SEO & traffic

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…

How to Actually Be Better Than Your Competitors in the Eyes of Choosy Customers

Every solid business or organization needs an overall unique sales/value proposition (USP/UVP), but individual offerings need one, too, to differentiate them from competing products/services. When hoping to win customers with specific requirements, a forthright explanation of why you believe your…

Google’s Navboost Queries and Brands in SEO

Are you still sleeping on brand as a ranking factor? Explore Tom’s detailed takeaways from the Google leak, with an emphasis on understanding Navboost queries, a click-based ranking system, and branded search. Source link

4 Surprising SEO Test Results — Whiteboard Friday

The final idea is article Schema. Google has said before that they love structured data. It helps them understand the site better. Article Schema is a form of structured data that includes the headline of an article, the author, the…

UTM Tagging for Google Business Profile — Whiteboard Friday

But what you need to think about is the fact that consistency is going to be key because what you don’t want to do is chop and change the way that you add your UTM tags because it’s going to…

Local Brand Loyalty Takeaways From That Time Ace Hardware Was Trending

The Ace Twitter thread began with a profile expressing disbelief that the brand should still be operating if it couldn’t price-match larger competitors. The above anecdote shows that same mindset being transformed by an outstanding second impression created in-store when…

20 SEOs Share Their Key Takeaways From the Google API Leaks

I can assume that if Google algorithms can tell whether an entity is relevant to a topic, they can also tell when links are topically relevant. I suspect that Google’s algorithm prioritizes links that are contextually aligned with the content…

Who Should Block AI Bots?

I will make three arguments for leaving your website totally unblocked for AI bots: Present-day traffic acquisition Present-day brand exposure Future developments in LLM-powered tools Present-day traffic acquisition I recently saw Wil Reynolds speak at SMX Munich, and in his…