Arsen Rabinovich (00:00:00):
Hello. Welcome to Episode 50 of SEO for Bloggers webinar with our special segment that we do once a month on the months that we don’t do our regular SEO for Bloggers webinar, TopHatChats, which is just me having a conversation with a very smart person. Today, we are joined by Andrew Wilder. For those of you who don’t know, he is a pretty big deal in the very small niche online community of bloggers. He’s also the founder and the CEO of NerdPress. He has Harry napping in the background over there. He’s the CNO, the chief napping officer, of NerdPress. And today, Andrew and I are going to talk about how to manage the overwhelm. So, a little bit of a different conversation than what we usually have. We’ll touch on SEO because there were questions from some of you about SEO. But we’re going to talk about how we handle the overwhelm internally. By the way, Andrew, welcome.
Andrew Wilder (00:01:11):
Hi.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:01:13):
Andrew and I, we try to meet once every few months. He’s here local. And we have lunch and we talk about life and we talk about business and we talk about all kinds of stuff. And we had lunch and we were with Harry and we were walking around a park and just talking. And I was telling Andrew about certain tools that I use now, AI tools to help me with my day-to-day and managing my emails and making sure I don’t miss things because everything is so chaotic. And we just had this conversation. And about a week later, with one of my coaching clients, I had another conversation very similar to that. And the conversation was, “Hey, how do I approach handling, updating hundreds of posts? How do I prioritize? How do I manage the overwhelming amount of things that are on the back burner, on our to-do list and we just can’t get to them and stuff is aging?”
(00:02:15):
So, we talked about this and we decided, “Hey, this is a good idea for us to talk about this.” And we posed the question to all of you who registered for this webinar. We have those questions. We used tools. We used artificial intelligence to go through all of these questions and essentially synthesize, collect all the like questions together and synthesize one individual question for each section that will kind of cover as much of everyone’s questions as possible. With that, Andrew, hello.
Andrew Wilder (00:02:51):
Hello. I think the overwhelm is real. Didn’t you say we had 65 questions come in?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:02:57):
Yeah.
Andrew Wilder (00:02:57):
Massive. So, everything is overwhelming, everywhere you turn. Even the number of questions is overwhelming, right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:03:03):
It’s okay. We had AI help us go through the questions.
Andrew Wilder (00:03:08):
AI helped us. And I went through the synthesized questions and actually replaced them with some of the original questions because some of the synthesized questions had no soul.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:03:16):
Zero.
Andrew Wilder (00:03:18):
Because you all asked really good questions, actually.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:03:21):
Right.
Andrew Wilder (00:03:22):
Yeah.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:03:24):
Okay. So, we’re going to break from the traditional format with this because we are going to approach this very conversation style. If you do have a question, put it in chat, put a Q in front of it. If it’s a good question, we’ll judge it. And the bad ones, we’ll get a thumbs down, boo. Just kidding. No bad questions. We’ll try to answer that question as a part of our conversation as we’re talking. So, we’re not going to wait to the end. We’ll just throw it in. All right. Andrew, do you want to start? Do you want to get in into this?
Andrew Wilder (00:03:54):
Yeah, let’s do it.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:03:55):
Okay. So, first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about prioritization and time management. With so many competing priorities and limited time, what is the practical framework for bloggers to decide what to focus on, what to ignore, and how to avoid burnout?
Andrew Wilder (00:04:12):
Okay. So, I think this is the big question, right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:04:14):
Right.
Andrew Wilder (00:04:15):
There were definitely more questions in this category of, like, “So much to do. How do I know what to do?” And so, I think the thing is to categorize things properly. So, I’ve got a really simple framework you can try. This isn’t necessarily the framework you have to use by any means, but I think it’s a really helpful way to think about this. And actually, we’re going to be applying this at NerdPress, too, because all these questions got me thinking about “How do we define this?” And so, I think you start with your to-do list and you take everything and put it into three different buckets. Put it into grow, protect, and explore. So, I want to talk about each of those three, because those are the big areas where you really need to be focusing on. Grow, protect, and explore.
(00:04:54):
So, grow is growth. Anything that drives revenue or traffic or helps you grow your business. Protect is anything that helps you protect your business or maintain your business, what you already have. And then explore is sort of that catchall of everything else where you try new things or you’re learning. Being on this webinar, or sitting in on this webinar, listening to this would be in the explore bucket because learning.
(00:05:14):
So, when you group into those three buckets, it starts to become clear what you’re focusing on and you can start to lump things together. And then what you want to do is think about how you want to distribute your time. We’ve all got so many hours in the day or so many hours available. I think one person said they have three hours a week to work on their site, right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:05:30):
Right.
Andrew Wilder (00:05:31):
And you may be working full-time, 40 hours a week on your site, somebody might be working… Whatever it is, you need to know how to divide up your available time. And so, starting with those buckets where you want to make sure you’re doing something from all three of those buckets every week. But then, where you are in your journey and how much time you have, you may want to spend 60% of your time in the grow area. Or if you’re just starting out, maybe you’re spending 80% of your time in the grow area. And if you’ve been at this a long time and you have a site with a lot of traffic, you want to make sure you protect that. So you’re really going to spend a lot of time focusing on protecting it and not growing as much content or traffic and just maintaining. And then the explore, you always want to probably be in 10 or 15%, something like that. Because if you’re spending all your time learning and exploring, you’re not taking any action.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:06:13):
Not executing, right.
Andrew Wilder (00:06:13):
Right? So, then, once you’ve got things in those buckets, the next step is to actually score each of the tasks. And there’s all these systems where you can add all these things about measurable, actionable, whatever. And I actually think you can focus it on two different things. One is impact. How much impact will this have on what I’m trying to achieve overall on my business? And how easy is it? And by easy, I don’t mean, like, “Oh, I could do this in my sleep,” as much as how much time does it take, how involved is it. Is it going to be, “Oh, I can get this done today. It’s pretty easy”? Or it’s going to take four weeks. I’ve got all these other sub-steps I’ve got to do. I’ve got to lay a foundation.
(00:06:49):
And so, you can put that into a little 2×2 grid of just impact, low, medium, high, and ease, low, medium, high. And what you want to do is find the high-impact, easy things and do those first, right? Since they’re easy, you’ll probably get them done quickly. So you’ll work through those quickly. But those are the most satisfying, right? You’re like, “Huge wins.” And you don’t want to overdo it. So you look at your buckets, look at those, and make sure you’re doing three high-impact things a week. That’s it.
(00:07:19):
One of the things we do at NerdPress is, every Monday, I meet with my marketing and communication team, and we go through our whole to-do list, and we tag things as this week. So, we have a filter. We just tag things we’re working on as this week. Often, if it wasn’t completed from last week, it just stays tagged and carries over. But we also then look at the list and go, “Oh, is this moving to this week? No. Or is this no longer this week?” And then, throughout the week, we filter the list and we only look at the things that are tagged this week. And what that really does is helps reduce the cognitive load of constantly reading through the checklist or the to-do list. And you want to get all that stuff out of your head so it’s not weighing on you. You know you’ve deferred it until next week or later because it’s not urgent, important, and high impact. And so, that can really help you focus and narrow it down. So, grow, protect, explore. Those are your three buckets.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:08:09):
Andrew, when you sit down with your team on Mondays and you guys go through the list and you tag things, let’s say, with, like, “I need to do this this week,” what happens after that? Are you further categorizing it into almost like a project management, like, working on it, stuck? Because a lot of times, especially for me… And I’ll talk about this, I have all kinds of systems in place that move things around on my calendar and all kinds of stuff. My biggest issue is that, yes, it’s been put on the task list, it’s been categorized properly, but then with my ADHD and everything else that happens on a daily basis around me, all the madness, I forget to even go and look at the task list to get it done. So, what are the next steps? After categorizing it or tagging it, what do you guys do next?
