SEO Tools and Resources

Managing budgets across multiple paid media channels is one of the most important skills in a PPC marketer’s toolkit. You’re constantly deciding how to allocate spend across channels and campaigns, how to handle big budget swings, and whether to set total or daily budgets. In an AI-driven ad platform world, campaign budgets remain one of the few levers marketers still fully control – and they deserve careful thought. Structuring your budget effectively Depending on your business model, you may have more or less input into the overall paid media budget. However, you usually have more control over how that budget gets broken out across channels and cam…

Link building is the practice of earning links from other websites to your own. These links act as signals of trust and authority for search engines, helping your pages rank higher in search results. Quality matters more than quantity. A few relevant, high-authority links are far more valuable than many low-quality ones. Modern link building focuses on creating genuinely useful content, building genuine relationships, and earning links naturally, rather than manipulating rankings. Table of contents What is link building? What is a link? Why do we build links ? How to earn high-quality links Link building in the era of AI and LLM search Examples of effective link bui…

Search has moved far beyond blue links and basic ranking signals. People now discover information on Google, TikTok, Pinterest, Amazon, YouTube, and an expanding layer of generative AI platforms that synthesize answers from trusted sources. As SERPs shift toward rich results and AI summaries, users often get what they need without needing to click at all. In this environment, brand authority isn’t just tied to your domain. It spans platforms, formats, and the systems that learn from your content. Modern off-page SEO must support both search engines and the AI models that evaluate and surface your expertise. This off-page optimization guide breaks down …

Cloudflare has blocked 416 billion AI bot requests for customers since July 1, according to CEO Matthew Prince. To highlight Google’s massive edge in AI, Prince revealed that Google can see 3.2x more pages on the web than OpenAI. Why we care. Generative AI systems are consuming huge amounts of web content, and many publishers have no way to push back. Cloudflare’s numbers show how aggressively AI bots are scraping the web – and how uneven access is for the big AI companies. Driving the news. Cloudflare customers have been automatically blocking AI crawlers since the company launched its pay-per-crawl initiative July 1, Prince said yesterday at WIRED’s Big Intervie…

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…

On episode 333 of PPC Live The Podcast, I speak to Nils Rooijmans, a renowned Google Ads script expert and top 10 PPC influencer, where she shares the experience of a costly error that serves as a valuable lesson for anyone managing paid search campaigns. The Setup: A quick account onboarding gone wrong The trouble began when one of Rooijmans’ existing clients acquired another company in the airport parking services industry. The acquired company was already running a small Google Ads account, and the client wanted Rooijmans to manage it without paying additional fees for proper onboarding. Against his better judgment, Rooijmans agreed to a compromise: they wou…

Google is quietly testing a new way to make Shopping ads feel more local. Select ads using local inventory feeds now display the merchant’s city or town directly above the product title — think “London” or “Tonbridge” — giving shoppers a clearer sense of where the store is based. Why we care. The new location labels make Shopping ads feel more local and trustworthy, helping nearby retailers stand out in crowded results. Clear city or town indicators can increase click-through rates and drive more in-store visits from shoppers who prefer buying close to home. It also gives merchants using local inventory feeds a competitive edge by highlighting proximity without n…

A report from AdWeek claimed Google privately told clients it plans to introduce ads in its Gemini AI chatbot in 2026 — but Google’s top ads executive is publicly denying it. Driving the news. AdWeek reported that Google reps, in recent calls with major advertisers, suggested that Gemini would get ad placements in 2026, separate from the company’s existing ads in AI Mode, the AI-powered search experience launched in March. Buyers said no prototypes, formats, or pricing were shown. The conversations were described as exploratory and lacked technical detail. Google says that’s wrong. Dan Taylor, Google’s VP of Global Ads, disputed the report directly on X, w…

LinkedIn is introducing new ad innovations designed to help B2B marketers strengthen brand awareness, personalize messaging, and accelerate creative workflows — all aimed at reaching potential buyers earlier in the funnel. What’s new: Reserved Ads give marketers front-row placement in the LinkedIn feed, ensuring premium visibility, predictable impressions, and a higher share of top-of-feed attention than competitors. The format works across Video, Thought Leader, Single Image, and Document Ads, letting brands maximize creative impact. Ad personalization allows messages to dynamically adjust using member profile data like first name, job title, industry, or com…

