SEO Tools and Resources

For years, SEO success was measured by charts pointing up and to the right. We celebrated traffic spikes, shared screenshots, and treated rising sessions as proof of strategy. But those days are gone. The Great Decoupling represents the decline of informational traffic The SEO playbook that was glorified for the last 10 years prioritized generating useless hordes of informational traffic. Marketing teams and agencies alike bamboozled executives by pumping up traffic numbers to obscene levels. People on LinkedIn celebrated programmatic SEO case studies and “SEO heists” that racked up irrelevant clicks – encouraging copycat behavior that ultimately …

The MCP Server for Google Ads is now publicly available on GitHub, Google announced. This marks a major milestone in bringing AI agents closer to real-world marketing workflows. How it works. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that allows large language models to interact with external applications through natural language. The initial version of the MCP Server is read-only, designed for diagnostics and analytics. Developers can integrate it into any MCP-compatible AI system to retrieve insights from Google Ads accounts securely. Why we care. The release of the open-source Google Ads API Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server makes it easier…

Adding fake publication dates to online content can dramatically boost its visibility across leading AI models, a team from Waseda University discovered. This seems to confirm that tools like ChatGPT systematically favor newer content over older, equally relevant material. Why we care. AI models seem to reward timestamps more than quality. That means your older high-quality content could vanish from AI search results unless it’s regularly updated – apparently, regardless of whether those updates are substantial or artificial. How they did it. Researchers added fake publication dates to passages from standardized test collections with no other changes. Then they as…

Google Analytics now lets advertisers automatically import cost data from Meta and TikTok through new native integrations, streamlining cross-channel performance tracking. Why we care. This update gives marketers a unified view of ad spend and ROI across major platforms – without relying on manual uploads or third-party connectors – helping them better compare efficiency between Google, Meta, and TikTok campaigns. The details. The integrations automatically pull up to 24 months of historical ad cost data from Meta and TikTok. Users must delete any overlapping manual imports to avoid duplicate or inflated data, as Analytics won’t de-duplicate records between m…

YouTube today introduced a new Brand Pulse report that gives advertisers a real-time snapshot of their brand’s total presence across YouTube — from paid ads, to creator collaborations, to user-generated videos. A holistic view of brand presence. The new report taps multimodal AI to spot every brand mention on YouTube – from logos and product shots to shoutouts in audio or titles. Even a quick name-drop by a creator gets tracked to show your brand’s real reach. Metrics that connect paid and organic performance. Advertisers can now see how they stack up with metrics like Total Unique Viewers and Share of Watch Time — plus how paid ads boost organic buzz when viewers…

While online discussion obsesses over whether ChatGPT spells the end of Google, websites are losing revenue from a far more real and immediate problem: some of their most valuable pages are invisible to the systems that matter. Because while the bots have changed, the game hasn’t. Your website content needs to be crawlable. Between May 2024 and May 2025, AI crawler traffic surged by 96%, with GPTBot’s share jumping from 5% to 30%. But this growth isn’t replacing traditional search traffic. Semrush’s analysis of 260 billion rows of clickstream data showed that people who start using ChatGPT maintain their Google search habits. They’re not switching; they’re e…

Generative AI is no longer a single thing. Ask, “What is the best generative AI tool for writing PR content?” or “Is keyword targeting as impossible as spinning straw into gold?,” and each engine will take a different route from prompt to answer. For writers, editors, PR pros, and content strategists, those routes matter – every AI system has its own strengths, transparency, and expectations for how to check, edit, and cite what it produces. This article covers the top AI platforms – ChatGPT (OpenAI), Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek, and Claude (Anthropic) – and explains how they: Find and synthesize information. Source and train on data. Use…

Yoast SEO is a free WordPress SEO plugin that helps your site perform better in search engines like Google. It also gives you the tools to bring your content to the highest SEO and overall readability standards. Here, we’ll explain how our plugin helps you build the best website possible! Table of contents What Yoast SEO does SEO for your posts and pages Technical SEO for your website Learn SEO by doing SEO with Yoast A quick recap What Yoast SEO does Yoast SEO offers many tools and features to boost your SEO. Some of these features influence the SEO of your whole site, while others help you optimize individual posts and pages for search engines. At …

