Welcome to episode #71 of the SEO Newsletter by #SEOSLY!

Here I have curated for you the most important SEO news and SEO tips from the last two weeks.

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Check my latest guides on SEO auditing

I’ve created a bunch of guides showing you how to audit specific website aspects or elements. These guides are essential if you want to be a good SEO auditor. Check them out:

And also I’m bringing back the weekly LIVE SEO audit episodes to my YouTube channel. Check out the latest episode:

Top SEO news

Here is the latest and hottest SEO news.

March 2023 Google SEO office hours

The latest edition of the English SEO office hours from March 2023 has been published. It’s – as always – packed with SEO tips straight from people from Google. You can either listen to this episode or read the transcript.

Google Trends has a new look

Google has updated its Google Trends website, making it easier to explore what is trending around the world and to access its resources. The website is updated every hour and features real-time trends that are accompanied by relevant news articles. The homepage also highlights what is trending in the user’s local region and provides tutorials and inspiration for Google Trends’ data.

Sitename, favicons, and sponsored labels coming to desktop

Google has now officially rolled out the display of sitename, favicon, and sponsored label on all desktop searches, as it did with mobile searches in October.

https://twitter.com/googlesearchc/status/1633535806915891200

Google announces the next generation of AI for developers and Google Workspace

Google has just announced that the next generation of AI is now available for developers, as well as for Google Workspace tools like Docs and Gmail. With a whole suite of new tools, including AI chat within Gmail and Google Docs, the possibilities for productivity and collaboration are endless! Read more.

Google February 2023 product reviews update is finished rolling out

Google’s February 2023 product reviews update, which started rolling out on February 21 and took 14 days to fully roll out, has now been completed, affecting not just English but also Spanish, German, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Polish languages, making it more widespread than past updates.

https://twitter.com/googlesearchc/status/1628153197515661312

Episode #2 of the SEO Cash Flow

In this video, Myriam Jessier and me – Olga Zarr -discuss pricing your services as an SEO consultant or freelancer. We cover a range of topics, including the “asshole tax” and comparing the value of your services to the cost of a luxury item like a Louis Vuitton bag.

SEO Cash Flow aims to empower professionals like you to confidently negotiate their worth.

More episodes coming soon!

Other SEO News

Microsoft may replace Bing Search answers with Bing Chat responses

Microsoft’s Bing may replace the current standard answers on Bing Search with Bing Chat responses, as announced by Mikhail Parakhin, the head of Bing Search and Bing Chat, with a possible new user interface for these answers, and Bing Chat has now exceeded 100 million daily active users.

News

Two updates to Bing Chat

Microsoft has updated its Bing Chat AI co-pilot with increased limits to 15/150 and a new “balanced” mode response that provides quicker and shorter responses. Additionally, the Bing Sidebar is now available in the stable release of the Edge browser, allowing users to chat, create, and compose with Bing Chat.

OpenAI GPT-4 Arriving Mid-March 2023

Microsoft Germany CTO, Andreas Braun, confirmed that GPT-4 is coming within a week of March 9, 2023 and that it will be multimodal. Multimodal AI means that it will be able to operate within multiple kinds of input, like video, images and sound.

Latest SEO interviews

Interview with Dixon Jones: A deep dive into semantic SEO

In this video, I interview Dixon Jones, an award-winning SEO pioneer who was one of the first in the industry. Dixon shares his story of being an SEO and talks about his passion for semantics SEO and his latest venture, inLinks. He discusses his experiences in the industry and he also shares his insights on entity SEO technology, which is the focus of Inlinks.

Top SEO Tips 

And here are the SEO tips for you.

#1: Google: Page Size Is Not A Ranking Factor

Google’s John Mueller clarified on Twitter that page size is not a ranking factor, but added that it is still worth monitoring as it could impact page experience and crawling, though finding pages that are too big for users, browsers, and bots are generally rare. Read more (Search Engine Roundtable).

https://twitter.com/nishant76026848/status/1633375454869745664

#2: Google Helpful Content Update impacts Google Discover

Google Discover visibility can be impacted by the helpful content update since October 2022, according to Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, who added that it is a light use, so they won’t confirm each search signal used by Discover, but advised it makes sense to pay attention to the things that are helpful with Search if you want to be successful with Discover. Read more (Search Engine Roundtable).

Videos to watch this week

You don’t want to miss any of these videos from other brilliant SEOs either.

Google Feb Product Review Update, New Desktop Design, Discover & Helpful Content, Bard & Bing Chat

The essential weekly recap of news by Barry Schwartz.

