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Doing great work is no longer enough to ensure client retention. Gear Up for Growth With Jean Caragher For CPA Trendlines Go PRO for members-only access to more Jean Marie Caragher. View the full article

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Google's March core update is done, I dig into what we know about it...View the full article

Attacks in retaliation for rockets launched from Lebanon follow weeks of mounting hostilities across the Middle East View the full article

Law firm says directive is ‘unconstitutional’ and notes a similar effort was declared unlawful by court View the full article

The chancellor’s Isa reforms must be designed with Gen Z in mindView the full article

I always ask the same hypothetical question to friends and coworkers: If you were 20 years younger with the hindsight you have, what career path would you take differently? It’s fairly easy to look back. But what’s (much) harder is to look forward in time and identify areas that will increase in value in the next few years. Here are five marketing skills I believe will only increase in value in the next few years to expand your expertise and your career path options. 1. Creative generation Everybody seems to think creativity is dying, especially since the rise of AI over the past two years. However, AI is the exact reason why I think the skill of creating smart, engaging, edgy, unique, and thought-provoking creative will be worth its weight in gold. Creative is advertising’s founding father. It will never not be at the core of your advertising strategy. In a sea of average content, which ChatGPT often provides across multiple channels, the ability to stand out from mediocrity will be crucial – particularly for brand building and new businesses in a crowded marketplace. ChatGPT and Gemini can be the answer when companies want quantity over quality. Advancements in technology and lower entry points will also allow more people to create high-quality ads, which will no doubt make people raise their game to stand out. Even for brands where user-generated content is more of the image they want to portray, I believe this will continue to thrive in a world where the stock of authentic content is only going up. 2. Conversion rate optimization In PPC, we focus so much on investing in what happens before the click that what happens after is neglected and taken for granted. Out of all the digital marketing skills I’ve seen over the past 10 years, there is not another that is more underestimated relative to its importance than conversion rate optimization (CRO). I’ve been involved in meetings where the primary discussion amongst six or seven business stakeholders is pausing or adding a handful of long tail keywords. Or whether changing a few titles and descriptions in a search ad is going to make a significant difference. We are guilty of delving into topics of little significance and ignoring areas of core value to a business’s digital success, such as CRO. I believe part of this is because it’s often delegated to the developers to fix. Most agencies only care what happens before a user visits the website, while the clients only want to focus on things where they can have an element of control. CRO is so valuable at the moment because so few agencies offer this outside of small-scale consultancy. There is usually a gap on the client side where they have their marketing team and developers, but no one in between linking ecommerce or lead gen expertise, strategy, and the ability to action any changes. Those jack-of-all-trades within businesses are normally spread thin because of their versatility. So having someone at the agency side to lead CRO with in-depth user and competitor analysis to back up any hypothesis and recommendations is vital. You can break it down by numbers to get a better sense of its importance: If a website is working at a 5% conversion rate at a £100 AOV with 100,000 unique sessions per month, that’s £500,000 in revenue per month. Through a CRO service, they identify a number of barriers to conversion for a large % of users, such as: Inefficient checkout process. Lack of USPs. Inefficient use of reviews. Bloating product page. Lack of payment providers. Lack of up-selling strategies. Slow response time. Generic USPS. Once the dev and marketing team had reviewed, approved and actioned these changes, conversion rate increased to 6% and AOV £125. With the same level of advertising dollars spent and the same monthly sessions, that revenue is now £750,000. A £250k improvement, which over the whole year is £3 million and a 50% uplift in the company’s annual revenue! And that’s just from a one-off service! That value won’t be underestimated forever. 3. Omnichannel There has always been a healthy form of competition between channel experts for years now. So often siloed and reported individually with channel-specific creative, an omnichannel approach is rare, whether on the client or agency side. The obsession with attribution has always fueled this separation. With the growth in marketing mix models (hello, Meridian), I believe this is a strong sign that we are shifting toward a more omnichannel approach. The impacts of this may be that we start seeing more channel consultants, client directors or omnichannel specialists. This will lead to a greater alignment of strategies and consistent messaging across the channels. We may even see a surge in old-fashioned storytelling, but with modern twists to enhance the customer experience across the different touch points. When reliant on channel-specific metrics, the individual parts are often greater than the whole. By stepping back and placing a greater strategic emphasis on omnichannel, greater channel collaboration can lead to the whole being greater. 4. Profit optimization and business economics This is something that has grown in importance over the past two years, but not as quickly as I would have thought. For a number of years in Google Ads for retail accounts, ROAS is the source of truth. In some cases, clients haven’t changed their ROAS for a number of years, despite increases in manufacturing costs, delivery, competition, etc. This makes your Target ROAS more difficult to achieve without lower revenue generation. In some cases, because of those increased expenses, the original target ROAS isn’t even profitable, regardless of revenue generation. ROAS is mostly an arbitrary metric that gives an account manager a goal to optimize toward. Nothing else. It does not reflect most businesses key objectives and it caps the growth potential of any ad account. ROAS is only effective if stakeholders have their finger on the pulse of their business economics (e.g., average cost of goods sold, shipping, packaging and handling, discounts). And, spoiler alert, most don’t! That’s where you come in. If you have an understanding of general ecommerce business economics, and combine that with executing a profit-first approach with a helping hand from tools such as ProfitMetrics, then you will go beyond just the PPC account management sending monthly reports on clicks and CTR. Suddenly, you will become a business consultant with the ability to structure a PPC account in line with a business’s key objectives. With ecommerce markets still struggling, campaign growth becoming more complex with rising costs, increasing competition, and more profitability levers to pull (Google even now has its own tool to focus on more profitable products) the value of integrating account management with profitable tracking and business unit reporting is only going up. 5. Ecommerce consultancy I’m cheating a little bit here as this skill covers all services, but the value of being able to expand beyond just a PPC specialist and become an all-rounder has never been higher. AI has levelled the playing field, no more so than for PPC specialists. For the past few years, PPC management has slowly migrated away from spending the majority of your time in Google Ads focusing on tactical decisions and optimization and toward spending more time on higher-level strategic work. This is largely because of automated features and tools that do most of the heavy lifting (PMax, RSAs, AARs, Smart bidding, etc.). PPC specialists who want to stay relevant and future-proof themselves may want to become a T-Shaped specialist. Essentially, you want to become someone who leans on core expertise and has a deep understanding of that service (e.g., a PPC specialist) but also has a broad knowledge of other business services on top of that. This will enable you to become less reliant on just one area and enhance your value across all other business and marketing areas, such as SEO, analytics, measurement, or the other areas I’ve already discussed in this article. You don’t need to be an expert in these areas, just enough knowledge to provide value to your client and integrate it into your core expertise. If managing PPC ads is your core expertise, but you also are comfortable with CRO and analytics, when troubleshooting poor PPC performance for a month, you have the ability to look beyond CTR and impression share. You might see that the ads are underperforming because the cart abandonment rate increased after installing a new checkout widget a few weeks prior, or removing a payment provider because their fees were too high, compromising the checkout stage and reducing website purchase efficiency. A PPC specialist may not have looked beyond the Google or Bings interface to spot the issue, which could have lasted months before being resolved. Grow your value Whether it’s becoming a T-shaped specialist or deep diving into another undervalued business service (would this be an H-shaped specialist?), the value of bulking up your expertise outside of your core area will really set you apart. You will bring added value to your own company and to your clients. And the appetite and demand for this type of person is only growing in an AI world! View the full article

The personal consumption expenditures index showed headline inflation flat at 2.5%, but the details of the report explain the Federal Reserve's reluctance to adjust interest rates. View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The old cliché "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies perfectly to the first-generation Google Pixel Watch. Released in 2022, Google's first smart watch looks great, is designed to work with FitBit's infrastructure, and is one of the best deals for Amazon's Big Spring Sale. You can pick one up for $129.99, 61% cheaper than the regular list price of $329.99, and the lowest price this model has ever sold for. Google Pixel Watch $129.99 at Amazon /images/amazon-prime.svg $329.99 Save $200.00 Get Deal Get Deal $129.99 at Amazon /images/amazon-prime.svg $329.99 Save $200.00 Here's a chart so you can see how the price falls off a cliff a few days ago: Credit: Stephen Johnson If you compare features of the original Pixel Watch with the Pixel Watch 3 that came out in 2024, you can see how competitive the older watch is. Sure, the Pixel 3 has an extra sensor that measures skin temperature, fall detection, a faster processor and a bigger battery, but if you want a dependable watch to keep track of your workouts, play music, make calls, and control your household smart devices, both work great, and you could literally buy two Pixel Watch 1's for the $289.99 sale price of the newer model and still have $30 left to buy lunch. If you want to take a deeper look at all the smart watch and fitness tracker bargains on Amazon this week, Lifehacker's Senior Health Editor Beth Skwarecki has broken them all down here. Shopping for tech? Lifehacker can help you make the right decision. Browse our tech reviews and head-to-head comparisons for everything from laptops and smartwatches to e-bikes and home gyms. Subscribe to our deals newsletter, Add to Cart, for the best sales sent to your inbox, or browse our best-of lists directly on Amazon, including: The Best Over-Ear Headphones The Best Wireless Earbuds The Best Adjustable Dumbbell Sets The Best Projectors View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. One of the best markdowns during Amazon's Big Spring Sale this year is on the DJI Osmo Action 4 Essential Combo, now $199, down from $289—its lowest price yet, according to price trackers. DJI Osmo Action 4 Essential Combo $199.00 at Amazon /images/amazon-prime.svg $289.00 Save $90.00 Get Deal Get Deal $199.00 at Amazon /images/amazon-prime.svg $289.00 Save $90.00 This Essential Combo keeps it simple without skimping on the must-haves—you get the camera, an extreme battery, a horizontal-vertical frame for quick swaps, and all the basics to get started, out of the box. The camera itself shoots 4K video at 120fps, with a 1/1.3-inch sensor that handles low light better than most other action cams in this range. That means clearer shots at dusk or in shady spots—basically, where cheaper cameras start to give up. The image stabilization is excellent and on par with GoPro, notes this PCMag review. You can run, bike, or strap it to your chest while snowboarding, and the footage'll be smooth. But there’s no onboard storage, so you’ll need a microSD card. Not a dealbreaker, but something to know upfront. That said, this isn’t the full Adventure Combo, so you don’t get the extra batteries or the charging hub. For casual users, that’s probably fine. But if you’re looking to vlog or shoot for longer sessions, the add-ons might be worth budgeting for later. It’s also waterproof to 59 feet, and the touchscreen works well even when wet. The DJI Osmo Action 4 camera pairs with your phone through DJI’s app if you want to shoot remotely or transfer clips quickly. If you’re already sitting on a GoPro setup, this won’t do much to make you switch. But for first-time buyers or casual creators, this deal is about as low-risk as it gets. View the full article

