SEO A to Z - part 4 - "Content to Custom GPT"

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello, welcome back to SEO. That Hard it's Ed here, and today we're on part four of our SEO A to Z. We're hopefully going to get from content to custom GPT today. So it's the second half of the letter C.

Speaker 1: 0:40

So let's start with content. So, yeah, content is what you build and provide to your website with visitors. So content can be in many forms. It's not just text. It can include imagery, video, audio, software tools anything that you can find and consume on your site. Also, nowadays, obviously, content can include podcasts, tiktok videos, instagram videos, facebook posts, videos, Instagram videos there's Facebook posts. Content can be more than just what's on a website. Mostly for SEO, we're generally thinking about what we put on our websites and how we promote our websites. So, yeah, that's content in a nutshell.

Speaker 1: 1:14

Next, we have content delivery network, or CDN. Now you may have heard of these. A content delivery network is a service which allows you to have your website files cached, and cached just simply means making copies of files from your original website on edge servers that are placed in locations worldwide. So when a user then requests a page from your website, the files that make up the page will be served from the CDN servers that are physically closest to the user, and this speeds up the response of your website for users, and it also lowers the load on your actual web server. So you might have your actual origin web server might be, say, in the US, but you might have someone in Australia requesting pages on the website. The CDM will serve them with that content from an edge server located much more physically close to them, maybe even in country, and that means they'll get a faster response. It also protects your website from your original origin web server from being overloaded close to them, maybe even in country, and that means they'll get a faster response. It also, yeah, protects your website from your original, your origin web server from being overloaded. Um, popular content delivery networks include cloudflare, and you get other benefits from them, because it helps protect your server from hacking and it makes it harder to reach. So, yeah, they're really, really. If you're not using them, I strongly suggest you use them on your website. Yeah, look at cloudflare or amazon um, cloudfront is the one I use really useful.

Speaker 1: 2:30

Next up, content gap analysis. Now, content gap analysis is a research method, um, where you identify all the content topic areas that your competitors are covering and look for gaps in your own content. So the aim is then to fill any gaps you find with new content. So you're essentially looking for things that your competitors have written about that you haven't, so you can looking. You're looking for gaps in content. If you do it across a whole bunch of competitors, you can get a complete landscape of all the content being written about all the topics and you can see where there's gaps that you haven't got. You might probably find most of your competitors have got gaps of their own, but if you do this analysis, you can hope to fill all the gaps that you identify and then obviously helps raise your topical authority.

Speaker 1: 3:10

Next up, we've got content marketing. Now. Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing materials online, such as web pages, video, podcasts, book, social media all with the aim of attracting an audience interested in the topics you're covering and the products and services you offer. And SEO is like a complementary process to content marketing. If you haven't got any content, you've got nothing to optimize with or for. I mean content, personally, is where my focus has been in terms of marketing and SEO for the past. Well, it's at Penguin, really, even though before that we were specializing in content, but you know we didn't put content as the core focus. Content marketing, I think, is the most powerful part of SEO because without good content, even if you do all the other tips and tricks, manipulations to get people to your site, if the content isn't good, then they're not going to stay for the longer run. Content marketing, I think, is the most powerful form of SEO.

Speaker 1: 4:07

Our next C is conversion. So the conversion rate is how many people who land on a web page will take the action you want them to achieve after landing there. So say you have a page with a lead magnet and 10 in every 100 people arrive on the page. Sign up for the lead magnet. Then you're going to have a 10% conversion rate on page, 10 out of 100, 10. If you have a product page on an e-commerce site and two in every hundred people who view the product page make a purchase, then that page has a two percent conversion rate. So it's just simple, a simple measure of how many people who arrive on a page, what percentage of people arrive on a page, will take the action that you want them to take. Your ultimate goal, so that's your conversion rate.

