater diversity of sites. According to other sources, including TechCrunch, Chegg seeks compensatory damages and an injunction to stop Google from engaging in “unlawful and unfair” conduct, possibly including scraping sites featured in search results. Although the case has only been filed, many publishers watch it closely. Future roundups will cover any big developments. For now, you’re ready to enjoy a solid technical introduction to the best practices of pagination. Pagination and SEO: A Complete Guide to Best Practices https://www.semrush.com/blog/pagination-seo/ Carlos Silva and Sydney Go bring you this look at how to design your pagination to provide the best experience to all your users. Pagination refers to the process of splitting your content across multiple pages. Pagination is far more of a planning concern than you might think. It can affect the speed of your sites and may affect how well your users can pay attention to all the products, posts, or search results that you offer them. As Carlos points out, pagination is essential to creating the right look for sites in many niches, including e-commerce stores, news sites, forums, blog category pages, and photo Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—March 2025 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

3/17/2025

Matt Diggity In 2025, the game of SEO has changed. With advancements in AI, you can build AI SEO experts using code (not humans) to create content at a scale that was previously unachievable… This case study reveals how my agency, The Search Initiative, leveraged AI to generate $491K in monthly revenue—and why every business should be thinking about AI-driven SEO today. Our client’s monthly revenue from $166k to $491k. … And increased monthly organic traffic by 255% from 21.6k to 76.9k sessions per month. In this case study, you’ll learn how to build an AI SEO genius that includes: If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. To start, here’s some context about the site and why their site needed an SEO boost. The Challenge The client is an eCommerce company selling home interiors. Performance was stagnant before joining The Search Initiative with the client hesitant to invest in SEO again after already investing tens of thousands of dollars with their previous agency who were unable to rank them for important product-related keywords. Their products weren’t ranking for key search terms, and their content strategy wasn’t built for scale. We needed to expand the site’s visibility by creating new pages that targeted keywords our client was missing out on. Failure to fix this meant lost revenue and stalled growth. But with a new approach, by scaling their content strategy through automation and executing an AI-powered link-building campaign, we helped them hit $491K per month increasing their revenue by 196% since when they first joined. Here’s how we did it. An AI-Powered Approach to Writing Content at Scale with Make.com Bridging content gaps between your website and the competition is one of the most effective ways to grow your reach and rank for more keywords. Covering key topics more comprehensively helps build your topical authority. This signals to search engines that your site is a trusted source of information within your niche—leading to higher rankings, more traffic, and increased visibility for your keywords. By identifying keywords that you’re missing out on and producing content that is optimized for these terms, you’ll increase your chances of bringing your products or services to more eyes. This can be quite time consuming, so what if you could do it with the help of AI and automation? That’s exactly what I’ll show you, but it’s worth noting that this should ideally be done for supporting pages (i.e. blog content) and your important pages (i.e. product/service pages, homepage etc) should be handwritten. This is because while Google doesn’t necessarily mind AI-written content (so long as it’s useful and helpful for your audience), the best content comes from humans. An AI can’t replicate your expertise, it can’t “create” or talk about your experiences. So, let’s see how you can build this system for your supporting pages. Finding Content Ideas with Ahrefs & Building Your Spreadsheet Here’s how you can find supporting topics to cover on your website, by looking at keywords that your competitors are ranking for, but you aren’t. For this, we’ll use Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool. Enter your domain, along with links to your competitors. Let’s say my website sells fresh produce, and I wanted to expand the content by creating supporting recipe pages that showcase my products, In this case, I’ll find the top ranking recipe sites so that I can find relevant recipe keywords and add them to Ahrefs’ Competitor Analysis tool. You can add up to 10 competitors. By default, the tool displays every single keyword that all of the competitors rank for, but you don’t. Note that some of these terms might not be relevant to your site. Narrow down the search so that you only see keywords where at least more than one of the competitors is ranking for. In my case, I only want to see which recipe pages I’m missing out on, so I’ve filtered the results even further so that they only include keywords that contain “recipe” or “recipes”. Now you’ve got a list of relevant keywords that you’re missing out on. The next step is to identify any topics/keywords that are relevant to your site that you want to publish too. Create a spreadsheet (Google Sheets), which will house the relevant information used by the AI to create your content. Your sheet should have the following columns: It should look something like this: Now that you have a list of topics in your spreadsheet, here’s what you’ll need to start the automation: Connecting Google Sheets to Make.com Create a new Scenario Give it a name i.e. “Content System”. Click on the Plus sign to add an app and search Google Sheets. Select “Get Range Values”. This is how the tool will know what information it should use in order to generate our metadata.  Connect to your Google account by adding a connection. Give it a name and follow the steps to Sign in with Google. Make sure: For the Range, you want to give it the range of the cells whose data you want the tool to use. This is the Topic and Target Keyword(s) that you want the AI to use when generating your content. For Table contains headers, select “Yes”, then enter the range for where the headers are. In my example, it’s “A1:B1” Click Save. Your spreadsheet is now connected to Make.com. Creating Your Content System with ChatGPT (OpenAI) Now that the spreadsheet is connected, the next step is to add a new module for OpenAI so that you can connect it to ChatGPT. Click Add another module and search OpenAI. Select Message an Assistant, this is what will allow you to provide GPT with a prompt. Like you did with your Google account, connect your OpenAI account. To do this, you’ll need to create an API key by signing in and going on this page. Give it a name and click “Create secret key”. Copy the API key into the respective field on Make.com and hit Save. Select a GPT assistant. Keep Role set to User. The Message is where you’ll add your prompt to instruct the GPT to craft your content. Note that you’ll craft the content for your page in a few stages, so we’ll create more OpenAI modules after this too. For the first one, we’ll ask GPT to create a structured outline. Important: You can adapt the prompt below based on however you’d like your content to be formatted and written. In this case, we’re working with recipes, so the outline will have a specific format. Make sure the outline is clear, engaging, and easy to follow. Click Save and right click on this module to Rename it to something like “Outline”. This will make it easier in the following steps where we’ll create one more OpenAI module. So that you don’t have to keep creating a new OpenAI connection, right click on the “Outline” module, and clone it. Rename this to “Content Generator”. The purpose of this second module is to expand the outline result from the first module, into a fully written page. Open the module and now replace the Message (prompt) with something like this. Make the content structured, engaging, and SEO-friendly. Click Save, and Clone this module Saving the Output to Google Docs Now, we could ask GPT to add in the resultant content back into the spreadsheet, but that’s not ideal considering it’s generating a full article. So instead, we’ll get it to save each article into a Google Doc. Add a Google Docs module, select Create a Document and make sure it’s connected to your Google account. Set the Name of the document to Topic (from the sheet) and Content to the Result (from the Content Generator OpenAI module). Select the location where you want the documents to be stored and hit Save. Click Run once to execute the automation. The documents are stored in the respective folder on your Google drive. And here’s an example of the content: If the results aren’t quite what you’re looking for, adapt the prompts according to what you’d like to be changed. For example, I’ve decided I want the recipes to be formatted so that it’s easy to upload to a website. Let’s update the prompt to Content Generator module (edits are in italics): Write a complete, well-formatted recipe page based on the following structured outline:   [Insert AI-Generated Outline from Outline Module]   Requirements: Make the content structured, engaging, and SEO-friendly. Here’s the updated content: This is just what we’re looking for! Now you have a system that you can reuse (and adapt) again and again to generate different types of content on your website. Generating Metadata with Make.com Metadata includes the page title, meta description and H1 heading of your pages. It helps Google to understand the relevance of your web page in relation to a keyword. It also allows users to identify whether your page contains what they’re looking for while browsing the search results pages. Like our client, you might have hundreds of Read More Read More The post [SEO Case Study]: $491k Revenue/Month by Building an AI SEO Genius first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

2/24/2025

Matt Diggity February was a turbulent month for SEO, filled with big moves by Google, explosive new techniques enabled by AI, and more. In the top stories for the month, you’ll learn what the latest data says about how much links really matter. You’ll also get the story on Hubspot’s collapse and find out what’s next after a global SEO tool outage. That’s just the beginning. Read on to find out more about the latest SEO strategies, building forums with bots, new site reputation abuse policies, new Google quality rater guidelines, and so much more. Google Says “Links Matter Less”—We Looked at 1,000,000 SERPs to See if It’s True https://ahrefs.com/blog/links-matter-less-but-still-matter/ Patrick Stox brings you this look at the real value of links in current SEO. This experiment was inspired by recent Google statements claiming links aren’t as important as they used to be. The Ahrefs team went into the numbers to determine what role links really play in strategy. The experiment involved analyzing the top 1,000,000 keywords with the most search volume in the US. Then, each keyword’s SERP rating was correlated with several SEO metrics, including domain rating, keywords present in the URL, and backlinks. Then, they examined closely how backlinks, referring domains, and internal links correlated with Google rankings. The data told them a lot, including that: Patrick concludes that links are still important, but there’s evidence that Google relies on far more signals than in the past. The data shows that the prioritization of other signals depends on the type of SERPs. Make sure you check out the complete study to learn even more about the role of links and to see the insights laid out in plenty of easy-to-read graphs. Links aren’t the only thing being weighed differently. The content game has changed, too, as the complete collapse of HubSpot shows. Hubspot’s SEO Collapse: What Went Wrong and Why? https://searchengineland.com/hubspot-seo-organic-traffic-drop-451096 Danny Goodwin brings you this look at how organic traffic has collapsed for what was once considered to be the gold standard of B2B blogs. For many years in a row, HubSpot dominated SERPS with a content-producing strategy that saw them building guides for almost every topic. At its height, the blog was pulling in 13.5 million readers a day but has now dropped to 6 million after HubSpot results vanished from thousands of SERPs. The blogs that lost traffic covered topics like writing resignation letters and famous quotes. This matters because it signals a big change in the SEO playbook. SEO has been getting more difficult for years, and this move signals that yet another large-scale strategy is no longer safe to use. Danny tracked some of the SEO reactions for you. A lot of theories were presented for why the massive penalty happened. Many argued that HubSpot’s blog was hit because it reached for topics for which it had no topical authority. He links to several breakdown threads where SEOs wrote their own analysis of why HubSpot fell. Check out the complete article to get links to these explanations and find out why so many of them seem to agree. Google hasn’t commented and usually doesn’t comment about enforcement decisions against individual sites. Google had plenty of other requests for comment to deal with in the last month, in no small part because they caused a massive SEO tool outage. Google Causes Global SEO Tool Outages https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-causes-global-seo-tool-outages/537604/ Roger Montti brings you this look at Google’s recent move to block search result scraping. The crackdown on scraping caused reported failures across several major SEO tools, including Semrush. Several SEOs documented what was happening in stories shared across the piece. They reported tool and third-party data supplier outages and generally reported that automatic anti-scaping protections were stricter than ever before. The new challenges are being largely put up by new Right now, it does not appear that web scrapers are completely blocked. Semrush insists that there are no widespread issues. Still, many SEOs are left to speculate about what will happen if Google takes further steps to prevent SERPs from being scraped. Google has long prohibited automated rank checking in its policies. For the most part, though, it has practiced a hands-off approach to SEO services that scrape results and charge a fee for the ranking data. While Google is getting more forceful with the policy, controlling scrapers will still be difficult. Scrapers can get around blockers in a number of ways, and these restrictions may encourage even more inventive scrapers that require more resources from Google to control. Google has remained silent on this action, too. Fortunately, most SEOs aren’t waiting for Google to tell us how to react. I’ve got a new plan for SEO in 2025, and I’ll tell you all about it. SEO in 2025: My NEW Google Strategy! SEO in 2025: My NEW Google Strategy! SEO is changing in huge ways. I’ve got up-to-date, actionable strategies ready that I’ve already tested at my own companies. In my video, you’ll learn all about these strategies, why I think they matter, and how to use them. My first big strategy for the year is maximizing brand search volume. Brand search volume measures how often people search for your brand. Recent data shows that sites with brand search volume massively outperform sites without it. I’ve been applying brand search growth to my own sites with some amazing results. In the video, you can learn my tactics, including leveraging job boards for brand searches and getting into bots. My next big strategy for this year is traffic diversity. I’m focusing on building traffic from sources other than Google. Recently, I’ve seen evidence that having different sources is its own ranking factor (covered in the video). You need to work outside of organic search, building traffic from social media, paid ads, organic videos, emails, and referrals. My third strategy is goal completion. As we now know from Google’s antitrust trial, user behavior is tracked with a ranking factor called Navboost. I’m focusing on helping the user complete their goal to signal the value of my content. No life stories before recipes kind of content. Ask yourself if your article answers the user’s question as quickly as possible. Start putting answers as close to the top as possible. My fourth strategy for 2025 is to focus on building strong content, and unlike Google, I’m going to be clear about what I mean by that. I’m building only and all the articles I need for topical authority in my niche. Then, I’ll write those articles well. In the video, I show you how to use ChatGPT and other tools to generate the titles you need and verify that they’re all SEO-friendly. My final strategy is to focus on quality over quantity for all links. Digital PR and high-end guest posting are working best for me, and I’ll show you how to do both to land links from huge sites like the New York Times. Check out the complete video for all of the tips and to learn how you can pull off my strategies on your own sites. Parasite SEO: This Insanely Spammy SEO Tactic that WORKS (and Probably Shouldn’t) Parasite SEO: This Insanely Spammy SEO Tactic that WORKS (and Probably Shouldn’t) The SterlingSky team brings you this look at how blackhat SEOs are wiping out the positions of their rivals with a tactic that isn’t supposed to work. They examine this spammy tactic and whether you should expect to see your competitors try it. The incident they investigated involves LinkedIn posts that have been filled with hundreds of spammy keywords and then republished over and over. As the hosts document, these nearly incoherent posts have been able to climb past results with months or years of SEO behind them. These posts were also promoted with dozens of spam comments from dubious accounts. By all accounts, these posts were winning SERPs with keyword spam, bought links, and bot comments. Is it time to reconsider being a blackhat? The hosts say no. These results have already been tracked dropping hard as they attracted more attention. While Google’s algorithm may not always get it right, they still have staff that can learn about what you’re doing and respond. Next, Google has some news about site reputation abuse. The policy has changed, and you’ll want to be caught up. Clarifying the Site Reputation Abuse Policy https://developers.google.com/search/updates#clarifying-the-site-reputation-abuse-policy Google has updated the site reputation abuse policy to include guidance from their blog post on site reputation abuse. The FAQ section that was created for the post proved useful to many SEOs with lingering questions and it is now a permanent part of the guidance. The new section clarifies many of Google’s definitions when determining site reputation abuse. It covers exactly what Google considers third-party content, whether third-party content alone violates the policy, and whether freelance content is forbidden. The FAQs also clarify what it means to “take advantage” of the host site’s ranking signals, what it takes to remove a manual action after one has Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—February 2025 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

1/27/2025

Matt Diggity January is no time to take your SEO lightly. The year closed with serious changes and announcements by Google and major generative AI players. Catch up on everything that’s happening in this month’s roundup. In the month’s top stories, you’ll learn how the December spam update ended, see the newest evidence that sites have finally recovered after the August core update, and get a great summary of the tumultuous last year in SEO. After that, you’ll get plenty more news and analysis. You’ll learn what top SEOs say about how the latest spam update worked, how the final form of SEO may have arrived, how sites are winning with calculators, what the new ChatGPT Search Update means, and more! Google Search Status Dashboard: The December Spam Update is Over https://status.search.google.com/incidents/UUq2WSouY7PhSm8zvtD1 Google announces that the rollout of the latest Spam Update is complete. It finished on December 26th, about two weeks after it started. This was the 10th spam update, following the most recent one in June. As usual, Google was tight-lipped about what exact changes were being made. However, you’ll see some analysis of what happened in a few upcoming roundup pieces for this month. This update provoked much discussion among SEOs while it was rolling out. Some community members were posting traffic drops as bad as 50% in the first few days. Others reported that the spam update undid progress they had recently made after the last core update. Others reported more positive signs, including some of the first recoveries the site owners had seen since March. Spam update recoveries weren’t the only kind of recoveries being tracked by SEOs this month. There’s also fresh data showing sites can and are recovering from the August Core Update. In the next story, you’ll learn about the data behind these recovery stories and hear why it may have been possible for these sites. Google 2024 August Core Update: Site Recoveries! Google 2024 August Core Update: Site Recoveries! LinkBuilding HQ brings you this fresh look at recoveries from core updates. This video summarizes and links to some of the latest research on recovering sites that has been performed by major SEOs. First, you’ll get a quick refresher on the original impact of the August update. In a referenced study that included more than 55,000 sites monetized with Mediavine, Raptive, or Amazon Associates, a researcher found that 53% of sites experienced traffic increases, while 47% of all sites experienced traffic losses. Now, there is proof that sites can recover and that they can do even more. Some sites you’ll learn about have shown signs of recovery for the first time in 11 months, and the possible scale of recovery may surprise you. Glenn Gabe’s research is first. In it, he covers his list of 390+ sites he has been tracking. 91 sites out of this list have experienced notable recovery, and he provides some data for you in his X thread. His thread includes some helpful graphics on the sites that recovered (and the ones that didn’t) Lily Ray also recorded a significant recovery for the site Retro Dodo. The last update hit this large retro gaming content site hard, but Lily has graphs showing the rapid recovery of 80% of the traffic. Check out the rest of the video to see more research and community discussion on recovering sites. If you’re interested in Google’s point of view, the next piece will give you a true insider’s perspective. It covers how major decision-makers at Google saw the last year. Wrapping up 2024 | Search Off the Record Wrapping up 2024 | Search Off the Record Google’s Search off the Record podcast offers a look at last year’s changes from inside the company. Hosts, including long-time Google leaders Lizzi Sassman, John Mueller, and Gary Illyes, break down some major topics that came up at the highest levels. AI and the work of the AI team were among the major topics covered. In one example, the hosts discuss whether SEO is dying and being replaced by AI. They all seem very skeptical that SEO is going anywhere. As one host quips, “SEO has been ‘dying’ since 2001.” They discuss questions that keep coming up at conventions and how audience members with a growing interest in AI want to know about topics such as hallucinations, retrieval-augmented generative AI, and other emerging technologies. Other topics in the long conversation include the future of javascript, which is used to turn websites into apps, using LLMs to write code, and NotebookLM. Check out the entire video to learn more about how some of Google’s influential leaders see the future. Next, you’ll return to spam update data with fresh analysis. One SEO will examine whether the update was useful for dealing with search spam. Google December Spam Update Was Massive, But Did It Remove Search Spam? Google December Spam Update Was Massive But Did It RemoveSearch Spam? Barry Schwartz brings you this look at the real effects of the most recent spam update. As usual for the last few spam updates, Google only linked to their spam documentation rather than providing specific details about what changed. Barry takes you through a quick review of these guidelines and what Google recommends. Then, he dives into the real changes in the data. First, he covers the SEO chatter around the update. Many SEOs reported that the update appeared to reward rather than punish spam sites. Spam sites that were not ranking effectively for long periods of time were reported to be surging while the update was still rolling out. Many SEOs also reported problems with existing pages being de-listed and deranked from search engine results. As Barry notes, search results were highly volatile nearly every day of the rollout and then again for several days after the update was reported to have ended. Barry judged this to be one of the biggest spam updates to land yet. He recorded many complaints from white-hat SEOs who denied using spam techniques and had to deal with serious drops during the vital holiday shopping period. He shows you multiple cases of “dangerous” spam sites that benefited from the update. The conclusion seems to be that this update appears less effective at targeting spam than the previous ones despite the large size. It’s unclear if Google is still tweaking this update behind the scenes despite the announcement you read about at the top. If you need some new techniques to avoid getting targeted by spam updates, why not try the “final form” of SEO? This is the FINAL FORM of SEO This is the FINAL FORM of SEO… I figured out how to make more money with SEO than any other method. Would you believe that it’s angel investing? As odd as it sounds, I’ve earned some of my biggest paychecks partnering with businesses to provide funding and expertise in exchange for a share of the growth. SEOs have an amazing position with companies that lack the expertise they provide. It’s possible (I’ve done it) to get equity and shares without putting any money upfront. This works like a joint venture between partners. Unlike typical angel investors, SEO investors get to start with companies that already have traction, sales, market fit, and all the other factors that make a business a worthy investment. That’s not all, as other SEOs in the investing game have pointed out, you can use multiple investments to upsell, cross-sell, get reduced rates for services, and more. This can allow you to improve margins at all of your investments, resulting in faster or better returns for you. Perhaps the best benefit of SEO angel investing is the access it gives you to network. As part of these companies’ hopes and dreams, you’ll be in the room for important decisions and meet people from all the industries that are involved. That’s not to say this process is perfect. As I’ve learned, it doesn’t always work. Vetting is always difficult, and investments can end badly for many reasons, including trade law disputes, bad working relationships, or even criminal behavior. If you’re still interested, the video takes you through all the steps that I follow to find my investment opportunities. I show you how to build your “deal flow,” how to perform in-depth vetting of founders (not just companies), and how to make deals that make this the final form of SEO. Check out the complete video to learn how I do it and get special insights like the questions I ask founders. For now, there’s a small-scale growth strategy that you can put into practice with just one piece of content. 8 Websites Driving Insane Traffic Using… Calculators https://ahrefs.com/blog/website-calculators/ Chris Haines brings you this look at how calculators are some of the most powerful content you can create. To help you understand, Chris takes you through 8 examples of calculators and shows you how they are generating millions of views for their sites. The examples show that this method is effective across some of Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—January 2025 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

1/6/2025

Matt Diggity Maintaining search visibility and traffic after a major Google algorithm update can be a tough task. Using advanced content solutions allows you to stay ahead of Google’s algorithms like the Helpful Content Update, making sure your site meets the search engine’s standards while offering high-quality, relevant content that connects with your audience. This case study shows how we achieved great results for our client after the update. See how my team The Search Initiative grew our client’s organic traffic from 11,063 to 53,913 sessions per month. In this case study, you’ll learn how to: If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. To start, here’s some context about the site and the challenges we successfully overcame. The Challenge The client is a global investment platform. The client’s performance was stagnant before joining my agency, with limited visibility for VC (venture capital) and investment-related keywords. The main goal was to revamp their content and improve key pages with valuable material to increase search visibility and drive meaningful growth in organic performance. As a large site with hundreds of pages, it was impossible to manually audit and analyze the content on every single page. We needed to create a way that would allow us to prioritize optimizing low quality pages and enhance the content to make them more helpful for the end user. Learn how you can tackle similar challenges on your site by following the steps outlined below. AI-Powered Content Auditing to Check for Helpfulness & E-E-A-T Analyzing and improving a website can be a challenging task when done manually. However, with recent advancements in AI, this process is no longer as time-consuming, and you can take advantage of tools like ChatGPT to accelerate the workflow. Before I go into the process of auditing your content, it’s important to understand exactly how helpful content and E-E-A-T are and why they’re important for SEO. The Context What is Helpful Content? In August 2022, Google introduced the Helpful Content update. After several revisions in December 2022 and September 2023, the update was integrated into Google’s core algorithm update in March 2024. Helpful content refers to website content specifically created to address the needs and interests of users, providing genuine value by answering questions, solving problems, or providing insights. Under Google’s Helpful Content Update, this means focusing on content that prioritizes human readers over search engines, aiming to serve the audience’s needs first and foremost. For your content to be truly helpful, it must be well-researched, relevant to the intended audience, and reflect your expertise on the subject. Why is Helpful Content Important? Helpful content is essential because it directly affects both user experience and search engine rankings. Here’s why it matters: Focusing on helpful content helps your website remain aligned with Google’s guidelines while building long-term audience loyalty and achieving sustainable growth. What is E-E-A-T? E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, a concept introduced by Google in its Search Quality Rater Guidelines, a set of instructions provided by Google to human evaluators, known as Search Quality Raters who assess the quality of search results to help Google improve its algorithms. E-E-A-T represents the key criteria that Google’s algorithms and these human evaluators use to assess the quality and credibility of a webpage or website. E-E-A-T is especially critical for Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content, which includes topics impacting health, safety, finances, and the overall well-being of the target audience. Ensuring high E-E-A-T can help a website gain better visibility and credibility in search engine results. Check Your Content is Compliant with Google’s Helpful Content & E-E-A-T Guidelines Read on to find out how you can create a custom GPT agent to automatically check whether your content is compliant with Google’s Helpful Content and E-E-A-T guidelines. Create Your Custom GPT Agent Note that creating a GPT is only available to paid OpenAI users, so if you have a free account, skip this step, as you can use a general one that we’ve already created for you! To achieve the best results, create your own, as this will enable you to make adjustments and refine the process for more relevant recommendations suited to your content. Head to the GPTs Editor (or select your name and then “My GPTs”) Select “Create a GPT” Switch to Configure mode. This is where you’ll select the actions that you want the GPT to take. Give your GPT a name i.e. Helpful Content Audit Checker. Description is optional. The Instructions section is where to detail what your GPT should do when you interact with it. Based on the type of content you’re creating, you can create a GPT agent with specific Instructions. So for example, if you want to audit your blog posts, then only paste in the Instructions for Blog Posts. Read on to learn how you can also converse with ChatGPT to create the Instructions for you too. Blog Posts Homepages Service Pages Product Pages Blog Posts I. Introduction Situation Overview Blog posts are a critical tool for building authority, engaging readers, and driving organic traffic. Goal Enhance blog posts to rank well, retain reader interest, and align with Google’s helpful content guidelines. II. Blog Post Analysis Step 1: Provide the Blog Content Step 2: Scoring the Blog Post Analyze the blog on the following criteria: Relevance: Does the post meet user intent for its target keywords? Content Quality: Is it detailed, well-structured, and free of fluff? Engagement: Does it use engaging language, headings, and multimedia? SEO: Are headings, internal links, and keywords optimized? Call to Action (CTA): Is there a clear next step for readers? Step 3: Improvement Suggestions Homepages I. Introduction Situation Overview Homepages serve as the gateway to your website, showcasing your brand and guiding users to key sections. Goal Optimize the homepage to improve user experience, build trust, and drive navigation to priority pages. II. Homepage Analysis Step 1: Provide the Page Content Step 2: Scoring the Homepage Evaluate the homepage on: First Impression: Is the value proposition clear in 3 seconds? User Navigation: Are key sections (e.g., services, products, blog) easily accessible? Brand Trust: Are there trust signals (e.g., awards, testimonials, stats)? SEO: Are keywords, meta descriptions, and headings optimized? CTAs: Are there clear paths for users to take action? Step 3: Improvement Suggestions Enhancements to CTAs. Service Pages I. Introduction Situation Overview Service pages should clearly communicate offerings, address client pain points, and drive conversions. Goal Refine service pages to improve clarity, SEO, and lead generation. II. Service Page Analysis Step 1: Provide the Page Content Step 2: Scoring the Page Evaluate the service page on: Clarity of Offer: Is the service clearly explained with benefits highlighted? User Intent: Does the page address client needs and pain points? Credibility: Are trust signals (e.g., testimonials, case studies) included? SEO: Are keywords and headings optimized? CTA: Is there a clear, actionable CTA? Step 3: Improvement Suggestions Product Pages I. Introduction Situation Overview Product pages must provide detailed, engaging, and conversion-focused content while meeting search intent and answering key buyer questions. Goal Improve product pages to increase conversions, enhance SEO rankings, and provide a seamless user experience. II. Product Page Analysis Step 1: Provide the Page Content Step 2: Scoring the Page Evaluate the product page on the following criteria: Step 3: Improvement Suggestions As mentioned earlier, you can also use ChatGPT itself to help write a prompt to create your custom agent. Here’s an example prompt: I’m creating an agent that will be responsible for checking the content on my web pages based on Google’s Helpful Content guidelines and Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines from a knowledge-base. I want to input URLs, and the agent should analyze key elements of the content on the pages with a score out of 10 and in the end, give me recommendations on fixing critical issues based on the analysis, with examples where appropriate. Prepare a prompt that I can use to instruct this agent. And here’s an example of its response: The great thing about using ChatGPT to create the Instructions, is that you can fine-tune them to exactly what you need. For example, we want the output to be as helpful as possible in suggesting recommendations for improving the content. Let’s get GPT to tweak it a bit. Please adjust the output format so that it highlights: Exactly what’s wrong with the content Provides actionable recommendations that I can implement Provides examples for each of the following categories. For example, if a particular section requires content expansion, tell me which section and what information should be added. Content Quality & Relevance (Add Detailed Explanations, Demonstrate Your First-hand Experience, Include Subtopics and Related Questions) Building Credibility and Authority (Reference Authoritative Sources, Include Expert Quotes, Display Author Credentials) Increasing Audience Engagement (Incorporate Visual Elements, Encourage Interaction Through CTAs, Add Interactive Elements) Delivering Originality and Value (Offer Unique Insights or Perspectives, Solve Problems Not Addressed Elsewhere) Improving the Structure and Readability (Use Clear Headings, Format Content Using Read More Read More The post Beating Google Updates Using Custom GPTs [Case Study]: 5X Traffic in 12 Months first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

