Tips Tuesday – AI Plugin Review, New SEO Workshops, Content and Conversion Audit

Boo y’all. Happy Halloween to those who celebrate.

Tips this week include:

• Is your site working for you the way it should?
• New Content and Conversion Audit service
• What I’m digging into with the WP 6.4 update rolling out next week
• Why you MUST upgrade your PHP version for WP 6.4
• New public SEO Workshops coming for Helpful Content and Content Silos
• Live session for AI WordPress plugin review

Is your site working for you the way it should?

This past week a new client contacted me for a consult to help her pivot from a lifestyle blog that covered a little bit of everything and into a business that has a much more narrow focus on one niche.

She had two other business ideas for that site, but they are not related and should be split off into a different site and business model.

We decided to focus on the one that will make the most money and that she is most passionate about too.

Assessing the Current Site

We had a look at what we had to work with on the current site.

In about 30 minutes we found a whole bunch of issues, like:

• Older theme that was not fully responsive and not ADA compliant at all
• Strange navigation that did not come close to meeting expectations of the visitor and made getting around the site a jumbled mess
• Multiple sliders that didn’t even function
• Serious lack of telling folks what the site was about or how it could help them
• No easily identifiable conversion elements
• Too many choices and no clear path for what the visitor should do next

Making a Plan

There is plenty of good content already on the site for this new niche focus.

And there is a LOT of low hanging fruit that will be inexpensive and relatively easy to do.

I say relatively easy because one of the first tasks for this client is to research her niche competition’s sites with all that she has learned about layout, content, and conversion from our first two sessions.

And then gather ideas for how she wants to present her authority and expertise on the topic, and how to get folks into her funnels so she is capturing her audience and growing her list.

That kind of research takes time because you get dazzled and dazed and forget what you were looking for. You have to take a step back, refocus, and start sorting through all of the new ideas you found in the search.

Then you have to start making decisions and eliminating those that are not laser focused on your goals.

Implementing the Plan

Once those decisions are made, then we will get busy restructuring the navigation and home page to lead visitors through the journey we want them to take.

And then we’ll do a full content audit and sort out everything we have that relates to that niche.

And then we’ll build content silos that will create a logical order of that content and point out where there are gaps in it.

Those changes are cheap and fast. It’s the low hanging fruit that will yield the biggest bang for the buck.

Once she gets traffic to the site, she will have journeys for folks to take and ways for them to convert via optins and direct sales.

In other words, everything will point to nurturing the client and making sales.

Down the Road

Once the money starts rolling in from those changes, she’ll easily be able to reinvest it into the bigger projects, like a new theme, and a site audit. 

And both of those will have high ROI (Return on Investment) to snowball the effectiveness of her SEO and marketing to get even more traffic.

Content and Conversion Audit

Are you ready to get super focused on growing audience and making money?

It’s not just about getting your site fast and doing all the SEO things.

In fact, you can do all the SEO things right but the layout on your site and your content may suck. 

Or, you could just be missing opportunities because you think it’s too pushy or you didn’t think of it at all.

How would you know?

You wouldn’t. 

Your site makes sense to you.

But does it make sense to your visitors? Does it meet your goals for the role you want your site to play in your online business?

Get a Content and Conversion Audit in a live session.

Let’s look at it together.

Let’s make a new plan.

And let’s get you in the money.

WordPress Tips

WP 6.4 Will Launch Nov 7

I’m super busy digging into all of the changes coming in WP 6.4 that will be out next week.

A LOT of those changes are at the core coding level.

It’s a slog to get through what they are and what they will mean for us.

I hope to make a video tour of the changes, if there are enough of them on the front side to warrant such a thing. I’ll at least have a post with those features, and a references to what I think is important with the under the hood changes.

Needless to say, with so many core code changes, there is no way for me to test under all conditions and I’m betting more than one plugin is going to have issues with some of the core code changes.

So, we won’t be the first to update.

