SEO Tools and Resources

Every year, Search Engine Land is delighted to celebrate the best of search marketing by rewarding the agencies, in-house teams, and individuals worldwide for delivering exceptional results. Today, I’m excited to announce all 18 winners of the 11th annual Search Engine Land Awards. The 2025 Search Engine Land Awards winners Best Use Of AI Technology In Search Marketing 15x ROAS with AI: How CAMP Digital Redefined Paid Search for Home Services Best Overall PPC Initiative – Small Business Anchor Rides – Post-Hurricane PPC Comeback (AIMCLEAR) Best Overall PPC Initiative – Enterprise ATRA & Jason Stone Injury Lawyers – Leveraging CRM Data to…

Many PPC advertisers obsess over click-through rates, using them as a quick measure of ad performance. But CTR alone doesn’t tell the whole story – what matters most is what happens after the click. That’s where many campaigns go wrong. The problem with chasing high CTRs Most advertisers think the ad with the highest CTR is often the best. It should have a high Quality Score and attract lots of clicks. However, in most cases, lower CTR ads usually outperform higher CTR ads in terms of total conversions and revenue. If all I cared about was CTR, then I could write an ad: “Free money.” “Claim your free money today.” “No strings attached.” …

The web’s purpose is shifting. Once a link graph – a network of pages for users and crawlers to navigate – it’s rapidly becoming a queryable knowledge graph. For technical SEOs, that means the goal has evolved from optimizing for clicks to optimizing for visibility and even direct machine interaction. Enter NLWeb – Microsoft’s open-source bridge to the agentic web At the forefront of this evolution is NLWeb (Natural Language Web), an open-source project developed by Microsoft. NLWeb simplifies the creation of natural language interfaces for any website, allowing publishers to transform existing sites into AI-powered applications where users and intelligen…

Nearly 90% of businesses are worried about losing organic visibility as AI transforms how people find information, according to a new survey by Ann Smarty. Why we care. The shift from search results to AI-generated answers seems to be happening faster than many expected, threatening the foundation of how companies are found online and drive sales. AI is changing the customer journey and forcing an SEO evolution. By the numbers. Most prefer to keep the “SEO” label – with “SEO for AI” (49%) and “GEO” (41%) emerging as leading terms for this new discipline. 87.8% of businesses said they’re worried about their online findability in the AI era. 85.7% are alread…

The death of an ad, like the end of the world, doesn’t happen with a bang but with a whimper. If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice the warning signs: click-through rate (CTR) slips, engagement falls, and cost-per-click (CPC) creeps up. If you’re not, one day your former top performer is suddenly costing you money. Creative fatigue – the decline in ad performance caused by overexposure or audience saturation – is often the culprit. It’s been around as long as advertising itself, but in an era where platforms control targeting, bidding, and even creative testing, it’s become one of the few variables marketers can still influence. This article exp…

Q4 is here – and for ecommerce brands, that means the biggest sales opportunities of the year are just ahead. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas – the biggest sales events are just around the corner. To hit your targets, preparation is key. It’s not too late to act, and the opportunities ahead are huge. Use this checklist to get up to speed quickly and set your account up for success. Website and UX Review site speed Start with a website audit to identify any red flags. Tools like PageSpeed Insights can help diagnose technical issues. Encourage clients to review key pages and the checkout process on multiple devices to ensure there are no bottle…

Google Search Console’s performance report is stuck and has not shown an update in the main report since Sunday, October 19th. Google confirmed the issue and said it will catch up. What it looks like. As I said on the Search Engine Roundtable, before Google confirmed the issue, the performance reports for all Search Console profiles are stuck on Sunday. Here is a sample chart: More details. The weird thing is that when you dive in to 24 hour data, you do get recent data. So it does seem like the data is being collected and stored but it just isn’t being rendered in most of the reporting. In addition, when you click on the by date breakdown under the chart…

On episode 329 of PPC Live The Podcast I speak to Jack Hepp, founder of industrious Marketing LLC, discussing the fallout and what it took to bring him back to feet after he got fired from his first PPC job. The big f-up: fired from his first agency job Jack’s defining career moment came just a year and a half into his first agency role. Despite being eager to learn, he was still new to digital marketing when a major mistake occurred. “We dramatically underspent a client’s ad budget for the month — by almost 50%,” Jack recalls. That underspend had serious consequences. The client relied heavily on Google Ads for online sales, and the missed spend transla…

