SEO Tools and Resources

Table of contents What are you actually paying for when building a website? Website building options Watch out for these hidden costs How Yoast saves you money (over time) Budgeting tips for small business owners Ecommerce vs. general website: does it change the cost? Final thoughts TL;DR Thinking about building a website? Whether you are a small business owner, a freelancer, or launching a side project, one of the first questions you will want answered is: how much does it cost to build a website? This is not just about curiosity, understanding your website costs early on can help you budget effectively and avoid any unpleasant surprises. The truth is that t…

Google Ads will change how automatically created customer conversion goals are set as account-default starting Nov. 17, aiming to reduce wasted spend from campaigns optimizing toward irrelevant goals. How it works now. New conversion actions created via the API automatically generate customer conversion goals. Those goals are set as account-default by default, making them biddable across campaigns. The result: campaigns may target unnecessary goals, diluting performance. What’s changing. Under the new rules, a newly created goal will only default to account-level bidding if every other goal in that category is already account-default. Example: If an acc…

Microsoft is rolling out the new and updated Bing Places for Business. “Today, we are excited to announce the launch of the new Bing Places for Business experience —an evolution shaped by deep user research, thoughtful design, and a commitment to help business owners thrive in local search,” the company announced today. What is new. Microsoft updated the overall design and layout for Bing Places, moved the domain name, improved the import process and added a recommendation tool. Microsoft said the updates “move simplifies access, improves trust, and aligns Bing Places with the broader Bing ecosystem.” They also moved from www.bingplaces.com to www.bing.com/forbusi…

Today’s customers don’t separate their lives into channels, and they don’t expect brands to either. They want experiences that feel relevant and personal, whether that’s confirming a delivery, getting a reminder about an appointment, or receiving an offer they actually care about. Imagine a shopper who adds items to their cart but never checks out. Hours later, the reminder email arrives, but by then it’s buried in a crowded inbox. The opportunity to recapture their attention has passed. This is the challenge marketers face today: timing and trust matter just as much as the content itself. For marketers, the challenge is not in deciding which channel to use in i…

AI is changing the digital landscape as we know it. An industry that used to run on Google’s 10 blue links is now rapidly transitioning to digital experiences based on personalized prompts and direct answers from AI. Success is expanding beyond tracking rankings, keywords, and organic traffic. To drive future growth, brands need to prioritize visibility and authority across all search experiences and optimize to improve mentions and citations within AI responses. Which begs the question: How do brands measure and maximize their visibility in AI? Let’s dive in. What is AI visibility? AI visibility refers to how often and effectively your brand, products, or…

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 …

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 …

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…

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…

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 …

AI referral traffic accounts for just over 1% of all website visits across 10 major industries, according to a new Conductor AI search benchmark report. AI referral traffic. 1.08% of all web traffic came from AI referrals. Digging deeper: ChatGPT drove 87.4% of all AI referrals across the dataset. IT (2.8%) and Consumer Staples (1.9%) led all industries. Communication Services (0.25%) and Utilities (0.35%) saw the lowest shares. AI referrals increased by ~1% month over month across all industries. AI answer engine market share. ChatGPT overwhelmingly dominated, followed by Perplexity. There were some interesting differences by industry (e.g., G…

Table of contents How AI perceives your brand The new gatekeepers: LLMs & generative search What shapes your brand’s AI profile What you can do about it: building brand equity in the AI era The future of brand perception What does ChatGPT say about your brand? Or Perplexity, Gemini, or Claude? As AI agents emerge alongside traditional search engines as the starting point of discovery, the way they perceive and present your brand can directly shape customer trust and buying decisions. These models don’t know your brand the way people do. They learn it from the web, from structured data, citations, reviews, and the context you’ve built across digital touchpoint…

My experience has shown one simple truth: clients stay or go based not on results alone, but on the service they receive. This holds true for the vast majority of clients we’ve worked with. You can deliver excellent outcomes, but if clients feel underserved, they’re likely to leave. Clients aren’t always rational, and that’s exactly why every touchpoint matters – especially reporting. Reporting is often your main connection with clients and can define how they perceive your service. That makes it one of the most important parts of your business. So, what makes a great report? This article tackles the key principles of building reports that …

