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Curious about the new brand associations in Google Search Console? We are going to talk about what they are in today’s tip.

Hello! And thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

This new feature lets you link your Google Search Console account to any other Google property (Analytics, YouTube, etc.) and “ can unlock more functionality for your site.” This feature helps Google associate your entities together. Every webmaster should go ahead and associate all of your Google properties together. There’s more about the new feature in the Google Search Console help files.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

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Do you know much of your direct traffic is actually Google Discover?

Are you suspicious that your direct traffic might instead be Google Discover traffic? Learn more about how to get a sense of this in today's tip.

Hello! And thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Unfortunately, Google Discover is recorded as “Direct” in your analytics, though you can add a filter to your Google organic traffic in Google Analytics to find out how much. You can go to your traffic report, flip to Google as your traffic source, add the secondary dimension of Direct Session, and add the following: “include” direct session containing “no.” 

If you line up your Discover reporting from Google Search Console and it matches direct spikes in Google Analytics - that’s probably the source of your direct traffic spike. Also, until last month, when a user opens a Chrome tab on Android or iOS to use Google Discover, it was *not* shown in the Google Search Console reporting, and now will be.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

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Hello! And thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Google’s John Mueller said they could recognize if a site has a good reputation on a specific topic area. Websites should work to build a reputation within a particular topic area. Additionally, I’ve seen via the various search algorithm updates over the years that being too broad topically for a website could be more challenging from a ranking perspective.

If you’re curious about your current topical authority, it turns out that you can get a sense of your topical authority by looking at topical citation flow in Majestic. Majestic looks at the backlink profile that your website has had based on the types of websites linking to you.

So that’s your quick tip for today. If you are working on a brand new website, you need to be aware that you will need to build your authority and expertise in a specific niche topic. 

You do this through your overall real-life marketing efforts and by strategically building backlinks from websites that cover topics (or closely related topics) you’re an expert in. 

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

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Hello! And thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

So today’s tip is just going to be a quick rundown of the new tools and resources that I’ve discovered and bookmarked. Let’s get into it.

• I found a great case study around strategically allowing indexing of your faceted navigation based on search volume to increase organic traffic. 
• I also found case study from Deloitte on how improvements in mobile site speed positively affect a brand’s bottom line.
• Spark Content Optimizer. A quick (and free) one page at a time SEO audit tool (and a Chrome browser plugin). 
• Here’s a  software option called SpeedCurve to measure the Web Core Vitals for your site via synthetic testing. 
• Free Google Search Console Data Exporter - which allows you to export all of your GSC query data - code free. 
• Analytics Mania has some great Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager starter views on their YouTube channel that I would recommend.
• Labrika at Labrinka.com- This one was new to me.. machine learning-powered all-in-one SEO tool. It includes page-specific, machine learning powered content suggestions. 
• Ahrefs’ new Site Explorer 2.0. You can use it to show changes in pages and keywords impacted by algorithm updates.

That’s your roundup of new tools and resources. 

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

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Let’s talk about Keyword Research Tips For YouTube Videos

Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

This tidbit comes from the YouTube Creator Insider channel, where members of YouTube’s search and discover team answer questions from users. 

In their video about search and discovery, they shared the following. 

Here are their three recommended tactics for keyword research:

1. Audience Insights
2. Google Trends
3. Competitor Analysis

Audience Insights are found within YouTube Analytics and show creators what other videos your audience is watching. Smart optimizers would note the titles and thumbnails of those videos to see if there are enhancements that you can make to your videos.

Google Trends (filtered for YouTube), which most SEOs should be familiar with helps you spot trending topics in general which you can apply to your YouTube video creation. 

And Competitive analysis involves looking at which videos appear in YouTube search when you search. You should analyze how your competitors are optimizing the labeling of their video and their video format and how they are working to increase their overall watch time and engagement. 

I would also add that tools like Ahrefs and Keyword.io actually help you query the YouTube database and show you monthly averages for queries on YouTube.

So that’s your tip for today. Three areas you can use for keyword research for YouTube videos.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

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We are going to talk today about all of the ways you can find URLs with backlinks to your site that might need redirects during website migrations.

Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

All week I’ve been living in spreadsheets over the past month-  tracking down the links that were missed during the original round of redirect mapping for a client’s recent website migration. This client site has been migrated quite a few times over the years and has seen various domain changes as well.

Here are all of the places that I’ve discovered additional backlinks that need mapping:

Ahrefs backlink tools - particularly the best pages by links report. I also spent quite a bit of time looking at the HTTP version of the site to make sure that I’ve captured everything.

SEMRush - particularly the ability to go back in time.

Bing Webmaster Tools - it turns out that Bing never forgets your URL structure, and you can find that in their Site structure reporting.