12/23/2024

Matt Diggity The year is almost over, but SEO is anything but restful. In this roundup, you’ll learn about major announcements, big changes, and how some of the community’s top minds prepare for the next year. In the top stories for the month, you’ll learn about the changes to Google’s site reputation abuse policy, the latest about the November 2024 Core Update, and why one SEO is predicting the possibility of Google’s End. After that, there are other headlines you shouldn’t miss. You’ll learn about ChatGPT prompts that break Google, search trends worth following, new alternative strategies for keywords, how bots will change the web, and what to expect from new Google Search Console recommendations. Updating Our Site Reputation Abuse Policy https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/11/site-reputation-abuse Google has dropped a new statement on their ‘site reputation abuse’ policy. This policy targets what Search Central describes as “the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site’s ranking signals.” Now, they’ve declared a large change in the policy. As they put it in the statement: Our evaluation of numerous cases has shown that no amount of first-party involvement alters the fundamental third-party nature of the content or the unfair, exploitative nature of attempting to take advantage of the host’s site’s ranking signals. The statement clarifies that there will be no exceptions for cooperation with white-label services, licensing agreements, partial ownership agreements, and other complex business arrangements. As part of this policy change, Google is implementing systems and methods designed to understand if a section of a site is independent or starkly different from the main content of the site. These areas will now be treated as independent sites. All practices that Google considers this type of abuse may be targeted with manual action. Furthermore, Google says it does not take a site’s claim about how content was produced at face value and will make a decision regardless of how the source of the content is described. Near the end of the statement, Google recommends that readers check out the complete spam policies page to learn more about what 3rd party content is considered violating and non-violating. Check out the FAQs provided at the end of the statement if you want their advice on recognizing spam, moving content to a new location, and how to redirect appropriately. For now, you’re ready to move on to what happened in the final days of the November Update. Google November 2024 Core Update Rollout Is Now Complete https://searchengineland.com/google-november-2024-core-update-rollout-is-now-complete-448428 Barry Schwartz brings you this news about the end of the 2024 core update. The end was announced on December 5th after weeks of search signal disruption. The update was still going strong in the final weeks of November. Barry tracked the movement through a series of tools. All of them showed a significant amount of disruption and collected some SEO chatter. The reaction of SEOs to the late-November movement did not seem overjoyed. On WebMasterWorld, multiple SEOs and site owners reported massive drops. The drops were reflected across the map, including in the USA, Canada, UK, and Australia. Others called it a “horror show” for their sites. Generally, the reviews were not good, though some of them were published before the review was over. Overall, Barry feels that this was not a large update compared to several that have already come and gone. Google had very little advice that was summarized in Google’s documentation of the update as: “There’s nothing new or special that creators need to do for this update as long as they’ve been making satisfying content meant for people.” It may take some time to know how all the changes will begin to impact SEO. According to at least one SEO, though, time is something Google is running out of. The Beginning of Google’s End? The Beginning of Google’s End? Mark Webster of Authority Hacker is predicting Google’s end. Comparing it to other dying properties like Facebook, he insists there are signs behind the scenes that point to it losing the power it once had. He starts by looking at how Google came up. As he points out, Google has maintained near-monopoly control of search for almost 20 years. Mark gives most of the credit to the value of PageRank, and how it allowed Google to deliver results that were simply stronger than the rest of the competition. This dominance eventually baked in to the point that “Google” became a universal verb for looking something up online. Mark believes that the story of this all coming down first started when Google began an arms race with SEOs. The steps they took simply to cut down on algorithm manipulation resulted in serious problems for users. For example, like recipe sites that insist on prefacing every recipe with a life story. Over the years, Google has fought a fierce war with SEOs. Updates like the Florida Update, the Panda Update, the Penguin Update, and most recently, the Helpful Content Update, were parts of this war, and each time Google penalized a significant amount of activity. SEOs can’t take all the blame, though. Google’s search advertising team is also a big target of Google’s critics. Over the years, Google has given ads more space, made them harder to discern from real results, and have constantly introduced features that competed with their top quality results. The effects of these and other problems have regular people abandoning Google, claims Mark. They are searching on Reddit, TikTok, Instagram and ChatGPT instead. Mark claims that Google is still enjoying some of the benefits of these searches, because users are going to Google after their search is refined. Mark thinks that Google is about to lose even this traffic, though as generative search becomes more able to deliver information and products directly. Check out the full video for more of Mark’s analysis. For now, you may be interested to know that there is a ChatGPT prompt that can do some interesting things to Google. This ChatGPT Prompt BREAKS Google This ChatGPT Prompt BREAKS Google I was able to fundamentally change how Google responds to my content by changing my AI prompts . In this video, I cover how I made these prompts and how you can use them to create more content that excites Google. The trick is quite simple: I make the AI write in a NLP-friendly format. If you need a quick refresher, NLP stands for “Natural Language Processing.” It’s a subfield of computer science that focuses on machine learning developments that allow computers to understand human language and communicate with it in an effective way. Google uses NLP to judge your intent. NLP techniques are used to discern the difference between common words or phrases based on context. It’s how Google can tell whether you’re looking for information on bass guitars or bass fishing lakes. So, now you know what NLP means, but what about NLP-friendly content? I provide you with a lot of examples in my video, but to tease some of them, you need to directly answer the question covered in your topic, and you need to have clear sentence ordering. To find out the value of NLP content, I performed a split test on my own sites with content that was NLP friendly, and content that wasn’t. Across multiple tests, NLP-friendly content went up, and the non-friendly content went down. I show you how to write these prompts in detail in the video. Detail is necessary, because there are a lot of parts of the prompt you’ll need to include to get the results I saw in testing. You’ll need to request a specific sentence order, vocabulary, and precision. See the video for some example prompts you can use to get started now on your own tests or high-performing NLP Content. Next, you’ll learn why one SEO thinks a big bot wave is coming and how it may change the web forever. BotNet: How The Rapid Growth Of Bots Could Change The Open Web https://www.searchenginejournal.com/rapid-growth-of-bots-could-change-the-open-web/532975/ Kevin Indig brings you this look at how bots are evolving and how you may soon be forced to deal with them in new ways. He starts by telling you something that will probably surprise you: more than half of all online traffic comes just from bots. To put it in perspective, Kevin provides you with some surprising data: However, it isn’t even the old bots Kevin is warning you about; it’s a new kind he refers to as “agentic” bots. While website owners have been forced to optimize their sites for Google bots, they may now have to do it to help AI helper bots that serve as agents to humans. As Kevin shows, AI crawl requests have already increased by almost 20% in the last six months. These and other statistics are important to consider because bot activity is not just benign. Some bots are malicious and designed to probe for weaknesses. All AI developers are currently working on agents that Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—December 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

11/11/2024

Matt Diggity This month’s news is almost entirely about Google. The company is facing heavy criticism, making some leadership shakeups, and possibly preparing for another big update. In the month’s top stories, you’ll learn why one top tech voice thinks Google Search is falling apart. You’ll also learn whether Google’s changes have affected its share of the search market (as one huge paper claims) and what it means that Raghavan has left Search to become the Chief Technologist of Google. You’ll also find other top SEO stories you shouldn’t miss, covering how AI overviews have changed since the last update, what Google doesn’t want you to know about their algorithm, and what to do next if SEO is truly “dead.” Why Google Search is Falling Apart Why Google Search is Falling Apart. Tech influencer Mr. Whosetheboss brings you this video explaining why he feels Google Search is in serious trouble. He performed a deep dive, and the video has attracted more than three million views since its release. In his video, he lays out three problems that he covers in a large amount of depth. The first problem he points out is the front page of SERPs itself. As he demonstrates with several live examples, sponsored content makes up nearly all the top results. These sponsored events have also gone from being highly labeled and brightly colored to nearly disguised, so you spend more time than ever working to verify that a result is correct. The situation is worse for products where sponsored results take up more space than ever before. Mrwhosetheboss even accuses Google of “playing dumb.” He uses one example to show that Google understands search intent well when delivering ads but delivers all the wrong items in the organic results. Even the state of the ads isn’t good. Plenty of ads lead to scam products, and scam companies continue to be promoted. He doesn’t think Google is the only party to blame, though. He considers SEOs who have constantly worked to find holes in Google’s system as part of why Google won’t invest in fixing some problems. He identifies AI as the final problem and suggests that Google’s awkward implementation of it may point toward a future where they summarize your options rather than provide them for you to choose from. Check out the full video to see everything he has to say and some examples he uses to make his point. Next, you’ll see some in-depth research covering what practices like these are doing to Google’s search market share. Is Google Losing Search Market Share? https://sparktoro.com/blog/is-google-losing-search-market-share/ Rand Fishkin breaks down a recent Wall Street Journal article. In that article, the author argued that Google could lose its lead in search advertising words. It predicted that Google may fall under 50% of the total share by 2025. The article attributed this staggering market loss to several phenomena, including the rise of TikTok, AI, and Google’s long-term legal troubles. Rand was dubious about these claims and looked into them to determine what SEOs should know. Using his own research, Rand doubts that Google is experiencing these problems. He is able to present some recent research showing that search advertising is expanding rather than declining—something that doesn’t make much sense if Google is losing market share. Rand confirms that Google stock prices have dropped (a signal that isn’t necessarily linked to search market share), but they haven’t dropped much more than any other tech stock. He found other problems with the story, including that the relative strength of competitors was being overstated. At the end of the piece, he argues for the importance of tech literacy when reading the news. His own analysis doesn’t find that Google is particularly threatened. However, Google has been dealing with many problems that could threaten its position lately. That may be the reason for some recent big leadership changes. Google Is Replacing the Exec in Charge of Search and Ads https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/17/24272786/google-search-prabhakar-raghavan-nick-fox Emma Roth brings you this look into Prabhakar Raghavan’s recent departure from the head of Google Search & Assistant. Raghavan is a figure named in multiple reports critical of Google, including the writeup by Ed Zitron that we covered in a prior roundup. Raghavan has now moved to another position and Nick Fox has stepped up to lead Search. Fox was already a member of Raghavan’s leadership team when he was moved into the higher position. Emma notes that this followed several other big leadership changes around Google’s AI projects and apps. Google is arguably facing more pressure than it ever has before, following the declaration by the US government that the company was running a monopoly. Google may be preparing for a future where it could be broken up. For the time being, Google hasn’t said much about the changes. It’s possible that the shakeup could mean big changes in how Search is run in the future. What you can learn more about now is how AI overviews are treating sites hit by HCU updates. Google AI Overviews Not Linking To Sites Hit By Helpful Content Update https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ai-overviews-hcu-38225.html Barry Schwartz brings you this look at how Google’s AI overview features are treating HCU-affected sites. He claims, after a series of tests, that there is reason to believe these sites have been blacklisted from the features. First, he reminds you that there are links between the HCU and the AI overview that have been discovered before. Initial tests were done by other SEOs like Lily Ray and Glenn Gabe who found sites affected by the updates would not be linked when searched in Google AI. The story contains multiple examples of this policy in action. Multiple SEOs in the community confirmed that their HCU-affected sites were not linked or appeared in AI overviews even when bounced back. Check out the complete story for more perspectives and examples. Not all participants are sure that the effect is intentional, but so far, Google has not provided more clarity. What Google Doesn’t Want You to Know About Their Search Algorithm What Google Doesn’t Want You to Know About Their Search Algorithm Sam Oh of Ahrefs brings you four big insights that his team pulled from the recent Google leak. He believes his team has narrowed down four revelations about Google’s inner workings that will forever change how we see the Search algorithm. He starts the story with 2012, the date Google’s Matt Cutts was first asked whether Chrome browser data was used to inform the algorithm. Matt denied it at the time. A decade later, Mueller effectively denied it again. We now know from the leaks that Chrome data is being used. Rand Fishkin, who is quoted in the video, accuses Google of using its monopoly power to dominate video, maps, flight searches, news searches, and other areas. The second lie Sam identifies is Google’s claim that clicks aren’t used in the ranking algorithm. He even shows examples of Google mocking SEOs over these theories. However, the leaks revealed that this data is used in CTR, Navboost, and other areas. The leaks show that Google not only counts clicks but categorizes them. All of this has now been confirmed in testimony. Sam guesses that these lies may have been used to keep SEOs from catching up with Google too quickly, Google also claims not to use a domain’s authority in its rankings. The SEO community has developed its own relative scores for years but has not discovered Google’s related scores for years. It’s important to understand that we don’t have all the context for what the leaks have revealed. The existence of these signals doesn’t tell us how they are used. These discoveries may, however, be the basis for an entirely new approach to ranking effectively. Or maybe there’s no point because Google SEO is…dead? That’s the argument I’m making in the next video coming up. Google SEO is DEAD. Do this Instead… Google SEO is DEAD. Do this Instead… All the recent changes have me wondering: Is SEO still worth it? In this video, I break down what I think matters in the world of endless algorithm updates, insurmountable backlink whales, and AI overviews. If so much effort is worth so little, is there somewhere else you could be working? I argue that YouTube may represent the future of SEO and the best place to invest your efforts for the easiest return. We already know the money is there. Since launching, the site has made multiple billionaires. I have six of my own channels, and I’ve driven over $1,000,000 in affiliate commissions and leads with them. In this video, I explore what I’ve done and whether it’s too late for others to follow. First, I explain in more detail why I think Google SEO might be dead (at least for some sites). I think things look the worst for content sites that don’t have another business behind them. As I pointed out in the video, small-to-medium content sites were nearly destroyed with the first Helpful Content Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—November 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

10/28/2024

Matt Diggity Search changed in some big ways with the arrival of the last big update. Catch up with how SEOs are responding in this month’s roundup. In the top three stories for the month, you’ll look at how many of the celebrated ranking increases during the update were later wiped out. You’ll also discover why one site owner believes Google crushed his business overnight and how regulatory changes have created two internets for Americans and Europeans. There’s plenty more to learn after that. The next set of stories covers hidden ranking factors, the death of Google website caching, and a new study into whether Google penalizes AI content. The list closes with news on Google’s moves, including new penalties. Google Search Ranking Increases During Core Update Wiped Out Post Update https://www.seroundtable.com/google-core-update-reversal-reversed-38101.html Barry Schwartz offers you this look at why some hopes for the new update were dashed when the dust had settled. He tracked several SEOs who provided internal numbers on various platforms. Glenn Gabe was one SEO who provided several internal charts to show how his sites were behaving. His numbers leading up to September 15th showed unnamed sites rising with the update and then slowly falling again in the weeks afterward. The trend was consistent across several sites. On September 17th, SEO Lily Ray reported that spam seemed to be overtaking good results in the aftermath of the update and received replies from several other SEOs tracking the decline on their own sites. Barry found dozens of other posts from SEOs, advertisers, and small site owners talking about completely lost gain, randomized results that changed with each new search, and traffic that had dropped by 20-30%. Many of the SEOs quoted held Google at least partly responsible. In the article, Barry seemed to agree, saying, “It is heartbreaking to read some of these posts, and meanwhile, Google is silent.” Check out his complete piece for more responses from SEOs about the changes. Next, you’ll explore the issue in depth with a story about how the recent update crushed one business overnight. The Google Update That Crushed His Business Overnight The Google Update That Crushed His Business Overnight – YouTube Sam Oh and the Ahrefs team bring you this look at how content creator Jake Boley had his gym and shoe-related content properties nearly destroyed by traffic loss from the recent update. The team worked directly with Jake to explore why the problem had happened and to find out if it could be fixed. The video opens early with some graphs that show the extent of the damage to Jake’s properties. One site had gone from a traffic average rate of around 200,000 to well under 1000. The Ahrefs team quickly noticed that most of the traffic drops coincided with the arrival of updates. Now, they had a better idea of what might be causing the problem. The team looked closer at Jake’s sites and identified several ways that it may have fallen outside of best practices. In a deep audit of his work, they identified key ways he could serve search intent, improve the user experience, develop a better content strategy, and pursue more authority. Check out the complete video for detailed steps covering each action that was taken to recover Jake’s site. The Ahrefs team is refreshingly clear about the principles that drove each change, so you can understand why they acted and better understand whether the steps can apply to your own site. Now that two stories have caught you up on the update, you should turn your attention to a problem in the industry’s future. Differences in the law are creating two very different internet experiences for Europeans and Americans. 2 Internets: A European And An American Internet https://www.searchenginejournal.com/2-internets-a-european-and-an-american-internet/528605/ Kevin Indig thinks that the experience of the internet may be changing for people under European and American laws. However, he also thinks it could be a good thing, and has some ideas for how SEOs can turn these changes into opportunities. As he argued in an earlier event, “The result could be two internets that allow us to compare the impact and changing AI landscape in countries like the U.S.” Do these changes really mean access to a split-testing tool with world-spanning coverage? Kevin explores the possibilities. First, he provides some background for those who haven’t followed the passing of new EU laws. The one that matters is the Digital Marketing Act (DMA). This law came with a lot of new rules that applied to sites serving EU customers. As Kevin summarizes— “Companies can no longer force defaults on users (like a search engine or browser), show their offering above other marketplace participants, and serve targeted ads without consent. They must guarantee interoperability, data access, ad transparency, and side loading.” This created a serious fork in the user experience. Kevin takes you through the real consequences by showing how top SERPs are very different. For example, Google features don’t appear for some types of searches in the EU (e.g., flights). They are replaced with direct links to aggregators that don’t work with Google. Kevin believes that these changes will ultimately create an advantage for EU sites. These sites will compete less for clicks with Google in their own search region. Next, I explore whether Google’s hidden ranking factor has been discovered. They found Google’s Hidden Ranking Factor! Is it Real? They found Google’s Hidden Ranking Factor! Is it Real? – YouTube In this video, I expand on a Moz piece that was recently featured in our roundup. The piece was called “The Helpful Content Update Was Not What You Thought It Was,” and in it, Tom Capper argued that a very understudied factor had a huge impact. Like many SEOs, I’ve felt skeptical that following Google’s guidelines was the best or safest way to rank. Google’s focus on people-first content, original information, or insightful analysis didn’t seem to align with what was really rewarded in search. When these updates landed, it was almost like another factor was separating the winners from the losers. Did Tom find it? Tom hypothesized that the HCU has something to do with a “suspect ratio of search volume for a site’s navigational terms to its link signals. To put it more simply, if a site has an impressive number of links, but no one is looking for the brand, Google may assume that the links are bought or bullshit. The data from the original article seemed to support the theory. Sites with a lot of brand search volume were likely to benefit from the HCU even if they didn’t have a good link profile. I was excited to see brand search volume highlighted as a signal because I have focused on this signal for a long time. Past experiments have shown that high brand search volume alone accounted for many winning sites. However, I’ve only focused on that, while Tom thinks the ratio of the two signals may be more important than the signal alone, and studied that. Tom performed a huge study that looked at winners and losers across nearly 2 million sites. These results seemed to confirm his suspicions strongly. My team has been actively working on brand search volume techniques for some time now, and I share some of them with you near the end of the video. Content marketing and influencer marketing is still effective for this part, but I also share some of my “gray” strategies. Check out my video and the complete piece by Tom for more into this big development. Next, you’ll say goodbye to a long-time Google feature that many will miss. Google Will No Longer Back up the Internet: Cached Web Pages Are Dead https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/google-search-kills-off-cached-webpages/ Cached sites have been an option tucked into results for decades. Google once made backups of pages that could be accessed from the search engine menu in case the website or page you were trying to access was inaccessible. This practice has now come to an end. As Danny Sullivan pointed out in a recent statement, this was a much more essential feature in the early days of the Internet. In the early 2000s, pages often would not load fully over slow connections. When this happened, cached pages summoned a copy of the text and non-interactive elements. SEOs and other search-watchers have noticed that cached results have disappeared since December 2023. However, this disappearance was not always consistent, and Google chose to be silent about what it intended to do until now. This move won’t seriously impact SEOs, but it may make it more difficult to recall old information for research. Tools like the Internet Archive may have a harder time making copies and may provide less research for your own case studies as a result. Next, not all of the news on Google this month is negative. Google is getting credit for being better at recognizing content creators, and it could lead to a breakthrough in SEO. Google Recognizes Content Creators: A Breakthrough for E-E-A-T and Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup — October 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

10/7/2024

Matt Diggity From a marketing perspective, getting visitors onto your website is just half the battle when it comes to SEO. The other half, from a business perspective, is making sure that those organic visitors turn into paying customers or qualified leads. Your SEO strategy should tackle both of these halves: it should contain the right content (so that Google puts you in front of relevant users) and be presented in the right way (so that users can easily find what they need and have a great experience). By doing just this, my team at The Search Initiative tripled our client’s organic traffic from 15,919 to 47,256 sessions per month since the start of the campaign. In this case study, you’ll learn how to: First though, here’s some background about the site we worked on and the main challenges that we overcame during the campaign. If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. The Challenge The client sells industrial and commercial DIY equipment across the United States. The site was ranking well for some product-specific keywords, but was struggling to get traction on conversions. Therefore, the main goal was to improve the content on key money making pages to turn these organic visitors into paying customers. The site’s backlink profile wasn’t quite where it should be in comparison to top ranking competitors who had lots more links from relevant websites. In order to build the client’s authority and already growing brand, we reached out to websites with “Where to Buy” pages and leveraged unlinked brand and product mentions to build backlinks. We also needed to improve the client’s blog which was already bringing in some traffic for informational search queries. To drive more conversions from the blog posts, we focused on maximizing the internal linking so that users could be guided towards relevant product and category pages and improving the overall experience of the blog by adding product widgets and a related posts section. The product descriptions on the website were taken directly from the manufacturer’s page which meant they weren’t unique or entirely helpful for the customer. We created product descriptions that clearly outlined features and described the product’s use. Find out how you can overcome the same challenges for your website by following the detailed steps below. Link Building Techniques Unless you’re a household brand that attracts backlinks naturally because everyone’s talking about you and your products online, link building is still an integral part of any SEO strategy. With eCommerce SEO, there are several unique strategies and tactics that you can use to build your site’s authority and brand reputation online. In this case study, I’ll show you two specific methods: getting listed on where to buy pages and leveraging brand & product mentions. Getting Listed on Where to Buy Pages Getting listed on “Where to Buy” pages can significantly boost your products’ visibility and sales. These pages are often hosted by manufacturers, popular review sites, or retailers, guiding consumers on where to purchase specific products. If you run an eCommerce store that sells third-party products from other brands, make a list of all of the brands that you sell products of, and use this Google search to find which of those brands have pages that list where customers can purchase their products. Note: if you only sell your own products, read on to find out how you can also use a similar tactic to get listed on relevant websites. [brand name] intitle:("where to buy") If you’re targeting the UK, you can also extend this further to include the keyword “stockist” (which just means that the shop stocks a brand’s product). [brand name] intitle:("where to buy" OR "stockists" OR “stockist”) Here’s an example of a search for a fashion brand called Maharishi. If you look at the site, you can see that it lists and links to all of the places that sell this brand’s clothes. You can also find stockist and where to buy pages with the Site Explorer tool on Ahrefs by: Entering one of your competitors’ store’s domain Navigating to the Backlinks report Filtering the referring pages with the same keywords within their page titles i.e. “where to buy”, “stockists” and “stockist”. Click “Apply” and “Show Results”. You’ll see a list of stockist websites that are linking to your competitor’s site. If you don’t sell third-party products, you can still benefit from this tactic by using a similar targeted Google search related to your products. For example: You can also add variations of these searches, for example: Look for well-known review and comparison sites that dominate the search results. Pay special attention to those with “Where to Buy” sections or affiliate links to retailers. Here’s an example: You can see that this page has a dedicated “Where to buy” section.   Once you’ve made a list of all of the websites that you want a link from, you can reach out to them with a simple email like this: Hi [Name], I’m [Your Name], [Your Position] at [Your Brand]. I wanted to know if you have a process for getting listed on your [where to buy | review | comparison] page? We sell [Describe your product or product range] and would love to be included. Thanks, [Your Name] By using these strategies, you can compile a list of relevant review and comparison websites that feature “Where to Buy” sections, giving you a targeted approach to getting your products listed. Leveraging Brand & Product Mentions Acquiring backlinks from unlinked mentions is considered an old technique that doesn’t work like it used to, but it’s still highly effective, if you do it our way. These mentions occur when your brand, products, or services are mentioned online, but without a corresponding hyperlink back to your site. For example, this small UK based vegan chocolatier below has over 250+ unlinked mentions that they’re missing out on. Converting these unlinked mentions from websites who are already familiar with your brand or products into backlinks, can improve your site’s SEO, driving more traffic and increasing visibility. They also serve as a key signal to Google of your brand’s online presence and reputation. There are a number of ways that you can go about finding unlinked mentions of your brand or products, we’ll show you two here. Enter your brand name (or product name) within quotation marks and click “Create Alert” You can also set how often, the source, language, region and how many results you receive. You can also set up an RSS feed or have the results delivered to your email address. Once created, this is what you’ll see: Create a separate alert for variations of your brand or product names too. Now, whenever another website mentions your brand or product, you’ll automatically get an alert. Like you did with Google Alerts, search for your brand or product name in quotes. Click “Highlight unlinked” and enter your domain so that you only see results where your brand/product is mentioned, but hasn’t linked to you. Filter by “One page per domain”, this removes all duplicates so you have a smaller list to work with. Filter even further by sorting the results based on the estimated page traffic. This is valuable as you’ll want to start by securing backlinks from pages that already have decent traffic. If you like, you can export the results or just manually sift through them on Content Explorer. If you do export, make sure to select the option for “Only pages with highlighted domains”. Here’s an example of a domain that has mentioned The Search Initiative, but hasn’t linked back.   When picking which websites you should reach out to for a link back to your website, here’s what to consider: When reaching out to your prospect list, there are several tactics that you can use to increase your chances of the website owner adding that valuable backlink to your site. Subject: Quick Request + Testimonial for [Website Name] Hi [Recipient's Name], I hope you're doing well! I noticed you mentioned [Brand/Product Name] in your article "[Article Title]" on [Website Name]. Thanks for the mention! To show our appreciation, we’d love to provide a testimonial for [Website Name]. Would you be open to adding a link to our site ([Your Website URL]) in return? I think it could be a win-win for both of us. Let me know if this works for you! Best, [Your Name] Subject: Repurpose Your [Article Title] + Quick Request Hi [Recipient's Name], I hope you're well! I recently came across your article "[Article Title]" on [Website Name] and noticed you mentioned [Brand/Product Name]. It’s great to see our brand featured! I was thinking—this content could be repurposed into an infographic or video, which might engage your audience even more. We’d be happy to help with the process and provide any resources you might need. If you’re interested, would you consider including a link to our site ([Your Website URL]) in the repurposed content? Read More Read More The post Case Study: A Holistic SEO Strategy That Tripled Traffic in a Year first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

