The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 116. Let's Get Technical: SEO with Casey Markee

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

It’s time to dive deeper into the technical side of SEO! We have Casey Markee, the owner of Media Wyse, here sharing his expertise with you. He dives into site audits, finding the balance between ad revenue and user experience, and the aspect of meeting core web vitals. He also offers guidance on focusing on your strengths as a blogger and seeking assistance where needed and continuing to keep up with Google’s ever-changing algorithms for your content. This was a powerful episode that we know you are going to want to hear!Thanks for listening! Let us know your thoughts on Instagram: @sparkmediaconceptsThank you to our sponsor Lulu for sponsoring this episode! Check out more about how to self-publish your next book HERE.Check out Big Scoots Plans here!Check out the show notes (link below) for more information including links and resources mentioned in today's episode!SHOW NOTES: www.sparkmediaconcepts.com/episode116

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast with Amy Reinecke and Jennifer Draper. We're on a mission to empower women who want to start or grow their own blog. This podcast is for women who want to learn blogging basics and who crave inspiration and encouragement. Whether you're just getting started or have been a blogger for years, we're excited to welcome you into this space where we are passionate about creating community over competition. We are bloggers who want to encourage you to believe in your potential, step outside the norm, and step into a life where you create your own schedule, your own success, and your own story. Join us for weekly episodes as we navigate blogging

and work from home life, all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. Hey, everybody. We've got an episode today that we are very excited about. Today, we are going to be talking with Casey Marquis, and he is the owner of an internet consultancy called MediaWise. And Casey has tons of experience with SEO, and specifically technical SEO, which is something we've never really talked about here on the podcast. He typically works with mainly food and lifestyle bloggers, and he's worked with thousands of bloggers. So he has tons of knowledge and information to share with us today. So welcome to the podcast, Casey. Thank you very much, ladies. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, we're so excited to dive in. But before we get too far in, can you just tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you do? Sure. As you mentioned, I own a consultancy called MediaWise based here in San Diego, sunny San Diego. I know many of you hate that. It's a little cold today. It's like 74, so I had to get a sweater. I know you guys hate that. Terrible. Rough. Terrible. But yeah, I've been doing SEO since the Stone Age, 1998. Crazy. Yeah.

The days of magneticmattresses.com and positioning pills at the top of Google. Good times. I have seen it all. I started working. I threw out my own shingle in about 2001. I started working, I threw out my own shingle in about 2001. Before then, I was working as a consultant for, like I said, various internet startups in the San Diego area. But since then, I have worked with a large, gosh,gers conference retreat in Big Bear, California. And that was great. Really enjoyed that.

I was well received. And the next thing I know, that was all I was doing. Since then, I have gained at least 40 pounds because of the incredible amount of food content I see every day. That's what I blame it on. But it has been a great, great journey. And I'm very fortunate to do that. And so I work, like I said, specifically with food and lifestyle bloggers. These days, I do site auditing, which involves a lot of technical components. And we're going to get into some of those today.

how well people have done making a career out of blogging on top of it. I think there's still so much room to grow. There's still so much room to learn. And so I'm anxious to dive into all of this. Right, right. Hey, it has never been more competitive to be a food blogger at this point in history. Of course, everyone and their sister decided to start a food blog during the pandemic. So it's a little bit more competitive now than say three or four years ago. But nevertheless, you can make a career out of it. And I'm always awed at the incredible amount of money a lot of these food and lifestyle bloggers make. So I applaud them. It's not an easy job and they do their jobs extremely well, as I know both you ladies do, since I know you both have your own sides. Is that correct? sides. Is that correct? Correct. Yes. Both too. We both do. So we've kind of talked about SEO and anybody who's listening to this podcast has heard that term before. If you're a blogger, then you've heard that term. But like Jennifer said, we're diving into the technical side of SEO. And that might be the first time that somebody listening to this has kind of heard

that specific term. So just to keep things really basic out of the gate here, Casey, can you just kind of give that a definition? Like, what do you mean by technical SEO? So loosely defined, technical SEO is about improving your website to make it easier for search engines to find, understand, and crawl your content. That's honestly the easiest way that we can explain it. Our goal is to eliminate barriers. So we want Google to come and crawl our site and not keep running into trees, things like broken links or orphaned pages or schema that's applied unevenly or incorrectly, or maybe they're using a template that Google doesn't necessarily understand. But technical SEO is all about removing obstacles and making it easy for Google to algorithmically understand and rank our content

as highly as possible. And I think that that's something that a lot of new bloggers miss out of the gate. They might choose something that is easier, what they consider easier to get started just to get started. But it might actually be something that they have to end up turning around and then redoing later. So basically, I want you just to give a pep talk to the new blogger right now, who maybe either did that or is considering doing that. What would be a couple of the main things that you would say, hey, these are the main things that you need to make sure that you're putting into play right at the start of your blogging journey,

because you're not going to want to go back and redo them later. Right, right. Well, as I tell bloggers all the time, you know, how you eat an elephant, you know, preferably start at the trunk, work your way back one bite at a time, preferably. SEO is that way, especially when you're first starting out.

