SEO

Addressing the tension between running efficient paid search campaigns and driving business growth is crucial. While building paid search accounts has become easier, using them effectively to grow a business is more challenging than ever.  Focusing solely on optimizing for maximum return on ad spend (ROAS) and the lowest cost-per-lead (CPL) may yield short-term gains,…

Facebook advertising continues to offer strong ROI for businesses in 2024, with some key metrics improving year-over-year according to a report released by Wordstream. Why it matters. As Google faces antitrust scrutiny and rising ad costs, Facebook is maintaining relatively stable pricing and performance for advertisers. By the numbers: Average click-through rate for lead campaigns:…

Creating high-quality, helpful content that drives search traffic is more important than ever. There’s nothing worse than pouring your heart and soul into a wonderful guide or blog post that nobody ever sees or churning out pieces with little value that disappoint or alienate your potential audience. Standing out from the crowd requires a delicate…

Microsoft is testing a weird change to the Bing Search results user experience. Bing is testing that when you do a search from the home page, that it opens the search results in a new window, instead of loading those results on the same tab you are on. Bing is also testing opening a new…

Google seems to be rolling out a new Google Lens feature that lets you record with your camera and also speak with your voice on top of that video. Then Google Lens will match the video or image with your spoken text to give you a set of search results or an AI Overview. This…

It is not every day that you see a Google featured snippet with emojis and special Unicode characters. Here is an example of one spotted by Nick Churick (hat tip Patrick Stox) that he posted on X. I was able to replicate it for the search [outbound link ratio]: This is pulled from this Quroa…

Since Friday, August 9th, I have been seeing yet another intense spike in Google Search ranking volatility. This is based on the SEO chatter within the communities and of course, the third-party Google Search rank volatility trackers. And no, we still do not have a new core update officially released by Google but it is…

There has been some confusion around how Google handles pages that might be more costly for Google Search to crawl, render, index and serve – i.e. JavaScript pages. Google does not have a monetary budget per site, in terms of it will spend $X of crawling budget on your site. Yes, sites do have a…

Google posted a new “Search Off The Record” podcast yesterday on the topic of crawling where John Mueller, Lizzi Sassman, and Gary Illyes spoke about how Google crawls, some ideas on how to make crawling more efficient and some misconceptions around crawl frequency and site quality. I don’t think anything in this podcast is particularly…

For the original iTunes version, click here. This week, we covered the big ruling that Google is officially a monopoly, a federal judge ruled. Google search ranking volatility heated up the day after that ruling. Google served ads for products from other merchants, paid for by other advertisers, which is why they pulled down…