Andrew Wilder (00:09:02):
Well, I think a big difference is how many people you’re working with. If it’s just you, you just need to remember to go back and look at the list. But if you’re working with a team of people and you’ve delegated work, and I’ve got a test that’s assigned to Miranda because she’s going to take a video that we shot and splice it up and share it on social media, if she’s doing that, then I need to just be able to see her working and know she’s doing it without having to check in.
(00:09:25):
We recently changed project management tools. Project management tools, oh, my god, it’s such a huge ordeal trying to find the right one. But when you find the right thing for you, it’s amazing. And I will tell you, I had a key insight that made all the difference for us. If you look at most project management tools, they’re task focused. Right? Here’s your task, has all the information, all the meta information about when you’ve tagged it, when it’s due, how long it’s going to take, all of these things, which is just meta noise, really, that if you have a project manager at an enterprise level place, maybe they need to track that. But you know that stuff, right?
(00:10:03):
But then what they have is a side conversation, where two clicks later, there’s this side conversation where people can leave comments. And what we found was we had a third-party task tool, and then we’d go back to Slack and have conversations and have all these conversations. And then we’d have to go check the item is done, right? And what I realized is we need to have the conversation in our task management tool in a way that actually moves the project along. So, we actually moved to GitHub for task management. GitHub is a programming and development environment, but really, it’s just a task management tool. And GitHub issues are basically conversation first. So, the main thrust of it is all the posts where somebody writes something and somebody else replies, and on the sidebar is where all the task stuff is, but it’s really conversation focused.
(00:10:48):
And so, what happens is, Miranda will, say, post an edited cut of a video, and I’ll chime in right on there and say, “Hey, that looks great. Thanks.” And we’ve moved the conversation forward. I saw she was doing work. I approved it. She can now move onto the next thing and say, “Great, I just posted it on Instagram,” and close the task. And so, what we found with GitHub, it’s really reduced so much friction for us internally. And it’s enjoyable to use. It’s not pretty. It’s not gorgeous. It’s not like Asana where you check something off and a unicorn flies across the screen. But I actually find it really enjoyable to use because it’s so efficient and it’s clean and it’s just very responsive. So, it’s an engaging platform to work on. I know Miranda and Joel in particular were terrified when I was like, “We’re doing this,” and then 24 hours later, like, “This is amazing.”
Arsen Rabinovich (00:11:43):
We tried monday a few times internally. Our SEO team uses Teamwork, and we’re using Teamwork for a while, and they’re comfortable. As weird and archaic as it is, they like it, and they’ve been using it. We switched from monday to Slack lists inside of Slack, and that gives us that integration of being able to have conversations around tasks. So, lists are tasks. And then you can organize it whichever way you want. You have full control of how things are structured and what you do with it, what fields are populated. And we noticed, at least I noticed that it’s easier for me to have a list inside of where we communicate and to be able to even take messages in Slack and turn them into tasks automatically. There’s all kinds of automation that runs with it.
(00:12:38):
Let me put this in here. I integrated Reclaim with Slack. Reclaim is a AI-powered app which tries to understand all of the tasks that I have and how long it takes me to do these tasks, and it organizes them and prioritizes them on my calendar. So, for me, it’s better to see my tasks on my calendar. Like I said earlier, it’s hard for me to remember to go check if I have tasks. So it puts them on my calendar, and it finds spots on my calendar where I have free time and it sees what’s on my plate, gives me little buffers between meetings and says, “Oh, you have 15 minutes here. You can work on this.” So it drops it in there. And then if I don’t finish a task, it finds another spot for me to do it. And I’ve been really happy with that.
Andrew Wilder (00:13:23):
Nice.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:13:25):
Okay, cool. So, it’s about organizing. It’s about really understanding where your tasks are. It’s about applying the right disposition to them and taking action on them.
Andrew Wilder (00:13:40):
Your first question, I think, also asked how to avoid burnout. So I don’t want to forget to answer that one. I think there’s a lot of things that cause burnout. One of them is just general overwhelm, and that is caused by lack of prioritization. So, if you’re able to find a system that works for you and lets you focus on just a few things at a time, not only are you going to accomplish those things, but you’re not going to have all that other stuff sitting in the back of your head, with all that noise, right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:14:08):
Right.
Andrew Wilder (00:14:09):
And one of the things I’ve been paying a lot of attention to is what energizes me. I’ll get off a call with you, Arsen, and I’ll be energized. Of course, right? There are some other people in the world, I’ll get off a call and I’ll feel really drained. Right? And I’m paying attention to that now and I’m like, “You know what? I want to spend more time working with Arsen or talking with Arsen.”
Arsen Rabinovich (00:14:27):
Aw.
Andrew Wilder (00:14:29):
Tasks are the same way, right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:14:30):
Right.
Andrew Wilder (00:14:31):
So, especially if there’s a tiebreaker. You’ve got two grow tasks that are, let’s say, medium impact and medium effort on your list. The tiebreaker is what’s going to energize you versus what’s going to drain you. And whatever’s going to energize you is what you should do next.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:14:47):
I agree with that. It’s kind of like feeding yourself the dopamine that you need to keep moving, right?
Andrew Wilder (00:14:52):
Yeah.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:14:53):
[inaudible 00:14:53] I like it.
Andrew Wilder (00:14:55):
There’s a lot of schools of thought of, like, eat the frog, do the hardest thing first in the beginning of the day. I don’t love that, personally. But if it works for you, great. There’s so many books written on this stuff. And really, there’s no one right answer. You have to try stuff and see-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:15:13):
You have to experiment with it. You have to figure out. I went through so many… And it’s not perfect. I still ignore the tasks and I’m overwhelmed. Like, “I really don’t want to deal with this right now.” And I’ll forget. It still happens. It’s a struggle every day. Andrew, how can creators effectively measure the ROI of their tasks to ensure they are investing time, their time into the activities that will actually move the needle for their business? This is a good one. I like this question.
Andrew Wilder (00:15:37):
Yeah, I like this question, too. I mean, this is the million-dollar question, right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:15:40):
Right.
Andrew Wilder (00:15:42):
How do you have high impact for the least ROI of your effort? So, I think the key is to set specific actionable and measurable goals to say, “I’m going to try doing this on my site. And my page views on this particular post are this many per day now. I want to get to this many per day.” And write it down, and set a timeframe on that. And then take notes and check the stats and see if it worked. Because I can’t sit here and tell you exactly what you should do to get an ROI, but it’s so unique to you and to your blog and your skillset and your situation. But just as a structure of setting a goal, writing it down, trying something, setting a timeframe and then checking it and getting that data, over time, you’re going to see what gets you that ROI and what doesn’t.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:16:33):
When I have conversations, just like I had that conversation with a few of my coaching clients about, like, “Hey, where do we go first?” And I think Zoe here asked a good question about this as well. If everything turns into frogs, where do you start? What do you do first? So, thank you, Zoe, for the question. So, what I like to convey, and if it’s possible, if you’re able to, prioritize activities that are closer to money. And however that applies to you. If you have a blog post that’s trending down, it used to make you money, it was a good blog post, but you have all these other things that you want to work on, you have to shoot some pictures, you have to write a new blog post and all that, I would prioritize updating the blog post that took a hit because it’s closer to money because it’s already written. It used to make money for you. And this is an example. There’s other things that you can do. And approach it that way.
