[Niladri]
Great, good morning everyone and good evening to some of you, my colleagues who are joining from India. It's been a while since we did a session, I think we skipped last week, thanks to everybody for joining us back again. So let's dive right into it.
Updates for the week, there is a bunch of updates that have surfaced over the last couple of weeks, especially related to Google AI overview rollout, the search generative experience, which is kind of an antithesis to the featured snippet, as we used to know. So there is another layer that has been rolled out in the US and is being rolled out in other parts of the world. Along with it, there are a couple of other changes that we noticed, the search in itself has become more graphical for brands, so just a lot more images and videos and other content types that are showing up apart from the usual.
But let's go into Google AI overview first. Does it impact local SEO? Not really, not at the moment at least.
Should you be worried as an SEO or a marketer? I see it as an opportunity, no opinion, it's going to take a lot more time for it to be consistent and providing the right answers to user queries. Right now, some of the responses that people asked, who have been working with it have noticed some of the responses are really stupid.
For example, this is the latest one, Google AI search is telling car drivers to consider changing the blinker fluid. So I don't know why. And then we started picking up content from relevant about medical that are not relevant, but I don't think it's going to be the norm going forward.
It's going to take a while for it to be stable and for us to figure out how it's going to work. I'm not sure if some of you remember how featured snippets started rolling out back in 2014. And the SEO started talking about how it will take away traffic from their website and how it spread the doom for SEO, no one is going to click through and get to your website.
And a few years down the line, the same people adapted. We learned how to use it to benefit us and finally came to realize that feature snippet, if you can get into it, it can drive a tremendous amount of value and traffic to your website and content. OK, Google still needs to make sure because results are still wonky, certain things that should be ranked, it doesn't rank.
But again, we need to realize why Google exists. It doesn't exist to rank our content. It's our responsibility to optimize it and figure out how Google works.
Forum threads and Reddit are still ranking prominently. But one thing for sure, if you're dependent on SEO tools, especially to track feature snippet and AI overview, be careful with it, OK? Because AI overview in general has not been rolled out to add all categories of searches.
It will be in the near future. But AI tools at the moment are there as a test case. As I say, Google was forced into releasing it early.
It's still half-baked. But if you're dependent on SEO tools to track if a certain query is generating AI overview or not, those tools are going to be incorrect. For example, I was looking at this live tool from SEMrush where they mentioned like 0.04% of queries may be displaying AI overview on desktop and 0.57% for mobile users. I don't think it's true. It could be lower in certain categories or non-existent in certain categories. Take these tools with a pinch of salt because the data is not accurate.
Because the way AI tools work, most of them scrape information from an incognito mode and AI overview is sporadic and based on incognito mode. OK, so I'll be careful about referring to third-party information right away. It's going to take some testing and some more usage and understanding to be able to perfect this.
Second update for the week, I was looking into a client's account late last week and noticed something unique that I've not seen before. There were AI summaries available in Google AdWords account for campaign performance. For what I can see, that's something that Google is testing with because we noticed it on one account.
But when we went back and logged into our accounts or accounts of other clients, I did not notice that. So it might still be rolling out in phases in the near future. Watch out for it.
If you find it useful, let me know what you think about the summaries. I hope the summaries work better than Google AdWords reps work. So let's see what's going on.
LSA, local search services ads, right? So if you notice the screenshot, if you're running local services ads for your clients, businesses, there's a new option that started showing up recently. It's called message multiple businesses at one go.
From a business's perspective, it might not be great because I want customers to contact me directly or any business would want that exclusivity with the customer. But when you try getting into it and try to understand from Google's perspective, who's trying to give the best deal to their customers, it makes sense. You tend to have parallel conversations with multiple businesses whenever you are buying anything, be it a product or a service.
Until now, this is a known business. It's a known entity that you've been dealing with for years. You tend to do that.
Users tend to do that so that they can get the best service and the best offer. This might not be the right example when you're looking for a criminal defense attorney, but we started noticing it and I thought that we should share it with you. Let's move on from the updates.
A lot of you, a lot of agencies we work with, they work with businesses who do not have a brick and mortar store. They work with senior businesses that do not have a physical address. They specifically go to the client's location to complete the services.
It's mostly home services, Locknet, HVAC, etc. So there has been a longstanding argument about if in the local search industry, if service areas, adding service areas to be a Google My Business profile impact ranking or not. Traditionally, it wasn't considered a crucial ranking factor.
