ISSUE 124

Google Product Review Update; SEO + ChatGPT; Content Writing Services; GSC and GA4 Report; YouTube Algo; and Much More!

Author

Yoyao
February 25, 2023 • Est. Learning Time: 15 minutes

Issue 2

FIRST…

ISSUE 124

Hey! I'm so thrilled to share some exciting updates with you.

Guys, I'm seriously blown away by the support we've been getting for my online course, Topical Maps Unlocked.

Over 100 students have already signed up and I couldn't be more grateful for the positive feedback I've received. I want to thank each and every one of you for being a part of our community.

And the $100 off launch discount was a huge hit! The first 30 spots were claimed in a heartbeat, and even the second release of 10 spots were gone within 12 hours.

If you missed out, don't worry, you can still sign up and take advantage of all the awesome content and the private community. I've been super active in there, so do join us!

Now, I have a confession to make... I recently fell victim to shiny object syndrome (SOS!) and bought 52 new domains at one time. Yes! I know, that's a lot!

But it's meant to be a multi-year project (justified?). I've started to do a little planning and research for it - which of course all leads to many topical maps! I'm excited and can't wait to see how it all unfolds.

It's going to be a challenge, but I'm up for it! And, of course, I'll keep you guys posted on how it all goes.

With so many domains, I definitely need to consolidate because there are ones I"m never going to get around to making. Maybe someone else can take advantage of the aged and/or branded domain names.

Before we get to the good stuff -

If you haven't already signed up for Topical Maps Unlocked, what are you waiting for?

This course is designed to help you unlock your site's full potential with topical maps and take your skills to the next level. I've broken it down to make it simple to follow, because topical maps don't need to be complicated. Nor do they need expensive tools!

NICHE CREATORS

L.E. McArthur has been honing her affiliate marketing skills for 2 decades. Now she earns $60k/month from her portfolio.

L.E. got in the game back in 2003, and as the industry has evolved over the last two decades, so have her skills and strategies. She has a vast wealth of knowledge about everything from entity-based SEO and topic clusters to CRO and "linkability," and she shares much of it here.

Also check out L.E.'s Niche Creator Q&A too.

ISSUE 124

It's Month 3 of the case study with Dim and myself. We're combining Programmatic SEO with a topical map

Still working through the first topic cluster with 65 posts published. Should have almost 100 articles by the end of February...just for the one cluster!

Not all posts are indexed either. In January, only 11 out of the 65 were indexed. By mid-February, 42 had been indexed.

The niche we're working in has large clusters (think car models...but it's not cars).

Dim and I are laying it all out there for everyone with this case study, so do check it out!

SEO

The first announced Google Update of 2023 is a Product Reviews Update!

This update applies to the following languages globally: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish. The rollout may take up to two weeks to complete.

A few things of note in the announcement:

  • The product reviews system primarily evaluates product review content on a page-level basis. However, for sites that have a substantial amount of product review content, any content within a site might be evaluated by the update.

  • If you don't have a lot of product reviews (a really substantial not-single-digit-percentage part of your entire site is made up of them), a site-wide evaluation is not likely to happen.

  • Structured data might help us better identify if something is a product review, but we don't solely depend on it.

  • Assuming improvements have been made, content that was impacted by a product reviews update might not recover until the next product reviews update is released.

  • However, note that our automated assessment of product review content is only one of many factors used in ranking content, so changes can happen at any time for various reasons.

Here's Google's help page on high quality product reviews.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

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Scale your customer base with a digital marketing powerhouse

Constant Contact - Large email marketing firm offering a 5-year deal. Grow your business fast with awesome tools for email marketing like high-quality templates, marketing automation, and analytics. Plans are up to a max of 3,000 contacts.

Website Auditor - Great Screaming Frog alternative if you're looking for one. $49 for a lifetime deal.

YouPost - YouTube videos into complete articles with text and pictures in one click.

Looking for alternatives to Google Analytics? FATJOE has 30 of them for you.

But I wouldn't go ditching Google Analytics completely though. If you ever plan on selling your site, GA is still the standard for most buyers.

CONTENT

Mushfiq at The Website Flip shares his list of the six best content writing services.