(00:17:34):
And it all comes from having a system in place of really understanding… Again, I’m approaching this from an SEO perspective. Like, “What am I going to do? I have posts that need to be updated. I have to write content. I have to check all of my internal links.” There’s stuff that you need to do on top of everything else that you’re already doing. So, if you look at it from… if you create a system for yourself, just like your system, like, “How do we approach it and categorize it on activities that are closer to money? What’s going to get me closer to a paycheck, closer to ROI?” And if you start doing those, you’re going to see that those frogs are now turning into a prince, right? Right?
Andrew Wilder (00:18:22):
Right, yes.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:18:23):
Because you’ve paid attention to it and now it’s resolved for you. You check that box and you get that happy face.
Andrew Wilder (00:18:33):
Can I just interject? It doesn’t necessarily have to be money.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:18:36):
Oh, yep.
Andrew Wilder (00:18:36):
Right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:18:36):
True. Right.
Andrew Wilder (00:18:37):
Well, it depends on your goal. Closer to your goal. Your goal could be happiness. It could be a shorter workday. It could be a lot of things, right? Whatever that is for you-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:18:48):
I would argue that both of those require money. Right. But go ahead.
Andrew Wilder (00:18:53):
Fair. I think my answer to that is to think about what can unblock you. You’re not going to be able to do everything each week. I’ve realized a big part of my job is to say, “Yes, but not yet.” I say that to my team all the time now. I’ve got a whole bunch of people come up with really great ideas of things we can do. And I have to say, “Great. Put it in GitHub, but we’re not going to do it this week.” And then we’ll look at it later. And so, saying yes to something means you’re saying no to something else, by definition, because you only have so much time. So, you really need to think about judiciously saying no. But then think about the things that are in your way to achieving the goals if you want to get closer to money or whatever your metric is.
(00:19:37):
There’s a great book I read a couple years ago called The ONE Thing. And it probably could have been a blog post, but it’s really simple. It’s, “What’s the one thing that you can do that makes everything else easier or unnecessary?” And so, I think that’s a good way to get unstuck, is you go down your list of all the things, all the frogs you have to kiss, and find, “Okay, is this frog, if I get this frog out of the way, is that going to free me up to do a bunch of these other things either more easily or quickly or more enjoyably?” And so, I think that would help.
(00:20:08):
Another thing that helps us with that is working in sprints. We just did a big push where we redesigned the top of our homepage. It’s a big project. We also launched our Mediavine partnership, which required building a whole landing page. That was a lot of work. And it took a couple of weeks working on it, on and off, and finally we launched it. And then the following week, we’re like, “Okay, let’s just get a bunch of easy wins done this week. Let’s take a break and just kind of clean up.” Because we all kind of felt like, if we tried to hit another big project right away, we’re just going to burn out. And it’s like, “Well, we’ve got some easy wins. We need to fix some typos on this page and change a couple of smaller things that are a half-day project. We can get on Zoom, work together, and it’s done.” And so, kind of controlling that pace of big push and then easy and big push, giving you some sprints and cleanup, I think, can help a lot, too.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:20:56):
Yeah. Listen, I tried an approach where I would break down big tasks into smaller chunks and separate them out for myself. And that worked for a while until I got bored [inaudible 00:21:09]. I have to change it up for myself [inaudible 00:21:13]. Okay.
(00:21:15):
So, we also had questions come in, and our very friendly AI assistant categorizes them for us. We have questions about content strategy, new versus old content. And again, this is not kind of the topic that we’re ultimately covering here, but it comes with the territory. So, the question is, and I see Andrew did not like the question that our AI assistant synthesized for us, so he wrote it by hand, how should bloggers approach new recipes being published on their sites? Should we look to research and recreate what the top 10 search results show or aim to be more creative or just write a very good recipe that tastes good and works?
Andrew Wilder (00:21:59):
Okay. Arsen, what do you think my answer’s going to be on this?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:21:59):
I’ll let you-
Andrew Wilder (00:22:02):
I think everybody knows what my answer’s going to be.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:22:05):
Right.
Andrew Wilder (00:22:05):
Write a very good recipe that tastes good and you know works. Look, how many potato soup recipes do we have right now? We don’t need-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:22:16):
Not enough is the answer.
Andrew Wilder (00:22:17):
Right, okay. First of all, if you’re looking at top 10 results and trying to boot them out, you’ve got to be better than those in some way. And Google is really working hard on making those top 10 results really good. They were starting to all look very cookie cutter. What Helpful Content is really all about is getting helpful content that now has variety and a unique perspective. So Google is mixing it up a bit. But you’re going to have to be really good to beat the top 10 results in a competitive field. So, maybe you can, if you’re an established blogger with a really strong brand and a strong following and you just happen to not have a potato soup recipe yet, but you’ve got lots of other weight behind you. But that’s not most people. Those are the unicorns. So, why try to do the hardest thing possible just to score a search result position that may or may not work, which probably won’t work, versus do something that sparks joy?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:23:18):
Yeah. Abbey.
Andrew Wilder (00:23:18):
I mean, yeah, if it’s not a competitive keyword, right? But are there not even competitive keywords anymore?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:23:25):
So, do you want me to hop in here?
Andrew Wilder (00:23:29):
Yeah.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:23:30):
Because I have a lot of words. I have a lot to say on this.
Andrew Wilder (00:23:32):
I want to see creative unique content. I don’t-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:23:35):
And this is where we are. This is what we need. We are done. And I’ve said this before, I think, on a few of our big webinars with Casey, that I am partially to blame. I was a part of the problem because the old approach to SEO was to give Google what Google wants to see, and Google is telling you what they want to see by placing things in top 10. And then we had the Helpful Content system roll out. And the Helpful Content system was like, “Hey, all of this looks exactly the same. It’s just written in different words. There’s no uniqueness.” And you’ve heard me do the spiel. A lot of you heard me on all my webinars. Google’s looking for something unique. Google is looking for unique perspective. It’s not just rewriting the content to be different. It’s not just saying why this recipe works or why you love this recipe or why I love this recipe. It’s about something that’s going to be unique.
(00:24:28):
Now, there is from a procedural strategy approach, a strategy approach component to, yes, we want to look at what’s in top 10 and get a feel for what everyone is doing in common and what everybody’s doing uniquely. And if you’re able to effectively do that, you’ll understand that “Hey, everything that’s in common is kind of the bare minimum that I need to qualify for this result.” And you don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, but you want to get as close to the top 20 results as possible by giving Google what it needs. So, if you see that 6 out of 10 results have an explanation of what this dish is, what is Ukrainian borscht, right? I’m pretty sure it’s a good idea for you to have it too, right? But it’s not enough because Google has said over and over and over again after the Helpful Content system update, “We want to see unique perspective.”
(00:25:33):
And I guarantee you that if you look at the top 10 results for any query right now, which I do on daily basis, and you analyze them, you’re going to see that everyone does something uniquely in that top 10. There’s a uniqueness. There’s uniqueness in ingredients. There’s a uniqueness in preparation method. There’s a uniqueness from a perspective of challenging the traditional approach to maybe using mayo, and you’re saying, “Don’t use mayo, use yogurt.” I don’t know, I’m making stuff up. But Google is looking for that.