What’s GPT-4 Got To Do With It? – The SEO Weekly – Episode 57

And here is the recap of the SEO news by Garret Sussman from iPullRank.

Video

Interesting SEO tools to check

Here are some new and fun SEO tools you might want to check.

SERP snippet preview tool

SERP snippet preview is an awesome tool by Sam Underwood. It lets you preview how your page could look in search results based on its meta data, types of rich results, etc.

Other articles & resources to read

And you need to allocate some time to read these articles from other SEOs. They are brilliant.

Lessons From 10 Women Leaders To Inspire Your Professional Journey

SE Ranking interviewed 10 women leaders in SEO and digital marketing, who shared their experiences, lessons learned, and tips on building leadership skills, overcoming obstacles, and achieving success in professional life, aiming to inspire female marketers to succeed. The interviewees provided valuable insights and advice to empower women to thrive in the industry.

The Fundamentals of Crawling for SEO – Whiteboard Friday

In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, host Jes Scholz digs into the foundations of search engine crawling. She’ll show you why no indexing issues doesn’t necessarily mean no issues at all, and how — when it comes to crawling — quality is more important than quantity.

The Role of E-E-A-T in E-commerce

Google introduced a new signal to the “E-A-T family” – E for experience, which can be applied to an e-commerce digital marketing strategy to increase visibility, user experience, and revenue. Lily Ray presented examples of e-commerce retailers using expert-focused content strategies to convey experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness with their users at the Re:Signal Re:commerce conference in London.

Site Architecture Optimisation for Seasonality

Areej AbuAli spoke at Re:commerce about the importance of capturing search traffic during seasonal demand and shared site architecture optimization techniques to help e-commerce websites tap into seasonal opportunities.

SEO is alive and kicking in 2023 – and beyond

Despite the ongoing AI-powered search features by Google and Microsoft, SEO is still thriving, with an increasing demand for SEO services and employment opportunities due to organic search reach still being a significant source of traffic, leads, and sales for many businesses, even though there is no visible optimism within the industry, with fears of the economic crisis hitting the SEO industry first and hardest.

How ChatGPT can help with local SEO

The article discusses how ChatGPT can help with various SEO tasks, including specific ways it can help in local SEO, from Google Business Profile to reviews and local link building. While acknowledging ChatGPT’s limitations, the article highlights how the tool can be used to perform local SEO tasks more efficiently and effectively.

The Importance of SEO Split Testing According to SEO Industry Experts

The article presents the importance of SEO split testing according to SEO industry experts, as testing in SEO provides a data-driven way to know what works best to advance organic search program and drive KPIs. It offers various SEO testing ideas to gather data that can be used to help prioritize projects or earn buy-in from key stakeholders, or even the dev team.

A Guide To Shopify Speed Optimization

Chris Long explains why and how Shopify store owners should focus on site performance as it directly impacts the ability to convert users, with a faster site resulting in more conversions, and it also affects the store’s SEO ranking, all of which can have a direct impact on the store’s bottom line.

Job Industry SEO

The article, written by Jean-Christophe Chouinard, discusses how Google For Jobs, the job search engine by Google, works differently from its regular search engine and even has a patent specific to it. The article aims to provide insights into how Google For Jobs operates.

23 SEO Questions to Ask New Clients + Questionnaire Template

In this article, SEO consultant Jenny Abouobaia provides a thorough questionnaire template with 23 questions to ask new SEO clients. The questions are categorized into six sections and cover topics such as business goals, website information, previous marketing efforts, and link building, ensuring that the consultant gathers all necessary information to create a successful SEO strategy.

SEO Twitter nuggets

And before we end, here are a few Twitter nuggets for you.

https://twitter.com/CyrusShepard/status/1632774790674251776/
https://twitter.com/AlphaSignalAI/status/1635631866567966722
https://twitter.com/olgazarr/status/1634456567029407744

Thank you for reading my newsletter! I hope you found the information useful and informative. If you enjoyed this issue, be sure to check out the next one next week.

I can help you with SEO.

Olga Zarr is an SEO consultant with 10+ years of experience. She has been doing SEO for both the biggest brands in the world and small businesses. She has done 200+ SEO audits so far. Olga has completed SEO courses and degrees at universities, such as UC Davis, University of Michigan, and Johns Hopkins University. She also completed Moz Academy! And, of course, has Google certifications. She keeps learning SEO and loves it. Olga is also a Google Product Expert specializing in areas, such as Google Search and Google Webmasters.