Digital Marketing

Don’t Care About Zero-Click SERPs? Trade Search Volume for Click Potential when Planning SEO Projects
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Don’t Care About Zero-Click SERPs? Trade Search Volume for Click Potential when Planning SEO Projects

Monthly search volume has long been the reigning metric to determine SEO opportunities for page creation and optimization. But given that only 50% of searches result in a click, how do you determine what searches are best to target for your business? If your KPIs depend on searchers clicking through (and ultimately, converting), monthly search…

Not Ranking Organically For Your Target Queries? Google’s SERP Intent Might Be Working Against You
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Not Ranking Organically For Your Target Queries? Google’s SERP Intent Might Be Working Against You

We all know the keywords we want to rank for, but that doesn’t mean Google actually wants to rank your content for those queries. Google’s algorithm may have already decided the intent of a query directly conflicts with the page you would like to rank. By understanding SERP intent, you can help serve up a…

SEO Disasters
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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 to make the change before Google crawled the new site. Above I said “instinctively” because, well, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen a site launch set to block search engines. It’s probably not even the 50th. I worked on an eCommerce platform where many sites launched with this issue. Wordpress – as fine a platform as it is – makes it super easy to launch set to noindex. Since developers often build sites in staging areas, they’re wise to block bots from inadvertently discovering their playground. But, in the hustle to push live an update or new design, they can forget a tiny (yet crucial) check box. I’ve gathered up three different ways you can monitor your clients’ sites, or even your own, without the use of server logs or an education in server administration. There’s different kinds of website monitoring (e.g., active, passive), but I’m keeping it simple and applicable for anyone. I wanted to pick a few that were diverse, free or affordable

Using Google Search Console Tools To Clean Up Your (404) Act
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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 inspector doesn’t work the same as the legacy report. In the previous report, you could…

Man using a laptop with keywords search concept on the screen
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The Best Keyword Research Tools You May Not Know

Note: This post reviews web-based keyword tools. It doesn’t cover desktop tools or plugins. Keyword research is extremely important when conceiving new content ideas or optimizing existing content for search engines. You likely have a favorite keyword research tool – be it Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs. These tools are great for finding high…

What Google’s Featured Snippet Deduplication Means for Your Site
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What Google’s Featured Snippet Deduplication Means for Your Site

On January 22, 2020, Google announced via Twitter that featured snippets will now be counted as one of the main organic search results, meaning that the same URL can no longer hold both the featured snippet and another organic listing on page one of Google. Google holds that this change will make page one of…

Google’s Current Desktop Design
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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 intact. On January 13, 2020, Google announced that a new site design would be rolling…

google bert
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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 a query and understanding the language of webpages. The better Google gets at these two…

seo report
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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.

canonical tags
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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 of unexpected results. Examples I’ve seen: via templates, products were suddenly “canonicalizing” to the homepage. Page 4 of a collection suddenly canonicalizing to page 1 of the collection. Crazy, random results are always likely if not implemented and QA’d properly. When the tag was announced in February of 2009, I worked for one of the largest eCommerce platforms at the time. We wanted to be first to offer this, and we rushed it out – with many, many problems. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with this tag.