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…

For the past two years, we’ve been living in AI’s gold rush era. To borrow from Taylor Swift, think of it as the “Lover” phase where everything is shiny, new, and full of possibility. The behavior: Buy everything. The metric: Can it generate something cool? The vibe: Pure FOMO. But we’re entering a new era now. Call it the “Reputation” phase, which is darker, edgier, and entirely focused on receipts. A sign of this shift was in the headlines recently, blaring on about Microsoft lowering its AI sales targets. The hot takes rushed in to frame it as a disappointment, a slowdown, and even a sign that enterprise demand is cooling. They all misread the m…

Google Ads is rolling out new location targeting options for Demand Gen campaigns, bringing them in line with controls already available in Search. What’s new. Advertisers can now explicitly choose between Presence or interest and Presence only when setting up Demand Gen campaigns. The option is available directly in the campaign interface, eliminating the need for manual exclusions. Why we care. Until now, advertisers running Demand Gen had limited precision over geo-targeting. By making “presence only” targeting native to the campaign setup, Google removes a common workaround and the risk of accidental geo-leakage. The result is cleaner traffic, more accurat…

Broad match used to mean “more reach, less relevance.” Now it means more reach, with a machine learning layer deciding what relevance looks like. Google has been steadily steering advertisers toward fewer moving parts – fewer match types, fewer manual levers, and more automation. Making broad match the default for new Search campaigns in July 2024 was the clearest signal yet that this is the direction of travel. If you still think of broad match as “the loosest match type,” you will manage it like it is 2016. That is where the pain comes from: CPC inflation, irrelevant search terms, and leads that look fine in Google Ads but do not survive contact wi…

Microsoft Advertising rolled out asset-level editorial review, giving advertisers visibility into policy approvals for individual ad components — not just entire ads — and reducing delays caused by single non-compliant elements. What’s new. First announced in June, advertisers can now see headlines, descriptions, and images reviewed separately inside the Microsoft Advertising interface. If one asset violates policy, only that component is blocked, while compliant assets continue to serve. Why we care. This shift minimizes campaign disruption and speeds up approvals. Instead of rebuilding or resubmitting whole ads, advertisers can quickly identify and fix the e…

Google changed one of its most fundamental advertising rules on April 14, and some marketers didn’t even notice. Buried in a policy update to the Unfair Advantage section, Google announced that advertisers could now appear more than once on the same search results page, provided each ad appears in a different ad location. Simply put, a single advertiser can now occupy multiple positions on one SERP. The move was framed as a way to “increase fairness and improve user choice.” But for advertisers already battling rising CPCs, shrinking control, and an opaque auction, the change raises a much more uncomfortable question: How fair can an auction really be w…

Google is releasing some new ways to book your flights and hotels through AI Mode, plus new tools to plan your travel and find travel deals. These updates include Canvas in AI Mode for travel, flight deals rolling out globally, agentic booking for dinner reservations, flights and hotels. Some of these features are similar to the AI Shopping updates that Google announced last week. Agentic booking. Google in AI Mode can now not just recommend restaurants, hotels and flights but now also help you book them. We saw some of these features for reservations and events but that was while in Labs, opting into Labs is no longer required. Dinner reservations agentic …

For much of its history, marketing thrived on creativity, intuition and an almost magical ability to connect with audiences. Campaigns were conceived in brainstorming sessions, executed over weeks or months and celebrated (or dissected) once the results rolled in. Theodore Levitt’s “The Marketing Imagination” stays on most marketers’ bookcases alongside their team’s awards. Much of the technology we buy inside marketing is mostly isolated and gives fractal views of the customer, never a complete one and never of the customer in motion (with or without us). The one platform to solve it all has been the misnomer we have been hunting for but will never find. The promise…

