2020 has been the year of uncertainty. Strategies changed overnight and clients’ budgets were no longer stable, which called for new approaches.

“How much should we invest?” is one of the questions that became critical. It’s one you’ll still have to tackle as CMOs are pressed to make the most out of shrinking marketing budgets.

To help your clients get back on track or manage growth in their vertical, you can create multiple business scenarios – from prosperity to hardship.…

Google's recently awarded patents touch on interesting topics like knowledge panels, machine learning, and more. Read about them here 

Welcome back to another week for the geeks.

The last few weeks were a bit uneventful, but I did come up with a few that really are worth a read.

As always, patents take some time to get into, but the more of them you read, the easier it gets.

So, please do take some time to click through and give them a full read.

It can…

Five search marketers contributed opinions on Google’s December 2020 Core Update. The observations offer interesting feedback on what may have happened.

In my opinion, Google updates have increasingly been less about ranking factors and more about improving how queries and web pages are understood.

Some have offered the opinion that Google is randomizing search results in order to fool those who try to reverse engineer Google’s algorithm.

I don’t share that…

The reasons why SEO doesn't work that range from unrealistic expectations to internal company factors to improper resource allocations. Check out 10 of them here.

As someone who has spent a significant part of their career working directly in search marketing, it’s rare that I can’t find a business case to be made for SEO being in the digital, and broader marketing mix.

There are few growing industries, businesses, or organizations that don’t have a web presence or some type of…

A quick SEO win for most sites is to include the top ranking keyword in the title tags that are missing them.

Think about it for a minute.

If a page is already ranking for a keyword and if that keyword is not present in its title, then that page could rank higher if we were to add that term in a natural way

Now, if you work on a site with hundreds, thousands, or millions of pages, doing this manually can become time-consuming and prohibitively expensive pretty…

As search marketers, we spend a great deal of time analyzing search query data. And for good reason!

That’s how we recognize when we’re matching to irrelevant queries and can add negatives. Or how we discover new queries that we never even imagined.

Are we always looking for the right things though?

Often we are scanning our SQR reports looking for intent, product types, themes, and more. What deeper layers are there? What about clues to gender, age, or even sexual…

A quick SEO win for most sites is to include the top ranking keyword in the title tags that are missing them.

Think about it for a minute.

If a page is already ranking for a keyword and if that keyword is not present in its title, then that page could rank higher if we were to add that term in a natural way

Now, if you work on a site with hundreds, thousands, or millions of pages, doing this manually can become time-consuming and prohibitively expensive pretty…

Are you getting your ecommerce and mcommerce programs ready for the holidays? Read about what to do to take advantage of their full potential here.

Congratulations on making it through another record-breaking Black Friday and Cyber Monday. These eye-opening numbers illustrate just how busy online retailers were from November 27-30:

Shopify’s data shows that sales increased 76% on its platform during the Black Friday to Cyber Monday (BFCM) stretch in 2020 compared to…

Everyone wants to rank across all search engines for their desired terms.

At a certain point in the evolution of Google search, it became apparent that naturally acquiring links (such as those from bloggers) helped with that goal.

That said, algorithms change. So is it still worth it to work with bloggers?

Hopefully, you didn’t say links.

Even while addressing SEO, this is not really the goal, even if it is what you might spend a good percentage of your time…

What's 2021 going to be like for SEO professionals? Check out 10 important trends you need to know from 42 top experts in the fieds

ut there’s much more to dig into when we’re talking SEO in 2021.

So what SEO strategies and tactics will work and help you dominate in the SERPs and earn more revenue in 2021?

This is the question we ask every year here at Search Engine Journal.

This year, I asked 42 of today’s top SEO professionals for their thoughts.

Here are…

Google confirms a core algorithm update is starting to roll out on December 3, 2020.

As mentioned in the announcement, Google’s guidance regarding the update remains the same as it always has been.

This is the third core algorithm update of the calendar year. A fair amount of time has passed since the last core update, compared to the average time between these types of updates updates.

The last core update rolled out on what the internet refers to…

Deciding on the best domain name to register for your business? Here are strategies for picking a domain name that will stand the test of time.

The first thing to keep in mind is that you are registering a domain name, not buying it.

Nobody really owns a domain name in the same way that they own an automobile or a house.

There is often a false sense of ownership with domains.

This is just something to keep in mind when approaching the registration of a domain…

Growth experts at social networks don’t think about SEO the way we might do for a SaaS company.

They face a unique set of challenges, such as getting Google to crawl and index billions of pages or render heavy JavaScript frameworks, and that takes a different mindset.

While only a small subset of sites deal with these challenges, there is a lot to learn from observing how social networks excel at SEO.

In this post, you’ll learn how Facebook and LinkedIn drive billions of…

After starting to learn Python late last year, I’ve found myself putting into practice what I’ve been learning more and more for my daily tasks as an SEO professional.

This ranges from fairly simple tasks such as comparing how things such as word count or status codes have changed over time, to analysis pieces including internal linking and log file analysis.

In addition, Python has been really helpful:

For working with large data sets.

For files that would usually…

Leveraging content to boost your lookalike audiences on Facebook can help you get maximum impact from minimum marketing efforts.

Content marketing, when done right, can produce remarkable results for a business.

This is precisely why an increasing number of business owners focus on producing quality content to achieve their business goals.

But the thing is, not everyone is effective in their content marketing efforts.

You’re probably already investing a…