SEO Tools and Resources

If I hear “always be testing” one more time, I might scream. It was great advice in 2016. In 2026, it’s a great way to light your budget on fire. That mantra made sense when budgets were loose and platforms forgave a lot of chaos. Launch five audience tests simultaneously? Sure, why not! Swap out three creative variables at once? Go for it! But the rules have changed. Our new reality has tighter budgets, longer learning phases, and signal fragmentation everywhere. One poorly structured test can distort your performance for weeks, not days. That performance hit compounds fast. Modern experimentation is expensive and risky. Why pay that price when we have the p…

Google announced yesterday that it is exploring ways for sites to opt out of Google using their content for its AI-generative search features, such as AI Mode and AI Overviews. I asked the SEO community on X if they would opt out of these Google Search AI-generative features or not. The results. Of the over 350 responses that took the poll yesterday, most said they would not opt out. However, about 1/3 of respondents said they would block or opt out of these features. Here is the breakdown: Question: Would you block Google from using your content for AI Overviews and AI Mode? 33.2% – Yes, I’d block Google 41.9% – No, I wouldn’t block 24.9% – I am not s…

Table of Contents What is an SEO reporting tool? Summary: best SEO reporting tools at a glance 10 SEO Reporting tools to choose From Google Search Console (free) Yoast SEO Dashboard (free) Google Analytics (free) AgencyAnalytics (paid) Semrush (free & paid) Ahrefs (Paid) Moz Pro (free trial & paid) Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free & paid) Mangools (paid) BrightLocal (paid) Choose wisely: what to consider Turn insights into action TL;DR If you’re investing time and budget into SEO, you’ll want to know if it’s actually delivering results. That’s where SEO reporting tools come in. They take the guesswork out of your strategy by showing you what’s worki…

Between a teetering economy and AI tools rapidly replacing entry-level roles, marketing careers – and many others – can feel increasingly unstable. There is a silver lining for those willing and positioned to look for it. In marketing, it’s this: professionals who can adapt, think critically, and integrate AI thoughtfully into their work can accelerate workflows, sharpen strategy and targeting, and spend more time on initiatives that drive meaningful impact. It’s still early in the AI era, but more than a decade as a marketing leader has made certain patterns clear. Across my own team and the in-house teams we work with, some PPC marketers are better pos…

Most people fail on Reddit because they write comments like ads. Reddit eats ads for breakfast. It’s better to follow a Reddit comment framework that has been proven thousands of times to get engagement and increase visibility and awareness. The winning move? Be useful first, be human, then casually exist as a company. Below are 10 proven comment frameworks we see working every single day for our clients. These aren’t scripts: they’re thinking patterns. Follow the structure, swap in your context, and your comments will feel native instead of needy. 1. The ‘been there done that’ comment When to use it: Someone is struggling or asking how to do something y…

Before you apply for a new role, it’s important to prepare for marketing salary negotiations and learn how to pursue fair pay with practical, realistic guidance. Whether you work in SEO, PPC, or somewhere in between, salaries remain a contentious topic. They are often hard to discuss, difficult to quantify, and challenging to change. While many resources cover salary negotiations in general, this article focuses specifically on negotiating pay for marketing roles. Difficulties with marketing salaries Several factors make marketing roles harder to benchmark than many other professions, complicating salary expectations and negotiations. No industry s…

Valentine’s Day is an interesting shopping event for ecommerce stores. Customers are looking for gifts that help express their love for one another, with flowers, jewelry, and other interesting options. It’s a great opportunity to attract and convert online shoppers. Here are some SEO tips to help make the most of your Valentine’s Day sale! Table of contents Start preparing early Optimize your product pages Create gift guides and seasonal content Focus on local SEO for delivery or pick-up Use social media and influencers Use user-generated content Run exclusive Valentine’s Day promotions Add festive details to your website Offer last-minute shopping options Track an…

Is your page not attracting the number of people you thought it would? Or are you wondering what you can improve to get your page higher up in the search results? And to get people to stay on (and come back to) your site? There are a few things you can do to give your page a better chance at performing well. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how you can determine which pages could use some extra love and what you can do to turn them into high-quality pages! It is important to realize that content quality can have a big impact on your business and online findability. Especially since Google announced its helpful content update, your rankings might suffer if you have t…

