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... [...]

Michael Cottam says, “When Penguin 4.0 launched in September 2016, the story from Gary Illyes of Google was that Penguin now just devalued spammy links, rather than penalizing a site by adjusting the site’s ranking downward, AKA a penalty. Apparently for Penguin there is now “less need” for a disavow, according to a Facebook discussion between Gary Illyes and Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land back in September. He suggested that webmasters can help Google find spammy sites by disavowing links they know are bad. He also mentioned that manual actions still happen — and... [...]

Dave Davies says, “There are plenty of good reasons to make your mobile site fast, and Google just reminded us of them with their new industry benchmarks for mobile page speed. Among them: Improving conversion rate and increasing profit, as 40 percent of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Customer retention, as 79 percent of shoppers who are dissatisfied with site performance say they’re less likely to purchase from the same site again. But is SEO one of those reasons? Will businesses that optimize their Google page speed score to 100/100 on mobile... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Since yesterday morning, the SEO industry has been watching an unconfirmed Google ranking update that seems to target more of the link quality aspects of the overall algorithm. Many are calling this the Fred Update, a name we’re also adopting. That came from Google’s Gary Illyes, who has jokingly suggested that all updates be named “Fred.” It’s sticking with this one. We’ve seen more chatter and reports of changes from within the “black hat” SEO community, which generally means that this is a spam algorithm update around links. Last time we reported... [...]