(00:26:06):
If you look at these search results, it’s not the same thing over and over and over again. And it’s not so much, “Do I have keywords in my headings?” Because I see content that doesn’t even have headings rank at number one. I see content that breaks every single SEO rule, every single best practice, but it’s ranking. Why is it ranking? Because it’s providing something completely unique. It’s satisfying the query. It’s matching the query. It’s satisfying the user’s intent. It’s very refined. There’s no doubling of content. There’s no filler content. It’s not going off on different tangents. It’s not pulling context in different directions. It’s effectively predicting what the user needs from your content and delivering just that. “I’m here for the recipe. Tell me a little bit about this recipe at the top. Give me the TL;DR. Tell me why I should listen to you.” The rest of the post should be unique perspective around the ingredients, the process, variations, and everything else. Your recipe card. That’s it.
Andrew Wilder (00:27:13):
I think for years, and years and years and years, Google has been saying, I mean, from the beginning, they’ve been saying, “Don’t optimize for Google. Optimize for humans.” Their goal is to deliver the best possible search result to answer the person who’s searching’s query. There is no Google that ranks. Google is not the end user. The person [inaudible 00:27:37] there searching Google is.
(00:27:38):
And so, the cool thing about what’s happening with AI right now is that Google is one step closer to being an all-knowing human. It’s starting to see websites as a human would, I think. And so, it’s not just necessarily looking at one blog post out of context, right? They’re looking at a body of work. Is this whole site trustworthy? And it understands your site as a website now, and it-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:28:06):
As a whole, right.
Andrew Wilder (00:28:08):
As a whole, right? And so, you really want to be thinking not just about, like, “Oh, I’m going to chase this one keyword to have a post on this.” You want to think about a body of your work. The whole website is a body of work. It’s an entity in itself that presents something to people. And really, you want to be thinking about “How do I fulfill a reader’s need so that they love my site and they come back for wanting more and they want to keep clicking around and find more content from me and become a rabid fan of mine?” not just, “Oh, they’re here for a page view so I can get a $40 RPM.”
Arsen Rabinovich (00:28:39):
You know what? Thank you for mentioning that. I forgot to quickly talk on that when we talked about prioritization and ROI on tasks. When was the last time, not you, Andrew, our listeners, our attendees, when was the last time you actually looked to see how your content monetizes? When was the last time you looked inside of your Mediavine? And tell us here in comments, say, “It’s been a month,” “It’s been two weeks,” “I do it every day.” How often do you look inside of your Raptive and your Mediavine dashboards to see which content is doing well, not only from a clicks perspective and sessions perspective, but monetization, where does it monetize? Amy, thank you, every day. Good.
(00:29:36):
When we look at this data, we’re able to find really interesting patterns and really interesting… unicorns, where we’re like, “Hey, you are monetizing much higher per session here with this content that maybe is not as in demand, doesn’t have the volume in search, the search volume as you would want it.” But at the end of the day, it’s a good moneymaker for you. So I wouldn’t deprioritize it just because the total combined search volume for your primary, secondary keywords is, let’s say, a thousand. You can make the same amount of sometimes more money with less clicks, especially with content that keeps the user, retains the user because you’re getting more page views, you’re getting deeper engagement with the site. Definitely pay attention to that. And that can help you create a secondary variable that you can include into your, let’s say, calculation of figuring out “What should I approach first?” And that’s, again, closer to money.
(00:30:38):
Okay. So, content has to be unique. Content has to be original. Content has to satisfy the user intent, the entire post why the user is there. “I’m here for the recipe. Tell me the recipe. Tell me everything I need to know before I make it. Tell me how to make it. Tell me everything I need to know after I’ve made it. And then anything else, link me out to different places.” Don’t put it on the page. What we’re seeing since the last update is content has become, and again, I’m not talking about from a ranking factor, shorter because it’s more concise. It’s covering the topic and nothing else. Content has become much more unique. We’re noticing written paragraphs instead of just bullet points that’s ranking. More context. And the more of that you do, the more of that you spend time on really understanding who’s there and why are they there and what’s unique, why did Google put them here, it’s because they have a different ingredient or a different preparation method or they’re covering a substitution differently, differently than everybody else.
(00:31:50):
Next question we have here. What are the current best practices for managing and optimizing all content, including deciding whether to update noindex or unpublish posts?
Andrew Wilder (00:32:01):
I feel like we did a whole webinar on this.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:32:03):
We did a lot of webinars on this.
Andrew Wilder (00:32:04):
We did a lot of webinars on this. I don’t think it’s changed that much, unless you’ve seen different trends. If it’s high-quality content, but if it’s in the top, what, 30 or 40 search results, you want to update it, see if you can give it a lift. If it’s just weeds in the garden, as Casey would say, you want to prune the weeds. You can either unpublish or noindex. We get the question of “Should I move it to draft or delete it or noindex it?” From Google’s perspective, it’s the same, right?
(00:32:40):
So, it’s really a question of what’s better for your readers. If you think people will want to see it, even if it’s not getting you search traffic maybe, or maybe it’s a post you just love… I’ve got a couple posts on my food blog from years ago that I’m so proud that they’re there. I’m the only one who knows. But I’m keeping them up. So I’m not going to delete them. I might noindex them. I haven’t even bothered, but that’s not my focus right now. So, you do want to be pruning the garden. But I don’t know, Arsen, is there anything new to add?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:33:11):
Yeah. We’ve updated. So we have our content performance review, SEO content performance review product where we don’t actually look at each page physically, we’re just pulling in data. And because we’re pulling in data, we made this process much more in depth. We’re pulling in all kinds of data for every single page on your website. We’re able to organize things appropriately. And we had our old system of doing it pre-Helpful Content, pre this whole new ranking system. And now we’ve updated it. Now we’ve added more things to it. We’re now checking, we’re looking at content that’s ranking well but has declining click-through rates. Content that’s ranking well, so it’s not getting clicks, right? Content that’s ranking well and has good steady click-through rates, but engaged user sessions are declining, bounce rates are declining. So the users are your ranking. People are clicking, but they’re not dwelling. Those two new things are very important for your evaluation because those are easy fixes.
(00:34:16):
People not clicking through. Why? Your meta description, your thumbnail, probably. People clicking through but bouncing back? They’re not getting to what they need to see. They expected to see one thing when they clicked through, they landed, and for whatever reason, they did not find it and they abandoned. Your intro’s too long, not on topic. You’re taking too long to load. Might need some Core Web Vitals stuff. That’s Andrew’s department. That’s Nerd stuff. We added those two levels to this product because that’s, again, closer to money. This is stuff that’s already ranking. You want to protect it, you want to shelter it, you want to do everything that’s possible for that.
(00:34:58):
We’ve also changed how we approach content that’s not getting traffic. We rethought it. We reworked it. And it’s not about “Did it get less visitors than everybody, all the other posts on my site?” If we look at what Google has been saying since 2024, since the leak and since they admitted that they’re using human data from Chrome and other devices, they talk about last meaningful visitor. And how do we translate that? That’s more of if I searched for something, and I search for all kinds of stuff on a daily basis, I’m probably one of the few people who searched for something in the last two years and whoever ranked there high-fived each other, like, “Yes, it worked.” But to me, that post that I found from 2007 that talks about whatever I’m looking for, for my bike or whatever, to me, it’s helpful. I’m probably the only visitor that’s been on that page in the year. But I clicked through, I searched, I found, I clicked through, and I stayed. That’s an engaged visitor. So, that content is helpful for someone.
(00:36:14):
Not all of your content is going to have high demand. So, again, the parameters are, I’m ranking, I’m holding good positions, I’m getting good click-through rates. People are dwelling. Yeah, you might have gotten five clicks, five visits in the year. Still good. It’s not going to cause you issues.
