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What if the future of SEO is being rewritten right before your eyes? Join us as we explore this fascinating landscape as we recap Brighton SEO in San Diego. Together with my insightful guests, Venkata and Zak, we unpack the engaging discussions around AI integration in SEO, brand consistency, and Microsoft and Google's latest innovations. The event was not just about absorbing expert knowledge but also experiencing the synergy between SEO and paid search, thanks to the concurrent HeroConf. This crossover provided the opportunity for additional insights, especially in the realms of reporting and data analysis.

Networking is more than exchanging business cards; it's about building impactful relationships. We delve into the immense value of engaging with speakers and vendors, leading to potential collaborations and deep dives into trends like topical authority. Reflecting on the event's accessibility and supportive environment for newcomers, we highlight the opportunities it offers for both seasoned professionals and first-time speakers. Our gratitude extends to Venkata and Zak for their contribution, as we look forward to future conferences and additional episodes discussing more in depth discussions on topics that stood out.


Guest Bios:

Venkata Pagadala:
Venkata Pagadala is a seasoned SEO and Growth Strategist, driving businesses from startups to enterprises generating over $1 billion annually to online success. With data-driven strategies, he has led campaigns achieving 40+ million monthly organic visits and worked with industry leaders like Apartments.com and Recovery.org.

Specializing in AI-driven content creation, site migrations, and technical SEO, Venkata excels at simplifying complex challenges to deliver measurable results. Featured on platforms like Spotify and SEOFOMO, he’s dedicated to building impactful online presences, sustainable growth, and revenue optimization in the digital landscape

https://www.venkatapagadala.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/venkata-pagadala/

Zak Perez:
With over thirteen years of expertise, Zak Perez is dedicated to optimizing LoopNet.com, the largest online marketplace for commercial real estate, with over 20 million indexed URLs.

His background spans SEO, front-end development, UX/UI design, conversion rate optimization, accessibility and AI. He brings a holistic and data-driven approach, aimed at maximizing online visibility, improving user experience, and driving results.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakperez/

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Ever wondered if AI chat interfaces could revolutionize your search experience? Imagine having a virtual assistant that not only answers your queries but understands the context and nuances behind them. In this episode, Philip Mastroianni takes you on a journey through the world of AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT, shedding light on their growing popularity and transformative impact on traditional search engines like Google. We’ll discuss Perplexity AI, a unique search engine that combines conversational abilities with real-time data retrieval, offering a more personalized and interactive approach to finding information. Philip compares Perplexity's strengths and limitations against traditional search engines, providing a comprehensive look at how these advanced tools are changing the landscape of online searches.

Looking to the future, Philip explores the emerging trend of RAG custom chats and their potential to provide even more personalized and nuanced search experiences. While these specialized chats require substantial upfront effort to curate their knowledge base, the payoff can be significant for users within specific knowledge domains. The episode also tackles the critical issues of trust and credibility in AI-generated content, highlighting the necessary balance between innovative AI tools and traditional search engines. This conversation delves into how AI technology might revolutionize SEO and information retrieval while emphasizing the continued importance of a diverse ecosystem of search tools tailored to different user needs and preferences. Don’t miss this insightful discussion on the future of search technology!

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I interview Jonny Rockz, aka Jonny Polanco about his latest single, marketing in the music industry, and his non profit he's working to help young artists get recording time.

Jonny has opened for the likes of Ice Cube, and his latest single just dropped yesterday. Listen to learn about how the industry has changed in the last 10 years and the types of marketing you can do in the music industry.

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Wade Carlson is an SEO professions based out of Orange County, CA.
From his time in the Coast Guard to working at Space-X, he's moved across several verticals and areas within marketing.
He talks about his first passion projects, local SEO, advice for SEO beginners, and we discuss the most interesting man in the world.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/wade-l-carlson/

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On today’s show, I wanted to talk briefly about a free tool called ahrefs. Many of you have probably already heard of them, but I’m not sure if everyone knows they have a free version you can use by connecting your Google Search Console data. It allows those specific sites to have access to some features in ahrefs.

Go to https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools and you can sign up there.
Let me know what you think!

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On today’s show I have Ryan Ricketts. I’ve actually known Ryan for six years now, and we’ve worked at several companies together.
I wanted  him on the show because he's moved between several verticals as well as from different types of agencies and to in-house.

He also gives away his best link building tactic he used for real estate!
Contact Ryan
Website: https://slickettsdigital.com/ or on
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Slicketts

Full Show notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/2022/06/interviewing-seo-ryan-ricketts-moving-verticals-and-agency-to-in-house/

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There are a number of common SEO misconceptions or myths. Some of these include the belief that SEO is all about stuffing keywords into content, your keyword density, that link building is the only important SEO tactic. And many, many more,  but let's first talk about domain names. 

I'll start off by saying you can rank any site with any domain name. Within reason. Names should be memorable and easy to remember, and that isn't an SEO thing.

Listen on to get an idea of why you don't need an exact match domain, and why it is better to consider the branding aspect than a descriptive aspect of your domain.