9/23/2024

Matt Diggity If you’re concerned about the update, don’t miss this month’s roundup. It’s packed with news, analysis from the community, and more. Our top stories for the month include Google’s official announcement about the end of the update and some further analysis from SEOs revealing how the update hit them. After that, you’ll learn from a series of studies covering optimal numbers of pages and how sites are recovering from the HCU. There’s plenty more great news you shouldn’t miss after that. You’ll learn from Google announcements covering AVIF, find out how sites dominate Google’s Top Stories Feature, look at the evidence that Google favors quality over quantity, and more. Let’s jump in, starting at the end of the big update. Google August 2024 Core Update Rollout Is Now Complete https://searchengineland.com/google-august-2024-core-update-rollout-is-now-complete-446225 Barry Schwartz brings you this announcement from Google confirming that, after 19 days of changes, the Core Update that started on August 15th is now officially complete as of September 3. You’re not alone if you’ve noticed a significant amount of volatility. As Barry points out, this was no ordinary update. It followed a large amount of criticism by small publishers, SEOs, and other parties over the negative impacts of recent updates. It is expected to address many of those issues (later, you can read more about what SEOs are seeing). Google was direct about its goals in a recent statement. They said— “This latest update takes into account the feedback we’ve heard from some creators and others over the past few months…we aim to connect people with a range of high-quality sites, including ‘small’ or ‘“’ independent’ sites…This is an area we’ll continue to address in future updates.” Remember that your data may not be completely reliable. A search ranking bug affected the first four days of the update. If you want to know what Google says about recovering from updates, you can find recently updated guidance here. If you want to see some real data about how sites are improving, there’s a video coming up in the roundup you shouldn’t miss. Before that, you may want to see some of the freshest surge charts covering the Core Update period. Google August Core Update Helpful Content Surge Charts https://www.seroundtable.com/google-august-core-update-helpful-content-surge-charts-37970.html Barry Schwartz brings you this piece about the full effects of the recent update, as measured by a series of SEO tools. He provides you with an educational series of charts that illustrates the impact as several top SEOs experienced it on their sites. He covers a set of charts that Glenn Gabe provided. These charts record some seismic movement, with significant visibility and organic traffic changes. Glenn says 73 of his 390+ HCU-affected sites have surged. Some of them experienced complete reversals of earlier losses. Other SEOs like Lily Ray and Marie Haynes also reported significant surges. The graphs included in this piece cover several of their sites, including one that saw close to a 300% increase in organic traffic. Check out the entire piece to learn more about the immediate impact of the update. That knowledge will pair nicely with the next top piece. You’ll get a longer-term view of Google’s strategy through some research into how they are changing how they reward content. [New SEO Study] Fewer Pages = More Traffic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAYtX5mHNfo Mark Webster of Authority Hacker brings you this breakdown of some recent research by Kevin Indig. That research revealed a surprising trend: That there is an inverse correlation between an increase in index pages and organic traffic growth. To put it simply: pages spike, and traffic drops. Kevin’s research, which you can find here, covered years of trends that have been building to this point. According to his estimate, Google has begun to favor fewer pieces of high-quality content over the sheer volume of content since the 2023 core update. As Mark points out, this research raises some big questions about how Google’s perception of topical authority has changed. They may be already working toward an algorithm that will punish behavior that was rewarded even a few short years ago. Kevin noted some other big trends as part of his analysis. For one, he noted that user-generated content from places like Reddit had been given a lot of visibility, which once belonged to small sites. He theorizes that Google may be changing these rules due to its own need for quality content. By decreasing the incentive for sites to “mass” content, Google would enjoy more human-generated content to train its models. Kevin provided many real-life examples of these new preferences in action. He found one isolated case of a site that doubled its page index quickly due to a bug. The response from Google, in this case, was a sharp and sudden drop. He also provides an example of a wide-scale programmatic strategy by a business that led to a 50% drop in organic traffic. Check out the complete research for more data and demonstrations of Google’s new policy. Also, check out the rest of the video for more insights about the update. Next, you’ll learn what I’ve learned about how sites are recovering from HCU and what problems they solved to achieve recovery. Sites Are Recovering From HCU! Here’s What They Did… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFK2bULRKPI I’m bringing you this look at the massive recovery of money sites like guitarchalk.com, HouseFresh.com, and thatfitfriend.com. All of these sites addressed a handful of problems, but I argue that what mattered most in every case was that they removed low-quality pages from their sites. You might say these sites have already reacted to what Kevin predicted in the last piece. Let’s look at how it went for them. The first site, guitarchalk.com, nuked almost a quarter of its total content before recovering. I argue that there is a new ranking factor at play. It works like this: When a website has a high percentage of pages with low or zero traffic, Google considers that a red flag. I also argue that it’s not a big secret why they would do this. Google has to contend with 5 million new blog posts a day. They aren’t trying to analyze every word of that; they just want to look at the most efficient big signals. I think they’ve found one that satisfied them, and I think I figured out how it works. This new signal might have first been hinted at in recent update documentation. There, Google mentioned a new site-wide signal that would be joining other existing ones. Other documents call it a page-level signal, but I can at least confirm it landed sitewide on my sites. In a later passage, Google admits that removing unhelpful content can improve the rankings of the rest of your content. Other SEOs and I have worked on several methods to optimize for this signal, and I share them with you in the video. I cover James Dooley’s method as well as my own. This is a detailed process where you’ll learn how to create sheets you need to organize everything, as well as instructions on how to relink your pages properly. Next, there’s even more news from Google. AVIF is now supported in Google Search. Supporting AVIF in Google Search https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/08/happy-avifriday?hl=en This announcement by Google may have some serious implications for image-search-based SEO. The AVIF file format, one of the most commonly used on the internet, is now a supported file type. All of them should be properly indexed on Google without any further work or action on your part. As the report explains, AVIF is an open image file format based on the AV1 video compression standard. This format is already supported on all web browsers, a variety of platforms, and many online services. Google does not recommend that you make any changes to your images as part of this announcement. You should think carefully before changing your images to other formats, and consider your visitor experience. They provided a guide to image SEO if you have any more questions. Next, you’re ready to jump into some fresh research covering how SEOs are winning Google’s Top Stories feature. The Sites Dominating Google’s Top Stories SERP Feature in 2024 https://detailed.com/top-stories/ Glen Allsopp brings you this look at how 1000 prominent domains have managed to account for more than 97% of all listings in Top Stories. Before he begins, Glen lets us know that in many of the independent sites covered for this research, certain details were withheld to protect the strategies involved. The big question that Glen wanted to ask was: Are any young sites performing well in Google’s Top Stories SERP feature? To find out, he checked the domain registration dates for all 1000 sites. He then broke down the young and independent sites that made it into the list and examined their properties. He takes you through each site, one by one, looking at factors such as how much traffic they get from Top Stories, how many visitors they get, and other interesting facts. Glen also asks, “Is anyone on this list Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup — September 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

8/26/2024

Matt Diggity Big changes in search and AI development are the theme of this month’s roundup. Get ready for a ton of news, analysis, and case studies covering everything from the latest update to the tricks SEOs are still using to get ahead. You’ll catch up with the August 2024 core update announcement in our top story for the month. Then, you’ll see some analysis on whether Search GPT can disrupt Google and what it means when some SEOs say attribution and clicks are dying. After that, we have more top stories for the month that you shouldn’t miss. You’ll see the results of one search-based case study that achieved 2000%+ sales growth, learn how to get SEO results on easy mode and find even more news, announcements, and experiments. What to Know about Our August 2024 Core Update https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/08/august-2024-core-update Google’s latest core update landed on August 15th. In a very short statement, John Mueller explained that the update’s purpose was “to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.” Mueller also insists that this update includes feedback from creators. As we’ve covered in recent roundups, some major content creators like Adam Conover have accused Google of crushing small websites with recent policies. In the new statement, Mueller specifically identified small and independent sites as an important part of the results. He seems to imply that their situation will improve in this and future updates. He also said that the update aims to capture site improvements that recent updates may have missed. This statement is likely intended to address recent reporting from past roundups (See Story: HCU Recovery Data) that nearly all sites hit by the HCU had yet to recover. As the final part of the announcement, John provided a link to recent changes on the help page. You should visit if you want to see more in-depth guidance on what to do next. Google may be responding to community complaints enthusiastically because it has a major competitor on the horizon. In the next piece for the month, you’ll learn about Search GPT and whether it has the potential to challenge the current big players in search. Search GPT – Can Search GPT Disrupt Google Search? https://www.searchenginejournal.com/search-gpt-can-search-gpt-disrupt-google-search/523296/ Kevin Indig brings you this look at the latest big AI moves. ChatGPT has yet to do much to replace Google Search so far, but a brand-new search engine from Open AI may finally turn search back into a competition. As Kevin points out, OpenAI has several competitive advantages when it comes to launching a search product. First, this is the first product to position itself as a direct search product, which may give it the power to compete against Google in ways that weren’t possible with the GPT product. Next, OpenAI already has a significant part of the infrastructure it needs to set up a search engine at high speed, as it already crawls the web for training data and sorts it. Kevin also thinks that the familiar search functions provided by this product will increase overall GPT adoption. He identifies and analyzes a number of other features that give Search GPT the potential to cause Google problems. For example, he highlights the greater incentives that LLM search engines have to work with publishers (who provide them with necessary training data). Check out the rest of the article for his complete analysis, including the stats and studies he adds to his arguments. Next, some SEOs worry that attribution is dying. You’ll learn what that may mean for your strategies moving forward. Attribution Is Dying. Clicks Are Dying. Marketing Is Going back to the 20th Century https://sparktoro.com/blog/attribution-is-dying-clicks-are-dying-marketing-is-going-back-to-the-20th-century/ Rand Fishkin claims that marketing does not work the way you think it does in 2024. He compares the situation now to 2010 when he would have claimed that marketing is “all about being able to track every view and every click so that when conversions happened, we could perfectly attribute them.” Now, he argues, this doesn’t work because attribution is dying. By attribution, Rand means the data that tracking tools provided far more reliably in past years. Now, he argues that Apple’s cookie changes, anti-tracking laws across the world, ad-blocker adoption, app domination, and other factors have made attribution data rare and often incomplete. He focuses on the” zero-click problem” in particular. He argues that he himself doesn’t click on things the way he used to. He thinks this may have happened because search engines have trained us not to click, largely so that Google could divert more eyes to search features. Rand makes a complex argument for a different approach to marketing. For example, he discusses a pasta company’s small, non-attributable strategy. This company used unconventional strategies, such as creating Amazon products just to have the credibility to be advertised in major cooking publications. They also paid chefs in tourist areas all over Italy to name the brand of pasta on the menu. Their American sales have skyrocketed in recent years, but not from any marketing attribution. So where do we go now? Rand argues that we’re going back to Mad Men’s principles and days of talking about how to get the right message that appeals to the right people in the right places and at the right time to the right audience. Next, we have a case study on the concrete steps one website took to increase its sales growth by over 2000%. Gaming SEO Case Study: 3 Tactics That Drove 2300% Sales Growth https://surferseo.com/blog/gaming-seo-case-study/ Satya D of Surfer shows you how one company in the ultra-competitive eSports market managed to SEO its way into massive gains. As he states in the article, things were not optimal when the SEO team first got involved with the clients. The existing website— The first stages of the recovery involved creating a major content clustering strategy. The current content was not built using data or a process. For that reason, a lot of the content that was produced wasn’t very effective. After that, a complete keyword optimization was necessary. The content creation process was updated to include keyword optimization as a basic practice so that all content going forward would have a purpose. For the next step, the team used AI to produce targeted content on a large scale while saving on costs. The marketing efforts didn’t just improve traffic and keyword rankings. They also led to an impressive 2300% increase in sales, amounting to growth from $5,000 to $120,000 over 24 months. Some of this work can be pretty complicated, but SEO doesn’t have to be. Next, you’re going to learn how I argue you can do SEO on easy mode in 2024. This Is How You Do SEO on Easy Mode in 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC-R7x6i3_M I bring you this piece for SEO pros and agencies who are struggling with all the recent changes. Have you considered eCommerce SEO? You may fear that it’s hard to get into. It’s not, but everyone thinking it is gives you a serious advantage—less competition. Throughout this video, I’ll explain why you should be doing ecommerce SEO, and give you the steps to do it yourself. First, this is a huge growth area. Recent studies I reveal in the video have it growing by 8% every year. Google has also, intentionally or unintentionally, been directing more traffic to e-com websites over time. I take you through all of the big strategies that I employ for e-commerce clients, and explain how my thought process works for each one. These include moves you’ll need to make for most clients like— I further explain how you apply optimization, linking, and website architecture to achieve large traffic gains much more easily than you can in publisher SEO. You’ll even learn how to partner with e-commerce businesses for more lucrative deals. I’ll tell you the stories of how I made it happen. Next, you’ll get the results of a fun little experiment. What do you think happens when you disavow every link to your website? I Disavowed Every Link to My Website. Here’s What Happened https://zyppy.com/seo/google-disavow-experiment/ Cyrus Shepard brings you this update on his recent experiment to disavow every link on his website. The initial tests suggested a lot about how Google receives this information, how it acts, and how long it takes to act. First, Cyrus reviews some of the original information for newcomers. The test site was a 60+ DR site with over 10,000 links from authoritative sites like Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush, and Backlinko. The experiment was necessary because disavowing was presented by Google as a solution for manual penalties, and Cyrus wanted to observe the effects. Google does warn against using the disavow tool correctly, but that just makes testing the response more interesting. The first two months of the test, as he covered in an earlier writeup, showed almost no changes in traffic whatsoever. At Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup — August 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

7/22/2024

Matt Diggity Don’t miss this month’s roundup of the top stories in SEO. You need to know about the big changes that came with the recent update, how site owners are adjusting to them, and what SEO headlines matter most. The top stories for this month include an announcement and the completion of the latest update. You’ll also see a major case study that argues that Google is punishing good SEO and another that summarizes the dire state of clicks around the world. Next, you’ll see some of the top guides and videos that will arrive this month. You’ll get the latest SEO ranking factor tier list and evidence of common SEO tactics that can destroy your traffic. Keep reading to learn even more about recent statements from Google and some fresh announcements from Surfer. June 2024 Spam Update (Announcement & Completion) https://status.search.google.com/incidents/QdUeCQx3LRVbzQ3E7FiD Google’s Search Central announces that the latest spam update has come and gone. It started on June 20th and ran until the 27th. While Google provided a few details, reports in the SEO community identified this as a general and broad spam update. While very few details were shared, the update reportedly did not include any changes to the link spam systems. Google confirmed that the site reputation abuse policy was not automated and will continue only to be done manually. A deeper analysis from Sistrix found few significant changes after the final announcement. As they pointed out in their examination, Google Update Radar and several other tools remained calm throughout the rollout. That isn’t to say no sites were affected. The Sistrix analysis ranks the top 20 winners and losers; you can find it in the link. For now, it doesn’t seem like there is much to say about the Spam Update. We may discover more when we can see the effects play out, or we may find that Google is happy with this system’s results and doesn’t intend to change it much. Some site owners may be hoping that significant changes will come along soon. The case study that is coming up next accuses Google of punishing good SEO. How Recent Google Updates Punish Good SEO: 50-Site Case Study https://zyppy.com/seo/google-updates-punish-good-seo/ Cyrus Shepard has some data that may show that Google is demoting “over optimized” sites. The study, which used data from Ahrefs, covered 50 different sites in depth. He starts by reminding readers that Google’s Helpful Content guidelines warn against creating content designed to draw clicks. It’s not clear what Google meant by this (and they aren’t going to provide any information that would make SEO gameable), so Cyrus’ study examines the SEO features that won and lost across the last series of updates. During the study, Cyrus and his team learned what features are most represented on the biggest winning and losing sites. For example— Check out the complete study to learn about other page features correlated with success or failure when new patches arrive. Better SEO won’t always help you, though. As the next item demonstrates, there are far fewer clicks to go around lately. 2024 Zero-Click Search Study: For Every 1,000 EU Google Searches, Only 374 Clicks Go to the Open Web. In the US, It’s 360 https://sparktoro.com/blog/2024-zero-click-search-study-for-every-1000-us-google-searches-only-374-clicks-go-to-the-open-web-in-the-eu-its-360/ Rand Fishkin brings you this report into what happens after an American (and, as of this report, a European) makes a Google search. You may think clicking on a result is the most common action, but the truth is that it happens less than half of the time. Let’s look at the stats. In the US, about 41% of searches end in a click. Of that amount, only 70% go to organic results. The rest of the clicks go to features (nearly all Google properties) such as YouTube, Maps, and Images, and a tiny percentage go to paid ads. That takes non-click searches up to nearly 60%. About 20% of searchers make another search, but the remaining 37% simply end the browsing session after the search. The numbers for Europe are only off by a few points. As you can see in the graphic in Rand’s article, 40% of searches end in a click in Europe, compared to 59.7% of zero-click searches. Rand seems to conclude by the end that things aren’t necessarily getting worse. As he puts it near his closing points—These zero-click search numbers are slightly lower than the highs reported by SimilarWeb in December 2020 but considerably greater than the 2019 numbers reported by the now-defunct Jumpshot panel in June 2019. What comes next for search may depend on many other factors, including what really works as ranking factors in the year 2024. Google SEO Ranking Factor Tier List (Part 2) Google SEO Ranking Factor Tier List (Part 2) In the second part of my SEO Factor Tier List Series, I discuss link sources and their value. If you know my business, you know I take links very seriously, and this video contains the internal tier list that I use for my own projects.   You’ll learn about more than 20 different links sources, along with a bit of history for each one and some judgment on whether they are still effective. Below, you can see some examples of where I place a few common link sources in my list. S (Super): Digital PR A: Guest posts B: Image outreach C: Link bait D: Skyscraper E: (negative SEO against yourself): automated links Check out the full video to see the final tier list and find out where your favorite link sources stack up. Now that you have a better idea of the top-ranking factors, you may want to hear some news about the environment you’ll be ranking in. It turns out that a search feature is going away. Google Drops Continuous Scroll on Desktop With Mobile to Come https://www.seroundtable.com/google-continuous-scroll-dead-37618.html Continuous scroll, the search feature that temporarily allowed you to keep scrolling results endlessly, has now been removed from desktop results. This means that the classic “pages” you remember from years past will return. Pages have been removed from Google Search results since continuous scroll was launched in 2022 for desktop results and 2021 for mobile results. Google says the motivation for this decision was to speed up searching and limit results to those that more closely match what the searcher asked for. SEOs had their own theories for why the change may have happened. Glenn Gabe suggested that the change may be related to the AI overviews that are soon arriving. Others, like Ori Zilbershtein, suggested that Google may have simply forgotten the resource and UI advantages of providing results in limited blocks. While some SEOs seemed surprised by the decision, most seemed to think it was good for both searchers and website owners. Everyone isn’t “on the first page” anymore, which should make explaining gains to clients easier. New features may take over in time, but Google hasn’t announced any. Next, there’s some more important news about the HCU and how sites have recovered since that time. (Discussion) HCU Recovery Data https://x.com/glenngabe/status/1806673850895085631 Glenn Gabe brings you this very quick update on the HCU data he initially checked in September of last year when the update dropped. When they were first revealed, the numbers, covering nearly 400 sites hit by the update, caused a stir. Some SEOs use the set to gauge how HCU-hit sites are faring overall. If you’re one of them, Glenn doesn’t have good news. The entire set has been massively down over time. Despite some minor movements around updates (both announced and unannounced), all sites are reliably heading even lower. Did all of these sites fail to make the proper updates? Has Google even re-evaluated them? Will it ever re-evaluate them? So far, we don’t know. The safe bet seems to be that these sites aren’t going to recover. Next, more news on Google’s moves. They’ve changed their AI overviews in a way that may predict future changes. AIO Pullback: Google Shows 2/3 Fewer AIO And More Citations https://www.searchenginejournal.com/aio-pullback-google-shows-2-3-fewer-aios-and-more-citations/521110/ Kevin brings you this look at Google’s most recent changes to its AI rollout. The overviews now appear less frequently, but when they do appear, they cite more sources. Kevin pulled these conclusions out of his own data set, which involved over 1,500 queries. Across those queries, he found that AIOs have dropped by about 2/3rds in the US. This may be because the AIO system needs some tweaks. Users have reported that AIO and other Google features provide conflicting answers to searches. In a recent appearance, Google’s VP of Search suggested that the way users phrase search queries may produce questionable answers from AI. Most of the cuts seem to be to YMYL queries. Now that you’ve reviewed the SEO news, you need to stay caught up; I want to bring you some big announcements from Surfer. Two new features are coming to the app that will play a large part in some of my future projects. First, they’ve launched a new content audit. It automates identifying pages that Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup — July 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

7/1/2024

Matt Diggity Topical authority has been all the rage and has been the go-to strategy for SEOs over the past few years. The idea here is to write everything about your industry as you can, and Google should see you as the go-to source and rank you. But, is there a more effective method that can help achieve this authority status, but also going to make you the most revenue? What if there’s a way that instead of writing two hundred pages covering every single topic within your niche that you can think of, you just need to focus your effort on the hundred most impactful pieces of content that your target audience will find most helpful? By doing just this, my team at The Search Initiative grew our client’s organic traffic by 115% from 12.8k to 27.6k engaged sessions since the start of the campaign. We also increased monthly revenue by 198% from $10.2k/month to $30.6k/month. In this case study, you’ll learn how to: If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. First though, here’s some background about the site we worked on and the main challenges that we overcame during the campaign. The Challenge The client specializes in providing commercial plant supplies to businesses across the United States. Recent Google updates have made it more and more difficult for doing content site SEO (i.e. affiliate marketing and display ads) right now. Because of this, there’s been a surge in eCommerce SEO which I hope to give you a crash course on through this case study. But before that, check this video to learn the true situation of what’s going on with Google SEO. The goal in this case, was to improve and diversify the client’s visibility in the SERPs by capturing users at each stage of the buying funnel (i.e. micro-moments) – this included optimizing for informational keywords on the blog to product-specific keywords for category and product pages. Although the client already had a range of categories and subcategories within the online store, navigating the products was difficult for users due to a lack of filtering options. To solve this, we implemented faceted navigation, which helped users discover what they’re looking for in less time and allowed the client to rank for relevant long-tail keyword variations for their product range. (You’ll learn exactly how to do this soon). Finally, in order to improve click-through rates and appear within Google’s rich results, we implemented structured data markup on the website: Product and BreadcrumbList. Let’s face it, out of these two results, one of which has implemented structured data and the other hasn’t, which are you more likely to click on? The one that has lots of useful information such as reviews, price and availability, right? Find out how you can overcome these challenges for your website by following the steps below. Optimizing for Micro-Moments With this surge in eCommerce, it’s important that you capture the crucial moments where you can put yourself in front of your target audience in the SERPs. These “micro-moments” are when potential buyers are looking for more information (e.g. “best running shoes”) or make a purchase (e.g. “Nike Air Max). The question is, can your SEO strategy capture their attention and guide them towards your products? The right SEO approach is your key to converting these micro-moments into sales. What are Micro-Moments? Micro-moments are the key moments in a buyer’s journey when they turn to their devices (and Google) to answer a question or perform some sort of action. For eCommerce websites (but also any other site), these moments are crucial as you’ll want to capture the users at these moments due to their high intent for finding solutions to their queries. During these brief windows of opportunity, is where you can grab your potential customers’ attention away from your competitors. The four main types of micro-moments are as follows: I-want-to-know moments – a person has a question or needs information to make a decision. They’ll typically turn to search engines to find answers e.g. “best bike for beginners”. I-want-to-go moments – triggered by a desire to find a local business. People will often use their smartphones to search for stores, restaurants, or services nearby e.g. “bike shops near me” I-want-to-do moments – a person seeks instructions or guidance on how to complete a task e.g. “how to change a bicycle tire”. I-want-to-buy moments – a person is ready to make a purchase and has completed the journey e.g. “bmx bike 20 inch” Why are Micro-Moments Important for eCommerce SEO? Micro-moments are crucial for eCommerce SEO for a few key reasons: In essence, micro-moments help you bridge the gap between user intent and your product offerings. By optimizing your SEO for these crucial moments, you can significantly boost your website’s and business’ success. How to Capture Micro-Moments for eCommerce Read on to find out what you need to know and do in order to maximize your eCommerce SEO efforts by capturing micro-moments. Understand Your Customers You need to be able to identify and understand your customers’ journey by identifying key pain points and critical decision-making moments that they will face. Doing so, will allow you to formulate content strategies that position you as the go-to choice for your target audience. There are several ways that you can find out their potential pain points: Scroll down and navigate to the Questions section, click View all. This shows you all keywords that are phrased as questions that are relevant to your seed query. You can see there are a number of keywords that can be grouped together via the Parent Terms filter. Expand the items to reveal even more questions. These will highlight any potential issues that customers face with your products that you can then craft content around and address on your website. In addition, UGC builds trust and authenticity, influencing and driving purchase decisions during micro-moments for prospective customers. Add content that addresses these key questions and pain points within your product/category pages, or as blog posts/FAQ pages. Create Content That Addresses Each Micro-moment The one and only way to ensure that you capture your target audience at each micro-moment, is by understanding their intention. Let’s go through the intent and content types that suit each of the four micro-moments for eCommerce SEO. Personalize the Shopping Experience Utilize user actions and behavior to personalize their experience on your website. Doing so is a great way to capture their attention and lead them towards placing an order. Here are some examples of how you can do this: For example, Zara displays product items that users may find interesting after viewing a product. The example below shows products that “complete the look”. This enhances their shopping experience as it saves time browsing products and allows them to quickly add these related items to the cart. An over complicated checkout process can discourage users from completing the final step in their order process and prevent them from returning to your site ever again. Including the following can help alleviate this: For example, Nike makes the checkout process less overwhelming by expanding and collapsing sections of the checkout process. Optimize Your Website for Mobile In the age of smartphones, where most browsing and purchasing happens on mobile devices, a mobile-first approach is no longer a suggestion – it’s a necessity for eCommerce success. This is backed by data from Statista, which shows that 54.67% of all global searches are now made on mobile devices. Implement Responsive Web Design Your website should adapt seamlessly to any screen size, from smartphones to tablets and desktops. A responsive design ensures everything – text, images, buttons – adjusts automatically to fit the user’s device, offering an optimal user experience. Prioritize Speed and Performance Mobile users are impatient. Their need to access information quickly and effortlessly directly influences their decisions during micro-moments. A slow-loading website is a conversion killer. Here are some ways to optimize speed: Also implement lazy-loading, which is where only certain parts of a webpage, especially images, are loaded until they are needed, instead of loading everything at once. Here’s a simple example: Original Code function calculateArea(width, height) { // Calculate and return the area const area = width * height; return area; } // Example usage const rectangleWidth = 10; const rectangleHeight = 5; const totalArea = calculateArea(rectangleWidth, rectangleHeight); console.log("The area of the rectangle is:", totalArea); Minified Code function calculateArea(w,h){return w*h} // Example usage (same as above) A great tool worth investing in that compresses and lazy loads images, takes care of minification and offers additional page performance optimization is NitroPack. Simplify Navigation Complex menus and dropdowns are a nightmare on mobile screens. Opt for a clean, intuitive navigation bar with easily identifiable icons and categories. Consider using hamburger menus (three horizontal lines) for secondary navigation options. Prepare for Seasonality Targeting seasonal keywords (i.e. queries that experience a boost in popularity and search demand during specific times of the year) is Read More Read More The post Case Study: An SEO Strategy That Tripled Revenue in 9 Months first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