To meet the web content crawlability and indexability needs of large language models, a new standards proposal for AI/LLMs by Australian technologist Jeremy Howard is here. His proposed llms.txt acts somewhat similarly to robots.txt and XML sitemaps protocols, in order to allow for a crawling and readability of entire websites, putting less of a resource strain on LLMs for crawling and discovering your website content. But it also offers an additional benefit – full content flattening – and this may be a good thing for brands and content creators. While many content creators are interested in the proposal’s potential merits, it also has detractors. But given the rapidly changing landscape for content produced in a world of artificial intelligence, llms.txt is certainly worth discussing. The new proposed standard for AI accessibility to website content Bluesky CEO Jay Graber propelled the discussion of content creator rights and data control, as it relates to being used for training in AI, on March 10 at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas on March 10. Robust and ambitious in its detail, the cited proposal offers much to consider about the future of user content control within LLMs’ vast data and content appetite. But a potentially simpler potential protocol emerged for web content creators last September, and while not as broad as the other proposal, llms.txt offers some assurance of increased control by the owner, in terms of what, and how much should be accessed. These two proposals are not mutually exclusive, but the new llms.txt protocol seems to be further along. Howard’s llms.txt proposal is a website crawl and indexing standard using simple markdown language. With AI models consuming and generating infinitely vast amounts of web content, content owners are seeking better control over how their data is used, or at least, seeking to provide context on how they would like for it to be used. Short of exceeding the astoundingly high bar of crawl capabilities of a Google or Bing, LLMs are in need of a solution that allows them to focus less on becoming a massive crawling engine, and more on the “intelligence” part of their functions, as artificial as they may be. Theoretically, llms.txt provides a better use of technical resources for LLMs. This article will explore: What llms.txt is. How it works. Some ways to think about it. Whether LLMs and content owners are “buying-in”. Why you should pay attention. What llms.txt is and what it does For the purpose of this article, it is best to quote Howard’s proposal to help reveal what he intends for this new standard to accomplish:: “Large language models increasingly rely on website information, but face a critical limitation: context windows are too small to handle most websites in their entirety. Converting complex HTML pages with navigation, ads, and JavaScript into LLM-friendly plain text is both difficult and imprecise. “While websites serve both human readers and LLMs, the latter benefit from more concise, expert-level information gathered in a single, accessible location. This is particularly important for use cases like development environments, where LLMs need quick access to programming documentation and APIs. “We propose adding a /llms.txt markdown file to websites to provide LLM-friendly content… llms.txt markdown is human and LLM readable, but is also in a precise format allowing fixed processing methods (i.e. classical programming techniques such as parsers and regex). The potential uses for this proposed protocol are quite intriguing for GEO benefits, and I’ve been testing it since December. In its essence, llms.txt let you provide context on how your content can be accessed and used by AI-driven models. Similar to robots.txt, which controls how search engine crawlers (or should) interact with a website, llms.txt would establish guidelines for AI models that scrape and process content for training and response generation. There is no real “blocking,” and robots.txt directives (ex. “Disallow:”) are not intended for the llms.txt file. When set up properly, it is rather more of a “choosing” about which content should be shown contextually or wholly to an AI platform. You can simply place URLs of a section of a website, add URLs with summaries of a website, or even provide the full raw text of a website in single or multiple files. The llms.txt file on one of my websites is 115,378 words long, 966 kb file size, and contains the complete flattened website text in a single .txt file, hosted on the domain root. But your file can be smaller, even potentially larger than this file size, or even broken out into multiple files. It can be stored in multiple directories of your taxonomy and architecture, as needed. You can also create .md markdown versions of each of your web pages that you believe deserves the attention of an LLM. It is very handy when performing deep site analysis, and it is not just for the LLMs. Just as websites serve many various uses, llms.txt follows in this regard, with many possible variations for providing context to LLMs. Generating an llms.txt or llms-full.txt file It is almost “elegant” in its simplicity, in that it strips complete sites down to their bare linguistic and textual essence, making it easier fodder to parse by your favorite platform, for myriad uses in content development, site structure analysis, entity research, and just about anything else you can dream up. It also provides a standardized method for website owners to explicitly allow or disallow LLMs from ingesting and utilizing their content. The proposal is gaining traction among tech industry leaders and SEO professionals as AI continues to reshape the digital landscape. The absolute utility for increasing relevance is there, with benefits for the LLM, the website owner, and the user who theoretically finds a better answer via this little textual handshake. Llms.txt functions similarly to robots.txt, only in the sense of creating a simple text file in the root directory of their website. Much like the robots.txt file standard, it can be obeyed, or not, depending on whether or not the AI/LLM agent wants to. But to clear up a common misperception, it IS NOT intended for robots.txt directives to be included in the llms.txt file. A few sample llms.txt files, in action Anthropic: https://docs.anthropic.com/llms-full.txt Hugging Face: https://huggingface-projects-docs-llms-txt.hf.space/accelerate/llms.txt Perplexity: https://docs.perplexity.ai/llms-full.txt LLMsTxt Manager: https://llmstxtmanager.com/llms.txt Zapier: https://docs.zapier.com/llms-full.txt Adoption Many different LLMs have voiced their support for the llms.txt standard,and many are using it, or exploring its usefulness. llms.txt Hub has compiled a list of AI developers using the standard for documentation, and claims to be one of the largest such resources for identifying them. But remember, llms.txt is not just for developers, it is for all web content owners and producers. Website and content creators can also benefit greatly from a flattened file of their site. Once the llms.txt file is in place, full site content can be analyzed, however it may fit the needs of your research method. llms.txt Generator Tools With the basic protocol outlined, there are a variety of tools available to help generate your file. I have found that most will generate smaller sites for free, and larger sites can be a custom job. Of course, many website owners will choose to develop their own tool or scraper. Word of caution – research the security of any generator tool before using, and review your files before uploading. DO NOT use any tool without first vetting security. Here are a few of those free tools to check (but still subject to your own validation): Markdowner – A free, open-source tool that converts website content into well-structured Markdown files. Appify – Jacob Kopecky’s llms.txt generator. Website LLMs – This WordPress plugin creates your llms.txt file for you. Just set the crawl to “Post”, “pages,” or both, and you’re in business. I was one of the first ten people to download this plugin; now it is at over 3,000 downloads in just three months. FireCrawl – One of the first tools to emerge for the creation of llms.txt files. While llms.txt improves content extraction clarity, it could also introduce security risks that require careful management. This article does not address those risks, but it is highly recommended that any tool is fully vetted before deploying this file. Why llms.txt could matter for SEO and GEO Controlling how AI models interact with your content is critical, and just having a fully flattened version of a website can make AI extraction, training, and analysis much simpler. Here are some reasons why: Protecting proprietary content: Prevents AI from using original content without permission, but only for the LLMs that choose to obey the directives. Brand Reputation Management: It theoretically gives businesses some control over how their information appears in AI-generated responses. Linguistic and content analysis: With a fully flattened version of your site that is easily consumable by AI, you can perform all kinds of analysis that typically require a standalone tool. Keyword frequency, taxonomy analysis, entity analysis, linking, competitive analysis, etc. Enhanced AI interaction: llms.txt helps LLMs interact more effectively with your website, enabling them to retrieve accurate and relevant information. No standard needed for this option, just a nice clean and flattened file of your complete content. Improved content visibility: By guiding AI systems to focus on specific content, llms.txt can theoretically “optimize” your website for AI indexing, potentially improving your site’s visibility in AI-powered search results. Like SEO, there are no guarantees. But on the face of it, any preference that an LLM has towards a llms.txt is a step forward. Better AI performance: The file ensures that LLMs can access the most valuable content on your site, leading to more accurate AI responses when users engage with tools like chatbots or AI-powered search engines. I use the “full” rendering of llms.txt, and personally do not find the summaries or URL lists any more helpful than robots.txt, or an XML sitemap. Competitive advantage: As AI technologies continue to evolve, having an llms.txt file can give your website a competitive edge by making it more AI-ready. Challenges and limitations While llms.txt offers a promising solution, several key challenges remain: Adoption by AI companies: Not all AI companies may adhere to the standard, and will just ignore the file, and ingest all of your content any way. Adoption by websites: Simply put, brands and website operators are going to have to step up and participate if llms.txt will be successful. Maybe not all, but a critical mass will be necessary. In the absence of any other type of scientific “optimization” of AI, what have we got to lose? (I still really think it is a mistake to apply an old term like “optimization” to generative AI. It just seems linguistically lazy). Overlap with robots.txt and XML sitemaps: Potential conflicts and inconsistencies between robots.txt, XML sitemaps, and llms.txt could create confusion. To repeat, the llms.txt file is not intended to be a substitute for robots.txt. As previously mentioned, I find the most value in the “full” rendering of the text file. Keyword, content, and link spamability: Much like keyword stuffing was used in the SEO days of yore, there is nothing to stop anyone from filling up their llms.txt with gratuitous loads of text, keywords, links, and content. Exposure of your content to competitors for their own analysis. While scraping is a basic cornerstone of the entire search industry, competitive keyword and content research is nothing new. But having this simple file lowers the bar a bit for your competitors to easily analyze what you have – and don’t have – and use to their competitive advantage. Other contrarian views about llms.txt exist in the SEO/GEO community. I had a message chat with Pubcon and WebmasterWorld CEO Brett Tabke about llms.txt. He said he doesn’t believe it offers much utility: “We just don’t need people thinking they [LLMs] are different from any other spider. The dividing line between a ‘search [engine]’ and an ‘llm’ is barely arguable any more. Google, Perplexity, and ChatGPT have blurred that into a very fuzzy line with AI responses on SERPs. The only distinguishing factor is that Google is a search engine with an LLM bolted on, and ChatGPT is an LLM with a search engine bolted on. Going forward, it is obvious that Google will merge their LLM directly with the code base of the search engine and blow away any remaining lines between the two. LLMs.txt simply obfuscates that fact.” XML sitemaps and robots.txt already serve this purpose, Tabke added. On this point, I agree wholly. But for me, the potential value lies mostly in the “full” text rendering version of this file. Marketer David Ogletree also has similar reservations: “If there is a bottom line, it is that I really don’t want people continuing this idea that there is a difference between a LLM and Google. They are one in the same to me and should be treated the same.” The future of llms.txt and AI content governance As AI adoption continues to grow, so does the need for structured content governance. llms.txt represents an early effort to create transparency and control over AI content usage. Whether it becomes a widely accepted standard depends on industry support, website owner support, regulatory developments, and AI companies’ willingness to comply. You should stay informed about llms.txt and be prepared to adapt their content strategies as AI-driven search and content discovery evolve. The introduction of llms.txt marks a significant step toward balancing AI innovation with content ownership rights, and the “crawlability and indexability” of websites for consumption and analysis by LLMs. You should proactively explore its implementation to safeguard your digital assets, and also provide LLMs a runway to better understand the structure and content of your site(s). As AI continues to reshape online search and content distribution, having a defined strategy for AI interaction with your website will be essential. llms.txt could create a little bit of science for GEO In GEO, much like SEO, there are literally almost no scientific standards for web creators to base on. In other words, verifiable best platform practices based on specific tactics. Any buzzy acronym containing a big “O” (optimization) is black box engineering. Or, as another tech development executive I worked with calls it, “wizardry,” “alchemy,” or “digital shamanism.” For example: When Google says “create great content for users, and then you will succeed in search” – that’s an art project on your part. When Google says, “we follow XML sitemaps as a part of our crawler journey, and there is a place for it in Google Search Console,” well, that’s a little bit of science. And the same for schema.org, robots.txt, and even IndexNow. These are “agreed upon” standards that search engines tell us definitively, “we do take these protocols into consideration, though at our own discretion.” In a world of so much uncertainty with what “can be done” for improving AI and LLM performance, llms.txt sounds like a great start. If you have a wide content audience, it may bode well for you to get your llms.txt file going now. You never know what major or specialized LLM may want to use your content for some new purpose. And in a world shifting from the multiple decisions required of a searcher of a cluttered results page, the LLM provides the answer. If you are playing to win, then you want your content to be that answer, as it is potentially worth a multitude of search engine searches. I started implementing llms.txt on my own websites a few months ago, and am implementing it on all my clients’ websites. There is no harm in doing so. Anything that can potentially help “optimize” my content should be done, especially as a potentially accepted standard. Are all the LLMs using it? It is definitely not even near critical mass, but some have reported an interest. Can an llms.txt file also help you better access and crawl your own website for various AI uses? Absolutely. One of the main uses I have found is in analyzing client sites in various ways. Having the entirety of your website content in a file can allow for different types of analysis that were not as easy to render previously. Will it become a standard? It definitely remains to be seen. llms.txt has a long road ahead, but I wouldn’t bet against it. Where companies are looking for new ideas to improve their presence as “the answer” in LLMs, it offers one new signal for AI optimization and possibly one step ahead for connecting with LLMs in a way that was previously only comparable to search engines. And don’t be surprised if you start hearing a lot more SEO/GEO practitioners talking about llms.txt in the near term, as a basic staple for site optimization, along with robots.txt, XML sitemaps, schema, IndexNow, and others. View the full article

