SEO Tools and Resources

If you manage both SEO and PPC, striking the right balance is key to maximizing efficiency and ROI. When paid search campaigns compete with high-performing organic listings, brands end up spending more while gaining little additional traffic. Keyword cannibalization dilutes search performance, inflates costs, and reduces overall marketing effectiveness. This guide will help you recognize the warning signs of PPC cannibalization, test its impact, and implement strategies to ensure both channels work together for optimal results. Signs your PPC campaigns are cannibalizing your SEO rankings Declining organic click-through rates If your organic ranking…

A new profile of Elizabeth Reid, the head of Google Search, confirms that Google is moving away from its longstanding model of sending its users to websites. As one former unnamed senior executive put it: “Giving traffic to publisher sites is kind of a necessary evil.” As for the iconic Google Search bar? It will slowly lose prominence in the Google Search experience, due to the continuing growth of voice and visual search, Reid said. Necessary evil. Google has been increasingly focused on keeping users inside Google properties, reducing the need to click through to external sites. A former Google senior executive told Bloomberg that supporting publishers was inci…

LinkedIn released automation updates that could help advertisers leverage advanced forecasting, automation, and insights to streamline ad creation and maximize ROI with new levels of efficiency. The big picture: The new Media Planner helps you forecast ad performance before launch. Ad Duplication and Dynamic UTMs simplify campaign creation and tracking. Marketing Overview, Measurement Insights, and AI-driven Performance Digest provide deeper measurement capabilities. What’s new: Media Planner. Forecast ROI before you launch What it does. Helps you test different audience segments, placements, and budgets to predict campaign outcomes. Key ben…

Many articles detail the top-level costs of SEO. While the fee you will pay an SEO consultant or agency is part of the cost to do SEO, getting results also requires a contribution in time and effort from the business. This article will look beyond the surface at the full spectrum of costs associated with doing SEO well, enabling you to approach 2025 well-prepared for SEO success. SEO costs: The basics If you are just looking for a straightforward overview of SEO costs, several studies have answered the question. Exact costs vary depending on factors such as business size, goals, industry, geographical location, and the overall complexity of the proje…

Generative AI (GenAI) has undeniably transformed the marketing function, from automated customer interactions to content creation. But while everyone has been focused on chatbots and creating new blog posts, a quiet revolution has been brewing in Digital Asset Management (DAM). It began with addressing long-standing challenges related to asset findability and reuse but today we are seeing a number of exciting new, high-value use cases that will take us well beyond asset tagging and unlock the true creative potential of your DAM solution. Asset tagging and retrieval One of the core tenants of DAM is asset reuse. Why invest time, resource and cost in reproducing an a…

Advances in AI search are opening a new chapter, with consumers exploring Google alternatives. ChatGPT has hit a new milestone of 300 million weekly active users. Perplexity has grown to serve 100 million queries per week. Google’s global market share trended below 90% for the first time since 2015. The rapid rise of AI search platforms brings significant opportunities and growing challenges. On one hand, brands can boost visibility and drive demand like never before. On the other hand, they face new hurdles, such as copyright concerns, increasing infrastructure costs, and the ongoing challenge of measuring ROI. Despite shifts in search interf…

Google Ads costs surged across nearly every industry in 2025, with 87% of sectors seeing higher cost-per-click rates. But the pain is being offset by significantly better conversion rates — 65% of industries are turning more clicks into actual customers. That’s according to a LocalIQ analysis of 16,446 campaigns. Overall 2025 benchmarks: Average cost per click: $5.26 (up 12.88% YoY) Average click-through rate: 6.66% (up 3.74% YoY) Average conversion rate: 7.52% (up 6.84% YoY) Average cost per lead: $70.11 (up 5.13% YoY) Big winners and losers: 87% of industries saw cost-per-click increases 65% of industries improved conversion rates Be…

As generative AI continues to shape website performance, much of the conversation has focused on its negative impact. Factors like AI Overviews, increased zero-click searches, and a growing demographic that turns to ChatGPT instead of traditional research methods may all play a role. While these shifts raise concerns, it’s equally important to examine the traffic these AI engines are driving to websites. To better understand this, we analyzed traffic data from 391 SMB websites, breaking them down by industry and AI search engine referrals. Our goal was to see exactly how much traffic these companies were getting – and whether it was significant enough y…