OpenAI has announced Instant Checkout on ChatGPT. ChatGPT acts as an intermediary agent for commerce purchases on behalf of the customer. This provides a foundation that connects people and businesses for the next era of agentic commerce. What does the buying process look like? The Instant Checkout flow keeps ChatGPT at the center of every step – from discovery to payment confirmation. After finding a product through conversations with ChatGPT, the user taps “Buy” and confirms payment and shipping. ChatGPT passes this signal, and the merchant then gathers fulfillment options. ChatGPT presents these options to the user who makes a selection.…

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) formally designated Google with strategic market status (SMS) in general search and search advertising — giving regulators new powers to shape how Google operates in these sectors. What’s included. The designation covers Google’s general search and search advertising services — including AI-powered features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode — but excludes the Gemini AI assistant and certain news and syndication products. The CMA emphasized that the designation is not a finding of wrongdoing but enables “proportionate, targeted interventions” to ensure fair treatment for consumers and competitors. Why we care. Th…

Google Ads added image quality checks to its Recommendations tab, nudging advertisers to upgrade low-performing visuals. How it works. The system now scans uploaded assets and suggests edits such as “copy and edit background color to white.” Advertisers can preview suggested changes and make quick fixes directly within the dashboard. Why we care. Image quality plays a growing role in how ads perform across surfaces like Display and Gmail – and these AI-driven tips aim to help advertisers improve engagement and delivery with cleaner, more consistent creatives. Bottom line. Advertisers who act on these image recommendations could see higher engagement and be…

On episode 327 of PPC Live The Podcast, I speak to Ayisha Yousef, a familiar face to the PPC Live audience. Known for her expertise in e-commerce and performance marketing, Ayisha shares a bold story about a major Black Friday mistake — and how she managed to recover from it. The Black Friday F-Up Setting the Scene A few years ago, Ayisha was working agency-side during Black Friday week — the most crucial time for e-commerce advertisers. She managed a team of six or seven and asked them to remove ad scheduling from top campaigns to ensure ads ran throughout the busy period. But instead of adjusting the schedule to “always on,” the team deleted the schedule e…

Google is clarifying its Misrepresentation policy for Shopping ads and free listings. The update doesn’t change enforcement but adds more examples and guidance to help advertisers comply. Enforcement clarification: Google added examples related to non-delivery and inoperable return or refund processes. These are clarifications, not new rules. Support clarification: New guidance explains best practices for maintaining compliance and provides more detail on the appeals process. Why we care. Advertisers now have clearer expectations about what counts as misrepresentation. This can help prevent policy violations, reduce account suspensions, and improve customer tr…

For years, marketers measured digital success through impressions, backlinks and clicks. If you ranked high in search results and won the click, you had visibility and control of the funnel. But that landscape is already shifting. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are rapidly becoming the first place decision-makers go for answers. These systems don’t return a page of links; they generate a synthesized response. Whether your brand is included, or ignored, in that answer increasingly determines your relevance in the buying journey. This changes the marketer’s playbook. Visibility is no longer only about ranking on Google. It’s…

2026 is around the corner – and the SEO space has never been this noisy. Every day brings something new. It’s easy to get stuck in panic mode, worrying you’re missing the next big thing, or to spend hours scrolling LinkedIn threads that lead nowhere. In both cases, you end up with nothing concrete – and with stakeholders still expecting clear impact. As we head into 2026, the real challenge is building a strategy with discipline – one that cuts through the noise and balances: Short-term wins that prove impact and build trust. Long-term bets that future-proof visibility. The boring but essential, business-as-usual (BAU) tasks that keep your foundati…

Are you spending hours on client reporting every month, only for your stakeholders to skim it, dismiss the numbers, or ignore your recommendations? When reports don’t drive action, you lose more than time. Budget approvals, strategic influence, and client trust are all compromised. Here are five ways to make sure your PPC report doesn’t just get read, but actually moves your audience to take action. 1. Start with your audience, not the data When building a report, it’s easy to get lost in the data – dozens of metrics, multiple platforms, endless ways to slice performance. The instinct is to ask, “What data can I show?” But that approach creates rep…

Amazon unexpectedly pulled out of Google Shopping auctions in late July, shaking up paid search. Retailers quickly filled the gap, driving stronger click growth and easing ad costs across Google and Microsoft. That’s according to marketing agency Tinuiti, which today released its Digital Ads Benchmark Report Q3 2025. Here are some of the key takeaways from Tinuiti’s report. Google Search – more clicks, lower prices. Ad spend rose 10% year over year, as clicks jumped 11% – the fifth straight quarter of acceleration. CPCs fell 1%, reversing a 3% rise from Q2. Shopping ads surged: clicks up 15%, CPCs down 1%, spend up 14%. Temu and Shein returne…

OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is more than a new ecommerce channel. By adding structured merchant feeds directly into ChatGPT, it changes how products are discovered and purchased in conversational search – and opens new opportunities for marketers. This shift moves us closer to real differentiators for generative engine optimization (GEO). Influence now occurs not only on pages but also within the structured data that conversational agents can consume, validate, and rank. While that’s been partly true for Google, ChatGPT introduces important differences we’ll unpack here. Why feeds in ChatGPT represent a new model While Google relies …

When marketing history looks back on 2025, it will mark the year AI truly hit the road. Google has used AI in search for years – RankBrain, BERT, Smart Bidding, RSAs, Performance Max, etc. But this year, it’s everywhere. From boardrooms to one-person shops, everyone’s asking how to use it and avoid being left behind. Amid the noise, facts have blurred into hype. I’ve heard it repeatedly from new clients: “SEO is dead. Don’t talk to us about SEO – talk to us about AI.” Fittingly, in this spooky season, SEO has “died” more times than every horror villain combined – yet it always comes back. AI is a true game-changer, but the hype is louder than anyt…

Heads up! Black Friday is almost here, and if you still haven’t prepared, it’s time to act fast. The clock is ticking, but you can still make meaningful updates that count. This article covers practical and straightforward last minute Black Friday tips to help you make quick, effective changes to your eCommerce store. Even with just a few days left, there’s still room to attract customers and make the most of the biggest shopping event of the year. Table of contents The must-dos (essentials you can’t miss) The nice-to-dos (if you have a little more time) Make your Black Friday deals shine with Yoast SEO for free! Bonus: Automate structured data for rich results Fina…

If you’re running Performance Max, or planning to launch a new campaign, I want to clear up one of the most misunderstood parts of Google Ads: audience signals and search themes. Understanding how to use (and not misuse) signals can strongly impact your PMax success. Why Performance Max is different than other Google Ads campaign types If you stop reading here and take nothing else away from this article, remember this: You do not get to pick your audience or keyword targeting in PMax. This is where a lot of advertisers get tripped up. Unlike traditional Search campaigns where you build a keyword list, or Demand Gen where you choose specific demographics …

Microsoft Bing now supports the data-nosnippet HTML attribute. This gives brands and businesses more control over what content appears in search results and AI-generated answers, including in Copilot. Why we care. This gives you more control over how your content appears in Bing’s search results and AI answers. You can protect paywalled or experimental sections and shape how your brand is represented in AI summaries. How it works. The attribute lets webmasters mark sections of a page to exclude from snippets or AI summaries, without affecting indexing or ranking. Bing still crawls and ranks the page, but omits the marked content from previews. Use cases. You c…

Google Ads is rolling out a major policy change around how advertisers can use prescription drug terms, marking one of the biggest shifts in healthcare ad regulation on the platform in years. What’s new. Starting Oct. 29, Google will restrict the use of prescription drug terms in ads, landing pages, and keywords, with different rules depending on location. In the U.S., Canada, and New Zealand: advertisers may promote prescription drugs if compliant with local laws. Certification is now required to keyword-target prescription terms, applying to online pharmacies, telemedicine providers, and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Everywhere else: Promotion of prescriptio…

Google’s Performance Max (PMax) campaigns now support vertical 9:16 image ads, bringing the popular mobile-friendly format to the platform’s most automated campaign type. What’s new. Google Ads specialist Thomas Eccel spotted the update, noting that vertical “Story Image Ads” – first seen in Demand Gen campaigns earlier this year – are now available in PMax. Specs at a glance: Minimum size: 600×1067 (recommended: 1080×1920) Maximum file size: 5MB Google hasn’t officially confirmed where these will serve, though in Demand Gen, they appear in YouTube Shorts Image placements. Why we care. Vertical 9:16 images let PMax campaigns fit naturally into mo…

ChatGPT performs a search in nearly one-third of prompts and averages more than two searches per query, each about 5.5 words long (roughly 60% longer than the typical Google search), according to a new study from marketing agency Nectiv. Why it matters: ChatGPT isn’t just answering questions – it’s searching like a power user. The model relies on longer, more specific, and more commercial-style queries than Google’s average searcher. That means SEOs could have more influence over ChatGPT’s answers, especially for local, product, and buying-intent searches where the model leans most heavily on external data. By the numbers. Some key findings from the report: S…