In all of these reports, if I spot a new domain that looks like it would potentially be an earlier version of this site, I've put that new domain in the various SEO tools to see if those sites have backlinks (or are ranking for some reason).

I’ve also pulled URLs that are still ranking from the old domains in Google Search Console and Bing webmaster tools to troubleshoot any URLs that do not have active redirects or were missed. 

And I’ve gone into Google Analytics for the old site and have pulled URLs that are still getting human traffic that need redirects.

And when I load the final result URL, I use the Chrome Redirect Path plugin to make sure that the redirects are true 301 redirects and not some other version. I’ve also eyeballed the page, and many tools will only execute the first redirect, which could be a 301 but at the next hop, the URL could resolve into a 404. 

You want to make sure that your redirects are 301s and that they resolve to a page that is indexable, it’s not blocked by a meta noindex tag or a robots.txt directive. I quickly spot-check these types of issues with the SEO Minion Chrome plugin (my current favorite plugin).

Of course, you can do some of this checking in bulk with ScreamFrog, but sometimes you just need to look at what page is rendered to make sure that the final redirect makes sense.

So that’s your tip for today. Be a true investigator to map all of those redirects post-migration!

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

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Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Just last week a client asked me where the best place to put an XML sitemap file was, which made me curious as to whether there are best practices for robots.txt file locations as well.

When it comes to an XML sitemap file, the best practice is to have it at the root of the domain it covers, and usually, it’s at domain.com/sitemap.xml. BUT if you list the XML sitemap file and submit it via Google Search Console, Google doesn’t care where it’s located. So to repeat, you could load the sitemap file up into a subfolder, submit it to Google Search Console, and any URLs in there can be for any verified path on your account.

Related to robots.txt files, you also can host it anywhere, just as long as it 301 redirects to your domain (Source).

So that’s your tip for today - workarounds if you can’t host either your XML sitemap file or robots.txt in the “ideal” locations.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

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Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

So I wanted to share some great insights on our increasing mobile use here in the US from App Annie.

The highlights:

• We collectively spent 4.2 hours on our phones in 2020 (a 20% YOY increase).
• This increase is the greatest in the Gen X/Baby Boomer dynamic.

And as a reminder, Googlebot is crawling mobile-first, and all desktop-only content will be dropped sometime in March 2021 (so this month). 

Mobile friendly includes ensuring that your site is:

• Fast loading
• Elements don’t shift as the page loads
• Elements are clickable with a thumb, and 
• Images that are viewable/expandable on a mobile phone. 

I also check to ensure that my clients have navigation that is crawlable with JS turned off with their responsive websites (which is a common issue). 

To check to see if you have any pages that are not rendered to show well on a mobile device, you can use Screaming Frog by turning on the “Rendering ->JavaScript” mode under the spider configuration tab and turn on rendered page screenshots. You can also view mobile usability errors in Google Search Console. 

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

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Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Today’s tip is from Brody Clark. (or @BrodieSEO on Twitter)

There are now two reports in Google Search Console that reports on your site’s news performance, but they measure different things.

The first report is under the Search Results tab where you can filter to news queries. That will show you results returned in the “news” tab and will show a sampled version of these queries. 

The second separate Google News report you can see on the right rail inside Google Search Console is traffic from news.google.com or the Google news app. Both serve the user results based on their interest profile so the report for you as a webmaster does not have query data. 

Note that the top stories carousel in Google search also has news, but you can’t pull that reporting from Google Search Console.

So that’s your takeaway from today - keep in mind what each report measures if you’re working to improve your Google News performance.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

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Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Let’s talk today about how the big discovery algorithms might be using aspects of your voice to personalize to you and the impact on marketers.

Spotify was granted a patent (originally filed in 2018) for technology that analyzes listeners’ voices and background noise to suggest content based on their mood, gender, age, accent, or even social setting. 

The patent outlines that it uses the speaker’s pitch to determine gender and age and causes like the intonation, stress, and rhythm of speech to potentially determine specific emotions or personality attributes. 

They can use this information to personalize music recommendations in real-time and they are most likely going to leverage this data for the voice assistant that they are developing. 

It’s worth noting that Google and Amazon have both filed patents using the data provided by voice responses in similar ways, and YouTube allows you to search via voice as well.

This is why for my clients that have users who are searching during times of high emotion, I’ve encouraged them to revisit their personas and how they are presenting that information. We know a lot about how different emotional states impact our ability to view and interact with online information. I specifically encourage those clients to look at their CTAs and meta descriptions to make sure they are addressing the emotional state of the user. 

So that’s your tip for today. If you’re doing persona work, consider the emotional state of the user.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode.