SEO A to Z - part 8 - "GA4 to Google Pagespeed Insights"

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 and welcome.

Back to SEO is not that hard. It's Ed here, as usual, and today we are on to part eight of our SEO A to Z, and this is starting with GA4, but I don't know where I'm going to get to just yet, because there are 34 entries under G, which is quite a lot, mainly because so many of them start with Google, like Google Alerts, google Ads, there's because so many of them start with google, like google alerts, google ads. There's just so many begin with google. So I'm going to crack through it and you know I'll probably do the first 12 or so and we'll see how we get on. So, first up, we've got ga4, which stands for google analytics 4, which is the latest version of google's analytics service. Now, while it's undeniably a powerful service, it's just totally unintuitive to use and it's nowhere near as widely liked as google's universal analytics were, which replace which it replaced. I mean, basically, google universal analytics destroyed every other analytics package pretty much out there because it was free and it was easy to use and it was just clear to get a good overview of what was going on. Ga4 is completely different. I hate it and some people have specialized in using it and I've showed some powerful things it can do, but it's so, so unintuitive and so unhelpful and I've pretty much just used clickycom now, which is a paid service, but it just it's simple, tells me how many people have been on my site, where they've gone on the site at a glance, and way, way better than GA4, which I still use Still got it on all my sites so that if I ever do need to go back and work out something that only GA4 can tell me all the data's being collected but I hardly ever log into it. Now.

Next up, we've got gated content. Now, gated content is that which is not available on a website to users who are not logged in, or content which requires detailed form filling to progress to the content. This means that Google cannot crawl and index that content. It's not to say it's not seeing that content and seeing the click stream of the content because the Chrome data it uses, but in terms of crawling and indexing it it can't see it. So, essentially, if you've got anything that is gated, you don't really need to worry about google sort of giving you any issues over it. If there's stuff that you that is gated, that you want google to see, then you need to think about a way of allowing google in to get to that data. And there are ways of doing that, such as making gated content available without needing to log in or without needing to fill in detailed forms. But just be aware that anything past a certain form fill or a certain login, if you need people to do that, google's not going to see it. They're not going to be able to rank you on that content. Next up, we've got a gateway page, which is essentially another name for a doorway page, and I talked about doorway pages in the SEO A to Z part 5, so for more on doorway pages, go back and listen to that episode.

Next we've got Gemini. Gemini is Google's competitor product to ChatGPT. It's an AI large language model, chatbot, and it was formerly known as BARD, and I have to say I've not got a great deal of experience of Gemini. It's a product you can use like chat gpt. You can just talk to it and it will give you responses back, just like chat gpt does, um, but yeah, that is google's version of it. Next we have generative ai, which is another word, another way of saying ai generated content. So this is ai that is specifically designed to generate content based on prompts and inputs. So, yeah, chat gpt is general ai content based on prompts and inputs. So, yeah, chat gpt is generative ai and gemini is generative ai. Um, and the names of I've completely forgotten the names of all the ones that do all the images and things like that, but they're all all these services that generate content based on a prompt that you give it, as they are generative ai systems.

Next, we've got Google Ads. Now, google Ads are the adverts that you see displayed within the search engine results, where companies bid to get their ads placed, and this is Google's primary income source. I think they get something like 80% to 90% of their money from Google Ads and that's why, even with all this AI stuff coming out and Google giving AI results, ai-powered results. If Google is going to continue as a business, they've got to either completely pivot away from Google Ads money to some other kind of income or they've got to incorporate links with adverts in them for people to click from their search results somehow, which is why I don't see at the moment how Google are going to completely become an AI answer engine, because if they do that, then they're not going to have ads on there or there's no way for them to put ads in, or it's going to have to be something very different.

Next up, we've got Google Alerts. So Google Alerts is a free tool from Google that will monitor the web for any search term you give it and it'll email you updates as it finds new relevant content as it's crawling. So it's perfect for keeping on our topics, products, companies, etc. That you're interested in. Most companies, most websites, will set up a google alert for their, their own domain name or their own brand name so that when they get new mentions, they will get alerted by google alerts. Yes, useful tool. I'd check it out.

Next, we've got the google api documentation leak. So in may 2024, part of google's internal api documentation for parts of its search ranking algorithms were leaked online. Now this leak's provided a unique insight into many of the attributes and modules that make up parts of Google search ranking algorithms. Now, it's not a complete overview of everything they do. It's kind of like an internal documentation set that's designed for developers working on Google search ranking algorithms to refer back to and see what modules they can tap into and the attributes of those modules. So it gives us a slight look under the hood, but there are lots of unknowns still with it.

