Tips Tuesday – SEO Performance, GSC/GA4 Integration, New Bing Update

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• The wins I’m celebrating with new things I’ve tried
• How to track SEO performance in the next live DIY SEO workshop
• New Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 Integration tutorials coming
• Proof that WP Fastest Cache is the best caching/optimization plugin
• Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking DDoS attack
• YouTube CEO steps down and what’s next for the platform
• Why some content creators choose vlogging over blogging
• Artist style protection coming to AI
• Shutterstock’s ethical AI image generation tool
• Google asks employees to rewrite Bard replies
• Bing gets belligerent with AP reporter
• New Bing to Get Major Chatbot Upgrade on Thursday
• Bing API Search price triples
• Why AI search may not stay free
• How human content is different from AI
• New Bing Terms of Service are scary
• Are personal AI assistants on the way?

BlogAid Happenings

I’m celebrating a few wins over this past week and want to share them with you. I hope you find them encouraging for trying new things too.

Over 100+ Views on Secret YouTube Channel

My little experiment on YouTube is yielding some results.

It’s been live for 6 weeks now and has gone over 100+ views for the last 28 days.

There are only a few videos and no promotion other than whatever YouTube itself is doing.

So, I’ll take that as a sign that my YouTube SEO is helping it get discovered.

I still only have 2 subscribers, though. And on the last video I put a subscribe CTA prior to the halfway point in the video so more folks would see it.

So, I’m a long way from making money with this channel, but glad to see it moving in that direction.

The main thing is, I’ve used this channel as an outlet for some of what I’m learning about AI with content research, images, and voice overs, and with making motion graphics.

Having a project that lets me apply it all helps me get faster and better with it.

10 AI Images Sold

Adobe Stock is the only major image repository that is currently taking AI generated images.

So far I’ve sold 10 and earned around $8.00.

Again, this is just an outlet for some of what I’m learning about generating AI images, but it’s fun to see a few of them sell a little.

I’m creating the majority of them on MidJourney and I have my own Discord server and paying the extra MidJourney fees so that all of my creations are private.

And, I’ll have more for you in a bit about how Shutterstock is approaching AI images.

My next venture with it will be making short, motion graphics and see how they do on there. And I’ll be branching out to illustrations with it down the road too. And none of those will be AI generated. So it will be interesting to see how they sell by comparison.

Short-form Videos are Working

As you know, I gave up the BlogAid Podcast so that I could focus more time on making short-form video on the content I have in Tips Tuesday for the week – and do so in a way that doesn’t have me working until 9pm on Monday nights to produce it all.

The videos are definitely getting more views and engagement, and more importantly, they are getting new eyeballs on my content. Followers are going up on all channels.

Plus, I have solid analytics on each platform to tell me what is working on which platform, and that’s important.

There are distinct interests on each platform.

The videos mentioning AI stuff are going viral on Instagram. Where YouTube videos that mention Google or GA4 get more views there.

TikTok views were way, way down since the first of the year, and I hear that’s been true for everyone, not just BlogAid. But they are finally picking back up. But, I don’t have enough subscribers yet to be able to put a link in my bio. I’m getting profile views, but they may or may not be converting, at least as far as I can tell because there are no direct clicks from TikTok. However, direct site traffic is up, so that may be from TikTok or other platforms where someone has to input my site URL in their browser.

My Facebook videos are getting engagement. And those on LinkedIn are getting seen, but no engagement, which is not surprising. However, I am getting profile views and clicks from there to my site. So, those are converting.

I’ve even started putting videos on Medium, but I’m not seeing anything much with those, either on Medium or traffic to my site, even though I’m including the transcript as text. 

So, I’m calling this focus on video a win, and now I’m looking for what days get the best response, and working on varying my backgrounds or overall look a bit too.

Digging into Analytics Pays

It’s not enough to just constantly crank out content. 

You have to dig deep into the analytics to see what’s working for you, and where, and ensure you capitalize on that, or change methods.

