SEO Tools and Resources

Ever notice how website visitors rarely follow the exact path you’ve planned for them? You might build great landing pages for different customer types, but visitors have their own plans. They Google something random and land on your blog post. They click a link from social media that drops them into your resources section. Or they skip your homepage completely and jump straight to a product page. This creates a problem. How do you make sure your website works for all your target customers when they aren’t following your planned customer journeys? The answer is simple: Build your entire website, not just specific landing pages, with y…

If your brand’s content arm has been active for a few years, I’m guessing you have plenty of material that can be revised to help you show up more prominently in AI search answers — we’ll call this AEO throughout the article. I’m getting bombarded with brand marketers’ questions about how to get AEO traction these days. “Revise your old content” is a favorite answer that often produces an “aha” moment for the other party, possibly because the nature of AEO is so forward-looking. That answer sparks a few important follow-up questions I’ll tackle below. How do you reformat content for better AEO performance? I like to lean on three principles when I tackle co…

You can now do in 20 minutes what used to take a full afternoon. Feed two Semrush exports into Claude or ChatGPT, and you’ll get a polished competitor analysis – complete with topic clusters, gap tables, and prioritized briefs. The output looks convincing. The tables are clean. The recommendations sound confident. That’s the problem. AI can organize and summarize data quickly, but it can’t make strategic decisions. Without the right workflow, prompts, and validation, you risk acting on insights that sound right but lack depth. Used correctly, though, AI can surface meaningful patterns – revealing differences in topical depth, content coverage, and authority si…

PPC advertising for medical and mental health services comes with many restrictions, but it remains an effective way for practices to maintain a steady flow of new patients and clients. Whether you manage ads for clients, run them for your own practice, or are just getting started, these tips will help you launch or improve your campaigns. Choosing keywords for medical and mental health advertising Consider the three main ways potential patients tend to search on Google. Symptoms and treatments Many people search for symptoms or treatment options without naming the professional they need, such as “treatment options for depression” or “why does my ankle h…

If you’re a lawyer, college administrator, or financial services provider, you’ve likely seen the frustrating “Eligible (Limited)” status in your Google Ads account. It can feel like you’re fighting Google with one hand tied behind your back when your remarketing lists, exact match keywords, and more don’t work as intended. While it might feel like Google Ads is out to get you when you operate in a so-called “sensitive interest category,” there are specific reasons for these rules. More importantly, there are specific ways to succeed despite them. This article will cover what the personalized advertising policies are, what they mean for your account, and five spec…

As LLMs continue to grow, optimizing brand visibility in AI-generated responses is becoming increasingly important. Consumers are turning to these models for answers, recommendations, recipes, vacations, and nearly everything else imaginable. But what happens if your brand isn’t included in those responses? Can you influence the outcome? And what are some proven ways to improve your brand’s inclusion and visibility? That’s where structured experimentation comes in. Prompt-level SEO requires more than assumptions or one-off wins. It requires repeatable testing frameworks that help isolate what actually influences LLM responses. Build prompt-level SEO tests with…

We’re getting a lot of questions about prompt tracking. Many of our current and prospective clients are tracking their visibility using tools such as Profound, Athena, and Peec. The million-dollar question that always comes up is “Which prompts should I be tracking?’. In an incredibly personalized and complex ecosystem, it’s extremely difficult to know what our buyers are even asking LLMs about our company. There are no data sources I feel great about right now. This isn’t like traditional search, where Keyword Planner data was publicly provided. It’s unlikely that OpenAI or Google will ever fully open up this data for us to analyze. There have been some recent p…

Most businesses sound interchangeable online, and AI search is making that impossible to ignore. When ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, or other AI systems summarize your business, they build that understanding from your website, profiles, reviews, and content. If all of it sounds like everyone else in your category, the machine’s summary will too. This is why AI visibility is becoming a positioning problem as much as a technical one. Businesses that stand out in AI search are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most aggressive tactics. They’re the businesses that clearly communicate who they serve, what they do differently, and why customers sho…

About a year ago, I came out of a meeting with engineers about improving automations for content briefs. A few days later, someone on the analytics team — unrelated to those conversations — pinged me that they’d built a content brief generator using various data pipelines and APIs. That’s when I realized “getting people to use AI” isn’t the hard part. Implementation and integration are. Most SEO teams don’t struggle with access to tools; they struggle to prioritize efforts with outsized impact and align across the organization. One team is experimenting with prompts, another is auto-generating briefs, and a third is building dashboards no one asked for, ofte…

