niche surfer - Wave Issue 130

AI vs SEO; Blog Types That Make Money; High-Ticket Affiliate Marketing; Entity SEO Guide; Virality + SEO; AI-Content Floor; and Much More!

Author

Yoyao
April 08, 2023

Let’s Have an Epic Session!

So, last week I asked y'all if I should keep the AI news and resources in our weekly newsletter. A whopping 78% of you said "heck yes!"—so that's exactly what I'm gonna do. Thanks for the feedback!

A bunch of you pointed out that AI and SEO are basically BFFs these days, so it makes total sense to keep 'em together.

To make sure I share all the juicy tidbits I find and trying to find a balance on length, I'll be using snappy bullet lists for ones that can be summed up in a sentence or two. If a section starts getting lengthy, I'll add that bullet list - like I did with the SEO and AI sections today.

So, I’ve been testing Midjourney-5 for the last couple of weeks. I paid $10 to sign up for access to version 5, and I was definitely not disappointed.

I’m loving it and you should definitely play around with it for the base $10 a month. I’d say it’s better than any stock photography site. This is a first iteration of the Santa Monica Pier for a travel blog:

Santa Monica Pier - Midjourney v5

You can create hundreds to thousands of images like that for $10/month. Can’t beat that with any stock photo site. Or try creating that with your own photos. These would be great additions to so many types of sites.

Of course, the disclaimers of checking for accuracy and all that are still valid. Can’t disregard that.

For other fun art, I created a couple iterations of the niche surfer logo (one here and one further down) and even some film poster concepts for a couple of film treatments I wrote many years ago - one and two. You won’t regret playing around with it!

niche surfer - 1970s comic book style

AD

I haven’t done any real link building campaigns in quite some time, but I recently dipped my toes back in the water. These are some of the links that were built in the last few weeks:

  • thespruce.com - DR 90

  • idealhome.co.uk - DR 78

  • homesandgardens.com - DR 77

  • yahoo.com - DR 88

  • msn.com - DR 92

  • shefinds.com - DR 72

DR 90 and 78

They are part of a 10-link HARO package I purchased at Linkifi.io. They did a great job. In the end, I received 15 backlinks because pitches were still out there as the 10th link came in.

The main Pros of the link building were the DR values of the links, with the lowest being a DR 72 and the highest a DR 92. Having 15 links at that DR level pointing to my site is awesome!

Another big advantage was the completely hands-off nature of the process. After I gave them information about the site and the author to use for pitches, they did the rest.

The main Con of the link building was that many of the links were syndicated, 7 out of the 15. They do say in their FAQs that the ones “meeting the metric requirements of the order will count toward the link total.” Most of the links were also nofollow (10 out of 15), but that’s par for the course when it comes to getting a link from large sites and journalists. Those still send signals to Google for trust, so I’m not worried about the nofollow from high-authority sites.

If you want to get links of that caliber too, Linkifi is giving niche surfer subscribers a big 20% Off discount!

Use this code when checking out for links and the class: NICHESURFER20.

Linkifi has 5 and 10-link packages available, as well as a HARO Masterclass that covers all about pitching to journalists.

SEO

Patrick Stox explores whether going viral helps with SEO, but from the title, you already know the answer. He analyzes several examples of sites that have gone viral and looks at their impact on traffic and rankings.

Patrick finds that while going viral can help with branding, awareness, and leads, it does not necessarily translate into significant improvements in SEO rankings. He also suggests that SEOs should not overlook the value of niche and local links, which can be more effective than digital PR campaigns.

You know those indented search results of secondary pages that people are trying to go after in the desktop SERPs? Ann Smarty says it’s risky to try and plan for them.

Optimizing for domain clustering poses risks, including keyword cannibalization, which splits keyword equity between multiple pages, diluting SEO efforts and confusing Google's algorithms.

One option to optimize for searchers' intent, not just their keywords, is intent optimization, which involves creating two pages for the same topic: one for commercial intent and the other for informational. However, optimizing for clustered domains risks keyword cannibalization.

This is actually something that is discussed in the Topical Maps Unlocked course and how to optimize and de-optimize posts. It’s important to make your posts distinct to avoid cannibalization.

Olaf Kopp discusses how SEO alone is often no longer enough for good rankings; it is important to focus on content marketing, PR, and marketing in order to generate positive signals in the sense of E-E-A-T.