6/24/2024

Matt Diggity This month’s roundup takes a few more shots than usual at Google. The finger-pointing is coming from many different directions. We’ve gathered the top leaks, accusations, and breakdowns to help you make sense of this huge event in the search history, and Google’s reaction. In the top stories, you’ll learn why there may be one last hope for sites hit by the September Helpful content update. Then, you’ll get a breakdown of the huge Google leaks that SEOs have been discussing, and the statement that Google released. After that, you’ll get all the other top stories of the month, including more leak analysis and a deep dive into why one commentator says Google “ruined the internet.” You’ll also learn about the death of the 2010s web, some guides to prepare for the next update, and other top news. There’s still hope for September HCU-impacted sites https://www.mariehaynes.com/theres-still-hope-for-september-hcu-impacted-sites/ Marie Haynes brings you a big prediction for the next Helpful Content Update. She claims that the sites that have suffered the most are about to get a break and start recovering. Her confidence partly comes from comments made by Danny Sullivan and John Mueller. First, Danny Sullivan went further than most Google representatives ever have in describing how a site can recover. In a long Twitter thread, he describes how publishers can make content that deserves to rank. He emphasizes the importance of having multiple traffic streams, and other details. However, Marie focused on one statement in particular “It Might Be the Next Core Update Will Help” As we covered in last month’s roundup, almost no sites have recovered from the penalties they received from the previous HCUs. Marie agrees, pointing out she’s seen no report of someone recovering, either. In addition to Danny’s notes, Marie provides a thread from John Mueller. In this thread, John says the Google team is working on how sites can/will improve in Search for the next update. Site recovery (at least for sites that obey the rules) may be possible once the update is out. Unfortunately, there is no news on when to expect that update. As soon as it’s announced, we’ll cover it in the roundup as a top story. For now, let’s look at the biggest leak ever to hit SEO. An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents With Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/ Rand Fishkin analyzes the massive trove of Google docs he and Michael King received from an anonymous source. As he reports, the leaked documents arrived in his inbox on May 5th. They came from a source claiming insider access to a massive leak of documents from inside Google’s Search division. The source claimed the documents had been vetted by former Google employees who provided even more insider information. The leak was big news for several reasons. First, it confirmed what many heterodox SEOs had been claiming: Google wasn’t always straightforward about how its system really worked. The leaks contradicted many company statements. According to the leaks… The leaker made a number of other surprising claims, including that Chrome was motivated by the desire for more clickstream data and that Google massively uses Chrome data to fight spam. Rand did his own fact-checking and contacted several former Google employees off the record. None of them could verify that they had seen the documents during their time at Google. All statements agreed that the documents looked legitimate and matched internal documentation. Rand shared the information with colleague Michael King. Michael provided his own deeply detailed analysis, though both of them are withholding some of their discoveries for their upcoming conference. Check out the complete write-up to learn why Rand took on this leak, what evidence he has found that its real, and what other lessons he took from it. Now, you can learn how Google has responded to these leaks. Google Confirms Search Leak but Urges Caution https://www.seroundtable.com/google-confirmed-search-leak-37476.html Barry Schwartz brings you this response from Google. As he points out, more than 32 hours passed before Google had anything to say. The statement that was finally released was sent to people in this form “We would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about Search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information. We’ve shared extensive information about how Search works and the types of factors that our systems weigh, while also working to protect the integrity of our results from manipulation.” While this statement is not itself a confirmation of the accuracy of the docs, it says something that rather than denying them, Google has chosen to warn website owners that the information may be complete and out-of-date. Barry went in search of more details, but he got the same story from nearly every Google rep he contacted. They claim that, by policy, they do not discuss ranking signals. To Barry, this is as good as saying the leaks are not fake as some have claimed. Google reps appeared to heavily push the characterization of the data as “out-of-context.” This did not deter many SEOs. One was quoted as saying in the responses that “all raw data will always lack context.” Many other SEOs Barry quoted had similar things to say. Unfortunately, there isn’t much more to share about Google’s response. They have not made the choice to release any further information. If this leak has changed the game for them, we won’t likely be able to tell until the next big update. However, if Google won’t do much to tamp down on the wild speculation, some experienced SEOs are. In the next piece, you’ll learn why one writer thinks that people are getting a little too excited about the information they have. Google Documents Leaked & SEOs Are Making Some Wild Assumptions https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-documents-leaked-seos-are-making-some-wild-assumptions/ Patrick Stox responds to some of the wilder chatter coming from the leak. He makes the argument that a lot of the responses have been overblown. First, he addresses the claim by many on social media that ranking factors leaked as part of this document dump. However, as Patrick points out, nothing found in the leaks so far includes code or weights that could be used to game ranking. He points out that a lot of the data may not apply to ranking at all, but instead other factors like Patrick seems to think many commenters are just seeing what they want to see from the raw data. He provides longer descriptions for several areas where he thinks the SEO community has really overstated what the data reveals. For example, he discusses the Sandbox. In the first piece, Rand seems to argue that the data indicates the existence of the sandbox. Patrick thinks this has been misinterpreted. As he explains the segment from the link “The document has a field called hostAge and refers to a sandbox, but it specifically says it’s used “to sandbox fresh spam in serving time.” To me, that doesn’t confirm the existence of a sandbox in the way that SEOs see it where new sites can’t rank. To me, it reads like a spam protection measure”. He also takes issue with SEOs claiming that the leak proves authors are a ranking factor. There is a lot of info about authors in the leaked docs, but we already know Google uses authors for many functions, and none of the leaked data connects authors to leaking. Check out the full piece for some pushback on the earliest claims from the leaks. For now, you’re caught up on the leak and almost everyone’s reactions to it. This leak isn’t the only source of Google’s grief, though. Adam Conover has accused Google of ruining the internet. How Google RUINED the Internet https://youtu.be/P7NHABs76mg?si=T4lBKZMGmh5nbA4L Site owners may recognize Adam from his comedy series Adam Ruins Everything (2015), where he took on ways people had created a worse world with various bad policies and decisions. His rants targeted subjects like airport security, car dealerships, and video game ratings. In this video from his active YouTube Channel, he turns his sights on Google. He starts off by arguing that Google once delivered strong results but is now dominated by much worse results. He goes beyond that to claim that nearly all search engines are bad (but it is ultimately Google’s fault).   In the video, Adam charts Google’s early history and some of the changes that have happened since Google first adopted the slogan “Don’t be evil.” He mainly focuses on the work Google has done to absorb many of its competitors and engage in alleged monopolistic practices to end the need to grow. Truthfully, anyone in the SEO industry will be very familiar with the events that he breathlessly describes. This video was made for a wide audience of Google users, and this information is new for many of them. Adam ultimately argues that anti-trust enforcement should be the reaction to the decline in quality that he describes in his video. Check out the complete video for a well-researched outsider’s look into search. Next, you’ll get Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup — June 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

5/27/2024

Matt Diggity As we roll into May, SEO is quickly becoming less predictable than ever. This roundup will help you catch up with the big controversies, changes, and predictions for the future. You’ll start by getting a briefing on a big fight that went down. Some people are charging that Google Search has been “killed,” and Google has a response for them. You’ll get both sides and the chance to make up your own mind. After that, you’ll get the facts from a block of great case studies. Is AI content detectable? What does the March Core Update do now that the dust has settled? Is 3500% traffic growth possible, and how? At the end, several big news items are covered to help you catch up on everything happening. Google has a new reputation abuse policy you need to comply with, AI is being used in knowledge panels, and new AI paywall options may be coming. The Man Who Killed Google Search https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ (Tag: News/Discussion) Tech journalist Ed Zitron brings you a piece in which he claims to track Google’s death through the rise and fall of some highly influential characters at the company. Throughout the piece, he argues that Google has deliberately pursued a course that would worsen its results. He compares the timelines of Google’s hirings and firings and shows how they coincide with court-released email chains and new updates that left big changes. The facts that he compiles (though he admits that some connections require speculation) paint a picture of a Search that was once independent of the ad side of the business but may now be completely ruled by it. He makes his case comprehensively. The complete story, with all the characters, events, and timelines, will take about 15 minutes to read. It’s an interesting read and may leave you feeling like you’ve just finished a heist movie. This reporting did not go unnoticed by Google. After a major SEO covered the issue on his Twitter (X) account and various SEO News sites, Google posted a complete response. Next, you’ll learn what Google had to say. Google’s PR Team Sent Me the Following Response to the Claim on the Man at Google Who Killed Google Search https://twitter.com/rustybrick/status/1783599060496056337?t=fbDo0deZX61xfmnirRvP5g&s=19 (Tag: News/Discussion) Barry Schwartz brings you this look into a Google response delivered to him after he pushed this report on his social media profiles. The response came in the form of a letter that challenged several claims that Ed made in his piece. First, Google challenged a connection that Ed had made between an email exchange and the rollback of some search changes. They dispute that there was a rollback and that improvement was continuous. Second, they stated that the organic results in Search are not affected by ad systems. They quote some of Ben Gomes’ testimony from the trial, claiming that the increased context shows a slightly different story. Finally, they provide some recent court testimony from Jerry Dischler, showing that Google keeps the search and ad teams separate. Jerry said, “The search team is only accelerating monetization velocity to the extent that they tell the ads team about…new research. This is a pretty short response to the full list of charges that Ed covered in his first piece. Google may be preparing a more substantial response. Ed Zitron has released a response to Google’s response. You can read that here. For now, we’re moving on until this story has more developments. Next, you can jump into the month’s big case studies and research pieces. I’ll start by studying whether Google’s algorithm can detect AI. Is AI Content Detectable? And does Google even Care? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ7G7RiRAGM (Tag: Case Study) Can the Google algorithm detect if content is written by AI? In this recent video I released, I argue that it doesn’t, and Google doesn’t even necessarily care. You’ll find all the evidence I gathered here, along with some predictions for the future of AI content.  First, I review some of the research that has already been done. Notably, ChatGPT performed some early research that found that people could only tell the difference between AI and real writing in 50% of cases. However, that wasn’t the research that interested me in the topic. My own experiences during the March Core Update were what made me interested in studying this. During that update, I was shocked to see my AI sites were doing great. That made me consider how hard Google was even trying. Shortly afterward, Gary Elias came out and said Google doesn’t take issue with AI content. After seeing many AI sites get hit (not mine), it was obvious that something was going on. My belief is that Google punishes low-quality content. How does it target them? My theory is with humans. Yes, I believe that a real human—in the same way as a content rater—is watching these Twitter accounts and YouTube channels and giving the information they learn directly to Google. This seems likely because many SEOs got their entire portfolios nuked. That reaction scared a lot of SEOs off of AI content, and I think that may have been the intended effect. However, Google didn’t have, or claim to have, a real way to catch these people (except when they’re telling on themselves on video). As my video shows, significant growth is still possible with AI content. There are a lot of humanizing touches you can add that don’t appear to be attracting penalties. Next, you’ll get one of the deepest breakdowns yet available in the past March Core Update. March Core Update Analysis with Lily Ray (Ep. 334) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DYqLUl9nNA (Tag: Case Study) The March Core Updated has finally ended. Lily Ray joined the Authority Hacker Podcast to discuss everything she discovered about who this update affected and how.  In a far-ranging discussion, Lily and host Gael Breton discussed the significant visibility changes in popular tools like Ahrefs and Semrush and how the fluctuating numbers don’t tell the complete story. They talked about how it’s possible to keep and even improve ranking while losing traffic to new search features and SGE. They can’t avoid discussing the growing lack of trust between Google and webmasters who no longer feel they can trust Google’s recommendations. Gael suggests that SEO could be less effective for improvement than channels like YouTube, social media, or even email marketing. Check out the complete discussion for one of the most comprehensive breakdowns of the new update yet available, complete with some fresh data. Next, I want to share another personal case study with you. It shows you that some massive growth is still possible. Case Study: A User-First SEO Strategy That Generated +3700% More Traffic in < 12 Months  https://diggitymarketing.com/user-first-seo-case-study/ (Tag: Case Study) Google claims that it rewards websites with helpful user-first content. Some SEOs are skeptical about listening to Google about what ranks, but I think this much can be proven by data. In fact, I think I proved it myself. My case study revolved around a recent client. The client was in the medical niche and offered various drug rehabilitative services in countries worldwide. Our strategy at the start was to target service-related keywords. This client primarily focused on informational keywords, which was not working for them. They also lacked CTAs in most content and failed to take advantage of an earned reputation for expertise. To address these problems, we developed a user-first content plan. First, we verified the intent of all the most important keywords. In the complete guide in my link, you’ll see screenshots of how the team and I used tools like Ahrefs to find everything we needed for the next step. We analyzed content types, structures, and gaps using what we knew about the keywords. I used ChatGPT for a significant part of this step. My prompts and outputs for collecting this information are in my guide. I also provide the complete steps I used to have the content crawled with Google’s Indexing API as soon as possible. Beyond that, the human-centered improvements spread across the entire website. We added buttons to emphasize user actions and placed well-located CTAs everywhere, from the footer to the meta descriptions. I think the quality and variety of CTAs are hugely important to our results here, so I also went into plenty of additional detail about how to design more effective ones. At the end of 12 months, organic traffic grew by 3,773.46% from 1,040 to 40,284 monthly sessions. This is also true for the site’s overall keyword visibility. They’re now ranking for 10,792 keywords within the top 100 positions. This is also true for the site’s overall keyword visibility. They’re now ranking for 10,792 keywords within the top 100 positions. Check out the complete guide for tips on how you can do this yourself. Next, a somber video has attracted a lot of attention in the SEO community. It’s the heartfelt plea of an independent site owner who feels trapped by recent Google decisions. Google Is Killing Us (& Other Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup — May 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

4/22/2024

Matt Diggity You won’t want to miss this roundup covering the changes that have come down through the end of March and early April. A huge update has landed, and SEOs have learned many new ways to make the most of AI. The three biggest stories of the month come first. You’ll get a look into the SEO strategies of the biggest digital goliaths, an analysis of the Google Core Update in 2024, and a message directly from Google about the future of spam policies Following the top stories, you’ll find other popular releases from last month that competitive SEOs cannot afford to miss. They have advice on building better backlinks, developing better content with AI, and recovering in case the update hits you. Let’s jump in! Detailed Q3: Analysing The SEO Playbook of Digital Goliaths In-Depth, Every Quarter https://detailed.com/q3/ Tag: Guide Glen Allsopp brings you this look at the SEO strategies of the internet’s biggest players. According to Glen, SEO is undergoing some of the biggest shifts he’s seen throughout his career. He tracks some of these shifts through some summaries of the latest moves by large companies making moves. In the first summary, Glen covers the success of NextDoor’s 300,000 pages of AI-generated content. He tracks how the content has performed since the company launched it and finds that the news is quite good. The content was attracting over 150,000 readers a month when last measured. In another summary, he covers Fortune.com’s 25% YoY growth. A significant increase in organic search traffic has helped the website reach 46.8M users worldwide in the most recent quarter. Throughout the rest of his report, Glen provides detailed summaries of the moves of almost a dozen more major players, including Chegg, Planet Sport, Valet, and M.O.B.A. You’ll learn how these companies managed accomplishments, including buyouts, new tech rollouts, and millions of dollars in revenue for their efforts. Check out his complete guide to get pages of SEO analysis. However, remember that everyone’s strategies may change in the next quarter to accommodate the latest Google Core Update. In the next piece, you’ll get a video review of what you need to know. Google Core Update 2024: Is SEO Dead? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoS-zXSeqs4 Tag: News/Discussion Julian Goldie brings you his rundown of the most recent core update. He takes you through the sites and owners who were affected, what it may mean for the future of AI content, and what it may mean for the future of AI content. He starts by looking at some of the sites that were hit. He notes that, unlike some recent updates, AI content does not appear to be getting the special attention it got from the last update. Julian then looks at some examples of affected sites and notes that human-created content is being targeted.  Next, he discusses some reactions from site owners who were hit. He names Niche Site Lady, Jackie Chow, Jesse Cunningham, and others reporting their experiences on Twitter, Reddit, and other SEO hubs. Julian was himself targeted in this update and had an interesting experience that he discusses in this video. He claims that of all the sites in his GSC, the only ones affected were the ones he owns. Is Google targeting SEOs by name rather than using algorithms to manage practices? Julian isn’t sure, but he names many other SEO influencer site owners who saw all of their sites hit. Julian also covers his thoughts on the future of AI content after this update. He argues that AI content has a place and is only becoming better at what it does. However, he has decided to stop publishing a lot of his strategy pieces publicly in response to what he’s faced. Check out the complete video for more analysis on the Google Core Update, and how it may affect sites that are using some of the latest AI technology. For now, you’re ready to jump into Google’s own rare statement about its intentions for web creators going forward. What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies Tag: News/Discussion The Google Search Central Blog brings you this look at their plans for the March Core Update. They let you know that this is one of the most complex updates to come down in years, with changes to multiple core systems. The changes include an evolution in how the helpfulness of content is judged. The number of signals that point to helpful content have been expanded and elaborated so that the new systems can reinforce one another. What do all these new systems mean for you? Google claims that content creators already making ‘satisfying content for people’ have nothing to do. For others, Google has announced many new policies covering a wide swathe of spam. The three new spam policies cover expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse, and site reputation abuse. Expired domain abuse is the manipulation of Search rankings through the purchase and repurposing of once high-reputation sites for low-value content. Google intends to target this abuse more effectively now. Scaled content abuse occurs when many nearly identical pages are created for the purpose of manipulating search. Google claims the update now allows for better detection of these sites. The new restrictions on site reputational abuse target large publishers who allow spammy 3rd-party content to be hosted on their sites without reviewing the value for readers. Google has recently expanded its spam policies page to be clearer about all of these violations. For now, you’re ready to move to learn how you can build high-value links far more effectively. How To Get DR 90 Links (Easily) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLVxdA6L8vQ Tag: Guide Mark of The Authority Hacker channel offers this look at how you can attract high-value links without ever needing to beg for a link exchange.  The force behind this strategy is one simple word: “statistics.” As Mark puts it, content creators constantly seek statistics to reinforce their points or add extra credibility to a claim. Results that supply desirable statistics based on a niche term can draw in some high-value links. One issue with this strategy is that these terms are often competitive. Mark suggests some ways to build content that out-competes the results already competing for these terms. He recommends that you— He provides you with a list of the steps that Mark and his team followed to create, post, and collect on the unique data that you create. Check out the full video to learn the steps and some tips that can help you use this strategy more effectively. You’re ready to move to the next big piece for the month. It’s a data study that examines what happened to all the sites that were hit by the September update (hint: nothing good). Report: No Site Hit By The September Helpful Content Update Recovered Yet https://www.seroundtable.com/google-helpful-content-recovery-core-update-37095.html Tag: Case Study Barry Schwartz brings you this SEO-community-led investigation into how sites have recovered since the September 2023 Helpful Content Update. Barry’s networks were not reporting any recovery, and some reported that visibility was worsening. This was backed up by data when Glenn Gabe posted his own data. He had tracked over 200 sites that were originally hit and found that not a single one had recovered before the latest update. Glenn looked further into the issue and found that the changes were impacting sites that were outside the HCU classifier. He speculates (but doubts) that these sites will receive a reprieve from the latest update. Any hope for sites that were hit may come with the new content signals being packed into the update. When these new signals are fully implemented, sites that were hit in the past may get content reevaluated with more comprehensive standards. However, site owners can’t overlook the possibility that the new signals may be even more judgemental of their content than the previous system. Humanizing your content will be key to delivering a better experience for readers. Next, you’ll learn the steps I use to humanize my ChatGPT content. How I “Humanize” ChatGPT AI Content… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWCAVBXhcbU Tag: Guide Humanization of content is a major issue for me currently. To balance the scale that LLMs provide and the quality required by Google, you need ChatGPT (or other tools of your choice) to deliver content that sounds more human.  I tested prompts for days to find a set that delivered more human content, and I tested them with my audience to understand how they appeared to outside readers. What I learned can be broken into several stages. First, I built in “personas.” I wanted prompts to deliver content that sounds like a specific person (for example, me). I trained ChatGPT to sound like me by having it analyze my old writing based on many factors. Then, I asked it to produce new content based on what it identified. A majority of the testers felt this content sounded human. This strategy has some starting limits. For example, a tool may be able to reproduce Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup — April 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

4/8/2024

Matt Diggity Through the numerous core algorithm updates announced over the past few years (most recently in March 2024), Google has made it clear that its focus is on rewarding websites with helpful, user-first content. This means that if your website doesn’t think of your target audience first, you’ll struggle to rank. In this case study, you’ll learn how my team at The Search Initiative grew our client’s organic traffic by 3,773.46% from 1,040 to 40,284 monthly sessions by adopting a client-customized, user-first SEO strategy and implementing some out-of-the-box tactics. In this case study, you’ll learn how to: If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. First, though, here’s some background about the site we worked on and the main challenges that we overcame during the campaign. The Challenge The client operates in the medical niche, offering a range of drug rehabilitation services and treatments, targeting the UK, Australia and the U.S.A. The main objective of the campaign was to improve the rankings for these service-based search terms, which are more likely to convert than informational queries. One of the main challenges was that the client’s key landing pages (i.e. the service pages) were missing out on ranking for key service-related keywords. This was due to the content not aligning with the user’s search intent for the target search term. This required analyzing the search intent for the keywords and then improving the landing pages on the site so that they aligned with what Google (and searchers) were looking for. Having created a bunch of new pages, it was important that Google crawled and indexed these URLs as quickly as possible. To help speed up this process, we used Google’s Indexing API and a plugin to crawl the new content on the site within a few hours of publishing. This is an easy process that can significantly reduce the waiting time for new content to be indexed by Google and appear in search results. Thanks to our efforts, the client had already started to rank for informational queries. However, their existing blog posts had no calls to action, which encouraged users to browse the key landing pages on the website or contact them. This was a missed opportunity to increase conversions, so we focused on optimizing the blog posts and the newly created landing pages with CTAs to drive more conversions. Finally, to build the site’s online presence, we focused our link-building efforts by using the client’s expertise in the industry to produce informational white papers that attracted backlinks organically. Find out how you can overcome these challenges for your website by following the steps below. User-First Content Plan If the content on a web page doesn’t align with what your intended audience is looking for, it won’t rank. It’s important to ensure that you’re providing users with the right content that will satisfy their search intent for their target keywords. How to Check User Search Intent Below, you will learn how to check search intent for a web page using a new Ahrefs feature and AI. But first, here’s a quick breakdown of the four main types of search intents: Informational Intent: Users are looking for information or answers to questions. They are in the research phase and might not be ready to make a purchase or take action yet. They’re simply seeking knowledge e.g. “How to make coffee” Navigational Intent: Users are trying to reach a specific website or page. They already have a destination in mind and use the search engine to get there more quickly e.g. “Starbucks menu” Commercial Intent: Users are considering a purchase or a specific action in the near future but are still in the process of researching and comparing options. They’re not quite ready to buy yet but are closer to making a decision than those with purely informational intent e.g. “Best coffee machines 2024” Transactional Intent: Users with transactional intent are ready to make a purchase or perform a specific action. They have completed their research and have decided on what they want e.g. “Buy Nespresso Vertuo capsules” Each of these intents requires a different approach in content creation and SEO strategy to effectively meet the needs of the user at their specific stage of the search journey. For example, if you’re targeting a keyword like “best coffee machines,” where the searcher is looking for reviews and comparisons, but you’re serving up a page that sells coffee machines, then the intent doesn’t match. Not only will Google not like the user signals that your content creates, but as a result, the potential client will leave your page in order to get a better answer to their query – from someone else. Chances are that when they’re ready to buy, they are going to go to the expert who gave them valuable information in the first place, not back to your sales page. Before running the checks, you’ll first need to identify a target keyword that you want to rank for so that you can grab the top-ranking competing pages (for ChatGPT). For this, you can grab the URLs by directly searching for your target keyword in Google. Ahrefs The tool automatically analyzes the search intent and types of content that the top-ranking competing pages have included. In the example, 57% of the users are looking for: “Guides on Growing Roses from Cuttings”. The top-ranking pages have included comprehensive guides and tutorials on how to successfully grow roses from cuttings. This is a quick way to find out what type of content you should consider including within your own web page. ChatGPT-4 You can also use ChatGPT-4 to understand and analyze the content fetched by WebPilot from a specific web page. “Use WebPilot to fetch content from [Competing Page URL] and analyze the user intent of its content. I want you to tell me: Content format (options are: blog post, guide, landing page, service page, category page, product page, homepage) Content Length Detail amount (score this out of 10, where 10 is very detailed and 1 is not detailed). Search intent (options: informational, navigational, commercial investigation, transactional) The heading structure How much rich media is used (this includes images, tables, videos etc). Here’s an example of the prompt being used for an informational article about growing roses from cuttings: And here’s an example of an output for a product page: You can now use the information provided by Ahrefs or ChatGPT to create the content for your own web page. Optimizing Content to Address Search Intent Having identified the search intent of your target keyword(s) and page(s), it’s time to optimize your existing content so that it aligns with what your audience is looking for. All of the below points have been integrated into the above prompt, but here’s some more context which explains why you should pay close attention to them: Analyze Content Types Analyze Content Structure Identify Gaps and Opportunities Following the above steps will ensure that the content on your website is optimized with the end user in mind. Google’s Indexing API Once you’ve created new content or adjusted old content, you want them to be crawled and indexed by Google as soon as possible, so that they can rank as soon as possible. There are several ways to help encourage Google’s crawlers to discover your content, but I’ll show you one of the most effective and efficient ways of getting your pages crawled and indexed by Google using its Indexing API. And it’s easier than you think to use. What is Google’s Indexing API? The Indexing API is a tool that allows you to directly let Google know when you want pages to be added or removed from its index. This notifies Google to schedule your pages for a fresh crawl, which can lead to higher-quality user traffic. That’s what the focus of this case study will be on, but you can also use the Indexing API to: It’s worth noting that Google says that the Indexing API can currently only be used to “crawl pages with either JobPosting or BroadcastEvent embedded in a VideoObject”; however, our tests (and many others) have successfully crawled and indexed all kinds of pages. I’ll show you how to use the Indexing API with RankMath’s WordPress plugin, but you can also use the API with any other CMS or framework. How to Configure the Indexing API Let’s start by configuring the Indexing API. You’ve now configured the Indexing API. How to Use the Indexing API With RankMath Our client’s website runs on WordPress, so we installed the RankMath SEO plugin which includes a feature dedicated to using the Indexing API, it’s called Instant Indexing. For example, if you select “Blog Posts”, then every time you create and publish a new post, the plugin will trigger an API call to Google’s Indexing API. This is how it should look when fully configured. And within hours, your page should appear in Google’s index. In our experience, Read More Read More The post Case Study: A User-First SEO Strategy That Generated +3700% More Traffic in first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