Google Analytics is enhancing its reporting capabilities with three new features designed to help users better understand their data and identify potential tracking issues. Percentage values are now included in all detailed reports, new notifications flag missing session_start events and system alerts also highlight high rates of “(not set)” values. Percentages now standard in reports. Google has added percentage values to each row across all detailed reports in both the “Reports” and “Ads” modules. The new percentage columns allow analysts to immediately see which traffic sources, pages, or campaigns are driving the most significant portions of their results…

If you want the lowdown on Google’s I/O hoedown, look no further than… 2013. Or maybe 2014. 2016 works too. Honestly, take your pick because it barely matters. Most of the coverage I’ve seen this year reads like AI-generated summaries written by folks with more letters after their names than a prescription bottle. Bless their hearts. But remember—Google’s founders didn’t show up with alphabet soup credentials. They showed up to solve a problem. A big, fascinating one that demanded thinking, tinkering, troubleshooting, and a lot of stops and starts. It wasn’t about polish; it was about the ridiculous drive to solve a problem. And have your own personal 767, but l…

If users don’t interact with your page in Google’s search results, Google may remove that page from its results – or possibly even its index. That’s according to a recent short video Google’s Martin Splitt posted on the Google Search Central YouTube channel. This information confirms what Google said in their recent (since 2019) communication and once again with the Navboost details from the DOJ trails, and the data leak. What Google said. Here is a partial quote from the video, which I will embed below: “If they are not showing up so it’s either that the query is a bit weird or that the query hasn’t actually been asked that much or that we have other pag…

Microsoft Advertising is ramping up enforcement of its user consent policies for advertisers targeting users in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland. Starting May 5, all advertisers using Universal Event Tracking (UET) must provide an explicit consent signal to avoid disruptions in ad performance. What’s changing: Microsoft requires advertisers to ensure user consent before dropping Microsoft device identifiers (e.g., cookies) on user devices. New enforcement measures will be phased in, culminating in full implementation by the May deadline. Advertisers must send explicit consent signals via one of Microsoft’s approved methods to maintain compliance. Why we car…

There has been a striking drop in remote SEO role listings — down to just 34% — as well as SEO content job listings – down 28%. That’s according to The 2025 Previsible State of SEO Jobs Report, released today. Meanwhile, SEO job listings for leadership positions (e.g., vice president of SEO) grew by 50% in 2024, while SEO manager positions increased 58%. Why we care. It may be too early to know whether this is a blip or a trend, but this data indicates that companies are looking to hire SEOs skilled in strategy, technical, and AI. Although content-focused roles are being squeezed by generative AI, leadership and technical skills remain as valuable as ever. Job…

Reddit reported its earnings last night, and while it underperformed in terms of user growth (thanks to Google), the earnings report seemed to highlight how much OpenAI is paying Reddit to license its content. As per Adweek, between Google and OpenAI, its AI licensing deal brings in about 10% of its revenue. 10% of its revenue is about $130 million. We know Google paid about $60 million to Reddit for its content deal, and the only other known company to have a deal with Reddit for its content is OpenAI. That leaves OpenAI paying $70 million to Reddit for its licensing deal. More details. I spotted this via Glenn Gabe who posted about this on X and wrote: Ro…

Is your landing page converting better—or worse—than your competitors’? If you’re not sure, now’s the time to find out. Unbounce’s new Conversion Benchmark Report provides a clear, data-backed look at how landing pages are performing across industries. The report includes median conversion rates by sector, giving marketers a useful baseline to assess their own performance. The report also offers helpful guidance for interpreting your own results—whether you’re outperforming the median or identifying areas for optimization. It reminds marketers that conversion rate is just one piece of the puzzle: lower conversion rates might still represent high-value leads, and e…

From automating review responses to suppressing negative search results, AI is making online reputation management (ORM) faster, smarter, and more effective. But while AI offers powerful tools, businesses must use them strategically to maintain authenticity and trust. Here’s how AI is reshaping ORM – and what brands need to do to keep up. Online reputation management in the age of AI In today’s digital-first world, a brand’s online reputation is more than just a reflection of its customer service. It’s a key driver of success or failure. A single negative news story, an influx of bad reviews, or even an outdated piece of content ranking high on Googl…

