Hi, I'm Khara, web designer and SEO expert with 12+ years experience. Stay on top of SEO trends and get my best tips and resources to help you optimize your website for SEO and attract more clients and customers from search engines.
If this one setting isn't turned on, you probably won't rank on Google anymore.
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Hi Reader, A few months back I sent an email explaining why I had turned off "AI scrapers" on my Squarespace website. AI is unregulated in the US (for now), and I felt it would be better to keep my content away from AI. However, with the release of Google's new AI search engine, this setting needs to be toggled on now! If your website is hidden from AI scrapers, it will also be hidden from Google's new technology. Having AI turned off won't keep you from ranking on Google entirely, it will just prevent your content from being included in the top AI generated results. My organic search sessions did go down a little in the last month. It's too early to say if this is related to AI since I just turned the AI scraper on a few days ago. Becca Harpin at Inside the Square mentioned on social media her traffic has spiked recently (she had the AI scraper turned on when Google released their latest update). As we get used to looking for those AI generated results, and the results get better and better, it will be more important then ever to optimize your website for Google AI. If you use Squarespace, you can go to Settings > Crawlers to turn this on. This setting is automatically on by default. If you didn't intentionally turn it off, it's still on! If you are using another platform such as Wix or WordPress, your website is probably being scanned by AI, unless you have intentionally turned that setting off somewhere. In other news.... SEO Space, the SEO plugin for Squarespace, is releasing an SEO course and a full keyword tool next month. I'll email more about this in the coming months as I personally test their features and report back in! In particular, I'm excited about their DIY course. This will be replacing my SEO mini-course (which I'll be retiring this month). Additionally, I have high hopes for their keyword tool. I believe it will only be available on their designer plan, but it's going to probably replace about 5 different tools I use right now (could be a game changer!). This tool could finally make keyword research manageable for everyone. Until next time, |
SEO Resources for Small Business
Hi, I'm Khara, web designer and SEO expert with 12+ years experience. Stay on top of SEO trends and get my best tips and resources to help you optimize your website for SEO and attract more clients and customers from search engines.
Hi Reader, Most SEO experts will tell you the same thing: “Everyone should be doing SEO.” But that’s not necessarily true. SEO can be a powerful tool, but only when the conditions are right.Profit margins, local competition, uniqueness of your offer… these all matter more than most people realize. In this case-study style blog post, I’m breaking down two real SEO case studies from small businesses in New York: ✅ One business had a high-ticket service, low competition, and a wide-open...
Hi Reader, Last Friday, ChatGPT released search, which allows you to search and see answers from the internet. This is a game changer. We all knew this was coming, but now it's here! Introducing AI Search. What does this mean for your business? More and more people are going to start "searching the internet" directly through AI chatbots and "AI assistants" instead of a manual search. This means you need to be optimizing your website for AI search. This is a different approach than we took...
Hi Reader, The other day I was doing some keyword research and saw marketing strategist Sarah Moon show up as a competitor for some of the keywords I was exploring. Later that day I saw a friend of mine post one of her stories on Instagram. I clicked on her website and found this blog: Five Red Flags When Hiring an SEO Consultant. I don't know about you, but how many emails do you get every day from people who say "I saw your website and it has a pretty good design but it isn't ranking on...