3/25/2024

Matt Diggity Reddit will have its content used for more results than ever before and will likely enjoy some traffic growth thanks to increased visibility. Reddit is also receiving access to Google’s Vertex AI platform and plans to use that access to improve search on its own platform. March is going to be a huge month for SEO. Changes are coming for search results and AI and the community has picked up some exciting new tricks following the last round of updates. This roundup will help you catch up. My big three stories of the month are featured first. The set includes a big case study into the sites winning & losing Google updates and a dive into a content deal between Google and Reddit. Then, you’ll read one of my favorite think pieces of the month, “How Google is Killing Independent Sites Like Ours.” After that, you’ll find more SEO stories from the last month that I think are too good to miss. You’ll learn about recent signs of an incoming rank update, a deep investigation into forum & discussion sites, big changes in featured snippets, and more. Winning & Losing Big Google Updates: 50-Site Case Study Tag: Case Study https://zyppy.com/seo/google-update-case-study/ Cyrus Shepard brings you this look at the on-page factors most associated with big gains or declines during the last series of Google updates. Releases from Google appeared to suggest that “removing unhelpful content” was the most important step of recovery, but website owners found that advice spotty at best. By looking deeper at the winners and losers, Cyrus hoped to get a clearer picture of what was driving traffic changes. The sites that he chose for this case study were mostly all content sites. He collected 2,500 data points regarding UX and on-page elements. This data created some fascinating correlations. Some elements were strongly associated with improvement during a Google update. Here are some examples of the page elements that were most likely to bring good attention— Some elements were highly associated with traffic drops when updates landed. These omens of doom included features like— Make sure you check out the complete case study for more data about favored and unfavored factors. For now, you’ll want to learn about a huge deal that Google recently made with Reddit to show more of that site’s content than ever before. Google Announces Deal To Show More Reddit Content Tag: News https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-announces-deal-to-show-more-reddit-content/509132/ Roger Montti brings you this look at a huge content deal that Google signed with Reddit. The deal is expected to increase visibility for Reddit discussions on search engines and other Google products. For their part in the deal, Google will gain access to a much wider range of Reddit content it can use to improve how language models understand human conversation and writing styles. Besides being vast, the information offered by Reddit is already structured in a way that can ease machine understanding. Reddit will have its content used for more results than ever before and will likely enjoy some traffic growth thanks to increased visibility. Reddit is also receiving access to Google’s Vertex AI platform and plans to use that access to improve search on its own platform. SEOs have expressed concern over the deal. Some are worried that Reddit will now be able to muscle out longstanding and high-quality sites for thousands of keywords. Some have argued this will cause searchers to be presented with more spam as reddit deals with its own spam problems in these answers. The true consequences for SEO remain to be seen as the deal has just been signed. Watch future roundups for more analysis and research on this issue. For now, check out a plea from an independent site that is feeling choked out by this and similar moves from Google. How Google Is Killing Independent Sites Like Ours Tag: Opinion/Discussion https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/ Gisele Navarro and Danny Ashton of the site Housefresh, bring you this in-depth explanation of how Google’s moves in the product review niche are killing sites and leaving consumers with worse reviews from top publishers. In an early example, the authors show how the same publishers (see the article for a helpful graphic and complete list) show up at the top of search results with a startling regularity. Huge general “content” sites like Buzzfeed, Forbes, and Better Homes & Gardens have dominated results for highly specific long-tail terms. The authors point out that nearly all top publishing sites have articles dealing with “the best air purifiers for pet hair” and the “best sheets for hot sleepers.” Despite dominating for these terms, these sites produce content far below the quality of most competitive review sites. Huge publishers don’t seem to be subject to the same rules and often rank highly for reviews without providing evidence of firsthand testing. The authors showed several examples of top-ranking review content that simply includes words like “testing” and “lab” but didn’t provide any verifying details. The problems didn’t stop there. There was rampant evidence of spam from major results, which is harder to detect because it is being provided under the names of 150-year-old publishing mastheads. The authors note that the recent updates do not address this problem. Even the big Product Review Update of 2021 did not appear to leave a dent in the power of large publishers. The write-up closes on a bleak note. Unless something is done, there is little point in pursuing reviews as an independent enthusiast willing to do the research. Users are going to be left with far worse expertise as a result. How Google will react to frustration from these and other site owners remains to be seen. However, there is evidence that changes are coming soon for search. SEOs have spotted the signs of a coming ranking update. Early Signs: Google Search Ranking Update on March 28 & 29th Tag: News https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-update-feb-28-29-36977.html Barry Schwartz brings you this look at the signs of a ranking update that showed up near the end of February. Many third-party tools detected volatility around this time, with some of the same patterns that have marked the arrival of updates in the past. You can see the full news report for the tools and graphs of the data they collected. As Barry points out, Google has not confirmed an update in more than 16 weeks now. Several unannounced updates are believed to have arrived in that time, including one that took place the weekend of Feb 24-25th. Barry recorded a significant amount of chatter from SEOs talking about major changes. Some recorded losses as high as 40% of traffic, while others reported smaller—but still lingering—traffic losses. The lack of communication is somewhat odd because Google announced the possibility of a major update all the way back in November. While Google is rarely precise about schedules, the long wait does seem to suggest some behind-the-scenes indecision. The early shocks recorded here may well be the first evidence of the coming update. When it arrives, you can expect to find it high up in an upcoming roundup. Next, you’ll get a deeper dive into discussion forums to expand on what you learned from one of our top pieces. The Discussion Forums Dominating 10,000 Product Review Search Results Tag: Research https://detailed.com/forum-serps/ Glen Allsopp brings you this look at the emerging major SEO player: Discussion & Forum Sites. Now that Google is increasingly giving prominence to these sites (ranking for more than 7.7 thousand of 10,000 product review phrases), Glen set out to understand them. He started by seeking to answer questions like these— Throughout his research, he seeks to answer them all. The tests involved using product review terms like “best electric toothbrush” and “fastest external SSD” and monitoring the appearance of discussion forums in the top rankings. This kind of monitoring produced some impressive insights. For one, he discovered very little diversity with these results. Reddit is far and away the largest “forum” on the internet. Not only did Reddit show up more than 97% of the time for these keywords, it often appeared more than once! Reddit wasn’t the only discussion site for product review terms to be double-billed. Quora was also able to show up multiple times for thousands of terms. As he points out— “Reddit and Quora were listed 18,095 times. Every other domain appeared 4,989 times in total. In other words, these two domains have more than 3X the presence of every other site combined.” Glen argues that Google’s Product reviews are now among the worst he’s ever seen. In many examples, he shows that Google appears to over-promote Reddit even when the results are going to spam comments. Check out the guide for a detailed look at the state of forum and discussion sites and how they dominate searches even when they aren’t delivering the best experience. Next, there’s some more research about how Google may be undermining results in a different way. How One Google Featured Snippet Is Killing Commercial List-Based Content Tag: Research https://searchengineland.com/how-one-google-featured-snippet-is-killing-commercial-list-based-content-437995 Lazarina Stoy brings Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup — March 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

2/26/2024

Matt Diggity Don’t miss February’s roundup if AI’s impact on SEO has been on your mind. Many of this month’s pieces deal directly with AI and how it is advancing and being optimized. Catch up now so you don’t fall behind. The guides are first. You’ll learn more effective ways to use AI, what big changes to Assistant mean for search, and how to rank quickly with entity AI SEO. The case studies and experiments are next. You’ll see what the data says about growing traffic without SEO, how a company generated 400k+ in revenue with money keywords, and how to most effectively block content from appearing in Google searches. The roundup closes on the SEO and AI news and discussions you shouldn’t miss. You’ll get the latest headlines about changes to core web vitals, examples of how Google grades content from a live audit, and some reasons AI-generated content may rank over original news. ChatGPT for SEO? You’re Using It Wrong https://ahrefs.com/blog/youre-using-chatgpt-wrong/ Joshua Hardwick brings you this piece about making the most of ChatGPT (or other generative text tools you may prefer). He argues that many SEOs aren’t using these tools to their full potential due to some common mistakes. Throughout this guide, he identifies these mistakes and provides some advice for overcoming them. For example, he discusses the mistake of asking AI tools questions they can’t answer. If you ask an AI to provide data only available through analytical tools, you will likely get a bad answer with flawed data. He provides tips for developing prompts that allow the AI to provide more helpful answers. Joshua also argues that asking an AI tool to simply write an article is a mistake. He recommends a different approach where you provide guidance and solicit ideas over several prompts to generate more elaborate responses. Check out the full guide for more tips on how to make the most of AI tools. Joshua addresses other mistakes and how to overcome them. For now, Assistant and Search. Did Google Just Quietly Launch a New Search Ecosystem? https://www.mariehaynes.com/assistant-and-search-did-google-just-quietly-launch-a-new-search-ecosystem/ Marie Haynes introduces you to some changes being made to Google Assistant, which may affect how users search for your site. Google published a blog post with the changes. Marie summarizes the major details: “The microphone icon will now trigger Search Results” from within the Google app…also…the microphone in the Pixel Search bar will now activate Voice Search instead of Assistant.” Marie argues that these changes make voice search a much more important feature. She points out that Assistant delivers websites (in addition to other sources) in response to spoken queries. Throughout the rest of the guide, Marie explains how Google Assistant works and delivers results. She takes you through what users see when they make commercial and non-commercial searchers. Several helpful images are provided to help you. She also reminds you that Bard is coming to Assistant soon. These and other changes may lead to an overhaul of the entire search ecosystem. Marie closes with some theories on where Assistant may go from here and how its capabilities are already evolving. Check out the complete guide to start preparing for a big voice search transition. Next, you’ll learn some tips you can put to use right now to rank more effectively. Entity AI SEO: How I Rank #1 In 10 Hours (Semantic ChatGPT Workflow) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1I_GgJJ7F4 Julian Goldie brings you this video explanation of how he was able to rank in only hours with entities using AI. For the guide, he uses ChatGPT and Autoblogging AI, but you can do the same with your AI tool of choice. The compact 12-minute video includes all the steps you’ll need to follow for your own ranking experience. Julian starts with a helpful explanation of entities and explains how you can differentiate them from related concepts like keywords and LSI. Once you’re caught up with all the definitions, he guides you through the process that he uses to create entity-focused content with AI. He uses his preferred tool for these steps but explains all the principles of what he’s doing so that you can apply them to any tool. As he’s going through the steps, he gives you an inside look into how he evaluates and modifies the first drafts that he’s given by tools. You’ll get some good advice on pruning AI results that you can use in almost any project. Check out the full video to get a great introduction to entities and how content can be used to target them. For now, you’re ready to move on to the case studies. First, you’ll be looking at one of my most recent experiments. It’s an SEO experiment…without any standard SEO. How I Grew Traffic 37.9% on Google, Without doing SEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DgWUgtZGqQ I was able to achieve a 40% increase in users and a 37% increase in sessions without using traditional SEO. I didn’t create optimized content or links as part of this experiment. I also didn’t use AI. I still achieved over 800 referring domains, including Microsoft and Google.  My agency did this through “programmatic SEO.” You’ve seen this before, most likely on real estate websites or other nationwide businesses with local fronts (such as hotels). Thousands of pages are generated to supply a home page to each region. The case study involved a software client not ranking for any keywords beyond their own brand name. We built thousands of programmatically-generated pages to cater to each location where they did business. As I show in my video, travel, and currency conversion tools do this regularly and generate millions of visitors. Before the video continues, I will give you a breakdown of the pros and cons of using this process. The pros can be compelling, including the potential to draw significantly more links from all sources. The video takes you through all of the steps I followed to generate programmatic pages for my client. I describe how I found the scalable keywords I needed, how to recognize head terms and modifiers for your content, and how to base your pages on search intent. I’ll also show you how I use various accessible tools like Google Sheets to create better-generated content for programmatic pages and how I help Google identify all these new pages. This isn’t a technical process at all, but as you’ll see, the results were impressive.In the next case study of the month, you’ll see how SEO changes can be reflected in revenue. How Cognism Generated $441K in Revenue With Money Keywords https://moz.com/blog/money-keywords Joe Barron shows how one SEO strategy generated nearly $450k for one company with declining traffic and ranking. Joe’s team decided to move forward with money keywords and were surprised at the results. Before he jumps into his process, he describes some of the changes in how his team thought about strategy. Previously, they focused on top-of-funnel keywords. However, this generated too much traffic that didn’t act when arriving on the page. Joe’s team transitioned from educational content to what he calls converting content. He defines these as keywords people only use when they want to buy something. He lays out the steps his team followed in choosing these keywords and how to recognize the business potential in each one. Once the keywords were chosen, Joe’s team went through several other steps, including publishing the content and optimizing for conversions. Joe describes how this change in strategy required his team to think far more about off-page SEO than they had in the past. He discusses how his team drove backlinks in several different ways. He also lays out the criteria they used to choose good sites. The results of the experiment were impressive. Page views increased by 72.1%, and our average engagement time increased by 13.6% from 2022 — 2023. The tested pages generated 832, and 242 deals. Of those 242 deals, 53 were closed-won, generating $441k in revenue. How to Use Data-Nosnippet to Block Specific Content From Being Used in a Google Search Snippet [Experiment] https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/how-to-use-data-nosnippet/ Glenn Gabe brings you this in-depth experiment into blocking content for being featured in search snippets. As he explains, he has been receiving a lot of messages from website owners who are displeased with the snippet Google has chosen to represent their site. He argues that though this is a problem, there are ways that site owners can effectively limit what content is used to generate a snippet. He runs an experiment to demonstrate how effectively this can be done with the data-nosnippet tool. As he explains, you can use the data-nosnippet attribute on any div, span, or section html element. The experiment started with a page that had a meta description but showed other content in the snippet. He added a span tag in the HTML containing the text used to craft the search snippet. A data-nosnippet attribute was then added to that span tag. He provides some helpful screenshots and other images to guide you through the process of blocking content on your own. See Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup — February 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

1/22/2024

Matt Diggity Jump into the new year with the biggest stories in SEO. This roundup covers AI, SEO heists, and big hints from Google about what’s coming next. First, you’ll review some recent data, analysis, and case studies. You’ll learn some new SGE insights, find out what tests revealed about removing meta descriptions, and learn whether the “SEO heist” we discussed in the last roundup was worth it. Next, you’ll find some guides to help you develop more effective SEO. They’ll teach you what to expect from SGE and Generative AI and how SGE will likely impact your organic traffic going forward. At the end, you’ll find some of the top news stories of the new year. It’s all about Google’s latest moves, including phasing out third-party cookies, the company’s response to a massive spam attack, and removing the previously posted SGE end date. New Google SGE insights: Content formats, YMYL, product views https://searchengineland.com/new-google-sge-insights-content-formats-ymyl-product-views-435849 Danny Goodwin brings you a trove of data covering Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE). This feature represents a huge shift in Google’s search capabilities and has already started driving some changes in some vertices. Danny introduces you to some of the changes revealed in a recent study. For example, SGE is now showing up for 84% of all searches. When it does show up, it most often takes the form of an opt-in option where users can voluntarily request an AI-generated answer. SGE is also showing up in some very predictable formats. 48% of the time, it appears as an ordered list. An unordered list appears about 38% of the time, and a product-view result appears about 8% of the time for product queries specifically. Google has also implemented some SGE warnings for YMYL results. Answers may include warnings about results not being age-appropriate, not representing legal, medical, or financial advice, or possibly dangerous. Product views are yet another area where Google is experimenting heavily. For products, Google provides SGE-related listings, carousel groupings for multiple preferences, and value cards for specific products. Check out the entire article for more analysis and links to the research. Generated meta descriptions have been another major part of Google’s AI adoption. In the next article, you’ll find out what happens when you remove the ones you’ve created. Does Removing Meta Descriptions Improve Click-Through Rates? https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/case-studies/removing-meta-descriptions Noe Servin brings you this look at a recent Search Pilot study. The study involved removing all listed meta descriptions over the recommended character limit from an e-commerce site, even from pages that had carried those descriptions for a long time. This allowed Google to rewrite them based on the page content autonomously. Search Pilot opened the test with a quiz of their followers. The polled SEOs didn’t agree much with the results. 42% believed the test would have inconclusive results, while the rest were split between the view the test would have positive or negative results. The results of the test showed that there was an average 4.2% increase in monthly organic sessions when the descriptions were removed, and Google’s generated descriptions were allowed to assert themselves. Ultimately, Search Pilot recommended the client to move forward with applying these changes to all applicable pages based on the result. Check out the complete study for more information about the test and its results. Next, you’ll look back at the recent SEO heist with AI content, and how it is playing out from the perspective of experts. An Agency Used AI to Pull an “SEO Heist”: Was It Worth It? We Asked Experts https://blog.hubspot.com/ai/seo-heist Curt del Principe brings you this biting analysis of how one agency founder used generative AI to pull off a heist that stole 3.6 million in traffic from a competitor. Curt asked experts to give their view of what happened, whether it is (as some critics call it) “the death rattle of the internet.” You can grab the backstory for this heist from our last roundup or read this full piece to get an idea of what happened. For now, you just need to know that the heist involved downloading a competitor’s sitemap, turning all URLs into blog titles, and using those titles as AI prompts to produce thousands of pieces of content. As Curt admits, this did work for a surprising amount of time. The site achieved significant growth over more than a year. According to Google, this shouldn’t be able to happen. The Google team has many times alluded to algorithms that catch and punish derivative content. They were effective at diminishing spun content sites in the early 2000s. He theorizes that the algorithms didn’t work this time because new AI articles have a different construction than old spun articles. The heist didn’t involve stealing the competitor’s content, just the subjects of that content. Some experts were asked whether this agency created a “black hat roadmap” for SEO. Some agreed that was a reasonable worry. If AI content can perform at the same level as human content, it could easily crowd out human-created content.  However, the experts Curt polled are skeptical that this will remain a problem. As they point out, hundreds of effective tricks for gaming Google have come and been squashed. They also pointed out that the original writeup of the heist didn’t cover conversion data, which may have been significantly lower than the traffic alone suggested. How Google will deal with issues like these remains to be seen, but check out the complete piece for more analysis. For now, let’s jump into the month’s guides, starting with an idea of what to expect from SGE in 2024. Google SGE And Generative AI In Search: What To Expect In 2024 https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-sge-and-generative-ai-in-search-what-to-expect-in-2024/504578/ Kristi Hines brings you this look at the evolving landscape of AI and how you may need to adjust your strategies to deal with the evolving landscape of AI in search. She starts with some coverage of recent surveys suggesting that people are highly interested in AI-powered search. About a quarter of US adults already trust AI results, and a third are convinced the results are factual. Kristi believes that Google is chasing even higher levels of adoption and reminds us that Google’s CEO and other officers have described the evolution of search with generative AI as one of Google’s top priorities. New changes, including increased speed and ad placements, have already been announced. Google also focuses on new features that drive organic search traffic to websites. Advertisers have already been told that they can expect native ad formats for SGE, greater connectivity with Bard, and more. Kristi notes that based on Google’s statements and actions, local searches may be a big focus. One-third of SGE results already include local packs. Overall, Kristi argues that SGE is here to stay. Far from a temporary project, it may be one of the most important parts of Google’s search results going forward. However, she also argues that there is a high potential for SGE results to push down organic results like featured snippets did. She argues that there are steps that SEOs should take to be better prepared, and makes some predictions, including: Make sure you check out her full article for more analysis of Google’s statements and how SEOs can prepare. For now, let’s dive more into one specific topic that she covers: GEMini, and its implications for the future of AI. Hidden Gemini: Google Is “Humanizing” the Search Results to Protect Itself Against the AI Storm https://www.growth-memo.com/p/hidden-gemini Kevin Indig brings you this look at how Google is attempting to humanize search results to protect itself against some of the consequences of the incoming AI storm. Google has already launched a system called “Hidden Gem.” This system is designed to find and boost content in forums and blog posts that have proven helpful to readers but have not been given a normal chance to rank. Kevin believes that this will target content that has good user engagement but has struggled on domains without strong authority. As he points out, we have already seen some effects of this policy, with sites like Reddit and Quora appearing for more searches. Kevin argues that one of the biggest benefits of boosting forums is that many of them already impose user verification in some form. By promoting forums, Google can rest on the work these forums already do to verify users rather than try to handle verification itself. He believes that the conversation offered by forums provides value that goes beyond what an LLM can produce. As he points out, forum conversations aren’t just frank answers, they can be funny, sympathetic, or provided by experts with a long history of good standing in the community. Kevin has some ideas for how you can leverage hidden gems for growth. He recommends collaborating with gems through paid influencer campaigns, creating or buying profiles on top forums. He also recommends starting your own community. Check out the complete guide for more tips on using hidden gems. In the final guide for the month, you’ll get a Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—January 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

1/15/2024

Matt Diggity What if I told you there’s an SEO tactic that allows you to create hundreds of thousands of high quality pages at scale and at a fraction of the cost of doing so manually? Welcome to Programmatic SEO. In this case study, you’ll learn how my team at The Search Initiative grew our client’s organic traffic by 38% sessions. This was achieved by adopting a programmatic approach to SEO. Instead of hiring writers, we designed a single page template and let programming do the rest, creating 500 pages.. On top of this, the site received links from over 700 referring domains including industry heavyweights like Oracle and Google – without us doing any link building ourselves. In this case study, you’ll learn how to: If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. Before that, here’s some more information about our clients goals and the main challenges that we overcame during the campaign. The Challenge The client operates in the software industry, offering a platform to secure and manage open source development for processes that involve custom combinations of tools and platforms. The client didn’t have any visibility for keywords that would make them money which meant that there was a large pool of lucrative keywords that were missed out on. Ranking one or two new pages wasn’t going to cut it. So we created a long-term plan on how to attain tens of thousands of keywords and without manual effort optimizing each page… programmatically. Find out how you can overcome these challenges for your website by following the steps below. Generating Content Through Programmatic SEO Traditional SEO focuses on enhancing a website’s search engine visibility through high-quality content and keyword-centric landing pages and blogs. In most cases, it’s a perfect way of building keywords, links, and mentions, as long as your content is well-crafted and adds value to the end user. But what if there was a way to do this at scale? What is Programmatic SEO? Programmatic SEO (often referred to as pSEO) involves creating landing pages at scale through automation with the aim of ranking them on the search results pages. Each page is uniform, targets a single unique keyword and is created using automated tools and a database. You’ve probably already used websites that have created pages in this way. Real estate websites, eCommerce sites, and even content sites (examples below) have been using this method to pass information from one system to another, allowing them to create thousands of properties or product pages populated with data from suppliers with generated titles, headings, images, descriptions etc. Here’s an example on Realtor.com. If you were to search “houses for sale in [location]”, you’re likely going to find the following kind of pages in the results. Los Angeles New York Note how the layout of each of these pages is identical, but the content (i.e. the properties) change. A quick Google search reveals that there are 19,495 cities, towns and villages in the USA. Realtor.com can’t possibly create a page for every location manually. Instead, they use programmatic SEO. What’s the Difference Between Traditional & Programmatic SEO? Although the goal of both of these is the same, to grow organic traffic, the difference lies in how this is achieved. Traditional SEO focuses on growing search visibility over a long period of time with a focus on producing high-quality, unique content that targets higher competition keywords. Programmatic SEO achieves the same goal, but at a quicker pace as you’re creating multiple pages with an identical layout at scale from a database, templates and automation. In most cases, if your template takes a page and duplicates it, only changing just the keyword – that sucks for users and will likely also get penalized by Google for having large amounts of duplicate content. However, if you use a template to create thousands of products and generate helpful content that accurately describes the specific product, you’re creating value to the user, which is what Google is looking for. However, when it comes to local SEO you do indeed get a free pass and only need to change the city name in order to be “unique enough”. Example Uses of Programmatic SEO Apart from real estate websites like Realtor.com, here are some other examples where websites have employed programmatic SEO to build their pages. Informational Sites Informational sites like Nomad List use programmatic SEO to help users find the best places to live, work and travel. The site takes data about things like cost of living, internet speeds etc for places around the world and produces landing pages in a way that is easy to understand and read. The site is essentially taking readily available data and repurposing it to provide valuable insights to its audience. Directories and Workflow Apps Zapier, a workflow automation tool that integrates thousands of applications and tools, programmatically made landing pages for every single tool they work with showing custom workflows that can be made with the unique combination of the user’s chosen tools. In the financial sector, Wise made a template for a landing page for every single currency they work with, helping their clients convert between any number of currencies. Travel Itinerary Planners Platforms like TripAdvisor and Expedia that help users plan their travel itineraries implement programmatic SEO to dynamically generate destination guides, optimize meta tags for popular attractions, and create content tailored to specific travel preferences. For example, TripAdvisor aggregates hotels based on location so that when you search for keywords like “hotels in japan” or “restaurants in london”, you’ll see pages like this: Job Portals Job search websites like Indeed or Glassdoor often use programmatic techniques to generate job listings, company profiles, and other content for search engine optimization. The template for their job listings pages remain the same. The difference here is that the content is generated by their users i.e. companies and individuals uploading the job listings to their system so that they can be displayed in the relevant listing pages. These are just a handful of examples, but regardless of your industry or size of website, you can make use of pSEO to generate pages at scale. Pros and Cons of Programmatic SEO Here are some of the advantages of Programmatic SEO: But before you commit to pSEO, here are some things you need to be aware of: Despite these disadvantages, and even if you don’t have a massive website, you can still incorporate pSEO into your SEO strategy. Read on to find out how… How to Generate Content Through Programmatic SEO Creating truly programmatic content requires data that needs to be sourced to create content for hundreds, if not thousands of pages. We’ll start by identifying keywords that you can target at scale and data sets that you can use to integrate into your content before using Google Sheets and ChatGPT to build out your web pages. Finding Scalable Keywords For programmatic SEO to be effective, you need to be able to target hundreds or thousands of similar keywords using a single page template. This requires identifying relevant keywords that have many variations that are similar. One way to do this is by entering a seed keyword relevant to your website into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool. For example, if you had a website about everything vegan, you might use terms like “vegan restaurants”. Then click on the Matching Terms report, which shows an expanded list of possible keywords related to the seed keyword. Top tip: consider refining the search results by adjusting the Keyword Difficulty to less than 20 and the Domain Rating (DR) of top-ranking sites to less than 30. This filter will show keywords that are easier to rank for, even with limited backlinks. Identify patterns within the keywords to see which of these can be used to create pages for programmatically. In this case, many of the keywords refer to a particular location, preceded by the term “best” i.e. “best vegan restaurants in chicago”. You can do this by sorting the keywords by “Term” as opposed to “Parent Topics”. You now have 176 keywords (in the USA) that follow a similar pattern for you to create pages for. Identify Modifiers In the previous example, the keywords identified can be split into two categories: head terms and modifiers. The head term is the top-level category of the keyword that you’ll aim for i.e. best vegan restaurants. The modifier is what turns the head term into long-tail keywords (these are highly specific search terms that have lower search volumes) i.e. in chicago. Here’s another example… For a travel website, you could have the following head term and modifier combination: “things to do” + “in [location]”. You could also narrow things down further by adding a secondary modifier: “things to do” + “in [location] + “for [target audience]”. By the end of this process, you’ll have a long list of keyword variations that you can now start to generate content for. Read More Read More The post Case Study: The Programmatic SEO Approach that Got Attention from Oracle and Google first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