Andrew Wilder (00:36:35):
I think this is another place we could go back to the grow, protect, explore framework. Right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:36:40):
Right. Absolutely.
Andrew Wilder (00:36:42):
Look at your posts and see how they’re ranking or not ranking. And when you’re making a decision of if you want to fix it up or noindex it, you may want to move some into the grow category where you’re like, “I can grow this post. I know this has some foundation. I can update it. I can grow it.” Or, “I know this post, I want to preserve what it’s got,” or, “I want to try and experiment on this post,” and that’s explore. So, you can set a time-boxed experiment and say, “You know what? On this one, it’s not really doing much. What if I move the recipe card to the very top just on this one post and see what happens on my site for that…” Arsen says no, because he’s done that experiment, I guess.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:37:18):
Casey just felt a disturbance in the force.
Andrew Wilder (00:37:23):
I’m using that as an example. Come up with another experiment. Turn the format into a Q&A, get a different video, something where you do an experiment, you explore on that and tinker and see if that’s going to get a result for you. Obviously, you have to take a smart guess. Don’t just move up the recipe card because I kind of threw that out as an example. But I think there are some posts where you can do an experiment and see what happens. And maybe it does nothing, but you’ve tried.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:37:51):
We have a good question, another good question from Zoe. Zoe is on fire today. Here’s a question, two-part question. What should I focus on when reviewing Google Search Console, such as 404s and pages not indexed? And which bucket, grow, protect, explore, would fixing these issues go into?
Andrew Wilder (00:38:07):
Oh, love the question. I’d say the easy one in terms of 404s, Search Console gives you a list of, like, “URL not indexed because it’s 404 or because it’s redirect,” or whatever. It has all these reasons. You have to click through and see what the URLs are for any of these. There’s going to be a lot of 404s that should be 404s. Google picks up a lot of junk. And because it spies, it often has a lot of URLs that are admin URLs that should be not publicly available. So, you have to go through and look and go, “Okay, do I want a visitor to be able to see a page at this URL?” And if it should be a 404, just let it be there.
(00:38:43):
That’s the easiest way to answer that, because 404s technically are not an error. They just mean, “Hey, this URL means nothing found.” But cleaning up broken links inside your content, especially broken internal links, that’s something you want to prioritize. And I think that could go in the grow or protect bucket. Either way, it’s holding you back. So, I think if you’ve got content that’s performing well right now, but you notice it’s got a link that could be updated, I would call that protect because you want to protect it at the high level it’s at. If it’s not doing well and you want to spruce it up, then that goes into the grow bucket.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:39:19):
I want to add to that real quick. Sorry. Sorry, I cut you off because I found the link. I’m posting a link in here. It’s from Search Engine Roundtable. And it’s an older article from 2022.
Andrew Wilder (00:39:34):
Wow.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:39:34):
In article world, right? So, one thing that a lot of bloggers don’t notice, that in your coverage report in Search Console, in the top-left, there’s a dropdown. It says All Known Pages. It’s showing you all of the pages that Google has discovered. So, if you’re going to analyze stuff, I want you to click on All Submitted Pages first because that’s going to show you data on all the pages that were submitted by you through your sitemap to Google. Here, the important thing is, why are my pages that I submitted that I actually want indexed are having issues? Why are they 404-ing? Why is Google crawling but not indexing?
(00:40:26):
And then, the flip side of that is I want you to click on Unsubmitted Pages only, because those pages are the pages that Google discovered that are not a part of your sitemap. And that’s also very important to check which pages are actually ranking, which pages that I don’t want Google to include in its index are actually making their way through. So, a little bit of a tip there. Take a look at that article. It tells you exactly what’s happening with that.
(00:40:54):
Okay. So, with that, last webinar, I had Adam on, and we talked about alternative methods of monetization for publishers. We talked about books. We talked about courses. We talked about everything. And I like this question. Should I just move on to creating items for purchase books, courses, and et cetera? It’s a good question because right now, traffic is dropping. Everybody’s sessions are low. RPMs are going up. I don’t know if they’re going up proportionally enough to cover that difference. So, looking at other ways of monetizing, becoming omnipresent, going to other platforms where you can make money, all those things are important. So, this is a good question, Andrew. Again, should I just move on to creating items for purchase books, courses, or anything else?
Andrew Wilder (00:41:50):
So, it’s two parts to this. Should I just move on to create items for purchase? Right? So, should I just move on? I think you’re going to have to keep your site going to attract an audience. Even if new traffic is a little bit slower, you still need to be building that so you have that as a magnet to get new people. But I do think everybody should be thinking about other ways to monetize besides page views, meaning display ads. No knock on Mediavine or Raptive, but just that is one ad stream or one revenue stream that you have available to you. So, yes, I think books, courses, memberships.
(00:42:30):
One of the things we’ve identified is it’s really hard to get started with e-commerce. It’s daunting. Someone’s like, “I want to build a membership site.” And you go to one of those membership plugin sites and they make it sound so easy. “Oh, 20 minutes, you have a membership site.” Well, that’s a complete lie because e-commerce is complicated. And as soon as you open up that little Pandora’s box, there’s like, “Well, what about order monitoring? What about refunds? What about the email that goes out? Deliverability?” All of-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:42:57):
The management of the whole thing, right, right, right, right.
Andrew Wilder (00:42:58):
Management of the whole thing. And if you’re content-gating where it’s like, “Oh, a members’ area,” you have to make sure you protect the content properly. That gets overwhelming, if you want to talk about overwhelm [inaudible 00:43:07]. Oh, my god. So, I want to simplify that. So, one of the things we’re looking to do, we’re a building in Hubbub, in Hubbub Pro+, is we’re going to call it Buy This, and it’s going to be a very simple way to sell an e-book.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:21):
What?
Andrew Wilder (00:43:22):
Talking, right? So, we created Save This… Oh, no, I’m out of focus. My camera… Wait. [inaudible 00:43:29]-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:29):
Get it together, Andrew.
Andrew Wilder (00:43:31):
Wait. I have blurry face syndrome. Great.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:33):
Is it hubbub.me?
Andrew Wilder (00:43:36):
morehubbub.com.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:36):
.com.
Andrew Wilder (00:43:37):
So, we’re building this now. It’s not live on the site yet. But we’re going to be building a thing called Buy This, where it’s just a little box that goes on your site that says, “Hey, buy this,” whatever you want to sell. It’s going to be any digital download, but it could be “Buy this e-book,” or, “Buy this…” Let’s say you’re a travel publisher and you’ve got a series of hikes in Spain. “Get my guide to the 10 best hikes in Spain, only $5.” Right there on the page, you hit Buy Now, goes through Stripe, boom, emails them a link, done.
(00:44:07):
We just had a great design meeting this morning with Colin and John about… We’re designing the interface right now. My goal is to be super simple. So, in 10 minutes, you’re literally set up, and you upload the zip file or PDF or whatever, and you connect it to Stripe and you’re good to go, and it automatically inserts in your blog posts. I can see the questions coming in immediately of like, “Oh, I only want to post in these categories,” or, “I need a different version for this post.” So, we’re going to make it very customizable. But out of the box, it’ll be literally 10 or 20 minutes, and you’re set up and you’re able to sell something online. So, that’s the direction I think everybody needs to be heading to diversify your revenue stream. And I want to help make it easier. So, that’s my pitch for coming soon from a Hubbub Pro+ near you.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:44:47):
No, but look, I think there’s a lot of value in that because by, again, bringing in the tech and providing the tools, people are effectively buying their time back. So, if you have a barrier, I’m not going to get into this because I don’t want to deal with the management, with the refunds, with Amazon and everything else. And you provide a solution for this, right? For someone who’s serious about this and approaching it from a business perspective, how much time are you going to spend doing all these things? How much is your time worth? This is the conversation that you and I had, right?
