Tips Tuesday – SEO Beyond Google, Pinterest Live Chat, UpdraftPlus Issues 

Welcome to 2025, y’all!!!!

Let’s get going so we can thrive in ‘25!!

Tips this week include:

• Quick Checks in progress in the DIY SEO course
• Special guest speaker for Pinterest
• Why we’ll be blogging on other platforms this year
• The roller coaster of Google rankings
• UpdraftPlus issues
• WordPress drama settling down

SEO Tips

DIY SEO Course Quick Checks

We are in Week 1 of our Quick Checks in the DIY SEO course, and will be next week too.

We do these at the beginning of every year to ensure all of our SEO settings are up to date and that we don’t have any technical SEO issues happening.

But, after this, the whole order of the course is changing, and I’m so excited about it!!!

Pinterest Still Loves Bloggers

While things may be going south with getting blog posts ranked on Google, Pinterest is still sending my clients plenty of traffic.

And Pinterest has its own SEO and algorithm tweaks that you need to know about.

That’s why I’ve invited Amy LeBlanc of Levee Road Studios to join my clients for a live chat.

She’ll be speaking on Jan 23 to members of my DIY SEO course and site audit Hub clients.

Amy watches Pinterest like a hawk!! She’ll be giving us the low-down on what’s working and what’s not on Pinterest these days.

Amy also has a full line of Pinterest courses. My clients just RAVE about them and they are now enjoying 3x more Pinterest traffic to their sites too.

(If you’re in one of the memberships above, look on your course dashboard for huge discounts. Thank you, Amy!!!!)

If you want to get in on the new Pinterest boom too, you can!!!

Blogging on Other Platforms

The fact is, we just can’t rely solely on Google for traffic anymore.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t still get some mileage out of our existing blog posts, or even new ones.

In February we’re going to start workshops for how to blog on Medium, LinkedIn, and maybe even Substack.

Each one has a different culture and we will want to go over those in a workshop to see which platforms are right for you, and how to post on them for max visibility.

Plus, we’re going to cover how to get paid directly from some of these platforms when you post exclusive content too.

Join Us

Now is a great time to join us in the DIY SEO course.

I have a huge, secret discount code available for you.

Just contact me through the site or reply to this email for that code, as I’m not making it public.

The Roller Coaster of Google Rankings

I’m in several pro SEO groups.

I’ve seen some folks say that their rankings suddenly recovered in the last few weeks, even with no changes to their site.

But, what I’ve seen even more are folks saying they were finally caught in one of the recent Google updates that tanked their rankings and their traffic.

I’m also seeing more pro SEOs and even courses for pro SEOs closing up shop.

The writing is on the wall.

Folks, even if you have not been hit by one of these updates, and even if you are getting more traffic now because you are one of the few sites in your niche left that is ranking, don’t count on it staying that way.

Now is the time to get yourself established with visibility in ways other than just blog posts for Google SEO.

Plugin Tips

UpdraftPlus Issues

Over the last couple of months I’ve had 3 clients contact me for issues with UDP not doing backups.

Some are not doing auto backups, and some won’t even do manual backups.

And these have not been the typical issues with cron jobs not running either.

On one, we had to delete the plugin in a special way that wipes all of its settings and then reinstall.

On another, we had to set up a staging site and are now working with UDP support.

I’m just getting started on the 3rd one, and it has errors that are not like the other 2 sites.

So, I’m not sure why this plugin is glitching, but this is one of the reasons why we do monthly checks for such things with my site audit Hub clients.

You don’t want to go too long without knowing you don’t have your weekly backups.

WordPress Tips

Settling Down

The WP drama settled down over the holidays.

I hope it stays that way.

A court ruled that WPEngine could once again access WP.org resources.

They have also taken back control of their ACF Pro plugin

In December, Matt Mullenweg put out a stupid statement about what drama he should create for 2025 and lots of folks gave him the attention he seems to be craving these days – most of it was negative, of course.

Also in December, Joost de Valk put out an open letter to the community with an idea of building a board for running the WP open source community. Support was all over the place – and we’re no closer to a coalition on it than we were the other 4-5 times this has been suggested over the last 2 decades, the latest big push being over the release of Gutenberg – and we’re all still here in one way or another.

I am, unfortunately, keeping my eyes on this for us.

But, I will only be reporting what we need to know, and only if there is something we need to do.

Let’s stay drama-free as much as we can, huh?

The bottom line is that Matt owns WP and it is still the best platform for bloggers and for course creators – but maybe not much else anymore.

So, we’re keeping what we have and marching on.