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YouTube issued guidance to creators and marketers on the best times to upload videos for maximum reach. For news, trends, or content with a shorter lifespan, it’s best to post as soon as possible. However, if you’re sharing evergreen content, the platform suggests posting at whatever time suits you prefer. Live videos. To maximize reach with live videos, YouTube advises going live when your analytics chart indicates that most of your audience will be available to watch. Off-hour posting. YouTube Liaison Officer Rene Ritchie mentioned on X that if you post during “off hours,” like the early morning, the initial boost in views might be slower. Therefore, it’s important to adjust your expectations. However, he pointed out that over a few weeks or a month, the total views usually even out, regardless of the initial posting time. Why we care. This guidance provides valuable insight into easily increasing reach by posting more strategically. However, if your content isn’t time-sensitive, YouTube confirmed that you don’t need to stress about researching optimal posting times– meaning one less thing to worry about in your content strategy. What YouTube is saying. YouTube Product Lead Todd Beaupre said in a video shared on X:
Deep dive. Read our guide on how the YouTube algorithm works for more information. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/CefMKzt YouTube advised creators and marketers against deleting videos from the platform. Additionally, the app strongly suggested avoiding making videos private. The Google-owned site explained that removing content from the app or restricting access could disrupt your channel’s connection to people who have watched that video and negatively impact ranking. What YouTube is saying. YouTube Product Lead Todd Beaupre said on X:
What this means. In simpler terms, YouTube’s algorithm recommends videos within its search results by connecting the dots between each upload. When you take away one of those dots (aka video on your channel), it is a bit like taking away a jigsaw piece. This means deleting or hiding content could lower your overall channel ranking and limit reach because it disrupts the pattern of your content. Why we care. It might be tempting to delete or hide content you’re not happy with, however, unless the video is really bad or harmful, it’s best to keep it on your channel. Otherwise, you could end up hurting your channel’s overall ranking. Deep dive. Read our guide on how the YouTube algorithm works for more information. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/reQT9Cx Google Product Studio is now available to merchants based in Australia and Canada. Previously, the suite of free, AI-powered tools was only accessible in the U.S., however, Google has confirmed it is planning to roll out the feature to more markets throughout the year. What is Product Studio? Product Studio is a tool you can use to create unique, high-quality product imagery across your marketing channels. Its tools can be used to generate scenes, increase image resolution and edit backgrounds. Why we care. Creative can be a headache for many SMBs, but Product Studio’s free tools offer a potential solution.They enable quick testing of diverse creative strategies, saving valuable time and resource. Getting started. You can access Product Studio’s tools in Merchant Center Next or in the Google and Youtube app on Shopify. Deep dive. Read Google’s announcement in full for more information. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/AnjWg3h Your âpretty goodâ rankings look pretty good. Except theyâre not. At least, not when you dig beneath the surface a bit. Youâll quickly realize that the âpretty goodâ ranking is actually more of a mirage, an oasis in a sea of fierce competition that means youâll unlikely, if ever, get to drink from the firehose of traffic you so desperately seek. Hereâs how to uncover whether your âpretty goodâ rankings will likely drive revenue soon, or whether youâll need to fix some short-term pain to achieve the long-term ROI you deserve. Problem 1: Top 10 isnât good enough â top ~3-5 minimum should bePull up your current organic keyword rankings. And feast your eyes on all these âpretty goodâ rankings youâre picking up for the highly relevant keywords you seek. Looking pretty good on the surface, right? Picking up a couple of top 10 rankings and then more top 20 to 30 rankings should bode well for the future. The keyword in the last sentence is âshould.â Letâs look again, expanding the list out and then try to focus on what you donât see. Give up? No top five rankings! But why is this bad? Two reasons:
Ranking in the top 10 is a nice start. But itâs not good enough because position 10 probably gets the same sliver of traffic that position 20, 30 or 100+ might â which is zero. And thatâs a bad sign â especially when combined with these next few problems. Problem 2: Your âgoodâ content isnât actually aligned with what searchers actually want.Big brands catch all the breaks. They can publish mediocre content on their giant site and typically do âpretty well.â Everyone else? Canât. Hereâs why. Letâs take another random SERP example. Say your current page is an opinion article, a how-to or even a landing page. Now, letâs look at the actual content types currently ranking: Uh-oh! Your article might be written well by real subject experts. (None of that surface-level AI garbage). It might be full of the technical babel-speak your ICPs adore. But, it ainât gonna rank as-is! Not likely and not anytime soon. So, while it might be âgood enoughâ for top 20 right now, thatâs in no way a guarantee itâs ever gonna see the top coveted positions 3-5 that actually deliver 80%+ of results for this keyword. Problem 3: Keyword cannibalization means on-page optimization is off, tooAnalyzing underperforming content with a balanced scorecard will immediately make some of these problems more obvious. Because when you lack topical authority (little-to-no top five rankings) and have search intent + content mismatch issues, youâll often also see keyword cannibalization (or âpretty goodâ rankings for a relevant keyword that makes it seem like youâre on the right track, yet will almost always hold you back long-term). This is a bad sign. Because generally speaking:
