Every few years, SEO gets a shiny new acronym. Voice search. AMP. E-A-T. Each promised to rewrite the rules, and each eventually found its way into the same corporate graveyard of experiments and half-baked roadmaps. I know, because I bought in. For a year and a half, I buried myself in schema markup—building page-level knowledge […]

I’ve straddled both the brand marketing and SEO industries for the past decade now. That dynamic has made it particularly interesting to watch how the concept of brand alignment has seeped into the search marketing vernacular.  To quote my favorite baseball player, Yogi Berra, “You can observe a lot just by watching.”  I’ve watched and […]

A new column called “Original Conversion Value” has started appearing inside Google Ads, giving advertisers a long-requested way to see the true, unadjusted value of their conversions. How it works. Google’s new formula strips everything back: Conversion Value – Rule Adjustments (value rules) – Lifecycle Goal Adjustments (e.g., NCA bonuses) = Original Conversion Value Why […]

Picture a chocolate company with an elaborate recipe, generations old. They ask an AI system to identify which ingredients they could remove to cut costs. The AI suggests one. They remove it. Sales hold steady. They ask again. The AI suggests another. This continues through four or five iterations until they’ve created the cheapest possible […]

The AI resume has become a C-suite-level asset that reflects your entire digital strategy.  To use it effectively, we first need to understand where AI is deploying it across the user journey. How AI has rewritten the user journey For years, our strategies were shaped by the inbound methodology. We built content around a user-driven […]

By now, we’re all familiar with Google AI Overviews. Many queries you search on Google now surface responses through this quick and prominent search feature. But AI Overview results aren’t always reliable or accurate.  Google’s algorithms can promote negative or misleading content, making online reputation management (ORM) difficult.  Here’s how to stay on top of […]

Google is preparing a new Search bidding model called Journey Aware Bidding, designed to factor in the entire customer journey — not just the final biddable conversion — to improve prediction accuracy and campaign performance. How it works: Journey Aware Bidding learns from your primary conversion goal plus additional, non-biddable journey stages. Advertisers who fully […]

Google submitted a compliance plan to the European Commission that proposes changes to its ad-tech operations — but rejects calls to break up its business How it works: Google is offering product-level changes — for example, giving publishers the ability to set different minimum prices for different bidders in Google Ad Manager. It’s also proposing […]