This post covers 9 of the latest updates in the SEO industry. Google is paying publishers 5-figure sums to test an unreleased Gen AI platform in a deal that requires them to publish 3 stories per day. Notable volatility in SERPs was detected at the end of February, with other data showing that Reddit's visibility in the SERPs was starting to fall. The Internet Archive website appears to have been penalized by Google as it dropped from 8M monthly organic visits to 1M.

Google Ads data contains a goldmine of information for SEOs. Identify high-converting keywords from ads, then track those in SEO rank tracking tools and optimize organic content for them. Review ad copy performance to identify ways to improve the clickthrough rate of organic pages. Identify long-tail queries to create or optimize existing content. Analyze high-converting PPC landing pages to identify learnings about page structure, CTA, and UX that can be applied to traditional search pages.

Sveta Bay is a marketing expert who built a product in a month, validated it in 2 weeks, and then quit her job. She emphasizes the value of targeting a specific audience and offering free AI tools for SEO to drive traffic and revenue. In this article, Bay provides 15 marketing tips she learned from growing her products, stresses the importance of email marketing for user activation and retention, and advises against subscriptions for products with poor retention rates.

Tangential SEO explores keywords beyond your core business, broadening your audience reach and offering unique content opportunities. It offers benefits like press coverage, expanded brand awareness, and reduced content fatigue. Brands are likely to face less fierce competition for tangential keywords. To uncover tangential keywords, use techniques such as mind mapping, leverage AI tools, and mine insights from platforms like Reddit.

This post contains a list of SEO content best practices, categorized by internal linking, meta descriptions, user experience, and more. The recommendations include structuring content with hierarchical headers, adding one relevant internal link per 200 words, and ensuring image alt text is descriptive and includes appropriate keywords.

This article describes the results of 6 different SEO experiments. Disavowing all external links to three blog pages showed that links still do matter for Google rankings. Added a related posts section to improve internal linking produced positive results across multiple URLs. Blocking Google from crawling pages using robots.txt results in decreased performance, but it can be recovered.

Google introduced INP (Interaction to Next Paint) as part of its Core Web Vitals this year. Your website's SEO ranking can be affected by INP. INP can be reported if the UI fails to respond promptly to a pointer or keyboard event triggered on your website. This blog post looks at a few different methods to identify the root cause of slow interactions, including comparing JavaScript self-profiling to other browser APIs.

Optimize existing assets instead of constantly reinventing the wheel by creating new content. Check the last 28 days of your Google Search Console and highlight relevant search queries that rank between #4 to #20. You can optimize these pages by adding new insights to refresh the topics, adding new internal links to recently published articles, replacing or adding new images, updating CTAs, or reviewing outbound links.

Despite AI advancements, the pull channel of search, whether through LLMs or traditional blue results, remains essential. There is an ongoing need for SEO champions who understand how to integrate AI tools into their workflows to anticipate changes. This blend of human expertise with AI capabilities enables marketers to deliver exceptional results and maintain relevance in the competitive online arena.

75% of this SEO checklist applies to most websites, excluding e-commerce. 25% is specific to SaaS sites. It covers checklists for backlink audits, internal link audits, on-page SEO issues, GSC audits, and more. Links to instructions and relevant tools are also included.

10 tips to climb the SEO career ladder.

There are scenarios where a narrow keyword focus works and others where a broader topic-based SEO strategy makes more sense. Optimizing for one specific keyword is a bad idea when it's seen as the single key to SEO success or if the goal keyword doesn't match search intent. In general, it's better to target multiple keywords relevant to your core service offering to maximize qualified traffic. Specific keyword optimization does make sense when it's about a niche or single topic or when you know that ranking for a single keyword will provide significant ROI.

The Inspect feature in Chrome (also called “inspect element”) allows you to diagnose problems, test changes on your site, and spy on your competitors. Some of its use cases include locating a specific color hex code, testing out page changes, and reviewing schema markup.

OpenAI offers a Batch API that allows users to send grouped requests at half the usual cost. This feature is particularly useful for tasks that can wait up to 24 hours, for example, clustering SEO keywords, product feed copy optimization, or large document summarization. This article includes a simple step-by-step guide to using the Batch API for large-scale SEO tasks.

This article delves into the cognitive biases that influence how people search and select information online. Confirmation bias leads users to favor content that aligns with their preconceptions, while authority bias makes them trust content from perceived experts. Tactics for marketers include using power words to establish trust, conducting thorough keyword research to match user intent, and enhancing content with authoritative signals such as certifications and expert endorsements.

