There’s nothing worse as far as user experience goes online, than running into a slow website. People’s attention spans are shorter than ever, and no one wants to wait for a page to load that’s creaking and groaning. Users want instantaneous, snappy access, and the numbers back it up. Valentina Orlandi, Product and Content Marketing Manager at WPRocket, wrote this week,

“Google’s research shows that as page load time increases from one second to three seconds, the probability of a visitor bouncing increases by 32%. Push that to five seconds, and the bounce probability jumps to 90%.”

Losing over 30% of your traffic for a marginal difference in load times is a bitter pill to swallow, but on the flip side this means making your site faster could potentially see huge increases in high-quality traffic and increased conversions. Seems an easy win, right? Speed up your site and improve everything exponentially. Well, many site owners still aren’t taking the necessary steps to improve site speed issues, as they don’t understand the drastic impact these issues have and the steps required to improve them. But don’t fear, in this article, we’re going to go through some simple and effective steps you can take to address site speed issues on your WordPress site.

Site Speed Audit – Page Speed Insights

The most important step to understanding what is affecting your site speed is to run a site speed audit. You can do this using Google’s very own Page Speed Insights. This tool gives you a numerical performance score out of 100 based on how well your site is performing on both desktop and mobile. It will also tell you what the key issues are affecting performance and how to address them. Some common issues that people face affecting site speed include:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
  This measures how long it takes for the main part of the page to fully appear, such as a large image or headline. It’s important because it reflects when the page feels “ready” to the user, rather than just when it technically starts loading.
• Reduce Unused CSS
  Websites often load styling code that isn’t actually needed for the page being viewed. Removing this unused code makes the page lighter and faster because the browser has less to download and process.
• Reduce Unused JavaScript
  JavaScript controls interactive features on a website, but many pages load scripts they don’t use. Cutting out unnecessary JavaScript reduces the work the browser has to do, helping pages load and respond more quickly.
• Minify CSS
  This means shrinking the CSS code by removing spaces, comments, and extra characters that humans use for readability but computers don’t need. Smaller files download faster, which improves page speed.
• Minify JavaScript
  Just like with CSS, this removes unnecessary characters from JavaScript files without changing how they work. The result is smaller file sizes and faster loading times.
• Optimise Image Sizes
  This means making sure images are no bigger than they need to be and are saved in efficient formats. Properly sized and compressed images load much faster and stop pages from feeling slow or heavy.

These are just some of the many issues affecting site speed performance but if your site currently has no optimisations in place, even implementing changes to improve these core aspects of your site can see a positive impact in speed performance.

Install All-In-One Performance Plugin

When these issues we have discussed appear on your insights report, it will give you different methods to fix the issues that are hindering your site. While many of these issues can be solved by developers meticulously going through your website with a fine-tooth comb, it is often extremely time-consuming and a waste of resources. For example, in order to reduce and minify CSS and JavaScript manually, your developer would have to go through thousands of lines of code, deleting unnecessary lines, which becomes a tedious and laborious task for often already very busy developers!

There are a number of different WordPress plugins you can use to improve different site performance issues and PageSpeedInsights will often recommend them to you. However, one of the most important plugins to have is an all in one performance plugin. These plugins will simultaneously allow you to fix issues with caching, file optimisation, minifying and reducing JavaScript, lazy loading images for faster load times and more. Having one plugin that solves a number of different issues on your site is smarter than downloading a large number of individual plugins to fix different issues. Some of the most popular plugins include WPRocket, WP-Optimize and LiteSpeedCache.

Using one of these plugins is a great base for fixing site speed issues and tackling the core problems that your site may face. Of course, these plugins won’t be able to fix every and all issues that your site faces when it comes to performance and having a deeper dive into your PageSpeedInsights and reading some of the material that Google provides may help address further issues.

What This Means for Marketers

If you’re pumping money into your SEO and PPC to improve performance but neglecting site speed, think again. Site speed is one of, if not the most crucial, factors that affect the user experience and following these simple steps, running a site speed audit and incorporating a performance plugin into your site, could help your traffic levels soar to new heights and make sure that all your hard work in other areas doesn’t go to waste.

Many Digital Marketers have recently been noticing spikes in direct traffic numbers in recent months, which on the surface would seem like a positive development; however alot of this new direct traffic is coming in large volumes from China and Singapore and is not in fact organic traffic but bots trying to scrape data from your sites.

How do I know if this issue is affecting my site?

