Opinionated SEO - Digital Marketing News

Today I have Hassan on the podcast and we’re going to dive into his journey, which started with a lie to his parents! We’ll dive a bit into entrepreneurship, the merit of agencies as a way to jumpstart your career, AI, and some of the original research and work he’s doing in his current role.Website: https://hassanuddeen.com/Blog: https://hassanuddeen.com/blog/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hassan-uddeen/

In this episode of The Opinionated SEO, we discuss an alternative to Google Analytics, specifically for those who don't want to switch to GA4. We introduce one of my favorite alternatives, which is a lightweight and open-source web analytics tool that is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR - Plausible Analytics.https://plausible.io/Here are some key takeaways:1. Plausible is a simple and intuitive alternative to the complex interface of Google Analytics.2. With Plausible, you own 100% of your website data, and there is no need for cookie prompts.3. Plausible's script is more than 17 times smaller than Google Analytics, making it a faster and more efficient option.4. Plausible is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR, and does not share data with third-party advertisers.5. Plausible offers real-time data and custom goals and events, making it a great alternative for those with small to medium-sized websites or personal blogs.

Welcome to episode 1 of Season 3 - 2023's first episode of the Opinionated SEO podcast! I'll be discussing Google's issues that I'm seeing.Slow speed of Chrome browserDecrease in ad revenueGoogle Analytics 4We also spoke about how Microsoft and Open AI's collaboration on Bing is quickly growing and may surpass Google in the future. Finally, we provided tips on how to use AI to help create content for SEO purposes and how to share it effectively on multiple platforms. 

In this episode of the Opinionated SEO, I discuss the capabilities of and implications of chat GPT, the free AI-based service from Open AI. I break down what GPT is, what it's good and bad at, how to craft requests correctly and how to avoid detection from search engine algorithms. I believes that GPT offers great potential as a tool, but should never be trusted to replace human content writers, especially for investigative reportage.Full Article and Show Notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/2023/01/chatgpt-what-is-it-and-what-should-i-know-about-it-as-a-marketer/Main Topics Covered:Overview of Chat GPTWhat Chat GPT Is Good AtWhat Chat GPT Is Bad AtHow To Craft RequestsAvoiding Detection from Search EnginesImplications for Content Writing & SEOI talk about how AI-based content can be used to create content more quickly and cost-effectively than traditional methods; I look at a past piece of content that I outsourced to a writer, compared to the same one using AI with the same prompt.I recommends trying out Chat GPT, an interface into DaVinci 3.5 from OpenAI, to produce creative, long-form pieces of content without much effort. Scott Aaronson was recently interviewed about AI safety; he mentioned that OpenAI research suggests that watermarking could help identify AI-generated content. Google's AI tools are able to pick up on certain key features such as punctuation and word choice that may indicate the content was generated by an artificial intelligence program. I believes that GPT 4 and 5 will make it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between human-written and AI-written pieces of content without adding original research or interviews. Have a happy holiday season and I look forward to seeing everyone next year!

Raj Sharma is an award winning real estate agent and brokerage owner in Southern California - DRE# 01886334, and we chat about some of the marketing efforts he’s done and how they’ve evolved over the last few years with a bit of emphasis on his offline efforts. Some key areas Raj talks about:What kind of marketing he has done in his 13 years of real estate profession?What's changed in the last few yearsWhat is working for him nowHow he measures success in his marketingWhat his favorite marketing story isWhat should someone do if they are just starting out in their business and they don't have a reputation to use, or a referral network?What he says has contributed most to his successThis is a great episode to listen to if you are a small business owner, or are doing marketing for a small business owner, and especially if you are in the real estate space.Raj's Contact Info:Email: Raj@legacyhomesrealty.comPhone: (951) 314-4251Website: LegacyHomesRealty.comFull show notes and blog page @ https://opinionatedseo.com/2022/10/offline-marketing-local-real-estate-marketing-interview-with-raj-sharma/

We have Gerald Murphy talking about everything SEO, marketing, AI content and also his work that he does at similar web as a senior solution business manager.We dive into topics such as:SERP featuresNew features coming out for SimilarWebAlternative search engines like TikTokThe evolution of SEO as a roleHow we saw COVID and Google's real time reaction to the SERPsUser Behaviors and how you can leverage this as a marketer specifically the user journey and not just looking at keyword ranksCreating original content, and how much does Google care about thatAI content - OPINIONS!Gerald's advice for people just getting into the industry