Google's March 2025 core update finished yesterday, I have a standalone video on that, so check it out. The core update caused more volatility at the tail end of the rollout...View the full article

Looking to increase your social media followers? Check out these 15 practical tips to grow your online presence. The post 15 Proven Tips To Get More Social Media Followers appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Shopify has become the leading online shopping platform in just a few years. It has become an anti-Amazon, helping small and large retailers worldwide run successful online stores with minimal effort. Although the ecommerce platform makes everything easy, there’s a lot you can do to improve the SEO of your online shop. In this ultimate guide, we’ll help you get on the right track by giving you many tips and tricks. In addition, we’ll tell you the best SEO app, and we have a Shopify SEO checklist for you! Table of contents Introduction What is Shopify? What is Shopify SEO? SEO basics for Shopify Technical SEO for Shopify How to increase sales in Shopify Learn more? Try the Yoast SEO for Shopify training course Conclusion on Shopify SEO What is Shopify SEO? While Shopify helps you set up everything correctly from the start, there are some things to consider when considering SEO. As with all content management systems, you must optimize your store to ensure it performs well for customers and search engines. With Shopify SEO, you’re building a technically sound store that is tuned to what potential customers are looking for. You will use SEO in such a way that you build a much better solution than what your competitors are doing. You use research to find out what customers need, and you use the power of high-quality content to draw people in. The Shopify SEO tips also have to do with what you do to market your store in other places — both online and offline. At Yoast, we practice holistic SEO and advise you to do the same — it’s the only way to get sustainable results. Yoast SEO for Shopify Want to outclass your competitors and boost your Shopify store’s organic traffic? Yoast SEO for Shopify has everything you need, from creating top-notch content to making your products eligible for rich results in Google. Our 24/7 support team and valuable SEO courses will ensure you stay ahead of the curve. Get it now! » Does Shopify have good SEO? Shopify ensures you set up your store quickly and that customers and search engines can reach it. It already has some basic SEO features, and you can use SEO apps such as Yoast SEO for Shopify for many of the other tasks. Of course, this being a closed platform, your control over SEO is limited to what the developers allow. For instance, you have to use the built-in URL structure and a system to manage your products in so-called collections, but these can be suboptimal and might cause duplicate content issues. In the rest of this guide, we will go through the SEO basics you need to cover and how Shopify and Yoast SEO can help you. Read more: How to become a Shopify expert » 12 SEO basics for Shopify to get you started It’s an excellent platform to host your online shop, but there’s a lot you can do to make it perform even better. SEO can help you get your store noticed on Google and other platforms while making it more attractive to potential customers. In this guide to Shopify SEO, we’ll give you loads of tips — and a checklist — to make your ecommerce site successful. 1. Define who you are and what you stand for To kick things off, we need you to think about who you are. Why does your business exist, and why do you need people to visit your store and buy your products? What makes you stand out from the competition? If everyone sells the same products, what would be your number one reason for people to come to you? Define a mission for your store. A mission is an effective way of explaining what you have in your head. It provides a line that you can connect to your values and principles. You can use your mission as input for your online store’s SEO and marketing strategy. We have a post explaining exactly what you need to do to define a good mission and what to do with it. Branding and storytelling are essential — so is having a mission! 2. Conduct keyword research for your store SEO for your Shopify store must start with keyword research. Keyword research for online stores produces a list of terms you want your products, services, or store to be found. It will also give you insights into your audience, which words they use, which solutions they prefer, and how they behave. If you do it well, you can instantly fill in your SEO strategy for your site. Various tools out there can help you get those insights quickly. You could use Google Trends, Answer the Public, or more professional tools like Ahrefs and Semrush — Yoast SEO for Shopify even integrates with Semrush. You can even use generative AI tools like OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini to inspire you. Do thorough research and find out which terms are used most often. Find out what people usually search for and which phrases have search volume that you might aim for. Remember that trying to aim for the most popular head terms only might not make the most sense — try to aim for more long-tail keywords that still attract traffic. It would help if you also looked at the different search intents around your products or services. No one goes from not needing something to buying it in the next second. The buyer journey has a number of steps, and you need to provide content for those steps. 3. Look at what the competition is doing When doing keyword research, you must also see what your competition is doing. There are a ton of competitors operating in every niche you can imagine. Whenever you are looking at entering a market — or growing your piece of the pie — you must look at the competition. Who are they? What do they stand for? What’s their offering? Their prices? Service? How do they talk about the product? Who are they targeting, and by which terms do they do that? Looking at your competitors gives you an idea of who to beat. You might find a weakness in their store or a strategy you might use. Or, you can find something that inspires you to work from. Please look at their content; are they writing thoroughly and with expertise about the product? Is that something you can improve on? Shopify SEO tips in a handy checklist This is a pretty epic Shopify SEO article, and we can imagine it is hard to keep track of all the great tips. Luckily, we put all the main tips in a handy little Shopify SEO checklist. Download the pdf and get started on the SEO of your store! 4. Write unique and high-quality product descriptions Together with product photography, product descriptions are the life and blood of your online store. With good product descriptions, customers can get a good feel for a product without having it in hand. The problem is many online shops count on the descriptions manufacturers supply to stores. You can probably guess what that means: the same descriptions litter the web, causing duplicate content issues. Writing your product descriptions can help you establish trust with the consumer. Having your content in your own words makes you more unique and lets you stand out from the crowd. Do keyword research for the products to determine which terms your consumers use. Use those terms in your descriptions and craft a compelling piece of content from that. Incorporate the details from the manufacturer, like SKU and product titles, but don’t rely on their descriptions. Helping you improve your product descriptions is one of the standout features of Yoast SEO for Shopify. The app gives you suggestions while writing your descriptions and tips to help you improve both readability and SEO. Taylor Stitch gives you everything you need to know about a product on one screen Keep reading: Product identifiers like SKU and GTIN are essential for ecommerce SEO » 5. Write great titles and meta descriptions Just as your product descriptions should be excellent, your titles and meta descriptions should also be epic. Title and meta descriptions are essential aspects that you can focus on to improve Shopify’s SEO. Use your keywords tactically and write something enticing those consumers want to click. Shopify automatically generates titles and meta descriptions based on a straightforward template. You can edit your products’ titles, meta descriptions, blog posts, pages, collections, and general site settings. Go to a specific page and open the search engine listing preview. Add a title and meta description for the search results pages here. These differ from the regular titles and descriptions, as these are specifically meant for the search results. You might have a specific title visible on your store and choose something else to show on the search results pages. Quickly edit the information that will show up on the search results pages You can edit these in Shopify, but Yoast SEO makes this process much more manageable. This SEO app comes with the incredible power of variables — and generative AI. Using variables, you can automatically generate part of the title and the meta description based on your settings. Of course, it’s always better to write both yourself, but this allows you to automate some parts, which can be helpful when you have many products. The same goes for AI in Yoast SEO! 6. Create SEO-friendly URLs in Shopify SEO-friendly URLs are easy to read, relatively short, and consistent. Unfortunately, the CMS is inflexible, and there is little wiggle room to improve your URL structure. If you sell ugly Christmas sweaters, your Shopify collection URL looks like this: https://example.com/collections/ugly-christmas-sweaters The only thing you can change in this setup is the last part. Many people feel that there should be a way to have Shopify give more control over the rest. 7. Fix your site structure with internal linking and proper navigation One of the most impactful tips to improve your Shopify SEO is fine-tuning your site structure and navigation. The more logical your site is, the better and easier customers and search engines like Google can navigate it and find what they need. Your site structure should follow a logical path, and your collection system should make sense. Please keep it simple. You can see collections as categories, so use the collections to keep customers from having trouble understanding your site. It’s also nice if they don’t have to wade through a million products to find what they need. Make sure to give the collection overview pages the love they need. At the least, give these a proper description. Internal links are essential Internal linking helps you give the most critical pages proper weight. By linking to your product pages from various parts of your online shop, you signal to search engines that these are important. With proper anchor texts, you can identify the destination and tell search engines in words what to expect from that link. All of this helps search engines understand your site. For your navigation, keep it as straightforward as possible. Use recognizable terms and destinations; your menu should describe where a click would lead. Contact us says a lot more than Touch base, right? Your most important pages should appear in your navigation. While the age-old three-click rule for navigating to all the pages on your site was debunked quite a while ago, there’s still a lot to be said for keeping everything within reach. Your most important pages should be accessible without digging for them. 8. Make products findable with an XML sitemap XML sitemaps are like maps detailing all the routes to the different parts of your website. Search engines use sitemaps to discover new and updated content. This also applies to your online shop. Shopify will automatically generate an XML sitemap based on your site structure. Your XML sitemap will include product pages, collections, blog posts, and pages. You can find your sitemap at the following URL, with example.com being your domain, of course: https://example.com/sitemap.xml There’s a set limit for XML sitemaps of 50.000 URLs. As many sites have more than that, they will generate sub-sitemaps with fewer URLs. The Shopify sitemap, for instance, can contain up to 5.000 URLs, after which the platform breaks these up into smaller parts. This also has the added benefit of speeding up the loading times of these sitemaps. To a certain extent, Yoast SEO for Shopify lets you control what appears in your XML sitemap. For instance, you can add a noindex to determine that a specific page or post won’t appear in the search results. You can also decide whether archive pages should or should not appear in the XML sitemaps. For the most part, though, your out-of-the-box settings will be good enough. But if you want to tailor your crawling, you can. Yoast SEO for Shopify helps you determine what does and doesn’t appear on Google 9. Streamline the number of Shopify apps you use While trying out every Shopify app under the sun is exciting, keep yourself in check. Many apps are bulky and heavy on JavaScript. Adding many apps will add much extra code to your store, as everything must be constantly loaded. One of the most crucial performance improvements you can make is to keep the number of apps low. Think about what you need for your store, pick the best apps that do that job, and remove the rest. 10. Optimize images for SEO Images are an essential asset for every online store. Customers can only get a good feel for the product with great photos. But you need to offer all those images in the best way. Optimizing your images is one of the best and quickest tips to improve your Shopify SEO. The importance of good product images Good product images make it clear what a product is all about. It helps consumers view products from