You can review your direct traffic reports in Google Analytics 4 and filter by country to identify any unusual activity levels from China and Singapore. If you can see your traffic is on the rise, but the sessions are not increasing business on your site, then these nefarious bots are likely the cause.

Session durations are usually extremely low, with bott traffic often being attributed to under 3 seconds and no more. You can see how long the sessions are from specific countries using filters in GA4 to identify low-quality traffic sessions coming from China and Singapore.

Why are these bots trying to access your site?

There are several reasons bots could be attempting to access your site, but they are mainly harmless, except potentially damaging your data reporting. The bots are usually trying to harvest your data and not hack into your site for security reasons. With the recent upsurge in AI models that are trained on real-world data, many of these bots are just trying to scrape content for AI machine learning.

How can you protect your data reporting from bot traffic?

There are multiple ways to protect your data from bot traffic, including creating comparisons and using filters within GA4, but the most effective method for removing bot traffic is to create a configuration tag in Google Tag Manager that excludes any traffic from China or Singapore, which will remove almost all of your bot traffic. Obviously, if you do have organic traffic coming from China and you need to be able to report on this, there are other workarounds, such as blocking traffic through Tag Manager that is engaged with your content for less than a second, which should filter out a lot of the bots.

What this means for Marketers

While bot traffic isn’t a major safety concern, it is dangerous in the sense that it can be distorting your analytics, which need to be reliable for you to report accurately internally and externally on performance. Reporting on inflated traffic figures will only come back to bite later down the line when performance doesn’t keep up with traffic levels, making sure your reporting is accurate is extremely important to ensure a coherent strategy for growth.

Growing a small YouTube channel can often be a frustrating experience for up-and-coming channels. The platform is extremely competitive, and the algorithm can often feel almost random, sometimes pushing your videos to achieve a healthy number of views, while other videos underperform, leaving you to wonder where you went wrong. YouTube Shorts can be a great way to help boost channel performance, both in the early stages of content creation and for already established channels.

Why YouTube Shorts are Important

On traditional YouTube videos, it is very difficult to be able to gain traction on YouTube search pages due to the highly competitive nature of most content. Outside of getting your video to appear on Google’s SERP, most people’s views will typically come from a combination of subscribers already following their channel and some new viewers from Google or YouTube. This is what makes YouTube Shorts so important; shorts are much more viral in nature, and don’t require subscribers to get views. YouTube will show your shorts to new users early on if they like similar content, and if your shorts perform well, a snowball effect will take place, which can see your views rise rapidly in a short amount of time.

How to make a Short Perform

There are a couple of key elements to making sure a short performs optimally, and most importantly, the hook. In the opening 2 seconds, your script needs to be able to explain what your video is about and be engaging enough for audiences to want to learn more, making it the most crucial part of your video. Nailing this and keeping people intrigued is probably the most important part of any short, but the pacing is also something that needs to be taken into consideration. If people are watching your shorts in full or on repeat your much more likely to get a viewership boost from YouTube. Pacing your short so it doesn’t lose people’s interest is important, keeping it engaging all the way through.

Turning Shorts into Subscribers

While shorts are great for attracting new viewers, one way in which they are not as reliable as long-form videos is in turning viewers into subscribers. Due to the short-form nature of YouTube shorts, people often flick through from one to the next and don’t have much incentive to stop and look around your channel, which people typically do more often with longer-form content. Therefore, finding ways to use your shorts to attract users to your channel is important. A good way to improve subscriber count with shorts is by including a call to action, such as breaking the short up into 2 parts and explaining you have a part 2 on your channel or linking your shorts to full-length channel videos, thus eliminating the limitations of shorts.

Understanding how YouTube shorts work allows you to accelerate the growth of your channel to new heights, wether your just starting or you’re already an experienced YouTuber.

As Google continues to integrate generative AI into search, advertisers are learning that familiar rules don’t always apply in new environments. One of the latest clarifications from Google Ads confirms that exact match keywords are not eligible to trigger ads within AI Overviews. While subtle on the surface, this shift has meaningful implications for how campaigns are structured and how brands show up in high-visibility search moments.

Understanding Google’s Update on Exact Match

Google recently confirmed that even if an advertiser is bidding on an exact match keyword identical to a user’s query, that keyword alone will not make an ad eligible to appear within an AI Overview. These AI-generated summaries are designed to respond to broader, more conversational intent, not precision keyword matching.

This marks a departure from how many advertisers traditionally think about control and relevance. Exact match still plays an important role in standard search results, but AI Overviews operate under a different logic, one driven by machine learning and inferred intent.