I’ll be sending update instructions exclusively to my site audit Hub members due to the nature of the changes, and the need for PHP compatibility. More on that below.

I literally can’t call it publicly safe to update anymore. I have to know that your site meets the minimum criteria and know the type of security you have in place to say if it’s okay to update or not.

And the only folks I can do that for now are my site audit clients who pay for the extra support in their Hub membership. 

WP 6.4 PHP Compatibility

For this release, WordPress is issuing a warning that you need to be on PHP 8.1 or 8.2 at your host.

Me and my peeps did the big jump from 7.4 to 8.0 in the summer of 2022 and helped each other get through the big breaks on older themes and plugins.

I was planning to take everyone up to 8.1 this fall, but we discovered that WP 6.3 had issues on 8.0. So we made the jump to 8.1 this summer. There were no major breaks.

We’ll probably do the 8.2 jump at the end of winter or early spring next year.

Get Ahead and Out of Panic

Stuff like this is the very reason it’s so important to be with folks who help you avoid major issues, and then help you when it’s unavoidable.

You don’t have to go through all this techie stuff alone.

Get a site audit. Get your site up to par. And then stay ahead of the curves. And stay out of panic mode. You won’t have surprises that break your site. You’ll have a plan, and support.

Keep Your BlogAid News Subscription

Thank you to everyone who has subscribed to Tips Tuesday Plus!!

But please do keep your BlogAid News subscription too.

I send all kinds of extra things out on that, like breaking news and special discounts, just like the new Workshops listed below.

SEO Tips

New SEO Workshops Coming – Open to the Public

The new Content and Conversion Audit is just one new service that I’m making available for you.

Google’s Helpful Content Update plus the October Core Algorithm update whalloped a bunch of folks.

That’s because Google has changed what they consider helpful content – and how they are detecting icky sites that are just trying to game the system.

Unfortunately, a lot of legit sites got caught in those detections and got their content marked as not helpful.

Right this minute I’m developing new workshops to help folks identify why their content is considered unhelpful, and what to do about it.

My DIY SEO course members will get these workshops for free.

But, I will be opening them to the public as well.

Here’s what I’m working on for you.

What is Considered Helpful Content Workshop – Coming Soon

That’s the million dollar question everyone is asking right now.

Let’s dig into it and identify what Google is ranking high and low now.

How to Build a Content Silo Workshop – Coming Soon

I have long wanted to break out the Content Silo workshop from the DIY SEO course and make it into a longer, more in-depth workshop.

Now is the time to do it.

A content silo is your best bet for creating helpful content in a structure that is easily understood by both Google and your readers.

I’ll Keep You Posted

I’m putting these workshops together as fast as I can.

And I’ll let you know when they open for registration.

BlogAid News subscribers will get first dibs and discounts.

AI Tips

Live Session for AI WordPress Plugin Review

I have finished my assessment and tests of the best all-in-one AI plugin that brings OpenAI functionality into your WordPress site.

It’s sort of like having ChatGPT in WP, but there’s WAY more to it.

This behemoth includes:

• AI content generation
• AI image generation
• Chatbot
• Playground
• CoPilot
• model training
• multiple model selection
• and more – yes – more!

I’ll be doing a review of it live this Thursday.

We’ll cover:

• A tour of the settings – most plugins are missing a LOT of these settings, and they are important
• how the content and image generation works
• how you can do Programmatic SEO for creating gazillions of posts
• how the API connection works and security
• who can benefit from this plugin
• what’s not in this plugin that is in ChatGPT and DALL-E 3
• whether this is something you want to use or not

This session is exclusively for Tips Tuesday Plus subscribers.

We’re meeting on Thursday at 12pm ET, so it’s not too late to subscribe to TT+.

I’ll be sending meeting invitation reminders Thursday morning, so you’ll get the Zoom info if you subscribe before then.

And, there will be a replay available in the member area too.