Getting Buy-In for Customer Stories — Whiteboard Friday
So we’re gonna dive right in. I’m gonna give you some really practical ways of tackling this challenge, and we’re gonna start by just unpacking what does “no” actually mean? Where does a “no” come from? So when your customer…
How To Secure an SEO Leadership Role [According to an Ex-SEO Turned Headhunter]
Many SEOs believe that experience automatically qualifies them for leadership roles. However, leading a department requires more than SEO expertise. In an article for Moz on retention strategies, Jon Martins, the Operations Director at Hallam, said that not every SEO…
Turn Marketing Into Meaningful Relationships — Whiteboard Friday
Now, in terms of the channels that you can go through, and I will acknowledge I’m paid. So a lot of this is paid-specific, but there is some organic pieces here too. Google Google does cover both search and visual…
The Helpful Content Update Was Not What You Think
Google has long been a little bit cryptic about major algorithm updates. Way back in 2011, with the launch of the first Panda update, Google said: “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites – sites which are…
Sins of an Agency: Parting Ways With Our Biggest Client
Here are six things we did to fix the client relationship: 1. Revisit core values At Vixen Digital, we turned to our core values—honesty, transparency, and respect— to try to mend the relationship. We reflected on where to adjust and…
Your Marketing Ecosystem’s Impact on SEO — Whiteboard Friday
Third-party, this is one of my favorites as someone who works in local SEO. So we’re always looking for opportunities for our clients to get partnerships because building your like brand, building your community is so important with local SEO….
Build a Search Intent Dashboard to Unlock Better Opportunities
This dashboard is now a Swiss Army knife of data that allows you to slice and dice to your heart’s content. Below are a couple of examples of how I use this dashboard to uncover opportunities and insights for my…
6 Underrated Keyword Research Methods — Whiteboard Friday
The next section we’re going to talk about is how you can apply modifiers to your keywords to enrich your keyword lists. So there are lots of different modifiers, and what this will look like will depend completely on your…
How to Optimize for Google’s Featured Snippets [Updated for 2024]
Go beyond traditional keyword research tools and ask people All the above methods (albeit excellent) tackle already discovered opportunities that you or your competitors are already ranking high. But how about venturing beyond that? One way to identify new content…
How Links Impact Organic Results and Local Packs — Whiteboard Friday
Now, before we kinda dive into that, I wanna make sure everybody understands what I’m talking about when I say local pack rankings. So when you do a search on Google, let’s say your search is “plumber near me,” you…
How To Plan and Run a Successful Client Meeting
Hopefully, with all your data prepared and pre-meeting emails sent, you’ll feel ready to walk into your client meeting with confidence. Now, let’s talk briefly about running the meeting and how to keep everyone on track. Listen to your client…
Search Intent and the Organic Funnel — Whiteboard Friday
So, starting at the top of the funnel, with informational search, this is people who are not necessarily even thinking anything to do with a conversion, not even at an early stage necessarily. They just want information. They might be…
How Will Google’s Antitrust Ruling Affect You?
So, how might this impact Google consumers in the broadest sense? At this scale, we don’t have much precedent. I’m old enough to remember both the Microsoft (2000) and AT&T (1982) antitrust rulings and the long-term reality looked very different…
How to Easily Find Backlink Opportunities With Moz – Next Level
As with any task, you want to maximize your efforts and find the best opportunities. So, before we dive into link prospecting, we need to identify competitors to compare our backlink profile to. If you already have a list of…
How I Develop Successful Link Building Strategies for My Clients
Here’s how I approach prospecting: I start by using Google Search operators to find relevant websites. For example, suppose my client’s site is about sports, specifically marathon training. In that case, I might use queries like intitle:marathon training -recovery plan…
Catering to User Behavior Shifts During Times of Economic Turbulence — Whiteboard Friday
If we think about organic traffic and SEO and how we can cater to this search behavior, dresses have a really high search volume. Then you’ve got blue dresses, which have about 18,000 searches a month, and blue work dresses,…
Directional Reporting in GA4 — Whiteboard Friday
All right, last question you’re gonna ask yourself, is this video helping to drive sales? I’m sure that you have been in the situation, like I have, where your boss, your client comes to you and they’re like, “I made…
AI Bots — Who is Blocking and Why?
I covered some of the potential arguments either way in my previous post, but the truth is that right now looking at how little traffic these models are driving, it’s probably not hugely impactful in the short term. If you…
The 11 Known Google Business Profile Fields That Impact Your Rank
I calculate that I’ve been tuning into Mike Blumenthal’s take on local search for about 20 years now. There’s a reason his voice has become such a trusted one in the industry, and I want to summarize something he recently…
Testing Ideas From the Google API Leaks — Whiteboard Friday
But you’re probably here more for the new ideas. So new ideas that came from reading these docs, and these are hypotheses, these are ideas of things that we could test, that may or may not turn out to be…
What I Learned About Search From Listening to 2 Musicians
You cannot read an SEO blog without someone using the word “trust,” whether that’s trust signals, trusted sources, trust factors, or trusted content. But here’s the problem: the public has lost trust in most large institutions, including those in the…
MozCon 2024 Videos Have Arrived! Plus Free Bonus Content
Drive Execution & Growth: SEO Audits in 2023 … and Beyond Aleyda Solis Aleyda demonstrates how comprehensive audits can enhance SEO execution and growth, presenting seven key actions to integrate into your process. She stresses radical audit prioritization, quick wins,…
Actionable AI — Whiteboard Friday
And what I always encourage beginners to experiment with is get a Proof of Concept. Just see if these different tools are capable of doing the thing that you want them to do. So for example, go straight to ChatGPT,…
Local Search Developments From Q2 2024
At the outset of today’s column, I referenced the Google leak in passing. If you’d like to hear more commentary on it from a local SEO perspective, here are two excellent conversations to tune into: I find it interesting to…