Why AI Overviews Favour Broader Targeting

AI Overviews are built to answer complex, exploratory questions. To do that effectively, Google relies on broad match keywords and AI-powered campaign types that give its systems flexibility to interpret meaning rather than syntax.

This doesn’t mean Google is removing advertiser control. Instead, control shifts from rigid keyword matching to smarter signals including conversion data, audience behaviour, and strong negative keyword strategies. Advertisers who lean into this approach are better positioned to access AI-driven placements.

What Marketers Should Do Next

For clients, this shift highlights an important evolution in how search works. User behaviour is becoming more intent-driven and conversational, particularly within AI-powered results. Brands that approach this change cautiously but proactively are better positioned to appear where attention is increasingly concentrated within AI-generated answers at the top of the page. By evolving keyword strategy in a controlled, data-led way, advertisers can safeguard results today while preparing for the future of paid search.

Search engine optimisation is evolving rapidly as AI-driven search experiences become more common. Can users use the same SEO techniques in AI Mode as in normal search to be successful? In this article, we will discuss all relevant SEO techniques for AI mode.

How Users Search in AI Mode

AI-powered search engines no longer rely on simple keyword matching. Instead, they use queries conversationally, analysing user intent. This means content needs to answer real questions clearly and naturally. Pages written for humans, with logical structure and depth, are more likely to be selected or referenced in AI-generated responses than those built purely around keyword repetition.

Technical SEO in AI Mode

While a lot of SEO techniques may not be relevant in AI Mode, Technical SEO is still important. Ensuring your site is easily crawlable for AI bots means it is easier for them to understand and evaluate your content, making you more likely to appear in AI-generated responses.

How to be successful in AI Mode

AI mode often delivers answers directly within the search experience, which changes how SEO success is measured. Rankings and clicks still matter, but being cited or referenced within AI-generated responses becomes a key outcome. This elevates the importance of brand authority, topical consistency, and content credibility across the web.

What Google says about SEO in AI Mode

Google’s Robby Stein named five factors Google uses to judge content within AI Mode, which Roger Monti has written about extensively in his article for Search Engine Journal. The five factors include quality, helpfulness, and real user satisfaction, driving visibility. AI Mode evaluates whether people find the information genuinely useful and use engagement signals and user behaviour to rank content, much like in traditional SEO.

What this means for Marketers

SEO in AI mode reinforces what we already know about SEO, content that helps users win. By focusing on the audience websites align naturally with AI and help to create engaging content for audiences that boost traffic and profitability.

In early December 2025, Google announced a new core update to its search ranking system. The update began on 11 December 2025 and is expected to take up to three weeks to fully roll out. Core updates affect how websites appear in search results globally and can cause noticeable changes in visibility and traffic.

This December update is the third major core update of 2025, following earlier updates earlier in the year. Like previous updates, it applies broadly across industries rather than targeting one specific type of website or content.

Google has described this update as a routine improvement designed to show more useful and relevant results for people using search.

What a core update actually means

A core update is a wide-ranging change to how Google evaluates content. It does not penalise individual websites and it is not aimed at specific tactics. Instead, Google adjusts how it judges relevance, usefulness and quality across the web.

As a result, some websites may see rankings improve while others may drop, even if nothing has changed on the site itself. These shifts are a normal part of how search evolves.

What marketers should expect

During the rollout period, it is common to see rankings and traffic fluctuate. Search performance can feel unstable until the update has fully completed and the results settle.

The main things marketing teams may notice include:

• movement in keyword rankings across important pages
• changes in organic traffic without any clear on-site cause
• short-term volatility that smooths out after rollout ends

Longer term, core updates tend to reward content that is clearly written, genuinely helpful and closely aligned with what people are actually searching for.

What to do if performance drops

Google’s guidance remains consistent. There is no single fix or quick action required if rankings decline during a core update.

Instead, teams should take a measured approach. That means reviewing content quality, checking whether pages answer user questions clearly, and ensuring the overall experience on key pages is strong. Overreacting during the rollout phase often causes more harm than good.

Monitoring trends over weeks rather than days gives a much clearer picture of whether changes are temporary or part of a longer shift.

The bigger picture

Core updates like this are part of Google’s ongoing effort to improve search results. They will continue to happen regularly and will continue to create winners and losers in the short term.

