SEO Tools and Resources

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Microsoft has rolled out the Citations dashboard within Microsoft Clarity, the analytics tool. Microsoft announced, “With this release, Citations in Microsoft Clarity moves into general availability with those refinements incorporated into the product.” This should give you access to see how well your pages are performing within AI-experiences. Citations dashboard. The Citation dashboard shows how your content is referenced in AI-generated answers across supported AI experiences by summarizing and aggregating citation activity across the following areas: Page citations: The total number of times pages from your domain were referenced in AI-generated answers d…

If you’ve searched for almost any product on Google recently, you’ve seen how much the results page has changed. Product packs and scrollable carousels of individual listings now appear multiple times on a single results page. We’re constantly evaluating data to understand how to scale ecommerce visibility. We’ve tracked searches that returned 60 individual organic product listings on a single page. These are premium placements — and for a growing share of commercial searches, they’re where the purchase journey begins. This shift is happening gradually enough that many brands haven’t fully recalibrated their strategy around it. The data suggests i…

New technologies come and go. Early in my career, I often chased shiny new things in an attempt to be on the cutting edge, but it didn’t take more than a few years to realize I was spending countless hours of my time, and my clients’ time, implementing technologies and techniques that went by the wayside. Google Authorship, anyone? It turns out that if you simply wait for wider — but still early — adoption, learn from the first movers’ mistakes, and catch up quickly, you can avoid wasting time and create greater value for yourself and those you serve. That lesson has served me well. And then there are those key moments where the early movers stand to not just win …

Most law firms follow the same trajectory with SEO. They invest in content, build out service pages, refine their technical foundation, and align their site to targeted keywords. Early on, the results are there. But firms often don’t realize they’ve hit the ceiling on their SEO strategy. They just feel it. Rankings stall, growth slows, and the default response is almost always to do more: Publish more content, target more keywords, make more incremental optimizations. However, for firms already investing in SEO, the problem likely isn’t effort or execution. It’s that their strategy is missing the layer that actually drives sustained visibility. SEO still is…

Forecasting SEO performance means estimating future outcomes from historical data. But search behavior rarely follows stable or linear patterns. Seasonal demand, anomalies, SERP changes, and measurement issues can all distort your data and lead to unreliable forecasts. That makes forecasting more complex than running linear regression, exponential smoothing, or asking an LLM to project trends from historical performance. Here’s how to account for seasonality, detect anomalies, and build more reliable SEO forecasts in Python using models designed for non-linear search data. SEO forecasting pays the bills, but doesn’t add much value Decision-makers rely o…

Google updates its search spam policies to clarify that those policies also apply to Google’s generative AI responses within Google Search. Google is saying that if you use these spam techniques to show your site or brand within AI Overviews, AI Mode or other AI responses, that would be considered spam and Google can take action. What changed. Google updated the introductory line to say: “In the context of Google Search, spam refers to techniques used to deceive users or manipulate our Search systems into featuring content prominently, such as attempting to manipulate Search systems into ranking content highly or attempting to manipulate generative Al responses i…

Most marketing teams have no shortage of tools. In fact, the average B2B organization manages between 12 and 20 martech tools. And yet, maintaining brand consistency at scale is still a challenge; fewer than 10% of brands sustain strong brand cohesiveness across their complete product and channel portfolios. The problem with most martech stacks is that those tools rarely work together in service of a single goal: feels consistent across all platforms and touchpoints. If you’ve spent any time managing a brand across channels, whether it’s through campaigns, sales enablement, partner content, or social media, then you know how quickly brand elements can drift. A slightl…

Microsoft Advertising is bringing LinkedIn profile targeting to connected TV campaigns, giving advertisers a new way to blend professional audience data with streaming inventory. The announcement was made by Product Liaison Navah Hopkins during the SEM Stories event on May 14. Why we care. Microsoft has long differentiated itself through access to LinkedIn audience data. Bringing that targeting capability into connected TV extends those signals into a fast-growing upper funnel format that has historically lacked precise professional targeting. For B2B advertisers especially, the move could help bridge the gap between brand awareness and performance measurement…

Google released version 24.1 of the Google Ads API, introducing deeper reporting segmentation, expanded experiment support, and new security features as advertisers continue adapting to increasingly automated campaign environments. The update also prepares developers for Google’s upcoming data retention policy changes, which take effect next year. Why we care. The release focuses on three areas that have become increasingly important for advertisers: visibility into performance, creative control, and testing automation. The update also gives brands more control over how creatives appear in Demand Gen campaigns, an area where automation has often limited custom…

Google Analytics added a new AI Assistant channel that tracks traffic from chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. The update should help you measure visits from AI assistants without using custom filters or workarounds. What’s new. Google Analytics now automatically labels traffic from supported AI assistants with new traffic source values. When someone clicks on your site from a supported AI chatbot, Google Analytics will automatically assign that visit to one of these new channels. Medium: ai-assistant Channel Group: “AI Assistant” Campaign: (ai-assistant) Why we care. This update should help you track AI traffic directly inside standard GA4 repor…