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Today I wanted to talk about AI content and my tests on its success as a viable option for creating content that ranks on search engines.

I’ll start with some background on the latest publicly available AI system, an example output that I pick apart, some additional example outputs, and then my opinion on how to utilize an AI system to write content.

See the full show notes / blog post with tons of examples, transcript, and links @ https://opinionatedseo.com/2022/02/can-ai-content-rank-in-google/

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Today is February 10th and I wanted to talk about Screaming Frog as well as the new Search Console URL Inspection API. 

Full Blog Post / Show Notes: https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e20

Let’s jump right in, what is screaming frog and what can you do with it?

Let’s start at the beginning, it’s free but limited, and you don’t run it online. The paid version is 149 pounds / year, or about $200 US dollars. So you are talking about $16 a month if you wanted to break it down that way. Buy it, write it off, and call it a day, it will save you that money in the first hour you use it.

So what can it do?

Screaming frog is an SEO spider, think GoogleBot but you get to save the data it captures.

Here’s a list of the top features for it:

• Find broken links, errors, and redirects
• Page title and meta data analysis
• Met robots and directives review
• Audit hreflang
• Discover exact duplicate pages
• Generate xml sitemaps
• Create site visualizations.
• You can do up to 500 URLs in the free version, unlimited to your computer’s capacity on the paid version.

But the real power comes in when you use the paid version, and I’m going to just touch on a few of the features.

• Javascript rendering: Actually being able to view the page as a fully rendered version. This includes a screenshot as well as being able to review source code for the rendered version.
  • We’re using this to better understand how the rendering affects crawlability, as well as what’s on the site and what isn’t depending on JS.
  • If you do any kind of client side rendering, using react, or just not seeing Google crawling your site like you think it should, this is a great way to better understand.
• URL Inspection API Integration - I was going to save this for last, but it’s just too good to not put at the top of the list. There are a few integrations you get with screaming frog out of the box. 
  • 1 - Google Analytics 
  • 2 - Google Search Console - this includes the inspection API integration. 
  • 3 - Page speed insights 
  • And non Google related companies like Majestic for backlinks, ahrefs for things like backlinks and URL rating, and Moz for data like page authority and backlink info from their open site explorer metrics.
• Site Visualizations
• Custom Extraction
• Meta Tags - Titles, descriptions, etc 
• You can even generate XML sitemaps
• Find out all pages that have broken links both internally and externally. 
• 301s - 

Integration with the new Search Console URL Inspection API which was officially launched on January 31st, 2022 by Google - and it allows you to see indexation status of your URLs via an API. This was integrated in the latest release in the last few weeks and you’ll see a good share of tutorials out there. 

You probably want to know - what am I doing with this new data, and what data do we get that we can use?

First, the data is used to understand indexation status in Google, errors that are coming up, and last crawl date.

And what am I doing with that data? Let’s start with indexation status - you have a few variations of the summary of indexation, things like index and submitted, indexed not submitted in sitemap, crawled not indexed, discovered but not crawled, soft 404, error, and probably a few more I’m forgetting. By pulling this data on pages, you can get a better understanding of how Google sees your s

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Today I’ll be recapping the Google Office Hours with Google’s John Mueller from January 28th, 2022. As always, I’ll provide a synopsis of the question and answer, my opinion, and a link to the question in the video. The video ran an hour, I’ll try to summarize this for you in about ten minutes.

Full blog post, show notes, and transcript @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e19

How does Google recognize paid links?

They have a lot of factors that they look into, not just did someone report this as a paid link.

Does Google care where the internal link is located in the site, header / content / footer?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=36

Running a blog type site without any actual products, but more information about products, they want to know if Google will treat it as a classic product review site?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=265

Local Directories:

Does Google really care if you are listed on local directories and the information is correct?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=451

Links:

Are there any issues with linking to a site that is also linking to you?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=685

Myths:

Are there any myths or inaccuracies that you see out there that you can just debunk right now?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=785

Malware:

Malware is still being shown in the search results.

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=1449

A tool to help index sites faster:

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=1718

Emojis in titles and descriptions:

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=1971

Search Console API Data Accuracy:

Is the data from the API more accurate than the web interface? 

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2054

FAQ Schema:

Our schema looks good from a technical perspective, but isn’t showing on Google.

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2176

Seasonal content:

What should we do with content that’s seasonal like Black Friday?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2257

CWV Impact?

Of the 3 metrics, my CLS isn’t passing, how much of an impact will that have?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2418

Will CWV impact crawling?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2555

Migrating from a subdomain:

The subdomain is old, like 20 years, and we’re looking to migrate to the main domain.

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2677

New Local Site Starting out:

What signals should we look out for or pay attention to.

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=3015

Geo redirects on site:

Should you geo-redirect on a new site?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=3195

The last question had to do with branded search - I don’t think it was relevant as it seemed they may have other issues, but feel free to watch that part if you are having any issues with your branded search being visible.