For non-technical marketing teams, the most important takeaway is consistency. Brands that focus on clear messaging, useful content and genuine value for users tend to be more resilient when these updates roll out.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO is the practice of using undesirable techniques in order to boost the SEO performance of a website. This can include, but is not limited t,o keyword stuffing, hidden links, paid backlinks and more. Google’s algorithms have found a way to penalise sites using different Black Hat SEO tactics, while promoting sites that use White Hat SEO techniques such as creating quality content and focusing on user experience. However, there are certain individuals who will always be trying to trick search engines to artificially boost their rankings. In this article, we will look into new Black Hat SEO techniques that have emerged in 2025 and why you should steer clear of them.

How does Black Hat SEO work in 2025?

The main black hat SEO technique that has become prevalent in 2025 is AI poisoning. This is when users purposefully feed information to chatbots that is wrong or misleading in order to damage a brand’s reputation or offering. Up until now, it was believed that it would take a large amount of data to manipulate AI responses, as they have already been trained to their current understanding on vast amounts of data. However, a recent study from Anthropic shows that only a small amount (as few as 250) malicious documents can cause this Black Hat SEO technique to take effect on the user’s desired Large Language Model.

Here’s what the study had to say,

“Poisoning attacks can compromise the safety of large language models (LLMs) by injecting malicious documents into their training data. Existing work has studied pretraining poisoning, assuming adversaries control a percentage of the training corpus. However, for large models, even small percentages translate to impractically large amounts of data. This work demonstrates for the first time that poisoning attacks instead require a near-constant number of documents regardless of dataset size. We conduct the largest pretraining poisoning experiments to date, pretraining models from 600M to 13B parameters on chinchilla-optimal datasets (6B to 260B tokens). We find that 250 poisoned documents similarly compromise models across all model and dataset sizes, despite the largest models training on more than 20 times more clean data. We also run smaller-scale experiments to ablate factors that could influence attack success, including broader ratios of poisoned to clean data and non-random distributions of poisoned samples. Finally, we demonstrate the same dynamics for poisoning during fine-tuning. Altogether, our results suggest that injecting backdoors through data poisoning may be easier for large models than previously believed, as the number of poisons required does not scale up with model size, highlighting the need for more research on defences to mitigate this risk in future models.”

What this means for SEOs

Obviously, it goes without saying that manipulating large language models to try and gain some sort of edge on your competitors is not an encouraging technique, as not only is it self-serving, but it can also come back to be a negative for you as well. Firstly, if people start manipulating large language models on a large scale purely for selfish reasons, then these models will become largely unusable and have to be retrained, which is bad for everyone in the industry ultimately. Secondly, if Google starts penalising people who have been manipulating large language models and feeding them ill information, your site could be heavily penalised or, worse, altogether restricted from appearing on Google. As ever, making sure you follow Google’s guidelines and best practices when enhancing your site and its seo performance, while creating quality content, is the best and most surefire way to beat out your competitors in 2025.

Google is testing a new feature in Search Console that brings social channel performance into the Insights report. It is designed to give marketers a clearer picture of how their website and social presence perform together in Google Search.

This update is currently an experiment and is only available to a small number of websites.

What is changing in Search Console

Google is expanding the Search Console Insights tab to include performance data from selected social platforms. The aim is to create a single view that shows how content performs across both websites and social channels.

At launch, the social platforms included in the test are YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

Google describes this as a unified view of search performance, rather than a replacement for existing analytics tools.

What Google has said about the update

Google confirmed that this is an early experiment and not a full rollout.

They explained that the updated Insights report will now include performance data from social channels that Google can automatically associate with your website.

This means Search Console will attempt to identify linked social profiles without manual setup at this stage.

Who will see these new insights

Not everyone will have access straight away.

Google has confirmed that the feature is only rolling out to a limited number of websites. If your site is included, Search Console will prompt you to review and confirm any social channels it has automatically linked to your domain.

If you do not see any mention of social channels in your Insights report, your site is likely not part of the experiment yet.

What data the social insights will show

The new social view mirrors the type of information marketers are already familiar with in Search Console, but applied to social platforms.

The data includes:

• Additional traffic sources such as Image Search, Video Search, News Search and Discover
• Total reach, showing clicks and impressions from Google Search to your social profiles
• Content performance, highlighting top performing and trending social posts
• Search queries that lead users to your social profiles
• Audience location, showing which countries users are searching from

This keeps the focus on search driven visibility rather than in-app social metrics.

How social channels are added

There is no manual setup process yet.

If your site is eligible, Search Console will automatically detect social channels it believes are associated with your website. You will then be prompted to review and add them within the Insights report.

If you are not prompted, there is currently nothing you can do to enable it.