Measurement is the foundation for everything we do in performance marketing. Without accurate measurement, what we recommend, implement, and optimize is, at best, guesswork. Maintaining accurate measurement is more challenging than ever — and getting harder. Regulatory crackdowns and increased privacy concerns, alongside longer multi-touch journeys, are compounding to create a measurement crisis. Brands still using decade-old tactics won’t be able to overcome modern measurement challenges. If your brand falls into this category, it’s time to rebuild your measurement foundation — from integrating first-party data (crawl), to creating cross-channel reporting for ac…

With AI Max for Search now widely available in beta, advertisers are debating everything from performance comparisons to how it plays with existing keyword structures. Google Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin is stepping in to clarify what AI Max is — and what it isn’t. What AI Max is designed to do. AI Max aims to unlock incremental conversions or conversion value — not replace or compete with your current keyword setup. It expands reach using broad match logic and keywordless matching (think DSA-style crawling of your landing pages). It pairs that with dynamic creative optimization, including text customization and Final URL expansion, to match intent more precisely…

To keep your Meta Ads performing at their best, it’s essential to regularly test new ad formats. This article explores the role of UGC and EGC ads – and how to effectively test them in your Meta campaigns. Understanding UGC and EGC ads User-generated content (UGC) refers to videos typically created by actual users of your product or service, often testimonials or a series of testimonials edited together. In some cases, UGC may even come from the company founder, recorded casually on a phone or using other non-professional methods. These videos are often recorded on a phone – or styled to look that way, even if professionally produced – to create an int…

AI has changed how people search – and what it means to be “visible” in results. Links and rankings still matter, but they’re no longer the full picture. Now, it’s about mentions, citations, and whether your brand even shows up in the conversation. Most SEO tools haven’t caught up. This makes tracking that kind of visibility hard – but not impossible. Here’s how to rethink visibility in the age of AI. Why tracking AI visibility is so tricky Remember when SEO was (relatively) simple? People typed in short phrases like: “Best project management tool or SEO tips 2020.” You knew how they searched, what they were probably looking for, …

Just like most other website owners, you want your website to attract customers. But how can you see who visits your website? And how can you use this knowledge to increase website traffic over time? Luckily, there are loads of tools that can help you. Let’s get you started with the right one for your website without the need to become a data expert! What is website traffic? The term website traffic refers to the number of internet users visiting your website. Traffic can arrive from wide-ranging sources, such as directly typing in your website address, through other websites that link to your site, organic traffic (meaning they come to your site from the search re…

Lately, I’ve been spending most of my day inside Cursor running Claude Code. I’m not a developer. I run a digital marketing agency. But Claude Code within Cursor has become the fastest way for me to handle many tasks I want to do, including pulling and analyzing data from Google Search Console, GA4, and Google Ads. The setup takes about an hour. After that, you can ask things like “which keywords am I paying for that I already rank for organically?” and get an answer in seconds instead of spending an afternoon with spreadsheets. (I wouldn’t have been the one spending an afternoon with spreadsheets anyway, but now nobody has to.) Here’s the step-by-step process I d…

There’s a growing problem in SEO and content marketing that doesn’t get talked about enough: everything is starting to sound the same. The same phrasing and structure, the same bland tone, the same safe language, the same robotic rhythm. The web is filling up with perfectly optimized content that no one actually enjoys reading. And that’s the real risk. Not that AI will replace SEOs, Google will penalize AI content, or automation will destroy search. The real danger is that brands lose their voice, their personality, and their identity in the name of efficiency. AI should make your SEO better, not blander. Faster, not flatter. Scalable, not soulless. Her…

Many of us use various generative AI tools to generate marketing ideas and improve ad campaign outcomes. Prompting can be a powerful alternative to working solo or brainstorming with colleagues. It improves productivity and expands your options. In this article, I’ll cover some of my favorite marketing prompts for ad campaigns. Use these suggestions to spark ideas for your own prompts. Why use prompts for online ads? Prompts quickly give you a range of ad elements — triggers, emotions, actions, and audiences. You can often repurpose prompt outputs across channels and initiatives — ads, email, landing pages, social media, and offers. When you get clo…

