Tips Tuesday – Image SEO, Find My Blocks, Rank Drop Recovery
Tips this week include:
- Hub perks for more traffic
- Please contact the new dev of the Find My Blocks plugin
- GA4 Conversions now called Key Events
- An update on my new EZ Metrix course
- 3rd-party cookie phase out delayed yet again
- Image SEO workshop series starts this week
- Google Search may not support AVIF images just yet
- A change to my recommendation for last modified date plugin
- Google’s March Core Update is now complete
- The official Google Rank Drop doc has changed
- How to submit feedback to Google if your rank dropped
- 2 SEO recovery tips
BlogAid Happenings
This fantastic spring weather has my get-it-done juices flowing and I’ve been in high gear all week.
I met live with my Hubbers for how to get more traffic and I made a bunch of tutorials for a new course. More on both in a moment.
Site Services Update
The wait list for all services is about 1-2 weeks, but things are picking up, so that won’t last.
If you want to get your site speedy and secure and get in on all our Hubber perks before spring is over, now is the time to get an audit.
If you have a site audit checkup due in May, now is the time to get in your request.
Consults are always on demand to help you make a change, pivot your site, lay out a plan for a new business idea, and more.
Hub Perks for More Traffic
Last week I was delighted to do a live session with a special guest for my site audit Hub members.
We got tips on a very specific way to get more traffic to our sites.
Everyone is super excited about the challenge we are doing with it too.
These days, you can’t rely so heavily on just SEO.
Active promotion is the backbone of getting more eyeballs on your content.
And we are delighted to get in the know about a great way to do that.
I’ve got another guest speaker lined up for next month to talk to us about a new feature that is getting big attention on another platform too.
Plugin Tips
Contact the New Find My Blocks Dev
Folks, we have an issue and I need your help to resolve it.
The Find My Blocks plugin has been taken over by a new dev.
And he removed any way to search for specific blocks.
It can only search your entire database for every block now.
And doing so impacts your hosting resources.
There are settings for Low, Standard, and Ultra to limit how many posts/pages are crawled. Low is 10 posts and Ultra is up to 500.
Previously, when there was a filter for finding a specific block it would crawl your whole database, but only once, and hold that info for you.
It’s not really helpful to see every single block when you’re likely just interested in finding specific blocks. And doing 10 posts at a time or such, to keep you from having resource overages is not going to work either.
And it looks like you can only filter for a certain block AFTER you do the scan, not prior.
So, please help our voices be heard en masse by posting to the plugin support page in the WordPress Plugins repository.
You will need a WordPress.com login to post. If you have a Gravatar account, or ever used the paid version of Vaultpress or JetPack or such, then you have a WordPress.com account.
Here is my post, so you can see what I said. You can reply to that post or you can go to the Support page and paraphrase and create your own.
Thank you for participating and making our voices heard loud enough not to get blown off.
I’ll update my tutorial on this plugin once the dev makes the requested changes.
GA4 Tips
Conversions Now Called Key Events
GA4 runs on Events, like Session Start, scroll, and click.
So, to avoid confusion with the old way things were done in Universal Analytics, Google changed the label from Conversions to Key Events.
Keep that in mind for every existing GA4 tutorial you may see on the topic.
EZ Metrix Looker Studio Report Course Update
The name of my new Looker Studio reports membership and course will be EZ Metrix.
Last week I was busy making all the tutorials for what I’m calling Tier 1, which will include:
- GA4 and GSC quick check in a live session
- Setup of the custom report in your own Looker Studio account in that same live session
- Configuring the report and adding any other custom reports you choose
- A full set of Getting Started tutorials
- Support
You’ll have access to Tier 1 for 1 month.
Tier 2 will have all of the above plus a whole other set of tutorials to take you deeper into your metrics and make the most of the reports.
And it will have a Facebook group too.
You’ll have access to Tier 2 for 6 months.
Tracking Key Events in Looker Works
In my GA4 course I showed how to mark certain Events as Conversions, now called Key Events, plus some basics on creating tracking tags in Google Tag Manager.
I’ll be bringing those tutorials, and more to EZ Metrix too.
I’ve already tested reports for the Key Events I had marked in GA4. They showed up in GA4 reports the next day. But it took weeks for them to show up in the Looker Reports and I have no idea why there was such a delay. I’m just glad to know they are working.
New Beta Tester
I’m very excited about onboarding a new beta tester for EZ Metrix as she has been making good use of tracking conversions for years.
I’ll be building a custom report for that and we’ll test it out.
These Key Event reports will be custom builds, and I’ll likely do them by the hour as everyone will have different things they want to track.
