Happy Friday!

Welcome to Boringmarketing.com, where you'll find "boring" marketing tactics to grow your profits via AI, SEO, and more.

Food for thought—Relevancy to searchers beats relevance to algorithms.
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​In today's rundown:

• Think piece on building authority as a new site
• Impact of Ads on website behavior
• Use of Generative AI for SEO (Survey)
• A ChatGPT prompt to revive older content
• An AI speed optimization tool
• SEO Director’s cut on website crawling

Read time: 10 mins

Think Piece: On Building Expertise & Authority as a New Website

Garnering trust and establishing credibility quickly is a challenge for new websites with no prior history. However, it's possible by making the right strategic moves.

Here are some ways we help new websites build authority & expertise:

1. Display real-world credentials prominently. Convincingly showcase your expertise through team/founder bios, certifications, testimonials.
2. Publish high-quality, comprehensive content. Demonstrate in-depth knowledge through guides and data-driven reports. Avoid fluffy posts.
3. Pursue earned media opportunities. Expert guest posts and publicity in reputable industry outlets add credibility.
4. Monitor and quickly fix potential issues. Check Search Console regularly and address any manual spam or quality issues immediately.
5. Highlight successes prominently. Promote media mentions, client wins, reviews on your site & social media.
6. Attend conferences and network. Make connections with influencers, partners, and people in your space.
7. Over-deliver for early clients. Go above and beyond, then proactively request reviews and testimonials.
8. Remain patient and keep delivering value. Building authority takes time, regardless of the quality you provide. Stay focused on serving your audience.

With dedication and consistently remarkable offerings, new sites can demonstrate expertise and accelerate authority.

This is How Ads are Impacting Your Website User Behavior

A recent experiment explored the interplay between ads, content, and user engagement on websites.

They tested how different ad types and quantities affected metrics like time on site, pages read, scroll depth, and return rates.

Some interesting findings that will help you understand the impact of ads on your website visitors:

• Users spent more time reading when shown a mix of ad types versus just one kind.
• Counterintuitively, more ads correlated with higher engagement, like pageviews and time on site.
• Reducing ad quantity led to a rise in bounce rate and a fall in total sessions.
• Potential explanations include ad competition effects, familiarity, belonging cues, and reciprocity norms.

The unexpected results highlight the complexity of advertising's impact on user experience. More ads don't necessarily equal worse engagement.

Testing different ad strategies is key, as outcomes depend on many factors. Assumptions about ideal ad load and engagement don't always hold true.

Boring Insights: On Generative AI for SEO (Survey)

A recent survey revealed that 90% of marketers are interested in using generative AI for content creation. And 81% are either using or considering using AI for SEO keyword research.

This survey enforces our predictions for SEO 2.0 - with AI streamlining tedious optimization tasks and amplifying human strategists.

Key applications of generative AI highlighted include:

• Automated creation of outlines and initial content drafts based on prompts.
• Large-scale production of link-worthy assets like calculators, quizzes, and tools.
• Aggregation and analysis of competitor content at scale to identify gaps.
• Instantly ideating creative link building outreach email templates and pitches.
• Personalizing outreach and messaging using data science and NLP.

The survey makes clear that interest in AI-assisted SEO is surging. As the technology matures, it will become a competitive necessity to incorporate these exponential capabilities into strategy.

Fav Links of the Week

Google releases the Oct 2023 core update [LINK]

How to earn passive backlinks with 10x ROI [LINK]

Niche vs. authority sites: the math behind their ROI [LINK]

10-point SEO accessibility checklist [LINK]

SEO strategy to outrank billion-dollar brands [LINK]

Must-Try SEO Prompt

This week's prompt will help you revive outdated evergreen content using ChatGPT.

First, identify an older evergreen post on your site that needs refreshing. Provide the post title, topic, and a high-level summary of the content. Next, ask ChatGPT to suggest 3-5 ideas for updating and repurposing the post to make it timely and useful again.

Example prompt:

"Here is an overview of an outdated evergreen blog post I want to refresh:

Title: Beginner's Guide to SEO

Topic: Introductory SEO tips

Summary: Covers basics like keywords, metadata, and backlinks but needs updated recommendations."

Suggest 3-5 ideas for refreshing and repurposing the beginner's guide to SEO blog post outlined above to make it more up-to-date and engaging."

You’ll get targeted recommendations like updating outdated stats, adding new sections around trending topics, turning it into a video, promoting it on social media, etc.

SEO + AI Tool

This week our spotlight is on NitroPack, an all-in-one platform for optimizing website speed and performance.

With site speed being a ranking factor and page experience metrics like Core Web Vitals growing in importance, tools like NitroPack can give SEO a boost.

NitroPack offers various speed-focused capabilities, including:

• Image compression and optimization
• Caching for faster load times
• Minification to reduce file sizes
• CDN for faster content delivery
• Lazy loading of assets

The platform uses AI to automatically analyze pages and apply performance optimizations tailored to each site. No manual configuration is needed.

NitroPack also provides insights into speed KPIs like Time to Interactive and Largest Contentful Paint to help track improvements.

If you are looking to enhance page experience as part of an overall optimization strategy, NitroPack is worth considering. Faster sites lead to happier users, lower bounce rates, and search ranking benefits.

Director's Cut

​Sanjay Shenoy is a partner at Boringmarketing.com and the Director of Search. He’s been in SEO for 14 years and has trained over 1000 students in the latest organic search strategies. Every week, he’ll share answers to the most common questions we receive:

Q: What is crawling in SEO? How does a search engine crawler work?

A: Going back to the basics here—Crawling is the discovery process in which search engines send out a team of robots to find new & updated content.

Millions of pages are updated every day on the internet.

So, there has to be some way for these pages to be discovered.

For this purpose, search engines like Google deploy crawlers.

Search engine crawlers (also known as spiders or robots) are programs or scripts that systematically and automatically browse pages on the web.

So, how does a web crawler work?

1. It discovers new URLs
2. Downloads the page’s content
3. Passes the content over to search engines for the next stage (indexing)
4. Extract links to other pages from the current page
5. Allowed URLs are added to the crawl queue to be visited next

Seems pretty straightforward, right?
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No.

Because crawling of any web page is not guaranteed just because it exists.

In fact, many sites have a significant portion of pages that have not been crawled yet.

How do you ensure crawling?

There are many ways, but most importantly, you do this with proper site architecture, sitemaps, and site navigation.

There are deeper concepts involved, like crawl budget & efficacy. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll not delve into these for now.

What other questions would you like me to answer? Hit reply & send all your questions my way.

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