Engineering teams usually have a quality assurance (QA) process. Without it, they risk releasing work that hurts the user experience and creates unforeseen technical issues – including major SEO problems. That’s where SEO QA comes in. Adding SEO-specific checks to existing QA protocols helps teams catch and fix issues before they go live. But this step is less common than you’d think. Too often, it’s overlooked. This article outlines what it takes to build an effective SEO QA discipline and provides a checklist SEOs and QA engineers can use to cover their bases. Why SEO QA gets overlooked Unless SEO is fully integrated with engineering, SEO-specific…

Table of contents What is content summarization? Manual or human-driven content summarization AI-driven content summarization What are some of the core benefits of content summarization? Why summarization matters in the modern content landscape? Information overload People scan and skim, so clarity wins Trust and clarity for readers and systems Faster decision-making Prominent use cases of content summarization Business reports Educational content Marketing strategies and reporting Everyday consumption: news digests, newsletters, podcast notes Content Summarization & SEO: Does it Benefit in Boosting Organic Visibility? Boosting click-through rates Improving…

YouTube launched the YouTube Activation Partners program, a new initiative connecting advertisers and agencies with vetted third-party experts who specialize in YouTube media buying and campaign management. Why we care. As the biggest streaming platform for over two years, according to Nielsen, YouTube continues to dominate attention spans. But as ad strategies become more complex, brands increasingly rely on external partners for campaign optimization and cross-platform efficiency. Driving the news. The new program curates a network of trusted YouTube experts who meet Google’s performance and quality standards. Partners receive a YouTube Activation Partner b…

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…

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…

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…

Everyone’s talking about “AI search” (AI SEO, GEO, AEO, or whatever you call it) – and everyone’s convinced they’re right. Some say SEO is dead. Others say nothing’s really changed (“it’s just SEO”). The truth? Search is evolving fast, but SEO fundamentals still matter. What’s shifting is where people discover information – and how machines decide what to trust. Here are a few myths worth retiring. Myth 1: “GEO is just SEO with a new name.” Reality: The fundamentals overlap, but the target has changed. SEO is about ranking webpages. AI search is about being cited, trusted, or chosen inside an answer. You’re not trying to win Position 1…

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…

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…

Something’s shifting in how SEO services are being marketed, and if you’ve been shopping for help with search lately, you’ve probably noticed it. AI search demand is real – but so is the spin Over the past few months, “AI SEO” has emerged as a distinct service offering. Browse service provider websites, scroll through Fiverr, or sit through sales presentations, and you’ll see it positioned as something fundamentally new and separate from traditional SEO. Some are packaging it as “GEO” (generative engine optimization) or “AEO” (answer engine optimization), with separate pricing, distinct deliverables, and the implication that you need both this and traditi…

For years, I told bloggers the same thing: make your content easy enough for toddlers and drunk adults to understand. That was my rule of thumb. If a five-year-old can follow what you’ve written and someone paying half-attention can still find what they need on your site, you’re doing something right. But the game has changed. It’s no longer just about toddlers and drunk adults. You’re now writing for large language models (LLMs) quietly scanning, interpreting, and summarizing your work inside AI search results. I used to believe that great writing and solid SEO were all it took to succeed. What I see now: Clarity beats everything. The blog…

Google’s AI Overviews are for research, not buying. A new BrightEdge analysis of thousands of ecommerce keywords (Sept. 1-Oct. 15) found that AI results appear for research and evaluation, while bottom-funnel queries still belong to traditional search. Why we care. Google’s AI Overviews appear to shape discovery, while traditional search continues to drive sales. So ecommerce brands can set themselves up for success by being visible, helping users learn, and guiding them to buy during these key moments. By the numbers. AI Overview coverage spiked to 26% in September before retreating to 9% in October. 30% of keywords were retained after the pullback. Ther…