Today, I'm excited to interview Ashwin who is a full life cycle content marketer, currently working as the head of marketing at Optmyzr. We'll dive into topics like diversification of your content strategy, branded search, how to break into the industry, AI content and it's future with marketers, and a bonus question that Ashwin has never been asked in an interview before.Ashwin Balakrishnan:Writer, marketer, strategist. Head of marketing @Optmyzr and contributor @sejournal. Proud husband to a breast cancer survivor.Twitter: @TheCopyTrail - https://twitter.com/thecopytrail LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashwin-balakrishnan/ Optmyzr: PPC Management Software

I interview Jonny Rockz, aka Jonny Polanco about his latest single, marketing in the music industry, and his non profit he's working to help young artists get recording time.Jonny has opened for the likes of Ice Cube, and his latest single just dropped yesterday. Listen to learn about how the industry has changed in the last 10 years and the types of marketing you can do in the music industry.

Wade Carlson is an SEO professions based out of Orange County, CA.From his time in the Coast Guard to working at Space-X, he's moved across several verticals and areas within marketing.He talks about his first passion projects, local SEO, advice for SEO beginners, and we discuss the most interesting man in the world.https://www.linkedin.com/in/wade-l-carlson/

On today’s show, I wanted to talk briefly about a free tool called ahrefs. Many of you have probably already heard of them, but I’m not sure if everyone knows they have a free version you can use by connecting your Google Search Console data. It allows those specific sites to have access to some features in ahrefs.Go to https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools and you can sign up there.Let me know what you think!

On today’s show I have Ryan Ricketts. I’ve actually known Ryan for six years now, and we’ve worked at several companies together.I wanted  him on the show because he's moved between several verticals as well as from different types of agencies and to in-house.He also gives away his best link building tactic he used for real estate!Contact Ryan Website: https://slickettsdigital.com/ or on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SlickettsFull Show notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/2022/06/interviewing-seo-ryan-ricketts-moving-verticals-and-agency-to-in-house/

There are a number of common SEO misconceptions or myths. Some of these include the belief that SEO is all about stuffing keywords into content, your keyword density, that link building is the only important SEO tactic. And many, many more,  but let's first talk about domain names. I'll start off by saying you can rank any site with any domain name. Within reason. Names should be memorable and easy to remember, and that isn't an SEO thing.Listen on to get an idea of why you don't need an exact match domain, and why it is better to consider the branding aspect than a descriptive aspect of your domain.

Today I wanted to talk about AI content and my tests on its success as a viable option for creating content that ranks on search engines.I’ll start with some background on the latest publicly available AI system, an example output that I pick apart, some additional example outputs, and then my opinion on how to utilize an AI system to write content.See the full show notes / blog post with tons of examples, transcript, and links @ https://opinionatedseo.com/2022/02/can-ai-content-rank-in-google/