all angles without having the product in their hands. Product images need to be good, as they are one of the main drivers of conversion. Good photos also can catch the eye of the shopper. Great photos stand out in visual search engines like Google Images, Instagram, or Pinterest. Optimize the file sizes One of the essential tips to improve the SEO of your Shopify store is optimizing your images. It’s also something everyone can do — whether you are a seasoned ecommerce SEO expert or just starting. Optimizing your images, compressing them, and giving them proper names helps! Lazy loading images Another effective way to improve the loading times of your images is by lazy loading them. With lazy loading, the images will only load once they appear on the screen. Of course, you should always load all your images, as you want the images at the top of your browser window to always be visible. For the rest, lazy loading is a good choice. Preventing CLS While at it, check if your theme enforces width and height attributes on img tags. This helps avoid cumulative layout shift (CLS), one of Google’s metrics to determine your Core Web Vitals scores. CLS happens when elements move around during loading because image boundaries haven’t been defined. This causes jerkiness, and that’s a sign that your user experience is lacking for Google. You can try this by running your online store through Google’s page quality checks at web.dev/measure. You can also learn why and how to optimize your site for CLS on that site. <img alt="screenshot" src="screenshot.jpg" width="100" height="200"> <img alt="{{ image.alt }}" src="{{ image.src }}" width="{{ image.width }}" height="{{ image.height }}" > Many sites still have visual elements that can use a proper width and height specification to prevent CLS Add alt text and good file names Alt text is crucial for both SEO and web accessibility, and there are essential tips to follow when writing them for your product images. Firstly, it’s vital to be descriptive in the alt tag and clearly and concisely describe the product’s features, manufacturer, and model number. You can add an alt text in Shopify’s media editor File names also help Google understand your image. Suppose your file name is DSC37612.jpg, which says nothing about what the image contains. Add something useful. For example, if you sell iPhones and the photo shows a close-up of the back camera of an iPhone 15, you can give the file a name like this: iphone_15_back_camera_closeup.jpg. You see this, and you know right away what the image contains. Try to add relevant keywords as well if it makes sense. 11. Add a blog to your Shopify store You can create a blog on Shopify quite easily. Compared to WordPress, it has a basic blogging engine that functions appropriately, and you can get started without much effort. Blogging on your ecommerce store can be an excellent way to enhance your SEO strategy as you try to reach an audience via search engines. It’s a beautiful way to offer customers more insights into your products and company. Starting a blog on Shopify is very easy. Open your online store and navigate to blog posts in the sidebar. You can add a blog post from here by clicking the green button. By default, the blog is called News, but you can change that to anything you want. You could also run several blogs side-by-side. If you need help setting up your blog, we have a more detailed post about adding a blog to your store. Check it out! If you have Yoast SEO for Shopify installed, there’s another way to improve your blog posts. Click Apps > Yoast SEO, and you’ll see an overview of all your products, collections, pages, and blog posts ready for you to optimize. Open the post you choose to edit, and you’ll get the full Yoast SEO readability analysis and SEO analysis. You can manage everything, from crawling directives for search engines to defining the proper article structured data. Optimizing your store with Yoast SEO for Shopify it get noticed by Google Is blogging good for my Shopify store? Blogging can be a good asset for your Shopify SEO strategy. For many fledgling stores, growth mainly comes from paid ads. Focusing on content marketing through a blog allows you to expand your reach and form a connection with your customers. But, as with everything, it depends on how you use it. Don’t go at it randomly; you need to strategize. First, you have to determine the goal of your blog. Do you want to reach new customers, build your brand, form a bond with your current customers, or do something else? What type of content would you want to share — or, instead, what content resonates with your customers? Think about how the user might find you — in other words, map out the user journey. And don’t forget about keyword research! Use those insights to build a content strategy for your Shopify store. When you have a strategy, you can build the blog content on your store. Use cornerstone content as a basis and add articles supporting that main content, so you can fully describe your topic from all angles — and connect everything by proper internal linking. Be sure to write high-quality, unique content that comes across as trustworthy and authoritative. Yoast SEO for Shopify Get more organic traffic by creating the best product and blog content. Make your products eligible for rich results in Google. Plus, you’ll get access to our top-notch SEO courses and fantastic support team (24/7). Check out the Yoast SEO for Shopify product page, or get the app now! Start your trial today! » 12. Finally, pick a good Shopify theme Your theme is an essential part of your online shop. Your chosen theme influences many things — from branding to user experience to conversions. Everything depends on how awesome your Shopify theme is. Luckily, there’s ample choice in the Theme Store, and many of these should function perfectly fine for your store. Let’s go over a couple of things you should look out for when choosing a theme: Determine what you want and need: Will you run a store with a single product or a theme that can handle thousands or more? The theme store has a handy selection of themes for stores with large and small catalogs. What type of design do you need? What options do you need? Figure out your budget: Themes in the Shopify theme store run from free to a one-time payment of a couple hundred dollars. Check what you are willing to spend. Free works for some, but then you hardly get support from the developer. Paid themes often come with more options and tend to be better built. Check the themes in the marketplace: Quite a few themes are available. Shopify has even structured these into several collections, such as catalog size or the type of industry, such as clothing or electronics. You can filter on different properties, like features you need for the product pages or what’s available on a shop’s homepage. Now, almost 200 themes are available in the Theme Store. Read the reviews: You are probably not the first to pick a theme, so it’s a good idea to read the reviews of people who worked with it. Check the support the developer offers: Every theme comes with documentation and support, but the level and quality of support differ from developer to developer. Read the documentation and check around. Don’t be afraid to ask your questions. Ensure the Shopify theme is lean and mean: Many themes want everything and appeal to every store owner. But that means that there’s bound to be stuff built in that you don’t need. Keep in mind that all those features come at a price. Try to find a theme that has low overhead and loads lightning fast. You can try the demos and check out other stores that run the theme: The theme store offers demos for all the themes, and you’ll need to check these out. Also, Shopify provides examples of stores that run the specific theme you are looking at. It’s a good idea to closely examine those online stores and run them through their paces. For instance, run a performance test on web.dev/Measure and see how they do. You’d be surprised at the results. Check mobile-friendliness: As consumers increasingly use their mobile devices to shop, your online shop must function correctly. Again, the theme store allows you to see a mobile view of the theme. Test the user experience: The theme store also gives you a good idea of how users might experience the store. Click around, see the various layouts, and check how images load, how the animations work, the structure of the menu, and how it all feels. You can also try out the theme on your store to get an even better sense of how the theme feels and performs. Pay extra attention to the shopping cart: Does it feel like it wants customers to move through the process as quickly as possible? Or are there elements that take away focus? Are there other distractions? Is there room to expand the basic cart with upsells/cross-sells, promotions, and the like? Test your cart to see if you can reduce shopping cart abandonment rates. An example of a Shopify theme in the Theme Store For total control, build your own Shopify theme Having your own theme built might not be something you start with, but it offers many opportunities to take your store to the next level. With a self-built theme, you are in control, and you get to define what it looks like, what it needs, and how it functions. You can make it as lean or as complex as possible. Building your theme is a good idea if you reach the limits of what’s possible with a pre-built theme. Only so much customization is possible in an existing theme — both in a technical and design sense. You have much more control over the conversion optimization options if you do it yourself. Building your theme is quite complex, and you must consider what you want and need. It would help if you planned to ensure you avoid issues later. Of course, it’s possible to go into the nitty-gritty yourself, but there are also agencies out there that can help you get this done. The developer section of Shopify has ample documentation to help you learn more about building and adapting store themes. 8 technical SEO optimizations for Shopify Much of what you should focus on for Shopify SEO in your day-to-day activities is content-focused. You are working on your product descriptions and content marketing, and you won’t be rebuilding your theme every day. Still, there are several things you can do to improve your Shopify store in a technical SEO sense. Let’s go over a couple of highlights. 1. Optimize for speed As a managed platform, Shopify works hard to provide users with a speedy experience. Shopify focuses heavily on speed to help customers quickly improve those all-important loading times. Fast converts! If your store loads slowly, customers will leave it and try a competitor. Luckily, the CMS prioritizes performance. For instance, it has an automatic content delivery network (CDN) for hosting your content on servers near your customers. In addition, it has a performance report that gives you insights into how well your store is performing regarding loading speed. For this, Shopify uses Lighthouse to get real-world results on your store’s performance. While it provides a good platform by default, there are other things you can do to speed up your online store. For one, you should pick a highly optimized, lightweight theme — or get one built based on your specifications. Ensure that you properly optimize images on your site and take care not to use too many photos. Discard those sliders — nobody uses these anyway — and don’t install tens of apps you hardly use. Regularly running a Lighthouse test gives you great insights into the performance of your Shopify store 2. Prevent duplicate content We’re talking about duplicate content when a product or content appears on multiple URLs. This is not ideal, as Google might need clarification about the main one. Therefore, duplicate content can hinder your search performance. Thanks to Shopify’s preference for collections, a specific product you add to a collection will be visible on two different URLs: https://example.com/products/alien-ugly-christmas-sweater and: https://example.com/collections/ugly-christmas-sweaters/alien-ugly-christmas-sweater Not ideal! Luckily, the second one is canonicalized to the first one, but this causes a headache. Recent themes, like the Dawn Shopify theme, have improved and now automatically output the correct URL. 3. Working with product variants Shopify works well with product variants like sizes or colors. You have plenty of options to make different combinations of whatever you like. The thing with variants is that it’s hard to get them to show in Google properly. You might not need that depending on your needs, but if you want the different variants of products to be indexed, you might be better off turning your variants into individual products. Of course, you must provide sufficiently different product descriptions for each to appear individually in Google. 