We want to do things the right way. You'll see that there's a lot of hosts out there that are very popular because they have a ton of money to spend on marketing, but they are terrible. Bluehost, for example, comes to mind. Well, Bluehost is very popular because they have a ton of money to spend on marketing, but they are terrible. Bluehost, for example, comes to mind. Well, Bluehost is very popular. People tend to sign up with Bluehost right away because they've been told by incredible marketing that this is a great host. It is not a great host. And even for smaller bloggers, we have a significant amount of network

interrupting. We have a significant amount of micro outages. We don't want to use a free host or we certainly don't want to use a cheap host. So if you can afford to get with a quality host, you know, something like Big Scoots, which I recommend for has my top choice for most food and lifestyle bloggers. But even if you couldn't afford Big Scoots, you know, even SiteGround is better than Blue Host, but go with a quality host right out of the gate so that you don't have to worry about downtime. You don't have to worry about interactivity issues. You're going to make sure that your content is up when people are looking for it.

So quality hosts right away. We also want to really focus on a quality platform. I know that it's easy for you to go out there and say, well, I want to use WordPress. But then you have WordPress.com and you have WordPress.org. What's the difference? Well, with WordPress.com, you're basically hosting with WordPress. You're tied to their platform. That's a bad deal, especially if you're trying to monetize in the future and you want a lot more flexibility because you don't want to be tied to WordPress.com where they limit the ads you can run. They limit the kind of plugins you run.

Might be great for the first year when you're trying to build, but imagine you qualified for Mediavine and AdThrive and you realize, oh no, I can't do all this stuff because I'm on WordPress.com. How come no one told me? I'm telling you now. So try to understand, go with WordPress.org right away, go with a self-hosted setup whenever possible. That way you could control your setup.

Plenty of starter guides out there, including some I've written with a top hat rank, our SEO for Publishers webinars, our exceptional starting points for new and experienced bloggers alike. Use those to find out how to optimize your site from the get-go, which plugins to use. Use a quality theme if you can. Don't go with one of these free themes. You want to use Astra, you want to use Canes, you want to use Feast, that's fine.

But you have to really make sure that you're doing something that's not free for everyone else. Because free for everyone else means that your site looks like everyone else, and we don't want that necessarily. And is it okay to use a child theme when you're using a theme like Cadence or Feast? Is that going to impact your site in a negative way? Or does that kind of add to the user experience? No, no. With a child theme, it's even better because then we're able to customize our presentation on the front end more. I'm a big believer in Feast. I think Skylar has done an exceptional job over the last several years to provide an extremely highly competent theme that is very WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get. You don't have to know coding.

You don't have to invest a ton of resources in doing things that should be done for the site. resources and doing things that should be done for the site, customized bylines, ability to modify your colors, setting up custom recipe indexes and product indexes, being able to understand how to optimize quality category pages, taking care of internal linking, building in things that solve a lot of SEO tasks out of the gate. Sure, you can use cadence, you could use Aster, you could use one of those other themes, but you kind of have to really invest in the tutorials, hire people to help you get all that stuff out of the ground. Whereas opposed that there's just some options out there like Feast that they do all the work for you, so to speak. So it's really about how you're starting. My advice to users is that if you can afford, you know, a kind of a semi custom theme right out of the gate, and that's really what Feast is, do that.

And then when you get to 50,000 or 100,000 sessions a month, then we could look at investing in maybe more of a semi-custom or custom theme. You know, maybe down the road, something like a Purr theme, or maybe you go with CultivateWP, which is an exceptional platform. Those started about $5,000. And frankly, if I have a daughter who's in a just-finished cooking school, she wants to be a baker. with Cultivate WP, which is an exceptional platform. Those started about $5,000. And frankly, if I have a daughter who's in a just finished cooking school, she wants to be a baker. That's why I moved her far away from me so I can start losing weight. She is in Roanoke, Virginia right now working at a Hilton. I'm very proud of her. But when she decides to become a food blogger, which I assume eventually she will, I will, of course, spend the weekend talking her

out of it. But then when she says, I'm going to do it anyway, dad, which is usually what happens, I will push her to use something like a CultivateWP thing, which right out of the gate is going to do extremely well for her. It'll be very customized. It's built by Dwayne and Bill over here at CultivateWP. They have an exceptional staff. They do a great job. And so if you're on the fence about, I've been doing this for a long time. I haven't got to the traffic level I want to, but you've optimized. I would never, for example, please let me clarify, I would never recommend a custom theme for anyone who hasn't optimized or qualified for an ad network yet. Makes no sense. site, you're at the level that, okay, what do I need to do to invest to really make sure that I've moved to this hobby to a business? That's when we would start be looking at kind of the semi-custom themes of a Cultivate WP or someone else. I appreciate the journey that you just took our listeners on. And I think that when we can look at it as a journey, then we can equip

ourselves appropriately as we move forward. Yeah. And I always say that. I always say that during the audits. This is a journey. I always say it's a marathon, actually, not a sprint. Because everyone always comes to me. It doesn't matter if they haven't qualified for an at work or they have qualified for an at work or they're a blogger doing 500,000 to 5 million sessions a month. There's always another step beyond that. Yeah. And our goal is just to make sure that they haven't forgotten how they got there and then provide them the necessary knowledge and tools to finish the race they're on.

