downtime is zero speed & practical tips for beating our new AI overlords

Handful of quick things in this email for you to help your website go faster, rank higher and perform better.

Downtime is ZERO SPEED!

One thing we try and hammer home with customers is that downtime=zero speed. In the quest to make their website faster and pass Google’s Core Web Vitals test, many people ignore simple things that will help reduce or eliminate downtime entirely:

Two simple but not obvious recommendations we make in both our site speed and SEO audits are:

Renew your domain name for as long as your registrar allows – accidental domain name expiry is one of the most common reasons for downtime. If you renew your domain for 10 years it’ll cost you $100-150 but will effectively eliminate the risk of downtime due to domain renewal issues

Get uptime monitoring in place. This will help alert you to downtime when it does happen and will also help identify whether your site has intermittent issues or occasionally is exceeding the limits of your hosting plan.

UptimeRobot has a free plan that monitors on 5 minute intervals so there’s zero excuse not to spend 10 minutes getting this setup.

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ChatGPT, AI & Search Engines – some practical next steps

We’ve been getting asked a lot about AI, ChatGPT and how that’s going to impact Google Search and SEO in general AND what to do about it.

While there’s no doubt AI is going to impact search and SEO, it’s not clear how things are going to play out.

AI is fed by data and the more accurate and up to date that data is the better so here’s a handful of practical next steps you can take to insulate yourself against our new AI overlords:

ChatGPT uses Bing’s search index so it’s critical you’re indexed there – at a minimum, get your site setup in Bing Webmaster Tools and fix any issues the console flags about your site.

We see a ton of sites that are not properly indexed in Bing – here’s a checklist of how we go about fixing that.

If you’re a local site, make sure your Bing Maps (Bingplaces.com) listing is claimed and up to date.

While you’re at it, claim and update your Apple Maps listing too at https://businessconnect.apple.com/

These listings drive the data on the Apple Maps app on iPhone and also the maps data on DuckDuckGo search.

If you’re an online store, make sure you have a Bing Shopping feed setup – like Google Shopping, Bing Shopping has a free listings section so zero reason not to be setup there.

Thats it for this email, any questions, just hit reply.

We’ve updated our Site Speed Audit & Consult Service with new consult only pricing tier (i.e. no implementation), full details as well as a short walk through video of how the audit service works is up on our website here.