Arsen Rabinovich (00:00:00):
Casey, are you going to flex?
Melissa Rice (00:00:03):
What? No.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:00:04):
Whoa, look at those muscles.
Andrew Wilder (00:00:14):
Wow.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:00:14):
They’re huge.
Melissa Rice (00:00:14):
Hi everyone. We’re showing off our guns over here.
Casey Markee (00:00:14):
We’re live. Sorry, sorry. I was talking about the beach.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:00:18):
I think it’s that way.
Andrew Wilder (00:00:19):
Oh my.
Casey Markee (00:00:19):
I think the beach is that way.
Melissa Rice (00:00:22):
I love it. Hi everyone. And you know, welcome to the 45th episode of SEO for Bloggers. We did it. Look at that. In this episode, we’re breaking down the most important SEO updates and trends for Q1 of 2025. From Google algorithm shifts to AI-driven search advancements, we’ll cover what’s changing and how you can stay ahead. Joining us, as always are our panelists, Casey Markee of Mediawise, Andrew Wilder of Nerdpress and Arsen Rabinovich of Top Hat Rank. And I’m your host, Melissa Rice. A reminder, we’re hosting a live AMA at the end of this episode, which as we always do, right? So bring those questions to the chat. A reminder to put a queue before your question just so we can up vote it and get it queued up for when we’re ready to answer. But let’s start because we’ve got a lot to cover today. First question, Casey.
Casey Markee (00:01:15):
Hey.
Melissa Rice (00:01:16):
Yeah. Hey, nice muscles by the way, how does Google’s latest algorithm-
Casey Markee (00:01:21):
It’s a tight shirt.
Melissa Rice (00:01:23):
Right, exactly. How does Google’s latest algorithm update impact SEO strategies in 2025? And is there anything specific that bloggers should be leaving behind in 2024?
Casey Markee (00:01:35):
I think they should be leaving behind any expectations that they’re going to have a really incredibly successful 2025. I mean, I would like to, I’m going to be realistic here. I think the odds of us having-
Andrew Wilder (00:01:46):
Wow. Whoa Casey.
Casey Markee (00:01:58):
No, not true at all. Not true at all. Especially good, true, good. It’s a good time. What is it? What is it? The year of the rabbit, is that what they say? You tell me. I can never remember. I just know that some noticed. So it’s nice. So it’s a snake, not great. Very constricting for sure. With these updates, it’s funny because it’s always the same blip reply from Google. Hey, it’s just like, don’t take these updates seriously because we’re really, it’s for your benefit. We’re making our search results better. It’s like you have a new list of the greatest songs and we’re flipping the list now because it’s a new year and we’ve got new artists we need to highlight. Well, that’s not great experience and it’s not great news for a lot of bloggers these days.
(00:02:38):
What we’re seeing with this update is a continual refinement by Google of “surfacing” things based upon their own user testing, based upon feedback, based upon maybe some of the quality rater guideline information that they’ve possessed and pushed out over the last couple of months. But we’re not seeing a lot more of what we usually see, which is a lot of bloggers confused. Here I was ranking very competitively all of a sudden now I’ve been moved to page three or page four, and we’re not really sure why you’ve elevated these other sites over us for no specific reason. And because of that, bloggers tend to jump out at certain things. Oh my god, Google just updated the quality rater guidelines to combat excessive scrolling. And they were talking about superfluous elements. So clearly my recipes, it must just be because they’re excessive scrolling. That must be why I was impacted.
(00:03:29):
With regards to core updates. It’s never one thing. And that’s where a lot of bloggers get confused about this is a reshuffling, this is a core updates are dramatic changes. It’s never one thing. There is just dozens if not hundreds of other factors that go into play. And it’s very possible, as a matter of fact, it’s more likely than not likely is that you didn’t do necessarily anything wrong. Others did things necessarily better than you did. And of course the result of that is a drop because there’s a reshuffling going on there. There’s also been a huge change in the search ranking since December. Google has basically moved all organic results to page two on mobile. We now have incredibly new carousels. We have an enhanced recipe carousel. We have a people also ask Carousel. We have a what people are saying Carousel we have a video carousel. We have the AI… Well not an AI carousel, but basically we have an increased photo and video carousel now.
(00:04:24):
And then at the very bottom, when we scroll down to the bottom of page one, we have this nice little link that says Click for more results. And hey, congratulations. That’s where we’re getting the regular organic listings now. So when people contact me about these ranking drops, we immediately go into search console and we see that the breakdown is because of the recipe-rich results, which of course is the organic rankings or the organic listing. The recipe-rich results are the ones that are really dropping like a rock in many aspects, whereas the carousel results tend to be increasing. But our goal here is we’re going to share the resources that we have shared previously, which is directly from Google on what these quality core updates involve.
(00:05:04):
But what we can leave behind honestly in 2024 is an understanding that we’re going to have less of the same. I think this is going to be a continual realignment by Google. They’re going to continue. This is just all getting us happy for AI mode, which is going to be coming in a couple of months. It’s going to be a little bit rougher in 2025 than it is in 2024. And I think we have to accept the fact that referrals by the end of the year may be lower than they were at the beginning of the year. And that’s just because there’s less real estate. And there’s also, of course, this belief that Google is moving from a search engine to an answer engine, trying to keep as many of those clicks as they can on page one for themselves and not you. And unfortunately that’s just kind of the world we live in.
Melissa Rice (00:05:46):
Yeah, well put. Andrew, can you tell us how important is site speed and core vitals for SEO in 2025?
Andrew Wilder (00:05:57):
I don’t think it’s changed much. We all know it’s a ranking factor. How much I think is going to depend on the specific query and also just what the competition is doing. But with anything that’s a known ranking factor, you want to take care of it, right? It’s table stakes at this point basically to be in the good range for all three metrics. We were talking right before the call and Casey was like, yeah, for every site that has good Core Web Vitals, there might be two or three others on the top 10 results that don’t have it. But they’re ranking for other reasons. And if you want to be competitive, it’d be crazy not to be making sure you’re in the good range. I wouldn’t lose a ton of sleep over it, but it’s definitely something that you need to make sure is taken care of and doing well.
Melissa Rice (00:06:37):
Awesome. Thank you. Arsen, what are the key technical SEO elements that bloggers need to prioritize?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:06:47):
We’ve been kind of looking at these updates since, well through 2024. And with every iteration of an update to the core ranking system, we are seeing more and more emphasis on user experience, mobile experience, EEAT a part of all of that. Well, not EEAT, Core Web Vitals and you know, Android TouchNet. And I think that’s a very, very important component from a technical perspective. It also kind of depends on what you consider technical. So like a lot of things from a user perspective, a lot of times, like when we crawl a website, we’re not just looking at things from an algorithmic like this is something that needs to be fixed because it will help you rank in Google. But also we’re looking at it from a user experience perspective. So you have broken links. If you’re referencing a study or you’re telling someone to go somewhere from an article and then you have a broken link or a link is pointing to a 404 page that doesn’t exist anymore, Google will translate that as a bad user experience because it’s bad for the user. So I would definitely pay a lot of attention to that.
