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Automation is critical in making informed, data-driven decisions in a world in which the amount of data companies are attempting to manage is unprecedented.

Automation in your SEO and content process can create efficiencies and ease the burden of redundant tasks, but we’ve evolved so far past that (and quickly). Today, automation alone is not enough. SEOs must automate intelligently — not only to complete tasks but to analyze data and make decisions about which tasks to prioritize (and how to carry them out), as well.

Last year, research by BrightEdge (my company) revealed that 80-plus percent of queries return universal search results. Optimizing, structuring and marking up your content to show Google its relevance for queries of varying intents helps increase your visibility when and where it matters most.

Small changes make a big impact. Google’s first point is that often with large sites, making small changes can make a big impact and return when it comes to search rankings. Google plotted the growth of one of the 7,000 websites, the Google My Business marketing site, showing how adding canonicals, hreflang to their XML sitemaps, and improving their metadata all resulted in gains in their organic traffic in search.Here is that chart:

Here is the chart showing the improvement after making the AMP error fixes:

Consolidation. For the past several years, many SEOs have been saying “less is more.” Meaning, having fewer sites and fewer pages with higher quality content often leads to better SEO results. Google says that works for them and they have been working on consolidating their sites. Google said they found a “large number” of near duplicate sites across their properties.“Duplicate content is not only confusing for users, it’s also confusing for search engines,” Google said. Google added, “Creating one great site instead of multiple microsites is the best way to encourage organic growth over time.”In one case study Google provided with the Google Retail site, they took six old websites and consolidated the content. They made “one great website” and it lead to them doubling the site’s call-to-action click-through rate and increased organic traffic by 64%.

opportunities to “recycle” data we already have to find new and different insights. Think about it–if you’re working at a full-service agency, your overall team may have access to a client’s Google Analytics and Adwords, SEMRush, STAT, HotJar, SurveyMonkey, SpyFu, Twitter Analytics, etc.

To get started on connecting utilizing other teams’ data, you have to pay attention to what the other teams are doing.

the key to integration

The first step in a technical SEO audit, for example, is to uncover pages that can’t be indexed, and why

Technical SEO, therefore, uses tools to measure anything from server downtime or HTTP status served to bots and users, to the size of resources (CSS, JS, images…) transferred when a page is requested or load time metrics such as TTFB, FCP, or TTLB.

It’s important that you check your business’s listings on as many of these high-quality directory sites as you can. Your main goal is to ensure that your company’s name, address and phone number (NAP) is correct and consistent on as many of these citation sites as possible.

Shopify stores generally score 20 or less on Google’s mobile PageSpeed Insights, with first contentful paint taking about 3.5 seconds, he added

Duplicate product pages are also a facet of Shopify. As an inherent characteristic of the framework Shopify is built on, category pages link to duplicate product pages, and although they do canonical back to the correct landing page, this may dilute link equity and make it more difficult for search engines to determine which page from their index they should favor.

“The reason this is just a bit riskier . . . is you’re setting up your entire website architecture around duplicate pages,” said Long, “Basically, every single category page on the site . . . is going to push internal links to duplicate product pages, but all of the product pages that are getting internal links technically aren’t eligible to rank in the search engines.” A solution for this does exist, you can read about it in our guide to technical SEO for Shopify.

Google has repeatedly said either is fine.

John Mueller said in 2017:Google websearch is fine with using either subdomains or subdirectories. Making changes to a site’s URL structure tends to take a bit of time to settle down in search so I recommend picking a setup that you can keep for longer.

Many SEOs believe that subdomains are treated as separate domains, but the truth is more complicated. Anyone that incorporates subdomains as a main part of their site will likely have them treated the exact same as a subfolder would be treated. However, if you’re not treating the subdomains as part of your main website (read as not connecting them with internal links), then they may be treated as separate.

<loc> and <lastmod>. These two tags are very important, so make sure you add them to your sitemap!