Why this matters for digital marketers

For marketers, this update is less about new metrics and more about context.

Being able to see website and social performance side by side helps teams understand how search visibility supports social growth and vice versa. It also reinforces how important social profiles have become within Google Search itself.

One thing to note is that Search Console data can sometimes be delayed. When reporting is up to date, this combined view could be genuinely useful for content planning and performance reviews. Google says the goal is to help site owners better understand their combined performance across channels. If the experiment proves successful, it is likely we will see a wider rollout in the future.

Google has quietly introduced a new behaviour on its home page: users can now upload a file or image directly into the main search bar, and instead of opening a standard results page or Google Lens, they are taken straight into AI Mode. It is a small visual change with a significant implication. The experience users see after uploading something is no longer the familiar list of search results but Google’s expanding AI driven interface.

What is AI Mode in Google

AI Mode is Google’s more conversational and generative search experience. Instead of showing a list of traditional links, AI Mode uses Google’s Gemini model to produce direct answers, summaries and recommendations. Users can then refine their query within a chat style interface.

The core idea is that Google handles more of the thinking for the user. Rather than searching through multiple webpages, AI Mode interprets intent and provides a single structured response. This makes the experience faster for users but offers fewer opportunities for websites to receive clicks.

A subtle update that changes user journeys

Previously, uploading an image through Google would trigger Google Lens or a traditional image search. The new upload button routes people directly into AI Mode. This reflects a wider pattern. Google has increasingly been guiding searchers towards AI Mode in multiple parts of its ecosystem. Examples include AI Overviews appearing more frequently, the AI Mode tab becoming more prominent, and even the Chrome address bar offering AI Mode as a pathway.

Although Google once stated that AI Mode would not become the default search experience, its product decisions suggest the opposite direction. Every new feature seems to reinforce AI Mode as the primary interface for search, discovery and query resolution.

Why this matters for digital marketers

For marketers, the shift brings real consequences. AI Mode does not behave like a standard results page. Users see fewer traditional links, and click-through rates are lower. The journey is more conversational and less oriented toward visiting websites.

This means brand visibility inside AI Mode becomes increasingly important. Marketers need to understand:

• How their brand or content is being cited within AI Mode
• Whether their site is referenced at all
• How rankings differ from traditional search

The performance you see in classic SERPs may not translate into this new environment. AI Mode often answers a query directly without sending users away, which makes measurement and optimisation more complex.

Preparing for an AI first search landscape

Although the shift is gradual, the direction is clear. Google is shaping a search experience where AI Mode plays a central role. Digital marketers will need to adapt strategies to ensure visibility in both traditional results and AI generated responses.

Checking your presence in AI Mode should now be a routine part of search monitoring. As this becomes a bigger part of how people search, early understanding will give brands an advantage while others wait for the shift to become impossible to ignore.

Google is quietly testing a new feature inside Google Ads called Website Optimiser, and it’s already capturing the attention of performance marketers. While the tool isn’t widely available yet, early indications suggest Google is preparing to bring website testing and optimisation back into its ecosystem, something advertisers have been missing since the phase-out of earlier tools. If launched broadly, Website Optimiser could give marketers a more streamlined, data-driven way to improve landing page performance without relying on external platforms.

A Modern Take on a Familiar Concept

For seasoned marketers, the name “Website Optimiser” may feel like a throwback. Years ago, Google offered a tool by the same name that eventually evolved into Google Optimise. With Optimise discontinued, many teams lost a simple, native way to run controlled experiments. This new iteration appears to reintroduce that capability, but in a more integrated form. Placing the tool directly inside Google Ads and potentially automating some setup steps, suggests a focus on ease of use and faster activation.

Why This Matters for Advertisers

If Website Optimiser performs as expected, advertisers could benefit from a centralised, more efficient workflow. Testing landing pages, user experiences, and conversion paths directly inside Google Ads would reduce technical barriers and help teams iterate more quickly. It also has the potential to give marketers a clearer view of performance by connecting ad data and on-site behaviour within a single environment. Ultimately, that means better insights, smarter optimisation decisions, and the ability to increase ROI without adding more tools to the stack.

What Marketers Should Watch For

While excitement is building, key details are still unknown, including how flexible the testing options will be and how soon they will roll out. Even so, the appearance of this feature signals Google’s renewed commitment to supporting experimentation. For marketing teams focused on continuous improvement, Website Optimiser could soon become a valuable tool in the arsenal. Keeping an eye on updates now will ensure you’re ready to take advantage of it as soon as it becomes available.