(00:07:49):
A lot of cleanup that we’re doing is around internal linking also. And you hear me talk about internal linking very, very frequently. There was a lot of recommendations and suggestions in the past that if you have a post that’s performing very, very well that you can link from that post to other posts on your website to help that post improve in rankings or to just perform better. A lot of times we lost the understanding of the meaning of internal linking, that it needs to be contextual, it needs to be relevant, some posts should not be linked together. It just does not make sense. So again, you’ve got to look at things from not just a SEO perspective, but also user perspective. Does it really make sense for me to link to a tomahawk steak from a birthday cake recipe or something like that. So those two things I would really focus on and look at them not so much from an SEO perspective. And it’s still important to look at it that way, but also from a user perspective.
Melissa Rice (00:08:43):
Awesome. Andrew, you’re going to love this question. For bloggers who are still missing their SERP images, can they expect to see them again this year?
Andrew Wilder (00:08:54):
SERP images like you’re missing the thumbnail and you want it back. So it might be time to change our catchphrase from it depends, to probably not. I hate to say it, but we’ve all been complaining to Google about this for what, a year, year and a half. I’m starting to think they think it’s a feature, not a bug.
Casey Markee (00:09:17):
Well, that’s actually true. They’ve actually used those words. It’s a feature, not a bug. Very true.
Andrew Wilder (00:09:26):
Because they don’t care about your site, they care about the person who comes to search on Google and they want to get them the best experience. However, Google defines it, right? So they’re doing all these different tests and for whatever reason they’ve figured out that some search results shouldn’t get a thumbnail next to them, which is awful from our perspective. But I don’t know if there’s anything we can do about it. You could write your congressman, but they’re kind of busy right now. I wish I had a better answer. The only other thing you could be doing is making sure everything is technically correct.
(00:09:58):
Make sure you have good thumbnail images to start. Make sure your featured image is a 1,200 pixel wide image. Make sure the center of the image isn’t in focus, because this is the way Google crops stuff. Sometimes if the focal point is in the bottom of the image and that gets cropped out, the image is going to be blurry and Google may choose not to use that. They do process these images and analyze them. It’s not just, oh, there’s an image, we’re going to use it blindly. So making sure your images are compelling to help encourage people to click on them may help get them back. But again, Google’s not really moving on this unfortunately.
Melissa Rice (00:10:32):
Thank you for taking that bullet and being a messenger of bad news.
Andrew Wilder (00:10:34):
Sorry.
Melissa Rice (00:10:38):
Casey. What are the best strategies for optimizing SEO for mobile? Any new tips?
Casey Markee (00:10:46):
When we’re talking about optimizing for mobile, we’re really talking about optimizing for mobile appearance on our phones. So if I pull out my phone and I’m looking at my site, I do not want to be completely bombarded with ads the first time I look at page one. If I’m clicking from Google to my recipe page, the first thing I’m going to be looking at is for the love of God, please don’t have a pop-up on that click, specifically. Please. I’ll make a donation to your favorite charity. Just remove the pop-up. This kind of intrusive interstitial issue and behavior is still something that we see every day with audits, and it’s not something that’s ever going to help you provide a superior UX for your users. If you want to do pop-ups, they should be exit only. And frankly, they shouldn’t even really be exit only on the first click anyway. They should just have those load between pages.
(00:11:33):
But your goal is to optimize that above-the-fold information. We shouldn’t have a huge photo. We should have clear information. I should see a title. I should see your information, I should see your byline. I should see maybe a jump or maybe a jump button there so that if someone is in a hurry, they can get down to where they need to go. Have a little bit of a teaser text there, understand, try to sell the user on why this recipe is worth their time as opposed to the million of other options there. Then we might have our featured image. And then below that, try to get into the recipe quickly. Where we’re seeing a lot of issues is if I’m scrolling down and right below that featured image, I’m seeing an ad and a sign-up for my email, and then maybe another ad, and then below that, finally I have a paragraph, and then below that I have something else. Really, it’s taking you two to three scrolling screens to get actually into the meat of the recipe. That might be something that I would probably want to change. We’ve seen the effects of doing that on bloggers who have already reported back, “Hey, know I was very fortunate, Casey, I don’t seem that I’ve been impacted negatively by this update.” And then I have others email me and they’re like, “Man, I don’t understand what’s going on.”
(00:12:43):
I’m like, “Well, hey, here’s your recipe for Salisbury steak. Watch me scroll down through it.” And it literally, I’m recording. I’m sending them a recording showing three full scrolls on my mobile device before I actually see any indexable text. It’s not a good way for you to sell the user on why your recipe is worth their time. So our goal is just to make it easy on mobile, to provide a better experience. And sometimes that means condensing content. Sometimes that means making sure that we’re writing for users and not search engines. Sometimes that means maybe you use ChatGPT to condense down to five paragraphs into two. Maybe we don’t need a full equipment list in your post. Maybe we can save that for the recipe card. Maybe we don’t need 15 substitutions and variations. Maybe we can just do four or five. Maybe we don’t need a stack of 10 FAQs, and we certainly don’t need five or six photos of the finished dish.
(00:13:32):
I know your photography is fantastic. I love it. Nothing makes me more excited than to look at photos of grilled meats all day on the internet. Okay, but I only need maybe two or three photos of that tomahawk steak and a recipe to really satiate me. So let’s just try to keep things in perspective. And that’s what I would do with regards to optimizing for mobile in 2025.
Melissa Rice (00:13:55):
Right, good advice. I’m going to let everybody answer this at free will. What do bloggers need to know from the updates Google made to the quality raters guidelines this year? Arsen, do you want to kick it off?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:14:08):
Yeah, I mean, we had a whole, and we’ll paste over, we had a whole episode of Top Hat Chats with Dr. Mary Haines about this, and you know, a lot of this stuff is really not new. And Casey, you can also jump in on this one. A lot of this stuff is not new. We’ve been saying this, you know, cut down on the fluff, make it a better user experience, really prioritize EAT signaling, and again, not so much from a ranking factor perspective, but to the user, right? But again, keep in mind these guidelines are not necessarily the algorithm, right? So it could be a potential hint at what we could be seeing in the future from an algorithmic evaluation standpoint, but I wouldn’t necessarily take those and say, this is how the algorithm… I think the way to apply what we’ve covered in that webinar, the way to apply it is from a user-centric perspective, more so much like a ranking perspective.
Casey Markee (00:15:01):
Yeah, like I said, I think that Arsen discussed with Marie was very great, was well done. She has an article on her site where she has an embedded tweet from me where we talk about the fact that the quality rater guidelines are moving targets. They’re where Google would like search to go. They are not ranking factors. A lot of bloggers get confused by that. They’re feedback that they’re using to grade and evaluate changes that they’re making in the wild, okay? That’s why they have these thousands and thousands of quality raters to begin with. But also even the results that they use in the quality rater guidelines as lowest meets the needs they’re ranking. And some of them are ranking pretty highly.
