Wave Issue 117

First...

Happy New Year, niche surfers!

A couple things I'm continuing to focus on in 2023 is the topical authority and AI.

How can I marry the two to create a winning formula for niche sites? That's the question I'll be continuing to explore in the coming year.

One low-hanging fruit that many people are already trying is using AI writers to create content to publish.

While that'll work in the short-term, I don't think that's a long-term solution by any means. I've seen successes in the short term myself with mostly AI content, but I've had also had hits to the sites and duds.

Long-term success has yet to be proven though as AI-content just hasn't been around long enough to truly gauge its staying potential - especially with the constant Google Updates and how they adjust to the flood of AI-content.

That's one reason why I think the two December Google Updates, Helpful Content Update and Spam Update, are still not finished yet.

My focus on utilizing AI isn't on the content creation side, but rather the before and after stages of creating content. That's where I've been looking to find ways to use AI to streamline and optimize my workflow.

For example, AI tools can help with keyword research, site auditing, and even link building. These are all important tasks that can take up a lot of time and effort, so the hope is for AI to handle some of the heavy lifting.

I'll be continuing to explore the ways in which AI can improve my processes!

SEO

Kyle Roof Shares Exactly What Affiliate Site Owners Need To Be Doing For E-A-T

When Kyle Roof speaks - I listen. He's one of the top SEOs and does a good job of explaining things in a simple way. This interview was recorded before Google added the extra E to E-A-T, so there's no discussion of that.

But everything is still relevant and he shares actionable steps site owners can take to cover their bases when it comes to E-A-T. He shares some really helpful advice, including:

His 2 'secret weapons' you can easily implement on your sites
The 4 things your site needs as a minimum for E-A-T
What you can do to level up in your niche without relying on link building
Dispelling some of the commonly held myths
And much more...

Lily Ray - Sr Dir SEO | SEO Evolution of E-A-T to E-E-A-T

Interview starts at about the 20:00 (minute) mark. Lily Ray is one of the top SEOs and always offer lots of knowledge bombs, especially in the E-E-A-T space.

A Complete Guide to International SEO

Brandon Lazovic at BrightEdge offers up a nice overview of international SEO and many of the key factors that matter: domain strategy, language, subfolders vs subdomains, hreflang, meta tags, etc.

One of the biggest challenges of international SEO is that search engines like Google often display different results to users in different countries. There are several signals that search engines analyze that help them determine where your pages should rank and what languages it should appear for.

My Take: If you're looking to grow your site, expanding into different countries is a great way to do that. There's more to optimizing SEO for foreign countries than just changing the language and putting it up on your site.

Core Web Vitals Not A Google Discover Requirement

Wondering if you need to have killer core web vital scores to make it onto Google Discover? No worries, according to John Mueller of Google, there's no need.

"I'd be surprised if CWV were a requirement for Discover."

Google Recommends Multiple Date Signals On Webpages

It's important to include multiple date indicators on your webpages to ensure that the correct date appears in search results, according to Google. Inaccurate or outdated dates can confuse users and make them less likely to visit your site.

Google looks at several factors to determine the best estimate of when a page was published or updated, and using special HTML tags like the <time> and <article> elements, as well as the lastmod and pubdate tags, can help search engines understand and display the correct date.

It's also important to keep your content fresh and to minimize signals that could be confusing to Google, such as multiple dates on the same page.

Tools and Resources

ChatGPT for SEO: 20 Ways to Leverage ChatGPT in your SEO Activities

ChatGPT has been taking the SEO industry (and the world) by storm. It's impressive with its comprehensive and high-quality answers, but it's got some limitations. For starters, it's not exactly up-to-date on everything that's happened since 2021. And let's not forget about the built-in bias and the fact that using purely AI-generated content goes against Google's guidelines.

But it can still be a useful tool to support your SEO efforts, just don't let it fully take the reins. And definitely don't try to use it to plagiarize and modify content to rank higher in search results - Google's algorithms will catch on to that sneaky behavior and demote your site.

Aleyda Solis covers 20 different scenarios to leverage ChatGPT in these areas:

Keyword Research
Content Optimization
Technical Optimization
Link Building
SEO Reporting

Some Cool SEO Uses For GPT3 Chat

Andrew Shotland shares 22 ChatGPT3 uses for SEO. Here are some of his that are beyond the basics of creating titles and outlines:

Generate quick breadcrumb navigation HTML for web pages
Identify schema markup
Generate structured JSON-LD structured data
Building a table of contents with jump links for a page’s main sections. 10.Robots.txt file generation
XML Sitemap generation
Custom GTM tags generation
Ask for image suggestions to make your content stand out

Content

ChatGPT for Shopify and Ecommerce

This Eastside Co article covers how to utilize ChatGPT to grow eCommerce and Shopify stores. There are some good ideas in here for inspiration on how to use it yourself.