Andrew Wilder (00:44:47):
Right.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:45:32):
Like, I’m doing these things and I’m looking at these things and I’m like, “I could probably be doing something else that’s closer to money.” So, if I have someone who I can pay and delegate this work to so I can do these other things, it makes sense, right?
Andrew Wilder (00:45:50):
Yep.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:45:51):
So, same thing with this. If you can provide that solution, why not?
(00:45:55):
Okay. Moving on, we have more questions. I think we’re going to switch into a different category here, unless you have another question on this one, Andrew.
Andrew Wilder (00:46:03):
No, I think I’m good. We’re gabbing away. We got to keep moving.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:46:06):
Good, good, good, good, good, good. Questions are coming in. Oh, wait, there was one question real quick. Hang on. I started. Tammy. Tammy, I’m going to show your question. Here we go. I’ve noindexed a number of posts that I now want to update and re-index. If the update still didn’t help but I like the content… Hang on. I think it got cut off.
Andrew Wilder (00:46:30):
I think it was a two-part question.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:46:31):
Yeah, yeah. And then it continues. Is there a downside to keeping that post live? So, basically, you noindexed posts that you wanted to update and re-index. And you’re saying, if I updated it and it didn’t help, should you keep it, or what’s the downside of keeping it? Again, look, there’s no downside of keeping a post that’s not performing if you’re going to keep working on it. You shouldn’t just touch it once and hope that it’s going to hit top three. It’s not going to do that, not anymore. You have to monitor your post. You publish something. It’s going to move. You go into Search Console or whatever tool you use, you look at which keywords are improving, which keywords are declining, and that’s kind of telling you which way Google is contextually pulling you.
(00:47:25):
So, if you’ve over-optimized in one direction, it’s going to pull you into gluten-free keywords, if you have too much gluten-free mentions on there. Or if you have Crock-Pot, it’s going to pull that recipe into Crock-Pot keywords. So, you look at which way it’s pulling you and then you start adjusting. “I’ve overdone it in this direction, I have to decrease it, or I have to improve it and oversaturate it in the other direction.” You should continue to touch those posts until you get to the point where you’re ranking for at least some keywords and it’s getting you some traffic that’s actually dwelling. And that’s my answer.
Andrew Wilder (00:47:59):
My answer is, is it valuable for readers?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:48:03):
Well, if it’s ranking, if it’s going to rank and people are going to come and stay, then it tells you that it’s valuable, right?
Andrew Wilder (00:48:09):
I mean, theoretically, in a perfect world, if Google’s working exactly as it should. But, I mean, you can have valuable content that doesn’t rank for a variety of reasons, right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:48:17):
True.
Andrew Wilder (00:48:17):
Because there’s only so much place to rank. So, at a high level, to answer Tammy’s question, the way I would is, if this post on your site has some value for somebody who might stumble upon it or might be interested in it, then keep it, even if you don’t want to do more work on it. I don’t think it’ll hurt you.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:48:35):
It’s not going to hurt. Right. But yeah, you definitely want to touch those posts more than once. Favorite topic here, AI and AI automation tools. I love this. How can bloggers practically use AI and automation to improve their workflow for tasks like keyword research, site analysis, and content promotion without getting lost in the hype? Andrew, take a go at it.
Andrew Wilder (00:48:56):
Oh, there’s so much hype. There’s so much hype. Actually, even more than hype, I feel like it’s hard to keep up. There are so many new AI tools kind of coming on board or new models. It slowed down a little bit. And I think it’s actually going to slow down more now that ChatGPT or GPT-5 is out. My solution, personally, has been, I use ChatGPT Pro, and basically that’s it. That’s not great for a team unless you pay a lot of money to have a team account per seat. But I’ve noticed ChatGPT gets better the longer I use it because it knows me more. I’ll be asking it a question and it’ll reference TopHatChat because it knows, or it’ll reference Tastemaker as an example of a conference. It doesn’t just pick a random conference anymore because it remembers a chat we had two months ago about something. Right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:49:44):
Right.
Andrew Wilder (00:49:45):
So, my short answer would be, pick one AI tool and train it well. And the more you use… Because if you’re bouncing around, it’s not going to learn you the same way. So, if you’re using that same tool consistently, it gets better and better. In terms of train it well, also, you can build yourself custom GPTs. Had a great conversation with David Leite a couple weeks ago where he told me about the custom GPTs he’s building, that he’s trained on his writing. He uploaded his books. Everything he’s ever published, he’s trained it on. And he uses it as a tool to synthesize stuff and create, let’s say, a meta description. It doesn’t always get it right, but it gives him a first draft.
(00:50:23):
So, I would definitely caution people not to AI’s direct output. And if you are going to use it, read it six times, because I’ve found AI’s writing in particular sounds really good at first read, and then you read it again and you’re like, “Wait, that’s not quite right.” And then you read it again and you’re like, “No, that’s actually really wrong.” So, you have to be careful. But it’s actually really easy to build your own custom GPT. You click there, and you talk to it. It asks you questions about building it and it builds it for you. Right? So, that’s my answer. I’m sure, Arsen, you have a bazillion tools you like to scroll out on, but I’m trying to avoid the overwhelm.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:58):
Right, [inaudible 00:50:58]. And our topic today is to avoid the overwhelm. And I’ll be honest, I am overwhelmed with all the AI tools I use. But for me, I thrive in the overwhelm, especially when it’s information coming from different sources. So, a few tools that I use, I use Descript for video. Super cool. There’s other… I think, Andrew, you and I talked, you said that your team uses something else.
Andrew Wilder (00:51:24):
We use Vizard.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:51:25):
Vizard. [inaudible 00:51:27].
Andrew Wilder (00:51:26):
Vizard, V-I-Z-A-R-D. I know. Vizard. But Vizard, because it’s video, get it? [inaudible 00:51:32].
Arsen Rabinovich (00:51:31):
So, Descript. I like Descript. And we had a conversation about that on Andrew’s podcast. Was it a podcast or a webinar? [inaudible 00:51:43].
Andrew Wilder (00:51:43):
It was a lo-fi webinar for our clients.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:51:46):
Yeah, lo-fi.
Andrew Wilder (00:51:47):
I’ve been doing these things where I just chat with somebody and then we share that with only our clients. So Arsen was our first guest.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:51:54):
Very honored. So, here’s Descript. And Andrew put Vizard in there already. So, what I like about Descript is I can literally one take. I record a lot of videos for our coaching sessions and for our coaching groups and for my clients and when I do reviews. And I’ll do a training session. I’ll record it. I’ll drop it directly into Descript. Right away, it creates a transcript, and you can add it by the transcript. They have this thing called the Underlord or something. It’s their AI. And you basically can talk to it. You can say, “Zoom in on me in second,” whatever. You can basically tell it what you want it to do with your videos and it’s going to do. “Remove my ums. Focus my eyes on the center,” all kinds of stuff.
Andrew Wilder (00:52:39):
Yeah, that’s creepy.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:52:41):
You can also, if you train it enough, it will put words in your mouth. So, if you said something wrong in the video, you can just retype it and it will make you say those words. Right away, it will create clips for your social, for TikTok, for Instagram, captions, everything. So, you don’t have to sit there and edit anymore. You can just write it out. I literally have a prompt that I wrote out. I copy-pasta it into Descript, and it does the things, as long as you’ve prepped your video and all this stuff. From there, the transcript can then be used. It has a feature to create social posts and to create an article. It’s kind of okay on the article part. I take the transcript. I take it to my favorite ChatGPT. I feed the transcript into ChatGPT with all the knowledge from all of my other webinars and everything else. And I say, “Okay, let’s turn this into a guide now. Let’s turn this in…” So, with one creation, with one video, you can have multiple assets. And for me, that’s a huge time saver.