(00:15:43):
Understand that even though they might rank something as lowest meets the needs, the algorithm isn’t recognizing it as lowest meets the needs. It’s like the recipe guide. There was a section in there that we had a guide on butter beer and a visit to Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the Universal Studios in Florida. That is a high ranking post. Okay. I know it’s not a great and easy post to rank or to read. It’s filled with superfluous filler content that could absolutely be cut down, but it’s ranking and it’s ranking well. Now the thing to understand is that we want to be useful in everything we do. So with like jump links, we absolutely want to use jump links. We absolutely want to use table of contents. But what you don’t want to do is if you’re going down and adding multiple jump links to your content, most likely your content is too large to begin with. And you should probably look at condensing that down.
(00:16:31):
If you need to add multiple jump links to your posts, that’s a sign that your content is probably too big to begin with and we need to start looking at trimming that down and something to be very proactive about that. Also, with regards to table of contents, we’ve literally had Google people tell us, “Hey, table of contents are great. It allows easy access to the main points of your content. Do not close those. It makes no sense to include a table of contents on a page and collapse it so nobody can see it.” So just really understand, trying to make it as easy as possible for users on mobile to digest your content. And that means really using one paragraph when you might already have three there as an example.
Melissa Rice (00:17:12):
Anything else, Arsen, you want to add?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:17:14):
Yeah, I mean, no, not really. We covered a lot of it with Marie. I don’t want to repeat that stuff.
Andrew Wilder (00:17:22):
I just want, while Casey was talking, I just pulled up the PDF of the actual rater guidelines from the January revision. I’m going to drop in a link here so everybody can look at it on pages 66 and 67, they give examples with screenshots of low quality sites in their opinion, like they’re literally saying this is bad. And again, it’s not a ranking factor, but if this is what they’re training the quality raters to look for, then this is what they care about, right? And I want to point out, especially something where they call out ads getting in the way and it’s difficult to find the main content. And for a recipe site in particular, the recipe is the main content. So you have to have a jump to recipe button. That’s non-negotiable at this point. I also want to mention, Mediavine just sent out an email last week, was it admitting this and saying, turn off the arrival unit finally.
Casey Markee (00:18:19):
That’s crazy talk. Didn’t we talk about turning off the arrival unit at some point in the past years ago, maybe?
Andrew Wilder (00:18:26):
Yeah, once or twice. But anyway, I think it’s really helpful if you pull up that PDF, if you go to pages 66 and 67 where it says low recipe one, two, three, if you click those links, it actually shows you a screenshot of those sites. So they’ve obscured the logo so as not to call anyone out, but you can actually see an example of what not to do right there. So I think that’s a good exercise.
Melissa Rice (00:18:47):
Awesome. Arsen, what are the best link building strategies that that’ll still work in 2025?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:18:56):
Okay, so this is an awesome question because we, in the last few years, we kind of changed how we view links and as a byproduct of information that Google passed on to us and what we’re seeing happen naturally. So we don’t know… Let’s say you have a hundred links pointing to a page. We don’t know, out of those a hundred links, how many links Google is actually using to evaluate your page or how much trust or authority or whatever you want to call it, is being passed over to you. We’re also seeing that there’s much less emphasis on the context that’s being passed from the anchor text of a back link to a page that it’s pointing to. And we were always, when we do link building, we try to get us close with the anchor text to the primary topic that we’re covering on that page.
(00:19:51):
And all of that is contextual signaling. So the way we’re looking at links right now is from a perspective of a supporting secondary signal, right? So I would rather invest time on making sure that my content is as perfect as can be before I think links. So I’m going to try to get to the top three spots with as much on-page optimization, focusing the content, optimizing towards the user, making sure my click-through rates are great, making sure my engaged user sessions are great, making sure that I’m answering all the questions, effectively predicting what the user is here for or the reader is here for and effectively addressing that. And if I’m able to reach position four and I can look at my piece of content and say, Hey, there’s really nothing else I can do to this, right? The rest is maybe authority, EAT signaling, whatever it is. At that point I would start link building and at that point I would build links little by little by little to see how they’re moving the needle.
(00:20:52):
And again, know any link building in Google’s eyes is a bad thing, but it’s still a necessary, not as necessary, but still super necessary. And we do see a benefit from it, but it’s not so much of like, oh, my competitor has 300 links pointing to this page. I need to have 300 links. That doesn’t work that way anymore. When you look at search results, you can use any tool, you can use Ahrefs, you can use SEMrush, any tool that shows you any kind of domain or back link count, and you want to look at linking referring domains instead of just back links because one domain can link multiple times, so that’s not a very accurate number, but we’re looking at the number of referring domains, and you’ll have somebody in the number one position with four referring domains, and then you have somebody in position 10 with 30 referring domains. So clearly those things are just not aligning for us.
(00:21:39):
Your on page signaling, your internal linking, all the context that you can know, the focus that you can bring to that topic and optimize for the user is definitely going to move the needle much more the linking. Having said that, the links that are still super important are the links that are going to help with brand identity, entity recognition, building your EEAT signals, so going on podcasts, being interviewed, submitting content to larger publications, becoming an author on other publications. All of those links are still super important from a brand perspective because Google looks at those links in a way where it can identify who you are as an entity, update the knowledge graph and connect the dots for it. And also helps from a brand building perspective. So definitely focus on those. If you are still doing those link roundups and stuff like that, that’s fine, as long as that’s not the only link in your footprint, you are perfectly fine continuing to do those.
Melissa Rice (00:22:30):
Awesome. Okay. Andrew, how do AI chatbots and virtual assistants affect search traffic and SEO strategies? Can you elaborate?
Andrew Wilder (00:22:43):
Chatbots and virtual assistants is kind of a broad category, right? because AI has its fingers in everything now. So I’m not quite sure exactly what that question is trying to get to, but what we’ve been seeing is that Google’s traffic is up in general year over year. We’ve got a link to an article, where is it? Sorry, I’ve got a lot of tabs open from Spark Toro, which is Rand Fishkin saying that Google’s grown 20% in 2024. Let me drop that link in here. Now that’s Google result, Google traffic, and that’s not necessarily click-throughs. And he’s also talking about how certain queries where the AI overview is coming in is keeping some traffic from going out.
(00:23:24):
But there’s another article which is a little bit older, this is from September, that I want to share that’s saying it is lowering click-through rates. But I think you have to think also, not in terms of the whole category, but what we’re looking for and what we’re targeting. If somebody’s searching for a recipe that’s very different than somebody searching to answer a more complicated question where an AI overview might make more sense. For me, I’ve started going to ChatGPT to answer queries when it’s something that I know traditional search results aren’t going to get me. And I trust ChatGPT’s AI answers more than the ones built into search. But if I’m looking for a recipe, I’m absolutely going to a search engine or DuckDuckGo or Google to say bake chicken recipe because that’s going to be the results. And then I’m going to go find one of my clients and click on their site. I also want to call out a different perspective on this Last weekend I met Hugh and Joy from Afrostylicity and they have created their own AI chatbot for their site that’s trained only on their content.