And then that's how we work. Right. And when you're in that beginning step, I want to highlight this again because I do think that this is important. Jennifer actually has a very specific testimonial with Bluehost. But it is important to make sure that that thing that nobody else really sees, like nobody really sees your host. But like Casey said, I think they have a very lucrative marketing plan and a very lucrative affiliate program. So you might be led astray by people who are trying to get a quick buck. And I really hate to say that as a

blogger and influencer, but not everybody is doing this job the most ethically. Most of us are, I will say, but we have to be very careful about where we are gaining our knowledge from and who we're learning from. And we agree with you on Bluehost. We recommend to all of our students that they start on BigScoots as well. If they're able, they have a shared and a managed plan. We actually do have that flexibility that, I think the shared is like eight bucks a month and the managed is about 35. And so for what it can give you,

that is one of the small investments that we do agree with. And something else I picked up when you were talking about something that we talk about a lot is thinking of yourself as a business owner out of the gate, whether you're making money or not. But that's an important part of this process of blogging is knowing that, first of all, where you need to invest and where not to. And I really, really appreciate that you said if you're not on an ad network, you don't have to have a custom theme yet. Absolutely not. No, it's not going to, it's possible right out of the gate that you'll build traffic faster. I mean, it's usually,

it's going to be extremely possible that you're going to build traffic faster. There are some people, especially since COVID, we've had an influx of new bloggers that have just killed it. They've managed to build a good amount of traffic and visibility in an incredibly short period of time. And I get them on my call, I get them on audits all the time, and they're like, you know, I just realized that I wanted to make this a career from the get-go. So I had a budget and I spent that budget based upon the feedback that I'd written or that other people had written, and they were able to cut the timeline down significantly. Now, most people start a blog and it could be six months to a year before they really get any discernible traffic from Google. That's fine. Those bloggers spent that six months to a year building up their social accounts and their email. They didn't just keep publishing into a vacuum with no returns. And yet it's amazing how many bloggers I visited with who did do that. And they were experienced bloggers. Boy, I wish I had known what I know now five years ago.

I'm like, well, hey, don't we all? I would have bought significantly more Bitcoin than I own right now if I had known that. So it's just one of those things where we always have 20-20 hindsight and your journey is your own. Make the changes you can now. Budget what you can. I had an audit today with a fantastic blogger. Her site is In The Kitchen. And she has, you know, this is one of her own.

This is, she's a business. This is her own, her only source of income. She was negatively impacted by the helpful content update. But I know a lot of bloggers that are listening to this probably were. But I showed her other things that she could focus on to recover that lost traffic. And she was very appreciative of that. And that's what we have to do. We can never put all of our eggs in the Google basket. We have to focus on that email. We have to focus on that non-Google traffic channels. And we do that while we're waiting for Google to figure their shit out and get us back the traffic that we so very much deserve. And I would guess that it's really an individualized case-by-case basis when it comes

to people and their blogs and the impact that the Google updates have and things like that. So being able to invest in an audit is probably just so valuable and helpful. But I think it's also one of those things that comes along with, okay, am I investing in this like a business? And when should I have an audit? At what point after starting my blog, should I even start to think about this? Because I think a lot of people will maybe hold back even longer than they should. And like you said, if you do some things upfront, it's going to give you a much better opportunity to grow faster. So I guess my question is, at what point should somebody start thinking about signing up for

an audit? And what does that look like? Do they need to have a certain number of posts or do they need to be monetized at that point? That's a good question. And usually, again, we have three levels of people who are having audits. I have the bloggers in group number one who are trying to qualify for an ad network. I have bloggers number two, which are already established bloggers who have qualified for ad networks, but they're looking to get to the next level. And then we have, of course, the third class, which are extremely established bloggers who have been doing well for years, but they've always known that they could do better. And in many cases, they want to have catch-up audits every couple of years to make sure that they've kept themselves and their staff abreast of best practices. So that's kind of what we fall into there in the buckets. For the initial blogger, I usually, I turn down blog request audits all the time. They have to have a minimum of 75 to 80 posts published recipes by the time they contact me. And I usually request

that they be blogging for at least a year. So I would say that that's the bare minimum that we need for someone to have a competent audit. My audits are not like other people. They're incredibly, I would say, more advanced, but they're just very detailed. I have a very big technical focus. I study my audits involve a full content and technical audit. I talk about their internal linking structure. I run a full internal linking analysis. We talk about the importance of seasonal content. We talk about their content inventory, how to set up their category pages, how I would write a perfect recipe post. We go over, I've done a lot of usertesting.com surveys since 2018, all over the United States with thousands of people who tell me in excruciating detail what they hate about food blocks. And so I've been able

to take that data and refine it into the recommendations that I give during an audit or I give during interviews like this. I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions, but that's what data is for. We don't have to like the data. We accept the data as it is, which is a view of that moment in time. So that's how things like jump to recipe buttons came to be. Didn't matter how much ad companies hated them. The data was very clear. Users wanted the buttons. And so that's again, why we push those so relentlessly in 2019, 2020, 2018, so to speak. And it's the same thing with things like table of contents and jump links. Those have clear UX and SEO benefits. So we tend to recommend those for

most bloggers these days. And that's how little things like that become blanket recommendations to the industry as they've become. Because user experience plays a huge role in people coming to your site. So you can have the best host, you can have a site audit that you've nailed it. If you don't have good user experience, they will not come. No matter how much you build it, they will not come if they are not able to navigate the site that you've created. And I applaud you for putting in that Field of Dreams reference. So I just want you to know, very nice. Big deal. Big deal. Kevin Costner, Field of Dreams. So you brought up the UX point, which is exceptionally important. I like to think that everything that I focus on in my audits is from the usability standpoint. It's from the user. That's why ad companies hate me so much. Because there's very specific ads that I just do not recommend. I never recommend running Google Vineyard ads, which are these between the page popover ads that cover the entire page.

that cover the entire page. Users love them because, hey, they can have a high RPM. But, well, I mean, advertisers love them, publishers, because they can have a high RPM. Users hate them. They'll just get one of those. They're like, what the heck just happened? They're off your site incredibly fast.

