Frederick Vallaeys says, “Doing PPC reporting right often involves some trade-offs between time and money. The perfect report takes a lot of time to build — time that could have been spent improving the performance of an account. A quick and repeatable report, on the other hand, is usually generated through a tool that costs money. So the arrival of Data Studio, which offers very customizable reporting, and now does so at a cost of $0, warrants an investigation to determine how it can help account managers. Because the tool suite of my company, Optmyzr, also includes PPC reporting, spending... [...]

Stephanie LeVonne says, “A client wants to develop a content strategy so they can rank for more keywords but isn’t sure if they can muster the resources to create a blog. Sound familiar? When budgets are tight, it’s often tempting to put more money behind your paid media campaigns; after all, you can actually see which ads and optimizations are generating the most revenue each month. Earned media is not so cut-and-dried. However, creating and developing blog content should be regarded as a long-term investment. And as any good financial advisor will tell you, it’s best to start... [...]

Casey Meraz says, “In 2016, I predicted that ranking in the 3-pack was hard and it would continually get more competitive. I maintain that prediction for 2017, but I want to make one thing clear. If you haven’t done so, I believe local businesses should start to look outside of a local-SEO-3-Pack-ONLY focused strategy. While local SEO still presents a tremendous opportunity to grow your business, I’m going to look at some supplementary organic strategies you can take into your local marketing campaign, as well. In this post I’m going to address: How local search has changed... [...]

David Freeman says, “Search engines are advancing at the fastest rate we’ve seen in many years thanks to machine learning. These advances have allowed the search engines to focus on providing the most relevant results, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of user experience (UX). At the end of the day, what is good for the consumer is good for organic search performance — especially if we consider how machine learning is becoming ever more central to search algorithms and incorporating areas such as search sequence, as well as content quality, structure and sentiment. To... [...]

David Freeman says, “Google has recently updated the Google My Business guidelines to state that virtual offices are not considered service-area businesses and that you need to have the virtual office staffed during business hours. A new section was added under the “address” portion of the guidelines that reads: Service-area businesses — businesses that serve customers at their locations — should have one page for the central office or location and designate a service area from that point. Service-area businesses can’t list a “virtual” office unless that office is staffed during... [...]

Darren Shaw says, “Have you noticed that a lot of local pack results don’t seem to make sense these days? Almost every time I search Google for a local search term, the pack results leave me wondering, “Why are these businesses ranking?” For most local searches these days, proximity appears to be weighted more than links, website content, citations, and reviews in the local pack rankings. Google doesn’t seem to value the traditional local search ranking factors when determining which businesses to rank in the local pack. The main consideration seems to be: “Which businesses are... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “High keyword rankings are the most sought-after achievement in the world of search engine optimization (SEO). Small businesses and brands alike strive to obtain the first organic listing in search results because of the lucrative traffic and lead opportunities that are associated with this position. But with the evolution of paid advertising and expansion of universal search, as well as Google’s continuous efforts to provide consumers with content that resolves their demands directly in search results, the opportunities attached to traditional keyword rankings are... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, ” Back in October 2016, I wrote about how you can use a Python script to determine whether a page has been indexed by Google in the SERPs. As it turns out, Google’s webmaster trends analyst Gary Illyes wasn’t too happy with the technique that was being utilized by the script, so I cannot endorse this method. Shortly after, Sean Malseed and his team at Greenlane SEO built a similar tool based in Google Sheets (among other awesome tools like InfiniteSuggest), and Googler John Mueller expressed reservations”. How to check which URLs have been indexed without upsetting... [...]

Beth Hayden says, “Promoting your content has clear short-term benefits — like attracting new readers, social shares, and comments. But did you know it’s also a critical part of your search engine optimization strategy? Even the best on-page SEO efforts don’t work as well if no one links to your site, so one of your biggest jobs is spreading the word out about your content. Think of it this way: You’ve got to attract incoming links to rank well in search engines, and no one is going to link to you if they don’t know you exist. In this post, we’ll talk about why content promotion... [...]

Beth Hayden says, “Promoting your content has clear short-term benefits — like attracting new readers, social shares, and comments. But did you know it’s also a critical part of your search engine optimization strategy? Even the best on-page SEO efforts don’t work as well if no one links to your site, so one of your biggest jobs is spreading the word out about your content. Think of it this way: You’ve got to attract incoming links to rank well in search engines, and no one is going to link to you if they don’t know you exist. In this post, we’ll talk about why content promotion... [...]