Performance Max (PMax) campaigns have become the cornerstone of AI-driven advertising. Both Google and Microsoft offer advertisers a way to consolidate creative assets, audience signals, and automation into a single campaign type. (Disclosure: I work as Microsoft’s product liaison.) While the concept is similar across platforms, the execution and feature sets differ significantly. This article aims to provide an objective comparison of Google PMax and Microsoft PMax as of late 2025. We’ll explore what’s universally true, what’s unique to each platform, and strategic considerations for advertisers looking to maximize performance. What’s universally tr…

As shopping becomes more visually driven, imagery plays a central role in how people evaluate products. Images and videos can unfurl complex stories in an instant, making them powerful tools for communication. In ecommerce, they function as decision tools. Generative search systems extract objects, embedded text, composition, and style to infer use cases and brand fit, then LLMs surface the assets that best answer a shopper’s question. Each visual becomes structured data that removes a purchase objection, increasing discoverability in multimodal search contexts where customers take a photo or upload a screenshot to ask about it. Visual search i…

In the last 24 hours, ChatGPT and Perplexity have introduced new AI-driven shopping experiences that aim to deliver more personalized product discovery and guidance. Both experiences are meant to help users find, compare, and purchase products through conversational queries informed by preferences and past behavior. ChatGPT Shopping research. OpenAI introduced shopping research, a guided buying experience that turns ChatGPT into a personalized product researcher. Users describe what they need (e.g., “quiet cordless vacuum,” “compare these strollers,” “gift for my art-obsessed niece”). ChatGPT asks clarifying questions, pulls price/spec/review data from the…

SEO never stands still, and neither do we here at Yoast. In our November 2025 edition of the SEO Update by Yoast, our principal SEOs, Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss, broke down the latest shifts in search, structured data, and AI. Whether you’re running an e-commerce store, managing a content-heavy site, or just keeping up with Google’s ever-changing rules, this edition highlights what actually matters. Google updates Google is refining its search results, phasing out certain structured data features, including FAQ snippets and COVID-19 updates. But that doesn’t mean you should strip structured data from your site. It still plays a role behind the scenes, especiall…

Google Ads appears to be reviving — or reinventing — its old Website Optimizer, after new help docs quietly surfaced detailing a tool that would live directly inside the Google Ads interface. Driving the news. Several new Google support pages were spotted describing Website Optimizer, a tool expected to show up under the Reporting tab. While the name recalls the OG Website Optimizer from 2008 that later became Google Optimize (sunset in 2023), this version appears to be something new. How it works: The tool requires Google Ads access and admin permissions on the linked GA4 property. If an advertiser doesn’t have a GA4 property, Website Optimizer will autom…

Shopify is experiencing a major login outage on one of the peak shopping days of the holiday season, leaving merchants unable to access their dashboards, POS systems, mobile apps, or even contact Shopify Support. What’s happening. Shopify’s status page shows a series of escalating alerts beginning at 14:54 UTC, warning that merchants “may experience issues when trying to login.” Minutes later, the platform confirmed the outage affects POS, mobile logins, and support access. By 15:26 UTC, Shopify urged merchants to stay logged in on any devices that are currently active to avoid further complications. Why we care. A login outage during a top-tier sale…

Google withdrew its antitrust complaint against Microsoft after EU regulators opened a new probe into Azure under the bloc’s tough tech rules. Driving the news. Google pulled its 2024 complaint—centered on Microsoft’s allegedly anti-competitive cloud licensing practices—just as the European Commission launched fresh investigations into whether Azure and Amazon Web Services fall under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Google says the withdrawal doesn’t mean it’s backing down. What they’re saying. “We filed our antitrust complaint…to give voice to our customers and partners,” said Giorgia Abeltino, Google Cloud Europe’s head of public policy. She added that Google stil…

Gemini 3 launched in AI Mode just a couple of weeks ago, but now Google is expanding it to about 120 countries and territories for English queries. Google’s Robby Stein said, “Gemini 3 is now available in AI Mode, across nearly 120 countries & territories in English.” What is AI Mode with Gemini 3. Google shared how AI Mode in Search is now using Gemini 3 to enable new generative UI experiences like immersive visual layouts and interactive tools and simulations, all generated completely on the fly based on your query. Gemini 3 is used in AI Mode in Search with more complex reasoning and new dynamic experiences. Just last week, Google automatically began u…