We just don't run those. We also try not to run any ads above the fold of the page, especially on desktop. We want to make sure that the users see what our most important stuff is, which is our content. So I tend not to recommend any ads above the fold. We want to run all that. We want those to be triggered as we scroll down the page. Recipe cards. We tend to want to limit recipe cards ad to maybe three or four on desktop and five to seven at most scrolling on mobile because it's a better user experience not to be bombarded with all those ads. And I know it's tough for bloggers.

Well, I'm trying to make money here. And I'm like, yeah, definitely. And you are making money. You will make twice as money and you will do it twice as fast if you limit your ads to this lower density. And that's what we tend to find with all the testing we've done. Is that because people are just so overwhelmed when they come to your site with so many ads they're just leaving?

And so you're just not getting those repeat visitors. You're not getting people clicking around on your site, multiple page views, things like that. And does that impact, I guess, then your ability to rank for organic search? Well, it can. Certainly, there are various ad-specific practices that Google has denoted as negative SEO factors. And those involve things like violating interstitials. A violating interstitial is a pop-up that is incredibly abusive. It pops up on the first clip from Google. It covers the entire screen. It doesn't matter if there's a delay. If I come to a site and I scroll down the page from Google and I'm confronted with a

violating interstitial, what pops up covers up the entire page. That's not great. Google knows that. And they specifically call that out as something that they can and will penalize for. They also penalize for ads that play music or sound. And yet you'll see these rogue playing video ads all the time. You're going through a site and all of a sudden,

boom, you hear crying baby. And you're thinking, oh, what the heck? My kids are in college. That stuff is what you want to avoid as much as possible, especially when you're near 50. So again, ad companies are things that, we respectfully,

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While we're on the topic of ad companies, I would just like you to go on record for this because I think it will be helpful. We recommend to our students to wait for Mediavine or Adthrive. That is our... If you're going to get on an ad network, that's our recommendation. But we get asked often about any others. So you are in agreeance that you would wait. If ad revenue is part of your business plan, is there anything before media, like the qualification for Mediavine that you would recommend or endorse? I guess I should say.

And that's a good question. And my opinion on this has changed over the last two years. And the only other company that I would remotely recommend is SheMedia. SheMedia has significantly improved the speed of their ads. They've significantly improved their best practices. You will pass core web vitals with SheMedia. SheMedia has significantly improved the speed of their ads. They've

significantly improved their best practices. You will pass Core Web Vitals with SheMedia. If you feel that you don't want to wait for that $50,000 and you're at $25,000 or $30,000, then absolutely. It makes total sense to consider SheMedia. Just understand that's on you to limit the ads because SheMedia is not necessarily like Mediavine and AdThrive or they'll push a higher percentage of ads. They will not provide necessarily a lot of re-education on which ads you should avoid, but the ads will work. The ads will convert and you could absolutely do $20 to $40 RPMs very easily. So again, not against SheMedia at all. I think SheMedia works in specific situations. If I haven't mentioned SheMedia, AdThrive or Mediavine, well, it's not AdThrive now, it's Raptive. But it's SheMedia, Mediavine and Raptive. There's a reason for that. I don't recommend any others.

Makes sense. It does. And we get asked that question often. Sure. Sure. Often. So you brought up Core Web Vitals. Can you do an explanation of what exactly is Core Web Vitals and how a blogger can utilize them, how we can prepare for changes made with that? Right. So when we talk about Core Web Vitals, there's a very specific small amount of them involved and really three of them. And currently we have three. They're called LCP, which is Largest Contentful Paint. which is a largest contentful paint. It basically measures loading performance. So you provide a good experience by making sure that we load the first page starts loading within two and a half seconds, basically what they want. Then we have FID, which is first input delay, and it measures the interactivity of the page to the user. So we'd want to be able to actually see something

on the screen that we can interact with within very fast, 100 milliseconds or less would be what we want there. And then we have this thing called cumulative layout shift. And again, I already know most of you are falling asleep, so I apologize. But CLS measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, your CLS should maintain at about 0.1 or less, which means that if I go to a site, I don't want everything to jump around me. Jump, jump, jump around me. I don't want the graphics to jump out. I don't want any of the fonts to change positions. Everything should be pretty stable, especially above the fold as we're loading the page.

Now we're getting into a situation where as of basically March 12th, Google is going to replace one of the current metrics, Interaction to Next Page, next page or imp with a new metric called first input delay fid and they're going to it's just a way for them to be a little bit more detailed in how they measure that interactivity now most of these core web vitals i would say honestly all of them are influenced by your ad company this new one first input delay specifically, is greatly influenced by your ad company. So there are some people out there, notably NerdPress, probably one of the top, if not the top companies line up across the many dozens and hundreds of clients that they're currently supporting. And they're not there at the level that they need to be. So they've got a little bit of over a month left to improve upon that. But the good news is Core Web Vitals, not nearly as important as they used to be.

