Category: Google

There’s a ton of fancy and expensive keyword research tools on offer these days but the truth is you can do some basic research with just three free tools: Google Suggest, Google AdWords Keyword Planner, and Google Trends. Even if you have and use paid keyword research tools you can use these as a starting point when doing topic research, finding how Google clusters keywords or associates relevant queries which can be helpful in getting a fresh perspective on your…

Google Search is running a new major algorithm update next week. This introduces some new ranking factors that will, they hope, improve the quality of the content served in the SERPs. What you need to know: The update is coming out next week. It will take two weeks to complete, in English only. If you are hit, you can recover by removing “unhelpful” content It is a sitewide signal It has been added to the Google Algorithm toolkit: it will…

Universal Google Analytics is dead. Live long Google Analytics 4. Well, not quite dead yet, but it’s definitely terminal. The phase-out date is set for July 1, 2023, and this has a lot of people wondering, “Should I care? What does the Google Analytics 4 change mean for me?” Well, dear reader, we are here to answer those questions and more as we walk through the biggest changes and what to expect when Universal Analytics kicks the bucket. Table of…

One of the benefits of society freaking out about a particular topic is that it can drive online behavior that affects SEO performance. For example, currently over the past few weeks, we have been experiencing a shortage of baby formula.

Remember when Google finagled with their system to make it so that you couldn’t double dip on Featured Snippets/Instant Answers (Get a Featured Snippet and rank on page 1 in 10 blue links). Well, there are a lot of people who have been skeptical about the value of this particular search feature in this new world. Were they right? Were we all fooled by Google into giving them free content for SERPs (Featured Snippets) that are great for their user…

May’s Local Pack-o-Meter data is in and shows basically flat growth in all categories, except one. People Also Ask:

And what I mean by that is Google has figured out how to automate a lot of the technical SEO things we used to take for granted as the domain of the technical SEO practitioner. That metaphor makes sense right? Zombies are kind of like automated fixes to technical SEO problems? Let’s just pretend it makes sense. I needed a catchy headline. I bring this up today because two weeks ago one of our clients decided to redirect all of…

For all you Local Pack-o-Meter watchers, you may recall that last month we saw an increase in the presence of both Ads and Shopping Boxes and chalked that up to business optimism about the economy. I don’t want to say that April showers are raining on the parade, but we did see a slight pull-back in both these SERP features:

It was just over a year ago that Dan Leibson open sourced aggregate Lighthouse performance testing in Google Data Studio (yet another resource in the SEO industry inspired by Hamlet Batista). I’d like to share with you some observations I’ve made over the past year of running Lighthouse testing on our clients’ sites and how I think Google’s render service operates.    I’ve noticed some interesting similarities between how successfully Google renders a page and the measurement thresholds in Core…

This is the first in a monthly series of updated Local Pack-O-Meter data. Each month we will report on the changes we see in Google SERP features across ~60M U.S. search queries (graciously provided by Traject Data). Without further ado, here is the March 2021 report: As in February, most of the action in March took place in Local Packs, PAAs, Ads, & Shopping Boxes. These changes feel to me like they are leading indicators of a strengthening economy.