(00:24:23):
So basically they’ve trained their chatbot to answer questions only about travel. It’s a travel blog, but it starts with their content and then it can help answer other travel questions, but only travel questions if they don’t have content for that. So I thought, how brilliant is that? Instead of being scared of AI taking traffic away, why not use AI to keep people on your site a little bit longer? So if you want to take a look at that, I’ll send you their link. Also, they go to some very cool places.
Casey Markee (00:24:50):
And it’s not hard to train your own AI bot, your ChatGPT custom AI bot. You just have to, basically, there are tutorials out there that you can do it. You basically keep the inputs open at one screen and then you have another screen on the laptop where you can look at the outputs and you can literally grade the outputs in real time.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:25:07):
We should do that for our webinar episodes because the templates are on the page.
Casey Markee (00:25:14):
Absolutely, and you can just load it in. For example, if I wanted to do a virtual Casey Markee, I’m kind working on something like it right now and I just load everything I’ve ever written into it, and I look at the outputs and I say, “Well, where did you get that? Because I never said that.” And then I just yell at AI bot, ChatGPT. “Yeah, never ever do that. Never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever say that I said that because I didn’t say that.” And of course I tell it never to mention Neil Patel and other things. Of course, obviously I have all that built in.
Andrew Wilder (00:25:42):
Casey, don’t forget to be nice to the chatbot. Be nice to the chatbot bot. They remember everything.
Casey Markee (00:25:46):
I do. That’s right. I always say please and thank you. I even send them candy. It’s fine. It’s all good.
Melissa Rice (00:25:53):
Fear mongering. I’m scared. I’m not very polite to my chatbot. My bad. I guess I should be worried. Casey, did you want to chime in on anything else about virtual assistants and so on?
Casey Markee (00:26:10):
No, I mean, I just… We’re in a world where I know that there’s a huge push by certain ad companies to block AI bots, and frankly, I just think that this is a closing the gate after the horse has already gotten out kind of situation. Google has all of the information that they need from you for training purposes. There is really no benefit regardless of what you may have been told, that blocking an AI bot or blocking AI bots for your robots file is going to do anything for you in the long run other than possibly dilute your visibility in these LLMs, which will output results that you will not be featured in.
(00:26:45):
I can assure you, for every person that’s blocking an AI bot, there’s five of your competitors who are not, and they’re going to have that competitive advantage with the LLMs when they’re surfacing that information for rich results. So again, I get it’s a personal decision. That’s why I covered it in detail in the 12 days of SEO presentation I did for Tastemaker in December. This is something that you have to start thinking about, that a lot of the reasons that you see big companies trying to get you to block AI bots is so that they can get hopefully enough people together that they can use you as a force to possibly change how things are going. But I can tell you that’s not a priority in the current administration for the next four years. So I just want to let you know that you’ve got four years here to play around with AI and the guardrails are going to come off.
Melissa Rice (00:27:31):
Yeah. All right, Andrew, I’m excited about this question. Are you pumped?
Andrew Wilder (00:27:35):
I’m always pumped.
Melissa Rice (00:27:38):
What are the current best practices for showing dates on posts?
Andrew Wilder (00:27:43):
All right, so this question came up because I think it’s come up in a Raptive forum somewhere. So I reached out to Eddie at Raptive to get some clarity because I heard anecdotally something that was like through game of operator was misconstrued. So I want to make it clear, first of all, you should be showing dates on posts. I still think personally as a reader, I like to see when a post was published and if the published date was not immediately after, or excuse me, the update date was not immediately after, like a year later, you’ve updated it. I like seeing the updated date also because those two things right above the fold say, “Hey, this post has been around for a while and the content creator has updated it and kept it fresh.” So right away, I know a couple of things about this where I’m like, oh, I should keep reading. I can trust this information.
(00:28:31):
You also want to keep your updated and last modified dates in the schema. Yoast does this automatically, but you should not do anything to remove that. I confirmed with Eddie that he agrees. The reason this has come up though is because Google only shows one date in the search results, it’s going to pick what it wants to show right next to the byline if it shows a date, and sometimes it shows the original published date and you want it to show the modified date because that’s newer and it makes the content look fresher. So what Eddie’s been experimenting with is showing only the updated date rather than both dates. And the hope is it’s going to get Google to show the newer date. That may or may not work because once again, Google’s going to do what Google’s going to do and it knows all the dates anyway. Even if you didn’t put any of the dates in the schema or anywhere, it knows when it first saw the content, right?
Casey Markee (00:29:19):
We know from the lake it keeps the last 12 versions of your content at any one time. So if you play around with your dates, think about that. Okay, why do I have version 10 here in my database showing this date and now all of a sudden two versions later that date’s been removed or replaced with this other date. That’s just not something that I would play around with a lot.
Andrew Wilder (00:29:39):
Nobody’s saying to fake any dates, right? One thing though is like, okay, so I’m doing an experiment now on my site and Eddie and I are going to follow this where we’ve just swapped the position of the updated date modified and the published date. I’m going to say last updated on this, originally published on this, that’s totally cool. It’s giving me the same information, but because it’s the first updated date, maybe Google will use that one first. That’s just, we’re doing a little test. I’m not saying to do that, but we’re trying that out. But I want to link to two articles about dates. I mean, Google is very clear. Yeah, show dates.
(00:30:12):
They have two pages. One is help Google. The title of the page is Help Google Search. Know the Best Date for your webpage. So not just what date, but the best date. I’m going to share that one in, I mean, Google’s got very clear guidelines that says show a clear date. It also says use structured data. It does also say show when a page has been updated. If you update a page significantly, also update the visible date and if desired, you can show two dates. So Google’s making this very clear. Now let me drop that link in. And then the other URL from Google, and this is what Eddie pointed me to, is influence your byline dates in Google search. That’s where you’re trying to get it to show the different date. Now they’re really talking about like if you’ve got other random dates, like if you’ve got related posts at the bottom that have dates shown and Google happens to pick up one of those, you might want to get rid of those dates from displaying.
Casey Markee (00:31:00):
Right. That makes perfect sense. Absolutely.
Andrew Wilder (00:31:03):
They’re not relevant to the main content. So that’s the recommendation that he’s noticed is minimize the presence of other dates on the page. And so that’s where it’s trying to just make sure you’re being clear to Google about what you want displayed. But again, as I have been saying for years, think of your readers first do what’s best for them, and I think what’s best for them is displaying your dates at the top.