Generative AI is changing how people search. The most effective SEO strategies aren’t just AI-enhanced – they’re AI-native. Many SEO teams are moving away from manual tasks and siloed tools toward intelligent, automated systems that learn from data and scale performance across every stage of the search journey. From content creation to site architecture and real-time monitoring, AI is now deeply embedded in many winning SEO strategies. Here are 10 cutting-edge ways to leverage AI for enterprise-level SEO success in 2025 – and stay ahead in a game that’s changing faster than ever. 1. Automating SEO tasks with AI agents AI in SEO is no longer just a…

Black Friday isn’t just a sales event; it’s a battle for attention. Whenever product, price, and promotion fight for a click, visibility becomes a battle for dominance, not just survival. Are you a WooCommerce store owner pouring your energy and budget into paid ads, but not getting the required results? But what about organic traffic? That’s free traffic, compounding over time. Does it often get ignored, just when it matters most? This Black Friday, Yoast WooCommerce SEO offers a more innovative way to boost visibility in search engines. It’s built to help ecommerce teams and SEO beginners optimize product listings at scale, improve product rankings, and get their p…

Are you new to the world of PPC? If so, welcome! We’re thrilled to have you on board. A career in paid search offers exciting opportunities for growth, creativity, and making a real impact on businesses. Let me tell you, starting out in 2025 is a whole different ballgame than when I first started in PPC. In those days, we managed accounts overflowing with millions of keywords, manually adjusted bids, and navigated the platforms while learning how the web was shifting marketing and consumer behavior – all while serving our clients. This was a time before AI and automation, when text ads were static, and both searchers and marketers approached the inter…

What could be the matter if your perfectly optimized post isn’t ranking? Is the problem that your site is not on Google, or is something else going wrong? What is keeping your content from reaching that coveted #1 position? In this post, we’ll discuss many possible reasons why your page is not ranking, even though it’s optimized. We’ve divided the possible issues you might be having into four sections: Indexing and crawl issues: How to check if your site is on Google, plus reasons why your site/page might not be on Google Technical issues with your website: Is Google disregarding it because it’s incorrectly set up? Linking issues: Is your internal linking …

The SEO industry has evolved dramatically over the past decade, but the pace of change is about to accelerate even faster as we approach 2026. With the rise of AI-generated search, multimodal experiences, privacy-first regulations, and the blending of SEO with user experience and brand, the skillset required of an SEO professional is transforming radically. Today’s best practices won’t be enough tomorrow. This article explores the core SEO skills you must master by 2026 to stay competitive, drive results, and prepare your career for the future. 1. Strategic thinking: Moving beyond tactics SEO is no longer a series of isolated tactics like link building …

After 12+ years in SEO, selling to hundreds of clients – from small businesses to global brands – I’ve learned what works when it comes to landing and retaining SEO clients. While every client is unique, there are clear strategies that consistently lead to success. This article tackles my best advice for winning new SEO clients, along with insights from top industry professionals. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to scale, these proven tactics will help you build a strong client pipeline. 1. Start small When building your SEO business, you can go after big clients (“whales”) or smaller ones (“rabbits”). While whales bring higher revenue,…

We’re celebrating 15 years of Yoast, and we can’t celebrate without offering some SEO insights. So, here are 15 SEO essentials to focus on in this year and beyond. Whether you are a beginner or an SEO expert, these tips will help you focus on what’s important right now. In collaboration with our Principal SEO, Alex Moss Table of contents 1. Embrace AI-powered SEO tools 2. Optimize for zero-click searches 3. Invest in video content 4. Improve e-commerce SEO 5. Prioritize local SEO 6. Improve user experience (UX) 7. Participate in SEO communities 8. Optimize for AI discovery 9. Focus on content pruning 10. Implement structured data markup 11. Keep focusing on mobi…

It’s frustrating. You put time, energy, and a lot of hope into a webpage. But it just won’t rank. Your competitors’ pages are ranking well, even though (subjectively) they’re worse. Yours deserves to be top of Google. So, why isn’t it? Figuring out the levers to pull to get your content to the top of Google isn’t quick, but it can be done. Identifying the problem The key to identifying why your page isn’t ranking is to systematically rule out the other possibilities. For this, you’ll need data, industry context, and a methodical approach. Firstly, you need to verify if the page is not ranking at all versus not ranking well. This is key. If a pa…

