SEO Tools and Resources

It’s frustrating. You put time, energy, and a lot of hope into a webpage. But it just won’t rank. Your competitors’ pages are ranking well, even though (subjectively) they’re worse. Yours deserves to be top of Google. So, why isn’t it? Figuring out the levers to pull to get your content to the top of Google isn’t quick, but it can be done. Identifying the problem The key to identifying why your page isn’t ranking is to systematically rule out the other possibilities. For this, you’ll need data, industry context, and a methodical approach. Firstly, you need to verify if the page is not ranking at all versus not ranking well. This is key. If a pa…

Whether they’re digital natives or prefer traditional channels, today’s customers share one expectation: relevance, wherever and however they engage. But for organizations balancing privacy mandates, data governance, and legacy systems, delivering that kind of personalization at scale is no small feat. Join Adobe for Secure, Scalable Omnichannel Engagement—For the Most Demanding Industries and get an inside look at how leading organizations in complex industries are evolving from fragmented messaging to seamless, secure, and scalable cross-channel experiences. In this session, you’ll learn: How to architect personalized journeys across touchpoints without…

Google officially announced AI Max, a new suite of automation features for Search campaigns – and the PPC community is buzzing. While Google positions AI Max as an optional, performance-enhancing setting, many advertisers are parsing the announcement carefully, trying to separate the substance from the spin. From excitement about creative automation to concerns about keywordless targeting, reactions span the spectrum. What is AI Max? Google says: not a revolution, but an evolution First things first: what is AI Max? According to Jyll Saskin Gales, a former Googler who spoke directly with the product team: “AI Max for Search campaigns is a bundle o…

Jerry Dischler, the former Google executive who was in charge of Google Ads is now leaving the company right before his 20th year work anniversary. Dischler in November 2023 stepped down as the ad boss, during the height of the DOJ Google anti-trust case. What Dischler said. Jerry Dischler announced today that it would be his last day at Google. He posted a message on LinkedIn. He said, “After nearly 20 years, I’ve decided to leave Google, and today is my last day.” Here is the full post: After nearly 20 years, I’ve decided to leave Google, and today is my last day. Google is a remarkable company and I’m proud of the incredible things we’ve accomplished in …

Inside most enterprise organizations, SEO isn’t just battling Google’s AI Overviews. It’s battling its own structural weaknesses that are bleeding SEO revenue drier than Google’s AI would have otherwise. Yes, traffic is down. Yes, the economy is squeezing budgets. But SEO revenue doesn’t have to be down this much. Across the companies I work with, one pattern is clear: Internal execution gaps are quietly amplifying losses beyond what external market shifts actually dictate. Even in 2025 – the era of declining clicks, AI Overviews, and tougher competition – companies are leaking more SEO performance than the market alone would force them to lose…

There’s an ongoing debate in the PPC community about whether ad strength is a metric worth measuring or optimizing for. While Google states that ad strength doesn’t directly influence ad serving eligibility, it’s often treated as a proxy for ad quality – up to a point. Understanding ad strength Google’s ad strength metric is designed to guide advertisers in creating higher-quality ads. Google wants to show the best combination of headlines and descriptions for every user. This ensures high ad relevancy and more clicks (revenue) for Google. Ads are rated from Poor to Excellent, and Google offers recommendations on how to improve your score. G…

Content marketing is everywhere. We do keyword research, analyse markets, and publish landing pages and blog posts. The goal? To attract clicks, convert users, and climb the rankings. But what happens when that stops working? The internet is drowning in generic, AI-generated material. Search is becoming ambient, answer-led, and keyword-less. And search engines no longer need to crawl or rank your site to serve users. In fact, they’d often prefer not to. In these ‘solved query spaces’, answers are synthesised. Content is commodified. The old tactics don’t work anymore. If we want to reach and influence audiences, we need a new approach. We must st…

Google officially announced the deprecation of Structured Data Files (SDF) v7. The legacy version will be sunset on Nov. 4. Key changes post-deprecation. SDF v7 will no longer be supported; the default version will shift to v7.1 for all users. Any sdfdownloadtasks.create API requests referencing SDF_VERSION_7 will return a 400 error after November 4. Why we care. Advertisers and partners using SDF v7 must migrate to v7.1 or higher before the deadline to avoid service disruptions in Display & Video 360 workflows. What to do. Review the v7.1 release notes to understand differences from v7 and plan your migration. Need help? Use Google’s new Display & Vid…