So even if you have one piece of content picking up multiple âpretty goodâ keyword rankings, youâre highly unlikely to ever rank well enough (top five) for those additional keywords. (Unless youâre seeing lots of SERP overlap.) The easiest way to spot this issue is when you see a good, in-depth article thatâs optimized well for the primary keyword target and yet optimized poorly for the secondary or tertiary ones youâre now cannibalizing. In other words, this: Great content, on-page optimization and search intent alignment for one keyword. Yet, double-checking on-page optimization for the secondary cannibalized keywords now makes this content ordinary by comparison. There are lots of missing âtop topicsâ or semantically related concepts that should be covered in this article. And âaverageâ optimization overall relative to the competitors whoâre almost always likely to continue out-ranking you if this issue isnât addressed. These three problems covered so far are extremely common but focused almost exclusively on how well youâre doing keyword research + content strategy. In other words, all factors are 100% in your control and are already on your own site. And yet, we havenât even touched on off-site strength issues! Problem 4: Your competition is incredibly fierceKeyword difficulty (KD) is a biased, incomplete metric at best â and a completely misleading or lying one at worst. Look it up in nearly every keyword research tool. What you see is not a true measure of competitorsâ content quality or domain strength but primarily the quantity of referring domains to each content page ranking in the top 10. This is a giant problem because youâll see false positives. Youâll be seduced into selecting a keyword or topic because the âKDâ says âeasyâ or âlowâ when itâs anything but that. Take a gander at the screenshot below for one of these âlower KDâ keywords, and now parse out the number of referring domains from the actual brand and domain strength of the current top 10: Recapping the above screenshot illustrates:
I mean, câmon. It should be immediately obvious already. Search is a zero-sum game. For you to win, others have to lose. That means you need to unseat these competitors. (See âProblem 1â above.) And so what are the chances of doing just that, on this SERP, with these competitors? Especially if youâre not already a giant brand (household category leader + DR 90+)? Slim to none. Or next to impossible. Either way, itâs a terrible SERP to compete for most mortal brands. And yet, weâre still not done unpacking this SERP competition angle just yet, either. Problem 5: The quality and quantity of referring domains are out of your leagueNow, letâs put all these problems together. Thereâs usually not just one reason youâre not ranking in the top five. Thereâs lots of them playing out on the same keyword + content match youâre trying to improve. And that all becomes a lot more challenging when facing an arms race in referring domains. The SEO Catch-22 most donât like to acknowledge is that the best-converting keywords on the web (i.e., the ones that generate the most revenue for your business) are also the most competitive and difficult to rank for (i.e., which means itâs going to require a bigger investment and take longer to show meaningful results). Once again, letâs look at an example to visualize these issues: The brands are big, domain ratings are high and the content is good and well-aligned with search. Likewise, the quality and quantity of referring domains in the top five are also extremely strong. This means that, in an ideal world, youâll need:
All before ever writing a single word for this topic! Otherwise, youâre just setting yourself up for failure (or at least, months-to-years of waiting and getting yelled at by bosses, investors, spouses and more). Donât settle for mediocre rankingsâPretty goodâ rankings are just that. Theyâre a decent jumping-off point. But theyâre not always a good sign that:
Pretty good rankings are like a mirage. They seem nice on the surface. They could be a good sign. Or, they could actually hint at deeper problems that will continue to sacrifice results for months and years to come if theyâre not fixed ASAP. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/LkUtfY1 Google added new details about how to reference or link a specific 3D model to a specific product using product structured data. The new code samples are in the Google product structured data documentation. The 3D model. Here is a screenshot of the code sample from the structured data documentation: Multiple images. The reason Google added this is because sometimes Google was unable to know which image the 3D model is referencing, especially when you have multiple images on the same product page. Google wrote, “Sometimes 3D models appear on pages with multiple products and are not clearly connected with any of them. This markup lets site owners link a 3D model to a specific product.” Why we care. If you have been using 3D models and AR images on your product pages, you may want to review this new code sample to ensure that you are linking your 3D models to the correct product images on your website. Google has been showing 3D images for a while now in Google Search. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/ywFdVZk App store optimization (ASO) is a bit of a mystery for many SEOs. So, let’s start with the basics. While SEO is geared toward improving website rankings on search engines like Google, ASO focuses on optimizing mobile apps for stronger visibility and performance within the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. But there’s a lot of research and strategy that SEOs can carry from organic search into ASO campaign research. By understanding how some critical SEO research components translate into ASO planning – and implementing them effectively into your app strategy – you can improve your chances of achieving stronger app store visibility, stronger app visibility on Google and increased downloads. Some SEOs put organic search into two simple buckets: on- and off-page SEO. I’m going to do something similar and break down my SEO and ASO synergy tips into two different areas of opportunity:
Discover ways to leverage your strategic SEO thinking and research skills for ASO below. App landing pagesWe’re all familiar with landing pages and their importance in organic search. However, many brands underestimate the importance of dedicated landing pages for their app when it comes to ASO. They simply add Apple App Store and Google Play Store buttons to pages across their site. These brands miss out on the benefits of creating a dedicated app landing page. Let’s look at four reasons why creating an app landing page is important and how to use your SEO skills to maximize your ASO success and learnings. 1. Highlight your value propositionEven if you’re an app-based business, your website is an essential touch point in your customer’s journey. It’s an opportunity to have a dedicated place for website users to discover your app, learn about its features and value and easily download it. Here are a few examples from Vrbo, KAYAK and SoFi where they highlight the benefits of using their apps: Your website is also a great place to highlight some curated social proofing, such as app awards, reviews and testimonials. This is an essential strategy in today’s E-E-A-T-based search world. Here’s another example from Priceline: 2. Test and learnLeverage your app landing page to run tests and gather helpful data. How? Make feature descriptions clickable so you can track clicks or use heatmapping software like CrazyEgg or Hotjar to understand which features viewers are most interested in. 3. Own your branded SERP resultsAn app landing page gives you another owned asset that can take up valuable SERP real estate for branded queries. For example, there’s a clear difference between SERP real estate for brands like Centr and Tone It Up (which do not have an app landing page) and Peloton (which does). Perhaps if Centr had a dedicated app landing page, they could outrank the negative press they’re getting on Reddit. 4. Internal linkingInternal linking is one of the most effective and under-appreciated SEO tactics. It’s low lift, easy to implement and we typically see great results from internal linking at our agency. That’s why it’s also a tactic you should use to boost your ASO campaigns and app page authority. If you want your app to build authority and visibility for competitive non-branded terms, internally linking to your app landing page is a great way to help build those signals. Here’s an example of this on Western Union’s blog: This strategy helps build topical authority for Western Union’s app within the competitive money transfer space. App listing pagesApp listing pages display each app’s features and other information as you browse the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. These pages are even more important to your ASO strategy than your app landing page, as their contents directly impact your app store rankings. They’re what a prospective customer will see before clicking to download your app. They contain several key elements, like ratings and user reviews, previews of what your app looks like and your app’s metadata. Let’s look at four ways your SEO skills can maximize your app listing page’s performance. 5. Research and competitive analysisTools like Ubersuggest, Ahrefs and Semrush are useful for your ASO strategy, just like SEO. These platforms can help you check organic traffic, keywords in your Apple App Store listing pages and backlinks to your Google Play store listing. Here are the same stats for a competitor, Wise, shown on Semrush: Why is this information helpful? It gives you the data you need to understand how your app listing pages are performing on Google vs. competing apps so you can adjust your strategy if necessary. Whether you’re working on an SEO or ASO campaign, it’s always critical to keep an eye on competitors to understand how you’re stacking up, what advantages you have (and want to maintain) and where your opportunities lie. 6. Apple App Store hidden keywordsHow people find your Apple App Store page via Google search can help inform how they find your app directly by searching in the store. An ASO manager who also knows how to tap into SEO research to inform iOS hidden keyword targeting is a much stronger asset to your campaign. App downloads may come mostly from branded queries for several brands, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lack of opportunity to drive more app visibility and downloads from non-branded keywords. Here’s a case study from our agency where we lifted non-branded keyword traffic and boosted installs by 57%: The 57% increase our client saw for non-branded app downloads came from a strategy rooted in SEO principles. Most of the campaign’s ASO keyword ideas came from the client’s website, including their app landing page. Focusing on basic information and strategies like keyword-level data and metadata restructuring enabled success in a highly competitive environment. 7. ASO meta optimizationFinding keywords where your competitors have stronger visibility also gives you a lot of consideration for optimizing your ASO metadata across the Apple App and Google Play stores. For example, you see below that Remitly’s App Store listing is ranking number 1 on Google for “wire transfer app,” while Western Union is ranking number 10. When looking at each of their listings, you can see Remitly uses “wire” in their App Store description, while Western Union does not. Remitly: Western Union: Similar to traditional SEO, if you want your store listing page to rank well on Google for certain terms, you must understand what people are searching for and ensure the right keywords are integrated into your store listing metadata. 