All Blog Posts Tagged 'techniques' (86)

Rumor has it that LinkedIn may be the up and coming advertising player this year.

Sure, they’ve offered advertising services for years now, but up until recently, LinkedIn has really nailed down the craft of being an ad service provider and a social media network.

What really helps set LinkedIn ads apart from other social media advertising platforms (e.g., Facebook), is their B2B targeting options. B2B marketers flock to LinkedIn because that’s where “all of the professionals”…

If you want to gain a competitive advantage from your link building efforts, you ultimately need to develop a strategy that sees you earn the links that your competitors can’t or at least those which they’ll struggle to replicate.

That means doing something different.

You won’t gain a strong competitive advantage through guest posting, resource link building or similar tactics, and even leveraging high-value PR approaches such as newsjacking are unpredictable given that you’re…

One of the greatest gifts digital marketing represents is the data to know when we are achieving our goals.

The most straightforward measurement is conversions.

Conversions can track any action a brand will find valuable from a sale to spending a certain amount of time on a page.

Yet not all brands are capable of using conversions. There are a number of reasons for this:

• Web host doesn’t support conversion tracking code.
• Brand doesn’t have on-demand…

One of Google’s biggest-impact algorithm updates was implemented for the sake of local search results, and local businesses typically saw the effects of the update in their website’s analytics data.

Google users certainly saw the impact, too, and that typically meant a different, and eventually better, search experience in terms of local businesses and the information pertaining to those businesses.

Believed to have launched on or around July 24, 2014 — and deemed the “Pigeon”…

In  like yoga, with every pose, we bring our mind, body, and breath in alignment to stretch out of our comfort zones.

The process of continuous improvement in yoga is rooted in objective introspection rather than a focus on the external.

The focus is on finding purpose, staying positive, building empathy, and expanding perspective.

The same principles can be applied to excel in digital marketing.

Pratyahara empowers us to find purpose by…

In time for the holiday shopping season, Facebook is rolling out new tools to assist advertisers with analyzing campaign performance.

Facebook is making it easier for advertisers to measure ad performance across accounts, channels, and publishers.

With this data, advertisers can better understand how ads are performing, which demographics they’re reaching, and where the most conversions are coming from. Here’s more about the new ad reporting tools.

Conversion…

Recently I took over another agency’s client, where they ran YouTube. The client is in the sports nutrition vertical.

I sat through the onboarding meeting with them and they shared their YouTube completion rates of skippable ads of 60%+.

All I could say to myself was “either their videos are the most amazing commercials ever, or someone doesn’t know what the skip button is.”

Turns out it was the latter.

Having reviewed the brands Where Ads…

The data can be found in a new Search Appearance in the Search Console performance report, which captures stats such as total clicks, impressions, average click-through rate, and average position.

Websites that are eligible to appear in Google’s product search results will find a new Search Appearance type called “Product results.”

Data can be segmented to discover, for example, how shopping traffic changes over time and which search queries product results show…

2019 far exceeded my expectations in terms of Python adoption within the SEO community.

As we start a new year and I hear more SEO professionals wanting to join in the fun, but frustrated by the initial learning curve, I decided to write this introductory piece with the goal of getting more people involved and contributing.

Most SEO work involves working with spreadsheets which you have to redo manually when working with multiple brands or repeating the same analysis over…

Over 5.6 million blog posts go live every day. That’s more than 233,000 per hour.

And, despite only about 20% of the world’s population speaking English, 66% of that content is in English.

That’s a lot of competition for users’ attention.

One way that you and your content can stand out in such a crowded space is by earning your place as a thought leader.

A thought leader is one of a few go-to people in their field of expertise. They are the type of person who is…

In 2003 it was generally understood by affiliate marketers that ugly sites that looked like they were “built by a 10 year old” tended to convert exceedingly well.

Major sites like Walmart and CVS use exceedingly plain websites. It may seem counterintuitive to purposely create an “ugly” site but the nearly forgotten affiliate marketing strategy of “ugly sites sell” might be useful to revisit.

The ugly site sells paradigm is not well known nowadays. But it was a…

Google’s John Mueller offered a clear explanation of how Google uses H1, H2, HTML headings. This explanation shows the role heading elements play in ranking and how you should use them.

Background on Heading Tags for SEO

In the early 2000s, heading elements (H1, H2, H3) were actual ranking factors. It was mandatory to add your keywords in the headings if you wanted to rank.

But that’s not been the case for many years. Yet, it is a common SEO practice to worry about keywords in…

For 2019 I endeavoured to write link building articles that were suitable for introductory, intermediate and advanced levels of knowledge.

Link building is more than just tactics and strategies. There is a great deal of background information that helps explain why it’s best to do things a certain way for maximum success.

The articles this year includes background information surrounding links, including the history of link building practices and how Google might score and rank…

Google published an article detailing a conversion metric called the Relative Mobile Conversion Rate. It’s a ratio of desktop versus mobile conversion rates. This metric, first discussed  in 2018, has now received an official introduction. It reveals gaps in mobile performance and provides an accurate reflection of conversion rates over time. The metric is referred to as Rel mCvR.

Google’s official blog post suggests it’s an important metric to monitor because it may indicate there…

SEO platforms have evolved from glorified ranking tools to full-scale platforms that manage SEO end to end.

But it can’t stop there.

Meanwhile, Google’s free  (GSC) service has come a long way by incorporating additional data and displaying changes in month-over-month traffic and organic performance.

In fact, the new GSC provides:

• 16 months of search traffic data.
• Detailed information about a specific page – including index…

More traffic, more links, more conversions – the trifecta of search engine optimization (SEO).

Whether you’re an SEO expert or a website owner looking to increase your presence online, you know that engaging, SEO-friendly content is the key to attracting high-quality links and organic traffic.

However, you may feel like you are fresh out of ideas or even that you are in a “boring” niche that makes it difficult to think up interesting content topics.

Fortunately, by…

If the way to get organic search traffic to our content is to answer questions clearly and with a high degree of expertise, where do keywords come into play?

How should we be using them, if at all?

Keywords: Input vs. Output

Remember those circa-2010 SEO content rules I opened this article with?

We all did it at the time, right?

It’s easy to look back at examples of that and laugh, but sometimes our search writing today isn’t much better.

This…

If the way to get organic search traffic to our content is to answer questions clearly and with a high degree of expertise, where do keywords come into play?

How should we be using them, if at all?

Keywords: Input vs. Output

Remember those circa-2010 SEO content rules I opened this article with?

We all did it at the time, right?

It’s easy to look back at examples of that and laugh, but sometimes our search writing today isn’t much better.

This…

Google is rolling out an updated look for paid and organic search results on desktop, bringing it more inline with the look of mobile search results.

The updated design includes a more prominent “Ad” label for paid results, at least in Google’s estimation, as well as favicons next to organic results.

Here’s a mockup shared by Google:

Google’s search ads on desktop now have a bolded “Ad” label in black text. Google says the label is more prominent, but early…

Google Ads is making parallel tracking available for video campaigns, which is optional for now but will soon become mandatory.

Parallel tracking is designed to improve mobile site speed by bringing visitors directly to the landing page while measuring the ad click in the background.

Due to the importance Google places on site speed, parallel tracking is already mandatory for Search, Shopping, and Display campaigns. As of March 30th it will also be mandatory for all video…