Google said it is now able to catch 20 times the number of scammy pages within Google Search than it was previously. Google also said that it reduced the number of bad actors on the web impersonating airline customer service providers by more than 80% within Google Search. Google credits its AI and improved classifiers for these changes. The numbers. Google gave these two stats when it comes to improving the safety of the Google Search results: Google Search can “catch 20-times the number of scammy pages” Google Search has reduced fake phone number “scams by more than 80% in Search” AI and classifier improvements. Google credits these improvements to i…

Google Analytics real time reporting may be off this morning, at least based on a number of reports we are hearing about since earlier this morning. If you are noticing unusually low real-time counts in GA4, you are not alone. More details. I reported about the issue earlier today on the Search Engine Roundtable, quoting a number of complaints on social: Seeing this right now. Either the bottom just dropped out on traffic, or it's an Analytics issue. — wordmetrics (@wordmetrics) May 8, 2025 Looks like GA4 is on a coffee break today! Hope they get back to work soon. Not alone in this! — Chandan Kumar (@ImChandanKumar) May 8, 2025 Again real time numbers …

Google’s web crawlers have come a long way in recent years in their ability to fetch and execute JavaScript. However, JavaScript integration remains tricky when setting up the front end of a web app. It requires extra network calls and processing time to load content, which increases browser CPU usage and page load times. A web app that relies entirely on client-side JavaScript can still exceed the capacity of Google’s Web Rendering Service (WRS), making it difficult for Googlebot to crawl and index content. JavaScript is still the backbone of the web – the only language that can run natively in the browser. At the same time, the rise of large langu…

Coding websites was my personal Everest in college, when I first started to learn WordPress to help my dad build his domain portfolio. He had registered thousands of domains while flipping through the dictionary in the early ‘90s, and if I had AI capabilities back then, I’d be retired by now. Alas, we’re finally living the future. Last week, I individually built 12 landing pages in two days using Cursor, an AI-powered code editor that allows you to generate and edit landing pages using simple prompts, no hand-coding required. What used to take me a marketing manager, copywriter, designer, developer, and weeks of production, was suddenly handled in a fr…

My SEO colleagues have a tall task on their hands, one that grows taller by the day as AI-powered search proliferates: compensating for eroding website traffic. Yes, I’m talking about zero-click search, which is taking root across AI search and LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini – and the AI Overviews creeping into more traditional SERPs. A recent report featured in these pages cites an organic SERP CTR drop between .64% and 1.41%. The smart money is on that CTR dropping as zero-click search behavior gains momentum. (Though recent Semrush data showed zero-click behavior declined slightly.) I would also bet on Google finding more ways to minimize th…

Google is investigating a data discrepancy issue affecting Google Ad Manager and Data Transfer reports stemming from an incident that began on May 2 at 14:00 UTC. The details. Users can still access the platforms, but reports for May 2 between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC may be incomplete. A filtration issue appears to have caused some data to be excluded from both Ad Manager reports and Data Transfer files. Discrepancies are possible between the two data sources. Why we care. Publishers may notice missing or inconsistent data in reports and Data Transfer files generated during a critical one-hour window, potentially affecting revenue tracking and campaign analysis. W…

Searches on Apple’s Safari browser declined for the first time last month, and Apple’s senior vice president of services Eddy Cue blamed AI. “That has never happened in 22 years,” according to Cue. “People are using AI,” Cue testified Wednesday during the DOJ’s antitrust trial against Google, calling it a fundamental shift that’s eating into traditional search’s dominance. AI search rising. Apple is exploring a revamp of Safari to prioritize AI-powered search engines, Cue testified. AI search tools like OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic are being seriously evaluated, though they aren’t yet ready to be defaults, Cue said. “There is much greater potential. T…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is upending the economic engine of the web, and Google is at the center of the disruption, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. What Prince said. In a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Prince said: “AI is going to fundamentally change the business model of the web. The business model of the web for the last 15 years has been search… search drives everything that happens online.” The Google tipping point. Google’s value exchange with content creators has collapsed, Prince said: “Ten years ago… for every two pages of a website that Google scraped, they would send you one visitor. … That was the trad…

Google is getting worse – or at least, that’s what “we” say. The common complaint: Search is dying, SEO is trash, and Google is nearly unusable. X, LinkedIn, and Reddit are awash with complaints about deteriorating search quality. The contradicting reality: Search remains the dominant channel for web traffic. Google still holds 90% of the search market, grew 20% year over year, and processes 5 trillion searches annually. If it were truly broken, wouldn’t we have left by now? The complex truth: Poet John Keats described “negative capability” as the ability to hold conflicting ideas without demanding a simple answer. That’s whe…

