Forecasting in SEO is Like Dune 05 Nov Show me the waters of your homeworld Muad’dib This post is gonna contain spoilers beyond the recent Dune movie, be warned. So forecasting in SEO is such an interesting subject. I really hate the cop-out answer of “it depends” and judge the SEO space for falling back on this lazy crutch as a way to […] Read More
What Is Going On With The SEO Market? 27 Oct Over the past year there has been an absolute explosion in the demand for SEO, and for digital marketing services in general. Here’s what I think is going on. When COVID hit around March 2020, many businesses shut down their paid acquisition and suddenly realized how over-reliant/exposed they were on paid. Most businesses had either […] Read More
Dan Peer Reviews Some Research: Top Keywords by Volume 04 Aug Hi! I’m Dan! I think the SEO discipline is a research based discipline. One of my favorite concepts is Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO), which I’m going to link to rather then explain but I still expect you to read it! Since bad data begets bad research begets bad tactics begets bad outcomes, I think […] Read More
How Location Page Providers Stack Up for Core Web Vitals 06 Jul Core Web Vitals are everywhere in the SEO news these days. We’ve known for years that slower website loading results in conversion loss, and that it impacts ranking, but now we have three metrics to focus on: Cumulative Layout Shift, Largest Contentful Paint, and First Input Delay. For businesses with physical locations, location pages tend […] Read More
SEO The LSG Way: Cognitive Bias and False Precision in our SERP Mental Model 16 Jun DAN THAT IS A MOUTHFUL! In another life I was an academic random internet person, deal with it and move on. So a couple of members of the team have been pushing me to document the Local SEO Guide approach to SEO and a topic came up internally over the past few weeks that I […] Read More
How Many People Actually Use Apple Maps? 14 Jun Since Apple Maps launched in 2012, that has been the big question. As with the rest of its business, Apple does not make it easy to figure out the answer. But whether you realize it or not, your business likely benefits from appearing on Apple Maps, or perhaps it doesn’t benefit because you have ignored […] Read More
Should SEOs Regret Focusing on Featured Snippets? 02 Jun 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 […] Read More
May 2021 Google SERP Features: People Keep Also Asking 01 Jun May’s Local Pack-o-Meter data is in and shows basically flat growth in all categories, except one. People Also Ask: PAAs jumped almost two percentage points last month according to Traject Data’s Historical SERP Database of ~60 million US queries. The monthly jump is not that interesting; it’s the steady upward trend over the past year. […] Read More
If Technical SEO Is Dead, It’s A Lively Corpse 26 May Two weeks ago I showed a case where a client site had broken some redirects, lost organic traffic shortly thereafter, then magically gained it back without fixing anything. The Tl:DR was that Google was getting pretty good at “fixing” tech SEO problems itself. But don’t toe-tag technical SEO just yet. At the end of last […] Read More
Technical SEO Isn’t Dead, It’s More Like Walking Dead 14 May 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 […] Read More
