SEO Tools and Resources

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…

Google’s crawl stats report is missing a single day of crawl data, which seems to be impacting all sites within Google Search Console. Google has not yet confirmed the issue but it seems to be impacting everyone. What it looks like. Here is a screenshot from one of my profiles within Search Console, showing the date that is missing for this site is October 14, 2025: Crawl stats report. The Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console shows you statistics about Google’s crawling history on your website. For instance, how many requests were made and when, what your server response was, and any availability issues encountered. You can use this report to detect whe…

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 …

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…

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…

Google made another change to the JavaScript SEO documentation help document to explain and clarify JavaScript execution on non-200 HTTP status codes. The change. Google wrote, “All pages with a 200 HTTP status code are sent to the rendering queue, no matter whether JavaScript is present on the page.” “If the HTTP status code is non-200 (for example, on error pages with 404 status code), rendering might be skipped,” Google added. Google also clarified that Googlebot queues all pages with a 200 HTTP status code for rendering. Here is the section that was updated: Google explained, “While pages with a 200 HTTP status code are sent to rendering, this mi…

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…

A dominant share – 86% to be specific – of AI citations come from sources brands already control, according to a new analysis of 6.8 million citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity conducted by brand visibility platform Yext. Why we care. The findings challenge the perception that forums like Reddit dominate AI answers. Yext’s analysis also suggests that brands can directly influence visibility in generative results by keeping website content accurate, structured, and crawlable. (Yes, SEO.) By the numbers. Across all industries, 86% of AI citations came from sources brands owned or managed. Websites lead: 44% of citations came from first-party sites.…

Google is quietly giving advertisers more granular control over how data flows when consent is limited. Driving the news. A new feature called Data Transmission Control is appearing in Google Ads, adding an extra layer on top of Advanced Consent Mode that determines how advertising, analytics and diagnostic data are actually transmitted. What’s new. Advertisers can now independently restrict advertising data, behavioral analytics and diagnostic data. When ad_storage consent is denied, there are two options: allow limited advertising data with identifiers redacted (while still enabling conversion modeling), or block advertising data entirely until consent is grante…

Google is piloting Brand Profiles in Merchant Center Next, giving retailers a fresh way to showcase their story, values, and promotions directly in Search results. Why we care. With shopping searches increasingly crowded, Brand Profiles give merchants a chance to differentiate beyond product listings, potentially influencing purchase decisions earlier in the journey. How it works: Appears in the Merchant Center Next “Brand” section, though currently locked from editing. Lets merchants highlight brand values, categories, and business descriptions. Supports images, videos, and offers to enrich product visibility. Provides insights into how customers in…

AI has quickly become the dominant topic in the PPC industry. If 2024 was the year of will-Google-or-won’t-Google finally kill cookies, 2025 is the year AI has taken over the conversation. From Google’s Performance Max to Meta’s Advantage+ – and with Mark Zuckerberg predicting that AI will fully run Meta ad campaigns by 2026 – automation now shapes nearly every aspect of paid media. Our role has shifted to guiding these systems with the right inputs, constraints, and context. Just as important is knowing how to use AI tools outside the ad platforms to work smarter and drive efficiency. This article shares key caveats, recommendations, and real exampl…

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…

Attribution shows who gets credit. Incrementality shows what your marketing truly caused. In an era of automation and privacy restrictions, understanding the real lift behind your campaigns is the only way to prove what’s working. This article breaks down what incrementality measures, why it matters, and how to test it across today’s major ad platforms. The problem with ‘great’ results that don’t actually drive growth Marketers love big numbers – CTR, impressions, and ROAS all sound great in a deck. But what if those results don’t represent real business growth? For example, a paid search campaign reports a 10x ROAS. It might sound amazing. But…

Google is starting to roll out its new Text Guidelines feature in Google Ads, a tool first announced at the Think Retail event five weeks ago that gives advertisers more control over AI-generated ad copy. Driving the news. The feature, now appearing in some accounts, lets marketers set campaign-level text parameters — guiding Google’s AI to stay within brand tone, language preferences, and compliance requirements when generating text assets. Why we care. As Google Ads leans deeper into AI-powered creative, advertisers have been asking for stronger brand safety and message consistency controls. Text Guidelines offer a way to fine-tune AI output without sacrific…