Following OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT Atlas, software company Search Atlas flagged a major issue: the AI-powered browser can interact with websites in a way that looks indistinguishable from real human users, including clicking on paid advertisements. Why we care. Businesses running digital ad campaigns could unknowingly pay for clicks generated by AI agents, not real prospects. The technology also threatens to corrupt analytics data, making it harder to measure genuine traffic and user behavior. The problem. ChatGPT Atlas is built on Google Chrome, so ad networks and websites perceive its activity as a legitimate user. Every AI click on sponsored posts can tr…

Google today celebrated the 25th anniversary of its ad platform, first launched as AdWords in 2000. Now known as Google Ads, the platform remains the backbone of the company’s revenue engine. Over two and a half decades, Google Ads has evolved from a manually managed system to a sophisticated AI-driven advertising platform spanning Search, YouTube, Play, and the wider web. What Google is saying. Google is celebrating, with Vidhya Srinivasan, VP/GM of Ads & Commerce, sharing how AI is empowering us to rethink what’s possible’ and create a future of smarter, more helpful advertising. “Generative AI is transforming digital marketing, and I am so proud to see…

In the early days of SEO, ranking algorithms were easy to game with simple tactics that became known as “black hat” SEO – white text on a white background, hidden links, keyword stuffing, and paid link farms. Early algorithms weren’t sophisticated enough to detect these schemes, and sites that used them often ranked higher. Today, large language models power the next generation of search, and a new wave of black hat techniques are emerging to manipulate rankings and prompt results for advantage. The AI content boom – and the temptation to cut corners Up to 21% of U.S. users access AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and DeepSeek mo…

ChatGPT referral traffic converts worse than Google search, email and affiliate links, trailing on both conversion rate and revenue per session, according to a new analysis of 973 ecommerce sites. Why we care. AI search platforms are starting to refer meaningful traffic to retailers – but not yet sales. For now, Google (paid organic) search still wins on conversion and revenue per session. By the numbers. The dataset consisted of 12 months (Augusut 2024 to July 2025), 973 ecommerce sites, and $20 billion combined revenue. ChatGPT referral traffic was ~0.2% of total sessions – ~200× smaller than Google organic. >90% of LLM-originating ecommerce traffic …

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…

In mid-September, many SEO professionals began noticing unusual drops in Google Search Console (GSC) data. Impressions were down, average positions shifted, and the number of reported queries changed overnight. This wasn’t the result of a ranking update but a reporting change – one that redefines how we interpret GSC visibility data going forward. What happened to GSC impressions The drop traces back to Google’s quiet decision to stop supporting the &num=100 parameter, which allowed tools and crawlers to retrieve up to 100 results per query. Once support ended, those extra data points disappeared – and with them, many of the impressions and posit…

Reddit is taking four data-scraping companies to court – including AI search engine Perplexity and SEO data firm SerpApi – accusing them of illegally using its content via Google search results. The lawsuit. SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and Perplexity “devised a scheme” to scrape Reddit data indirectly from Google, then resell or reuse it to train AI models. That’s according to Reddit’s lawsuit, filied today in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Reddit alleged the companies hid their identities to bypass technical restrictions and scraped its data “at an industrial scale.” Reddit is seeking financial damages, a permanent injunction,…

More than a decade ago, I coined the term brand SERP – the result you get when someone searches for your name or company. I called it the “digital business card” because I saw firsthand how a messy one could cost a business trust and revenue. That idea shaped how many people think about online reputation and visibility, but the landscape has shifted again. \In the age of assistive and conversational AI – from ChatGPT to Perplexity to Google AI – a new and far more powerful asset has emerged: the AI resume. Unlike a brand SERP, which reflects what Google shows, the AI resume reveals what the machines themselves understand about your brand. It’s a liv…

The message from this month’s SEO Update is clear: AI and data accuracy are reshaping how we plan, optimize, and measure SEO. This is not just a slate of updates, but a signal to rethink impressions, content creation, and tooling so you stay effective. Chris Scott, Yoast’s Senior Marketing Manager, hosted the session. Alex Moss and Carolyn Shelby shared deep dives on AI trends, Google updates, and Yoast product news. Data and rankings in flux A key shift centers on data. Google removed the num=100 parameter, which changed how much ranking data shows up per page in Google Search Console. The result isn’t a sudden performance drop; it’s a correction. Impressions can …