Two new studies agree: Google’s AI Overviews steal clicks from organic search results. While Google told us that AI Overviews citations result in higher-quality clicks, the introduction of AI Overviews correlates with a measurable decline in organic visibility and clicks, particularly for top-ranking, non-branded keywords. That’s according to two new data studies from SEO tool provider Ahrefs and performance agency Amsive. By the numbers. Here’s how AI Overviews have decreased click-through rate (CTR) for traditional organic listings, according to the two studies: Ahrefs: A 34.5% drop in position 1 CTR when AI Overviews were present, based on an analysis of…

The U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of states unveiled their proposed remedies today aimed at dismantling Google’s illegal monopoly in search and search advertising. These include breaking off Chrome and banning default search payments. The remedies. They break down into five categories meant to enable and increase competition: Distribution remedies. This would mean ending payments that “freeze the ecosystem in place,” including Google’s multi-billion-dollar payments to Apple and Android device makers. Chrome divestiture. This would separate Chrome from Google – organizationally and financially. Chrome accounts for 35% of all Google search queries …

Google released a new help page detailing Asset testing for retailers, a specialized experiment type for Performance Max campaigns that lets you measure the effectiveness of your creative assets. What’s new. The new experimental feature tests asset impact within a single PMax campaign: A control group (feed-only) is compared against a treatment group (with added assets). The results are viewable in the Experiment report. Split testing without duplicate campaigns. Unlike traditional A/B testing that requires running parallel campaigns, this new feature splits traffic within a single Performance Max campaign: Control group: Shows product feed-only ads. …

Google Search may now be faster when you use Chrome for Google Search. Google is leveraging Speculation Rules API to prefetch results, ultimately making the overall Google Search experience faster. “Google Search has been making use of the Speculation Rules API to improve navigation speed from the search results page to the result links and they’ve been using a few features of the API that may be of interest to other site owners,” Google wrote on the Chrome Developers blog. More details. Google will prefetch the first two search results to speed up the search experience. Google said it does this through using the requires configuration, to ensure prefetches use t…

The concept of the funnel is so fundamental to digital marketing, it’s hard to imagine a world where it doesn’t serve as the go-to metaphor for lead generation and capture. There’s only one problem: it doesn’t fit with the way real humans engage with information on today’s internet. With access to more data than ever before—and tech to interpret that data for marketers looking to write the right content to drive organic traffic—we now know the better framework for marketers to embrace is the spiderweb. Sign up today to join Search Engine Land and Ryan Brock for this live event and learn how to shift your thinking around your organic content strategy to create the …

Advertisers can now tap into Promoted Pins on Maps as part of their Demand Gen campaigns. These pins leverage existing image assets and appear in key spots on Maps, like Browse, Directions, and Entity/Place Details modes. How it works. Existing image assets from campaigns can be repurposed for these pins. Pins show up in Maps when users browse areas, search for directions, or check out specific places. The move aims to increase visibility in these “browse-worthy” moments, helping to convert digital interest into physical visits. Why we care. Promoted Pins are designed to drive more foot traffic and in-store sales by putting businesses in front of users as …

Google today announced Search Live, a new feature that lets users have real-time conversations with Search using their smartphone camera. The tool builds on Google’s work in visual search and AI, combining the capabilities of Google Lens and Project Astra. How it works. Users can tap a new Live icon in either Lens or AI Mode. After pointing their camera at an object, they can ask questions about it. Search Live responds in real time with explanations, suggestions, and links to relevant websites, videos, and forums. What it looks like. Here’s a video showing how Search Live works: Why we care. Search Live highlights Google’s ongoing push toward multimo…

Using transition words in your writing can help you enhance the readability of your content. They help your text flow and show readers the relationship between phrases and paragraphs. That’s why the readability checks in Yoast SEO provide feedback on your use of transition words. But what are transition words, and why are they so important? And how should you use them? Table of contents What are transition words? Why you should use transition words Types of transition words Why are they important for SEO? What does the transition word check in Yoast SEO do? How to improve your usage Conclusion What are transition words? Transition words like ‘and’, ‘but’,…

SEO is widely recognized as a long-term investment, which creates pressure for businesses to translate performance into measurable revenue. Early on – or even over time – disconnects can emerge between expectations and actual ROI. One major disconnect lies in understanding what SEO truly means in terms of strategy and tactics. Another, often magnified if left unaddressed, is the time it takes to see meaningful results. If the goal of SEO (or any digital marketing effort) is to drive return on investment (ROI), then identifying and addressing the root causes of the SEO-to-ROI gap is critical. Failing to do so can lead to compounding issues, making it h…