Today is February 10th and I wanted to talk about Screaming Frog as well as the new Search Console URL Inspection API. Full Blog Post / Show Notes: https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e20Let’s jump right in, what is screaming frog and what can you do with it?Let’s start at the beginning, it’s free but limited, and you don’t run it online. The paid version is 149 pounds / year, or about $200 US dollars. So you are talking about $16 a month if you wanted to break it down that way. Buy it, write it off, and call it a day, it will save you that money in the first hour you use it.So what can it do?Screaming frog is an SEO spider, think GoogleBot but you get to save the data it captures.Here’s a list of the top features for it:Find broken links, errors, and redirectsPage title and meta data analysisMet robots and directives reviewAudit hreflangDiscover exact duplicate pagesGenerate xml sitemapsCreate site visualizations.You can do up to 500 URLs in the free version, unlimited to your computer’s capacity on the paid version.But the real power comes in when you use the paid version, and I’m going to just touch on a few of the features.Javascript rendering: Actually being able to view the page as a fully rendered version. This includes a screenshot as well as being able to review source code for the rendered version.We’re using this to better understand how the rendering affects crawlability, as well as what’s on the site and what isn’t depending on JS.If you do any kind of client side rendering, using react, or just not seeing Google crawling your site like you think it should, this is a great way to better understand.URL Inspection API Integration - I was going to save this for last, but it’s just too good to not put at the top of the list. There are a few integrations you get with screaming frog out of the box. 1 - Google Analytics 2 - Google Search Console - this includes the inspection API integration. 3 - Page speed insights And non Google related companies like Majestic for backlinks, ahrefs for things like backlinks and URL rating, and Moz for data like page authority and backlink info from their open site explorer metrics.Site VisualizationsCustom ExtractionMeta Tags - Titles, descriptions, etc You can even generate XML sitemapsFind out all pages that have broken links both internally and externally. 301s - Integration with the new Search Console URL Inspection API which was officially launched on January 31st, 2022 by Google - and it allows you to see indexation status of your URLs via an API. This was integrated in the latest release in the last few weeks and you’ll see a good share of tutorials out there. You probably want to know - what am I doing with this new data, and what data do we get that we can use?First, the data is used to understand indexation status in Google, errors that are coming up, and last crawl date.And what am I doing with that data? Let’s start with indexation status - you have a few variations of the summary of indexation, things like index and submitted, indexed not submitted in sitemap, crawled not indexed, discovered but not crawled, soft 404, error, and probably a few more I’m forgetting. By pulling this data on pages, you can get a better understanding of how Google sees your site.

Today I’ll be recapping the Google Office Hours with Google’s John Mueller from January 28th, 2022. As always, I’ll provide a synopsis of the question and answer, my opinion, and a link to the question in the video. The video ran an hour, I’ll try to summarize this for you in about ten minutes.Full blog post, show notes, and transcript @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e19How does Google recognize paid links?They have a lot of factors that they look into, not just did someone report this as a paid link.Does Google care where the internal link is located in the site, header / content / footer?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=36Running a blog type site without any actual products, but more information about products, they want to know if Google will treat it as a classic product review site?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=265Local Directories:Does Google really care if you are listed on local directories and the information is correct?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=451Links:Are there any issues with linking to a site that is also linking to you?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=685Myths:Are there any myths or inaccuracies that you see out there that you can just debunk right now?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=785 Malware:Malware is still being shown in the search results.https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=1449A tool to help index sites faster:https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=1718Emojis in titles and descriptions:https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=1971Search Console API Data Accuracy:Is the data from the API more accurate than the web interface? https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2054FAQ Schema:Our schema looks good from a technical perspective, but isn’t showing on Google.https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2176Seasonal content:What should we do with content that’s seasonal like Black Friday?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2257CWV Impact?Of the 3 metrics, my CLS isn’t passing, how much of an impact will that have?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2418Will CWV impact crawling?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2555Migrating from a subdomain:The subdomain is old, like 20 years, and we’re looking to migrate to the main domain.https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2677New Local Site Starting out:What signals should we look out for or pay attention to.https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=3015Geo redirects on site:Should you geo-redirect on a new site?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=3195The last question had to do with branded search - I don’t think it was relevant as it seemed they may have other issues, but feel free to watch that part if you are having any issues with your branded search being visible.

See Full Blog Post / Transcript / Show Notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e18I wanted to talk about something that came up recently that I’ve mentioned before but is worth devoting some time to.Three things – 1: Acronyms and abbreviations2: Link Juice3: Domain Authority