Google's AI Overviews are an attempt to take unstructured data gathered from web content and give a structured answer to a search query, just like answer boxes. Its impact on SEO results will vary widely across industries and categories. For informational content and top-of-funnel keywords, the clickthrough rate will likely decline by over 50%. However, there could be very little traffic loss on topics with deep content or products/service pages that can't easily be summarized.

The most prevalent SERP feature in early 2024 is “related search,” which appears in 99% of SERPs, a notable rise from 84% in 2023. Video features have shifted to be more common on smartphones than desktops, indicating changing user behaviors and technological improvements. In terms of share of voice, local packs (places) lead, followed by carousels and Knowledge Graph results, with organic results dropping to 34% overall and 28% on smartphones.

Leaked Google documents have surfaced, revealing valuable insights into the company's search algorithms. These documents emphasize the importance of using nofollow links consistently and maintaining high content quality, particularly in categories like Travel. While the authenticity of these documents has not yet been confirmed, they seem to validate long-held SEO strategies and practices.

Joseph Lee, the founder of Supademo, an AI-powered product demo tool, shares growth tactics starting with a 4-step SaaS validation framework. The framework involves problem identification, focus definition, hypothesis development, and solution delivery. Supademo's initial growth relied on unscalable tactics, such as manual outreach and leveraging networks. Viral loops, accounting for 70% of Supademo's acquisition, and SEO, contributing 20-25% of signups, were crucial strategies. Sidecar products (complimentary free tools), co-marketing, and reverse trials also drove growth.

The leaked information from Google was API documentation related to ranking systems, not the actual algorithm. This documentation provides insights into potential ranking signals, such as page views and toxic links, which may influence Google's algorithm but are not guaranteed factors. Marketers should interpret this information as part of a broader strategy and prioritize foundational SEO practices, such as optimizing for site speed, quality content, and user engagement, rather than relying on supposed shortcuts or loopholes.

The same content is rendered on uppercase and lowercase URLs, but Google treats them as different pages. This results in duplicate content issues but can be solved with global redirects.

This method offers a clever tactic for marketers to identify low-competition SEO keywords to try to rank for. Search for a broad keyword topic in Ahrefs or Semrush, then filter by “Lowest DR” to bring up all the keywords where a site with a lower authority than yours ranks in the top 5. Analyze the results to find low-competition keywords that your website could likely overtake.

A list of free and paid keyword research tools for SEO that includes the Keywords Everywhere browser extension, Ubersuggest, KeywordTool.io, SpyFu, and more.

Marketers can employ the "Low Intent Match" method to identify search queries with unmet needs. This involves focusing on search intent where existing top content falls short, such as broad guides ranking for specific tools queries. By creating targeted content like "49 Best Voice of Customer Tools," they can better fulfill the exact need. The process includes deep manual keyword research, clustering keywords by SERP similarity, and analyzing groups for intent mismatches. This strategy can help content to rank quickly and draw significant traffic, even outranking major competitors.

There are common weaknesses in competitors' SEO content that indicate you could easily outrank them by simply creating better content (without link-building). Low word counts in a SERP of all blog posts usually indicate that a more robust blog post could overtake them. If the content winning the keyword is outdated, either based on the title signifier or the information itself, then it's likely a more timely article could win. Content that takes forever to deliver on search intent (or barely addresses it) probably sends poor user experience signals, which provides another opportunity to take over the keyword ranking.

TermSniper identifies search intent for any keyword and suggests content tips for optimizing. SEO.ai offers AI-driven research that can match target keywords to a target audience. Free SEO Keyword Research & SERP Analyzer is a custom GPT on ChatGPT that can scrape any Google search result page and analyze keyword usage, intent, and the target audience.

A checklist for a content brief for a blog post.

This post shares 8 steps in building SEO backlinks using Google Keyword Planner. It includes choosing a content topic, building a top 10 list of keywords for your topic, searching and building out the data, creating a report, finding relevant journalists, and sending the reports out to the journalists.

Forums are making a comeback as Google favors sites with genuine user interactions, such as Reddit and Quora, leading to a decline in visibility for traditional niche websites. This change highlights the importance of building dedicated forums to encourage user participation and create valuable, community-driven content. Emphasizing authenticity and engagement can help niche sites regain relevance in search rankings.

Websites should only use the disavow tool after receiving a manual penalty notice from Google and only when that penalty is related to backlinks. Otherwise, the tool has little to no value.