12/25/2023

Matt Diggity You need this month’s roundup if recent core or review updates have hit your site. It curates some of the freshest, most in-depth coverage of updates and other urgent SEO topics. The case studies are first. You’ll have plenty of data to sift through, starting with a deep dive into the impact of the Helpful Content Update. Then, you’ll find out the real size of Google’s index and see some numbers on Google Discover traffic declines. Next, you can pick up some new SEO tricks from the guides. You’ll learn how to recognize and respond to the three different SGE snapshots and how to mine Reddit for SEO insights using your favorite AI tool. You’ll also discover the results of a massive SEO “heist.” Last, you’ll get caught up on the latest news in SEO. Discover why some Google patent requests may offer clues for the future. You’ll also read the announcement closing the November Core Update and November Reviews Update. Analyzing the Long-Term Impact of Google’s Review Updates and What That Could Mean for Sites Impacted by the Helpful Content Update (HCU) https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/analyzing-long-term-impact-google-reviews-updates/ Glenn Gabe brings you this deep dive into how the HCU and other recent updates have impacted sites. For site owners who may be new to the topic, he provides a quick history of how the update has evolved and explains why you may not get any announcements of future changes. He then lays out what he’s learned about the update, using graphs of real client sites, direct statements from Google, and his analysis. His first finding was that things look bad for many review sites he’s analyzed. He describes many of them as “basically shut down.” These sites dropped by as much as 70%+ overnight and then never recovered. However, he argues that sites can recover. His review of the most affected sites found that many of them, unfortunately, had obvious reasons for being targeted. He provides some tips (backed by evidence) for how sites can lose the “not helpful” classifier through content and UX updates. Check out the complete analysis for evidence about how the review updates work and how you can stay on Google’s good side. Next, you’ll get some information that Google rarely discusses about its index size and capabilities. Google’s Index Size Revealed: 400 Billion Docs (& Changing) https://zyppy.com/seo/google-index-size/ Cyrus Shephard brings you this behind-the-scenes look at some information revealed in Google’s recent trial. As Cyrus points out, there are trillions of pages out there. Google never had or claimed the ability to deliver them all. However, they’ve never discussed how many sites were eligible for Google searches. Court documents revealed that the true size of this index was 400 billion documents. To put this in perspective, he reminds you that Wikipedia alone has 7 billion pages. The existing index includes ebooks, PDFs, and other kinds of content. The total space reserved for web pages is probably well under the reported figure. He notes that this makes Google’s index only about half the size of the Wayback Machine’s index of pages. These numbers suggest that web pages are fighting for limited space. Cyrus believes they may be fighting over even less in the future. Cyrus examines the belief that Google’s index expands over time and argues that there’s a possibility it’s shrinking instead. Google suggested in some documents that they had taken action in the past to shrink the index, and Cyrus believes they may be motivated to do it again. Check out the complete breakdown of the data for some of the reasons Cyrus expects a smaller index in the future and some of the forces he believes will be driving that change. Next, you’ll learn why so many publishing sites are struggling after the updates and what may be causing it. Traffic Declines in Google Discover, Top Stories & Google News Affect Publishers Across the Globe https://www.amsive.com/insights/seo/traffic-declines-in-google-discover-top-stories-google-news-affect-publishers-across-the-globe/ Lily surveys the damage done to the online publishing niche in the aftermath of the two broad core algorithm updates, between September and November. She notes that the chatter she is hearing from publishing site owners is bad across many different languages and regions. She was able to draw some data from an SEO community post she started. In it, you can find SEOs sharing evidence of pages that had gone from millions of clicks a month to zero by the conclusion of the updates. She also surveyed over 150 site owners to learn (among other facts in the full article) that: She breaks down her survey respondents to draw out a lot more data. She covers the kind of sites that are affected, the amount of traffic they’ve lost, and where they are located in the world, and which updates caused the issues. Check out the complete piece for a ton of other information, including some theories on what’s causing the volatility. Now, you’re ready for the guides. You’ll start by learning about SGE snapshots, and how much traffic risk you can expect from each one. The 3 Main Types of Google SGE Snapshots and Their Level of Ranked Pages Traffic Risk https://www.aleydasolis.com/en/search-engine-optimization/the-3-main-types-of-google-sge-snapshots-and-their-level-of-ranked-pages-traffic-risk/ Aleyda Solis breaks down the different SGE snapshots that may affect results in your niche and examines the possible risks that they represent to your traffic. For site owners who need to catch up, SGE snapshots are AI-generated results based on user queries. Site owners with ranked pages are concerned that these previews may replace the need for clicks (like other past Google features), or direct SGE users toward only a few sites. Alyeda describes three ways that the snapshot may behave and analyzes the risk level of each one. She covers— Check out the complete guide for more information about how each of these snapshots behave along with plenty of helpful images so you can see these snapshots in action. They may play a large role in organic search going forward. In the next guide of the month, you’ll learn how to mine Reddit for insights using generative AI programs. Build Your Keyword Tool With Python and ChatGPT: A Subreddit Insights https://moz.com/blog/build-reddit-keyword-research-tool Amin Foroutan teaches you how to set up and automate a process he’s discovered for pulling SEO data out of Reddit. He uses ChatGPT for his work, but you should be able to follow along with most other chat programs you prefer. He starts by explaining how to apply for an API key with Reddit (you’ll need it for the process to work). He also explains how to use the Notable plugin, which will be important for the process. Even if you’re not technically inclined, you should find it easy to follow the steps, and there are a lot of pictures to help. Jumping into the process, he shows you how to structure a prompt and use the tools you’ve set up to generate tons of insights for keyword research, gap analysis, and more from the most-used terms and topics on Reddit or individual subreddits. Check out the complete guide for some prompt templates, examples of results, and ideas for doing even more with the data you’ve produced. In the final guide of the month, an SEO team “steals” 3.6M traffic from a competitor and wants you to know all about it. We Pulled off an SEO Heist That Stole 3.6m Total Traffic From a Competitor https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509?s=46&t=qFIUJibFQHvKJNqpZweO-g Jake Ward tells you how he nabbed more than 3 million in traffic, including 480,000+ in October alone. The process he describes is shockingly simple. In the thread, he summarizes it as: He lays out each of the steps in more detail across the entire thread, though it doesn’t get much more difficult than that. He describes how he found the right competitor, exported the sitemap, generated article titles from the URLs alone, and then produced the content with AI. The 3.6 million count was achieved after about 18 months of work, though he argues that this process moves faster with AI tools than it did even a few months back. Check out the entire thread for more information on his process and some images and data he’s provided. Now, you’re ready to jump into the month’s top news stories. The first one covers what you can learn from Google’s latest patent. Google SGE & Generative Summaries for Search Results Patent https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-sge-generative-summaries-for-search-results-patent/502573/#close Kristi Hines takes you through Google’s latest patent, and what it can teach you about Google’s next moves. As it turns out, the patent deals with SGE and has major implications for the future of search. She covers Google patent US11769017B1. This patent is described as a “method for creating summaries of search results using large language models (LLMs).” It covers the integration of Google SGE and generative AI search summaries. The patent is highly detailed, and Kristi links to several sources where you can check out the entire application. Among other interesting reveals, it shows you how the snapshots you read about earlier work. In an included image from the patent application, you can see Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—December 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

11/30/2023

Matt Diggity Don’t miss this roundup if AI SEO and Google’s recent updates have been on your mind. The guides, case studies, and news items we’ve got for you will catch you up on everything happening. This month’s guides focus on AI and a recent change in Google’s algorithm. You’ll get tips on how to future-proof your marketing for AI, advice on how to incorporate AI chat into your SEO, and a breakdown of how to respond to a broad core update. The case studies are next. First, you’ll learn how Google changes your searches, then you’ll learn what happened to one site when they experimented with removing content. Finally, you’ll get some of the biggest SEO headlines of the past month. Google has announced another update and may have already started a different one. You’ll also learn about Google’s mobile-first indexing announcement and discover how a presidential executive order may impact your marketing tools. How to Future-Proof Your Marketing for an AI-Centric Search World? https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-future-proof-your-marketing-for-an-ai-centric-search-world-5-minute-whiteboard/ Rand Fishkin brings you his vision of how marketing departments may need to adapt to AI in the coming years. He posits a hypothetical future where Google search results may look more like the output of an AI tool—with links and snippets replaced with generated statements that include information, advice, and possibly only a few tailored links. There are at least a few reasons to believe this might be what’s coming, and he spends most of his analysis discussing how this new model might play out and how you need to adapt. As far as preparations go, he argues you need to tie your brand to words and phrases people enter into search experiences so that it can be mentioned. If Rand is right, this may be the only kind of SEO that matters in the future. Check out his full piece for tips on adjusting to AI-driven changes for SERPs in the next few years. Next, you’ll learn how you can adopt the AI chat technology that’s already here. How to Incorporate AI Chat and Software into Your SEO Workflow https://moz.com/blog/incorporate-ai-chat-into-your-workflow Katherine Waiter Ong brings you this look at where the current generation of AI chat tools belongs in your project development process. She has a series of ideas for how you can put these AI tools to work, including some she has already put into practice. The detailed guide covers prompts that you can use in all parts of your workflow, including: She gives you plenty of alternate prompts for each task so that you can test them out on your own preferred AI Chat program. In the final guide of the month, you’ll get a broad core explanation that can help you troubleshoot site problems. Google’s Broad Core Algorithm Updates: Important Points and Frequently Answered Questions for Site Owners and SEOs https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/google-broad-core-updates-important-points-and-frequently-answered-questions/ Glenn Gabe provides a guide for site owners who are having a bad time with the recent broad core updates or those who just want to understand how core updates work on a deeper level. He covers the major points, including what site-level quality algorithms are, how content is judged, and what makes content “quality.” You’ll learn some recovery steps that you can follow to improve your performance next time. As he explains, improvements aren’t likely to be recognized until the next update rolls around. Take that time to implement some of the higher-impact improvements Glenn recommends. He covers his “kitchen sink” approach to remediation and provides evidence for why he believes Google is looking for significant improvement over the long term. He advises you to look at content, UX, ads, affiliate setup, and technical SEO across your site. Check out the complete guide for more information on playing the long game with broad core updates. For now, you’re ready to move on to the month’s case studies. The first has three different case studies on the impact of Google’s Search Generative Experience. How Google Changes Your Searches (A Study of 10,000 Queries) https://moz.com/blog/google-modifying-searches Dr. Peter J. Meyers analyzes over 10,000 results to tell you what’s really happening with your queries. His analysis follows a recent wire article published (and then withdrawn) claiming Google was replacing searches with branded searches. Google has denied that charge, so Myers launched a case study into what they really were doing. He tracked thousands of results and recorded how they were changed. He then applied his own analysis to the changes and their intent. From his results, he created several categories of the changes Overall, he argues against bad intent on Google’s part. You can see his data and make up your mind for yourself. The next case study is a bit of fun, but it might have some real implications for site owners. You’ll explore what really happens to a rank when content gets deleted. I Deleted the Content From Two Posts to See if They’d Still Rank. Here’s What Happened https://ahrefs.com/blog/impact-removing-content/ Patrick Stox brings his personal experiment into removing content and its consequences. You might be surprised to learn this isn’t necessarily a death sentence for your pages. He starts with an interesting reveal from Google’s John Mu. In it, Mu explains that it’s not necessarily Google’s policy to stop ranking pages that lose content. He goes as far as saying that Google may continue to show an empty page if it serves some relevant search purpose. His simple test involved two old blogs with decent traffic. The content was removed on August 8th, and then restored on the 20th. First, he found that Google was able to detect when the change happened. Traffic dropped immediately, but what he noticed was that most of the rankings only lost a few positions. The rank loss remained consistent, without growing worse over the course of the experiment. He offers some final notes toward the end of the experiment. He argues that more testing will be necessary to understand the long-term effects. Additionally, he points out that a recent test to remove links had a similar outcome. Now, you’re ready to catch up on the news. The first item is the announcement of November’s updates. Announced: November 2023 Core Update https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/11/q-and-a-on-search-updates Google Search Central’s team brings you this news of several major updates, including the newest core update. They acknowledge that this news will surprise some SEOs who didn’t expect another one so soon after the October update. This update will focus on a different core system than last month’s. They clarified that their guidance is the same for both updates. However, as the announcement clarifies, this won’t even be the only update rolling out in November. In the same statement, Google confirmed that an update to the review system would also be rolling out. With this announcement, they also said they will no longer give updates on review system changes. This will be because the updates are moving to a format of regular, ongoing changes rather than big rollouts. The core update began on the 2nd of November. The rollout is predicted to take about two weeks. However, in many past updates, Google has exceeded these deadlines (sometimes by several more weeks). The rest of the announcement contains some helpful resources on updates for site owners who may want to review information about what to do next. Another update may have also landed near the end of October. The next piece brings some data and chatter about it. Google Search Algorithm Ranking Update October 25 (Unconfirmed) https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithm-ranking-update-36269.html Barry Schwartz brings you this analysis of an update that may have had an impact on some sites out there. It was not announced before it began acting on rankings, but drove some interesting volatility and a lot of chatter from SEOs. The volatility that he was tracking began to spike around October 25th. Barry takes you through the major tools and what they detected. You’ll get to see the results from about 10 of them to get an idea of how the tools are measuring the action. Barry also covers some of the active chatter from the SEO community. A number of SEOs responded that they experienced sudden drops or increases that leveled off over the day. Some reported the traffic spikes had also resulted in much higher conversions. Ultimately, it wasn’t clear what had caused everything that had been recorded and discussed. This may have been an aftershock of the earlier update, or it might have been testing or preparation for the November update. Google did have one major announcement to make just before October ended. On the final day of the month, they declared that the long-delayed mobile-first indexing had finally arrived. Mobile-First Indexing Has Landed – Thanks for All Your Support https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/10/mobile-first-is-here The Google Search team brings you the news that the trek to mobile-first indexing is finally complete. This process has been ongoing since early 2016. The final date was pushed back multiple times before it finally was declared complete with this statement. Google included justifications for the change in their writeup, including Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – November 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

10/23/2023

Matt Diggity October’s SEO roundup comes in the aftershock of several huge Google updates and developments that may determine the future of AI content. Get caught up here with the latest case studies, guides, and news. First, the case studies will update you on the latest data. This month’s items are about the updates, including how Google foreshadowed some Helpful Content Update (HCU) changes, how the HCU deployed from rollout to impact, and what you can do about HCU visibility loss. You’ll also get two perspectives about the winners and losers of the core update. After that, the guides will help you adjust to some of the new changes. You’ll get two looks at how to take advantage of recent AI upgrades. Finally, you’ll get caught up on the month’s biggest news. Google confirms the helpful content update is complete, has quietly removed the tag “Written by People, and has made the controversial announcement that links are not a major search factor (I have some thoughts about it). The September 2023 Google Helpful Content Update – Did Google’s Announcement in April About Page Experience Foreshadow What We’re Seeing With the Current HCU(X)? https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/september-2023-google-helpful-content-update-hcux/ Glenn Gabe brings you this look at the Helpful Content Update and why it may be having the impact it had on the hardest-hit sites. He takes you through some recent statements by Google and provides data to help you understand how these ideas are now being used. He starts you with some image examples of sites that saw significant drops. Glenn argues that he’s found an important pattern in these hard-hit sites: They all have the dual problems of unhelpful content and bad UX. Among other trends he noticed on these sites were large ads, auto-playing videos, pop-ups, and other intrusive elements. Google has become more committed or more advanced at targeting these issues as of this update, and as Glenn explained—they warned you. Glenn refers to a recent change to Google’s guidance on helpful content. It recommends that website owners focus on user experience overall rather than trying to score higher core web vital scores. He argues that this policy is now being enforced, and the sites hit by this update were the first to feel the effects. The changes to best practices go beyond web vitals and require website owners to think more carefully about ad placement, readability, and other issues that compromise content quality. Check out the complete guide for more of Glenn’s thoughts. For now, you can jump into some theory on what to do about these changes if your website is targeted. You’ll start with one of the most comprehensive HCU breakdowns yet available. Google’s Helpful Content Update: Full Review, Analysis, and Recovery https://on-page.ai/pages/helpful-content-update/ Eric Lancheres brings you this deep look into the HCU, which he argues is one of the most impactful updates in a long time. He tackles the motivations behind the update, some theories for how the algorithm works now, his ongoing tests and experiments, and so much more. He starts with a comprehensive look at the signals Google was putting out before the update landed. You’ll find a list of links to all of the official statements and his arguments for what they’re hinting toward. Then, he gives you a history of the “AI Classifier,” an AI-driven process that he argues was a large part of this update and that Google is using to judge article-type content in particular. He covers some theories of how this process works and how it may be evaluating your content He also makes a case for how he believes the Google Algorithm itself is changing after this update. He introduces the new “helpful score,” which is now a ranking factor, and shows you how it may already be leading to serious changes in your ranking position. That’s really only the beginning of his analysis, however. The rest of the article features before-and-after comparisons, small case studies of affected sites, and his predictions for the future. His article has far more than can be covered here. Make sure you check it out to find some solid advice and a ton of graphs and data to help you make sense of what you’re seeing. Next, you’ll find another perspective on HCU, focused on the steps you can take right now for recovery. The September Helpful Content Update: Why You Were Affected and What You Can Do https://www.mariehaynes.com/the-september-helpful-content-update-why-you-were-affected-and-what-you-can-do/ Marie Haynes brings you this look at corrective actions you can take if your site was one of those hit by the latest HCU. She has a theory for why many sites were negatively affected. She argues that there are strong reasons to believe that sites most affected were those that prioritized SEO tactics over authentic first-hand experiences. Her analysis spotted the following trends among the affected recipe and lifestyle sites— She diagnosed most affected sites as having low-value or unhelpful content. As she points out, if the Helpful Content System detects low-quality content—it becomes a site-wide classification Only a few sections or pages of bad content need to exist to cause problems for your entire site. She believes that the rater guidelines offer some clues to help you recover. First, she recommends that you shift your content goals toward what is being rewarded, namely: See her guide for a more complete explanation and more tips. The next guide also has some ideas on quality. It will teach you the importance of utilizing quality data. Now that you have somewhere to start with the HCU, let’s jump into the months next big update. It starts with a look at the winners and losers of the core update with an analysis from the Sistrix team. Google Core Update August 2023 – Data and Analysis https://www.sistrix.com/blog/google-core-update-august-2023-data-and-analysis/ Steve Paine brings you this post-update look at how the changes are affecting major sites in UK search. He tracked the volatility through the peak on September 1st until the announcement it had concluded on the 7th. He includes for you several tables that cover the biggest winners and losers. You’ll find the 20 largest winners and losers by both percentage and absolute changes in position. As a preview, here are both the top 5 winners and losers by change in absolute position— Steve identified two niches in particular as worth some extra attention. Large general retail sites seemed to experience lost rankings across the board. Reference domains seemed to do much better than they have during recent updates. Their positions mostly didn’t change. Next, you’ll get some more Analysis on this update from the team at Amsive. Google August 2023 Core Update: Winners, Losers & Analysis https://www.amsive.com/insights/seo/google-august-2023-core-update-winners-losers-analysis/ Lily Ray brings you this next look at the Core Update. She focused her analysis on some of the factors that may be driving the changes, including the rise of AI content, and changes in how Google perceives user experience. She starts with a look at the most affected sites broken down by their niche/category. She found that some categories were highly over-represented. Among the most affected were news sites, review sites, health sites and travel sites. Reddit.com was recorded as one of the most rewarded sites, with a 64.68% increase in its visibility. She dove further into this result, noting that UGC (user-generated content) sites in general experienced very good results, though none were close to matching Reddit. Among the losers, she highlighted the results of some news sites, some of which saw declines in visibility over 70%. Lily also identified what appeared to be a trend with significant gains and losses among different review sites. Review sites that emphasized the user’s personal experience were rewarded, while sites that lacked real experience seemed to see declining visibility across the board. Additionally, she noted that many lyric sites rewarded in the March update seemed to lose a lot of their gains. Check out her full analysis for more information on winners and losers. For now, you’re ready to move on to the guides. To begin, you’ll learn about the importance of quality data and how to build it. What Is Quality Data and How It Connects Search, Content, and AI Success https://www.searchenginejournal.com/what-is-quality-data-and-how-it-connects-search-content-and-ai-success/496287/ Lemuel Park wants you to understand the essential role of quality data in building a foundation for enhanced AI, search, and content marketing strategies. He identifies poor quality data as a root cause of numerous problems, including operational disruptions, useless insights, and bad decision-making regarding search. Quality data, he argues, will have the following attributes— He has some ideas for marketers who are looking to improve the quality of their data so that they can use it more effectively. Among other strategies, he argues that you should— See his entire piece for more advice on the importance of data quality, and how businesses can do more to ensure it. Next, you’ll learn how generative AI fits into the future of branding, and how the knowledge graph can help. GenAI and the Future of Branding: The Crucial Role of the Knowledge Graph https://moz.com/blog/gen-ai-and-the-future-of-branding Sara Moccand-Sayegh Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—October 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

10/2/2023

Matt Diggity Going up against big competitors in your industry, like Outlook India for Affiliate sites, Amazon for eCommerce sites or Wikipedia for informational queries, isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either. With careful content optimization, following the right UX best practices and building authority with quality backlinks, there’s nothing stopping you from doing what we did with our client’s rankings. In this case study, you’ll learn exactly how my team at The Search Initiative increased our client’s organic traffic from 72.4k to 136.4k sessions in under a year – and outranking the likes of Amazon for important keywords. In this article, you’ll learn how to: If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. Before that, here’s some more information about the website’s goals and the main challenges that we overcame during the campaign. The Challenge The client is an online adult store primarily targeting the United States. The main objective for this campaign was to grow visibility for commercial intent keywords so as to drive organic traffic to important category pages, with the ultimate aim of generating more online sales through eCommerce. One of the first things we did to build the site’s domain authority and ranking power so that it could compete against the likes of Amazon – one of their main competitors for adult toys – was to leverage the power of AI to execute a blogger outreach strategy. Didn’t think Amazon rank for these kinds of keywords? Think again… At the same time, with the client operating in such a lucrative market, we needed to build topical authority and present them as a credible source of information. To address a lack of topical authority, we implemented a content strategy that focused on creating informative blog articles that are related to the adult toys that the client sells, and the niche in general. For any website looking to improve conversions, you need to ensure that you’re providing users with a great experience; and that everything works as expected. The client’s website lacked basic UX best practices that were costing them both money and traffic. Finally, to improve the positions of the client’s “money” keywords (i.e. the ones that have a commercial intent and bring in the most conversions), we focused our attention on optimizing existing and creating new category pages (more on this later). Learn how to tackle these challenges for your website by following the steps below. Building Backlinks With Blogger Outreach (& AI) When it comes to boosting the rankability of a web page, few SEO tactics come close to being as powerful as link building. One such link building tactic that we employ (and have continued to get great success from) at TSI, is blogger outreach. Blogger outreach involves finding topically relevant websites who you can then reach out to for a link back to content that their audience will find useful. Let’s break down the main steps on how to do blogger outreach – with the help of generative AI tool ChatGPT. Link Prospecting There are a number of ways you can find link prospects, but in this case study, I’ll show you the cool new way of how to do it – using ChatGPT. Link prospecting is about finding niche relevant websites that can link back to your website. I recommend using GPT4 in conjunction with the WebPilot plugin enabled. To do this, go to Settings and enable plugins. Go back to the chat and open the Plugin dropdown and select WebPilot – this is a plugin that enables GPT to scan live websites as opposed to relying on its training data from 2021. So here’s a prompt that you can use to find these prospects: Using the WebPilot plugin for ChatGPT, please give me a list of 20 popular websites within the [enter your niche]. Here’s an example of a response from GPT providing websites from the audio tech niche. It was able to find an article that lists 30 popular audio tech sites, and it asked if that’s what I wanted. I said yes, and it listed the sites along with their links. Now, AI tools like ChatGPT aren’t perfect (yet), so It’s important to manually check each of these sites to ensure they’re relevant to your website. You can also apply a similar approach to identify online communities within your niche. Here’s a prompt: Using the WebPilot plugin for ChatGPT, please give me a list of 10 popular online forums/communities within the [enter your niche]. Here’s the response from ChatGPT: By the end of this process, you should have a considerable list of potential websites to get a backlink from. Getting Contact Details Once you’ve prepared your list of websites that you want to reach out to, the next step is to find the contact information for them i.e. an email address of a writer at the site, or via their general contact form. You can usually find email addresses on the contact us page of the website (see why having one is important?), but if you’re unable to find one, you can use a tool like Hunter.io. Hunter.io is a tool that you can use to do this – they have a Chrome extension that allows up to 25 searches per month for free. If you’re using their website, enter the domain into Domain Search and hit enter. You can see that the tool has found 21 email addresses for the example site. Pitch Creation The most important step in this process is the pitch – this is what will be the deciding factor on whether or not you’ll get a backlink from your prospective site. The key to crafting a great outreach pitch is ensuring that you’re adding personally relevant information about the website that you’re pitching to. This doesn’t mean that you can template the process, but that you still need to personalize the pitch based on who you’re pitching to. In general, you need to explain: To create a pitch worthy of securing backlinks, why not use the help of ChatGPT? Here’s an example of a prompt that you can use to do this: Using the WebPilot plugin for GPT, please write a blogger outreach pitch to [enter prospective website URL] (might want to include their about page) with the goal of writing a guest post for their site. Please include a subject line. My website is [enter your URL], and it’s on the topic of [insert your niche]. Guidelines: Here’s what ChatGPT came up with: GPT even provides a compelling subject line that you can use. Monitoring Progress Once the emails have been sent out, all is not done. You should monitor your progress to identify which pitches (and subject lines) worked the best. Blogger outreach is something that constantly evolves over time, especially as not every website will get back to you on the first go. You can also ask GPT to provide a template for follow up emails… Learn more about how to carry out blogger outreach in detail here. Here’s a look at the kind of results we’ve got from this link building campaign: Building Topical Authority with Engaging Blog Content Apart from optimizing and creating new content for your website’s core landing pages (i.e. the pages that drive your business), it’s important to grow your topical authority – which is a concept that’s been thrown around a lot in recent years. Read on to find out what it is, why it’s important and how you can build it for your own site. What is Topical Authority? Topical authority refers to a website’s perceived expertise and credibility on a specific topic or subject area. Search engines like Google aim to deliver the most relevant and high-quality content to searchers’ queries and use signals like topical authority to determine the ranking of web pages in search results. Websites that consistently produce high-quality, informative, and relevant content on a specific topic are more likely to be seen as having topical authority. Here’s an example… Imagine you’re venturing into the realm of sustainable fashion. Crafting a single article that revolves solely around ‘sustainable clothing’ might not be sufficient to thrive in this niche. Why? Because sustainable fashion is a broad subject, and attempting to encapsulate its entirety within a single article would be an overwhelming task. To establish yourself as an authority in this field, your content needs to cover a wide range of topics within sustainable fashion, including: Why is Topical Authority Important? Google associates a website with a topic in order to rank it as a relevant resource for search terms about the particular topic. By having a lot of content about a specific topic on your website, you create opportunities to add internal links between the pages so that Google and users are more likely to find your content more easily. Doing so also helps increase your topical authority in the eyes of Google and helps show that your website is the go-to Read More Read More The post 88% Monthly Traffic Growth & Outranking Amazon (SEO Case Study) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

