Structured data / rich results

As search engines are getting taken over by AI responses, there are now more and more things you need to do to show up in the results. And I have a bunch of other videos going over those things.

In this video, I wanna talk about the things that you can stop doing because the only way you're gonna make room to do all these new things is if you stop doing some of the old things that don't work anymore or never worked in the first place. First of all, stop taking technical audits seriously.

If you run essentially any website online through a technical audit like hrefs or Semrush, you're gonna find a ton of errors. The thing is, 95% of these errors aren't an issue at all, or at least not issues worth addressing.

When determining whether a technical issue is worth addressing, ask yourself these two questions. One, is this having a significant impact on the people visiting my website?

And 2, is this preventing Google from finding or indexing any important pages on my website? Anything else that matters will be taken care of by doing normal on page optimization...

our social media profile. But again, this is only because it's necessary for placement in those Google search features.

It's not improving your rankings and large numbers models are treating it like any other text on your page. The third thing you can stop doing is adding your business to every directory online.

Now there's one exception to this rule. If you're a new business with a brand new website, then I do think there's some value in getting what are called foundational links.

So using a tool like Bright Local to submit yourself to a bunch of directories for a very low cost is often worth it just to help you get into Google's index. But if you're an established business, you're already ranking for some of your main search terms, these low quality directory links are not gonna help you.

If you look at the directories that are actually ranking in Google and being cited by large language models in your industry, you'll find there's rarely more than 12 and typically only one to three that really matter. For some industries, directories aren't important at all.

Free SEO tools that actually help you rank, part 18. Google's Rich Results Test lets you see structured data on your website pages, which influences how they appear in search results.

Structured data gives you richer results, so rather than just showing the page title and description, Google will show things like pricing, reviews, delivery info. All of this encourages more clicks from Google search.

Enter your page URL, and it will show you the data available for your listing and any errors that you need to resolve for the richest results.