However, new tests are stating it otherwise. Apparently, adding the right service areas could be a potential ranking factor. Further tests are needed as like everything new.
For example, you shouldn't be adding service areas for a business that's like 50 miles away from the usual service areas and just hope to rank for it. If you're adding service area, make sure that you are tracking ranking as well so as to determine a baseline and see if there is any improvement after adding the service areas. Once you add the service area to a business, wait for some time, maybe add content related to the service areas on those area-specific pages that you've created.
Add unique content rather than using a template to update them. Then track if there has been an impact. We are going to do the same.
I think the screenshot is from a grid ranking tool that I found online that is doing the study. I think Darren was the one who mentioned it a few days ago. Then the news spread.
By the way, we are launching our own grid ranking tracker towards the end of the month. It's going to be in beta version. Drop us an email if you want to be among the first set of users to try it out.
We'll activate it on your account, show you how to use it. It's going to be rolled out in phases because a lot of features need to be developed. The bare bone option will be available for some of our users towards the end of this month, as far as I understand.
Okay, now in the first deck, we did touch upon something called how search results are evolving. There's a lot more graphical, there are richer search results, there's images, there are videos, etc. So how does one actually optimize images for search if you want it to show up or you want it to show up alongside of content?
First thing I would say is avoid adding too much text on any image file if it's part of your content because text on images are really, really difficult to read on mobile devices. And as far as I can see, mobile searches keep growing, leaps and bounds every year. Okay, I've seen websites like 40, 50, 50% of searches or search traffic that are coming from mobile devices right now.
Okay, so if you put this tiny little text on a lot of content, embedded images, gets very, very difficult to read on a mobile device. Think about it. Avoid stock photos.
I cannot reiterate this enough. There have been studies that have shown that stock photos can reduce the number of clicks that you receive. So if you can, and if you're a business owner or you're working directly with a business owner, create a calendar event for them to be taking good quality solid photos every time.
If you're blogging for them, if you're writing a lot of content on a regular basis, you're doing content optimization and you want certain images to show up in Google image searches, there are a few things I would suggest you do. One is check what's ranking already for the phrases that you want those images to show up for. Create high quality images.
By high quality, I mean it should be at least 1,200 pixels wide. You would use proper image, image title, all tabs and surrounding content. They really matter if you want to get into, want to drive any meaningful results from those images.
To stand out from the crowd, I would recommend when you are creating these images, some of these images, you can include your, highlight your offers or awards, things that can set you apart from the competition. Okay. If you're part of a charity, a local charity group or something, highlight them as well in those images that you share or embed on your website.
Another thing that we recently came across, a couple of things I would suggest you do, one was related to Apple business profiles. There was this profile post where we noticed a bunch of people had their Apple business profile listing getting marked as permanently closed. Businesses are open, people, they are conducting business as usual, but profile has been marked as closed for some reason.
Then we dug into it deeper, then there was an email back to the user from the Apple business team who mentioned, oh, the profile got marked as closed because you did not have hours mentioned on your website. They're available on the Facebook profile, they're available on the Google profile, so which tells me Apple team or Apple has a system through which they are checking the website as well. If you face such an issue, make sure you have hours listed permanently on the customer website or the business's website where you're facing the issue with.
This could be one of the reasons why it got marked as closed by mistake. Another prominent chatter that I've come across a lot in the last six to eight weeks is some of these local competitors are indiscriminately going into other businesses listings and moving the map marker pin to a different location. This is being done intentionally to harm the business or competition in the area.
If and only if you notice it, there are some do's and don'ts that we have learned about so far. One, do not go into the Google My Business dashboard or the Google business profile dashboard immediately and try to rectify the pin by pulling it in the right location. That kind of unusual behavior is leading to listings being suspended.
That will cause a whole lot of problems. Listing can get suspended. You may even lose the reviews that are on the listing.
So there's a trick. Instead of going through the Google My Business or Google business profile dashboard, log into your different Google account that is not managing the listing. Search for the business.
For example, for example, Larynx business has got the pin removed or pin has been placed in a different location. You just noticed it. So log in from a different account and go to maps and there's a suggested edit option.
Okay, so make sure you modify it using that, using a different account altogether. Please do not use the same account, email address that you use to manage the Google My Business. Do not log into the dashboard and try to edit it from the dashboard.
Use this suggested edit option and if need be, reach out to support. This will allow you to avoid a lot of hassles later on with suspension. Okay, a ton of people are reporting it.