Casey Markee (00:31:25):
Yeah, and we, like I said, we do a lot of user testing com, a lot of user testing studies. The last time we did anything with dates was January 2023, and we found that there was a clear preponderance and prevalence by Google for the last modified date. Again, when at all possible, we should probably be showing that date. But if you go in and look at the search results, I always use banana cream pie because I love it. You will find that the top ranking results for banana cream pie are split into three camps. There’s one that is just showing the published date. It’s even crazy. They’re even showing like if the post was published today, it literally just says published today. If it was published three days ago, it literally says published three days ago. That’s how crazy it is. I’m not sure I would necessarily recommend that. This is a large site. Wouldn’t copy that.
(00:32:13):
Then you’ve got the second group that are showing just the last modified dates. Then you’ve got the third group that are showing both the published and the last modified dates, and then I say three, but then I found three sites who are not showing any dates. I’m not a believer in that at all. So my advice is we always say that recipes are… What’s the word? Future-proof. They’re not because you can always improve a recipe. I mean, that’s really what we’re doing on a continual basis. So we don’t necessarily want to have a recipe that hasn’t been touched in four or five years. Maybe we go in and realize, okay, I need to update the photos on this, or I need to go in and really clarify the step-by-steps. Or now based upon all the comments that this post has accumulated over the last couple of years, there’s a couple of things that I can clarify and add to my original content.
(00:32:59):
Then it makes sense to have an updated date on that post. But we don’t want to lose the published date, so we keep the published date there and we just have a last modified date, and then it gives Google both of those dates to use and they can choose which one they want to use. To me, I’m all about choice. Google has said even on the pages that Andrew, I think has pasted those over, give them more information. Google wants more information when at all possible, more data points to determine what the most appropriate date is to display. More information is always something that we’d want to err on there whenever we can.
Melissa Rice (00:33:33):
A lot of questions coming in the chat, guys, without the-
Casey Markee (00:33:37):
Yeah, we’ll paste over the plugin is the change last modified date.
Andrew Wilder (00:33:41):
Also, be careful when you’re using that plugin. Make sure that if you’re republishing, that you do let the modified date change. I think there must be one plugin out there where we’ve seen somebody changes the published date, but the modified date ends up being older than the published date.
Casey Markee (00:34:00):
That must be the limit modified date, which is no longer supported.
Andrew Wilder (00:34:03):
Yeah, which it doesn’t make any sense for the last updated date to be older than the published date.
Casey Markee (00:34:07):
Right, exactly.
Andrew Wilder (00:34:08):
You want to be careful of that, and that’s a little tricky to fix at a scale. You need to do some SQL queries, or you just need to go in and hit update on each of those posts.
Melissa Rice (00:34:20):
Next question, guys. Are we ready?
Casey Markee (00:34:21):
Yeah, let’s knock it out.
Melissa Rice (00:34:24):
We’re trailblazing here, right? We’re making really good time. I love this.
Casey Markee (00:34:27):
We got plenty of questions to answer.
Melissa Rice (00:34:29):
Yeah, exactly. What’s happening with the AIOs and how does this affect bloggers and content creators?
Casey Markee (00:34:38):
What question is that?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:34:39):
Casey, that’s for you.
Melissa Rice (00:34:40):
Yeah, for you. What’s happening with AIOs and how does this affect bloggers and content creators?
Casey Markee (00:34:49):
Yeah. The AI overviews. The AI overviews that we’re seeing with Google are basically a… For many of you might remember, we had them previously. They were basically called featured snippets. You remember those? Position zero featured snippets? Well, just like with AI overviews, they’re there based upon intent. You’re not going to see a ton of recipe-based AI overviews unless it’s a multi-step process or there’s some kind of a transactional various intent. Maybe it’s informative, but usually commercial intent is pushing more of those AI overviews specifically. But you’re going to find with these AI overviews that it’s going to result in one specific thing. Specifically, it’s going to push regular results down the page, which is going to lower your CTR, and it’s also going to push organic results to page two. That’s the biggest thing that we’re seeing here.
(00:35:35):
When we’re seeing these people say, “Oh gosh, I don’t understand Casey, I don’t know what’s going on. My rankings haven’t changed, but my impressions seem to have dropped like a rock.” Well, it’s because you’re not getting the impressions you had before because of the change in the actual SERP on page one. So this is a new reality that we live in. It’s not anything you’ve done incorrectly. That’s just the change in how Google is featuring these SERPs. It’s the change in the features that you’re seeing being pushed at scale. We can optimize for AI overviews, but it’s nothing dramatic. It’s just a matter of you going in and making sure that you’re writing complete content and that you’re putting it in a really simple, easily able to digest way so that Google can pull out that information.
(00:36:16):
That maybe you have FAQs on your page. Maybe you’ve done a good job of providing a little bit of background on some of these more important techniques or steps in your post, but as long as you’re using clear steps, you’re using tables, you’re using lists, you’re using FAQ blocks, you’re using headings. As long as you’re doing that and making it easy for Google to crawl and semantically score your content, you’re going to get the benefit of those possible inclusion in those AI overviews. There’s no real secret sauce to that. Although we did share a couple resources last time, and I’ve also shared that I think that was day number seven for the 12 days of SEO for that we did for Tastemaker in December. There’s a whole section in there about how to optimize for AI overviews. So definitely look at that.
Melissa Rice (00:37:06):
Awesome. Thank you.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:37:07):
I think it’s very… Sorry, I’m going to quickly chime in. I think it’s very similar to how we used to optimize for featured snippets. I think it’s a very similar engine of how it selects who to include. There’s a certain element of trust and authority that needs to be associated with the brand, with the website for you to be selected. We’re also seeing that a lot of the sites that are getting picked up are the sites that are ranking the top 10 positions. So there’s a lot of correlation. We can’t say it’s necessarily causation, but there’s a lot of correlation between how we used to optimize for featured snippets to how we’re able to get stuff included now into AIOs.
Melissa Rice (00:37:39):
Awesome. Arsen, last question is going to, you can bloggers optimize video content for search?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:37:47):
You can’t really do anything with the video that you’re putting on that page because the video is not the primary focus, right? So Google is not going to take that video and include it inside of the video carousels. If that video is on YouTube. If that video is on TikTok or that video is on any of the platforms that Google pulls into its search results, then that video can get in there and then you have to optimize that in accordance with those platforms. But there is a lot to be said, especially with how the environment that we’re in and the environment that we’re heading into with AI and everything else, and different search engines and AI search engines, you definitely want to start being omnipresent. So definitely don’t sleep on creating content or repurposing content that you create for your blog to go on YouTube, to go on TikTok, to go on Instagram, where Google pulls information into the search results, and that’s all about being omnipresent.
Melissa Rice (00:38:39):
Awesome. All right, are we ready?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:38:39):
Yeah. We disappeared.