(00:53:40):
What else? I use Gemini a lot. I like Gemini a little bit better than ChatGPT, especially now, ChatGPT-5. ChatGPT-5 and I got into an argument yesterday. We’re not talking for a few days. I literally wrote, I’m like, “I’m going to Gemini.” Closed the chat and went to Gemini. I like Gemini for content stuff. I like Gemini because it’s a little stupid compared to ChatGPT. It’s on a little dumber side. And it listens much better and it doesn’t assume as much as ChatGPT. Even though I put those guardrails in for ChatGPT and said, in my custom settings, say, “Don’t make things up. If you don’t know something, tell me, ‘I don’t know.’ Don’t predict stuff. Don’t people-please me. Keep your answers short. If you feel like I’m saying something that’s not right or asking [inaudible 00:54:29], let me know about it.” Does not care. Still makes things up. Still does everything that I don’t want it to do.
(00:54:35):
So, I go to Gemini and I use Gemini. It’s quicker. I think it’s better. We have our own prompts that we’ve written. We have our own content analysis frameworks that we use internally. And I like to use Gemini for that. I use it as an assistant. I use it. I don’t ever have it write content for me. I use it in as assistant. If I’m stuck and I need to write something, then I’m like, “Hey, I am having a hard time saying this. What’s a better way of saying this?” and it says it. Again, and I like what everybody wrote in here, that it’s an assistant. You can easily ask it things. The models are smart enough where you can say, “Hey, take a look at this post. Tell me, am I over-optimizing or am I oversaturating on a specific topic? Is there a lot of redundancy in my content?” It will do all of that stuff. Use it, but don’t copy-paste and publish.
Andrew Wilder (00:55:30):
We had a bunch of questions about tools, in general. I think as a general guideline, if you’ve got your tools and you want to try something new, one tool in, one tool out. So, I think if you find a better tool, great, but then drop the old one. But in general, I think you’re probably going to need a graphics tool of some kind. Canva is great, if you want to use Canva, or Photoshop, Lightroom, whatever. All right? But Canva’s, I know, a popular choice. A video tool, a video editing tool, like we just mentioned, Vizard and Descript.
(00:56:00):
And I also wanted to mention social media scheduling, which all of these are starting to tie together too, right? Like, if Descript can help with the social media. But Miranda told me this morning, Canva Pro can actually do social media scheduling. You can actually create the graphics in Canva and schedule it out. I know Tailwind is still popular. And I talked to Kate recently and she still likes Tailwind for Pinterest scheduling in particular.
(00:56:23):
And we also use Vista Social for our social media scheduling for Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook. So, you don’t necessarily need to even be using AI tools in all those. And AI is being crammed in all the things, but just because it’s there doesn’t mean you have to use it either.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:56:38):
Andrew, we have five, four minutes left.
Andrew Wilder (00:56:43):
Oh, my goodness.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:56:43):
Yeah. Okay. So, there’s two sections here, and I want to do one question from each section, and I really want to hear from you. I’m going to jump down to the technical insight management question.
Andrew Wilder (00:56:53):
Okay.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:56:54):
Give me a second here. What are the key technical priorities for a blogger, including how often to conduct audits, where to begin after major traffic loss, and how to AI-optimize the site. And then the second question here is, what are the most important technical elements to focus on for blog growth, including specific SEO definitions and the current best practices for all that? Before you answer.
Andrew Wilder (00:57:19):
Okay.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:57:20):
Right.
Andrew Wilder (00:57:21):
There’s a lot in there.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:57:22):
Let’s not ever use AI-optimize. We do not want to use AI to optimize anything on our website. It’s not smart enough to do that on its own just yet. As far as conducting audits, you should be checking your Search Console. You should be clicking through all of the tabs that are important to you inside of Search Console at least once a month. More active bloggers, every two weeks. If you’re really into it, once a week. Now Andrew’s going to talk about key technical priorities for a blogger and that other question, important technical elements to focus on for growth.
Andrew Wilder (00:57:57):
Okay. So, I think there’s a lot of things that have become table stakes when it comes to tech. Your site has to run fast. It has to load quickly. Core Web Vitals are more important than ever. I think, Arsen, you were telling me you’ve been seeing a lot where, and we’ve seen this with clients, a post just edged out of the good range on one metric, and their rankings dropped, and they fixed it and it comes back up. I mean, things are moving very fast now. And particularly in very competitive areas or searches, Core Web Vitals is huge. So you got to stay on top of that.
(00:58:34):
But your site also has to be secure, not hacked. It kind of feels so basic now. But if you’re not dealing with that stuff, it’s going to become a problem over time. And this goes back to that protect bucket we talked about. So, updating your plugins, staying current. If you don’t update your plugins, eventually it’s going to break. It might take a couple years. It might not. Or updating your plugins too soon. Right? When WP Tasty releases something that has a bug in it and then they release something with a bug in it again, right?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:59:03):
For an update right away.
Andrew Wilder (00:59:05):
Not to call them out or anything. So, knowing when not to update is also really important. And so, that’s where if you don’t have the time to do that and you’re overwhelmed, obviously, it makes sense to get help on that. And so, that’s where NerdPress comes in. We help with… Basically, everything we do is in that protect area. Maintenance and support of the technical elements is helping you maintain your investment. So you can focus on the content creation and a lot of the other stuff we’ve been talking about today.
(00:59:34):
I think other logistic things, because the question is, how to AI-optimize a site? I read that as how to make your site optimized for AI to understand it. And I think that is an important piece now, is your site does have to be machine-readable. Google is becoming this omniscient human. I’m putting big air quotes. But the computer needs to be able to read your site. So it has to have proper structured markup. The HTML has to be correct. You have to use headings in the right orders. It’s the same stuff we’ve been talking about of just making sure your site is technically correct and structured properly. It does actually make a difference for Google and AI crawlers. It also makes a difference for humans. If somebody is using a screen reader, having that same markup is really important. Fixing 404s, internal and external links, fixing 301s so you don’t go through redirects, all of that stuff, all the technical pieces, just making sure all of that is smoothed out. So you reduce the friction for crawlers to understand your site.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:33):
And the way Google really translates that, right? So, your technical health is not just for Google, right? Because Google is looking at it like, if this page is problematic from a load perspective or this page is problematic from a content-shift perspective, Google translates that as a bad user experience and does not want to rank a site that has bad user experience. So your technical health. So, like, you have broken links. I click on the link on one of your pages to go to another and it doesn’t take me anywhere. That’s bad. Even links pointing out to other sites, that are to somebody else’s site that has a 404, bad experience. Now, we don’t know how strong of those things are from a ranking-signal perspective, but we can safely assume that if a user is not happy, Google is going to translate as Google is not happy also, right? Vice versa.
Andrew Wilder (01:01:14):
Yep, yep.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:01:15):
So, the last question that I have, and for those of you who are still hanging out and didn’t run away, general strategy and staying current. Okay. So, in a constantly-changing industry, what’s the sustainable way to stay informed, and how can bloggers determine when to pivot long-term strategy versus staying the course? And, I’m going to do the second question right away, looking ahead, what are the foundational strategies for long-term success, such as the role of consistency, focusing on right traffic sources and the future visibility of blogging as a career? I’d like to finish on that one because that’s kind of like why people are here. So, the first question, Andrew, in constantly-changing industry, what is the sustainable ways to stay informed? Listen to our webinars.