4. Faceted navigation or product filters Shopify has only a handful of filtering options for your online store—no Amazon-style mega menu for you! Luckily, there are ways to add more filters to your navigation. There are two options: add your custom filters if you use an Online Store 2.0 compatible theme or add an app to manage them. The first option is relatively straightforward but might be limited, while the second option opens up a world of possibilities. Product filter apps give you more control over how you want to categorize and visualize the faceted navigation. They also come with intelligent options that make it easier to load filters based on loads of variables dynamically. Whatever you pick, ensure that the parameters generated by the faceted navigation don’t end up in the search results pages — block them in the robots.txt liquid file with a disallow rule. Here’s an example of a faceted URL : https://www.allbirds.com/collections/mens?bestFor=everyday&hue=red&material=wool 5. Editing robots.txt to determine what ends up in search engines The e-commerce platform hired top-notch SEO people to help expand and improve its capabilities. One of the things that came out of that team pretty quickly was the new ability to edit the robots.txt file. Having complete control over robots.txt gives you more ways to control what Google can and can’t do in your store. This takes away one of the most significant issues SEOs have with Shopify. The robot.txt file is one of the crucial tools that you can use to optimize your online store or your website. It gives a way to tell Google how you want them to crawl the site. Ideally, you use this to prevent search engines from crawling less critical pages or sections of your site. For huge ecommerce sites, this is very important. You can find your robots.txt file at https://example.com/robots.txt. Here’s what a standard robots.txt of Shopify looks like: User-agent: * Disallow: /admin Disallow: /cart Disallow: /orders Disallow: /checkout Disallow: /54914154724/checkouts Disallow: /54914154724/orders Disallow: /carts Disallow: /account Disallow: /collections/*sort_by* Disallow: /*/collections/*sort_by* Disallow: /collections/*+* Disallow: /collections/*%2B* Disallow: /collections/*%2b* Disallow: /*/collections/*+* Disallow: /*/collections/*%2B* Disallow: /*/collections/*%2b* Disallow: /blogs/*+* Disallow: /blogs/*%2B* Disallow: /blogs/*%2b* Disallow: /*/blogs/*+* Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2B* Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2b* Disallow: /*?*oseid=* Disallow: /*preview_theme_id* Disallow: /*preview_script_id* Disallow: /policies/ Disallow: /*/*?*ls=*&ls=* Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3D*%3Fls%3D* Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3d*%3fls%3d* Disallow: /search Disallow: /apple-app-site-association Shopify automatically disallows crawling for several parts of the store. It does this well; most users don’t have to touch this file. However, adding rules to ensure that more advanced features don’t generate duplicate content in the search results for more complex or expansive sites might make sense. You can edit the robots.txt liquid file by visiting your Online Store admin page. Go to the theme section and select Actions > Edit code. Find the template section and click Add new template. Click the dropdown and select robots.txt from the bottom. Click Create Template, and you can start editing. 6. Structured data for your products Structured data is essential in this day and age. This data is coded in a specific vocabulary — Schema.org — that search engines read to better understand your website. Structured data describes every part of your website to Google, so it knows all about your authors, articles, types of pages, businesses, and how they connect. Of course, there’s also Schema structured data for products. With product structured data, you can describe your product to search engines. You’ll tell them about the product’s name, description, images, SKUs, prices, reviews, etc. Search engines like Google might give your product listings rich results in return for this valuable information. A rich result is a highlighted search with price information, availability, and even star reviews. Getting this is essential for online shops. An example of a rich snippet for a product in Google Luckily, most themes and Shopify itself output some product structured data. If you need a more complex setup without coding, you can use one of the structured data apps in the App Store. But there’s also another possibility: Yoast SEO for Shopify. Yoast SEO for Shopify outputs structured data automatically On WordPress, Yoast SEO has one of the best implementations of structured data out there. We built a complete graph that describes and connects every nook and cranny of your site. Google loves this! We bring that to Shopify in our Yoast SEO app so we can help you tell Google all about your products and their details. You must follow some steps to get Yoast SEO to output Schema. A lot of structured data is added automatically, like Product information on product pages, but we need your input on other details. First, go to Apps and open the Yoast SEO for Shopify app. Go to the settings and click the Schema tab in the sidebar. Click Site Representation and fill in your store name, upload a logo, and fill in the social profiles. Now, your site is ready to rock. Schema structured data for your articles and pages Yoast SEO does a lot more with Schema structured data. For instance, we tell Google about your business — the name, logo, and social handles. The SEO app is flexible, so you can determine which parts of the Schema structured data you want to turn on or off should you ever want to integrate with another service. Yoast SEO for Shopify has an additional structured data option to set yourself up for posts and pages. You can now describe the pages in detail. For instance, you can tell Google that your contact page is exactly that using a simple selection in the app. After that, Yoast SEO will add ContactPage Schema structured data to your contact page — ready for Google to enjoy. This also goes for articles. Yoast SEO adds Article structured data to every article by default, but you can easily change this. There are news articles, reports, scholarly articles, and more options. By defining this, you give search engines more details on what they can find on the page, and they have to guess less. 7. Manage your redirects Redirects are incredibly important and helpful when working on your site structure. With a proper redirect, you can send a customer from one URL to another URL without them noticing it. This is useful when you remove pages or products and don’t want people to stumble on dead links. Shopify has a redirect feature built in. For one, it automatically adds a redirect when you change the slug of an existing post. If you need to do large-scale work on your site, you can upload CSV files with your redirects. You can also use the URL redirect feature in the admin settings navigation section. It’s a straightforward redirect feature with just two fields: one for the old URL you want to redirect and one for the new URL you want the old one to point to. You can manage redirects via a simple URL redirect feature 8. Add your store to Google Search Console With Analytics, Google Search Console is an essential tool for insights into your store’s performance in search. It gives you an idea of how your site does in a technical sense — crawlable, fast, and with valid structured data — and in a visibility sense. How do people see your pages and products, and how do they interact with them? Adding your store to Search Console is a must. A quick rundown Adding your Shopify store isn’t complicated: Open Search Console and log in, Add a new property Choose either way if you’ve bought your URL from a third party Choose the URL way for your examplestore.myshopify.com or examplestore.com URLs you got from Shopify (this is the only way that works) Temporarily turn off the password protection (if needed) Enter your domain name (including https://) Copy the HTML file Open your site theme settings Click Actions > Edit code Find the theme.liquid file and paste in the HTML tag below the head tag Save and wait for Google to verify your site Yoast SEO for Shopify makes adding the verification code to your ecommerce store easy. You no longer have to touch any code to do that! Open the Yoast SEO app, go to the settings, and click on Webmaster tools in the sidebar. Find the webmaster tool you want to verify — Google, Baidu, Bing, or something else — and paste the verification code you received into it. Click Save, and you are good to go. Check the head of your site to see if the code is correctly added What are the biggest SEO issues with Shopify? Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms out there. It does most things reasonably well, and with some finetuning and care, it’s a solid platform to build your online store. Most SEO issues arise from its handling of different products and their variants. Products on the ecommerce platform can live in multiple places/URLs in your online store, and that can confuse search engines. Luckily, the CMS adds canonical URLs to signal to search engines that the one in the /products/ section is canonical. Unfortunately, you cannot do much about this, but be aware of the limitations. Another area people could improve is Shopify’s rigid URL structure. It uses a system based on subfolders, making for unnecessary long URLs. For instance, you can find the contact page on a regular site on example.com/contact/, but on a store, that’s always example.com/pages/contact. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about this. Shopify is listening to its community and has begun to roll out several improvements that make it even more attractive as an ecommerce platform. Let’s hope they keep their focus and help you get the best results with your store. In the meantime, SEO apps like Yoast SEO for Shopify and the tips and checklists in ultimate guides like the one you are reading now help alleviate the various issues. What is the best SEO app for Shopify? Shopify is extendable, and you can choose from a broad selection of apps that help you improve your store. Some apps help ship your products, design your store, and offer customer services. Too many to choose from! Of course, there are also some SEO apps to take note of. Some apps help you optimize images, others help with Schema structured data, and there are all-in-one SEO suites. The best one? We’re biased, but we think Yoast SEO stands out from the competition. Yoast SEO for Shopify: Your SEO expert WordPress fans have enjoyed using Yoast SEO for more than a decade — it’s the most popular SEO plugin for a reason! Yoast SEO is for SEO experts by SEO experts. But we didn’t make it for experts only. We’ve made SEO accessible so everyone working with WordPress can use Yoast SEO and get a fair chance in the search results. Over 13 million websites trust Yoast SEO, and our WordPress SEO app has over 25,000 five-star reviews on wordpress.org. Now, Yoast SEO is also available for Shopify. We’re ready to help shop owners get more out of their stores. Yoast SEO for Shopify helps store owners improve their site technically and comes with an advanced SEO and readability analysis. The app will suggest improvements to your product page descriptions, helping you create the best ones. These analyses also work on your Shopify blog. Content marketing plays a massive role in getting your store noticed on Google. The Yoast SEO app helps you write high-quality, readable content that resonates with potential customers. Yoast SEO for Shopify helps you write awesome product descriptions that serve both customers and search engines The best structured data for your Shopify store To enhance your Shopify store’s organic traffic, it’s crucial to capitalize on the benefits of rich results, which increase search visibility and edge out competitors. Yoast SEO provides rich structured data/Schema.org output in JSON-LD format, supporting various types such as Product, Organization, WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, Article, and Offer. Yoast SEO also ties all its structured data together in a single graph, which helps search engines understand your store. Additionally, Yoast SEO has integrated with the popular review apps Judge.me, Loox, Ali review, and Opinew, to generate the necessary AggregateRating schema to show your reviews in Google. Furthermore, the Yoast SEO breadcrumb block can conveniently be added to Shopify themes v2.0 to increase your store’s structured data and help boost its organic traffic. Product variant schema Product variant schema allows you to organize items like size, color, or material under one parent product to improve how Google displays them in search. Using properties like brand for the manufacturer, color, material size, and unique identifiers like sku, you can define each variant clearly. Adding this structured data helps search engines understand and showcase your product variations more effectively. Our Shopify SEO app makes it easy to implement this schema, ensuring your variants are optimized and compliant with Google’s guidelines. Yoast SEO for Shopify outputs a lot of structured data for product variants Of course, that’s only part of what the SEO app does. Be sure to check out the product page for Yoast SEO for Shopify or the Shopify SEO app store listing to find out more. In addition to the app, our SEO content gives you all the knowledge, tips, and tricks you need to make the most out of your SEO. The Yoast SEO for Shopify training improves your skills! In this guide, we gave an overview of what you can do to improve the SEO of your store. Of course, there’s more to the CMS — and to ecommerce itself. Luckily, we can help you on both fronts. Our SEO solutions come with training courses, and Shopify is no different. You’ll find an ecommerce SEO online course and training explicitly showing how to properly set up Yoast SEO for Shopify. Be sure to check out Yoast SEO Academy. Please try the ecommerce and Shopify training and bring your online store to the next level. Conclusion on Shopify SEO Shopify is a popular platform for hosting your online store. Rightly so, because it is easy to use and performs well out of the box. Of course, there are many things you can do to improve your store’s performance by focusing on Shopify SEO. This ultimate guide to Shopify SEO gives you an excellent place to start. Don’t forget to download the Shopify SEO checklist and sign up for Yoast SEO for Shopify! Read on: How the right Shopify SEO tools can boost your traffic » The post Shopify SEO: the ultimate guide appeared first on Yoast. View the full article