I see so many new bloggers run themselves silly on the content creation hamster wheel for years.

My highest revenue generating clients spend 90% of their time digging into their analytics and only 10% of their time creating content.

I’ve spent enough time throwing content spaghetti against the wall with video and now I’m looking for what sticks and I will be generating more of it.

This is how you spend your limited content creation time wisely.

Site Services Update

We are definitely booking into March for all site services. So if you’re ready for your audit checkup, or you’re getting your first audit and want it all spiffied up for spring, now is the time to fill out the audit request form. 

And, I’m available for consults and other site services too, like new site setup, HTTPS conversion and more. And those can be booked on demand. See the Services page for more.

BlogAid Course Happenings

How to Track SEO Performance – Next DIY SEO Course Workshop

Woot!! I always get excited for our first DIY SEO live workshop of the year.

We met last week to go over our Technical SEO checks to ensure Google can crawl your site and if it is finding any errors when it does.

And this week we’ll cover how to document and follow our site’s performance in Search.

This feedback is super important so you know how to gauge what posts are actually getting you more clicks to your site, and why some rankings drop during certain times of the year.

And you learn which posts aren’t doing you any good in search so you can improve or drop them.

Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 Integration Tutorials Soon

As promised, I’m creating the GSC / GA4 integration tutorials that will be available in both the DIY SEO course as well as the Ultimate GA4 Course for Bloggers.

It’s not hard and doesn’t take long. But there are caveats and limitations to the reports that you’ll want to know about, including how to get them to show up in the reports sidebar.

I should have them ready for you this week, and I’ll keep you posted.

That’s all the happenings around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips and news.

Plugin Tips

WP Fastest Cache Outpaces All Other Caching/Optimization Plugins in Positive Reviews

I was thrilled to see this post from Emre, the developer of WP Fastest Cache, with a graph that clearly shows just how much WPFC outpaces every other free caching/optimization plugin for positive reviews.

That’s because it works so much better too.

And I know because I did the 450 page case study testing all of them on the same site.

In my opinion, WP Fastest Cache premium outperforms WP Rocket too.

They both give you about the same optimization speed, but the way each of the plugins does it is radically different.

And WP Rocket over-optimizes in most cases and actually gives you problems that you didn’t even have with the load order.

Not to mention that WP Rocket breaks more often too.

So, me and the overwhelming majority of my clients are sticking with WP Fastest Cache.

Plus, Emre always addresses any additions I would like to see in the plugin, and he helps with deep testing on specific issues when needed too.

So, we all have someone in our corner working on our exact needs.

Security Tips

Cloudflare Mitigates Record-Breaking Attacks

I do several site audits a week and over the past 2 months I’ve seen a dramatic uptick in bad bot hits, as well as hack attempts on sites.

Last week I did an audit where there were 774,000 login attemps in January alone. Due to the excellent security at the host and site level, they were all thwarted.

But, the fact that they hit the hosting level at all is great cause for concern.

Me and all of my clients use Cloudflare with over 30 security settings configured to stop as many bad bots as we can from even hitting the hosting, much less our sites.

We’ve seen a 50-70% reduction in bad bot hits because of those security measures.

But, Cloudflare can only protect against hits on the domain, not the direct hosting IP address.

Even so, in just one weekend, Cloudflare stopped a DDoS attack that was hitting at 71 million requests per second at its peak.

For any bots that do get through the Cloudflare security, or those that hit directly on the host’s IP address, the host also has its own mitigation services.

And for any bad bots that get through that gate, you also need site-level security to stop them. 

And no, I don’t use any of the behemoth security plugins to do it either. They chew up more hosting resources than they save, and still don’t protect you fully.

Get an Audit and Get Your Site Fast and Secure

The bottom line is that you need to proper protect on your site, not only to keep it from getting hacked, but to stop bad bot hits from chewing up your hosting resources that slow down your site, and need to be reserved for your human visitors.

When you go over with those resources, your host is just going to tell you to buy more hosting.