Andrew Wilder (01:02:03):
I was going to say, tune in to TopHatRank’s webinars, of course. But actually, one of the things I found some years ago was I was subscribed to all these email lists of telling me how to do things and, like, “You have to do A/B testing and build your landing page this way,” and all this sales advice and technical advice. And I was overwhelmed and getting all these things. And I realized, “Actually, I already know how to do it. I just need to actually do it. I need to take action. I need to execute.” And getting all that information coming in was part of the overwhelm. And I started unsubscribing from things.
(01:02:36):
You shouldn’t unsubscribe from everything. But I think a good guideline is, if you have not opened an email from a mailing list in five or six emails or you haven’t gotten value out of the emails you’ve opened, unsubscribe. Get it out of there. Or if it’s coupons from VistaPrint, build a filter that auto-archives them. So when you need to go to VistaPrint and buy something, you can search and get that coupon. But I think pruning the noise or trimming the noise really helps in terms of focusing. And then make sure you’re getting value of whatever you’re paying attention to. So, I hope we provided lots of value today and you’ll keep coming back to TopHatRank, of course. But I think it’s kind of counterintuitive. And I think, maybe I’ll say this, if it doesn’t help traffic, revenue, or your resilience, it’s just a shiny object.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:03:27):
Absolutely.
Andrew Wilder (01:03:28):
Yep.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:03:29):
Okay. Now, the second question. Looking ahead, the foundational strategies for long-term success. So, I want to quickly talk about this. And again, this is coming from the hundreds of conversations that I’ve had in the last two years, since the Helpful Content system update, with bloggers. The entire website is affected. We have to touch a lot of posts right away. How do we approach this? And I think that’s a big source of overwhelm for a lot of publishers, especially if you’re by yourself. You’re not one of those big-brand publishers where you have a team of writers and then somebody who’s going to shoot your content and somebody who’s going to test your content. You’re on your own. You’re wearing all of those hats. So, how do we approach it?
(01:04:24):
And it’s about consistency. It’s about patience and consistency. And it’s about prioritization. It’s about understanding where you’re going to put your efforts. And we talked about that earlier in terms of really understanding “Which content am I going to touch first?” But then you approach it from “How much time can I dedicate to this without it affecting other things that I need to do per week, per month,” whatever it is.
(01:04:47):
And if you start working on 5 posts the first month, you work on 5 posts the next month and revisit the 5 that you did the previous month, month two, you have 10 posts that are optimized. Month three, you move on and you do another 5 posts, you optimize 5 posts, revisit them, update them, and you revisit the ones 5 from the previous month. Now you’ve touched each post twice. And I have 15 posts, and that’s three months. Now, if you want to move faster, you can do this every week. You can have 20 posts in one month that are optimized. That’s significant. And it’s a snowball effect because you’re touching those extra posts that you’ve touched the previous week or the previous month, because now they ranked. They ranked somewhere, maybe not in the spots where you want them, but now you understand your movement, your trajectory, and for which terms. Now you can go back and apply a little bit more optimization to it.
(01:05:45):
It’s about organizing, prioritizing, and then staying consistent. That’s how you battle that. And those small easy wins are going to feed you those happy dopamine boosts to make you keep going because you’re getting a reward for your effort. Do you have an instructional video on what to check on Google Search Console? Yes, we will have one soon published on our YouTube at one point, hopefully.
Andrew Wilder (01:06:14):
One of the things…
Arsen Rabinovich (01:06:14):
Go ahead.
Andrew Wilder (01:06:19):
When I was in college, a friend of mine had some inspirational magnets on the fridge, and one of them just said, “If you’re going through hell, just keep going.” And I feel like we’re in the turbulent time and we all literally need to keep putting one foot in front of the other and just stay the course and keep our heads down and keep working in a way that doesn’t overwhelm us. And we have to take good care of ourselves. Self-care is not selfish. But if we just keep going, we will actually come out of this stronger.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:06:50):
I think, really… And it’s easier to say than to do. We really have to wrap it up here because we’re seven minutes over.
Andrew Wilder (01:06:59):
[inaudible 01:06:59].
Arsen Rabinovich (01:07:01):
Can one person do it all? That was one of the questions that you highlighted, Andrew.
Andrew Wilder (01:07:05):
Yeah, my comment on the doc was no.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:07:07):
No, right. So, certain things you want to delegate. And if you have, you have to take that approach. And I hear this all the time. I hear this from some of Andrew’s clients who are like, “Hey,” because we’ll do an audit and we’ll deliver it to the client, they’re like, “If it wasn’t for Andrew, we wouldn’t be able to implement. If it wasn’t for NerdPress, we wouldn’t be able to implement this. This would’ve taken me weeks to figure out.”
(01:07:32):
So, if you’re in a position where you’re able to delegate stuff, where you know that, “Hey, this is going to take me a long time. I’m probably going to struggle figuring out how to do it, and I’m probably going to do it wrong, and then wind up paying someone to fix it for me,” just pay someone to do it for you. Because the time, the money that you invest, again, if you’re in a position to do so, the money that you invest paying somebody like Andrew or his team to fix your Core Web Vitals, you’re going to make twice, if not more, doing what you know you’re going to do well, as long as you’re constant, properly prioritizing and using Andrew’s amazing framework.
(01:08:07):
Thanks, everyone, for coming. We’re going to have this up on YouTube right away. The recap will come later. If there are any questions that we didn’t answer, we’ll try to answer them once we have the recap up on our website. Andrew, how can people find you? What do you do? What do you sell? What’s your offer?
Andrew Wilder (01:08:24):
I’m so glad you asked. You can find us at nerdpress.net, and our core service is maintenance and support for WordPress websites. I know many of you know that. And I think, Arsen, you said it so well, outsource the things that you’re either not good at or don’t want to do. And a lot of people are not good at or don’t want to do the technical stuff, and we actually thrive on that. If fixing Core Web Vitals is your idea of a good time, good on you. But I actually have a team of folks who do really geek out on that and love doing it and are very, very good at it. So, we can help you take a lot of the things in your protect bucket, out of that bucket and into ours and help you out with that. So, we have different support tiers for every budget.
(01:09:06):
And we also have Hubbub, our WordPress plugin. Want to give that a shout-out as well. That’s the most customizable website-growth tool. You can find that at morehubbub.com. The core feature is social media sharing buttons, but we also have Save This. If you don’t have a save-this-recipe or save-this-post feature on your site, you definitely need that. That’s the best lead gen of 2025. So, check out morehubbub.com and Save This. And if you have any questions, support@nerdpress.net or support@morehubbub.com, and that’s how you can reach us. And we’re wrapping up.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:09:35):
No, no, I’m saying, what else? Tell them your Instagram. Tell them your Facebook.
Andrew Wilder (01:09:38):
Oh. Our Instagram is @nerdpressteam. And I think you can find us also, we’re experimenting with LinkedIn. We’re trying that.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:09:38):
Yay.
Andrew Wilder (01:09:45):
And we also have a Facebook group, or a Facebook page, excuse me, and a private Facebook group for our clients.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:09:52):
Awesome. Andrew, thanks so much for hanging out with us today. Thank you all for coming today. Really enjoyed talking about this. We look forward to more of these webinars.
Andrew Wilder (01:10:01):
All right. Thank you so much for having me. Good to see everybody in the chat.
