SEO Tools and Resources

We spent six months testing custom visual assets across 47 articles on a client’s high-traffic accounting education website to find out which design investments actually improved SEO performance. The experiment included featured images, infographics, and video across both new and existing content. Some visual assets consistently increased organic traffic. Others turned out to be a poor use of time and budget despite requiring far more production effort. The goal wasn’t to prove that any image helps. Basic visuals are already table stakes. Instead, the focus was on the ROI of bespoke design and which visual assets consistently improved organic traffic. The clea…

Google is phasing out offline conversion imports through the Google Ads API for some developers starting June 15th. Advertisers and martech providers that rely on offline conversion imports, including enhanced conversions for leads, will need to migrate workflows to the Data Manager API to avoid disruptions. Details. Google notified developers that offline conversion imports using the UploadClickConversions request will stop working after June 15, for accounts that have not used the functionality in the last 180 days. The change applies to offline conversion imports and enhanced conversions for leads. Other Google Ads API operations will continue functioning n…

Google has published a new guide on how to optimize for Google’s generative AI features, like AI Mode, AI Overviews and more. A lot of this content is put together from previous communication from Google but all in a neat new help document named Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search. What’s in the document. The document covers the following topics: SEO is relevant for generative AI search, follow Google’s best practices for SEO. Create valuable, non-commodity content for your audience Provide a unique point of view Create non-commodity content that’s helpful, reliable and people-first Organize content in a way that helps yo…

Watch this video on YouTube In a recent PPC Live podcast conversation, Dean Kadi, Head of Paid Growth at One Link Media, shared a real-world agency experience where a client insisted on replacing high-performing Meta ads with heavily branded creative — despite clear evidence that the existing strategy was delivering strong results. The discussion highlights the tension agencies often face between expertise and client preference, while offering valuable lessons on communication, testing, tracking, and why data should always lead decision-making in PPC. The campaign was performing exceptionally well Dean Kadi and his team at One Link Media built a highly success…

For most of modern marketing history, the operating assumption was surprisingly theatrical. Brands performed. Consumers watched. Channels existed primarily to distribute persuasion more efficiently than the next company. Even performance marketing, for all its mathematical confidence, still revolved around a fundamentally human premise: somewhere on the other side of the screen sat a person making a series of reasonably linear decisions. That model is beginning to fracture. Not because consumers disappeared. Because software started participating in the decision-making process and now marketers need to take notice. Recommendation systems already shape disc…

Anyone who’s been following me on LinkedIn or X has seen my smartass responses to people making some of the dumbest claims imaginable. “100% automate your SEO.” “Fully automate your content calendar.” “Run your business with AI while you sleep.” At this point, I’m just waiting for AI to start doing my dishes. (Please be true.) But jokes aside, there’s something deeper going on here that’s worth talking about. View embedded content LLM: Looting, lying, manipulating I was talking with a good buddy, Rob Wormley, a great GTM consultant, about the state of AI. Like most conversations right now, it started with a discussion of the cool things w…

What differentiates a great SEO professional from a good one is often their ability to manage stakeholders effectively. This is especially true in technical SEO, where projects often depend on multiple teams, and it can be difficult to communicate the need for implementation. Stakeholder management typically comes down to one thing: the perceived value of the work. With technical SEO, that can be hard to establish. Non-SEOs are unlikely to inherently understand the value of improving a website’s internal linking architecture or implementing schema markup. The most effective technical SEO initiatives aren’t framed only as SEO improvements. They’re directly tied to …

Running SEO and GEO/AEO audits is an excellent use case for AI, especially with recent models that have agentic capabilities. These models have extensive knowledge bases and can perform multistep processes, such as extracting webpages, reviewing data, and formulating recommendations. But before running your SEO or GEO/AEO audit in Claude or ChatGPT, have you considered whether the model has everything it needs to provide a good response? You might be shocked to discover that state-of-the-art models provide detailed recommendations without the most basic information, including Google SERPs, keyword volumes, or even the ability to fetch URL content. For example: …

Watch this video on YouTube Frederick Vallaeys’ route into PPC started with a student side hustle, not a career plan. While at Stanford in 1998, he spotted a resale opportunity in used Blockbuster video cassettes and needed a way to find buyers. That led him to GoTo, an early search engine where advertisers could bid on keywords – and gave him his first glimpse of the power of paid search. More than 20 years later, Vallaeys has become one of the best-known voices in PPC, a former Googler, one of the early builders in the Google Ads ecosystem, and founder of Optmyzr. In this interview, he looks back at the early days of Google Ads, how automation changed e…