Google's been very clear, not a big ranking factor. Sometimes they'll come out and say it's not even a ranking factor, which is hilarious. So I have the opinion that we want to pass Core Web Vitals, but we shouldn't lose too much sleep over dropping NML. If you've got needs improvement, great. Not going to kill you. If you've got poor, then I would certainly fix that. The soonest you can afford to sign up with competent blog support, you should. I know it's expensive, but it's just like anything else. It is a cost of doing business expense. It's like hosting.

You need good blog support to build a business. So things, if you can afford it, you know, I know that iMark Interactive is out there. Grayson does a great job. There's other options out there. NerdPress is a little pricey for the average blocker, but it's also the best option out there because they will 100% ensure that you pass Core Web Vitals the minute you sign up.

And they keep you passing throughout your entire subscription, regardless of whether you're at the low package, the middle inner piece, or the high package that they offer. You're always going to get that level of customized

continual support to pass those metrics long term. So it is important and you certainly should do that because you've got nine blogs and seven of them are passing Core Web Vitals and the other two are not. That's a little bit of an advantage for those seven sites. And in the food blogging niche, we want as many advantages as we can. Yeah, it really does come down to what can you do? And if you can improve something, then doing so is just going to help you that much more. And what are some of the other things that if you do hire a blog support company, besides passing Corbett Vitals, what other kinds of examples of things do they typically help bloggers with?

Well, at the bare minimum, they tend to do an inventory when you're on board. So they'll do a plug-in on it. They'll make sure that you don't have any conflicts. They'll make sure that your security is robust. These days, if you don't have CAPTCHAs or any sort of two-factor authorization enabled on your blog, you definitely want to set that up. Hacking has never been more prevalent than it is now. They're going to harden your install. That's the most important thing. They're also going to make sure that backups are taken care of. Usually we want to have multiple backups. We want to have your local backup. We want to have a backup with your host and we want to have a

online backup somewhere. So usually tends to have multiple backups and your blog support will tend to basically supervise all that. They also just want to make sure that things are performing as they should. If you have an issue, I don't understand. I installed this plugin and all of a sudden all of my basically custom blocks disappear. That's a concern. If I'm using what we call patterns now is what they've renamed them. But if you're using patterns across your site and all of a sudden you've updated something and all of your patterns disappear, that's going to

be a headache for most bloggers. And it's going to be hard to troubleshoot that. Whereas if you've got blog support, it's just a matter of you submitting a query and they're going to fix it for you or a blog support request. So I'm all for that. I don't manage my own blogs because I'm lazy. So I can do that. NerdPress takes care of media-wise and any other blogs I would set up with them in the future, they're in good hands. So much of it comes down in blogging, it's down to your time and your knowledge versus money. And there's so many things we can do ourselves, but you can't do everything. Exactly. I'm all do everything. And it's called the time value of money, right? Yeah. We only have so much time and we only have so much money. If I can do something within 15 minutes myself, I'm going to do it because I can afford that. But if it takes longer

than that, my hourly is so high that I'm not going to do it. I'm going to have someone who's a professional do it for me, especially if it's going to require multiple hours. I can spend those multiple hours making a significant amount of money as opposed who's a professional do it for me, especially if it's going to require multiple hours. I can spend those multiple hours making a significant amount of money as opposed to hiring a professional at less than my hourly rate to do something that I'm not necessarily qualified to do. Last year, we went to a conference and Bonnie Christine was there and she talked about the zone of genius at that conference. And that has come to mind so often since it really hit home to me. And it's in alignment with what you're talking about.

If you're not working in your zone of genius, then you're not making as much money as you could be making. And you're almost wasting your time in the other areas that somebody else can come in and do that part of your business really, really well and almost effortlessly because it's their zone of genius. So not everybody's meant to be a blogger, just like everybody's not meant to be an auditor. You know, let the people do what they need to do. And then together, then we all succeed. Because when you hire people like you, Casey, then you learn the behaviors of the users. You

learn what's working, you learn what's not working, you learn how bloggers are finding success, and then you're turning it right around and saying, hey, this is working really well. Don't do this. Then together we can all grow. Together all tides rise. That's very true. Like I said, with the email conversation I had with the blogger today, I am not going to invest the time to become an email expert. So I have no desire to do that, but I know enough to know where the best experts are. So I'm going to make sure that I'm sending them to a vetted professional who knows what they're doing. And that's what we've done. And that's why I have vetted referrals who I've worked with for years and who allow, pick up the slack where I don't. And that's what an audit is for, is to make sure that we advance in the areas of specialty that we have some

experience in. And then we seek out help to support us in the areas that especially that we have some experience in. And then we seek out help to support us in the areas that we do not. Yeah. And I think that anybody listening right now who's feeling like, oh my gosh, I'm going to have to hire all these people just to run my blog. I think what we can encourage them with is that there are resources out there. You're probably not going to start out with all of them, but you can start adding one at a time. As things start to grow, you can pick adding one at a time as things start to grow. You can pick the next thing that's the most important to you, the most impactful to your business, and you can add that one on. And so as time goes on, the resources that you will be able

to utilize will grow and that will in turn just help your business. But you don't have to start out with it all on day one. Exactly. Exactly. This is, again, it's a marathon. It's not a sprint. We can't launch 100% perfectly every time. We have enumerations of your site that you're going to go through. And as you acquire more and better knowledge based upon your mistakes, we can improve our template that much going forward. It's the same way with audits. The audit that I offer now is nothing like the audit that I offered to the first food bloggers that I worked with in 2015, because SEO is not like it was in 2015. We've had complete paradigm shift in how Google classifies information. We've had a complete paradigm shift in how the search results are presented.

