Fixed: Fathom Says “Only organizer can record”

It only took a few days and a handful of meetings before I finally found the fix for this, “Only organizer can record” error that kept popping up in Fathom when I’d join team meetings.

Was a bit madening because they were meetings of which I am a domain admin within that Google Workspace. After scouring Google’s docs and changing host control settings repeatedly, without success, I stumbled back into Fathom’s meeting control settings for our team and viola!

A magical little drop down is set by default to only allow the host to record calls. The problem we’re probably all too familiar with is that hosts are only in a call first half the time. In the day and age of meetings running over each other, I was really missing the ability to kick off a call and not miss a single note, thanks to my trusty second-brain ai notetaker joining the call.

While the “Limit to a single bot per meeting” setting is a MUST for groups using Fathom together, defaulting to the host-only recording setting is a bit aggressive. Glad I found and corrected the setting!

It’s good to have my Fathom back. Hope this helps!

What is AI’s Impact on SEO and Marketing? (And how to respond)

AI’s Impact on SEO Visualized by an illustration of a robot interacting with a businesswoman.

As I see it, AI’s impact on SEO and marketing is most broadly being felt in three areas:

  1. Content Production Pace
  2. Search Results
  3. User Behavior

These three dynamics play off of each other and continue to change each other (as users try new search platforms, for example, Google will continue testing changes to their AI SERP summaries, driving content creators to re-think how they’re generating content, and for whom).

Studying what’s actually going on is hard and changing literally daily.

Still, I believe there are core principles and practices we live by that will succeed regardless of where artificial intelligence and LLM’s take us.

Here’s how AI’s changing the face of SEO and marketing (and how to best respond and optimize for it).

Continue reading “What is AI’s Impact on SEO and Marketing? (And how to respond)”

The Pros and Cons of Using AI / ChatGPT to Write an SEO Blog Post (as written by ChatGPT)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized many industries and has transformed the way we work. True or false?

I’d argue, “False.”

But ChatGPT would disagree. That opening sentence was the first statement it spit out when I asked for a blog post on the pros and cons of using AI to write an SEO blog post.

I know, almost too cliche for its own good. But I wanted to see for myself (a) what AI would generate and (b) what Google would do if I edited and published that content. So, here it is – with the exception of the opening sentence, the words up to this point have all been hand-written by yours truly, the human behind the SEO Eclectic screen. Beyond this point is all AI generated by ChatGPT, with a few human edits throughout.

Continue reading “The Pros and Cons of Using AI / ChatGPT to Write an SEO Blog Post (as written by ChatGPT)”

Is There a Google Analytics Annotations API? (Spoiler: Almost)

Originally published June 14, 2019. Updated (yes, actually) March 9, 2020

Can you automatically or programmatically add notes via a Google Analytics annotations API?

I’ve been adding annotations to Google Analytics accounts for much of the last decade. I’ve noted development go lives, Google algorithm changes, SEO questions and even holidays that affect traffic or search volume (hello huge spike in organic traffic every year on Labor Day weekend to HireAHelper’s day labor pages). Along the way, these little analytics post-it notes have come back to prove incredibly useful as we look over historical trends or climbs and drops in traffic.

The problem with something becoming more useful is that you then tend to use it exponentially more, and such is the case for us at HireAHelper. In the last 2 years we’ve almost added more annotations than in the 10 years before that!

Along the way I thought to myself, “Self, there must be some automated way to add annotations to Google Analytics, at least the programmatic updates and go lives we’re shipping regularly to our website. Maybe an Google Analytics API we can tie into?”

Continue reading “Is There a Google Analytics Annotations API? (Spoiler: Almost)”

Your AdWords Account: Ad Disapproved – Malicious or Unwanted Software – Why Did My Ads Get Disapproved?

Red Alert

Last night, 9:33pm, a slack notification lit up my watch from our lead developer with the preview, “red alert?”

Ok, so, that’s probably not a Slack to skip.

I jumped into the conversation while at the same time peeking at my email inbox only to notice the “Your AdWords Account: Ad Disapproved” emails warning that 800+ of our ads had been disapproved for “malicious or unwanted software” found on our site. Continue reading “Your AdWords Account: Ad Disapproved – Malicious or Unwanted Software – Why Did My Ads Get Disapproved?”

Rand(om) SEO Insights into Panda

Moz Monthly Header Screenshot

The “Monthly Moz-Letter” almost got deleted today on my crusade to clean out my Gmail inbox. Glad I decided to open it – I almost missed this gold nugget from the Rand(om) Question section:

One last thing I’ll say about Panda in particular – you need to be willing to take dramatic action to respond. The sites I’ve seen recover are those who’ve done a complete redesign and a refresh of their content, making things so wonderfully amazing that they stand out as the best result for the query. Those who’ve made iterative attempts to reduce ads a little or throw some extra paragraphs on a page so as to hopefully get over the Panda algo generally haven’t.

Best of luck!
Rand

My take away?

Continue reading “Rand(om) SEO Insights into Panda”

Guest Post Counterpoint to “Social Signals and Algorithm Changes – Industry Dependent?”

An SEO friend, Alec, emailed me after reading my theory on a “relativity factor” in the Google algorithm. He had to respectfully disagree and explained why. I loved his point of view and asked if I could post his thoughts here as a guest post. He also has an intriguing article on the side effects of too much sleep over at the Healthy Way. Check out his side of the discussion and let me know your thoughts in the comments…

Picture of a Discussion
Photo credit to quinn.anya

I just ran across your last post and being my usual contrary self, I have to disagree with you when you say a “one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t work.” In this case I think it would. Market forces make it more equatable and eliminate the need for “fair metrics relative to [each] industry”. Besides since when is G fair? (but that is another discussion)

Big G wouldn’t necessarily have to have another algo factor for movers or any other industry (isn’t each industry unique?) as the industry itself will create their own relative effect on one another’s rankings by their willingness or ability to participate in each of the ranking factors.

Here is what I mean: Continue reading “Guest Post Counterpoint to “Social Signals and Algorithm Changes – Industry Dependent?””

Social Signals and Algorithm Changes – Industry Dependent?

During my rabid consumption of SEO knowledge in the form of podcasts, webinars, and blog posts, I’ve come to the conclusion they’re all wrong.

Not entirely, and not necessarily individually. But as a whole, if you combine all the suggestions & theories, they’re very one-size-fits all. I hear over and over again “social is important,” “You gotta build a Facebook community of thousands of followers around your brand,” “keywords in the URL are on the out,” “get your url tweeted & re-tweeted.”

From what I’ve seen in the moving industry, these are not true for everyone. Continue reading “Social Signals and Algorithm Changes – Industry Dependent?”