Brandon Turner says, “Why don’t planes crash more often from mechanical failure? With all the moving parts inside a plane, it seems that something would break fairly easily. So, why doesn’t that happen? One primary reason: checklists. Before pilots push the button for taxiing and take-off, they perform an extensive pre-flight checklist to make sure everything is functioning exactly as it should be. Entrepreneurs hoping for strong SEO (search engine optimization) rankings might take a lesson here. They can create a checklist of their own to make sure everything is perfect for their next... [...]

Ben Davis says, “Google announced a tranche of changes to its ad products yesterday. Whilst there were no massive surprises (updates were in line with recent tests seen in the wild), there’s still work for marketers to do to understand their impact. Here’s a summary of things to look out for in the coming weeks and months. Start preparing now for expanded text ads Text ads will include more characters for the first time since Google launched AdWords. For mobile, neatly summed up by the GIF below, this means two lines of headline and more description”. What do Google’s... [...]

Larry Kim says, “What is the most important ranking factor? Ask 1,000 SEOs, and you’ll get a wide variety of answers. Getting links and creating great content would definitely be two of the more popular answers, and for good reason. After all, that’s what Google says are the two most important ranking factors. But there’s one other factor you can — and should be — focusing on. It’s something that could double your traffic. Yet so many people are overlooking it. Your organic click-through rate”. 5 brilliant headline hacks for crazy high organic click-through rates Marketing... [...]

Bridget Randolph says, “Mobile search as a topic has changed a lot over the past few years. When I first started looking at this, back in 2012, there was already a lot of discussion happening around the topic of mobile. And back then, the big question everyone was asking was, “what should my mobile strategy be?” Even then, things were shifting. At one of my early conference presentations on the topic, I made the point that we should stop thinking about a “mobile strategy” as different from our web strategy, because mobile technology was becoming simply another way to access the Internet.... [...]

Miriam Ellis says, “Right now, a customer is trying to find your local business. How quickly are you delivering the NAP, directions and other details he needs, on the go? Volumes of excellent free advice have been written for small businesses about creating quality, optimized local landing pages, but today, I’d like to talk about a topic that has received much less attention: helping customers discover locations when you’ve got a ton of them. This article is for the medium-to-large business with 20, 100, 500 physical locations and a pressing goal to have each one be found by the customers... [...]

Barry Levine says, “Small and medium-sized businesses have more free ways to present their stories to customers, with Adobe’s recent announcement of its Spark suite of tools. They are intended for the creation of visually based marketing material for the Web and social networks, provided as four applications. Three of them are rebranded, existing iOS apps, and one is new. In addition to web pages and social posts, the tools enable the creation of company event announcements, newsletters, lessons, flyers, brochures, small catalogs and explainer videos”. Adobe unveils Spark tool suite... [...]

Christi Olson says, “If you haven’t done it already, now would be a great time to take a fresh look — or even a first look — at how data feeds can reinvigorate your online marketing strategy and prepare your business for an undeniable shift in the search space. Structured data feeds are the silent drivers behind a new search experience centered around more conversational, localized and personalized search engagements. Engines are moving away from the “traditional” customer journey, where users search for a keyword, sort through text PPC search results and click onto a new website.... [...]

Tom Anthony says, “App search is growing and changing, and there’s more opportunity than ever to both draw customers in at the top of the funnel and retain them at the bottom. In today’s special British Whiteboard Friday, Tom Anthony and Will Critchlow of Distilled dig into everything app search and highlight a future where Google may have some competition as the search engine giant. Video Transcription Tom: Howdy, and welcome to another British Whiteboard Friday. I’m Tom Anthony, head of the R&D Department here at Distilled. This is Will Critchlow, founder and CEO.... [...]

Daniel Faggella says, “Generating a consistent source of website traffic is the foundation of every online business. If you don’t have visitors coming to your website, it’s impossible to convert them into prospects and loyal, long-term customers. When you establish yourself as an authority through the lens of Google, it will increase your visibility in search engine queries. But what happens after you’ve earned yourself a top spot in Google search results pages? Contrary to popular belief, ranking for particular keywords is only half the battle. The core tenets of SEO are constantly... [...]

Laura Lippay says, “Markup on a page helps both search engines and assisitive technologies (AT) like screen readers to understand what elements are in a page. For SEO, different elements like title tags, headings, or some schema markup can have more weight or value than other markup. People using assistive technologies are reliant on these structural elements to navigate through the page without being able to see it or without being able to use a mouse. We’ll start with some easy SEO + accessibility overlaps: structural elements that you might deal with in your every day coding or optimization.... [...]