We have search features now that did not exist in 2015, and we have techniques and tools that no one ever dreamed of in 2015 that we can avail ourselves of use now. So everything's going to change, of course. When it comes to hosting your website, you want somebody you can trust. That's why we recommend BigScoots. Not only do we recommend BigScoots to our students, but we both use them for our own blogs as well. to our students, but we both use them for our own blogs as well. We love them because as a new or experienced blogger, their hands-on 24-7 support is invaluable. Anytime we've submitted a support request, we've gotten quick responses from a real person ready to help. Big Scoots has an uptime of

99.99%, meaning your site won't go down at critical times like with other hosting companies. With managed and shared plans, you'll be able to get support that fits your budget. Big Scoots is the perfect hosting company for bloggers. Use the link in our show notes to find a plan that works for you. Speaking of change, Google tends to change the game often. And what usually happens in the blogging world is something like this. Google gets an update, you head over to Facebook, you get in a Facebook group and bloggers. It's like mad chaos. And everyone's angry and everyone's freaking out and all the things. What is your advice when this happens? Because this is honestly

just part of blogging. I hate to say it, but Google does change the game. They keep us guessing. So what is the encouragement there when there are changes and when there are content updates, when all of a sudden your post that's been ranking for three years is no longer ranking? What next? Instead of the mass chaos, instead of the, you know, like what action tips? What's the call to action there? Like, hey, instead of freaking out, let's do this instead. I think the most important thing I would say there is don't take it personally. This is not a personal attack on you. This is not Google saying that you're a terrible blogger and you should get out of this immediately.

This is just Google saying that we've evaluated your site content. Maybe there's some issues. We've elevated someone else who might be a little bit better match. Maybe you were ranking for keywords that you initially should never have ranked for, and we've refined the intent to remove those keywords. That is literally the most and most common explanation for bloggers losing traffic is that you are generating traffic from keywords you should not have been ranking for anyway. The intent was not there. Google's refined the intent, and now they've tried to improve the search results with another result or another site that has a better or more focused resource. And I know that's tough for bloggers to hear. Well, you know, I thought this was a quality resource when, you know, maybe now the resource is still ranking, but it's just not ranking for these 20 specific keywords that you were killing it for initially. And you're now getting similar traffic numbers, but now you're finding that the traffic is actually converting better because it's reflective in the content on the page. So we just don't take it personally. The second thing is to really focus on understanding why Google is doing these things. It's not vindictive. Google is trying to, again, with everything they're doing, whether it's SGE, search generative experience, or any of this other stuff, is that their focus is on helping people more quickly find the content they're looking for.

The reason that we had this influx with the helpful content update of Reddit and Quora and these other results that started to dominate the search results is that, guess what, guys? It's because a majority of the population was appending Reddit and Quora to their query because they were so displeased with the search results they were getting for various queries. And so they found that they were just putting in, find me information on CoffeeMakers Reddit, because they found that you could go directly to Reddit and see a whole thread completely devoted to that topic from real world people talking about this issue. Google, of course, has access to all of those query informations. They have access to all that search history. And then when they refined and launched out the helpful content update, they realized that, hey, this is something that people are searching for in ever increasing percentages. We need to take advantage, well, not take advantage, but we need to change our search results to reflect that. Well, if you're a recipe publisher, that was very jarring because now you're seeing that

Google's not necessarily putting the recipe sites as high as they were previously, and they want to send people to a Reddit thread on banana cream pie and said, I get it. I know it's jarring, but you just have to put yourself in Google's position as to why they did this in the first place. You don't have to agree with it, but you have to understand why they did that, which is that again, they're trying to fulfill the bottom line UX of the data that they're receiving.

And sometimes that data goes against our longstanding beliefs that our content is the best option for the user. And you're going to find a lot of that happening in the coming months. As a matter of fact, I can tell you from personal experience that we have a significant amount of updates coming up and we'll call it the queue. I suspect that March will be an extremely busy month. There are multiple updates coming down

just from the information we've received from Google's personal liaison, which is Danny Sullivan, his search liaison account. Danny and I go way back. He always visits me at Comic-Con every year. He's a great guy. He used to be an SEO like us, and then he decided to retire. And Google took that opportunity to hire him as their search liaison because he already had so many close connections to the industry. And I think he does a good job with the information that he has. He can't tell us how Google works, but he can help us dispel myths. He can help us dispel ineffectivenesses or things that are just not correct. And I think he's trying to do the best that he can there. We've had recent issues over the last couple of weeks with carousels being dominated with crazy Pinterest descriptions and other things that

are not recipe related. Those have started to clear up now. We let Danny know about this and he escalated those cases to the appropriate teams and they fixed it. We have that to clear up now. We let Danny know about this and he escalated those cases to the appropriate teams and they fixed it. We have that. That's what we're using the conduit for. Google is just like anyone else. It's not perfect. It's going to take several updates of this helpful content update for them to really get the results right. And then we have, of course, SGE, which provides a completely new AI layer on top of our existing results, which some people are just completely scared of. But again, it's a user-first optimization. You can activate it yourself or you cannot activate it. It's totally fine. It's not a

