Note: This post reviews web-based keyword tools. It doesn’t cover desktop tools or plugins. Keyword research is extremely important when conceiving new content ideas or optimizing existing content for search engines. You likely have a favorite keyword research tool – be it Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs. These tools are great for finding high…
The SEO report. It’s a calling card for some agencies. These reports can be ornate or no-frills (everyone has their own style). Smart companies use APIs to compile reports without spending manual hours. Some rely on automatic SEO reporting tools. For other companies, it’s a time-intensive and considerably low-value exercise.
The reason Google doesn’t accept the canonical tag as a directive is probably because they know many webmasters will screw it up. If you have a massive database-driven eCommerce site, and you’ve tried to get a developer team to implement, you’ve seen how it can ultimately launch with a ton of unexpected results. Examples I’ve seen: via templates, products were suddenly “canonicalizing” to the homepage. Page 4 of a collection suddenly canonicalizing to page 1 of the collection. Crazy, random results are always likely if not implemented and QA’d properly. When the tag was announced in February of 2009, I worked for one of the largest eCommerce platforms at the time. We wanted to be first to offer this, and we rushed it out – with many, many problems. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with this tag.
As long as I’ve been doing SEO and digital marketing, I’ve pushed for the early adoption of new products, platforms, and technology. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (not an Amazon affiliate link, I swear!) has been a book I’ve leaned on since studying marketing in college. The first law states, “being first in the…
Google Ads location targeting allows advertisers to choose who can see their ads and prevent them from showing in areas they cannot serve. Google uses a variety of signals such as user settings, device, and search activity to determine where a user is located each time they search. In Ads reporting, you will see two…
Simplifying a massively complex algorithm sounds like a fool’s game. Google’s search algorithm is like a rope. A thick rope full of fibers. Some of the fibers (or smaller algorithms) are old, and some are new. Some are made for on-the-fly determinations, and some are looking for old school signals. A jungle of computation! Think…
Nowadays, SEO and PPC practitioners need to think outside the box, especially when it comes to eCommerce sites. In order to stay ahead of competitors, we need to invent creative ways to provide unique value through search engines. Ecommerce SEO isn’t just about rankings anymore. It includes ROI (revenue) from category pages, product pages, and…
We all know that links are an important part of SEO. They help users and bots navigate a site and give search engines information about its quality and authority. With links confirmed as one of Google’s top three ranking factors, we’ve all been reminded of the importance of quality, relevant backlinks. In order to get those backlinks, we have to put a good amount of effort into link building, and that often proves to be a big challenge. There are scaling issues. There are research and outreach management challenges.
These days, most clients and prospects I talk to believe they’ve run out of things to write about. One ceaseless option is to update (and improve upon) their existing assets and stale “evergreen” pieces. Yes—evergreen pieces do go stale. But this post is about new ideas in a modern age. The days of “one landing page per keyword” is SEO history. The emerging best practices for SEO content—in text form—is (again) long form, holistic copy. Searchmetrics has told us this for years. It’s not a 1:1—it’s not because Google inherently thinks long copy is better for them to serve. The correlation is likely related to Hummingbird, Google’s improvement in comprehension, and good old fashioned keywords and synonyms. Or maybe it has to do with the content’s improved power to convert (and lower the bounce). At the end of the day in 2014, the bigger net you cast, the more likely to capture Google’s attention and trust. At SMX East, Search Metrics’ Marcus Tober gave a great presentation providing more context. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t really need a study. I’ve been seeing it myself.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Many years ago, one of our clients bought a popular, content-rich website and redirected it to their current domain. SEO (and retaining the backlinks) were not on their radar at that time. Upon learning about the migration, we asked if they had redirected the site at a page-level or just redirected the site to their own homepage. The client had no idea how the redirection was done and they didn’t have a redirect list (list of the old, legacy URLs) to work from. We needed to invent a plan to gather up the data.
If a website is a mess of URLs and duplicate content, Google will throw their hands up in the air out of frustration. This is a bad spot to be in. You’ll find your traffic and rankings drop while your indexation becomes bloated. Your crawl rate (which we’ve found correlates with traffic) will be curbed. It could seem all very sudden, or it could be gradual. Every case is different – but it’s always a nightmare. Keeping track of website changes is critical with SEO. The other day I peaked into our own Google Webmaster Tools indexation report, and saw something pretty alarming in the “index status” report.
I remember a few years ago blowing the mind of a boss with a theory that Google would eventually rank (in part) based on their own internal understanding of your object. If Wikipedia could know so much about an object, why couldn’t Google? In the end, I was basically describing semantic search and entities, something that has already lived as a concept in the fringe of the mainstream.