We've seen the clipable coupons within the search results for several years now and in store listings and many places, but have we seen them in local knowledge panels? Maybe, I am not sure.View the full article

Google announced a number of features across Google Search, Maps, Lens and other areas around travel and vacation planning. Some of the features were already out there but let's recap some of the more interesting features.View the full article

Google is testing a "contactless" label in place of the curbside pickup labels in the shopping search results. The curbside label became popular during COVID and has stuck around as a convenience factor for shoppers after.View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Amazon's Big Spring Sale (spanning seven days from March 25 to March 31) gives shoppers the chance to grab great deals on everything from tech to home goods. It's Amazon's second-ever spring sale, and while it may not be as flashy as Prime Day, it's still packed with discounts that are hard to ignore. Prime members get the best deals, so if you want in but don’t want to commit, Amazon’s 30-day free trial of Prime does the trick—just remember to cancel after the sale. One of the better deals in the mix is the EufyCam S3 Pro (2-Cam Kit with HomeBase 3), now going for $439.99, marked down from $549.99—it's lowest price ever, according to price-trackers. It's still pricey, no doubt, but it’s one of the few security cameras that manages to deliver actual 4K resolution without locking you into a subscription plan. eufy Security eufyCam S3 Pro 2-Cam Kit, Solar Camera Outdoor Wireless, MaxColor Night Vision, 4K Security Camera with Solar Panel, Face Recognition AI, Expandable Local Storage, No Monthly Fee $439.99 at Amazon /images/amazon-prime.svg $549.99 Save $110.00 Get Deal Get Deal $439.99 at Amazon /images/amazon-prime.svg $549.99 Save $110.00 The cameras come equipped with Eufy's MaxColor Vision technology, which uses AI-powered image enhancement and an impressive f/1.0 aperture to deliver vivid nighttime footage that's almost daylight-clear. Plus, the added benefit of the SolarPlus 2.0 panel means you can go nearly an entire year without charging the camera, provided it gets an hour of direct sunlight daily. All of this is backed by the included HomeBase 3 (with 16GB of built-in local storage, expandable up to 16TB if you ever need it), which acts not only as a storage hub but also as a siren-equipped central control for Eufy's security lineup, ensuring local video storage without recurring cloud fees. That said, while the IP67-rated EufyCam S3 Pro offers a robust feature set—two-way audio that allows you to communicate through the camera, customizable motion detection zones that can be adjusted to avoid false alerts, and AI-powered system that can distinguish between people, pets, and vehicles, ensuring you only get the notifications that matter—it’s important to note that integrating it with Apple's HomeKit can be a bit of a headache, with resolution dropping to 1080p and necessitating an iCloud subscription for video storage (which kind of undercuts the whole no-subscription appeal), according to this ZDNet review. View the full article

