Wesley Young says, “As 2016 comes to a close and we begin planning for next year’s goals and budgets in earnest, it is prudent to remember to take time for reflection. Learning from successes experienced and mistakes made helps you set goals that will move you forward and plan for ways to get there. To help remind you of some of the most important lessons learned this past year, below are my Top 10 Insights from 2016. In full disclosure, it’s my Top 10 list and thus is largely derived from the articles I wrote this year and statistics cited therein, but at least you’ll know you won’t... [...]

MOZ team says, “Should you focus on perfecting your H1s and H2s, or should structured data demand all your on-page attention? While Google hasn’t completely pulled the rug out from under us, don’t let the lack of drastic change in page markup fool you. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines where to focus your efforts when it comes to on-page SEO and offers some tools to help with the process”. Which Page Markup + Tags Still Matter for SEO? – Whiteboard Friday MOZ  [...]

Adam Dorfman says, “In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), a citation is a direct mention of a specific brand within an online platform. Some of the more common examples of online citations are comments published within a community blog about a favorite local coffee shop or an unpleasant experience working with a franchise outlet. Citations serve as contextual forms of content that are recognized and indexed by search crawlers. On a local level, citations have the ability to improve organic visibility for small businesses and community brands alike. Consumers mentioning a... [...]

Kerry Jones says, “I was in Peru earlier this year for a digital marketing conference, and I overwhelmingly heard the same frustration: “It’s really hard to use outreach to earn links or PR coverage in our country.” This wasn’t for lack of trying. As I continued to hear this sentiment during my visit, I learned there simply weren’t a lot of opportunities. For one thing, in Peru, there aren’t nearly as many publishers as in more populous countries. Most publishers expected payment for mentioning a brand. Furthermore, journalists did a lot of job-hopping, so maintaining relationships... [...]

Joy Hawkins says, “Previously, I wrote an article unveiling some of the most common myths I see in the Local SEO space. I thought I’d do a follow-up that specifically talked about the myths pertaining to citations that I commonly hear from both small business owners and SEOs alike. Myth #1: If your citations don’t include your suite number, you should stop everything you’re doing and fix this ASAP. Truth: Google doesn’t even recognize suite numbers for a whopping majority of Google business listings. Even though you enter a suite number in Google My Business, it doesn’t translate... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google has just removed another feature from the Google Search Console: the content keywords report, one of the earliest features found in the Google Search Console when it was first built. Google said when the tool first launched, this report was the “only way to see what Googlebot found when it crawled a website.” Now, you have features like Search Analytics and Fetch, and others. Google also said “users were often confused about the keywords listed in content keywords.” So Google decided to remove the feature for those reasons. This is not a surprising move;... [...]

Amy Gesenhues says, “Prior to the Thanksgiving holiday, Bing announced it was helping business owners display the correct hours of operation via their local search listing on Bing. From the Bing Search Blog: “Bing local is collaborating with business owners and trusted partners to get accurate holiday hours in real time. When you search for local businesses, you’ll receive up-to-date changes for holiday hours.” Bing included the following image to highlight how holiday hours will be displayed for local listings”. Bing local search update highlights business holiday hours in local... [...]

Lindsay kolowich says, “It’s been years since the power’s shifted away from marketers and advertisers and in favor of Internet consumers. Now more than ever, people are empowered to choose their own experiences online. They’re actively avoiding ad content — and instead of living by advertisers’ rule books, they’re deciding what to click on, what to read, what to download, and what to buy … and what not to. And they have a lot of choices. When inbound marketers like us are looking to generate more leads from our website, we need to think not just about how to capture people’s... [...]

Bryson Meunier says, “n the first full day that we had a Google Home in our house, we interacted with it 473 times over the course of the day. Four hundred of those were my two-year-old asking it to play “Cherry Bomb” by The Runaways, followed by his mother or me interrupting with, “Hey Google! Stop!” (Look, I love that song, too, but enough is enough, you know?) The point is, watching the way that my family interacts with the device, and how often they interact with it, I’m more inclined to believe the forecast that sales of Amazon Echo and Google Home type devices will go from... [...]

Samantha Anderson says, “Search engine optimization (SEO) has been the buzzword of inbound lead generation for the past few years. SEO enables you to reach relevant leads and guide them to your Website. However, it is a mistake to focus your efforts on just SEO. SEO is unable to be the lead generating strategy, it must work in concert with other techniques to create sales and build a business. Many small business owners get trapped into the lead generation cycle and fail to build bridges to convert those leads into sales. Never forget the purpose of SEO lead generation, to find you, potential... [...]