Tips Tuesday – Pinterest SEO,  FTC and GoDaddy, Track Niche Trends

Tips this week include:

• Blocking out time to get more done
• Why it’s all about promotion
• Tidbit and tips make for great marketing content
• Track trends in your niche
• Update on the mini video course
• Pinterest SEO – special guest speaker this week
• Google now requires JS for search ranking results – and who is affected
• There’s an easier way to see your metrics
• Healthcheck issues with the wp-options table
• WP 6.8 release update
• FTC takes action against GoDaddy – others may follow
• Where I host my sites
• WP Rocket acquires GTMetrix

BlogAid Happenings

I finally started to catch my breath this past week from the flurry of client work I’ve been buried under all month. 

It’s not that I intentionally overwhelm myself.

It’s that I’m in the service business and I have to be responsive to an everchanging schedule of client work on the fly.

That includes fires as they pop up – and there have been several this month.

It also includes regular audit checkups that go long because we’re doing far deeper checks now and finding new things that need to be fixed.

And there is one fix that you may have been alerted to on your site that you don’t need to do. More about that is in the WordPress section.

Blocking Out Time

Do y’all remember back in the summer or such when we had a change that was so technical I could not make a tutorial for you to do it yourself and we had to meet live for like 5 minutes so that I could correct it for you?

For 2 weeks my days were booked up solid with those meetings. And that meant I had 50 minutes in between them to get other work done.

That was VERY productive.

Recently I participated in a Work Sprint Day with the mastermind group I’m in. And it was 4 hours blocked out into 50-minute segments. I could only participate for 2 of those hours that day, but they were very productive. And the time goes by so fast!!

So, I’m going back to blocking out time like that every day that I can during the week. And I’ll be focusing on just 1 thing until it is done.

That’s going to be especially helpful when I start making videos for the marketing of courses on eCreators Hub. I intend to batch record them.

And I already have the first video topic lined up, plus 2 pages of bullet points for video topics to start writing scripts for.

It’s All About Promotion

Do you block out time for marketing your business?

You don’t make money unless you sell something.

And in one form or another, what you are selling is information that someone needs.

This year, I plan to make more money off the actual marketing too – mainly in the form of videos.

Keep it Short

The Heartwood Art YouTube channel has been paying part of my grocery bill for going on 5 years now. And that’s with me only posting twice in the last 4 years. That’s the power of evergreen tutorials.

I dove into my analytics and discovered that those big builds are not what’s getting watched. It’s the shorter, more focused tutorials that solve a specific info need. So, my plan this year is to make more of them.

I’ll be making the same sort of short, focused, Q&A style videos for the eCreators Hub YouTube channel too.

Having an answer to a specific question right when someone needs that info is some of the best promotion you can do to prove your authority in the space.

How can you break down your long form content into little segments? Or, what little tidbit can you take from one of your posts and highlight it as a Q&A or such?

Take a look at your content. You may already have more tidbits than you think.

Track Trends in Your Niche

Promotion is not just about you broadcasting your stuff. It’s also about you listening.

You need to know what direction the trends are going so that you can ride those waves too.

The nice folks over at Blogging Wizard have a nice post on 6 Ways To Keep Track Of What’s Trending In Your Niche that will help you keep on top of things.

Course Happenings

Mini Video Course Update

It looks like TikTok is still on shaky ground, as there is a lot to still sort out.

And that means the fantastic video editor CapCut could be mixed up in this as well because it is owned by the same parent company.

That editor was going to be at the heart of my new mini video course. So, I’m going to hold off on it for a bit until we have more clarity and/or until I have time to research another free tool for us that works on all computers and mobile devices.

Plus, a lot can happen during the 90 day extension that was given to TikTok. And spring might be a better time to do a course like this anyway.

So, this needs to go on the back burner for a bit.

Pinterest SEO – Special Guest Speaker

This week in the DIY SEO course, we will have a joint live session with my site audit Hub clients. 

And we are delighted to welcome guest speaker Amy LeBlanc of Levee Road Studios.

Amy has multiple Pinterest courses that many of my peeps have taken and they just rave about them. And it’s working to get them 3x more traffic to their sites and products too.

Pinterest has its own culture, SEO, and algorithms. And Amy’s going to tell us all about them!!!

SEO Tips

Google Requires JS for Search Now

A few years ago Google could not properly assess web pages that had JavaScript on them. That’s because JS requires a browser to execute the scripts. 

In other words, the page has to be fully rendered, just like a human visitor would see it, and the poor crawler bots couldn’t do that. They could only read the HTML.

Rendering the page or post takes a LOT more processing power, and that costs all search engines more money and time to crawl sites.

Google finally realized that JS was going to continue to be a huge part of design, so they ponied up the money and resources so that some of their bots could fully render the pages.

But what about all of the SEO agencies, like SEMRush and AHrefs, that want to scrape from Google to determine your rank? They have not implemented the more expensive way of crawling, even when it’s just crawling rankings. Some of them don’t even have the resources to do such a thing.

And Google knows that.

Google just announced that JS will be required to access their search data.

These agencies will no longer be able to just make a simple API or http request to scan/scrape rankings for queries.

