From smartphones to smart home appliances, artificial intelligence, voice and virtual assistants are very much at the center of a shift in the way we interact with digital devices. While voice has not yet lived up to its promise, it’s clear it will be an enduring feature of the digital user experience across an expanding…
DetailsLast week, I drove down to Washington, D.C. to interview one of the still most well-known Google personalities in the SEO space: Matt Cutts. He served as the head of web spam at Google and was one of the company’s first employees, joining in 2000. Cutts took a leave in 2014 and officially left Google…
DetailsGoogle has the ability to impose its own rules on website owners, both in terms of content and transparency of information, as well as the technical quality. Because of this, the technical aspects I pay the most attention to now – and will do so next year – are the speed of websites in the…
DetailsDuring my “Managing Search Terms In A New Match-Type World” session at SMX East, attendees asked questions about match types, negative keywords, using pivot tables and more. Below I answer a few of the questions asked during my session. Before the exact changes, we had synonyms as separate keywords. With the recent changes, should we…
DetailsEarlier this year, Google Ads announced it is shifting customer support requests to an online form and will no longer supporting customer service through Facebook and Twitter. On Friday, Google said that, as of January 1, 2020, direct messaging on the Google Ads’ Facebook and Twitter accounts will be deactivated, and users will see a…
DetailsThis is the second installment of our series on in-house SEO in which we dig into the operational challenges and opportunities that managing search engine optimization in-house presents. As a consultant who specializes in in-house SEO, I’m often asked how large the SEO team should be. Most people think it has to do with revenue…
DetailsFrance’s antitrust regulator imposed a 150 million euro fine ($166.2 million) for arbitrarily suspending ads, according to the Wall Street Journal. The ads in question were “deceptive,” according to Google. La vie et la mort. Claiming that Google exercises “the power of life or death” over companies, the French antitrust authority characterized the suspensions, according…
DetailsImages and icons on a website can add to a visitor’s contextual experience. They serve one of three purposes: purely decorative, actionable (ex. magnifying glass on a search field), or to convey information (i.e., a chart demonstrating population growth). Using alt image tags may seem relatively simple at first glance. However, images can be highly…
DetailsWe’ve all had this frustrating experience: you’re browsing the internet and come across an interesting link. You click on the link, but instead of being presented with the content you are expecting, you receive an error message: “404 Error: The page that you requested could not be found.” The bane of every overworked web developer,…
DetailsFake news, deceptive content, and disinformation will continue to be major, contentious issues as we head into the 2020 election next year. Following heavy criticism in the wake of the 2016 election, both Facebook and Google initiated fact-checking efforts to help identify falsehoods in news content (although Facebook’s political ads policy has been thought to…
DetailsDetermining a marketing budget can be frustrating. Are you investing enough? Are your marketing dollars being applied in the most efficient way? How do you know if what you’re doing is working? Lou Covey, principal of Footwasher Media Agency, has decades of experience helping clients hit that marketing budget “sweet spot.” In this Agency Perspective…
DetailsWhen Google launched Local Guides some years ago, few of us could have realized what level of impact this program would have on the local search ecosystem, and even if we had, I’d like to have thought it would be a positive one. After all, getting real-life humans to contribute their opinions and time to…
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