E-E-A-T requires a holistic view that looks outside of the SEO box and is a fundamental break in the way Google ranks websites. He shares this great infographic of possible factors that affect E-E-A-T

source: oncrawl.com

Surf More Quick SEO Waves

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

Here are a few cool tools I saw this week:

  • Linksy (Paid) - Linksy is an onsite link-building WordPress plugin that uses AI and NLP to score posts and suggests relevant semantic keywords for linking. I haven’t tested it myself, but it looks promising and with AppSumo’s 60-day return policy, I’m definitely going to test it out.

  • UseChatGPT.AI (Free) - Write, rephrase, summarize, translate, or explain any text on any website without copy-pasting. It’s similar to the Harpa AI extension I shared last week, except this one connects to your ChatGPT account directly and has a mini-tab open in your window to give it access. Your chats seem to be saved this way.

  • GA4 Migration Gap Hunte (Free) - Gap Hunter is a free and no-code tool that automates the process of identifying data gaps between UA and GA4 for key metrics like Users, Pageviews, and Transactions.

CONTENT

Rand Fishkin has a good article on AI and large language models (LLM) becoming cheap, accessible, and ubiquitous. It echoes much of what I said a few weeks ago that we now need to publish content that’s better than AI…otherwise it’s not worth publishing.

Wave Issue 127

…it's time to step up your game because anyone can now create 7/10 content. You need to create content that's 9/10 or better.

newsletter.nichesurfer.com/issues/127#start

The three biggest advantages human creators have over AIs are emotion, novelty, and creative insight…The floor for content has never been higher, but the ceiling is still higher than most of us can imagine.

source: sparktoro.com

Google's Danny Sullivan addressed a complaint about a piece of content not ranking above "spammy robo chat churners" spitting out news articles. Sullivan explained that having dates on fresh content is important for Google to understand the content is recent and updated, which can affect its ranking

He suggested that including dates on published content can be helpful for readers to know the currency of the information and can help Google understand if the content has been recently updated

My Take: Even though this was more about news articles, I’ve said before that there’s no “Evergreen” content anymore. It’s important to regularly update and refresh your content, even if it’s only once a year.

Originality.AI examined the top 20 webpages for 1,000 popular keywords to find out if AI-generated content influences their position on Google Search. They came away with three key takeaways:

  1. Websites with higher human content scores, as found by Originality.AI AI Detector, have better Google Search rankings.

  2. A 1% higher Originality.AI human content score corresponds to an improvement of 2.65 positions in Google ranking.

  3. The correlation stops above 75%… meaning there is a marginal benefit in scores above 75%, according to this study.

My Take: This is one of the first studies that I’ve seen try to take into account a baseline of a human vs AI score. It’s not an easy task. As with any study, do read how they conducted the study, the datasets, etc. You’ll get more insight into the validity of any study that way according to your needs.

AI

Jon Clark discusses how AI has both positive and negative impacts on SEO. While AI content creation and personalized search results can improve SEO, there are concerns that it could decrease content quality and limit the ability to create something new.

AI-powered predictive analytics can also help businesses identify trends and chatbots can provide instant customer support. He suggests companies need to harness the power of AI while ensuring they stand out with human-created content, as there is potential for loss of control over search rankings and referral traffic.

Ann Smarty also discusses AI for SEO and Content Marketing and how it’s more of a friend than a foe.

Anthropic’s Claude is the ChatGPT rival, but it’s not released publicly. Read about the ChatGPT vs Claude differences from someone who’s tested both.

Google invested about $300m in Anthropic for 10%. Anthropic raised $300 million at $4.1 billion valuation, bringing its total raised to $1.3 billion. For comparison, Microsoft has invested a total of $13b ($1b in 2019, $2b in 2021, $10b in 2023) and will end up with 49% of OpenAI.

Surf More Quick AI Updates

LINK BUILDING

Brooke Beasley discusses the anchor text guidelines that Google shared in the February 2023 update for best practices for links.

The update includes guidelines for placing anchor text, anchor text formatting, and the use of internal and external links. The page covers proper link formatting, anchor text placements, writing good anchor text, cross-referencing content with internal links, guidelines for using external links, and the use of nofollow tags and sponsored tags for paid backlinks.