But I think the real aim of this move is to thwart AI bots, as we know they only scrape the HTML info.

I’ll be watching to see who starts screaming about this the most.

I’ve already heard that SEMRush is having issues delivering metrics.

And that’s going to impact small SEO providers/techs too who use them for deep reports to their corporate clients, especially with competitive analysis, and then $1500 SEO audits for smaller site owners.

There’s a Faster, Easier Way

Digging through your Google Search Console metrics can be VERY time consuming, especially if you want to know what is ranking for over time.

This is where EZ Metrix makes it a breeze to get that info. 

In just 1 minute you can see:

• What you’re ranking for
• What queries folks are using that get you impressions
• Which pages folks are clicking over to on your site from search

Plus, with just 2 clicks you can see each search engine one at a time.

So, if you want to know if you’re getting more traffic from Bing now, and which pages folks are hitting, that info is just a click away.

Same with social platforms.

Once you get into Amy’s Pinterest course, you can very easily monitor the traffic increases in just your Pinterest traffic as reported by GA4 too.

Folks, data doesn’t have to be hard, nor does it have to involve a lot of math or such.

You can get color-coded heatmaps of exactly what’s bringing traffic to your site and where visitors are landing.

You can even see which posts are converting to your paid offers and such too.

It’s easy!!!

I taught a class on how to make GA4 custom reports and I never even look at them anymore.

EZMetrix gives me the answers I need in seconds.

WordPress Tips

Healthcheck Issues with wp-options table

The WP Healthcheck team is once again poking around in things that most site owners should NEVER goof with.

This time it’s a notification that there may be something wrong with the wp-options table and what’s getting autoloaded.

Folks, this is a database table that I even chicken out on goofing with. I clean out transients and such during audit fixes. But as far as deleting orphans from plugins that may or may not be in use – nope!!!! I would only do that if there seemed to be a conflict with another plugin or function.

This database table has to be manually cleaned, and you have to do it on a duplicated database.

You need to also keep in mind that some plugins, especially Thrive, take parts of other plugins and fork it into their own wares – and they don’t even bother to change the code or names of the other things they “borrow”.

So, you could have rows in that wp-options table for things you don’t recognize, but are very much still in use.

I’d like to give that Healthcheck team a good talking to about putting messages in front of non-techie site owners that worry them, and could potentially lead to them goofing up their sites.

WP 6.8 Release Update

As I reported last week about all the WP hoohaa going on, the next release will be brought in-house, with a smaller team that is directly under the control of Matt Mullenweg.

Without all of those extra volunteers in different groups, they are going to radically pull back on what they intend to focus on for this release, which will mainly be just bugs and “polishing” for whatever that means.

Personally, I’m glad to hear it and think they should do this for at least one release every year.

It will be due to release in early March and I’ll keep you posted about what will be in it.

Hosting Tips

FTC Takes Action Against GoDaddy 

Well, it’s about damn time that somebody got a hold of GoDaddy over their lax data security issues. 

The FTC is taking action against GoDaddy.

In the article they say that the:

“Proposed order will prohibit GoDaddy from misleading customers about its security protections and require it to establish a robust information security program.”

I’ve got a new client who is on Bluehost and I see some of the same practices there. We’ll be moving her off that hosting soon, as I refuse to work on such junk hosting. 

Clients are paying me to make their sites fast and secure and I have no shot at doing that at these hosts and others like them. So I won’t take the client’s money to do a crap job. I also won’t take on the liability of it either.

When I say no to clients on these hosts, without fail, every one of them then asks me to help them migrate to better hosting.

If you are a webmaster with clients on junk hosts like this, especially GoDaddy, send them this article and ask them to move.

If they don’t want to, ask them to produce written documentation that there is no problem with their hosting – because I have the receipts to show clients the problems, so their sentimental and/or ignorance of the facts, don’t hold up their argument very well.

And if they still don’t want to move, reconsider your own liability by working on sites there. And get a waiver in writing too.

Where I Host My Sites

(Thank you for using my affiliate link to support the free and helpful info you get from BlogAid!)

Me, and all of my clients, and most all of my Webmasters and their clients host our sites on Iridium Hosting. 

It’s fast and secure and the support is AMAZING!!!!

Performance Tips

WP Rocket Acquires GTMetrix

The parent company of WP Rocket just purchased GTMetrix.

I’m glad, as GTMetrix has been struggling lately – to the point that I dropped my paid subscription to them as one of my speed testers. In the meantime, WebPage Test created a better mobile tester and I use it for both mobile and desktop tests now.

I’m not a big fan of WP Rocket, at least not for my clients. It does offer more customization, but to me, that is part of the problem as it has to be tweaked every time there is a change on the site.

And honestly, I don’t think it gives enough difference in speed to warrant the extra work.

And I know for a fact it doesn’t give extra speed compared to WP Fastest Cache if you don’t do all of those customizations on WPR.

Plus, I REALLY didn’t like that WP Rocket sent your critical CSS and JS optimization info out to their servers to perform, and then back into your site. To me, that’s just one more hack point. And then when their data center burned down a few years ago, that function stopped working. I don’t know if they do that anymore or not, though.