So, for example, there's one attribute called is a small site. So small personal site or small personal blog is one of the attributes where it's a flag that's set if Google determines a site is a small personal blog is one of the attributes where it's a flag that's set if Google determines a site is a small personal site. But we don't know whether, if a site is flagged with that if it's a positive or a negative it could be that Google's trying to boost small personal sites to try to bring them up, or so you know, if you're a small personal site, maybe you don't need as many links to rank in a certain place, for example, or it could be oh, if you're a small personal site, we don't need as many links to rank in a certain place, for example. Or it could be, oh, if you're a small personal site, we don't want you to appear for certain types of rankings. But we just don't know. We just know that Google is identifying that so it can give us insight, but doesn't give us a complete answer. And it's like that with lots of the things in there. Some things, yeah, clearly give some quite detailed information. Others less so, but it does give us a real look under the hood. That's very, very interesting. We've done lots of deep dive articles On keywordspeopleusecom. If you go to our SEO guide section, there's some deep guides in there. We'll put links in the show notes for those, and plenty of other people have as well. They're really worth going and looking at. So, yeah, very interesting that Google API documentation link.

Next up, we've got Google Autocomplete, which I talked about in the first episode of the SEO A to Z under the title Autocomplete. That's where Google will, as you're typing in a search query, will, start to fill out related queries to what you're typing in. We also scrape Google autocomplete as part of one of the tools on keywords people use. So, yeah, if you want, I'll talk about it a bit more. Go back to episode one, part one of the SEO A to Z, if you want to hear more on that.

Next we've got google business profile. Now google business profiles are available as businesses which serve their customers in person, either as fixed premises or the customer's premises. So, for example, shops, restaurants, plumbers, electricians, etc. And a google business profile allows your business to feature in the local pack. So essentially, if you register your business for its google business profile, you can give information to extra information to google about like where you're located, the areas you serve, your opening times, contact details, websites, that kind of thing. So if you, you or any of your clients have that kind of business, then do definitely register for your google business profile and get that information there, because it will help you appear in those local packs which are crucial for that kind of business.

Next we have Google Discover. Now Google Discover is a feed of personalized web content that is based on what Google thinks you, the individual surfer, is interested in. So Google uses information it knows about you from searches it's seen you do both on Google and other services like YouTube and your activity on the web, originally only available via the Google app on iPhone or Android, it's now being trialled on the desktop version of Google. It's not something I'm massively familiar with personally, but I do know that I've seen people online, such as Lily Ray, for example, talking about her clients getting their content on Discover and it driving quite immense amounts of traffic, and though how useful that traffic is I don't know, but yeah, it can definitely drive a lot of traffic. So, yeah, it might be one that could be interesting.

Next, we've got the google indexing api. So the google indexing api lets you programmatically request that a page be added or removed from google's index. Making a a request via this API usually gets very quick results, and several tools have been created that use the indexing API to expedite getting pages indexed. However, Google's documentation does say that the API should only be used for job posting or broadcast event page types. So while people have used the API for other types of pages successfully, it's not completely clear if this is a loophole that Google might close in the future. If you do have like a piece of content you want indexed, and really quickly, you can use Google Search Console and you can manually request I think, about 20 or so pages a day to be indexed requests that they get indexed, and that usually works pretty quickly as well. So if you've just got one or two to do, like, say, you've done a new blog post or a new page you want to get indexed quick, I just use Google Search Console.

Next, we've got the Google Knowledge Graph. Now this is a database of entities developed by Google and the relationships between them, and this is what's used by Google to move beyond just understanding keywords but also the underlining entities and how they relate to each other as well, and we talked more about entities in part six of SEO A to Z. So, yeah, go back and listen to that episode if you want to learn more about entities. Next, we've got Google PageSpeed Insights. So Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool provided by Google to enable you to get insights as to how any web page performs in terms of core web vitals and page speed, and it gives recommendations on how to improve any issues that encounter. So if you're trying to get your site as optimized as possible for page speed, it's a really good tool to go there and check it out, and it will give very useful and recommendations on how to fix things such as like minifying javascript, that kind of thing. So some of it very technical, but if you've got developers working on a site, you're trying to get your site as tight as possible page speed wise, definitely use that tool.

So I think that's where I'm going to leave it for today. When it comes to how far through the g's we get, so I won't make my usual request for tell me if I've missed any G's, because there's definitely some more to come, and those will come in the next episode or two. So I look forward to seeing you next time and thanks for listening. Before I go, I just want 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 keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon, can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

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