Bill Sebald, Author at Digital Marketing, PPC and SEO Agency

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Introducing the Greenlane Adsense Explorer (a free PPC tool)

Here’s the thing: We knew Google was running our clients’ display ads on irrelevant sites. And the daily upkeep was maddening. We needed a fix, so we built a Chrome extension to give us more control over where our ads…
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SEO is an Experiment

The complexities of SEO are exacerbated by the limited visibility we have into Google’s algorithm. Google claims more than 200 signals make up the main web search algorithms. When Google told us content, links, and RankBrain are the biggest contributor, it didn’t exactly unravel any mysteries of how to improve …

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First 50 Days of Quarantine: What We’ve Learned

On March 12, Greenlane’s Management Team announced that we’d be working from home for the foreseeable future. In the 50 days since, we’ve made adjustments to what “business as usual” means. Some of our client partnerships have unfortunately had to…
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4 Tools for Getting Ahead of SEO Disasters

We recently had a client launch a new site in Wordpress. It was appropriately in a staging area before launch. Instinctively upon hearing the news of the launch, we decided to look for a robots tag. Sure enough, every page was marked as "noindex, nofollow". The client was able …

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Using Google Search Console Tools To Clean Up Your (404) Act

This article is an entire rewrite from its original 2012 version. When Google launched the new Search Console (thus killing the legacy 404 report), it rendered the old version of this post useless. The bad news – the new URL…
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What Is The Best Google Suggest Keyword Tool

A rose by any other name may smell just as sweet, but good luck trying to find good results for “thorny red flower” on the first page of the SERPs! Until Google gets even better with their relationship-mapping (thanks Hummingbird, you're a great start!), long-tail optimization will be a huge …

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Google’s Current Desktop Design

Update as of January 24, 2020: After Google received negative feedback about favicons in organic search results, they have rolled back the favicon portion of this update. The other changes including updates to the Ad symbol and breadcrumb placement remain…
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How Google’s BERT Works In SEO

Every few years, Google announces a significant update to its organic search system. From the inclusion of semantic search in Hummingbird to the announcement of machine-learning (RankBrain). Google is trying to get better at two things: understanding the intent behind…
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SEO Reporting: How to Build Meaningful Analytics Reports

The SEO report. It's a calling card for some agencies. These reports can be ornate or no-frills (everyone has their own style). Smart companies use APIs to compile reports without spending manual hours. Some rely on automatic SEO reporting tools. For other companies, it's a time-intensive and considerably low-value exercise.

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Improve SEO by Auditing and Fixing Canonical Tags (and How to Do It)

The reason Google doesn't accept the canonical tag as a directive is probably because they know many webmasters will screw it up. If you have a massive database-driven eCommerce site, and you've tried to get a developer team to implement, you've seen how it can ultimately launch with a ton …

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Google For Jobs: The Optimization Guide

What is Google For Jobs? Google for Jobs is a job search feature powered by Google that was launched in June 2017. For job applicants, it is a one-stop shop in a native user interface. It helps applicants save time…
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The Truth About Multiple H1 Tags and SEO

The "official rollout" of HTML 5 in October 2014 ignited renewed interests in an old SEO debate: whether or not using multiple H1 tags on a single page is bad for SEO. Depending on the school of thought, some designers debated the true use case. Likewise, some SEOs had a …