8. BacklinksWhile backlinks aren’t a factor in the Apple App Store, they are in the Google Play Store. Conducting competitive backlink research and finding ways to gain mentions across the web is a task you should be doing for SEO and ASO. Here are a few tips to get you started with backlinking strategy. An effective competitive conquesting strategy starts by researching round-ups and listicle articles mentioning your industry’s apps. Try to find articles where your app isn’t listed and pitch the author why they should include it and link to your app listings. When you reach out, you’ll provide the same information for your app in the same format and with the same details as the other apps in the article. PR pitching Taking the PR angle has the same result as competitive conquesting, except you’re not trying to get into existing articles. Your goal with PR pitching is to provide the latest information about your app for a journalist to include in a new article. Instead of targeting the best fitness apps, you could focus on different audiences or timely use cases, such as the best fitness apps for women or the best fitness apps for beginners. With this approach, you’re creating a reason why a journalist would want to write this story. Be sure to include data on why the story is relevant now and pitch it a few months ahead of the theme. For example, you could pitch your app as one of the best fitness apps for women in March so a journalist has time to finalize their story before Women’s Health Month in May. Forums and discussions Answer consumer questions related to your app in forum communities like Quora and Reddit. Link directly to where users can find your app in the app stores in your answers. This helps consumers with their direct questions and increases the app’s chance of ranking in the forums and discussions featured within Google SERPs. Harness SEO basics to boost your app downloadsWhile ASO is quite a different practice than SEO, many principles apply to both disciplines. If you’re struggling to boost your app’s performance, taking things back to basics may be a good idea. Approach your app store listing pages and landing page from an SEO perspective and improve their fundamental aspects like keyword optimization. Couple this with your other sound ASO tactics and you may be surprised by your new download numbers. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/f7FA5vM Mikhail Parakhin is stepping down from his role as the head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising and may be transitioning to a new role within Microsoft. “Mikhail Parakhin, head of the company’s Bing search engine and advertising businesses, will exit those roles and look for a new position, a week after the software giant named Mustafa Suleyman to oversee consumer artificial intelligence work and asked Parakhin to report to him,” Bloomberg reported. Mustafa Suleyman. Last week Microsoft announced that Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind, a company Google acquired years back, would now be leading up Microsoft’s AI efforts as the CEO of Microsoft AI. “Mustafa will be EVP and CEO, Microsoft AI, and joins the senior leadership team (SLT), reporting to me. I’ve known Mustafa for several years and have greatly admired him as a founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product maker, and builder of pioneering teams that go after bold missions,” Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft wrote. Mikhail Parakhin. Mikhail Parakhin was suppose to report up to Mustafa Suleyman but it seems like now that won’t be happening. Mikhail Parakhin is stepping down from his role and the head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising. An internal email secured by The Verge says:
Mikhail Parakhin was leading up a lot of Microsoft’s latest AI efforts around Bing Chat, now known as Copilot and that integration into Microsoft products like Bing Search, Office and other services and devices. Why we care. With Mikhail Parakhin stepping down, you may expect to see changes to the direction of these efforts in Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising. It is unclear if Mikhail Parakhin will be leaving Microsoft completely or switching to a new role. Personally, I loved how transparent and accessible Parakhin was with the industry. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/0N3l1BE A fast-loading website provides a good user experience and helps increase conversion rates. Google also recently updated its documentation to confirm that Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems. Ready to make your website fast? Here are seven tips to help you analyze your site speed and identify potential optimizations. 1. Analyze a network request waterfall for your websiteA request waterfall visualization can tell you exactly what happens when opening your website. For example:
This information can serve as the basis for identifying the highest-impact optimizations. You can run a free page speed test on your website to generate a waterfall view. Request waterfalls provide a lot of detail and can look intimidating. Let’s break down exactly what you need to look for. To interpret a waterfall, look for three key milestones in the loading process of a website:
Unless there are redirects, the HTML document will be the first request in the waterfall. Before the TTFB milestone, no other resources can start loading and no content can become visible. Therefore your server TTFB represents a minimum value for the FCP and LCP scores. Next, we’ll look for render-blocking requests. These are requests for important additional resources that need to load before page content becomes visible. In this example, we can see that there are four render-blocking CSS stylesheet requests. Once these files have finished loading we can see the first content appearing in the rendering filmstrip in the top right. To optimize the FCP you can:
