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SEO updates you need to know
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βAI Overviews reduce clicks by 34.5% according to a new study of 300,000 keywords by Ahrefs. The test backs up reports of site owners suggesting a 20-40% reduction in clicks as AIOs rolled out. |
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βHighlighting the inaccuracy of AIOs, it was discovered adding "meaning" onto the end of any query will generate a definition for any fabricated saying - with Google saying "fish fingers up a tree" was a common British English phrase. |
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Search with Candour podcast
How to start an SEO agency
Season 4: Episode 16
This week, Jack Chambers-Ward is joined by returning guest Matt Kohli.
Together they discuss Matt's journey from being a freelancer to founding Fortitude Marketing.
The conversation covers the challenges of transitioning roles, the importance of building a reliable team, learning to trust others, and strategically planning for long-term success. They also highlight the importance of not overpromising to clients and focusing on delivering results.
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This week's solicited tips:
City-level searches now available on AlsoAsked
βHUGEβ new feature on AlsoAsked today: the ability to specify city location, on a worldwide basis! ποΈ
Big credit to user Arnout Hellemans who showed me that Google appeared to be doing some quite precise geographic targeting (for US searches on 'food trucks') - and further investigation showed this seems to be happening on a much more widespread basis.
So, the R&D began and we've finally rolled out the ability to specify city with your search to ensure you are getting the highest quality data. π₯
π I believe this makes AlsoAsked the only PAA research tool on the planet that offers live PAA data on a city level (and still the only one with async API to this data) - just in time for brightonSEO!
....new AIO features coming soon!
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Sometimes, you just need to wait...
This is a one page experiment website. Do you want to know the ranking secret that took it from 800 to 9,000 clicks a month? π
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After seeing a niche I thought might work, I wrote 1 page of content, I secured 3-4 links and then......
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Nothing. I waited for 6 months π¦π¦π¦
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A component of SEO is time. β³
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I knew it provided value, and Google would learn this over time. As Daniel Foley Carter highlighted in his brightonSEO talk, and as I've discussed with people like Arnout Hellemans - Google sometimes just wants an assessment period, and if you keep chopping and changing things, you can sometimes shoot yourself in the foot.
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Advanced SEO really can defeat the HCU
Content is assessed in context to the site it is delivered on. Good content is table stakes, not an SEO differentiator. π€
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This is why you can take content that isn't ranking - or has even been specifically supressed by the "Helpful Content Update" and transplant it to another website, where it will immediately rank number one. π
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The content is not as important as you think in regard to the wider ranking picture. Too many clients coming to us with traffic decline obsessing over fiddling with content when there are much larger bits of the jigsaw missing. π§©
βHere is a fun example from a couple of months ago of a site that had 99.9% traffic loss because of the HCU - was it the content? ‡οΈ
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What are LLMs saying about you?
While I am sceptical on "GEO", it is certainly a fact that search behaviour is fragmenting and shifting with many LLM-powered systems being used. One of the key problems that I know people like Emilia Korczynska have encountered is these kind of systems returning false information about their products/services. β
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I am currently slowly experimenting with the features on Waikay (What AI Knows About You) that Dixon Jones introduced me to.
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One of the cool things it can do is fish out some "facts" from various LLMs about your product so you can get a sense for what kind of imprint as been made.
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While some of these will be a product of training data, I can see particularly bad ones being "solved" during a grounding process if new content was published on trusted sites that contradicts these statements.
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I've been impressed so far - the link is https://waikay.io/β
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[I'm also experimenting putting links in posts as Nikki Pilkington showed me some data this will apparently be fine!]
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Here is some AlsoAsked facts from LLMs ‡οΈ
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XML Sitemap can make indexed URL comparison easy
I would always recommend having an external XML sitemap as it provides an easily audible list of indexable/canonical URLs. This makes it much easier to spot when rogue URLs are either linked to or are present in the index and getting traffic.
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π₯ MJ CachΓ³n YÑñez (LinkedIn / Bluesky)
π₯ Nikki Pilkington (LinkedIn / Bluesky)
π₯ Lidia Infante (LinkedIn / Bluesky)
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Saijo George (LinkedIn / Bluesky)
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