Melissa Rice (00:38:56):
Oh man. Something on the back end. We’re going to go into our Q&A though. All that banner is just a reminder that if you want to keep asking questions, please don’t forget the queue because I’ll be gawking on the Q&A as we go. All right. Some of these are kind of having to do with the questions you’ve already asked, so bear with me. I’ll start with Julianne. She asked, there’s been chatter in the Raptive group about current best practices for both published and modified date on our posts versus just one date due to how Google is showing it in the SERPs. Can you tell us your current stance on this?
Andrew Wilder (00:39:26):
Yeah, I think we answered that live.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:39:30):
Yeah, we got that early.
Melissa Rice (00:39:32):
Get it out of here. Like I said, we’re going backtracking and then we’re making a post forward. All right, Shawna, she asked, what do you think about all the large bloggers with Raptive doing communities more like Reddit? Is that going to help with SEO and should I be doing more?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:39:49):
I don’t think it’s going to necessarily directly help with SEO for your website. It might be, and like I said, being omnipresent. It might be another platform or another channel to surface content into search results. Because I think that what they’re trying to do, and I’m hypothesizing, is that they’re trying to kind of mimic how Reddit is being included, how forums are being included, and anything that’s UGC and brings more value. And there’s maybe a little bit more trust, but that’s also very much platform specific, right? Because there’s millions of forums out there that are not ranking. So I don’t know enough specifics, just again, from my hypothesis, I don’t think it’s going to help.
Casey Markee (00:40:27):
Yeah. Again, you can’t add a forum to a site and have it immediately increase your SEO. That’s just not how it works. It doesn’t even matter if it’s the… I’m trying to think of a… Like a taste better from scratch or a spend with pennies or some really big rapid publisher. You’re not going to add a forum to that site and have a lot of benefit from that, even with the size of their community. Where you would get benefit from that would be trying to convert those people on that platform over to your email list or something like that. So we can have more of a channel there to cross market to that increased community. But no, I get why they’re doing that. Community is a never a bad thing, but there are probably other priorities that you could probably go after, which have a little bit more long-term success.
Andrew Wilder (00:41:12):
I think also the key to that question was the bigger publishers in there, right? So those larger publishers are going to have a budget to hire a team to moderate those forums and to run those forums, for example. And it also depends on your audience. Like I’m all for building community, but adding forums to your site may end up being way more work than it’s worth, and you might not be able to get an ROI unless you’ve already got some semblance of a community that you can then use that to leverage into the forums.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:41:36):
But also might have an opposite effect because you’re adding more pages. Those pages need to be optimized. Those pages can be considered low quality.
Casey Markee (00:41:43):
Right. It’s true. Unless, yeah, I guess if you’re going to do some kind of a community like that, probably want to look at a subdomain initially.
Andrew Wilder (00:41:50):
So is our answer, it depends or probably not?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:41:52):
It depends. Wait, wait, wait. Will it help your SEO for your blog? No.
Casey Markee (00:41:57):
Probably not.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:41:58):
Probably not. 99.9% not.
Melissa Rice (00:42:04):
Okay. Sheesh. Veronica asks, what’s the difference between recipe gallery and recipe rich results under search appearance? Did we answer this in the comments already?
Casey Markee (00:42:13):
We did. But very quickly, again, recipe gallery is the recipe carousels and the recipe rich results are the organic results. So when you can go in under search appearance and Google Search console, you can filter that out and see the breakdown by those channels with traffic losses or traffic gains.
Melissa Rice (00:42:28):
Is there a way to optimize for this? That’s the next question on our queue.
Casey Markee (00:42:31):
Just where the recipe carousel is self-explanatory. Fill in all of your recipe data, make sure that you’re using a correct image. Make sure it’s high quality. All of those things that you should be doing if you’re using a quality recipe plugin like WP Recipe Maker.
Melissa Rice (00:42:45):
All right. Some of these questions are long. They might fill up the whole screen, but we’re going to go for it. Just stay. We won’t see Casey’s beautiful face for this. Yeah. Should we use H2 for frequently asked questions? People also ask at the top of the post to make it easier for AI to crawl, or should we prioritize the main content such as ingredients and step by step, and how many H2s are too many for answering those questions? And when should we use FAQs?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:12):
Casey, take it away.
Casey Markee (00:43:14):
This is an it depends question respectfully. Now that being said, there is no real difference between using an H2 or a Yoast FAQ block with regards to getting pulled in. The people also ask, I tend to recommend the Yoast FAQ block because number one, they look and present a lot better on the page. You can also collapse those, which again, our goal today is really to hit on the try to reduce your scrolling and recipes argument. So at no time do I think you need to add a lot of unnecessary or superfluous H2s to a page. I see a lot of people adding H2s for storage and an H2 for storage and an H2 for equipment, and maybe another H2 for, oh gosh, what was the other one I saw?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:56):
Special variation.
Casey Markee (00:43:58):
Yeah, something like that. You probably don’t need all that. You could even include those as FAQs on the page. Hey, if you got leftovers from this specific recipe, here’s how you would store it. That would be a much easier way for you to present that as a collapsible FAQ. And then as a completely new H2 section under storage, which we see a lot. And again, we treat, we do teach various templates. I know Arsen, Top Hat has their template. I have a template that I have pushed for years, but it just depends. Like for example, on every client that we have, I look at their existing template and I’ll take out some frivolous information and I’ll tell them to combine other sections. So this is really what works for you, but less is more. We just don’t need to write an encyclopedic novel on tortilla salad. There are already a million tortilla salads out there. So just understand that you’re not going to reinvent the wheel there by adding a different kind of cheese to your tortilla salad.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:44:52):
Right. I have a little bit and I agree with what Casey said. I think for us at least the way we view it is if the question is an actual search term, like if you can take that question and plug it into any keyword tool and you see that, oh, people are searching for this, I would prefer to have that as an H2, but that’s just a preference, right? I would want to have it as an H2 as long as it’s not diluting away from why the user is there, right? So like I would argue like how to make versus ingredients instructions, right? So I would use a heading like How to make X, Y, Z. So there’s different ways of approaching that, and I always recommend also testing this. Now, the schema that’s applied with the Q&A and everything else, FAQ, sorry, the FAQ block. Super important for AIOs Casey, right? For AIOs.
Casey Markee (00:45:41):
Yeah, I mean, we tend to find that if your goal is to get into the people also ask, or your goal is to really kind of spoon beat Google as much information as possible. Don’t use an H2, use the FAQ block. But also just a note here, we’re seeing that Google is having a hard trouble, hard time picking up the default cadence FAQ block. As a matter of fact, I saw it yesterday. It’s not reading any of the FAQ in that. So do not use the Cadence FAQ block, use the Yoast FAQ block or something like that. That’s not an FAQ block. It’s just a block that looks like an FAQ, but it’s not. It doesn’t have any scheme in it.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:46:14):
There was also a question about how many… So look, there was a question earlier about how many words or how many headings. There’s no guideline for that. It’s as long as it makes sense, and as long as you’re not overdoing it and you’re not over-optimizing. As long as you can look at your post and you can ask yourself the question, did I cover everything that needs to be covered without overdoing it, without providing any information that’s completely useless or redundant or just doesn’t make sense to have here, will this information change the outcome of this? If the answer is no, it doesn’t need to be there.