A New meta tag and Walmart is making big moves into the Metaverse Full Show Notes / Blog Post @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e17Last Friday, January 21st, 2022, Google Search Central released a new tag.This tag called indexifembedded, you can tell Google you'd still like your content indexed when it's embedded through iframes and similar HTML tags in other pages, even when the content page has the noindex tag.There are a few use cases which Malcom Slade over at Creative Race outlined in their blog post. I’ll give a few here and a link to the full blog:1- Embedding sharable content2 - Embedding comments - like Disqus where it’s an iframe and the comments are not indexed3 - Embedding video where you want the video to be indexed on the page4 - Reviews from 3rd party embeds5 - They asked for other ideas. One that we’re talking about is a widget that we’ve had around for a while that other companies embed and they can display specific content. Think being able to embed stock tickers. Now, with each of these being indexed, and having links coming back to us, this could really change our link profile.Overall I like the idea that we can have more control of our content in the wild, but also to allow others to have that content indexed.https://creativerace.co.uk/indexifembedded-what-does-this-new-meta-tag-do/https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/01/robots-meta-tag-indexifembeddedAnd it’s been a week or two since I mentioned the metaverse, but it looks like Walmart is the next big name to file patents associated with the metaverse.One trademark application was for “Financial services, namely, providing a digital currency and a digital token of value for use by members of an online community via a global computer network.” In another filing they mention an on-line retail store featuring virtual merchandise.If you remember I mentioned other big names like Nike and Disney with similar type filings, but also Under Armor, Urban Outfitters, Ralph Lauren and Abercrombie & Fitch have also filed similar trademarks with intent on virtualization of retail stores.Right now, Meta (the King formerly known as Facebook) seems to be pushing both the software and the hardware to the masses. With their Oculus headsets and requirements for a Facebook account, we’re seeing virtual connections that are coming right from existing web 2.0.So Meta has Oculus, Microsoft has HaloLens, Apple is rumored to be working on hardware, and Google just ramped up their AR hardware with plans to ship in the next 2 years. Remember Google glass came out in 2012, so they have a lot of previous hardware experience in this field, and I know they don’t want to lose out to Meta in the coming MetaVerse wars.https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/16/walmart-is-quietly-preparing-to-enter-the-metaverse.htmlMy personal belief is we are going to see a huge transformation in the next 2-4 years with how we work and interact in business. Right now we are seeing that you don’t necessarily have to be in an office together, though there are some advantages to having access to people right away. Middle and upper management like to have a visual that people are focusing on their work, whether you agree with that or not, it’s something that may never go away.

Today I’ll be recapping the Google Office Hours with Google’s John Mueller from January 21st, 2022. As always, I’ll provide a synopsis of the question and answer, my opinion, and a link to the question in the video. The video ran an hour, I’ll try to summarize this for you in about 15 minutes.Full Show Notes / Blog @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e16Questions seemed to focus a bit on internationalization, and internal linking. Hope you enjoy:The value of internal links in header, footer, or in content?https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=41Seeing links - they are paid, and the sites are ranking #1, why is that contradiction from what Google says?https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=88Some links are not crawling according to Google Search Console.https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=20325% of the pages have dropped being indexed, quite dramatically a few months ago. Submitted pages dropped by 50%. They thought it might be structured data that’s not valid.https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=342Seeing images in organic search results, not the image tab. There isn’t documentation in google Search Central. https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=655Multiple websites for each location but just a different phone number and address.https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=833Allright, then it was my turn. We have a strong US presence and moving into international. Should we go with ccTLDs or a single domain with subfolder country / language. Technology isn’t an issue, and I think being able to target Google Search Console to each unique domain by country may be the most advantageous option.https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=1217Is there a way to capture a folder without a trailing slash in Google Search Console adding a new property?https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=1998Site downtime, and how that affects indexing.https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2064Splitting the domain, what should we do in search console?https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2321This is kind of a reverse internationalization, removing the countries from the site and just focusing on one. But all the countries were already in subfolders, so would moving the main language to the root have a big impact on ranking?https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2684This person really asked, can we trust the answers given. https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2868Internal Linking, more important than URL structure?https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=3058I then had a chance to talk to John again and ask about client side rendering issues a client was having, this particular client was having trouble replicating the issue as GoogleBot sees it. 