Google Ads conversation started goals section, where you setup WhatsApp messages within Google Ads, has new tabs. Google added diagnostics, store diagnostics, and webpages.View the full article

19 months ago, Google released a feature named SGE while browsing, and later changed it to AI while browsing. Well, that feature is no longer - Google has deprecated it and put it in the Google graveyard.View the full article

Director of communications Matthew Doyle quits after just nine months in post View the full article

We’ve always had teammates who have side projects in addition to working at Buffer. Working on new projects, building, experimenting, and self-improvement are built into our DNA as a company. So it's quite common to be speaking with someone only to find out they own a small business outside of Buffer that started as a side project. We also have several published authors and many apps built by Buffer teammates. We believe this entrepreneurial spirit and creative drive not only enhances our individual growth but also enriches our culture at Buffer. These passionate pursuits outside of work bring fresh perspectives, innovative thinking, and diverse skill sets back to our team. In the spirit of celebrating these endeavors, we've compiled the blogs, businesses, books, and apps created by Buffer teammates. We hope they inspire you as much as they inspire us. The header for the side projects page in our teammate handbook The 35 side projects the Buffer team is working onHere’s what our team works on outside of work. Hopefully you might spot some cool side project ideas for yourself, or check out some of the things our team works on. AppsAndy: Alpenglow, F1 Calendar, Starglow Alpenglow: An app to check sunrise, sunset and golden hour times as well as quality predictions. Also sends out notification reminders and with Alpenglow Pro will notify you if the next forecast is looking good compared to your desired threshold. The app can be doing on both iOS and Android, often featured by Apple and includes over 35+ localizations.F1 Calendar: Taking over the development from a few friends, I rebuilt F1 Calendar as an easy way to check Formula 1 Session times in your timezone as well as making the data available via Calendar subscriptions. The site has been going for 14 years and we now have additional sites for F1 Academy, F2, F3, Formula E, IndyCar, MotoGP.Starglow: Essentially Alpenglow but for viewing the night sky. It’s been requested quite a bit from users and friends. It displays weather parameters for each hour, focused mostly on cloud coverage and visibility which are key to view the night sky clearly. The app is currently on the App Store for pre order, aiming to release it in April.David: Contain Contain is a browser-based, accessibility-first design tool. Current UI design tools like Figma and Sketch are great for visual explorations but become cumbersome with responsive design, components, animations, and user interactions. Website builder tools push too much complexity on users, and generate bloated, inaccessible code. Contain solves this by living in the browser, meaning everything you design is built with accessible HTML and CSS. This brings the design process into the final medium, making responsive design, container queries, and user interactions possible while cutting much of the waste from the design process. Eric: PlayCraft Platform for everyone to create web games and share it to their friends in seconds! We’ve built our own modular framework to create games really quickly for PixelBrawlGames. With today’s AI capabilities, we’re using this same framework to create new games with a single prompt. Martin: Palabreja, Voices.ink Palabreja: A NYTimes Spelling Bee Game clone in Spanish.Voices.ink: Voices.ink is a cutting-edge application that streamlines the note-taking process by using AI to record, transcribe, and analyse audio, summarizing it directly to your Notion account. It identifies key points and actionable items, ensuring detailed yet concise notes.Mike: Carpeta Carpeta is a project-management tool for interior designers, architects, and industrial designers to help them centralize all their conversations, budgets, and files, and better manage their time while managing their projects. FreelanceKarinna: Pilates Instructor Karinna is a certified Pilates & Lagree Instructor, and teaches classes in her spare time. Martin: Two Emotions Street & Travel Photography Mitra: Social media manager for The Used, Thrice, Dustin Kensrue, and robbietheused Mitra is the social media manager for bands/artists The Used, Story of the Year, Thrice, Dustin Kensrue, and robbietheused. She’s been working with these bands since 2017. Mitra: Mitra Mehvar Photography Mitra does live music photography, primarily for rock bands. MusicBrandon: Kid Lightbulbs Brandon writes, produces & releases music under the name Kid Lightbulbs from his small home studio. He’s released 3 albums under this name, the most recent being RUINED CASTLE in December 2024. Nonprofits Amanda: SheSharp Amanda runs SheSharp: a non-profit foundation based in The Netherlands that makes it easier for all women and non-binary people to enter, stay, and grow in the tech industry. We host events, facilitate mentorship programmes and give out funding through scholarships, and a plethora of other initiatives. Kateryna: TallinnJS It is a technical community for JavaScript developers in Tallinn Sofia: Nosotras Hablamos Design Nosotras Hablamos Design is a community where Spanish-speaking women come together to practice English and explore the world of design through engaging conversations and workshops. Small BusinessesAndy: Woof Warehouse Andy works on a Shopify store that sells dog bandanas and accessories. He focuses primarily on the tech side of things, customizing the store, plugins, and branding, while also caring for and photographing the adorable pups. Mike S: Otter, WTC Otter: Mike co-founded Otter. Based in Spain, Otter helps people make custom furniture by connecting them to local carpenter’s that suit their needs.WTC: A hat brand 🧢 with statements designed for creatives, entrepreneurs, and those who embrace a life of thinking and doing business with purpose – more designs coming soon!Mitra: The Torshi Dough Mitra bakes sourdough bread at her home cottage bakery Nathan: Riftgate Nathan runs a brick-and-mortar store at 5412 S 900 E Murray, UT 84107. Podcasts & WritingAndy: Personal blog Andy keeps a personal blog where he's written about App Clips in Alpenglow and plans to share more transparent updates about Alpenglow in the future. Diego: Pink and Her Cast Diego and his partner launched this book, which his partner wrote and illustrated himself. Diego did the editing, formatting, and cover design (+ translation since the book also exists in Spanish). They wanted to create a book with a valuable lesson for children: That sometimes life will throw curve-balls our way, and that even though we might feel like we are the only ones going through it, we are not alone, and others might actually be feeling the same way or going through similar situations. Fun fact: Their 8-year-old nephew did the Title and appears in the credits. Hailley: Personal blog & weekly newsletter Hailley writes a weekly newsletter about the systems she uses in work and life; she also writes pieces for her personal blog, where she shares more in-depth looks at those systems and her career growth advice. Jess: Pinecone Papers A blog about how to mindfully journal and track symptoms when you have a chronic illness. Working on a downloadable printable journal that will be out later this year. Joe: Practical Jetpack Compose, CI/CD for Android with GitHub Actions, Practical KMP Practical Jetpack Compose: A book to teach Android Developers how to build apps using Jetpack Compose, Googles new UI framework for Android!CI/CD for Android with GitHub Actions: A book to teach Android developers how to automate their testing and release process using GitHub Actions.Practical KMP: A book to to teach developers how to build apps using Kotlin Multiplatform, the framework from Jetbrains that allows for code sharing between Android & iOS!Joel: Newsletter From time to time, Joel sends out a newsletter with links he's saved, what he highlights in books, new and noteworthy at Buffer, something that's been on his mind, and a general update. Kirsti: SA Tech Marketers Podcast and Community The South Africa Tech Marketer’s podcast aims to help spotlight fantastic talent we have in South Africa, and the community is set up to help us connect and grow. It’s sponsored by a company called The Global Talent Co, which is effectively a recruitment agency for SA marketing talent. They help South Africans get remote jobs — it’s neat. 😄 Lexi: The Burden of Joy Lexi’s debut novel is available from Rejection Letters, an indie press. Mike: Building Better A weekly podcast where we reflect on building better businesses and relationships inside the hectic startup and digital business world. Nate: Almost Heretical A podcast by Nate (a former pastor) and his wife Shelby (a Bible scholar). They reimagine and revisit the Bible for those deconstructing Christianity. Tami: Content-as-a-Career Content-as-a-Career is a newsletter that shares tips on how to grow a personal brand that can secure global opportunities, along with a jobs board to relevant Marketing and Creative roles. Shared on Fridays. YouTube ChannelDavid: Build UX Build UX is a YouTube channel on focused on accessible design and development. Past series have focused on building out design ideas from Dribble in Figma and code to be accessible, performant, and responsive. Current videos focus on shorter accessibility tutorials that span design and development, as well as test-driven development (TDD) techniques used to build resilient user interfaces. Honorable mention: side projects that turned full-time You might be wondering if these side projects ever turn into full-time businesses – they do! We've had several teammates start a side project at Buffer only to leave to pursue it full-time. When this happens, we are beyond excited for that person. It's immensely gratifying to watch someone build something and see it succeed. So, here are former Buffer teammates who left to pursue their side projects turned businesses, give them a follow or some support! Pill Agnew: Nudge Podcast Rodolphe Dutel: Remotive Todd Balsley: Clever Supply Co Over to You We’d love to hear from you! Are you working on any side projects? Feel free to drop a link in the comments! If you are, how do you make time for them and stay motivated, are you working on more than one? View the full article