For example, in the example above we can see that the app.css file is over 100 kilobytes large. This can take some time to download, especially on slower mobile data connections. To speed up requests, you’ll also want to look at what servers the browser is connecting to when opening the page. A new connection is needed for every new domain that a resource is loaded from, and each new server connection takes some time to establish. You can identify server connections in the waterfall by looking for three small rectangles in front of the main request. These rectangles represent the network round trips needed for the DNS lookup, TCP connection and SSL connection. Finally, we’ll look at the LCP milestone. If the largest content element is an image this can usually be clearly seen by looking for the “LCP” badge in the waterfall view. After the LCP image has been downloaded the browser quickly starts updating the page and displaying the image. You can see the LCP metric marked by the red line in the waterfall view. To make it easier to analyze the request waterfall data, many performance tools like DebugBear also include automated page speed recommendations. 2. Load the most important content firstWhen loading a website, less important content shouldn’t take bandwidth away from more important requests. In the example above, lazy loading is applied to the LCP image. That means the browser won’t prioritize this resource. Once the page starts rendering the browser realizes that the image is actually important and the request priority is changed. As a result, the image only starts loading late, and other requests also use up network bandwidth at that point. We can see that by looking at the dark blue lines in the request inside the waterfall. The dark blue lines show when response data is received for each request. To ensure an LCP image is prioritized you can:
3. Reduce download sizes of key early requestsLarger files take longer to download, as bandwidth is limited and loading a large amount of data requires multiple network round trips between the client and the server. For example, this screenshot shows a large CSS file: AWhen we look into it more deeply we can see that it contains many images that have been embedded as text. That means that loading these images blocks rendering, even though they are not important for the page and may not be used at all. To reduce file sizes you can:
4. Compare real user data to lab dataGoogle provides real user data for most websites as a part of their PageSpeed Insights tool. Comparing this data to the results of their lab-based Lighthouse test can help you better understand what’s happening on your website. The lab test result typically reports worse metrics than real user data. That’s because the Lighthouse test uses a slower network connection and CPU than most visitors will have. Two common reasons your lab testing results are faster than real user data:
5. Check how your website performance has changed over timeThe real user dataset that Google provides based on the Chrome User Experience report (CrUX) also includes historical data, even though it isn’t reported in PageSpeed Insights. Seeing how your website performance has changed over time lets you see when a problem was introduced and identify the root cause. To view historical Core Web Vitals data for your website you can run a DebugBear Core Web Vitals test and then check the Web Vitals tab for a 25-week trend. Each CrUX data value covers a rolling 28-day time period, if an issue occurs it will gradually impact your scores over the following four weeks. 6. Set up continuous website speed monitoringIf you want to catch regressions (i.e., a change was deployed that had a negative impact on website speed) as soon as they happen you need to set up page speed monitoring for your website. DebugBear is a monitoring service that provides two types of monitoring:
Setting up monitoring for your website will alert you whenever there’s a regression and then compare the data before and after to identify the cause of the slowdown. 7. Look at metrics beyond load timeWebsite performance isn’t just about the initial loading speed as measured by the LCP metric. Google also considers how quickly a website responds to user interactions, as measured by the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric that became a Core Web Vital on March 12. While LCP mostly depends on what’s loaded over the network, INP looks at CPU processing and how long it takes before the page can process an interaction and update the UI to be ready for the next interaction. Measuring INP requires user interaction, which makes it difficult to test in a lab environment. There are some lab-based INP testing tools like the INP Debugger, but they can’t identify all possible user interactions or tell you which elements users interact with most often. To improve Interaction to Next Paint you need real user monitoring (RUM) data. This data can tell you:
ConclusionTo improve your website speed you first must understand what’s slowing it down. Start by running a free page speed test. A website monitoring tool helps you keep track of Core Web Vitals over time and get notified of regressions. You can start a free 14-day trial of DebugBear here. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/gIFiRm4 Instagram updated how hashtags work for discovery. Now, when users tap on a hashtag, they’re directed to broader search results, including profiles, instead of just a “Top Posts” feed. The platform announced this change was rolled out to encourage users to explore different parts of the platform, not just posts. Why we care. This update represents as opportunity to get your brand’s account discovered by high-value consumers. Action needed. Ensure you tag your target keywords in both your profile and posts to boost the visibility of your brand’s account in the Explore overview. While profiles in hashtag searches may not always include the hashtag in every post, they typically have the word in their profile name or description. What Instagram is saying. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said on Threads:
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