Today I wanted to focus a bit on privacy and security. This is central to every marketer and I think it’s something we should be considering heavily.Full Show Notes Blog Post @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e15The biggest name right now in private browsing is duck duck go who is averaging 105 million queries per month so far in January 2022. Duck Duck Go is actually the #2 search engine on mobile in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. On desktop, it has about 2.5% market share in the US, around what Bing’s market share is at. If you feel have been using Bing for advertising or doing SEO for Bing, then don’t discount DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is also launching their desktop browser which will be in my opinion a major competitor to Google. Their mobile browser has a huge install rate, and it would only make sense that mobile users would like this experience on the desktop systems.Another search engine that you may have heard of is Neeva. This is a subscription based search engine with no advertising created by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at YouTube). Some things that I really like about their platform is that they give 20% of their topline revenue with content creator partners when their content is used to directly answer a Neeva customer’s query. This is great for newspapers and other content creators to get revenue back for content that a search engine like Google would normally have as a zero click result.They just introduced a free (at least for 3 months) tier, and then it’s $4.99 per month.https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-neeva-free-basic-and-neeva-premiumhttps://neeva.com/blog/supporting-humanitys-curiosity-with-quality-contentAs you are looking at marketing channels, consider that this model may become more popular as people prioritize their privacy over highly customized ads. I do like the idea of paying under $5 a month and knowing that my search results are not skewed by how much an advertiser spent. It also has a lot of privacy features which help keep other advertisers from being able to track.As marketers, we may not love this, but it emphasizes why we need to make sure to fully utilize all marketing channels and not rely on a single one. It also emphasizes how important SEO can be as well as creating top quality content.Now I wanted to talk about browser plugins that you may not realize are affecting your numbers. The main ones are ad blocking plugins, and I wanted to focus on one in particular as it’s the most popular, but does one thing by default that may surprise you.And that one thing - it blocks Google Analytics by default. There are over 10 million installed users actively blocking Google Analytics with this one plugin. It may not seem like a huge number, but depending on what vertical your users are in, you may be surprised with the percentage that use a plugin like this.One thing I suggest doing is pull your Google Analytics data, and cross reference that with your Google Search Console click data and then against your server logs. You’ll have to take into consideration things like bots that GA doesn’t count, but this could give you an idea of the number of people visiting your site that don’t trigger Google Analytics.So in summary, we’ve got millions of users blocking your tracking software, millions of users moving to new search engines which tout privacy first, and even search engines that have no ads. How are you planning for these numbers to grow in your marketing. What moves are you making to measure impact of your marketing efforts that don’t involve digital online tracking? I’ll be talking about privacy updates and impacts as part of marketing regularly, so keep listening.

I wanted to do something a little different today. Since I didn’t see much that was really newsworthy - the usual rumblings about a potential algorithm update, and some ongoing Twitter drama about SEO in general. I thought I would talk about a book that should speak to most of us. The book is Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin.The full title: Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World, is really just that, Rand is brutally honest, to the point where you can feel his pain in his words. If you listen to the audio book, he narrates himself.This book is really for anyone who is an aspiring startup founder, an entrepreneur looking for insider tips, or just anyone fascinated with the world of business and especially how venture capital ties into that.The book really talk to you about investors and how the wrong ones can be devastating for your business. How a transparent office culture can make or break a business. And what happens when you take shortcuts.Rand started out like so many of us, doing small projects and then took the leap to starting his own company to do it full time. His story feels like the untold story of most startups, a lot of money issues, wrong moves, over-extending. But Rand had built a name for himself and his company. His “whiteboard Fridays” were the stuff of SEO agency legend, many companies would stop all work and watch, just because they were so insightful and well done.SEO Moz, or now just Moz, was really one of the first SAAS (software as a service) companies for SEOs. It started in 2004 and finally found itself around 2017, it took nearly 13 years for it to become a stable profitable company. At the time of publication, the company was bringing in 45 million in annual revenue.What I find fascinating about his next area in the book is talking about the success of companies, which 5% of venture backed companies actually become profitable, is market research. His new company Spark Toro does exactly that and I can see how his identification in the book here and his years of experience led him to starting that company. For example, Uber used search trends for “taxi” to determine their markets to move into.Once you get about half way through the book, you start really disliking venture capitalists, and I understand his frustrations. The push for large returns is never ending, and only three in ten venture backed companies will yield even minimal returns.Rand gives several scenarios where Moz simply failed internally, from how it catered to employees with unique needs to its racial diversity. He takes a long hard look at how he led the company and how it was hard to recognize the changes that needed to be made. Once made, he saw huge changes and attributes that new culture to the success of the company.The big takeaway from his book for me:Don’t let the hype about superstar startups lead you down the wrong path. Consider very hard what types of investments you are willing to take and what that means to your ability to grow the company. Be transparent and honest with your employees and your customers.If you are starting out on your own, even just as a freelancer, this is a good book to give you an idea of what the next stage might look like. Rand does go into a lot of detail about his early years building websites and optimizing them as a small business of 2 or 3, and the insights are still valid today.Thank you - I hope you found this interesting.Have a great day and see you tomorrow.