Andy Taylor says, “There are plenty of options for particular metrics to drive paid search programs toward, but not every KPI is created equal. Here, we’ll dive into what your preferred KPI says about you and provide recommendations to help you assess whether your KPI reflects the goals you care about.All insights are at least slightly hyperbolic and assume you have a one-track mind for your KPI of choice. I bet some of you out there can keep two, three, maybe even more KPIs in mind when managing accounts, as you should. You’ll just have to meld the descriptions to uncover those deep... [...]

Jacob Baadsgaard says, “Ever feel like AdWords is one giant juggling act? You cut your cost per click, only to watch your conversion rate drop. You increase lead volume, but those leads don’t turn into sales. You finally boost sales, but now your cost per click is unprofitably high…When does the madness stop?With all of these apparently conflicting priorities, it can be easy to drop the ball a few times. Or, worse still, you might feel like AdWords isn’t worth the effort, throw your hands in the air and quit.However, there is a way to juggle all of your marketing goals —... [...]

John E Lincoln says, “Do you have an app that you’d like to rank in mobile search engine results? If so, you’re going to need to make room in your SEO strategy for app optimization.For apps, there are distinct ranking factors. Although they are similar to ranking factors for a standard web page, there are differences that you need to know about.Here’s how you can optimize your app to get the best possible rank.Yes, you need to optimizeAccording to a recent Google report, 27 percent of users find apps through a search engine. That’s up from 2 percent to 3 percent in 2014.That... [...]

Jono Alderson says, “Websites, like the businesses who operate them, are often deceptively complicated machines.They’re fragile systems, and changing or replacing any one of the parts can easily affect (or even break) the whole setup — often in ways not immediately obvious to stakeholders or developers.Even seemingly simple sites are often powered by complex technology, like content management systems, databases, and templating engines. There’s much more going on behind the scenes — technically and organizationally — than you can easily observe by crawling a site or viewing the... [...]

Julie Joyce says, “I’m one of those people who thinks I can usually handle things by myself — I don’t need or want anyone’s help. It’s been tough for me to let go of that attitude when it comes to link building, but I’ve been doing much better lately after realizing that it really is beneficial to have more involvement from various people.Sometimes that extra involvement has been kind of forced on me. Sometimes I’ve had to beg for it. But all in all, I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that the best links we get these days come from working together with the client, their... [...]

Tom Capper says, “Back in September last year, I was lucky enough to see Rand speak at MozCon. His talk was about link building and the main types of strategy that he saw as still being relevant and effective today. During his introduction, he said something that really got me thinking, about how the whole purpose of links and PageRank had been to approximate traffic.Essentially, back in the late ’90s, links were a much bigger part of how we experienced the web — think of hubs like Excite, AOL, and Yahoo. Google’s big innovation was to realize that, because people navigated the... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Today, Google has reaffirmed that 15 percent of Google searches done by users on a daily basis have never been seen before. Google said this back in 2013 and now has restated that metric as Google announced Project Owl this morning.Google wrote:There are trillions of searches on Google every year. In fact, 15 percent of searches we see every day are new — which means there’s always more work for us to do to present people with the best answers to their queries from a wide variety of legitimate sources. While our search results will never be perfect, we’re as... [...]

Rolando Herrerasays, “SEO is one of the most important strategies in online marketing. For this reason, we’ve compiled 8 SEO strategies that have proven to be effective over time. The right SEO approach can effectively lower your user audience cost and lead you to success.Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important strategies in modern digital marketing. A successful SEO strategy will help your website find a place at the top of the search engines results pages (SERP). The right SEO approach can help you get an abundance of traffic and lower your Customer Acquisition... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Bing Ads rolled out three new features this week for Shopping Campaigns.Search term report at product level: Advertisers can now see which search queries triggered product ads a the product ID level with Product Search Term.This report will show whether products are triggering for appropriate search terms. But in the blog post, Bing Ads also points out that this report can help guide product title optimization in ways you might not already be thinking about, such as seasonal triggers:Example: If you’re selling personalized photo frames and you notice seasonal... [...]

Dr. Peter J. Meyers says, “Just over 9 months ago, I wrote that 30% of page-1 Google results in our 10,000-keyword tracking set were secure (HTTPS). As of earlier this week, that number topped 50%.While there haven’t been any big jumps recently – suggesting this change is due to steady adoption of HTTPS and not a major algorithm update – the end result of a year of small changes is dramatic. More and more Google results are secure.MozCast is, of course, just one data set, so I asked the folks at Rank Ranger, who operate a similar (but entirely different) tracking system, if they... [...]