default thing yet, but you should test it out. Think about the fact that you're number 10 in search results for Salisbury steak. Well, if you go in and activate AI and say, please serve me a recipe for Salisbury Steak, guess what? Google's not going to return the top three. They're going to go down the page and return you different examples. The other day, it was position number one, position five, and position 10. So hey, if you're position 10, that's a good reason to like SGE right there because you got in the top carousel there and you didn't have to do anything. So there are benefits to publishers. You're just not necessarily aware of what those benefits are right now. Can you tell us a little bit more about the SGE and as a blogger, what's the action on our part in order to participate in this, I guess, or to be

optimized for this? Right. So generally speaking, and again, or to be optimized for this. Right. So generally speaking, again, please feel free to throw a shoe at me if I get too technical here. But SGE basically breaks down a search generative experience, and it uses generative AI to break down the top SERP results into a single snippet at the top of the page. Really simple. Their goal is to dumb it down, you know, tell it to me like I'm a fifth grader. And the goal is to provide these quick answers to users involving complex questions. So they're breaking the content down into these single snippets that we can digest. Now, the whole point of SGE was to compete with the incredible 800-pound gorilla of ChatGPT that was released a couple years ago now. ChatGPT came came on the stage and it was just the most amazing thing anyone had ever seen using predictive text alignment guessing word after

word into text strings for you to answer basically everything you could possibly want to know the answer to and that scared the crap out of google and google had these ai information in the pipeline and they basically hot linked it. They basically, you know, guess the word is, is they fast tracked it. And now that's what we have. And this is an evolution in how Google works. Back in 2019, Google was using what are called bi-directional encoder representations from transformers. I try to say that five times fast, also known as BERT, B-E-R-T, in their search rankings. And the whole point of BERT was it was a huge change in search quality. It basically allows Google to understand words better and longer conversational searches.

And then Google decided to move to more powerful large language models or LLMs, which is where we are now. And they're using what is called a multitask uniform model or MUM, a model that is 1000 times more powerful than BERT, and is already across 75 different languages to power the main front end of their search these days. And it's used to understand user preferences, related interests. Basically, you go to Google now and describe a video that you remember watching, and boom, Google's able to find it for you. So funny, because I did this a while back, years ago. There was this HBO documentary. It was like three to five minutes. And it was about a guy that was accidentally hit by a car. Well, it wasn't accidentally. He was hit by a car. And he was a slacker. He hadn't done anything with his life. He was in his early 30s. And he goes down to a waiting room, which basically ends up being purgatory. And he finds out that heaven and hell is all based on a positive or

negative score. If you're plus 10, you're going to heaven. If you're negative one, you're going to hell. This guy was a negative 1800. And he was looking at the screen. He was like, oh man, I don't want to go to hell. So he took advantage of a commotion and escaped purgatory to get back in the elevator and go back to the world up above to see if he could improve his score. And hilarity results. For the next three to five minutes, he saves someone from being shot. He tango dances. Apparently, who knew? Tango dancing is worth plus 100 points. So you guys need to know that for the future. He did a couple other things. He apologized to people. He picked up a coin and gave it to a homeless person. Those little things allowed him to beat the system. When they tried to kill him again by hitting him with the car, he was at plus three and made it into heaven. So those are the kind of things I was like, man, I remember watching this in college, but I can't find it anywhere. And lo and behold, I just went to Google and typed in some various little summary and popped right up. That did not happen a year ago. I had trouble finding that a

year ago, but now I was able to find it. No problem. So understand that these things, the whole point of SGE is to kind of use more conversational search. And you're asking, what can we bloggers do? Is this something we should be concerned about? Is this something that we should be worried about? I can see the concern. I get it. This is your livelihood and new technology is strange. It's like the people who were get it. This is your livelihood and new technology is strange. It's like the people who were selling horses, then all of a sudden the car came along. Oh my God, we're never going to be able to sell another horse again. Well, that didn't happen because my wife has several. Thank you very much. Every time I make a mistake in my marriage,

my wife buys a horse and she buys the same color. So I have no idea how many we really have. They're all based. So it could be 10, could be a hundred, who knows. But it's the same thing here. So we have to, it's evolution. We have to change how we're approaching Google. We have to change how we're approaching our content. I would say that bloggers who are looking for how this is going to impact them and what they should plan for is focus on things that you know will always have a strong impact. That's good content. That's fast loading pages. That's limiting your ads. That's improving your UX. Then we want to make sure that we're using attractive images. Please do not fall into the allure of using stock images. Consider using AI images. There's nothing wrong with AI images as long as they're unique.

You can make those, but we really want to focus on attractive images. I'm a big believer in the food niche of using labeled photos of ingredients. Users love the crap out of this. Users like to go down shopping halls, you know, what's the term? Maybe it's shopping shelves or whatever, and pull ingredients off the shelf. I tell you what they don't like is stupid AI ones where you're just listing a photo of the ingredients. So don't do that. Don't cut corners like that. You're better than that. If your goal is to beat other bloggers,

look at these really high quality recipe photos that they're doing with all the ingredients laid out on a shelf and everything's nicely labeled. Hey, I get it. It's more work. That's what you're going to have to do. So we don't want to cut corners on that. And we also want to make sure that we're putting the most important words we want in our recipe in our titles. Make sure that we're writing detailed titles. Google is very clear that the longer the title, the less value each individual word is individually. So we kind of want to focus on making sure that our top keywords are towards the front. We don't want to necessarily stuff our titles with two or three different keywords we kind of want to focus on making sure that our top keywords are towards the front. We don't want to necessarily stuff our titles with two or three different

keywords. We really want to focus those in. And we want to make sure that we monitor our keywords and how they're being presented in SGE. We always want to capture the HTML so we can capture visual changes. We want to try to see the overlap in site resources. Maybe we can determine or distill changes with how Google is pulling their citations if we just spend a day looking at some of our top results. And that's what we're looking for. And if there's anyone on this call listening in the EU or other countries, you might not get the SGE stuff immediately. The impact is going to be on first markets.