But, you’ll be able to watch tutorials for how to set up those Key Events in GA4 and tags in Tag Manager.
After that, it’s just a matter of building the report page to show them, and that’s pretty fast to do. So, it should be cheap and quick to add more pages to your report so you can easily see what is making you the most money.
Monetization Tips
3rd-Party Cookie Phase Out Delayed Yet Again
It’s stunning to me how Google can legally just keep kicking this can down the road.
The controversy is over Google new Privacy Sandbox and the need for other regulatory agencies to approve it, like the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)
See this Business Insider article for more on the Google cookie removal delay.
And then see this article from Google’s Privacy Sandbox for how they are spinning it.
SEO Tips
Image SEO Workshop Series Starts This Week
There is SO much SEO you can get on every image on your site that we need 3 workshops to cover it all in the DIY SEO course.
And we start that series this week.
It’s always a good time to join us in the course. You haven’t missed anything. Replays for all workshops are always available.
Google Search May Not Support AVIF Images
I was SO excited about WP 6.5 supporting AVIF images.
And considering that Google helped develop this new image format, it never occurred to me to check if Google Search would support them.
It doesn’t – not yet, but they are working on it.
I sent an email to all BlogAid News subscribers on Tuesday about it.
I found this one person who was so upset about it that he posted on the Google Search Console support forum to ask if any legal action can be taken against Google for promoting AVIF images, but not supporting them in Search.
The most recent news I can find is from a month ago on SEO Roundtable that also says Google does not yet support AVIF images in Search.
But, read the comments on that post.
At least one person has done a test that shows AVIF images in Search. And even Google replied that they are looking into it.
So, you can continue to use MozJPEG or OxiPNG if you want. Or switch to using AVIF.
Honestly, it’s likely that only your Featured Image would be indexed in Google Search anyway. So maybe make all the rest AVIF.
Change Last Modified Date Plugin
The plugin I had been recommending for ensuring that the modified date on your post did not change when you made a minor update was Limit Modified Date. But it is no longer being updated.
The new plugin I recommend using is Change Last Modified Date – see the tutorial here.
I believe I have the links updated everywhere on BlogAid and the DIY SEO course. But if you see the old one anywhere, let me know.
FYI, the new plugin has a warning at the top in the WP repo that it has not been tested with the last 3 versions, but it clearly has been. You’ll see that info in the sidebar of the plugin.
March Core Update Complete
If your site was hit in the Sept HCU and your rankings fell, then they may not recover anytime soon, as was hoped would happen in this March core update.
See this post from SEO Roundtable about the effects of all of the recent Google core updates.
Google Rank Drop Doc Changes
Google has revised their standing article on how to diagnose and fix a drop in ranking.
But, they made it more bleak in that they removed the lines that say it can often be reversed.
Here’s a full breakdown of the Google Rank Drop doc changes from Search Engine Journal.
Submit Feedback to Google
If your site was hit, you may want to consider filling out this Google feedback form.
If you do this, be strategic about it.
And keep in mind that this will not work if your post never ranked on page 1 prior.
- Have in mind one of your posts that used to rank at the top of Google.
- Decide what keyword phrase best describes the topic of that post.
- Search for that keyword phrase in Google Search.
- Ensure your post does not appear in the top 10-15 posts (below the ads, carousels, People Also Ask, and other sections that may be at the top)
Then fill out the form and let them know your page did not appear in search and give them the URL.
If you try it, leave a comment to let us know, and maybe a follow up if it worked to get your URL ranked again or improved your site rankings.
SEO Recovery Tips
Even if you didn’t get hit with the last few sets of Google Core Updates, these recovery tips will help you. In fact, I already have a few of them planned for a deeper dive in the DIY SEO course too.
Tips Tuesday Plus subscribers got the rest of these tips.
Recover from September HCU Tips
This post from Surfer SEO goes into specific detail, with 13 steps and 10 examples, of issues hit in the September Helpful Content Update.
I found his update on March 22 interesting, which says Google has removed the site-wide hit to the update and is now considering it on a post-by-post basis. But, he also cautions that what Google says and what Google does may be very different things.
The first steps involve finding low-performing content.
And I agree with this priority.
I think it is worth your time to look over longer time periods to identify content that has never performed well.
And then remove it or rework it.
I cover how to properly do both types of content changes in the DIY SEO course to ensure that Google doesn’t pop you even worse.
Recover from March Core Update Tips
I’ve heard several top SEOs talking about the info in this video from On-Page.
It specifically covers the March Core Update, including what was hit and ways to recover.
There is also a full case study that you can download too.
I don’t know that all of the examples apply to the type of sites that my followers have, so take that into consideration.
But I do think this is good info and worth the watch.