You can differentiate via the user agent and show an HTML sitemap instead if a real person visits the page.   Yoast SEO already does this. Visiting a /sitemap_index.xml file on a WordPress website will return an HTML sitemap, while hitting CTRL + U to view the source will return the actual XML sitemap.

Google limits that to only 10MB so make sure your file doesn’t have more than 50,000 URLs and 10MB

To enable your business Knowledge Graph card, you need to add the necessary Corporate Contact markup on the homepage of your website.

The easiest way to add a micro-markup to the site is to use the Schema plugin. It works with any available schema options and is embedded in the Yoast SEO plugin.

If the above-mentioned plugin doesn’t suit you, you can choose from a large number of WordPress plugins alternatives for schema markup. Here are some of them: All In One Schema Rich Snippets Schema JSON-LD Markup Rich Reviews WP SEO Structured Data Schema Markup (JSON-LD) structured in schema.org

Hreflang URLs must be crawlable and indexable and therefore non-200 URLs are treated as errors, and ignored by the search engines.

This is optional, and not necessarily an error or issue.

Unsafe Cross-Origin Links – This shows any pages that link to external websites using the target=”_blank” attribute (to open in a new tab), without using rel=”noopener” (or rel=”noreferrer”) at the same time. Using target=”_blank” alone leaves those pages exposed to both security and performance issues.

use Mobile Moxie’s awesome SERPerator tool to check mobile results from your desktop.

The key sign of a “gimme” keyword is when the top results show missed opportunities. You can usually tell this just by skimming:  Does the page lack a sensible heading structure? Is it difficult to read or flooded with ads and pop-ups? Does the content seem too thin (or unnecessarily long)? This technique may involve a bit more leg work on the front end, but you will avoid wasting countless hours targeting irrelevant or high-difficulty keywords.

This free entity extraction tool provides semantic topics — people, places, brands, and events — referenced in a document.

something that I see really frequently with sites that are negatively impacted by recent core updates is that they have produced so much content for so long–and maybe way back when the content did really well for SEO–but the rules of the game, kind of changed. 

you have great product pages, service pages, brand pages, but there’s this blog that has so much content on it. And in many cases that content was not up to par with what we would expect nowadays with good quality content. So it’s really chipping away at that and just making sure that whatever is being indexed by search engines is truly high-quality content.

if you see that there’s really no organic traffic going to the page, not a lot of page views, not a lot of engagement, maybe it hasn’t ranked for anything in a few years, that makes it a lot easier to recommend what to do with it. And it’s not always just delete it. In many cases, it’s consolidated into this one, redirect it, and update that existing article.

These entries are all optimized around a single keyword (usually a long tail). And they’re NOT written like normal blog posts. Instead, each entry is more like a Wikipedia article.

a recent SEO experiment discovered that “duplicate images” (like stock photos) can hurt your page’s rankings.

Content Features are things like: Calculators Comparison charts Feature breakdowns Pros and cons lists Summaries Quote boxes

Over time, maybe Google’s search engine and results product will be less important as more consumers shift to AI sources to get their information or that information is brought to them. 

Another colleague, in a separate conversation, reiterated that Google has the most information, so despite Bard’s initial disappointment, it could end up being the leader

One of the most significant impacts of AI on SEO is personalized search results.

AI algorithms can understand natural language queries and provide accurate results. Therefore, SEO strategies should include conversational keywords and phrases matching people's speech.

AI-powered predictive analytics can help businesses identify trends and predict future outcomes

Why we care. Economic uncertainty has kept marketing budgets flat (or even reduced) and put greater focus on SEO this year.

Google has warned against using AI-generated content for years – although that guideline has softened in 2023. Now, Google cares less whether a human or AI writes your content, as long as your content is helpful to people and not created to manipulate the search results. 

For every $1 put into SEO today, organizations can find compounded benefits over time, resulting in greater ROI, Yu said.