EU tends to be kind of slower in that regard because there's so much more legality that has to go into the results over there. They're so tightly managed. But just be aware that this stuff is coming and that you want to be very cognizant of and make changes accordingly. Casey, as you've been talking for like the last 10 minutes here and there, there's one thing that keeps coming to mind. And that is that we live in a society in a world of instant gratification. And that's what users want. So as a blogger, I think when we are creating content, as things are shifting,

we have to ask ourselves, are they getting exactly what they want, what their intent is? Are they getting it as quick and as easily as possible? Are they having to search too much? And several different things that you've just said, those words just keep coming to mind. We live in a place in a world right now that we want the information now. If we have a thought, we want to be able to find it immediately. So I think that that is something I hope that other people were picking up as you were talking. Because I think that that's really, really wise advice making a play on your... I think that's wise media advice. There you go. There you go.

On your business in there. But I think that that's just true for a lot of things. And I think as bloggers, instead of... I love that you said, don't take it personally. I think many of us do. And you're right. That is not a personal attack. But it is asking ourselves, how do we go in and make this better? So one of the things I'm going to share this that I love about my husband, he's a very good employee.

And so he will often go into his employee, whatever they call it. I don't work in corporate. He goes in for his evaluation or whatever. And they're like, Kevin, you're doing an amazing job. You're amazing. And he's like, well, that's kind of not good enough. I need to leave with at least one thing that you can tell me that I can improve on. And he makes them give them a couple things to do. Puts them on the spot. Yes. And give me a couple things to do. Well, that's kind of the same thing

that Google is doing to us as bloggers is how can we improve our craft? How can we make sure that we're staying relevant? How can we maybe find a brand new group of people who can find our content relevant? Because maybe the people who were coming to our sites, like you said, maybe it wasn't actually tracking. Maybe they weren't our ideal reader. And so it's just a way for us to continually improve and stay with our content like we have to keep up on our content we have to keep looking at it you don't create it once and then and then forget it but how can we continue to take this content that we've created and make it the best that it can be right and what's the delay on this how long does it take for these

episodes to go live i know it's about the 15th of the month right now. Do these go live pretty quickly? Your episode is going live March 26th is when it goes live. Okay. So March 26th, we'll have already multiple updates guaranteed. So if you're listening to this now in March, I'm going on vacation the first two weeks of March. So you can absolutely guarantee that there'll be multiple updates the first two weeks of March. So that's what I expect will happen. Yeah, you know, maybe we can get Amy and Jennifer to move this up a little bit, but we'll see. But the point of this is that there's always going to be updates. It's not going to change. How we react to those updates is what needs to change. Some Google updates help us. Some Google updates hurt us. I've never seen a blogger ever who wasn't impacted by at least one update or more.

That's just how it goes. If you're concerned about that, focus on the things that we have more control over. How big is my email list? Am I really working to build that up? Blogger today, 500 people on our email list, unacceptable, especially for a blogger who's been working for six years. Should have had 50,000 people on that email list by now. So those are the kind of things that we need to work on because those are things we really own. Build up that email list. Build up your social accounts whenever you can. Try not to focus on more than three networks.

That'd be a good idea. Understand that sometimes Google's gonna be a great team and sometimes it's not. We have to take lessons from that and adjust accordingly. Thank you so much. This was so much. This was so insightful. This was so good. Well, I appreciate you having me. If I can do anything for you in the future, please let me know. And just word of advice for audience here, don't buy horses.

Incredibly expensive. I was trying to get my wife to become a race car driver. That's how more less expensive it would be than to buy horses. So just be aware of that. That is hilarious. Oh, gosh. Casey, before we sign off here, can you please let people know where they can find you and connect with you? Absolutely. You can find me through my website MediaWise. That's M-E-D-I-A-W-Y as in yellow, S-E. Look at the Contact Us page. There's usually an update there about what month I'm booking audits for. I usually try to keep that open. I usually have anywhere from a four to six month wait, but I can assure you I'll give you plenty to do while you wait in the audit

queue. Definitely look for me at Food Bloggers Central, which is one of the largest food and lifestyle groups on Facebook. I'm in there all the time answering questions. I'm unable to go to this year's tastemaker conference in Chicago because I'm taking a trip to Norway. But hopefully those of you will have gone to that this year and had a really good experience. And hopefully we can do something next year. And I'm in San Diego and I like beer and pork goods. So if you ever make it into town, let me know and we'll hit a craft bar together. Thanks so much for having me, ladies. Appreciate it. Thanks, Casey. Fantastic. Thank you.

Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you'd like to continue the conversation about blogging with us, please find us on Instagram at Spark Media Concepts. You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter where we share blogging tips and inspiration. You can sign up by finding the link in the show notes. For those of you who are ready for the next step and want to start your own blog,

join the waitlist for the Ultimate Blog Bootcamp. The link to join the waitlist is also in the show notes. Go out and make today a great day.