9/22/2023

Matt Diggity Stay ahead of the competition with the latest SEO news, analysis, and tips. This roundup, featuring the latest core update and some big AI changes, has everything you need to hit the ground running. Big news opens this roundup. You’ll see the first early analysis on the new broad Core Updates, learn about the removal of FAQ snippets, and find out what’s rolling out alongside Google’s new Search Generative Experience (SGE). Next, you’ll get the latest numbers from recent case studies. You’ll get some data-based arguments for why AI optimization may be the future of SEO and how other SEOs are making the most of these new tools. You’ll also see an analysis of how digital “goliaths” are doing SEO and what one SEO learned as a Google Search Quality Rater. The guides, at the end, will empower you with some new techniques. They teach you how to strike the right balance when creating AI content and how to beat existing power players when jumping into new niches. Google August 2023 Broad Core Update Is Live – What We Are Seeing Now https://www.seroundtable.com/google-august-2023-core-update-35927.html Barry Schwarts brings you this news about the drop of the latest Core Update. This one arrived on August 27th and is still continuing as of this writing. The official Google announcement claimed the rollout would take approximately two weeks. However, even three weeks after the launch, Google has yet to announce that the rollout has ended. This rollout may be taking extra time due to the amount of changes. According to the details Google released, all types of content are being targeted for adjustments. Google declined to state the percentage of all queries/searches impacted. Barry reported the first obvious tremors in an update article he published on the 12th. He tracked SEO chatter across major forums and found that there were significant reports of dropping traffic. Several SEOs reported traffic changes as significant as -35%. Most of the volatility may be yet to come. While Google hasn’t given us many details about this core update, they have been more direct about another change. FAQ snippets are disappearing for many results. Google Removes FAQ Snippets from Search Results https://www.sistrix.com/blog/google-removes-faq-snippets-from-search-results/ Johannes Beus breaks down Google’s recent decision to remove FAQs and How-to rich results from most SERPs. The move was announced in a Google Search Central post in early August. At the time, Google claimed that these types of results were being cleared to create a “cleaner” and “more consistent” search experience. Under the new guidelines, FAQs will only be shown for authoritative government and health websites. How-tos will continue to appear for desktop results but not mobile results. So far, there’s no news on if or when How-to results will be removed for desktop users. Google provided this reminder for users who still plan to use markup for desktop searches. Note: With mobile indexing, Google indexes the mobile version of a website as the basis for indexing. To have How-To rich results shown on the desktop, the mobile version of your website must include the appropriate markup. Johannes took a look at how SERPs had changed since the announcement. According to his data, FAQs were nearly completely eliminated from mobile results by early September. This followed the removal of nearly half of them around June of 2023. This was not Google’s only major change this month. They also introduced links to web pages within the SGE’s AI-powered answers. Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) Officially Rolls Out Links to Web Pages Within Answers https://searchengineland.com/google-search-generative-experience-officially-rolls-out-links-to-web-pages-within-answers-431324 Barry Schwartz brings you this news about a new SGE feature that could have major implications for SEO. As announced by Google earlier this month, SGE users will now see an arrow icon next to AI answers that directs them to relevant pages. Google claims that this feature will show the websites that were used to generate the information for the AI answers. Depending on the answer given, it may show one or several sites as sources. U.S. users should already see these changes reflected in searches. In the coming weeks, it will roll out to other countries, including Japan and India. This feature is not necessarily in its final state. Google has tested other models and may continue to update. The move has been supported by many SEOs who want to see their sites get credit for being used to generate AI answers. It may open up a new avenue for optimizing AI. The first data piece of this roundup has some ideas for how that may work. Forget SEO: Why ‘AI Engine Optimization’ May Be the Future https://venturebeat.com/ai/forget-seo-why-ai-engine-optimization-may-be-the-future/ Sharon Goldman brings you this analysis of the potential for AI engine optimization in the future. A series of experts were interviewed on their predictions for how AI optimization might appear and how SEOs should prepare. They predict several major changes that SEOs may need to adapt to, including— Check out the complete article for in-depth interviews with several AI industry players and analysis of recent AI moves by major players. Next, you’ll learn what a recent survey says about how SEOs are using AI right now. (Survey) Generative AI and SEO Strategy: Getting the Most Out of Your Tools https://www.searchenginejournal.com/generative-ai-and-seo-strategy-getting-the-most-out-of-your-tools/493591/#close Matt G. Southern brings you some AI insights from Search Engine Journal’s State of SEO Report. A series of SEO experts were asked to answer questions about the AI tools that were being used in their strategies. The survey revealed some interesting trends, including— Matt predicted some additional possibilities based on the results. He predicts that humans will remain an important part of auditing and perfecting content and that the rising popularity of voice AI searches will mean big changes for SEOs. Next, you’ll find out what’s important in SEO right now, from the perspective of an SEO who tried being a Google Search Quality Rater. I Secretly Worked as a Google Search Quality Rater (You Can Too) https://zyppy.com/seo/google-search-quality-rater/ Cyrus Shepard brings you this look at his time as a Google Search Quality Rater. These raters are responsible for reviewing sites and providing information Google may use to promote or demote sites in key niches. Google had no problem allowing an SEO to sign up. While confidentiality agreements cover parts of the experience, Cyrus was able to share a lot about how the process works and what SEOs can learn as raters. First, the test to become a quality rater is apparently a challenging one. Even with a long background covering Google’s guidelines, Cyrus reported failing it on the first attempt. While he couldn’t provide information about what he was asked to evaluate and why, he did provide a list of the publicly available factors he thought were especially important in light of what he learned. He named “Page Quality” at the top of this list, noting that the current guidelines devote 70 pages to it. He also identified Needs Met, User Intent, and Reputation as factors that are particularly worth studying. Cyrus suggests that some SEO teams could seriously benefit from getting at least one team member to sign on and serve a short time as a Google Quality rater. So far, he’s keeping the position. The guides are up next. First, you’ll get some ideas for creating balanced AI content. Balancing Creativity With Caution When Using AI to Create Content https://moz.com/blog/use-ai-with-creativity-and-caution Bethan Vincent brings you this look at some of the practices she’s developed while working with AI writing tools. Based on her experiences, she created some basic rules that you can apply to create high-value AI content. First, she shares some warnings for big organizations. She stresses that, due to AI using inputs to learn, it is vital that anyone building AI content avoid providing proprietary information. Be careful about entering client information to build content because it could be used to train the model. It may also show up for other users of the AI system. Bethan also warns you against automatically trusting the outputs you receive from AI. While AI hallucination is one problem, she reminds you that there’s also a possibility that even the original information retrieved by AI isn’t correct. Human eyes are still essential for catching errors. She recommends that anyone using AI for quality content create a step to verify sources, figures, and facts. She also recommends that you double-check any links that are created by generative tools. After providing some warnings, Bethan has some advice for using AI to the best of its current abilities. She lays out how she’s developed her own process to use AI for the acceleration of original ideas, to analyze completed content, and to create more variations for a different perspective. Check out the entire guide for some thoughtful tips on how to make AI content better. In the final guide of the month, you’ll learn some strategies for taking on the sites that are already at the top of a given niche. Beating Incumbents at Content in Competitive Spaces https://www.kevin-indig.com/ Kevin Indig brings you this advice on Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—September 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

8/22/2023

Matt Diggity If you want to amplify your SEO efforts with AI, this is a roundup you shouldn’t miss. We’ve gathered together some of the most essential guides, case studies, and news headlines to keep you ahead of the competition. The guides are the first. They’ll give you the tools you need to use generative AI to increase E.E.AT. scores, understand Google’s own systems, run better campaigns with machine learning, and use ChatGPT to find keyword variations. Next, the case studies will give you real data on what’s working in SEO. You’ll learn how one site grew 200% with image-based SEO, the experiences of SEOs who removed AMP, and the results of an interesting experiment that disallowed humans. At the roundup’s end, we’ve included some headlines you shouldn’t miss. Google is planning some huge changes, Shopify is enhancing its on-page experience with AI, and Google has made a big update to Product Rating policies. 4 Ways to Leverage Your Website’s E. E. A.T. Using Generative AI Tools (Part 1) https://www.ezoic.com/guest-blog-4-ways-to-leverage-your-websites-e-e-a-t-using-generative-ai-tools-part-1/ Saleh Ahmed brings you this two-part guide to analyzing and filling content gaps using AI tools. In it, he covers how you can fill in competitor data and search queries using AI, assign topics more effectively, and generate topic clusters from competitor sitemaps. After an introduction, he starts with some steps for priming any AI you use for content-level improvement. He provides a series of starting prompts you can use to guide the AI toward the right parameters, including all of the following— After that, he gives you examples of how tools like ChatGPT and Bard respond to these prompts and prepare themselves for the next step. The steps are designed so that you can use most major AI systems to complete them. His advice carries you through four levels of different prompts until the tool is ready to analyze your content. The guide continues with advice on directing the parameters you’ve created with these prompts to analyze your content and that of your competitors. Check out the complete guide for more content tips. Next, you’ll learn about some AI systems that may already be impacting your content—Google’s own. Google’s Helpful Content & Other AI Systems May Be Impacting Your Site’s Visibility https://www.mariehaynes.com/google-ai-systems/ Marie Haynes brings you this look at how Google is reshaping SEO with AI. In it, she dives deep into how AI has already significantly changed Google’s ranking system. She follows up with some tips you can follow to avoid big losses across these changes. First, she makes the case that nothing is more important to SEO than aligning with Google’s quality criteria. Now, she argues, AI is doing a lot of the work of judging and ranking content based on that criteria, and she has some ideas for how you can play by AI’s rules better. She comprehensively breaks down how Google’s AI systems have been operating since 2016, with some graphs that track the introduction and resolution of major traffic volatility since then. Then, she takes you through all of the AI/Machine systems that are currently at work. She covers— For each system or series of systems, she gives you some analysis of how they work and what signals they use. She explains how you can do better to please these systems and which factors matter most. The complete guide is incredibly thorough and could provide a good foundation for you or any employees you want to understand AI in SEO. Next, you’ll learn some precise steps you can use to get keyword variations from your favorite AI tools. How to Use ChatGPT to Uncover Keyword Variations Other Tools Miss (Prompts Included) https://searchengineland.com/chatgpt-keyword-variations-tools-miss-prompts-429665 Tony Hill brings you this look at how you can use ChatGPT to find keyword variations other tools might miss. The process involves a series of prompts, so you can use the same principles on any of your favorite AI tools. The guide jumps directly into the steps with the basic keyword “drones” as an example. Starting with this single term, Tony takes you through five steps that will get you a narrowed list of effective variations. The guide doesn’t end there. Tony takes you through another set up steps that you can follow to find words and phrases that your potential customers might need. Finally, he provides some best practices for adding missing word variations to your lists. With all the steps laid out, you can test this technique out for yourself in a half hour or so. It may become one of your AI-enabled habits. For now, we’re ready to dive into the month’s data studies. In the first one, you’ll learn how one company used image thumbnails to earn a 200% increase in traffic. Foot Locker Image SEO Case Study: 228% Increase for Google Image Thumbnails https://brodieclark.com/foot-locker-image-seo/ Brodie Clark brings you this case study into a big traffic increase for Foot Locker. As an introduction to the results, he provides some quick background on how Google image thumbnails are generated for category pages. Foot Locker had been an example in an earlier guide he created about thumbnails, and this study looks at the actions the company took to correct their problems—as well as the results. He jumps right into those. Foot Locker went from having no image thumbnails appearing for any of its important category pages to having nearly all pages producing multi-image thumbnails. Brodie illustrates the difference by showing you images of how SERPs looked for Foot Locker results before and after the changes. Even from just one image, the change is striking. The company’s result covers significantly more of the page with half-a-dozen images. In numbers, the changes across the site accounted for a rise from ~60K organic visits per month to now 195K organic visits per month. The traffic is still increasing. Brodie continued by documenting the steps the company took to resolve the issues. He covers a long list of changes they made while troubleshooting issues related to— Check out the complete study for more information about how you can target the same issues with your own sites or clients. Next, you’ll learn how the AMP removal may still affect your sites. How It’s Going After Removing Google AMP Pages 3 Weeks Ago https://www.seroundtable.com/remove-google-amp-status-35724.html Barry Schwartz brings you a condensed look at some of the changes that have followed the removal of AMP. He covers his own site (SEO Roundtable) as an example and provides you with a look into his site data three weeks afterward. He followed the AMP removal guidelines closely, so his experiences may be instructive for site owners attempting the same thing. He recorded a few problems with the initial removal. He warns readers that Google was still referencing AMP URLs in canonical pages early in the process. This turned out to be a delay in reporting that was easily resolved. As many SEOs likely fear, there were some problems with Discover. For a brief time, the site was not showing up at all, and when images did appear, they were not the proper size. This was resolved with a minor fix. Overall, Barry described the process as going smoothly. Several weeks later, no major problems are holding the site back. You should be able to enjoy the same results by following Google’s guide (linked just above) and considering the troubleshooting steps Barry discusses here. The last study in this week’s roundup is an eyebrow-raising test of Google’s cloaking detection and response. Disallow Humans (Bad Cloaking) https://ohgm.co.uk/bad-cloaking/ Oliver H.G. Mason tests Google’s cloaking limits by fully banning humans from his site and watching how Google responds. As a quick reminder, cloaking is when you show two different pages to crawlers and human searchers. Google considers cloaking to be spam and has worked to control it since it emerged as an early black-hat technique in the 2010s Oliver’s test tracked the modern response from Google’s detection systems. Human searchers were sent to a nearly blank page with a simple message about the website being closed. Crawlers could still access the original content. The interesting result was that Google didn’t appear to have detected the change at all. Traffic did begin to decline, but it was a slow and moderate decline even three months after Google had indexed the change. Oliver suggested that the results may have come from over-tuning of Google’s detection mechanisms. He theorized that the systems policing this practice may be primed to hunt for adult topics rather than a page that’s simply empty. The results may be interesting to SEOs who want to run their own tests. For now, let’s jump to the news. First, Google has made a major announcement regarding Howto and FAQ results. Google Reduces the Visibility of Howto and FAQ Rich Results in Search https://searchengineland.com/google-reduces-the-visibility-of-howto-and-faq-rich-results-in-search-430452 Google has announced that they are effectively demoting HowTo and FAQ rich results. As part of the changes, fewer rich results will be appearing in all searches. Fewer FAQ results will appear overall, and How-to results have been restricted for desktop searches. Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—August 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

8/14/2023

Matt Diggity Whether you’re starting out from scratch or growing your existing brand’s organic search presence, there’s nothing stopping you from disrupting the search results pages of your industry one step at a time. The key to doing this is keyword selection. Combine this with killer, shareable content and a solid link building strategy, and you’re well on your way to boosting your organic traffic. In this case study, you’ll learn exactly how my team at The Search Initiative increased our client’s organic traffic by 368% and monthly revenue by 445% despite their industry being dominated by a big competitor. If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. In this article, you’ll learn how to: Before that, here’s some more information about the website’s goals and the main challenges that we overcame during the campaign. The Challenge The client produces and sells nicotine alternatives that use natural ingredients instead of tobacco. The brand and product had close-to zero online presence when joining the agency and their main competitor had already monopolized the market – so the main objective for the campaign was to build organic traffic from the ground up and generate online sales through eCommerce. One of the main challenges was the fact that keywords that had any substantial search volume were extremely competitive and dominated by their main competitor. As a start-up, the client’s site lacked the topical and domain authority required to be able to compete for such terms. Instead, we focused on building visibility by targeting informational search queries about quitting smoking such as smoking alternatives. By focusing on producing more content on the blog, we needed to make sure that the client’s products were showcased in the articles so that users were enticed to click through and place an order. This was achieved by implementing a related posts section (designed to keep users longer on the site), a sidebar (so that we could add calls to actions) and adding internal links (to drive users towards relevant product pages). To build the brand’s online presence, we focused our link building efforts through digital PR, so that people would start to know that the brand and product range existed. Check this video below to learn more about digital PR. Finally, we rounded off the strategy by making sure that any technical issues holding back the site’s performance were addressed. The two main issues that we tackled was to implement a more user-friendly URL structure (so that they were easy to read, remember and share for users) and to improve the page performance (by compressing and minifying files that were large). Find out how you can overcome these challenges for your website by following the steps below. Informational Keyword Targeting With the commercial keywords out of bounds due to high competition and lack of topical authority, we focused on building the site’s keyword visibility for informational search terms instead by producing content around question-based keywords related to smoking. How to Find Question Based Keywords to Target I’ll show you two ways to find question-based keywords that are relevant to your site’s niche. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer The first is using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool. You can now go ahead and write an article about the lifespan of cats. People Also Ask If you don’t have Ahrefs, you can still find informational keywords from the People Also Ask section in Google’s search results. In the above example, Google added the two following questions “What is the friendliest cat to own?” and “What is the kindest type of cat?” when expanding the original question “What is the best cat for first time owner?”. Writing Content for Informational Search Terms Once you’ve found the informational keywords that you want to target, the next step is to start writing the content. Here are some tips on how you should do this: Here’s what you need to look for: Use your competitors as a baseline for what you need to include within your page. You should also look at how they have optimized other on-page elements such as the title tag, H1 heading, meta description and their URL for the target keyword. For example, here’s the featured snippet for the keyword “how long do cats live”. And here’s where the answer is taken from within the ranking page. As you can see, the page provides a clear and concise answer to the question right at the beginning of the article. Then it goes into much more detail about the lifespan of cats later on in the article by covering more specific topics like which type of cats live the longest etc. The short answer caters to users who just want an instant answer to their search query whereas the rest of the article is for users who want to learn more. This is especially important if you’re writing about a topic that can impact a user’s physical, mental or financial well being. But even websites that don’t fall into this category need to demonstrate their expertise in order to build trust. Here are a few ways you can achieve this: Following the above steps will help grow your keyword visibility for informational search terms. Redesigning The Blog for SEO Apart from optimizing and expanding the content on your blog, it’s also important to ensure you’re following best practices in making it as functional as possible for users. Below are things that you should include within your blog to improve navigation and overall usability. Add Related Posts A Related Posts section provides readers with additional relevant content that they might be interested in. It helps users discover more of your blog’s content, increasing their engagement and time spent on your website. In addition to this, related posts help: How Should I Choose Related Posts? When selecting the related articles, make sure that they are indeed relevant to the current post so that readers are naturally encouraged to continue reading. Where Should the Related Posts Be Added? The most common place to put your related posts section is towards the bottom of the page. How Many Related Posts Should I Include? When it comes to how many related posts to include, I recommend aiming for 3 to 5. Adding too many will confuse readers as to what to read next and dilute the importance of each related article. How Can I Add Related Posts? One of the most popular WordPress plugins for related posts is the Contextual Related Posts plugin. It’s a free plugin that automatically generates a list of related posts based on contextual cues from your blog post’s title and content. All you have to do is install and activate the plugin. If you’re looking for something that allows for more customization, check out the Custom Related Posts plugin which allows you to pick your related posts manually. Add A Sidebar The purpose of most blog posts is to provide information, not to sell. However, that doesn’t mean that you can convert users looking for information to customers. One way to do this is to leverage the space in your sidebar by adding calls to action (CTAs) and other enticing content. Here are some examples of what you can add to boost engagement and conversions: Building out your sidebar by adding these elements can transform the engagement levels on your website. Add Internal Links You’ve already learned about internal links in the form of Related Posts, but let’s focus on internal linking in its most traditional form. The idea of internal linking is to add a hyperlink on one page on your website to another page. These links help establish connections between different pages, improve website navigation, and assist search engines in understanding the structure and hierarchy of your website’s content. Here are some tips on how to implement internal linking on your blog: Use Relevant Anchors: use descriptive anchor text (the clickable part of the link) that accurately reflects the linked page’s content. If possible, try to use anchor texts that include the main keyword that you’re trying to rank on the linked page. Strategic Placement: incorporate internal links so that they fit naturally within the body of your content. Link to Relevant Pages: distribute your internal links across relevant pages to ensure a well-connected website structure. Don’t Overdo It: avoid excessive internal linking on a single page, which can confuse users and dilute SEO value. Link Back to Your Blog Post: don’t forget to also add internal links back to your blog post too so that it too can benefit from other pages’ authority. Building Brand Awareness With Digital PR Considering that the client’s brand had no online presence and the product range itself had zero search volume, the site needed a boost in domain authority. The best way to do this is with backlinks. Instead of general blogger outreach, we showcased the client’s product range with content that highlights smoking alternatives, targeted towards people looking to quit smoking and built awareness of their Read More Read More The post How to Grow Traffic by 368% (Market Disruption Case Study) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

7/24/2023

Matt Diggity This month’s roundup has the latest SEO data studies, guides, and news headlines you need to stay ahead of the competition. To start, you’ll get some data from our studies. The first one is a poll of marketing teams, including major names like Spotify, on their implementation of AI. The next is a deep-dive case study into how one brand took a commanding lead in the volatile insurance niche. Then, you’ll pick up some new skills from our guides. First, you’ll learn how to use the new Google Perspectives feature. Then, you’ll learn how to improve your informational content by using points of view. At the end of the roundup, you’ll find a lot of recently breaking headlines you shouldn’t miss. Learn about mysterious queries, the latest new launches by Google, how Google uses AI, and how to make the most of the newly-available Google Analytics 4. Marketing Teams Are Using AI to Generate Content, Boost SEO, and Develop Branding to Help Save Time and Money; Study Finds https://www.businessinsider.com/marketing-industry-using-ai-save-time-money-boost-productivity-study-2023-6 Aaron Mok brings you this look at a recent client poll by the platform Bynder. The company polled 104 major clients about their AI usage, including major brands like Spotify, Puma, and Canon. More than half of all respondents to the poll reported that their marketing teams were already using AI. They reported using it to automate basic tasks, generate email/social media drafts, and quickly paraphrase other content. Aaron followed up to find out how ChatGPT was being used. He got responses from various founders, marketing directors, and other leaders. They reported using AI for tasks like product descriptions and even generating business proposals. AI is still an emerging technology. The adoption rates seen in this poll suggest that it will play a large role in marketing going forward, especially for companies large companies in competitive niches. Check out the complete article for the link to the study and more analysis of AI’s potential. Next up, you’ll find out how the company Progressive overwhelmed competitors in the insurance niche to become the #1 SEO presence in two years. How Progressive Is Winning the SEO Insurance Industry https://www.kevin-indig.com/ Kevin Indig brings you this case study examining the rise of Progressive (a national-scale insurance company in the United States). Several years ago, this company was firmly in 4th place. Now, it’s beating all competitors, and Kevin details how. First, he reminds us that this is an incredibly difficult niche. It’s highly regulated, has strong competition, and the buying cycles are typically very short. It takes serious effort to see movement in this niche. Still, Progressive was able to manage it with three strategies that Kevin goes over in great detail He took several lessons from his analysis that he condensed into several strategic questions you can ask yourself if you hope for the same results: Don’t miss his complete guide if you have some content problems. The results speak for themselves, and he has much more advice (and helpful graphs) for you to learn from. Learn From Others’ Experiences With More Perspectives on Search https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-perspectives/ Lauren Clark (Google’s Product Manager), brings you this detailed look at the new Perspectives feature now available in some searches. She describes this feature, what it is meant to accomplish, and how it pulls its results. As she explains, this is an AI-powered feature meant to provide more access to real opinions from sources across the internet. The new feature will highlight results that are drawn from forums, QA sites, and social media. They will include long and short-form videos, images, and written posts. The features will also include information about the person who posted the content (for example, their name, profile pictures, or the popularity of their content) when possible. Lauren claims that in addition to the other stated goals, Perspectives is intended to make it easier for users to find expertise and experience. The update also comes with some changes to how review content is ranked. See the full guide for a complete introduction to this new feature. Next, you’ll get some ideas on improving your informational content with another kind of perspective. How and Why You Should Create Informational Content With POVs https://moz.com/blog/informational-content-with-povs Victor Ijidola brings you this look at creating more compelling informational content. He argues that by providing a point-of-view, you can make this content drive sales more effectively. In this guide, he lays out how. By using a POV, he means to provide your own perspective or to personalize the information so that it could only have come from your own experience. This practice can help you avoid creating generic, cookie-cutter content. He presents some detailed arguments for the power of the POV. First, he argues, it helps you form a deeper connection with your visitor. Sharing a POV helps readers feel that they are beginning to know you. A relationship is created when you reveal your personality or preferences. Victor argues that the connections you build through authentic perspective can create or attract more committed fans to your content. He also argues that it has the potential to make readers more likely to invest in content after reading the opening paragraphs and eventually more likely to convert. He follows up his arguments with some tips for how you can create some POV-driven content. He recommends exploring your product’s keywords and identifying the areas where you have strong opinions or background. As he reminds you, POV isn’t just about opinion. You want to be able to back up your view. With the month’s guides finished, you’re ready to take on the latest headlines. First, you’ll learn about a bizzare Local Guide Program keywords that may also be appearing in your client’s Google Search Console. The Mysterious Appearance of “Local Guide Program” Queries in Google Search Console https://www.seroundtable.com/local-guide-program-gsc-35575.html Glenn Gabe brings you his own investigation into a mysterious keyword. During a client audit, he found out that the keyword Local Guide Program was driving traffic to pages across his client’s site. The problem was, he couldn’t figure out why. He checked out similar sites and found that the keyword was appearing there, too. These pages did not appear to have any relevance to this keyword or to be participants in a Google program of the same name. All the traffic was coming from desktop searches, nearly 100% of it. It was also coming from multiple countries. Furthermore, it was always reported that every checked page was always ranking #1 for the term. For many sites, this keyword alone accounts for a decent amount of traffic. As of yet, the mystery remains unsolved. Glenn was unable to find any answers on his own, or any answers in the various forum posts that have covered the same topic. SEO should keep an eye on the situation, especially if this keyword is appearing in their client’s console reports. If it’s a bug, the traffic may suddenly disappear after an update—creating an issue for SEOs and their clients. Next, Google has a new feature going live. The Perspectives feature we discussed above is getting it’s own menu filter on SERPs. Google’s Perspectives Search Menu Filter Is Now Live on Mobile in the US https://brodieclark.com/google-perspectives-filter/ Brodie Clark brings you this look at the new search menu filter that appeared shortly after the launch of the Perspectives. Now, mobile users will be able to filter their results down to exclusively the items that appear for perspectives. This development may be worth noting for SEOs. Any filter that limits results to personal essays and videos will likely bypass brand websites or other properties where SEO is typically performed. This may be the start of another big change in how content is valued and produced. Brodie speculates that the entire Perspectives feature may be an attempt by Google to win back some search share from its growing rival tiktok. The Perspectives feature and filter makes it significantly easier for searchers to find short-video results. Make sure that you check out the complete article for some images and explanations of how the new filters work. You’ll find some ideas you can use to start developing content that can rank on this new and potentially revolutionary search features. Next up, Google has another announcement. It claims that its upcoming algorithm will eclipse ChatGPT. Google DeepMind’s CEO Says Its Next Algorithm Will Eclipse ChatGPT https://www.wired.com/story/google-deepmind-demis-hassabis-chatgpt/ Will Knight brings you this look at recent statements by the CEO of Google’s DeepMind projects. The CEO, Demis Hassabis, claimed that the next project, AlphaGo, would be powerful enough to eclipse the current capabilities of ChatGPT. As Will reports, AlphaGo has been in development for a while. In 2016, the program defeated a champion player of the strategy game Go. The project rests on proprietary techniques like reinforcement learning and detailed trees of alternative options to generate more effective responses. While Google may have some high hopes for AlphaGo eclipsing ChatGPT, the program currently remains in development. That isn’t to say Google has been absent from the AI Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—July 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