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…

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.…

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, is worried that the ad-supported web will collapse due to AI. In a new interview with Nilay Patel on Decoder, Berners-Lee said: “I do worry about the infrastructure of the web when it comes to the stack of all the flow of data, which is produced by people who make their money from advertising. If nobody is actually following through the links, if people are not using search engines, they’re not actually using their websites, then we lose that flow of ad revenue. That whole model crumbles. I do worry about that.” Why we care. There is a split in our industry, where one side thinks “it’s just SEO” and the other …

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…

Google rolled out a beta that lets merchants display different loyalty-member prices by region in Shopping ads — giving retailers a new way to localize promotions without managing separate offers. Why we care. The feature gives merchants more flexibility to tailor pricing to local markets and highlight loyalty perks directly in ads, potentially boosting conversion and membership sign-ups. How it works Merchants must join Google’s loyalty add-on, set up regions in Merchant Center, and add loyalty_program attributes — including program label, tier, and price — to their regional inventory feed. When a shopper clicks an ad, Google appends a region ID to the UR…

When a TV commercial makes people feel something, it doesn’t just win in the moment – it sparks curiosity, drives searches, and fuels conversions. That’s why the “Breaking TV Ads Report,” jointly launched by Kinetiq and DAIVID, deserves a spot on every search marketer’s radar. The monthly report ranks the top-performing new TV ads in the U.S., blending Kinetiq’s real-time TV ad detection with DAIVID’s AI-driven creative analytics to uncover which ads broke through, why they resonated, and what brands can learn from their success. It’s a powerful reminder that search doesn’t start on Google – it starts in the mind. As Barney Worfolk-Smith, chief growth offi…

Having great product pages is important for your sales. After all, it’s where people decide to click that buy button. Besides optimizing your product pages for user experience, you also want to make sure these pages work for your SEO. You might think this is obvious. That’s why we’ll show you a few less obvious elements of product page SEO in this post. And we’ll explain why it’s so important to take these things into account. Let’s go! Table of contents 1. The basics of product page SEO 2. Add structured data for your products and get rich results 3. Add real reviews 4. Make your product page lightning fast 5. User test your product page Bonus: Build trust and show…

Table of contents How is Yoast SEO a game-changer for your Shopify store? Top Yoast SEO for Shopify Features to help maximize your Black Friday visibility Instantly generate SEO-friendly meta titles and descriptions with one-click AI SEO and readability analysis Automatic product structured data Optimize how your store appears on search and social media Other notable features Over to you… Before we know it, the winter hues will set in, and with them comes the biggest shopping day of the year: Black Friday. Black Friday 2024 was a goldmine for online businesses, clocking in record-breaking numbers. Online shoppers spent over $10 billion, marking a 10% jump fr…

Many still treat E-E-A-T as a box to tick in an SEO audit. But it’s more than that – it’s how search engines and AI systems decide which content to trust. The paradox? Global brands that dominate in one country often underperform in others. Without clear local trust and authority signals, even the strongest global reputation may not carry across borders. Why E-E-A-T breaks down across borders When Google or an LLM compares multiple content options, it must choose which is the most complete, accurate, and trustworthy. That decision once leaned heavily on backlinks. Now, advanced algorithms consider a richer mix – authorship, structured d…

Over the past year, Google Ads has increasingly embraced automation, shifting the account manager’s role in both practice and strategy. The granular control and transparency we once took for granted are rapidly disappearing. As 2026 approaches, it’s time to face reality – five PPC tactics are falling out of favor in the new era of automation. 1. Relying on phrase match keywords Once the go-to option for advertisers who weren’t ready for a broad match strategy but wanted to expand search volume, phrase match has recently fallen out of favor. Google continues to redefine how match types work. Because Smart Bidding and broad match rely on multiple i…

Google’s pitch for AI-powered bidding is seductive. Feed the algorithm your conversion data, set a target, and let it optimize your campaigns while you focus on strategy. Machine learning will handle the rest. What Google doesn’t emphasize is that its algorithms optimize for Google’s goals, not necessarily yours. In 2026, as Smart Bidding becomes more opaque and Performance Max absorbs more campaign types, knowing when to guide the algorithm – and when to override it – has become a defining skill that separates average PPC managers from exceptional ones. AI bidding can deliver spectacular results, but it can also quietly destroy profitable campaigns …