Speaker 1: 4:48

And next we've got conversion rate optimization, or cro, conversion rate optimization. So this is not strictly seo, but it is a very closely related discipline and to be a fully rounded online marketer you'll need an appreciation of it. So cro is the discipline of trying to improve the conversion rate of your website. So, whatever the main action is you want the user to perform on a page, whether it's sign up for a newsletter, purchase a product, complete a form, etc. Cro is the process of creating new versions of the page and then split testing them or A-B testing them, as we covered in the first podcast in the series the new version against the old one and see which one converts better. So if the test version performs better, then that becomes a new version of the page and you can repeat the process and try to improve on that page.

Speaker 1: 5:34

Now SEO feeds into conversion rate optimization because it's important to balance any potential negative SEO effects of changes that you might make which might reduce traffic to a page and may outweigh any potential gain in conversion rates. So essentially you're having to balance the amount of people you can get from SEO to a page with the amount of people you convert. With conversion rate optimisation on a page Done well, conversion rate optimisation can increase your revenue or the actions that you want people to do on your site by quite a large margin without having to improve you know the amount of people visiting, so you can increase revenue without increasing visitors. But so it's just a balance to make sure that you don't get too carried away with conversion optimization that you damage your seo and then then you know, decrease the level of traffic you get to your site, meaning that you you're in a negative net loss rather than a win. So next up we've got core update.

Speaker 1: 6:33

Now core updates are the most major of the google updates that google periodically make to its algorithms. They're called core updates because they're carried out on the most core parts of google's ranking systems. Now these core updates tend to take several weeks to roll out and they can have significant impacts on the search engine results for many websites. So if you spend any time in SEO, you'll appreciate how much noise it makes in the community when there is a core update and the amount of upheaval it can have on sites, positive and negative, you know, because for every site that loses traffic, there is another site winning traffic. But you tend to hear more from people losing traffic when these core updates happen than those winning. Core updates are usually officially announced by Google. I say usually because in the past they didn't always announce them. They seem to now be announcing every single one that comes out, but that's not to say they might change their policy on that in the future. So yeah, I'll always announce core updates as soon as possible. On the podcast, I put out an emergency podcast every time one comes out, just to let people know what is happening and to look out for upheaval. So yeah, but they're a major, major thing and something you need to watch out for.

Speaker 1: 7:42

Next, we've got core web vitals Now. Core web vitals they're a set of metrics that Google measure to see how well a page serves users in terms of loading performance and reliability and readability. So you can see your Core Web Vitals scores for your pages in Google Search Console and they get this data from Chrome, from people actually physically using your website, and, yeah, they'll give you a score and they'll let you know if there's any issues you need to sort out. So it's the kind of thing I would recommend Look, keep an eye on, just see if you've got any issues. And if they do come up, there are links there and it tells you what's wrong and they've got guides on how to fix it. So just a thing to keep an eye out for.

Speaker 1: 8:16

Next, we have crawl budget. Now, crawl budget is the amount of resource that Google allocates to a website for crawling your web pages. So well-established sites with lots of pages and authority, they will be allocated much more crawl budget and will be frequently crawled. Newer, less established sites will be crawled at a much slower rate. So, for example, amazoncouk, amazoncom those sites are being constantly crawled by Google. They have millions of pages indexed and Google spends a lot of resources on crawling those pages all the time and keeping their index very up to date for them, whereas if you've got a very brand new site, if you created a site and say you use programmatic SEO on a new domain and put up a million pages of your own. Google is not going to crawl and index and rank a million pages because you're just too new for them and you haven't established that authority and they don't value you enough yet to cover that much content in their index for you. Their crawl budget for you is going to be much smaller now for most sites, especially if you're starting off small and you're starting off publishing, you know, just a few pages at a time. That's not. That's going to be fine. You know those pages will be found and they'll be indexed. You'll be well within your crawl budget. You can boost your. You can boost your indexing by using google search console and every time you put a new page up, go and just request that google ranks, it puts in its queue. That can get stuff indexed quicker. But crawl budget yeah. So it's only going to be an issue for you if you're a small site trying to publish huge numbers of pages which I wouldn't recommend straight away because they're just not going to get indexed because your crawl budget would be too small.