AI search measurement in 2026 looks a lot like paid media in 2008. Everyone can see the impressions. Almost nobody can defend the revenue. Agencies are slapping AI visibility dashboards onto retainers, clients are writing checks, and CFOs are starting to ask the question that always ends a hype cycle: Prove it. Here’s the hard truth. Citation share, presence rate, and AI Overview appearance counts are the new domain authority. They look defensible in a slide. For 95% of the agencies selling them, they aren’t connected to pipelines in any rigorous way. What I lay out below is a five-layer framework for measuring GEO performance that you can actually defend. No…

Advertisers are paying more for clicks in Google Ads — but they’re also getting better at turning those clicks into conversions, according to new benchmark data from WordStream by LocaliQ. The 2025 benchmark report, based on more than 16,000 campaigns, found the average Google Ads cost-per-click (CPC) rose to $5.42, up from $4.66 the previous year. CPCs increased in 87% of industries analyzed. At the same time, average conversion rates climbed to 8.18%, suggesting advertisers are getting more efficient even as traffic becomes more expensive. Why advertisers should care. The latest benchmarks reinforce a growing reality in paid search: cheap traffic is dis…

You prompt ChatGPT with something, and suddenly your brand name shows up in the response. Sounds like a win, right? But before you share the screenshot with your team, there’s one important question to ask: Is your brand being cited or mentioned? As AI search and LLM-driven discovery continue to grow, understanding the difference between AI brand mentions and AI citations is becoming increasingly important for SEO and brand visibility. In this article, we’ll break down what AI brand mentions are, how they work, and how they differ from citations. Since we know you’re excited to celebrate your AI visibility win, let’s get straight into it. Table of contents W…

Large language models (LLMs) excel at synthesizing enormous amounts of information into personalized responses to plain-language prompts. These responses draw on massive training datasets and are often enhanced with internet searches. The fastest way to influence what LLMs say about your brand is to influence the content they retrieve through those searches. At Evertune Research, we use the Evertune AI marketing platform to track hundreds of brands across 250 categories across every major LLM. This gives us clear insight into which content AI models cite most often, especially when users ask for brand or product recommendations across industries. For this analysis…

By now, you’ve heard the doom and gloom. In April, Verizon CEO Dan Schulman warned that AI could push U.S. unemployment to 20%-30% over the next two to five years. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. Ford CEO Jim Farley has said AI could replace “literally half” of white-collar workers in the U.S. SEO is a white-collar job. So does that mean our jobs will be eliminated, too? The answer isn’t as obvious as you might think. Yes, the world is changing. But if you’ve been doing SEO for a while, you should be used to that by now. SEOs have always been forced to wear str…

For a long time, SEO reporting revolved around dashboards. When a meeting was on your schedule, you’d spend your day preparing by exporting data from Google Search Console, cleaning it in spreadsheets, and layering charts into Data Studio. Now, AI coding agents are changing that workflow. Instead of the manual work that would previously take hours, you can use tools like Claude Code to surface customized data with polished visuals in just minutes. Here’s how to turn Google Search Console data into custom reports and speed up your reporting workflow. What Claude Code can do with GSC data Claude Code isn’t the same as using Claude in a browser tab. The sta…

Ask any paid media manager how their Monday morning starts, and you’ll hear some version of the same story. Google Ads. Meta. LinkedIn. TikTok. Reddit. Pull the numbers, drop them into a spreadsheet, make them tell a coherent story, and send the report to your client or boss by 10 a.m. Somewhere in there, figure out what worked last week and why. It’s a terrible use of a Monday morning. I’ve been in performance marketing long enough to remember when “multi-channel” meant running Google Ads and maybe a Facebook campaign on the side. That was already hard enough to reconcile. Now you’re dealing with 10 or 11 networks, each with its own attribution logic, campaig…

Google is adding new creator, video and measurement capabilities to Demand Gen campaigns as it pushes YouTube further into performance advertising as announced today at Google Marketing Live 2026. Driving the news. The company announced several new Demand Gen updates focused on creator partnerships, product discovery and cross-platform campaign optimization. Advertisers will soon be able to: Use multimodal video creation inside Asset Studio Promote creator partnership videos directly within campaign setup Upload Merchant Center product videos for dynamic distribution Extend Demand Gen campaigns into Google Maps inventory Google is also expand…