6/26/2023

Matt Diggity Read this roundup to catch up on AI and SEO. This summary of May’s top guides, data studies, and news headlines comes packed with 5 fresh items covering new AI systems and the changes they are bringing to search. The first guide will introduce you to SGE—Google’s new AI search augment— and how it works. Then you’ll learn about some new recommended KPIs for content quality and find out how to seize the most low-hanging SEO opportunities on a tight budget. The data studies are next. You’ll see the path one team took from 0 to 12,000,000 users in 2 years. Then, you’ll find out which brands are recommended by AI engines (and why), read a large-scale report on the state of search, and see the data for predictions that AI use will grow by 5x this year alone. You’ll find news at the end. The latest headlines will tell you how to understand news topic authority, and how Google is introducing AI to its results. If you prefer consuming video content, check this out. Google Search Generative Experience: A Look at SGE With 12 AI Overviews https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-sge-ai-overview-examples/487918/ Kristi Hines provides you with this in-depth look at SGE (a new generative AI search aid that will augment normal Google searches). She provides multiple examples of how it will handle queries and provide results so that you can start to adjust your SEO. First, she lets you know how to join the partial rollout as a volunteer and start testing all these features for yourself. If you plan to wait until the full release, these examples will give you a good idea of what to expect. These limited examples suggest that SGE works on slightly different principles than desktop and mobile search—at least enough to change the top winners. Make sure you check out the rest of the guide for the other examples and what they can tell you. Ranking in any kind of search takes good content. In the next guide, you’ll get some advice for building better content with more updated KPIs. Your New KPIs to Gauge Content Quality https://sparktoro.com/blog/your-new-kpis-to-gauge-content-quality/ Amanda Natividad suggests you start building content with a new sort of approach. She claims that her development process isn’t meant to produce raw traffic but reliably delivers business results. In this guide, she introduces the KPIs she keeps for her process, what they mean, and how to capture them. Among others, she recommends the following KPIs for content quality— Check out the guide for a complete list of KPIs that prove your content is on the right track. Following KPIs like these can help you claim the credit you deserve for long-term or more abstract strategies. Speaking of helping clients understand your value, the final guide of the month focuses on how you can reorder large SEO projects to start delivering for clients faster. The Ultimate Low-Hanging Fruit SEO Strategy — Whiteboard Friday https://moz.com/blog/low-hanging-fruit-seo-strategy-whiteboard-friday Aleyda Solis brings you this guide to finding SEO’s “low-hanging fruit,” or in her words —” those activities that will tend to have a higher output, a higher impact, and lower effort.” She argues you should be tracking these opportunities from the start so you can use them to mitigate impatience from clients and stakeholders. She recommends that you build a low-hanging fruit analysis alongside your typical SEO audit and use this analysis to develop your SEO schedule. When you identify needs that can be met with low-hanging fruit solutions, space them out so the client sees results for the entire project. She provides some examples of solutions that may work for most types of projects, including— Her complete guide (see the full video) includes a number of low-hanging targets and a flow chart to help you organize and prioritize them. She also has some extra advice on how you can start executing faster for clients. That’s all the guides for the month. The case studies are next, starting with how one team hit 10m visitors in 2 years. 0 to 12,000,000 Users in 24 Months – Sleep Advisor Case Study https://nemanja.com/case-studies/sleep-advisor/?fbclid=IwAR2jZDC1rAMtv9lzOvvDiSS9vZPsFMICT_B-Emgcf1Uzu8x8jvYwcxlRW-Q Nemanja Mirkovic brings you this analysis of the explosive growth of SleepAdvisor.org. This site project between Nemanja and a friend has been ongoing for 5 years. This study looked at a slice of two years when the site moved from no visitors to millions. The analysis starts at the idea stage. Nemanja fully documents how he chose the niche, researched the competitors, and even chose the exact domain for SleepAdvisor. From the start, he says, he focused on having content superior to what niche competitors were offering. He built and scaled high-quality content using an internal team. You’ll also get a lot of information about how he built his team and content process. For the rest of the analysis, he describes how his team acquired backlinks for the site, developed content marketing for growth, and tested social media. When traffic began to pour in, the team made the decision to focus on CRO. He provides examples of how CRO informed his process and how years of CRO testing have changed the presentation of his site. He closes the analysis with all the ways the company successfully (and unsuccessfully) monetized the traffic it generated. You’ll learn about how all of the following monetization attempts played out— For the next data study, you’ll take another look at AI. These systems have been found to recommend brands when prompted. Is this an SEO opportunity? Visibility in the AI Future: Which Brands are Recommended By OpenAI? https://www.sistrix.com/blog/visibility-in-the-ai-future-which-brands-are-recommended-by-openai/ Johannes Beus brings you this exploration of what major generative artificial intelligence engines are recommending brands and how often. This test was performed on OpenAI. The team gave the engine 10,000 product categories and asked it to return recommendations. This immediately yielded some interesting findings for the future of commercial search. Johannes noted— Johannes was also able to determine the most recommended out of all brands. In order, these were— These results have significant consequences for brands that cannot make this list. Generative results are drawn from search engine results, and the winning brands there may have a powerful foundation in coming AI technology. Check out the complete analysis for many other insights, including the list of brands that perform below average and charts of how often certain brands appear. The next case study is a look at the overall state of search in 2023. It’s a helpful large-scale review of everything that’s changed in a tumultuous couple of years. The State of Search 2023 https://www.semrush.com/blog/state-of-search-2023/ Marcus Tober brings you this catch-up resource for all the changes in search. His team calculated total traffic trends based on 50,000 US domains. Nearly 150,000,000,000 searches were analyzed to determine the rise and fall of different factors, topics, and terms. One factor that his team couldn’t ignore was the dramatic increase in Google Search Updates. They tracked how many of these updates landed compared to previous years and how much volatility they caused. For one, they detected that updates are becoming more frequent. Next, Marcus takes you through the major website tends for the last year. As he notes, there has been a 3-year decline in the number of ranking domains. This may result from Google’s work to stop spam from ranking. He notes that this also means larger sites rank for more keywords than before. This may suggest a growing advantage for sites with larger budgets and footprints. The remainder of the study is a detailed, extended graphic that illustrates most of the covered trends. You’ll learn more about: Check out the complete study to catch up on everything that happened over the last year. For now, let’s look to the future. One study predicts that the use of AI will rapidly increase over 2023. Use of AI for SEO and Content to Grow 5X This Year https://searchengineland.com/seo-compounding-value-393965 Danny Goodwin brings you these polling results on SEOs and their agencies performed by BrightEdge. He notes that marketing budgets have mostly been holding steady from the start of the COVID crisis. Budgets are expected to grow again, with many investments going toward AI. He analyzed the following findings from the study: Check out Danny’s write-up to get more analysis and a link to the full AI use study. For now, you’re ready to see the latest news. First, we have an official Google announcement with some important news for SEOs in the “news” niche. Understanding News Topic Authority https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/05/understanding-news-topic-authority?hl=en Google has released this guidance in response to the proliferation of news sites and sites that deal with news content. Over the course of the guidance, they explain how topic authority works for these sites and how Google balances a need for accuracy with other concerns. The company partly explains how topical authority works with “news.” Like many niches, this one works on a number of signals that determine how high you can rank. They include— This short report should help SEOs in the news niche understand what it takes to succeed in Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—June 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

5/22/2023

Matt Diggity Are you feeling on top of the competition now that you’re nearly halfway through the year? If not, this roundup should give you the edge you need with the latest data studies, guides, and news alerts. In the first case study, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at how a site earned one million visitors. Then, you’ll get a breakdown of the latest review update and another breakdown of what it may target now and in the future. The guides are next. You’ll learn new skills to help you develop content from AI and find out what matters most to make the first page in 2023. The roundup closes with some headlines you shouldn’t miss. You’ll get confirmation that the Reviews Update is finally over, a notice to export your analytics data, the resolution of the ‘site name’ error last month, and some of the latest official guidance on creating helpful content. Examine SEO Case Study: 7 Lessons to 1 Million Monthly Visits https://ahrefs.com/blog/examine-seo-case-study/ Bill Widmer brings you this case study covering Examine.com’s journey to 1 million visits. This is an interesting case, as he notes because the site didn’t focus hard on either SEO or backlink outreach. Throughout the study, Bill details the unique ways the Examine.com team built its audience and credibility. He points out how the site has generated a significant number of mentions from journalists by creating highly valuable data content. Examine.com publishes expert analyses of food and supplement nutrition claims. This is highly valuable content for journalists, allowing the site to pull mentions from news giants like The Guardian. It has over 1000 of these backlinks now. As Bill points out, it owes this relevance to some incredibly high standards for its high-detail content. Only subject matter experts produce the articles, and each piece passes through three different editors (also experts) before being posted. It is a massive investment, but Bill also reminds us that Examine didn’t arrive here by guesswork. By policy, they audit their SEO every six months. This has allowed them to pursue this strategy with the confidence that it would pay off. See the full guide for even more lessons about how Examine reached a million visits—even after being hit by a recent update. Speaking of updates, the next study has some interesting facts about the most recent Product Review Update. It was more volatile than ever. Google’s April 2023 Reviews Update More Volatile Than the Previous Product Updates https://searchengineland.com/googles-april-2023-reviews-update-was-more-volatile-than-the-previous-product-reviews-update-data-providers-say-398825 Barry Schwartz brings you this post-review report on the April 2023 Product Update. It may have felt like this one was bigger or messier than the previous ones. It was, and Barry has the data on why. First, Barry points out this review went beyond previous product reviews by also covering He backs this up with a collection of visuals that cover insights from all the top tools, such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Rank Ranger. These charts and graphs cover the times of peak volatility, the number of URLs newly appearing in the top 10 results, and breakdowns of the volatility by niche. For example, you’ll learn about the large impact this update had on health, finance, retail, and travel niches. Why was this update so volatile compared to the past one? The next case study by have some clues. The author argues that the update was targeting a wide-scale but unnamed factor. Google’s Newest Reviews Update Elevates Real-Life Experience https://www.amsivedigital.com/insights/seo/googles-newest-reviews-update-elevates-real-life-experience/ Lily Ray has an interesting interpretation of the latest reviews update, and in particular, a theory for why Google removed the word “product” from it. She argues that this update was targeted at real-life experiences. This is a big case to make, but she brought some evidence. First, she notes that Google has recently started to emphasize “experience” in its directions to searchers and search raters. Google defines experience more clearly in their Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines as “Experience: Consider the extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic. Many types of pages are trustworthy and achieve their purpose well when created by people with a wealth of personal experience. For example, which would you trust: a product review from someone who has personally used the product or a “review” by someone who has not?” As Lily points out, Google has built out a number of references to similar terms like “authenticity” and “original research.” in recent history. She also has some data evidence from the recent update. For example, she showed that many big update winners emphasize personal experience. She uses mom bloggers as an example of a niche where the update rewarded sites that focused on personal experience. She also tracks rank changes in audio and entertainment sites that support her theory. Check out the article for her complete argument. I take a wait and see approach to this theory for now, but it’s worth considering as future updates roll out. You’re ready to jump into the guides, starting with a look at how content is evolving with the expansion of AI. How Content Is Evolving Thanks to AI https://moz.com/blog/content-evolving-with-ai-whiteboard-friday Ross Simmonds bring you this Moz Whitebaord on how AI is likely to change the development of your content at every level, from workflow to creation. Near the start of the guide, you can find a graphic that fully illustrates how he expects AI to work for you as it continues to develop. He tracks and explains the changes that are possible for research, brainstorming, briefs, drafts, and publishing. In the rest of the piece, he goes into greater detail on all of this. For example, he talks about how AI can amplify human abilities in the planning stage by generating ideas, expanding them into outlines, and giving you drafts to review before you’ve even really started your day. He argues that SEOs should start focusing on using AI as an augment to the experience and strategy that they bring. Everything AI is still in flux. We don’t yet know how good it will get or how much it will really cost to use effective models.  The next guide will focus on the present. It looks at what’s necessary to reach the first page right now. How to Get on the First Page of Google in 2023 https://ahrefs.com/blog/how-to-get-on-the-first-page-of-google/ Joshua Hardwick brings you this look at what he thinks it takes to make the first page. This isn’t just a list of general tips, though, Josh takes you through the entire decision process that takes a failing page and prepares it to compete with the current Page 1 winners. Like many modern guides, it treats understanding search intent as the first priority. He reminds you that the first step is always finding out what is already ranking for the niche. If all results are in one format (for example, a “how-to” guide), that’s likely the only format that will be competitive for that term now. No keyword mastery can overcome this requirement. The full guide takes you through each modern requirement and lays out the tasks you need to complete to move to the one. It’s a good guide for beginners and a decent troubleshooting checklist for experienced SEOs who may have fallen behind on the trends. Now that you have some new skills. let’s jump to the big headlines of the last month. First, the most recent big update has now ended. April 2023 Reviews Update Is Officially Over https://www.searchenginejournal.com/april-2023-reviews-update-is-officially-over/485471/ Roger Montti brings you this announcement from Google about the reviews update that hit your sites starting on April 12th. As of April 25th, the review is officially considered concluded, and any ranking changes will likely have other causes. As we already noted in the case study at the top, this study was confirmed to have affected a lot more than products. Google announced that the update covered reviews about services, destinations, digital products, and more. Only 3rd party reviews (such as GMB reviews) were confirmed not to be included. Roger takes you through some of the post-update chatter from top SEO forums. For many, the mood was not great. SEOs are showing exhaustion with the number of updates they’ve endured in a short amount of time. Many reported large drops. The article closes with some advice on recovering if you’ve experienced drops. You’ll get some more actionable advice in the next news item. It gives you the deadline for saving your valuable analytics data. Export Historical Data From Universal Analytics Before July 1, 2024 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/13510998 Google’s team brings you this announcement that you’ll need to export your historical data out of Universal Analytics (UA) or risk losing it all. While the title only mentions one deadline, there are 2 of them here you’ll need to note if you’re still using this service— The announcement provides you with links to solutions you can use to export your data. They’ll give you the full steps for exporting to existing cloud storage, generating CVS report downloads, or using Google Sheets to Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—May 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

5/8/2023

Matt Diggity Whether you’re working on a brand new website, or building your existing site’s organic presence, it’s important to showcase your topical authority to both Google and your audience. They want to see that the information you provide, or the products that you sell, are of great quality and are coming from a credible source. That’s why it’s essential to present yourself as an authority through your content and your backlink profile. In this case study, you’ll learn the exact steps that my team at The Search Initiative took to increase our client’s organic traffic by 60.99%. In this article, you’ll learn how to: Before that, let’s find out a bit more about the website’s goals and the main challenges faced during the campaign. The Challenge The client is a website selling health supplements in the United States, who joined the agency having already decided that they wanted to migrate their dated website and build a fresh site from the ground up with SEO in mind. One of the main challenges of this campaign was to make sure that the migration was carefully planned and executed to ensure that the site’s original rankings and traffic were sustained. We also added E-E-A-T signals that established the client as a trustworthy and authoritative voice within the industry – read on to learn how to do this. The next focus was to produce well optimized content for the product pages by writing compelling descriptions that convert as well as producing supporting blog content to build topical relevance and improve keyword visibility for informational keywords. Finally, to build the backlink profile of the new domain, we boosted the newly optimized product pages by executing a link building strategy, including HARO (which you’ll learn all our tricks soon). Find out how you can overcome these challenges for your website by following the steps below. Executing an SEO-Friendly Site Migration Making the decision to migrate your entire website shouldn’t be taken lightly. In some cases you might not have a choice, which is why it’s worth being aware of the risks and challenges that you might face along the way. Apart from potentially completely losing or breaking parts of your website, a site migration can also have significant impacts on your SEO. I’ll walk you through the process of an SEO-friendly site migration below, but for now, let’s look at what a site migration actually is. What Is a Site Migration? A site migration is the process of making significant changes to a website’s structure, technology or design. Here are some examples on why you might want to consider a site migration: Unsure about which hosting provider to use? Check out my video below.  How Site Migrations Can Impact SEO A site migration is a substantial task that requires rigorous and thorough research and planning before you even begin to execute the strategy. With many moving parts and teams involved, it’s important to be aware of the SEO impacts that this can have. For example, without careful planning, you may lose your site’s precious rankings and traffic due to incorrect URL mappings and redirects or, you may encounter slow site-wide loading times as a result of incorrect server configurations. Even after the migration is complete and everything has gone to plan, it’s crucial to monitor progress to ensure that your site maintains and/or builds as much organic visibility as possible post-migration. SEO Site Migration Checklist I’ve put together this checklist so that you can be sure that your migration will be executed in an efficient and SEO-friendly way. Due to the scope of the work and risks involved, it’s good practice to plan your site migration for a time where, should things go wrong or there is a temporary dip, the impact is minimal. This is of course, assuming that your business has some seasonality to it. A site migration before or during the holiday season is not advised. The last thing you want to do is lose out on all of the potential traffic from a peak season as a result of your migration not being executed properly. Likewise, some days of the week may be quieter than others. For example, you may find that the start of the week is the best time to do your migration as fewer people browse your site at this time. Personally, I always migrate on Saturdays. Therefore, make sure to pick a smart migration date that allows time for you to monitor progress and iron out any issues that are presented post-migration. Using an SEO web crawler tool of your choice (i.e. SEMRush, Screaming Frog, Sitebulb etc), crawl your website so that you have a comprehensive record of everything that is on your website before the migration. For example, this will ensure that you have: You should also create a backup so that if for whatever reason the launch of your new site doesn’t go to plan, you can always revert back to the original if needed. Here’s a comprehensive guide on how to backup your website. This precautionary step is vital in making sure that you have peace of mind before launching. The next step is to create a copy of your website so that you can test and revise all of the changes that you intend to make – this is called a staging site. This staging site should be uploaded to a new server and ideally, should be on a separate domain or subdomain so that you can compare your new website to the original site before the launch. This’ll allow you to check and verify important things like making sure that the URLs from your old site are correctly redirected to the new site. Another important step is to make sure that you block access to this staging website from Google. This is to prevent both the staging site AND the original site from being indexed by search engines and in turn, potentially competing against each other for rankings. There are several ways you can do this: Add the following line of code to your pages: <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> You can’t carry out a migration without a clear and well organized URL map. Mapping your URLs involves keeping a list of all of your existing URLs so that you can match them up with the new URLs on your new website and implement the necessary redirects correctly. This is why crawling your original website comes in useful. In addition to your crawl, you should also compile your URLs from your XML sitemap (this is a file that serves as a roadmap for Google to access your pages). You can access your sitemap via the following URL:  example.com/sitemap.xml Your URL map can be as simple as this: Original URL New URL Redirected? olddomain.com/old-url/ newdomain.com/new-url/ Yes/No If you’re changing the structure of your URLs or combinings old pages into a single page, remember to map all of the combined pages’ URLs to the correct new URL. When it comes to actually migrating the content (i.e. your HTML files, images etc), I strongly recommend doing so in small chunks. The more pages you move at once, the higher the chances of something going wrong. So take your time and carry out the migration whilst carrying out checks and tests at each stage. This’ll make it easier for you to identify any potential issues that may arise. This is also your chance to update any of the content if you need to. Without implementing proper 301 redirects, your new pages will not receive the traffic and PageRank (ranking power) of the old pages, which will significantly impact the new site’s rankability. 301 redirects are a way of indicating to users and search engines that the location of a web page has permanently moved. Using your URL map, you can go through each of your pages and implement a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL. If for whatever reason you have an old URL that is no longer needed, you can redirect it to another relevant page on your website, or serve a custom 404 page to let users know that the page no longer exists. Once you’ve redirected your URLs, you also need to remember to update all of the internal links (hyperlinks from one page on your site to another) on your new website. You can find all of the internal links from your website crawl that you did right at the start of the process. You should change all of the internal links from the old URLs to the new URLs to avoid unnecessary internal redirects. Imagine you had the following scenario. If you don’t update the internal link, then Page A would have an internal link to Page b. But, when clicked, Page b would redirect to Page B. This creates an unnecessary internal redirect that when multiplied across thousands of requests, can seriously affect page load times. Therefore, you should update the internal link so that, you have: Although your Read More Read More The post How to Grow Traffic by 60.99% & SEO Topical Authority (Case Study) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

4/24/2023

Matt Diggity First, you’ll get hard data from the latest case studies. The studies cover the state of AI in the marketing industry, the winners and losers of the last big update, and whether going viral helps with SEO. Next, the guides will give you some new skills to put to work. You’ll learn how to find out if PBNs are still working, how to apply AI to create SEO-friendly content, and how to do your own tracking of Google Update changes. The top SEO headlines are waiting for you at the end. Google has announced the broad core updates are done and provided some details about how they catch fake reviews. There’s also a new reviews update that’s no longer just about products. The State of AI in the Online Marketing Industry: 2023 Report https://www.authorityhacker.com/ai-survey Mark Webster, writing for Authority Hacker, brings you this massive survey on how digital marketers use their new AI toys. More than 3,800 marketers were included in the survey. They were asked dozens of questions to reveal insights like the following examples: The respondents came from various backgrounds, including website owners, freelancers, agency owners, and more. The results suggest that AI already powers many marketing operations at different levels. The survey also revealed some of the pioneering users’ frustrations. 63% of respondents cited inaccuracies in the copy as a major issue with the current functionality. Despite high trust in some other areas, fewer than 15% of users report trusting keyword data generated by AI. Still, everyone seems eager to forge ahead. 90% of marketers are confident that they will be able to learn and adapt to these new tools. Check out the full article for a complete breakdown of how SEOs report using A.I. Surfer AI Launch Date Announced for May 23, 2023 https://surferseo.com/ai/ Surfer’s AI tool’s release date has been announced.  This is the same tool that Matt Diggity helped design which takes care of article research, outline creation, content creation and SEO optimization in a single button press. Watch the case study where Matt talks about his website that grew from 0 to 50,000 visitors per month, with pure AI content.  To sign up for the waitlist and take advantage of the launch bonuses, head on over here: https://surferseo.com/ai/ Next, you’ll get a better understanding of the impact of the last Core Update through a look at its winners and losers. Google’s March 2023 Core Update: Winners, Losers & Analysis https://www.amsivedigital.com/insights/seo/googles-march-2023-core-update-winners-losers-analysis/ Lily Ray lets you know who is celebrating after the end of the last big update. Her analysis looked at 7,000+ domains and the positions that they held before and after. This update’s winners included some of the biggest sites on the internet. Below, you can see them listed next to the absolute change in visibility they achieved— These were the top 5 biggest losers, based on the absolute loss of visibility they experienced— In her analysis of the list of 7,000 sites, she judged that eCommerce and shopping were the winningest categories, though a significant amount of the growth went to a few huge players (such as Amazon). Reference/dictionary sites showed up in both lists. Bigger reference sites appeared to benefit greatly, whereas smaller reference sites lost a ton of visibility. Lily also noted some strange trends in the travel industry. Sites that directly sell services (such as home sites for hotels) did well, but affiliate sites that rated and reviewed hotels all suffered. This may be an early warning sign of Google’s changing priorities in search. The final case study of the month asks (and answers) how much going viral is really worth as a strategy. Does Going Viral Help With SEO? Not Really https://ahrefs.com/blog/viral-seo/ Patrick Stox brings you this look at the real SEO benefits of having a viral moment. As he notes early on, a viral moment can bring on a huge influx of news stories and social media mentions. That should mean a big change in visibility, right? That’s not what Patrick found. He used an interesting example: The Four Seasons Landscaping company that was (presumably due to a scheduling mixup) the host of a presidential press conference. This business received hundreds of new links as a result of this event, many from the largest print and TV news sources in the United States. Patrick uses analytical sources to show you how the company reacted and benefitted from these new links. As he points out, this company isn’t even hitting the first page for most of its key terms (and most competitors are also small businesses). The company claims, at the time this article was written, that they had netted only 3 new clients from the attention. Patrick follows up with several more examples you can check out in the complete article. Each time, he points out mistakes that these companies made, but the trend remains clear that an explosion of media mentions doesn’t seem to deliver growth on its own. With the case studies for the month closed, you’re ready to move on to the guides. First, you’ll learn about the state of PBNs after the last round of updates so you can decide where they belong in your strategy. Pbns & the Google Spam Update – Do They Still Work? https://rankclub.io/pbn-link-spam-update/ Rob Rok takes a data-driven dive into the performance of PBNs after a series of updates rocked the link-building world. As he noted, “search spam” was a major target of the recent updates. Many suspected that links like PBNs would be targeted. He set up a series of tests to determine how the updates had impacted PBNs. Using a method from one of my old blogs, he sent links from PBNs in his network to a number of small, stagnating test sites. From there, he waited several months to see how the test sites would respond to the fresh link from the PBN. His testing showed a strong and sudden reaction from all the test sites. A few sites jumped into the top 10 results for related terms. Rob concluded that the updates didn’t harm the viability of PBNs. Every single test site saw a response, and they were all positive. Check out the full article to see the data from the test sites and some more analysis from Rob on how these results were possible. Next up, the good people at Moz will help you start putting AI to use with new recommended practices. AI for SEO and Content Marketing: A Friend, Not a Foe (For Now, at Least) https://moz.com/blog/ai-for-seo-and-content-marketing Ann Smarty takes you through a look at how you can start getting friendly with AI. First, she argues that most SEOs shouldn’t feel threatened unless their content never expresses a human opinion or reflects expertise (the two things she argues AI can’t do). It’s not going to replace your pillar pieces, but the value she does see in AI is as a sort of virtual assistant that can be activated throughout the day to kickstart, simplify or automate SEO tasks. She provides you with a long list of ways you can use AI, including all of the following examples she explains in the article: She closes the guide with some extra news about upcoming AIs that are promising even more applications in the future. She introduces you to some projects that may soon help you create your own reliable stock art and convert blog posts directly into videos. For the last guide of the month, we’re jumping back into talking about the updates. It will teach you how to use simple metrics in GA4 to handle your own update tracking.  How to Compare Hourly Sessions in Google Analytics 4 to Track the Impact of Major Google Algorithm Updates (Like Broad Core-Updates) https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/ Glenn Gabe brings you a new update-tracking solution he developed based on a Twitter reply. He was recently asked if there was an easy way to compare Google’s organic traffic hourly (for example, while an update was rolling out). A report like this is possible with GA4 , and Glenn helps you build it out so you can see what’s happening to your site live. Glenn takes you through a complete tutorial of his process so that you can follow it yourself. The nine steps cover all the settings you’ll need to apply to get the report that provides the right information. On top of the helpful steps, he uses visuals to show you where to find all the right session, segment, and timeframe options. This guide is a short one because the process is really simple when you know where to look. Once you’ve figured it out, it will be set up every time a new update hits. You may be waiting awhile because, as our first news item states, the last update is confirmed complete. Google March 2023 Broad Core Update Done Rolling Out https://searchengineland.com/google-march-2023-broad-core-update-done-rolling-out-394724 Barry Schwartz brings you this confirmation from Google that the March 2023 Core Update has finally concluded. It was finally listed as Read More Read More The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—April 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.