In this week’s video, I collected tips from the speakers and experts at PubCon Pro in Austin, Texas. This group of tips is pretty incredible, check it out…
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Hey, Gary, you wanna give me a tip for my video series?
No.
Alright, so last tip I’m gonna give for today is about the reinstatement process. It’s one of the things we were talking about today. It’s one of the things we’re allowed to talk about. And that is is that currently in the EU, right now you have one shot and then you have basically a re-appeal process, so you’ve got two shots. What’s going to be happening is, in the United States, is currently it’s one shot deal. You’re gonna basically be able to start the reinstatement process, you’ll have 60 minutes once you get to a certain point in that process to upload your proof, and if it fails, you’re just not gonna get reinstated at that point. Now, that’s not to say that that can’t change, by the way. There are talks going on about putting a re-appeal process in it for the United States, it’s just not here yet. And as a matter of fact, this whole process is not in the United States yet. Expect it probably sometime in Q4.
I’m super excited about the relevancy of schema markup in this changing world of SGE and the new Bing, because you can use it not just to get a rich result, but instead as a marketing data layer to communicate with AI exactly what your brand’s about. Schema markup is your knowledge graph, so go get that schema rocking.
Hey, gang. Cannot recommend enough that folks dig in deeply on their content. Look, you cannot answer enough questions for consumers today and for our world of AI and generative AI search. Any question you can think of, and then go find more. Dive deep, it is the way to be the authority. Showcase your expertise and your experience with it, trust will follow. But I’m telling you right now, if you have to make a decision, I’m prioritizing content over technical SEO for at least the next year. Get on it, you will succeed.
All right, so here’s my favorite tip, um, write to the consumer journey, don’t write towards search intent. And it’s easy to confuse those two, you may think they’re similar, they might be the same, whatever it is. It’s not, there’s some really subtle differences between consumer journey and search intent, and if you write towards the journey instead, you’ve got a whole world of content that you can develop, uh, that most people aren’t touching.
Yeah. This is my bonus tip on this one: don’t believe Domain Authority. It’s completely worthless. It’s a vanity metric. Um, I wrote a whole paper on this. Check it out. It’s worth it, look, taking a look at.
So anybody who knows me knows that I’ve been completely obsessed with AI content for the last, uh, year or so. And this conference today and yesterday has had an entire track around AI, particularly focused on content. And one of the coolest takeaways that I got, uh, so far was from Dixon Jones, who talks about extracting your entities to identify what your content really needs to be about for a proper content brief before you go to any of the tools to start generating content. So thinking not just about keywords and whatever the single keyword that you might plug into the tool is, but thinking instead about the entities that are related to your keywords, and then using them as the basis for your content creation. That, to me, was the money, and something I’m gonna take outta here and use right away.
So we’re in an age where AI is gonna replace a lot of writing jobs. The estimate is 100 million writing jobs. Um, I’m a writer, I adapted to AI by literally joining one of the best AI writing tools out there, Content at Scale, and what I’m teaching, I’m teaching this role called AIO, and what it is, it’s a new way to think about your work as a writer. You’re no longer writing the base draft, you’re no longer spending eight hours. If you are, you’re in the Stone Age, sorry. What you should be doing is optimizing content that comes out of AI. How do you do that? So follow a series of steps I call the CRAFT framework. CRAFT stands for cutting the fluff, review that content, optimize it, add images, visuals, media, fact check. AI is notorious for BSing, so check your facts and then trust build with story. So if you follow that framework, you kinda can’t go wrong producing content out of AI that is still humanized, because that’s at struggle. We gotta make sure our content coming out of AI is still ready for the end humans so they can trust and buy from us.
So the biggest tip that I would say that I would learned while we’re here is how AI can effect our jobs here in SEO. You know, as you know, of course it can be an excellent assistant, but the fact of the matter is is that by marrying our AI with SEO with content, that’s gonna be a winning combination over time. And Gary Illyes actually was stating, talking about this, create content which is useful for people even if you are using something like AI. That’d be the biggest tip I would give everybody today.
Okay. My tip is if you’re gonna use ChatGPT or OpenAI, try and come up with a data layer that is your own before you make the input. So if you’ve got some information that is unique that ChatGPT and OpenAI doesn’t know about and you’re gonna start writing content, you’re gonna write unique content, your g- output is gonna be different to everybody else’s that’s out there.