Google is rolling out major updates to Asset Studio aimed at helping advertisers generate creative assets faster using Gemini as announced today at Google Marketing Live 2026. Driving the news. Asset Studio will now support AI-powered generation across text, images and video using natural language prompts. According to Google, the platform can understand: Marketing briefs Brand guidelines Website content Campaign goals The system then generates creative assets across multiple themes and formats. Google is also integrating Gemini Omni, its multimodal model, into Asset Studio to support video creation workflows. Advertisers will additio…

Google is expanding its Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) initiative with new checkout features, AI shopping integrations and support for additional industries as announced today at Google Marketing Live 2026. Driving the news. The company announced several new UCP-powered commerce capabilities designed to support what it calls the “agentic commerce era.” A key update is the expansion of Universal Cart, which allows shoppers to save products across retailers and complete purchases using Google Pay or retailer checkout experiences. Google says the experience will soon support brands including Nike, Sephora, Target, Walmart, Wayfair and Shopify merchants such as…

Google is introducing a new generation of Gemini-powered ad formats across AI Mode and Search designed to make ads feel more conversational, contextual and helpful as unveiled today at Google Marketing Live 2026. Driving the news. The company announced several new ad experiences for AI-powered Search, including Conversational Discovery ads, Highlighted Answers, AI-powered Shopping ads and Business Agent for Leads. The updates are part of Google’s broader push to integrate Gemini deeper into Search and advertising experiences. Conversational Discovery ads are designed to answer a person’s specific question directly inside AI Mode. For example, someone searching for…

Google Marketing Live 2026 made one thing clear: Gemini is no longer just powering features — it’s becoming the operating system behind Google’s advertising, commerce and measurement ecosystem. This year’s event focused heavily on agentic AI, conversational Search, automated creative production and AI-assisted shopping experiences. Across Search, YouTube, Merchant Center and Analytics, Google introduced new tools designed to make campaigns more autonomous, predictive and interconnected. Here’s a recap of the biggest announcements from Google Marketing Live 2026. Google introduces a new generation of AI-powered Search ads Google announced several new Gemini-…

Google’s new Lighthouse “Agentic Browsing” audits now check for the presence of an llms.txt file. The new experimental Lighthouse documentation frames llms.txt as a discoverability and efficiency signal for AI agents, not a traditional crawling directive. The audits are part of Chrome’s emerging “Agentic Browsing” category, which evaluates whether sites are structured for machine interaction. This document comes less than a week after Google published new guidance on optimizing for AI search features like AI Overviews and AI Mode, in which it said you don’t need llms.txt files in a mythbusting section of its new guide on optimizing for generative AI features. …

On May 20th, 2026, the next major release of WordPress came out: WordPress 7.0. While previous releases focused on improving the block editor, this release takes it to a new level. It pushes the platform into the next phase of its roadmap with smarter workflows and a more app-like experience. So, let’s dive into what’s new and what features are interesting for you. Table of contents A modern admin experience Revisions are now more visual New blocks in the block editor Better responsive design controls Smarter pattern editing Connect to AI tools of your choice A new list filter for plugins Final thoughts A modern admin experience WordPress 7.0 introduces a…

Conversion signals are disappearing from your marketing data, and it’s probably costing your business money. Ad blockers, aggressive privacy laws, cookie deprecation, and a host of other converging factors have combined to mask significant conversion data, costing businesses up to $203 million in revenue annually, according to one Deloitte study. For most brands, the path from discovery to purchase is no longer clear. This signal decay is more than an annoying data quirk. Left unchecked, it can make it harder for new customers to discover your brand. Most marketers don’t realize they’re making decisions based on incomplete data. Instead, they see top-of…

AI adoption appears to be diverging between professional and consumer audiences, according to Rand Fishkin’s new analysis of Datos desktop-panel data and SparkToro audience comparisons. The data highlights a sharp divide in how people talk about AI use: broader consumer adoption may be slowing, while professional and B2B audiences appear far more likely to use tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Why we care. There’s no one-size-fits-all AI strategy. Your audience may behave very differently from broader AI trends, so you need to understand whether your audience is actually using these tools — and which ones. ChatGPT desktop growth slowed. Fishkin, SparkTor…