I'm sure there will be something Google may do something to alleviate this problem for good. We'll send out the notes along with the pointers. So no need to take notes right now.
Okay, tools of the week. I've seen a lot of people struggle using Google Webmaster Tools and not a lot of tools, not a lot of free tools in the market that can help you actually check what's going on. But there is one tool I was playing around with last week is the Ahrefs Google Webmaster Tool.
There's a free version of it. You can basically go in and check pages that has dropped off from the top positions in ranking along with the ratio of configurations and changes. There is a page explorer tool that you can easily spot issues and opportunities with.
If you're already using Ahrefs, you might be aware of it already. But if you're not, give it a shot. Try it out.
You may need to have Google Search Console access to be able to use it. But if you're using a free paid version, be careful with Ahrefs. They have a credit system in place.
I believe it's usage-based pricing, they call it. So be careful what you click on. But otherwise, give this tool a shot.
I thought it was interesting as it allowed a lot of flexibility that Google's interface does not allow. And Google's interface is usually clunky, it's difficult to use. So try it out.
The next tool that I'm going to talk about is Screaming Frog. It's become like my go-to, one of my favorite tools for auditing and doing a lot of SEO tasks. For example, website audit.
If you're trying to audit, you're trying to do content audit, you're trying to determine the content length, meta tags, missing meta tags on a page, identifying internal linking opportunities for large websites. You have like hundreds of pages on your website, like me, and you're trying to figure out how you can fix internal linking. You can use the tool.
There's one couple of interesting aspects that I use a lot is aggregating anchor tags for internal linkings. You can find all the anchor tags that are being utilized in internal links at the moment, and then try and figure out if you're using the most prominent or your targeted keywords at the anchor links to an internal link. They recently launched a custom JS application through which you can plug in a custom JS and automate a lot of these processes.
Take a look at it. Additionally, it's great for competitor review. You have a competitor website, you're trying to figure out why they are ranking, what content do they have on the website, what kind of content is doing good, what's the length of this content, what are the title tags they are targeting, what are the meta tags they are targeting, and try and kind of reverse engineer from there.
It's great for that. The only problem is it comes at a one annual cost. There's no subscription system that you can be on month for month.
But if you are looking for a subscription system, then I think a good alternative would be SEO bulb. I believe they have a monthly subscription and they have an option that is like web-based. You don't have to download and use it.
But it's expensive. The web-based one is expensive, just like Streaming Pro, they have a desktop version as well. They do have a...
They don't have a subscription service. Yeah, they do, actually. Yeah, they provide a monthly option.
So if you're using it temporarily, don't use it too often, then you can give SiteBulb a shot. Otherwise, I just love my Streaming Pro. If you want me to do a detailed session on it, let me know.
I'd be happy to jump on the call. So that's it from us today. I'm open to questions if you have any.
[Akshita]
Thank you everyone for joining. And if you have any questions, you can send it to me directly or send it in the chat. Also, like Neil said, that we're always looking for new topics of interest that you might want us to cover.
So just drop us an email on hello at signup.com or just reply to one of the emails that we send you. And you don't need to take notes. Like we said, we'll be sending you the event notes along with the recording and the deck.
[Niladri]
All right, Irina, drop us an email with your details. We'll get on a call and show you how Streaming Frog works or I can cook up a video sometime soon.
[Akshita]
Awesome, Irina.
[Niladri]
Just DM your email to Akshita and she'll make sure we send you the details.
[Akshita]
Awesome. Just one question that I had. Okay.
It goes, what tools are currently able to track AI overview section?
[Niladri]
No tools. They will all claim that they are going to track it, right? But they cannot.
As I mentioned, most SEO tools that you see in the market, they won't work in an incognito mode and AI overview is wonky at best on incognito mode. AI overview is very personalized and is going to keep getting more personalized. So no tool is going to be able to accurately determine if there is an AI overview for a particular query or not.
[Akshita]
All right.
[Niladri]
Okay. If there is a tool in the market that claims that they're doing it 100%, please point me to that.
[Akshita]
Any follow up to that or any other questions that anyone has? We can wait for a couple of minutes.
[Niladri]
I don't think there are any questions today. Great.
[Akshita]
Awesome. Thanks everyone for joining. Have a great week ahead.
[Niladri]
And we'll send you the recordings by tomorrow. Have a great day. Bye-bye.
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