(00:46:47):
And we see this more and more and more, if you look at the top ranking posts, super focused. Super focused, super helpful. Not only that, they’re able to address why the user is there. They also take the time at really understanding what the user might be interested in once they’ve made this dish. And maybe you can assist them, or maybe there’s a certain process or a certain technique they might need, and maybe you can assist them with that. You can link out to another post on your website or an external website. Don’t be afraid to link out to other websites. As long as you can do that, you will have a much easier time ranking than if you’re over eluding or over optimizing.
Casey Markee (00:47:21):
Exactly. And I know Sally asked a quick question about H3s respectfully, in very rare situations are you ever going to have a recipe post that has an H three. You just don’t need to do that. H3s, H4s, H5s. That tells me that you’re probably being a little bit too obtuse with the information that you’re putting in these posts. It’s too much. You don’t need, for example, to have every one of your individual ingredients be an H3. I have to wipe all that stuff out when we have an audit. That’s not helpful.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:47:49):
It also doesn’t have to be a sentence. Try not to wrap an entire sentence into a heading, because that also doesn’t help the user, or it confuses-
Casey Markee (00:47:56):
The WCAG violation too. We don’t want to put headings or sentences in headings anyway. But less is more. I mean, the average site might, the average recipe post, maybe not counting the on-page H1 and the recipe card H2 might have 68 headings, and you’re totally good. If you got more than that. Maybe we need to do some condensing down.
Andrew Wilder (00:48:18):
That was six to eight, not 68.
Casey Markee (00:48:20):
Six to eight, not 68.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:48:20):
68 headings.
Casey Markee (00:48:20):
Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Melissa Rice (00:48:26):
That’d be extreme.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:48:26):
That’s extreme world contents.
Melissa Rice (00:48:30):
All right. They have this question a lot. What is a good CTR? Also, how can one increase it? This is just flooding.
Casey Markee (00:48:40):
Were you just talking about [inaudible 00:48:43]-
Melissa Rice (00:48:40):
What?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:48:40):
100%. Yeah, a hundred percent.
Melissa Rice (00:48:40):
Obviously we’re looking at CTR.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:48:54):
Casey handle it.
Casey Markee (00:48:55):
Sure. The average CTR for a keyword in the top one through three can be anywhere from 11% all the way up to about 27%. Very rare though that we see that from the average blogger. If you have something in between maybe nine to 13 and a 5%, usually you’re doing pretty well for CTR, especially for search results, for keywords, and sometimes there’s just, it’s very hard to increase that because Google keeps moving the goalpost for you. I’ve got, here’s a recipe post, and the top three keywords to it are just humming along at 15, 16, 17%. And a week later, for some reason, those plummet all the way down to eight, nine, 10%. Nothing changed at your end. The search result changed. We’re getting a lot of that. So that’s very confusing to users. I get that you want to focus on CTR, but understand that it’s a very muddy graphic and sometimes the data just doesn’t provide you the information you need to make an informed decision.
Andrew Wilder (00:49:56):
I think the other question was how you can increase it. And I think that the important thing to be doing if you’re trying to optimize is look at what the click-through rate is. And if you’re making changes to increase it, there’s your baseline, whatever it is, right? So if you go up and you have a higher click-through rate, then that’s winning, right? So it may be one of those situations where you just have to have your own reference point.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:15):
Look at your meta descriptions, look at the thumbnail that you’re presenting. We were just reviewing a post for someone who had a recipe for a sauce, but the thumbnail in the search results was a picture of the dish, not the sauce, right? While everybody else in the top 10 had pictures of the sauce. So all of those little things. So they might not be ranking factors, but they are supporting to the ranking factors. So if you’re ranking, if you’re in the top three, top four positions, but you’re not getting clicks, pretty sure over time that post is going to start aging out of those positions because people are not engaging with it, right? So we want to make sure that if we want to improve CTRs, you can play around with your meta. It’s not a ranking factor.
(00:50:58):
If your meta description, you can rewrite it as many times as you want. It’s not going to change the outcome of your rankings, right? It’s not a direct ranking factor. Thumbnail, not a direct ranking factor. So you want to make sure that you’re improving, that you’re constantly optimizing, you’re looking at what’s there. Is Google taking what I’m giving it from metadata, from the meta description, and is it taking it and presenting it? Or is it saying, I like this other snippet or this little chunk of content from your website as your meta description. That’s kind of like a direct hint to you that maybe might need to improve that.
Melissa Rice (00:51:29):
Okay. I wanted to follow up with you, Casey, because we had a question and Sally was asking in particular about the H three because you said-
Casey Markee (00:51:38):
Yeah, I just kind of… That’s what my answer was earlier was to her. So she kind of gets it. Sally, you have my… Call me girlfriend. You have my email. We have not [inaudible 00:51:52]. It’s time for us to revisit a little bit. Okay. Because I definitely want to get you to get rid of the H3s when it all possible. Okay. We just don’t need them. H2 is all the way down. Maybe an FAQ block here. Show your expertise. Your photography has always been fantastic, but we’ve just got to dial in the recipe template a little bit.
Andrew Wilder (00:52:10):
Are there any non-food bloggers on this? This is SEO for bloggers, right? I mean, I was just at a travel conference and I noticed travel publishers have very long posts because they’re like digging deep into a city or something like that. And so we were looking at the heading structure for those posts, and it does make sense to have H threes. You’ve got H2s and H3s as you visit different regions or do other tours. It’s like, especially on longer content where it’s appropriate to have longer, it’s okay to have H3s or even H4s if it makes sense for the structure of your content.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:52:39):
Right. And I’m actually seeing, I was doing a little bit of research and I’m actually seeing travel sites that have content that addresses one piece of content that can potentially address multiple user intents, longer depth into posts are performing a little bit better now. So yeah, the deeper posts are definitely surfacing a little better.
Melissa Rice (00:52:59):
Okay.
Andrew Wilder (00:53:03):
I just want to say, think about the word outline, right? Where you can have the headings and the nesting, just that’s all this is really. It’s just the organizational structure of your content.
Melissa Rice (00:53:12):
Okay. All right. Next question, Carol. What advice do you have to counteract the competition from AI-generated sites, both on Google and Pinterest? A lot of up votes on this one, guys.
Casey Markee (00:53:24):
The problem with this to understand is that Google is not against AI content. That’s very clear about that. They have a whole guideline on AI content. It’s fine to have AI content, it just has to be high quality, and it has to provide some added value to the user. So we have people on this very call who I visited with recently who are using ChatGPT and other AI tools to write the majority of their content. But then they go in and they kind of soothe it a little bit with their own personal observations. They add a little some feedback here and there. Totally okay to do. That’s what Google wants. I think what we’re getting with the AI content is that the imagery is really what Google is pushing back on. And that’s also what we’re getting the biggest complaints for with regards to Mediavine and Raptive, is no one wants to see these incredibly fake AI photos of food and other travel destinations. And they’re relatively easy to follow just to find if you install various filters to your browser, which will actually show you what the confidence is that that image is AI-generated.