For 20 years, the web has run on a simple trade: publish content that meets a person’s needs, rank in search, earn traffic, then monetize that traffic through products, services, affiliate referrals, or ads. Zero-click answers and AI search are rewriting that relationship. The new question is whether AI will cite you as a source — and whether that visibility can turn into revenue. To understand who gets included and who gets routed around, I ran over 200 AI visibility audits across 10 industries. The pattern was consistent: Most sites are easy to parse, but hard to justify citing. And the industries that rely on discovery traffic the most are often the ones ma…

If your loyalty strategy still revolves around points and perks, it’s time for an update. Consumer allegiance is no longer built on convenience alone—it’s driven by alignment. Shoppers are scrutinizing your brand’s ethics, your data practices, and your follow-through. And younger audiences aren’t shy about walking away if you miss the mark. AtData’s white paper, Beyond the Purchase: The Future of Consumer Behavior in 2025, outlines the real drivers of brand trust and retention in a post-personalization landscape. Based on emerging data and behavioral trends, it shows how to evolve from transaction-first to values-led—and still deliver measurable growth. Inside you’ll …

The PPC landscape in 2025 shifted faster than ever, with updates arriving at a pace unmatched in the industry’s 20-year history. At SMX Next, a panel of industry experts broke down what’s working, what’s failing, and what advertisers should prepare for in 2026 and beyond. The state of PPC The panelists agreed that 2025 marked a major shift, especially in how quickly Google responded to advertiser feedback. Ameet Khabra, founder of Hop Skip Media, called the year “interesting” and said he was genuinely surprised by Google’s willingness to listen to advertisers, especially on channel reporting for Performance Max. “It was really cool to see the people wh…

You don’t need a site redesign to improve performance. Sometimes, small changes—like a different headline, image, or layout tweak—can have a measurable impact. This free guide offers 26 practical A/B testing ideas that digital marketers can use to boost clicks, signups, sales, and more. You’ll find test examples for: CTA buttons and placement Product detail pages and image choices Homepage layouts and messaging Checkout friction and cart recovery Each idea comes with a brief explanation of why it might work—so you’re not testing blind. Whether you’re in search marketing, ecommerce, or CRO, this is a great resource to help you spot opportunities a…

SEO is at an inflection point due to the rise of LLMs as search platforms. This has led to a lot of contradictory information about how we should approach LLMs and whether we should even continue to call their optimization “SEO.” As a consequence, I’ve been dedicating much of my day-to-day as an SEO consultant to clarifying countless questions about AI search, many of them coming directly from decision-makers. I’ve helped them establish AI search optimization roadmaps that make sense, are realistic, and are cost-effective based on each company’s context and current SEO process. My goal: to avoid fundamental AI search optimization mistakes triggered by misinformati…

Last month, I asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini the same question about three of my clients: “Who is [Brand Name] and what do they do?” Two out of three got it wrong. Wrong services. Outdated office locations. One even suggested a competitor as a better alternative. Here’s what makes that more than a curious mistake. What today’s AI errors reveal about brand visibility AI-sourced traffic jumped 527% year-over-year from early 2024 to early 2025. While that growth is real, it’s growing from a very small base. Most sites still see AI referrals representing less than 1% of total traffic. But when half the AI-generated descriptions of your brand ar…

A BrightEdge study found that 68% of brands across industries are changing their search strategies to catch the GEO wave. That’s a big number, but hardly surprising – you’d have to have lived under a rock for about three years (since ChatGPT launched in late 2022) to miss the current. Still, many B2B marketing leaders I speak with haven’t fully grasped the shape of the opportunity – what GEO can do for their brands and where it falls short. There’s no question that AI search/GEO/LLMO – whatever you call it (there’s no consensus yet) – is critical to a holistic organic strategy. But leaning on them too heavily exposes gaps competitors can exploit. Thi…

Regulated industries have long faced heightened scrutiny in organic search. This is where “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) first took hold. AI Overviews and LLMs like ChatGPT have intensified that scrutiny, expanding both the audience and the consequences. Accuracy and credibility have always mattered for SEO success in regulated sectors, but in today’s AI-driven search environment, the bar is significantly higher. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) are not optional for regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, government, and education, which sit squarely within Google’s YMYL territory. In this new search lan…