So if I’m sharing a tip, everybody’s all on AI, but if there’s one thing that’s absolutely true about AI, it’s not set it and forget it, it’s absolutely fantastic for generating ideas, coming up with bulk i- things to implement, but if you leave it alone, it will bite you in the butt. Take that from somebody with a little bit of experience getting bit in the butt with it.
Don’t randomly just change your website, think that the b- the new design is much better. Instead, always makes sure to A/B test any changes you’re gonna make on the website to see the actual improvements, or decline.
All right, so my quick SEO tip is we have to pay attention to the, really the core and, um, I really like focusing and revisiting that the internal link structure is absolutely amazing. So go take a look at your internal link structure, make sure that it’s as optimized as it can be, and you’ll see, still see the results.
I think a really good tip that a lot of publishers, uh, are overlooking is, uh, optimizing your images for display so when it’s on a thumbnail or whether it shows up in Google Discover, it’s important to have colorful images, images that are centered, and images that will pop out and tell the story, what it’s about. So if it’s about kayaks, make sure you have a kayak in there. Don’t use dim colors, don’t use in shadow, don’t use dark and black and white or monochrome colors, use colors that pop out and that… And make sure your image is centered so that when it’s in thumbnail view, um, it displays well, whether it’s Google SGE, Google Discover or Google News, it’ll look really sharp. Call attention and get more clicks.
Here’s a tip for you: guest blog post links are against Google’s guidelines. If you’re not sure on that, search Google for ‘John Mueller guest blog post’ and see what he says. It’s okay to have a guest blog post only if you know follow the links. So if you’re doing guest blog posts for link building, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, that could get you in trouble, or chances are they just won’t count.
All right, so whenever you’re thinking about conversion optimization, obviously you like to think about the user first. And one of the biggest, uh, things that we’ve seen in helping increase conversions is actually including either a Google Meet link or a Zoom Link in our website chat, so when it pops up and you have questions, can’t figure it out, oh, well, boom, jump on with one of our experts or jump on with one of our sales people to get better questions. And when you can provide that great user experience and actually get a real live person on the other side of that chat into a Zoom or Google Meet, that’s almost a guaranteed conversion.
Uh, my quick tip is very simple: sign up for Microsoft 365’s beta of Python in Excel. You’ll wanna use it and you’ll want your teams to use it.
We just shipped new version of Bing Webmaster Tools. Um, that surface, uh, Bing performance data, with a shot and news and image and knowledge and all those things that you need to know, uh, to see if your site is performing on Bing and will, uh, get you more customer. We announced also integration of Wix in Index Now, so mean that if you have a site that is Wix enabled, a premium site on Wix, it will immediately get indexed at Bing all the content, … content indexed at Bing. We announced removal of disavow links where you don’t need to go to Bing Webmaster Tools, uh, to get all this, uh, links without pointing to your site. We can figure this out on our own, so we don’t need you to tell us what changed on your site. We shipped also in Bing Webmaster Tools the ability to drill down into site maps to see the index coverage of Bing’s parsing that very useful data to help you being indexed at Bing and to understand why the content is not indexed in search engine. So all kind of changes that we have enabled today for PubCon conference, uh, you need, you need to look at to get more user for your site.
So my big tip for you is, regardless of whether you have a customer value in mind or whether you still need to figure it out, you need to be using maximized conversion values. If you are using maximized conversions, you are setting yourself at a disadvantage because, A, conversions all have different values, we need to set those stages in a different journey, but also the algorithm really benefits from having conversion values. In every instance, we have seen that conversion value, maximized conversion value outperforms max conversions, so unless you’re going to take yourself out of the smart bidding race, absolutely lean into maximized conversion value whether you’re a legion or eCommerce.
So in 2023, my biggest, uh, project and thing I’m advocating for is education and enablement of teams. Uh, I’m a big believer in the more people in an organization that are enabled within SEO or any type of discipline, the better the, the business will, will grow and achieve as far as what their goals are, and then it makes you a better professional because you have to know what you’re talking about to actually educate others. So that’s my big tip for 2023.
It’s a competitive market out there trying to find SEOs to join your team, and I know how hard it is. Uh, so one of the things I really like to do as an SEO rather than necessarily 100% focusing on hiring, building a team internally by engaging your coworkers and other department with enablement sessions, training sessions, open office hours to build an SEO awareness throughout your organization so that people who are in development will know that, hey, if I change this code, it might impact SEO or content writers, uh, will know how to best, uh, talk about their topic in a way that users are searching for. So definitely use enablement training and open office hours to build a team internally, that’s the best way to build your team.
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