The last year has had many of us trying to understand how to report on AI visibility and understand what it takes to be seen and cited by AI. But Rand Fishkin’s latest study on AI response variability has emphasized that LLM outputs aren’t as stable and predictable as search rankings, making this KPI an inconsistent piece of the puzzle. The study found there’s less than a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google AI will return the same list of brands across two responses. They analyzed thousands of prompts across multiple LLMs to highlight just how varied they are. This has left some of the SEO community questioning the value of rank tracking at scale. But, rank…

Pages on your website can be well written, well laid out, supported by backlinks, and even meet E-E-A-T expectations – yet still fail to rank. While there are many possible explanations, one common issue is a misalignment with search intent, and it’s often harder to spot than it sounds. When the focus is on content, optimization, and usability, intent can easily be missed or misjudged. This is where AI can become a useful review tool, helping guide things back in the right direction. Get back to basics Whether you’re starting work on a new page or updating something older, beginning with the basics of search intent can help set you up for success. …

Broad match used to mean “more reach, less relevance.” Now it means more reach, with a machine learning layer deciding what relevance looks like. Google has been steadily steering advertisers toward fewer moving parts – fewer match types, fewer manual levers, and more automation. Making broad match the default for new Search campaigns in July 2024 was the clearest signal yet that this is the direction of travel. If you still think of broad match as “the loosest match type,” you will manage it like it is 2016. That is where the pain comes from: CPC inflation, irrelevant search terms, and leads that look fine in Google Ads but do not survive contact wi…

Watch this video on YouTube Generating high-quality leads from Google Ads often comes down to one unexpected factor: speed. If potential customers have to jump through hoops to reach you, you’ll lose business fast. That’s why Google Ads offers a trio of what I call “Contact Us assets.” Instead of sending users to a landing page, Call Assets, Lead Forms, and Message Assets let customers call you, fill out a form, or start a conversation directly from your search ads. Let’s dive into how to set up and optimize these three essential assets to simplify your funnel, capture valuable personally identifiable information (PII), and turn an expensive click into a…

ChatGPT Tasks might be the most underrated tool in SEO today. It can turn a single employee into a vast team – but only if you know how to use it. And in this article, you’re about to see the future of SEO. What is ChatGPT Tasks? ChatGPT Tasks is a tool within ChatGPT designed to automate various tasks, including those related to SEO, such as content generation, keyword research, and link building. This feature allows users to schedule tasks to run at specific times, either as one-time events or recurring actions, enhancing workflow efficiency and productivity. As of writing, it’s in beta and rolling out to users on the Plus, Pro, and Team plans. …

In the world of digital advertising, data is king. Yet, many PPC advertisers underutilize one of their most valuable sources of insights: their CRM data. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, your CRM is a gold mine of customer information that can significantly enhance your paid media strategy. To boost efficiency and scale, focus on the most impactful CRM data, such as: Job titles, industry, company size, and revenue for B2B. Age, gender, location, product preferences, and customer lifetime value (CLV) for B2C. This article tackles how to use CRM data to refine your targeting, craft compelling ad messaging, and create more relevant website con…

Google has introduced new capabilities within its new customer acquisition goals, including high-value customer bidding and retention targeting. Most Google Ads strategies still treat new customers as inherently more valuable. That assumption breaks down quickly. Not every new customer is worth acquiring, and not every existing customer is worth ignoring. Just because someone buys once doesn’t make them a customer for life. Likewise, some past buyers are far more likely to convert again than a net-new user. This is where Google’s high-value customer and retention bidding goals start to matter. How high-value customer bidding works in Google Ads Google u…

Like it or not, everyone is fishing in the same pond. As content marketers and SEO practitioners, we all have the same subscriptions to Semrush and other SEO tools, giving us access to the same data as our competitors. If we all have the same tools, aren’t we just writing the same content? There’s a better way. You may be sitting on a wealth of data about your target audience and your existing customers, and you don’t even know it. These insights are invisible to your competitors, yet they’re unread, unanalyzed, and underutilized by the marketing team. The problem: Third-party tools can create an over-commoditized content echo chamber While SEO toolse…