Keyword research is one of the most important tasks for both SEOs and paid search practitioners. While there are plenty of robust tools on the market, Google Ads Keyword Planner is a great, free starting point. You can explore keywords, see their search volume, and even get an idea of potential costs – all without spending a dime on ads. In this article, I’ll answer key questions, including: Where can I find Keyword Planner in Google Ads? Should I start with keywords or start with a website? What does a “keyword” mean in Keyword Planner? How can I use Keyword Planner to plan my Search campaigns? Should I pick high volume or low volume keyword…

As AI-driven search engines rewrite the rules of content visibility, one thing is clear: optimization isn’t dead — it’s evolving. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity AI don’t just retrieve web pages; they synthesize answers. And your content? It only gets included if it’s clear, relevant, and easy to extract. The good news? If you’re already using the Yoast SEO plugin, you have some of the most critical tools for this new era baked right into your workflow. Table of contents Learn how to structure content for AI What AI search wants from your content The Flesch Reading Ease score is more important than ever Don’t ignore those g…

BigQuery is one of the most underutilized tools in PPC. While data professionals have been leveraging data warehousing and Structured Query Language (SQL) for years, many PPC specialists still rely on in-platform reporting and third-party tools such as Optmyzr and TrueClicks. But with Google’s evolving data limitations, increased automation, and the growing importance of first-party data, mastering BigQuery is becoming a game-changer for paid search experts. What is BigQuery? BigQuery is Google’s fully managed, serverless data warehouse that lets you store and analyze massive datasets using SQL. Unlike Google Ads, Google Analytics 4, or Google Search …

AI Overviews are no longer an experiment – they’re live, prominent, and already changing how people interact with Google Search. For content creators and marketers, that means traditional SEO strategies are under new pressure. When Google answers a query before users scroll, visibility no longer depends just on rankings. It hinges on whether your content is selected, cited, or even needed. This shift calls for more than short-term tweaks. It demands a rethinking of how SEO works both now and in the future. So, what can you do when AI Overviews take the spotlight in search? How to stay visible when Google’s AI Overview answers first When AI Overviews…

Want to supercharge your customer acquisition efforts? Join industry-leading experts as they share their acquisition strategies at Acxiom’s exclusive Accelerate Acquisition event, May 14 at The Ritz-Carlton New York, NoMad. Connect with top marketers and enjoy an afternoon learning proven strategies designed to boost your customer acquisition programs. The agenda includes: Guiding principles marketers need to know to better understand and engage customers How a top retailer used Adobe Customer Journey Analytics to improve customers’ experience Multi-touch strategies you can use today to increase response rates Stick around for cocktails at the stunni…

Looking to do more with your first-party data? Behavioral marketing offers a powerful, privacy-conscious way to deepen customer engagement and improve performance. This guide from Acoustic breaks down seven proven strategies to help you collect, activate, and apply behavioral insights across the funnel. Whether you’re refining B2B nurture journeys or scaling cross-channel personalization, these tactics can help you shift from guesswork to real-time relevance. You’ll learn: How to build a cohesive first-party data strategy Why behavioral signals are the key to closing visibility gaps How AI and machine learning unlock smarter targeting and content Why ret…

The U.S. Department of Justice is calling for Google to break up its digital advertising empire after a federal judge ruled the tech giant had illegally maintained monopoly power in the ad exchange market. Driving the news. In a court filing on Sunday, the DOJ said Google should divest its AdX exchange, where ad inventory is bought and sold. It should also sell its DFP platform, used by publishers to manage and serve ads. The sales would be overseen by a court-appointed trustee, who would find buyers and monitor compliance. Why we care. The DOJ’s proposal to force Google to sell off AdX and DFP strikes at the core of Google’s multibillion-dollar ad tech stack. A s…

ChatGPT announced the addition of shopping features to search last week. But how exactly is ChatGPT search choosing products and ranking them? Here’s what you need to know from OpenAI’s documentation. How product results are selected. When ChatGPT detects shopping intent in a query, it selects products based on a mix of the following: User intent and context Based on the user’s current query (e.g., “funny dog costumes”). May include saved memory (e.g., past dislikes, such as “clowns”). May factor in custom instructions (e.g., preferences like “I want affordable options”). Structured third-party data. Product metadata such as: Price. Product des…