Speaker 1: 10:00

Okay, next up, we've got crawler now. Crawler it's just software which crawls the web and downloads pages and follows links and pages to discover new pages. Examples of crawlers the other most well-known one is Googlebot. There's Bingbot, which is Bing's crawler. You will find other crawlers will crawl your website from other services and other tools. But yeah, if everyone talks about a crawler, it's just that crawling software that automatically crawls the web, looks for pages, downloads them Simple as that Crawling. Crawling is the process by which Google and other search engines and services will discover content online. They crawl, which is downloading pages, and then save the page contents, look for links within them and then follow those links to further crawl, and the idea is it's like a spider crawling across a web. That's just where the name crawling comes from.

Speaker 1: 10:46

Crawling software, now calling software such as the popular screaming frog. That's where you can get your own software to perform your own crawls and you can use them to perform a crawl of your own website, to look for issues like redirect chains or broken links and to check if all parts of your site are crawlable. And obviously you can use that same software to crawl other people's sites if you want to download information off them. It's a really good technical SEO thing to use crawling software. It's really good technical SEO thing to use crawling software, wouldn't worry about if you've got a very small site. But as soon as your site gets past a certain size, it's worth investing in software like that. I think the screaming frog costs maybe 200 pounds a year. Uh, 200 dollars a year. So, you know, not a major investment once you get past a certain size, and it can help flag up issues that you wouldn't you know it'd be hard to audit and find otherwise.

Speaker 1: 11:32

Next up, we've got CTR click-through rate. So short for click-through rate. It's a measure so metric that measures for any viewed link what percentage of people who see it choose to click on it. So if you've got a hundred people view a link and five of them click it, then the link has a click-through rate of five percent. Click through rate is used in Search Console Google Search Console, to show what the click-through rate from the search engine result pages are when your web page appears in the results. Obviously, the higher your click-through rate, the better, and this is a metric that Google will pay attention to on those search engine results pages to see what click-through rate you get. The higher your click-through rate, the more people are clicking your link, the more likely they are to push you further up the results pages because they believe all right, okay, this is the link people want to click on. Obviously that works with you want to make sure that those people start bouncing back quickly. Google soon learn. Soon learn if you've got a high click-through rate. If they're bouncing back and going somewhere else, that you're maybe not the right place to go, but it but it helps to start with a good click-through rate. But that's what the CTR is in the Google Search Console. Second to last.

Speaker 1: 12:37

Now yeah, we're nearly getting to the end CSS. Css is short for Cascading Style Sheets. So CSS is a code used in conjunction with HTML to style websites and it covers elements such as fonts, colours, placements of elements. It's probably not something most people need to worry about. If you're using a CMS and pre-built themes, then all this is sorted out for you. It's really a web developer kind of thing. But if you get to a point of starting to muck about with editing themes or creating websites from scratch, then CSS is something you're going to need to have to get to grips with.

Speaker 1: 13:08

And finally, we've got custom GPT. So a custom GPT is an extension of chat GPT that allows you to add additional training in the form of documents and instructions, and then these custom GPT's can then be saved and shared with others. So, for example, I've seen some people create custom GPT's where they trained it with the Google quality rate of guidelines, for example, and then have given it some additional information and other pages around Google quality guidelines and then sort of trained essentially the custom GPT to specifically look at that data, and then they've provided access to this custom GPT that's very focused on discussing and answering questions around the Google quality of data guidelines. I've seen other ones where people have used them for trying to create things like topical maps and things like that. I'm a little sceptical about how well some of these things work at the moment. I think in time, obviously, these custom GPT or at least the concept of the custom GPT is going to get bigger and I think as AI advances, then they will become more powerful, but at the moment I've yet seen one that I've been really blown away with. But the concept is a good idea, right? So that covers everything in C.

Speaker 1: 14:24

So if there's anything you think I've missed, if you can think of any C's for SEO that should be in here, do let me know and I'll get them added into the main glossary. I'll put links to anything that I've, just any external links. You know that's disgusting, as I'll put in the show notes and we'll be back next time and we'll be moving on to D. So yeah, great to see you and see you next time. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that keywords people use, that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode.

Speaker 1: 15:15

Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywords people usecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.