(00:54:20):
But there are going to be sites that are using AI tools, and they’re using AI tools very well, and they are going to beat you. And this is where we have to go in and start using AI tools as well in a way that helps to make us more efficient, use it, use it to provide ways for us to put together or maybe shorten our workflow processes. But it’s not a battle that you’re going to win. Those sites are always going to be there and they might increase because that’s something that they’ve gone all in on. Just because a site uses AI does not make it a bad site. We want to report those sites, but it’s just like Mediavine. Mediavine, the whole point of journey is to become the next AdSense.
(00:55:08):
That’s why they’re literally letting everyone in with a pulse. And I think they even lowered the traffic minimum to a thousand clicks a month now, which is insane. You think that they’re going to be able to weed out all the AI sites in there? No. I know they’ve hired people to help them do it, but we sent 10 sites and they might find one or two of them. That’s just something that we have to live with going forward, and we have to really work smarter, not harder in many aspects.
Andrew Wilder (00:55:34):
I think the answer is be better than the AI content and be unique and uniquely you. I mean, I’ve been talking about this for a while, but if you can take your blog post and drop it onto somebody else’s site and put their logo on it and not know that it was theirs or yours, if your content is interchangeable with other sites, then that’s your problem. It’s not AI that’s the problem.
Casey Markee (00:55:59):
And I totally get what Andrew is saying here, but there’s also a little naivety there. No disrespect to Andrew. I can literally take the last four articles that Andrew has written, load them into ChatGPT and have it analyze the style and spit me out an article that’s going to be almost, for all intents and purposes, like Andrew wrote it.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:56:16):
I think I’m going to chime in here, and I think this is why, and again, if we look at the documentation for all of the updates that Google’s been releasing since HCU, it’s unique perspective. Google wants unique perspective in your content, right? So it’s not so much, Hey, I’m going to approach it procedurally or from a template perspective. I’m going to do what everybody on page one is doing. We also want to look at what are they doing in common, but also look, what are they doing uniquely? What unique perspective, Google’s mentioning unique perspective very, very, very frequently across every update in guideline data site.
Casey Markee (00:56:48):
And you know what you can use to find that unique perspective? ChatGPT. You load in the top five results from ChatGPT and have them, Hey, what do they share? What is it not sharing?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:56:59):
We should have ChatGPT as a guest on our show.
Andrew Wilder (00:57:02):
Absolutely.
Casey Markee (00:57:03):
Your choice. Right here.
Andrew Wilder (00:57:04):
I’m going to say though, Casey, if I have not figured out how to get ChatGPT to write a blog post exactly the way I would write it, even if I feed it my blog posts.
Casey Markee (00:57:13):
Oh, I’m going to send you two tonight.
Andrew Wilder (00:57:16):
It’ll probably be technically wrong about something or-
Casey Markee (00:57:20):
Oh, I’m sure. As matter of fact, I’m going to make it technically wrong, but it’s going to sound just like you.
Andrew Wilder (00:57:23):
Or most likely it won’t be nearly as endearing, but I mean-
Casey Markee (00:57:27):
I just have to pump up, make this as charming and endearing as this-
Andrew Wilder (00:57:33):
No, I mean, I still read that stuff and go, oh, that was clearly written by AI. And it’s not just one post, it’s the body of work. Right? I think that’s really the big difference. So what you really need to do here is get your readers to fall in love with you and keep coming back for your content. And that’s what you, we talked about the bigger publishers and they’re building community. That’s what they’re doing. That’s why the bigger publishers are doing so well is because they’ve been really good at having a unique voice and building community. And people go, “Oh, I love her recipes,” and they come back for more.
Melissa Rice (00:58:02):
That’s true.
Casey Markee (00:58:03):
I would say that there’s some truth there, but I would say the other truth is that they are big and that they have huge external factors helping them, including social. But hey, that’s just all of the above.
Andrew Wilder (00:58:13):
All of the above. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Melissa Rice (00:58:16):
I want to fit in one more question just before we go, because I think this is important for newer people. Let’s go ahead. If you were to start a new site this year, considering what’s happening with Google, would you begin with social media at YouTube? Or is a blog still viable? Let’s answer that before we get out of here.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:58:31):
I think blogs are still important. I think having your own, controlling your own digital equity.
Casey Markee (00:58:40):
Yeah, your own. Basically what your-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:58:43):
Everything should terminate there, right? And it’s still important because from entity recognition and we’re heading into an entity, search engine, entity retrieval and all of that from an answer engine perspective. Also, but again, it goes back to what I said earlier about being omnipresent, right? So you take off your SEO hat and put on your marketer’s hat, and think about it this way. There’s multiple channels of driving traffic and getting page views, right? And you want to capitalize on each one of them, and each one of them needs to be worked differently and optimized differently, but you should not just stick to one type of eggs in your basket.
Melissa Rice (00:59:19):
Okay. Very cool. Just letting everybody know, our recap will be on our site with all of the links that everybody mentioned today in a week, but our YouTube replay is available right after we close this. Yay. I know. Look at us. We’re tech-savvy sometimes. I just want to mention that we’ve heard your requests. I’ve gotten a lot of your messages. We are creating more content this year. Arsen will be back next month with Top Hat Chats, our segment of SEO for bloggers with some of our friends from NEOs. So don’t worry, you’re going to see plenty of Arsen this year.
Casey Markee (00:59:58):
I don’t know if that’s a good thing.
Melissa Rice (01:00:03):
Yeah, that’s a good thing.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:03):
Carolyn is coming in. Carolyn’s coming.
Casey Markee (01:00:04):
Well, Carolyn’s going to be on here. Okay, well then that’s fine.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:06):
Queen Carolyn.
Casey Markee (01:00:07):
Yeah. Log in for the Queen. Her Majesty, the Regent, first of her name, queen of Ladonia.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:13):
Are you a part of that royalty? Are you a part of the royalty? Are you a Grand Duke?
Casey Markee (01:00:17):
I’ve had it offered. I’m in negotiations right now. I don’t know if I’m going to be a Duke. Maybe I’ll go with-
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:23):
What’s the tax code over there? What’s happening?
Casey Markee (01:00:26):
I don’t know. We’ll see. I’m thinking Baron, maybe. The marquee of Marquee.
Melissa Rice (01:00:31):
Wow. The marquee of Marquee. All right, cool. All right. I’m going to let these guys get out of here. Everybody, thank you for joining us again. We’ll see you next time.
Casey Markee (01:00:41):
Bye everyone.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:41):
Bye. Thanks everyone.
Andrew Wilder (01:00:41):
Thanks.
