Stefanie Flaxman says, “By now you know that — technical details aside — SEO is not separate from content marketing; it’s an integrated aspect of content marketing. Optimizing your content for search engines is part of your craft and a skill you can strengthen with practice. But even when you rank well for search terms your audience uses, the real test is what happens when someone clicks through to your website. As Brian wrote on Monday: “There’s nothing worse than a quick bounce.” To avoid a quick bounce, you need to focus on content optimization. Since you don’t want to miss... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Google’s domination of the US search ad market isn’t letting up. Thanks to mobile in particular, Google will take 77.8 percent of US search ad revenues this year. By next year, for every dollar spent on search advertising in the US, an even eight dimes will go to Google. The remaining 20 cents will be split up among Microsoft, Yahoo, Yelp, Amazon, Ask and AOL, according to eMarketer’s latest report on the US digital ad market. “Google’s dominance in search, especially mobile search, is largely coming from the growing tendency of consumers to turn to their smartphones... [...]

Rand Fishkin says, “One of the marketing world’s greatest frustrations has long been the lack of data from Google and other search engines about the behavior of users on their platforms. Occasionally, Google will divulge a nugget of bland, hard-to-interpret information about how they process more than X billion queries, or how many videos were uploaded to YouTube, or how many people have found travel information on Google in the last year. But these numbers aren’t specific enough, well-sourced enough, nor do they provide enough detail to be truly useful for all the applications... [...]

Ben Davis says, “Our Day in the Life feature recently profiled an SEO account manager within an agency, but now we’re turning the spotlight on a client-side SEO specialist. Jack Saville is an SEO specialist at Bynder. Here’s what he does with his days. And if you’re looking for a new challenge in digital our jobs board lists hundreds of open positions, and you can benchmark your own digital knowledge using our Digital Skills Index. Please describe your job: What do you do? I work as an SEO specialist for a digital-asset management provider in Amsterdam called Bynder. Bynder... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Last week, we reported about a new unconfirmed Google ranking update that is going by the name of Fred. Google has not confirmed this update. In fact, they told us they have no comment at all on this. That being said, I spent the weekend collecting sample URLs of webmasters who claimed to have been hit by this update. After reviewing now upward of 100 different sites, I believe this update targets low-value content sites that put revenue above helping their users. The vast majority of URLs shared with me all show the same type of website. A content site, often in a blog... [...]

Andrew Ruegger says, “Generation Z and early Generation Alpha will likely be the last of us to type. Keyboard users are a dying population. Who is the next generation? Voice users. If you spend time with young kids, you’ll notice that they favor voice assistants over keyboards. And who can blame them? People rarely turn down easier ways of doing things! Marketers need to be thinking about this shift, because voice search will have a significant impact on content discovery through search. Although currently there is no simple or precise way of identifying voice vs. non-voice queries, “Okay... [...]

Laura Scott says, “Often when we think about the holidays, we envision panicked crowds on Black Friday, Cyber Monday desk shoppers and last-minute gifters filling their cart on Christmas Eve. We think about the winter holiday season. That’s no surprise, since last year, the winter holidays accounted for over $658 billion in sales, according to NRF. They’re an important time for retailers; but they’re not the only time that search behavior and sales spike. Other holidays like Mother’s Day, Halloween and the Back-to-School “holiday” all compel shoppers to search for different needs,... [...]

Brian Clark says, “Imagine. Imagine a world without search engines … It’s easy if you try. No more surprise Google updates. No more worrying about XML sitemaps, robots.txt, and content analysis and optimization. And perhaps most importantly, no more keyword research. That last one means you’re going to have to go old-school to figure out the language of your audience to reflect it back to them. It’s going to take a lot more work. You didn’t think you were going to get out of that one, did you? “. Forget SEO Copyblogger  [...]

Tom Capper says, “A little over two weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at SearchLove San Diego. My presentation, Does Google Still Need Links, looked at the available evidence on how and to what extent Google is using links as a ranking factor in 2017, including the piece of research that I’m sharing here today. One of the main points of my presentation was to argue that while links still do represent a useful source of information for Google’s ranking algorithm, Google now has many other sources, most of which they would never have dreamed of back when PageRank was conceived as... [...]

Ted Ives says, “This is the first of a three-part series about SEM account management. SEM is a fun and constantly changing online marketing channel. There are numerous things that account managers can do to improve their account performance, and even to excel and get more responsibility from their organization. However, the first requirement of being a good SEM Manager is to be one. If you get fired by your boss, you can’t really work on excelling, can you? I have some pretty substantial experience in this area — both in being fired myself and in being on the scene when other account... [...]