Capturing intent at the precise moment consumers are ready to take action has always been the goal in search. But there’s value – and real payoff – in influencing that intent before the search even begins. As customer journeys grow more complex and span multiple touchpoints, the need to reach audiences earlier continues to rise. Connected TV (CTV) advertising offers that opportunity. It helps build brand awareness and consideration that drive downstream search behavior – all while maintaining the targeting precision and measurement capabilities search professionals expect. What is connected TV? Connected TV encompasses any television that offers …

Black Friday is when performance peaks — and so do risks. In 2024, global spending reached $74.4 billion, with U.S. online sales up 10.2% year-over-year. Behind that growth, affiliate competition and coupon activity surged, pushing paid channels to their limits. During these high-traffic days, even a single unchecked campaign can waste hundreds of thousands of dollars. Coupon fraud, coupon scam tactics and unauthorized brand bidding mess with your paid traffic, distort performance data and steal conversions that should’ve stayed yours. That’s why strong PPC compliance and continuous promo code monitoring aren’t optional — they’re what keep acquisition costs stable…

Yelp just unveiled its 2025 Fall Product Release, a sweeping AI-driven update that turns the local discovery platform into a more conversational, visual, and intelligent experience. Driving the news: Yelp’s rollout includes over 35 new AI-powered features, headlined by: Yelp Assistant, an upgraded chatbot that instantly answers customer questions about restaurants, shops, or attractions—citing reviews and photos. Menu Vision, which lets users scan menus to see photos, reviews, and dish details in real time. Yelp Host and Yelp Receptionist, AI-powered call solutions that handle reservations, collect leads, and answer questions with natural, customi…

OpenAI announced the launch of its first web browser, which they named ChatGPT Atlas. Atlas is currently available on Mac only right now and has all the features you would expect from an AI browser. But the most surprising part is that its built-in search features seem to be powered by Google and not Microsoft Bing, its early partner and one of its largest investors. How to download Atlas. If you are on a Mac, you can download ChatGPT Atlas at chatgpt.com/atlas. From there, the web browser will download to your computer, you double click on the installer and then drag the application to your application folder. What Atlas does. It is a web browser, first and forem…

Google Merchant Center is rolling out a new Issue Details Page (IDP) to help advertisers more easily diagnose and resolve account or product-level problems. How it works: Located under the “Needs attention” tab, the page provides a consolidated overview of current issues. It surfaces recommended actions, business impact metrics, and sample affected products — giving merchants a clearer sense of what to fix first. Why we care. Until now, identifying and fixing issues in Merchant Center often required navigating multiple sections and reports. The new Issue Details Page (IDP) in Google Merchant Center gives advertisers a single place to view and fix accou…

Google Ads appears to be testing an automatic assignment of New Customer Value within New Customer Acquisition (NCA) campaigns — and it’s doing so without advertisers’ explicit consent. The change, first spotted by performance marketer Bilal Yasin, has led to unexpected reporting shifts and frustration among advertisers. “Without any heads-up, and without it being in the change history, a new customer value has suddenly been applied to a customer,” Yasin wrote on LinkedIn. “It was set to 200 DKK… One thing is that Google has assigned a value, but another is that I can’t remove it again!” Why we care. Advertisers rely on New Customer Value settings to determin…

When you think of video advertising on YouTube, you probably think of ecommerce: Videos showing products. Influencers doing an unboxing. Other visuals of consumer products that lend themselves to the video format. Even Google’s own case studies for video emphasize consumer-focused themes. Just look at the analysis of the top 2025 video ads. See any B2B brands there? Me neither. It’s true that YouTube Ads perform very well for ecommerce advertising aimed at consumers. But YouTube can also help drive B2B leads. You might be scratching your head and saying, “But I’ve tried YouTube for B2B. It doesn’t convert.” And you would be right. YouTube…

Marketing mix modeling (MMM) is having a moment in marketing measurement. As privacy regulations limit user-level tracking, marketers are turning to it for reliable, cross-channel measurement. (We love it at my agency – MMM analyses often lead to smarter budget allocation with significant downstream impact.) But as adoption grows, so do execution errors and misconceptions about what MMM can and can’t do. Despite its strategic potential, it’s often misused, misinterpreted, or oversold – leading to costly mistakes and credibility loss from unrealistic expectations. MMM isn’t a black box. To produce meaningful insights, it demands context, strategy, iteratio…