Jeff Baum says, “Many businesses receive significant lead volume from phone calls. The reason marketers want to generate phone leads is to capitalize on the immediacy of being able to activate the sales funnel. This article delves into why lead generation businesses need to have a call tracking solution in place, how data collected through call tracking technology can improve conversion funnel performance and why integrating call tracking into third-party systems can lift paid search performance. Why do lead generation businesses need call tracking? Lead generators run into a blind spot... [...]

Patrick Stox says, “Many people are more afraid of duplicate content than they are of spammy links. There are so many myths around duplicate content that people actually think it causes a penalty and that their pages will compete against each other and hurt their website. I see forum posts, Reddit threads, technical audits, tools, and even SEO news websites publishing articles that show people clearly don’t understand how Google treats duplicate content. Google tried to kill off the myths around duplicate content years ago. Susan Moska posted on the Google Webmaster blog in 2008: Let’s... [...]

Thomas Caulton says, “We all know building backlinks is one of the most important aspects of any successful SEO and digital marketing campaign. However, I believe there is an untapped resource out there for link building: finding your competitors’ broken pages that have been linked to by external sources. Allow me to elaborate. Finding the perfect backlink often takes hours, and it can can take days, weeks, or even longer to acquire. That’s where the link building method I’ve outlined below comes in. I use it on a regular basis to build relevant backlinks from competitors’... [...]

Sherry Bonelli says, “Fall is in the air, and that can only mean one thing for most digital marketers: budget season. The approaching fourth quarter is often the time when companies begin the budget and planning process for the next fiscal year. And it seems that ROI, while always considered a top priority, has renewed importance now. Advertising Age recently reported that intense demand for ROI is causing companies to replace their CMOs at a rapid rate — as much as a 48-percent turnover in top retailers. You’d think that ROI would be easy to track on digital, right? Compared to offline... [...]

Andrew Dennis says, “In March, Google Search Quality Senior Strategist Andrey Lipattsev stated that Google’s two top ranking factors are content and links. Content and links have a symbiotic relationship: great content attracts links, and links improve the visibility and popularity of content. However, not all types of content will attract links, and even content types that typically attract links require strategic promotion in order to secure those links. What makes content linkable? There are numerous types of content: blog posts, articles, white papers, eBooks, listicles, videos,... [...]

Brian Clark says, “Of all the components of a holistic online marketing strategy, search engine optimization (“SEO”) seems to mystify many the most. And it’s true that years back, the key to ranking well in Google was a form of dark art. That’s changed in recent years. Google’s algorithm has gotten smarter, and is more distinctly tuned in to what the audience thinks is relevant and valuable for a given search term, rather than what we as marketers would prefer to rank well”. SEO that Grows Your Business with John Jantsch Copyblogger  [...]

Serge Stefoglo says, “Content marketing has been discussed and researched more in the last 5 years than ever before. There are various kinds of content marketing strategies out there. Blog promotion, infographics, video strategies, and creative content are some. Depending on your goals, some are more effective than others. At Distilled, we’ve been fortunate enough to work on many creative content pieces with some incredible clients. This article is going to focus on a piece of content that my team and I created for a client. We’ll take a look at both the creation process and the tangible... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google launched the real-time, more granular version of Penguin on Friday. Google wrote in its announcement that it “now devalues spam.” Many SEOs and webmasters took that to mean that Penguin no longer penalizes – and it seems like they are right. Google’s Gary Illyes said on my public Facebook post that the new Penguin algorithm “managed to devalue spam instead of demoting.” But he also said that Google’s recommendation for using the disavow file has not changed. In other words, you should use the disavow file to help recover from Penguin issues. But... [...]

Pratik Dholakiya says, “SEO has come a long way from being all about on-page optimization, building backlinks and creating “relevant” content. When I read popular search engine blogs, I notice a definite trend: SEO is moving toward a more inclusive strategy that goes beyond new ways of link building or content marketing. A huge part of present-day SEO practices is brand building and influencing search queries themselves, as opposed to starting with a truckload of keywords and creating content around them. Therefore, while links, keywords, content and site optimization remain the building... [...]

Kelsey Libert says, “The Fractl team has worked on hundreds of content marketing projects. Along the way, we’ve kept track of a lot of data, including everywhere our client campaigns have been featured, what types of links each campaign attracted, and how many times each placement was shared. While we regularly look back on our data to evaluate performance per campaign and client, until now we’d never analyzed all of these data in aggregate. After combing through 31,000 media mentions and 26,000 links, here’s what we found. Most marketers assume that if they build links on high-authority... [...]