When I got into this biz in the previous decade, there weren’t as many of you goofballs out there sharing all of your amazing SEO insights as there are now. As an SEO newbie, I was always on the prowl for the voices of SEO pros who didn’t sound like they were full of shit and who weren’t pushing their “sign up for my ten-step course” squeeze pages and e-books. Mostly I was looking for people who seemed interesting. I…
For those that missed the news this morning, I couldn’t be more excited to see @SIMPartners join the @Reputation_Com family! https://t.co/c1pqdtD9uy — Adam Dorfman (@phixed) February 28, 2018 While I did not expect Reputation.com to be the suitor, it is not surprising to see it embrace SIMPartners. Reputation.com has grown from a service that took care of those “caught with a hooker” search results for you to something that is starting to look like a full-service digital marketing solution. Here’s…
The chatter amongst the SEOratti is that Voice Search, AI, Machine Learning and SkyNet are a-coming and you better either get ready or prepare for extinction. If it pleases Twitter, in rebuttal, may I present Exhibit #532 in the case for Shotland’s Law (“The better something looks on the surface, the worse it looks underneath”). Google only surfaces the best people for your money or your life. H/t @LennyPham pic.twitter.com/ipJ8JRLnIA — Dan Leibson (@DanLeibson) January 29, 2018 Even those slick…
I recall a presentation by Ted Paff, Founder of Customer Lobby, where he asked an audience of HVAC business owners, “How many of you love Uber?” Pretty much every hand went up. Then he asked “How many of you would rather use a yellow cab?” Pretty much every hand went down. “Congratulations!” he yelled, “because all of your businesses are yellow cabs!” Silence. I have been thinking about that presentation a lot lately because Google’s move into Local Home Service…
I have seen a lot of chatter online lately between SEOs about how the new U.S. tax laws will affect them. I have been having an ongoing conversation about this issue with our long-time accountant, Ed Borine, and I figured it might be of interest to share what he has been advising us. It’s all about optimization right? Warning, this post should not be construed as actual tax advice. This is purely clickbait entertainment. If you want actual tax advice,…
(Editor’s note: This post has received some criticism that I “gamed” the outcome by using the unusual case of a two businesses with the same address and phone number. While I agree that the majority of businesses won’t have this issue, there still is a huge swath of them that do. We deal with them every day. That said, if you are one of the lucky businesses that is not affected by this kind of thing, then your results with Moz…
Many sites use bot blockers like Distil Networks to stop scrapers from stealing their data. The challenge for SEOs is that sometimes these bot blockers are not set correctly and can prevent good bots like Googlebot and BingBot from getting to the content, which can cause serious SEO issues. Distil is pretty adamant that their service is SEO-safe, but I am not so certain about others. We recently saw a case where the http version of a big site’s homepage…
In case you had any doubts that CTR has a direct impact on Google rankings, feast your eyes on this Search Analytics data:
Now that Apple has switched from Bing to Google for SIRI’s web search results, I have been trying to wrap my head around the implications for our clients. In keeping with Apple’s secretive ways, it’s not exactly clear there are any. Here’s a voice query result for “outdoor seat cushions”: The results are typically presented as a set of five results in an iOS tile showing the title, description snippet and URL.