A new pair of studies from MIT Media Lab and OpenAI found that those who use the chatbot most heavily also experience the most loneliness. The catch-22: it’s unclear whether this is caused by the chatbot itself or if lonely individuals are simply more likely to seek out emotional bonds. Researchers analyzed millions of interactions and found that only a small number of users rely on ChatGPT for emotional support—but those who do are among its heaviest users. The MIT study found that higher daily usage of ChatGPT “correlated with higher loneliness, dependence, and problematic use, and lower socialization.” Since loneliness is a tricky feeling to quantify, researchers said they measured both users’ subjective feelings of loneliness and their actual levels of socialization. The studies also found that heavy users were more likely to consider the chatbot a “friend” or attribute human-like emotions to it. Those engaging in “personal” conversations with the chatbot reported the highest levels of loneliness. If they set the chatbot’s voice mode to the opposite gender, those levels were even higher. It’s been over two years since OpenAI released ChatGPT. While researchers emphasize that these studies are preliminary, they reinforce existing concerns about how AI chatbot tools are affecting people’s lives—both online and offline. ChatGPT attracts 400 million users weekly worldwide. Some use it to win arguments or even as a substitute for therapy, despite warnings from health professionals. Others call ChatGPT their “best friend.” “Interactions with chatbots that cater to your preferences and are trained to be as polite and affirming as possible might help in the moment when you interact with them, but they also slowly chip away from your ability to deal with the messy real world and complex human interactions,” says Sandra Matz, Columbia Business School professor and author of MINDMASTERS: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior. “The problem is that we’d need to understand this more causally by assigning people to use or not use chatbots and then studying the impact of these experiences on loneliness,” she adds. “Obviously, something that comes with ethical questions if we’re playing around with people’s experience of loneliness.” There’s been increasing scrutiny of the negative effects of interacting with AI chatbots—and for good reason. Decades later, researchers are still trying to fully grasp the impact social media has had on mental health. When it comes to AI chatbots—well, I guess we’ll check in again in a couple of years and see. View the full article

As return-to-office policies take hold and fully flexible work arrangements decline, employees are re-adapting to in-person interactions. One of the biggest challenges? Giving and receiving constructive feedback. Unlike praise, constructive feedback highlights areas for improvement—a critical driver of individual and organizational success, yet one that many find difficult. Whether remote or in-person, various factors, like overestimating negative consequences or fearing relationship fallout, often make both giving and receiving feedback feel high stakes. While virtual feedback has its own challenges—limited nonverbal cues, potential misinterpretation, and technological barriers—the shift back to in-person conversations introduces new complexities. Body language, tone, and the immediacy of face-to-face exchanges add layers of nuance that leaders may feel less practiced in navigating. Now more than ever, leaders and teams must navigate feedback thoughtfully. Here’s how to make in-person feedback a tool for growth—ensuring it strengthens, rather than strains, workplace relationships. Anchor yourself in the right mindset Before giving constructive feedback, get into the right headspace. The goal is to help the other person grow—not to vent frustration, prove a point, or put someone in their place. If emotions are running high, step back. Feedback should come from a place of support and a genuine desire to see the other person succeed, which in turn strengthens the team and organization. Stay centered, and make sure your words and tone reflect that intention. Choose the right time and place Giving feedback soon after observing behavior, reviewing work, or having a key interaction keeps it relevant and actionable—but timing and environment matter. In-person conversations offer the potential for richer dialogue, but only if done right. Avoid squeezing feedback into rushed moments, like between back-to-back meetings, where neither party has the focus needed for a meaningful exchange. Choose a time when both people are centered and not overwhelmed. Opt for a neutral space, such as a meeting room rather than your office, to minimize power imbalances, and ensure it’s free from interruptions to foster an open, productive discussion. Be specific Vague feedback falls flat. Instead of saying, “You always interrupt” or, “You’re not a team player,” point to a concrete moment: “In yesterday’s Ops meeting, you raised your voice several times and spoke over others. After that, the room got quieter.” Speak from personal observation—what you saw, heard, and when it happened—rather than assuming how others felt or making broad character judgments. This keeps feedback clear, actionable, and easier to receive. Get the nonverbal part right It’s easy to focus mainly on what you’re going to say, but don’t forget how you say it, including the part that involves no words at all, which is much more important when you can’t hide behind a screen. Tone and body language are thought to make up the vast majority of how communication is received. Speak in an even tone, including about challenging topics. Maintain good eye contact but not in a scary, intense way. Lean forward to communicate engagement and care. Avoid postures that convey defensiveness, like having your arms crossed tightly. Don’t fear silence In our always-on world, it’s tempting to fill every space with words. Instead, try to be comfortable with silence, whether by pausing more frequently as you speak or not pushing for an immediate response from the other person. Silence, even a few seconds, creates time and capacity to become aware of and process emotional responses, contributing to a more genuine interaction that will help both parties understand and support each other. Mind the generational gap Members of different generations may prefer different modes of feedback. Gen Z may want an approach that takes into account their values and sources of meaning (“I know collaboration matters to you, so here are some ways I see you doing it well and some areas for improvement”), while boomers may be more focused on outcomes and practical advice. Ask for feedback—genuinely Asking for feedback regularly from your team members models important leadership behavior and promotes an open, growth-oriented, high-performance culture. But it has to be a genuine request, and employees you manage may be reluctant to be honest for fear of retaliation. Be empathetic to that reality. Avoid asking for feedback in the same conversation where you’re giving it. It can feel transactional or make the other person hesitant to share openly. If you don’t want to hear it, don’t ask for it. And remember: How you respond to feedback will determine whether the person feels comfortable providing any feedback in the future. Feedback skill is as much about receiving as giving. It’s human nature to react defensively, but try to take a breath and open yourself to what is being communicated, especially if it’s coming from a place of support. Ask for specifics if they’re not provided. While listening, ask yourself, “How might this feedback be true? How does it fit with how I see myself?” And remember: Feedback is a gift. It is one of the most impactful experiences that supports growth. Practice, practice, practice Some people may be “naturals” when it comes to communicating feedback, but most aren’t. Luckily it’s a skill that can be improved. Think of feedback-giving as a muscle to strengthen. One way to do that is to start with low-stakes situations (say, giving feedback to a team member after a specific activity like a presentation) and work up to more sensitive areas of improvement like patterns of behavior or communication. View the full article

That old, familial feelingView the full article

When OpenAI announced earlier this week that image generation was now directly available within ChatGPT, a lot of the initial examples used advertising to show how it works. Powered by OpenAI’s flagship multimodal model GPT-4o, the updated chatbot can now create visuals straight from its chat interface. Turbo Design founder Shane Devine posted an image of his prompt asking the platform to turn a generic office scene into a McDonald’s ad. His reaction to the results: “We’re cooked.” We are cooked pic.twitter.com/LfWizvSEoh — Shane Levine (@theShaneLevine) March 26, 2025 Other examples floating around in reaction hypothesized how the new tool would replace traditional photoshoots. Much like Levine’s comment, the mood appeared to be yet another sign of death at the door of traditional advertising creatives. Is it the future of all banner ads and bus shelter posters? If that McDonald’s spec ad is any indication, we’ve still got a long way to go. For Fast Company’s Brand New World podcast, I’ve been talking to creatives, ad agency execs, and CMOs about the impacts of, and strategies around Gen AI tools. They all focus on the utility of these tools to help humans, not replace them. Even for its own Super Bowl ad, OpenAI only used Sora as a concepting tool. CMO Kate Rouch told me at the time, “Because we made this on a pretty compressed timeline, it really helped the creatives prototype, experiment with camera angles, and things like that, all to speed up the process.” Deepthi Prakash, Omnicom Advertising Group COO, says this latest update is a really valuable integration, allowing for a more conversational experience, and a more natural “sparring partner” to help identify insights and translate them to visual ideas. “The quality of the visuals isn’t at par with the best specialized technologies out there,” she says. “But it’s certainly good enough for a strategist or a business leader to help develop and communicate concepts and ideas.” Omnicom-owned agency network TBWA announced its CollectiveAI platform last June. Integrating platforms like ChatGPT, as well as others from Google, Adobe, Microsoft, and more. Its tools are trained on the company’s past work to create social content and brand materials for clients, among other things. For Prakash, this new update simply improves their existing quiver. “This doesn’t really change things for us,” she says. “But hopefully, it accelerates the development of tools that are designed not just for specific tasks, but for entire workflows so that AI moves from being a set of tools to being a real partner in the creative process.” Omid Farhang is the founder and CEO of award-winning independent ad agency Majority. He says this new update feels like the first time he ever watched Netflix on his phone. “A moment that I knew for sure was coming yet still couldn’t help feeling utterly dazzled that it’s here,” says Farhang. Far from the existential dread expressed in some of the social media reactions to the new update, Farhang sees profound opportunity especially for smaller creative firms. “It feels like for the first time ever, being a small, young company is a competitive advantage,” he says. “Because we have no legacy departments and antiquated processes to undo; we can harness AI with less fear, more nimbleness. More malleability. More playfulness. More audacity.” Farhang advises any creative professional to embrace any and all the new AI tools. “Since the dawn of man, every generation operates under the delusion that they’ve hit the height of human potential, until an innovation emerges that reminds us we are perpetually the chrysalis, never the butterfly,” says Farhang. “All this chatter, speculation, daydreaming and resistance about AI are shrieks from the cocoon.” View the full article