My Take: I shared the link best practices update before, but it’s good to still share reminders of this. I still see people sharing tips to use Miscellaneous-type anchors (click here, read more) for variety. You don’t need to do that anymore. I stopped that over 2 years ago. It’s outdated and there are now a variety of ways to avoid exact-match target anchors.

niche surfer - Pixar animation style

EDUCATION

Timothy Warren created a great resource if you don’t know what Entities are and why they matter when it comes to SEO. It’s still techy because of the many technical terms and wrapping your head around it, but this is probably the most friendly one I’ve seen (and not just because it has many pictures - although that doesn’t hurt).

Whether you want to learn about topical authority and coverage through Entity SEO or through Topical Maps Unlocked (only mentioning the word “entity” once), it’s an important topic to learn about. Google updates have been moving towards topical authority and EEAT becoming important factors to building trust and gaining organic traffic.

Uh oh…am I going to be out of business? Nah…I’m not worried. The manual process is still going to give you the most complete coverage. One thing ChatGPT can’t do (yet) is cluster keywords according to the SERPs, as well as understand the nuances between keywords.

For example, as humans, we understand the search intent difference between “horse feed” and “feed horse.” But ask ChatGPT and it’ll say they have the same search intent. Google understands the difference.

Joshua Hardwick shares three methods for clustering keywords, which includes manual clustering, parent topic clustering, and SERP similarity clustering.

My Take: Stick with clustering by SERP similarity and use either KeywordInsights or LowFruits as they’re the most accurate ones that I found after testing 13 different tools.

Tim Jensen provides an overview of event tracking in GA4. It explains the built-in events in GA4, such as page views, scroll tracking, outbound click tracking, site search, form interaction, video engagement, and file downloads, along with how to create custom events.

As we get closer and closer to July 2023, more and more of these guides will be coming out to help people transition to GA4. It’s best not to wait until the end of June to start looking into it.

SerpNames is one of the aged domain marketplaces where I’ve purchased aged domains from before. In this video, Sumit shares his process for finding aged domains and also has a Google Doc outlining his steps.

CASE STUDY

Looking for the best type of blog to make money? Mateusz Makosiewicz takes a look at Niche blogs, Affiliate/review blogs, Personal blogs, Personal brand blogs, and Business/corporate blogs to see what works and how much money they’re making. Some interesting stats too on blogger income:

  • About 15% of bloggers make a full-time income from blogging ($30K a year).

  • About 31% of bloggers make a decent side income from blogging ($6K a year).

  • 6%–10% of bloggers make over $10K a month.

  • You can realistically make $25K–$50K in your first year of blogging.

    The most successful blogs make over $100K a month.

BUSINESS IDEAS

Bill Widmer discusses high-ticket affiliate marketing and promoting products or services with large payouts. He covers finding high-paying affiliate programs, building trust and authority, investing in video, and capturing people at different stages of the funnel. He also shows three examples of high-ticket affiliate marketers.

Ahrefs also has a video series on affiliate marketing - 14 videos in and everything from getting started with affiliate marketing to choosing a niche to affiliate programs to keyword research to site navigation to informational content templates this week.

NEWS

Twitter is taking the first step towards a new era of transparency by opening much of its source code, including the recommendations algorithm, to the global community on GitHub. They have excluded any code that would compromise user safety and privacy or the ability to protect the platform from bad actors. Twitter also has a blog post on their recommendation algorithm.

Jacky Chou shared an easy way to interpret the ranking factors of tweets without you needing to dig through the code:

While Twitter is trying to become more transparent with sharing their source code, they’re also crippling tweets with Substack links and revamping their API pricing plans. The new API policies have led to getting priced out and random violations/suspensions - crushing the livelihood of many small app and bot developers/teams.

REFER NICHE SURFER AND GET REWARDS

If you’re enjoying niche surfer, I’d love it if you would share it with your friends! I’ve put together some rewards as well:

  • Refer 3: Get a Twitter Shout-out

  • Refer 5: Get featured in an issue

  • Refer 10: Get One Ask Me Anything Question

  • Refer 50: Get 50% Off the Topical Maps Unlocked Course

  • Refer 100: Get a Free copy of Topical Maps Unlocked

  • Refer 150: Get a 1 hour SEO 1-1 Coaching session with Yoyao

SURF WITH OTHERS

I’ve followed Richard Patey’s newsletters for quite some time now as a great resource for staying up to date with acquiring and investing in digital assets.

Acquire The WebDigital media asset deal flow from the main marketplaces every Monday
Digital Asset InvestorYour weekly roundup of digital asset news

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