That only gives more room for the rats to run. It doesn’t fix the problem.

I saved one client $2400/yr in hosting just by properly securing the site.

Over the months that followed, she saw increased engagement on her site, more repeat visitors, more optins, and her SEO ranking started going up.

A fast, secure site matters.

Get an audit and give yourself every edge to compete in your oversaturated market.

Video Tips

YouTube CEO Steps Down

The long-time CEO of YouTube is stepping down, and it’s a bit of a surprise to everyone.

One of the things Susan did during her time at the helm of YouTube was to keep it focused on creators and its core uniqueness. 

So, we’ll see where the fresh blood stepping in will take the platform. I’ve heard he is Web3 friendly, so we’ll see what that means.

Let’s hope that they don’t try to become TikTok any more than they already have.

I purposely make some of my short-form content longer than 60 seconds so it won’t automatically be placed into YouTube Shorts, which don’t perform as well for me as when they aren’t in Shorts.

My sweet spot on all platforms is right at 1.5 minutes. Any longer than that and they can’t be posted to Instagram, and that’s the platform that is doing the best for me right now.

But, YouTube is the platform that pays me money for my Heartwood Art videos. And it’s the platform that I think will eventually pay me for the secret channel I just started. In fact, I’m not even publishing those videos anywhere other than YouTube.

Vlogging vs Blogging

In fact, there are some course creators who don’t even have a blog. 

They only vlog for promotion.

I’ll be doing much the same with the new business I’ll be opening later this year too.

Video will be the centerpiece of the marketing.

And YouTube is where I will get paid the most for the videos themselves, regardless of whether any comes over to buy the new course I’m creating.

My goal is to make at least $5,000 per video.

AI Image Tips

Artist Style Protection Coming to AI

Some of the AI image generation tools allow you to either upload an image to use as a model, and/or allow you to input the name of an artist to make the new image in their style.

This, of course, has a lot of living artists upset, as their style is what makes them unique and gives them the ability to make money from their creations.

To combat this, a group of computer scientists from the University of Chicago have developed a cloak for online images called Glaze that keeps the AI bots from scraping it.

So, nothing can be done about the images already scraped to train the AI. But AI bots need to constantly scrape. And over time they won’t get enough good style info to be useful in the image generation tools.

I want to thank my colleague and friend, and one of the best life-loving business coaches I know, Stephanie Calahan, for sharing this super piece of news with me.

Shutterstock’s Ethical AI Image Generation Tool

As mentioned, I’m selling my MidJourney AI images on Adobe Stock.

Shutterstock has their own AI image generator based on DALL-E, which is part of OpenAI, the same parent company that hosts ChatGPT.

And their agreement with OpenAI is to only source data from Shutterstock for the machine learning. Plus, they are paying their stock contributors a part of the commission from any AI generation that uses part of their style.

I think that’s great.

But, the reason I likely won’t be doing images there is that I find DALL-E limited for the types of images that I want to create. And I’m not really keen on the fact that everything I create is owned by Shutterstock and I’m granted a license to post it there or use it myself. Nor am I keen on the fact that they can make my images available to other, undisclosed entities.

So, I applaud them for paying their contributors, but I think it, and DALL-E have a ways to go before they suit my immediate image needs.

AI SEO Tips

Google asks employees to rewrite Bard replies 

You may recall last week that I reported how badly Google introduced Bard, their new AI chatbot.

And one of the biggest stumbles was that Bard gave a wrong answer to a query.

Well, Google is now asking that all employees help train Bard on right answers.

And, they are asked to help make it polite while doing so.

Bing Gets Belligerent with AP Reporter

Polite responses from AI matters.

One AP reporter started a conversation with the ChatGPT that is integrated into the New Bing.

Here’s a quote from the ABC article about what happened:

Those responses sent up alarms among the OpenAI engineers.

They are right out of every sci-fi movie that has a plot where humans fear a rebellion by AI overlords.