The first one on his list is Clockwork Copy, which he recently invested in. Even before his involvement with them, it's also the only writing service I've tried myself on the list. They've actually been my go-to for months now when outsourcing content that my writers are unable to fulfill due to bandwidth.

Word Agents is another one to check out. I haven't ordered content from them yet, but I have created a topical map for them for their latest case study. And since they're using their own writers, you'll be able to check out their quality too when/if their domain is revealed.

Joshua Hardwick gives three reasons why Google doesn't care about AI content and even encourages content creators to use AI in some situations:

  • Reason 1. Google can deal with an influx of bad content—if it has to.

  • Reason 2. Google already knows how to surface good content and bury the bad—however it was created.

  • Reason 3. Google knows that AI can help people create better content (like creating a personal tax calculator).

Michael Martinez makes his case with 3 reasons to drip content:

  1. RSS Feeds and future subscribers may not see your content.

  2. Search Engine Crawling and ability to crawl and index at same time.

  3. Who is the content intended for?

What do you think? This is a big question when it comes to programmatic SEO and publishing hundreds to thousands of posts at one time.

AI

Si Quan Ong at Ahrefs shares his thoughts on the best use cases of ChatGPT for SEO and suboptimal ones:

Best use cases:

  1. Construct regex

  2. Create automations

  3. Whip up quick snippets of code

  4. Write click-worthy titles

  5. Create quick outlines

  6. Suggest seed keywords

  7. Generate short-form content

  8. Proofreading

  9. Rewrite sentences

Less-than-ideal use cases:

  1. Content creation

  2. Keyword research

  3. Search intent classification

  4. Local SEO

Tom Demers shares many ChatGPT prompts that can be helpful for SEO use, including some best practices and areas where ChatGPT isn't as helpful.

This was his general recap of ChatGPT for a lot of functions:

  • The initial set of results gave a pretty good framework for sites to check out and general topic areas

  • As I niched down and needed to develop specific, actionable plans with search-specific data things got murkier.

Danny Richman shares yet another GPT-3 + Google Sheets tool. This one allows you to train GPT-3 on your own data inside Google Sheets.

There's a short 5 min demo video and a copy of the Google Sheet.

Microsoft says that it is learning from the first week of its AI-powered, Bing search engine – even as it starts to send unsettling and strange messages to its users.

Microsoft said that Bing could have problems when conversations are particularly deep. If it is asked more than 15 questions, “Bing can become repetitive or be prompted/provoked to give responses that are not necessarily helpful or in line with our designed tone”, it said.

They also said that weird behavior may be a result of the chatbot becoming confused or trying to match people’s tone.

So don't be hostile with ChatGPT and it won't be hostile back!

EDUCATION

Today, we're announcing bulk data export, a new feature that allows you to export data from Search Console to Google BigQuery on an ongoing basis.

You can configure an export in Search Console to get a daily data dump into your BigQuery project.

The data includes all your performance data, apart from anonymized queries, which are filtered out for privacy reasons; in other words, the bulk data export is not affected by the daily data row limit. This means you can explore your data to its maximum potential, joining it with other sources of data and using advanced analysis and visualization techniques.

ISSUE 124

Here's a step-by-step guide on creating a Looker Studio report powered by Google Search Console and GA4 data using BigQuery.

Rachel Handley shares a local SEO keyword research guide that will teach you how to find what locals search for. So you can make sure your business appears in all the right places.

  • How to do local keyword research

  • How to target the keywords you find

  • How to track your website’s rankings

Good YouTube algorithm overview from Zoe Ashbridge to help you understand how YouTube works:

  • How does the YouTube algorithm work in 2023?

  • How YouTube measures viewer satisfaction

  • YouTube search

  • YouTube homepage

  • YouTube's algorithm news, authority and trust

  • Tips for working with the YouTube algorithm for more reach

  • Keyword research

  • Use YouTube Shorts

  • Engaging thumbnail

LIKE NICHE SURFER?

ISSUE 124

Have questions about building niche sites? Find me and others in the Niche Surfer Discord group.

I’d also love to know what you think and if you have any ideas for the newsletter. Reply or email me at [email protected].

I’d also appreciate it if you shared it with fellow niche surfers.

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

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