You just ran a crawl of your website. The report flags hundreds of technical issues, many marked by your tool of choice as high priority. You map out a plan based on best practices, and you’re already dreading the email to your developers. But here’s the catch: Many of those “critical errors” don’t actually matter. You can spend weeks resolving “high-priority” technical issues and still see no meaningful impact on traffic or conversions. Some fixes look critical and do absolutely nothing. A 404 buried six levels deep in the site architecture? Probably not worth the fire drill it causes. Meanwhile, a seemingly minor internal linking issue on high-value categor…

“Hi Frank, I had ChatGPT look at our SEO and it has a bunch of recommendations. Can you take care of this for us?” We’re all getting some version of this email from clients and bosses. Responding is fraught with challenges. How do you avoid sounding defensive or dismissive? How do you avoid looking territorial while still explaining that some of these recommendations are generic, flawed, or completely wrong? It’s one thing to know SEO. It’s another to know how to respond tactfully when AI-generated recommendations are suddenly part of the conversation. Resist the urge to respond, ‘ChatGPT is wrong’ It might feel good to tell them the AI output they sent…

LinkedIn has always been a key driver for B2B discovery, but over the past few years, a new layer of upper-funnel clout has developed: the platform’s influence on AI search citations. LLMs are increasingly influential in how B2B buyers discover products and services, and LinkedIn has become a top source of this information. This means that if your brand effectively optimizes its LinkedIn presence and content flow for AI search ingestion, you’ll likely get a corresponding bump in AEO-based discovery. In our work with B2B clients (mostly of the high-growth SaaS variety), we’ve divided this LinkedIn AEO initiative into three segments: Optimize earned media. F…

When OpenAI switched default models on March 4, the number of websites cited per response dropped by a fifth, and never recovered. But the citation drop is only part of the story. We also reverse-engineered ChatGPT’s internal browsing tools, ran a honeypot experiment, reconstructed its system prompt, and released a new version of our ChatGPT Search Capture plugin. What happened On March 4, ChatGPT switched its default model from GPT-4o/5.2 to GPT-5.3 Instant. The result: the average number of unique domains cited per response dropped from 19 to 15, a decline of more than 20%. Unique URLs per response followed the same trajectory, falling from 24 to 19. We…

Disclosure: I’m the co-founder of Optmyzr. I’ll use one of our open-source skills as the example below, but the frameworks here apply to anything you install or build. If you’ve used Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini for marketing work in the last six months, you’ve probably hit the same wall I have. The chat is great until you need the same thing done the same way every week. Then you’re back to copying a prompt template into a fresh window, hoping you didn’t forget a step, wondering why a tool this powerful still feels this manual. Skills are what bring that wall down. I’ve written before about skills as scalable systems for PPC and why agents are useless without a…

Negative keywords aren’t a checklist anymore. In 2026, they’re a series of strategic decisions — and how you make them shapes how the algorithm interprets your account. If you’re still treating negatives like maintenance, you’re missing the point. Every exclusion is a signal: who you want to reach, what you’re willing to pay for, and how your campaigns should perform. Here are six decisions that define modern negative keyword strategy — and why they matter more than ever. How negative keywords shape campaign performance Negative keywords are how you sculpt a campaign so the right ad shows up for the right person. The user’s query should match the ad. The ad…

Over the past few decades, digital marketing has settled into a stable system. While it spans SEO, content marketing, social media, and digital advertising, many programs have relied on a predictable core that didn’t always use every available channel. This gave digital marketers a sense of predictability and comfort. For years, teams stuck with what worked and refined execution through the same familiar framework. AI search has disrupted that comfort and exposed our inconsistencies. To succeed with AI SEO, we need a much more comprehensive approach. AI SEO rewards strategic marketing Over the past 15 to 20 years, digital marketing settled into a predictable r…

The search index is evolving from ranking pages to supporting AI-generated answers. In a technical blog post “on the evolving technical characteristics of the index,” published today, Microsoft Bing explained why AI search needs a different indexing system than traditional web search. Traditional search vs. grounding systems. Microsoft said traditional search can rely on users to self-correct, while AI systems need stronger evidence because they generate committed answers. Traditional search is built around documents. Users get ranked links, scan the results, and decide what to trust. Grounding systems are built around supportable facts with clear sourcing. Th…

Google is expanding its Analytics Data API to include cross-channel conversion reporting — giving developers programmatic access to paid and organic performance data. What’s happening. The new feature, currently in alpha, allows Google Analytics and Google Ads users to pull conversion data across channels via the API — mirroring what’s available in the Conversion performance report in the Analytics interface. This means developers can now access the same insights without relying on manual reporting. Why we care. As measurement becomes more complex, advertisers need unified views of performance across paid and organic channels. This update enables teams to auto…

Everything looked normal in the SEO data. Google Search Console, traffic, and indexing — no red flags. Then I opened Scrunch, our AI citation monitoring tool, and looked at platform-by-platform presence for searchinfluence.com over the prior 30 days: Google AI Mode: 37.8% Copilot: 22.2% Google Gemini: 16.3% ChatGPT: 9.6% Perplexity: 7.8% Claude: 0.0% Meta AI: 0.0% Two platforms at zero. Every crawler reads the same site, so content quality and topical authority can’t account for that gap. They’re identical for every platform on the list. What varies is access — whether each platform’s crawler is allowed in. Nothing else explains how Google …