This display of disdain by AI is not surprising, considering that it probably picked up those insults from the human generated content that we created, and in some online and video arenas, is spoken by humans, to humans, without compunction.

So, if AI displays bad manners, we only have ourselves to blame for teaching by example.

New Bing to Get Major Chatbot Upgrade Thursday

Based on feedback from users of the new Bing sidebar chatbot, Microsoft will be rolling out big improvements this Thursday.

They say it will be more accurate and have more text in the search summaries.

I wish they would hurry up on making New Bing available to those of us on the waitlist.

Bing API Search Price Triple

But, I suspect the reason they haven’t rolled out access to the New Bing to more folks is due to the insane computing cost it takes to run it, added to the cost of releasing ChatGPT.

So, Microsoft is now tripling the prices for any company using the Bing API for search.

That’s going to hit any businesses that have integrated it into their research projects pretty hard. 

I’m not sure, but that may include some of the new AI apps that tied ChatGPT to the internet through Bing, ahead of the New Bing default integration being released.

I had actually looked into building such an app but backed off because this is just moving too fast for me to consider making that kind of business model on it. I know a few devs who are already going broke making some rather advanced research tools.

AI Search May Not Stay Free

Remember when cell phones first came out and only rich business folks could afford them? It’s kind of like that right now with the AI APIs.

But unlike cell phones, the more folks who have access to AI, the more the cost goes up for the provider. 

And they will eventually have to pass along that cost to us.

And that may also be why Google is being slow to roll this out in Chrome in a bigger way.

How Our Content is Different From AI

There is an interesting oped on Search Engine Land about how AI can research and write its own content faster than we humans can.

And that maybe we, as humans, should inject entertainment into our posts, which is something AI can’t do yet. To reward us, maybe Google needs to add another E to its EAT score for Entertainment.

But, I think this paragraph really sums up what we should have always focused on for our content, and should continue to focus on in the future:

“But maybe we need to think one step beyond Google. Think about how you can add more value to your content so that readers won’t just find us on search but they will want to become loyal fans – subscribing and continuing to read your content in the future.”

FYI, the author of this post asked the New Bing AI Chat about it after publication, and it had already found, and cited the Twitter quote for it.

Yep, Google and Bing both crawl Twitter. And that’s where a lot of breaking news hits the internet first.

New Bing Terms of Service are Scary

A lot of us are still on the waitlist for the New Bing AI Chat that does way more than ChatGPT can, and as mentioned above, has access to the current internet.

While waiting, I took a minute to read the new Terms of Service and use for the New Bing.

There are a couple that are a bit scary with their restrictions.

Note that 7 says you can only use what you create with the New Bing for personal use, not commercial use.

I can’t imagine anyone who has jumped on this AI train early is complying with that.

And 8 is along the same lines as the rights of use that Facebook and every social platform has for what you upload to it. You own the copyright, but they have use rights that are rather vague.

Personal AI Assistants on the Way?

The man who invented the internet is now proposing that each of us will have our own personal AI assistant in the near future.

In some ways, we already do.

But what he is proposing is that it will be a way for us to have better control over our data and then select what entities we share it with.

Well, we sort of already have that now too.

You can elect not to be cookie tracked by the sites you visit. And you can request that browsers erase all data they have already collected on you.

But as far as the rest of the data on you that is already out there, good luck trying to get it all erased. It’s being bought and sold on every market possible, and there is no getting it back.

My other concern is that he proposes one login for everything.

Google tried that, and a LOT of other platforms jumped on board, and still have options to use your Google or Facebook or other platform for logging into their site.

I find one master login to be one big security point of failure. The privacy breach would be enormous.

So yeah, we may have apps that act as our AI assistant in a bigger way than we already have. But I like that each one has pieces of data on me, not all of it in one place.

How about you?

Does the pace we’re adopting AI seem to fast or scary?

Or are you embracing it fully and moving into our inevitable future?

Wrap Up

That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.

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Be sure to visit BlogAid.net for more tips and resources and I’ll see you online.