ChatGPT for Email Marketing
ChatGPT for Google Ads
ChatGPT for Social Media
ChatGPT for SEO
ChatGPT for Website Development and Coding on Shopify

31 Actionable E-E-A-T Strategies for Ecommerce Sites

Eastside Co shares 31 strategies to demonstrate a high degree of E-E-A-T on your sites to earn more traffic. There's an eCommerce angle to the article because of their relationship with Shopify, but the majority of the tips are relevant whether you sell products or don't. They cover tips in these areas:

Content E-E-A-T Factors
Technical E-E-A-T Factors
Operational E-E-A-T Factors
Performance E-E-A-T Factors

We Evaluated ChatGPT vs. Google on 500 Search Queries

Surge AI measured ChatGPT vs. Google, and found that ChatGPT crushes Google on coding queries and ties it on general informational queries — despite not being optimized for a search experience at all.

Queries where ChatGPT wins:

How do I make risotto?
what is the difference between freezing rain and sleet?
How to create a head and temp node for doubly linked lists in C
how do I calculate the ply an lvl beam needs to be for a one story snow load house

Queries where Google wins:

how do you search for tweets from a specific date on twitter
how do you cite a book in mla format
What kind of dog is Brian Griffin?
Which ETF has historically offered higher ROI?

Link Building

Google Says Anchor Text With The Word Here Is Bad Link Text

Lizzi Sassman from Google said using the anchor text "here" as the hyperlink text is "bad link text."

Instead, it's better to use more descriptive text that accurately reflects the page you are linking to. This is true for both internal and external links. Using descriptive text helps both users and search engines understand what to expect from the link, whereas using the word "here" doesn't give any indication of what the page is about.

Google Says Don't Nofollow Links To Your Own Social Media Profiles

Google's John Mueller said on Reddit that when it comes to linking from your site to your social medial profiles you should not nofollow those links. He added that you should add the rel=me attribute to them because it is an open standard to help others validate that this profile is yours.

John added, "Add a rel=me (this is more of a thing on Mastodon & open-standards based social media, but still a good practice), don't add a rel=nofollow -- it's pretty much the link you should be able to trust the most. Promote your social profile! It's all "you", why would you not want to recognize that? Or is your social media profile so bad that you don't want to be associated with it? (then, well, maybe make it less bad)."

Education

SEO in 2023: My NEW Strategy for Google Traffic!

Are you wondering what SEO strategy you should implement in 2023? In this video, Matt Diggity gives a step-by-step guide on methods to get massive traffic on Google.

Perfectly Optimized Articles
Topical Authority
Link Building Plan
User Experience

Case Study

Grammarly's SEO Strategy: 11 Interesting Insights

Ahrefs shares some insights into Grammarly's organic traffic. Lost of interesting stats here that show there's no "right" method to gain traffic. Some of the interesting stats:

90.7% of its traffic comes from 11.2% of its pages
22% of its content gets no organic traffic
50.3% of traffic goes to the blog
15.1% of blog posts get 83.6% of blog traffic
75.8% of its top-performing posts were published long ago
Updating blog posts is a core part of its strategy
23.9K of traffic goes to “hub” pages

Business Ideas

Want to Start a "Niche Pursuit" Together?

Spencer Haws is seeking a partner to start and run a niche online business with. He is willing to fund the business up to $10,000, and provide ideas and consulting, while the partner will be responsible for executing on those ideas and managing the day-to-day operations of the business.

Spencer is open to a variety of business ideas and plans to split profits with his partner. The goal is for the business to begin seeing returns within 90 days and have long-term potential.

Spencer intends to document the process of starting the business on his blog, social media, and YouTube channel, and he requires his partner to be willing to share the results of the business with his audience.

News

Microsoft to add ChatGPT features to Bing Search

Microsoft is apparently hoping to give Google a run for its money by adding OpenAI's ChatGPT to Bing Search. According to sources, Bing will soon be able to answer some search queries with AI-powered responses instead of just giving you a list of links.

The feature is expected to launch by the end of March, and it's all thanks to Microsoft's billion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

There are already Chrome extensions that puts ChatGPT in the sidebar of Google searches, so it'll be interesting to see how Bing integrates ChatGPT beyond that.

SEO 2022 in review: E-E-A-T, AI, Search Essentials and more

Search Engine Land takes a look back at the biggest SEO news of 2022 – from Google and other search engines, tool providers and the community. Topics include:

Google Search Essentials and more documentation changes
E-E-A-T and the QRG
Continuous scroll, multisearch, featured snippets and more search feature changes
Algorithm updates
AI & machine learning
Local search

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Have a great week taking your niche sites to another level!