SEO Tools and Resources

If you’ve played around with audience targeting in a Demand Gen or Video campaign lately, you may have thought to yourself, “Um… does something look different here?!” It’s not just you. Audience Builder is the new workflow for audience targeting in Demand Gen and Video campaigns, and audience signals in Performance Max campaigns. This isn’t just a cosmetic change. Audience Builder brings different capabilities than those you may be used to. This Audience Builder breakdown will cover: What is Audience Builder in Google Ads? How is Audience Builder different from the old audiences workflow? Audience Targeting vs Audience Signals with Audience Bu…

Most PPC marketers still default to static landing pages, whether it’s one catch-all page or a growing library of customized versions. You might already have dozens of static pages built for different campaigns, audiences, and offers. This is a proven approach: Create a page. Personalize it. Launch it. Optimize it. Repeat. The question isn’t whether to customize – it’s whether managing 60 static pages is more effective than running 12 dynamic ones that adapt in real time. Dynamic landing pages offer a different solution by adapting headlines, calls to action, visuals, and offers based on signals from the campaign itself. In theory, this…

A strong Google review strategy is one of the most effective – and accessible – ways to boost your local SEO. Unlike other ranking signals that may feel out of reach, reviews are something business owners can actively influence. And their impact is only growing. Google reviews play a major role in map pack rankings, and yet many businesses still underestimate just how much they matter. By consistently earning new, high-quality reviews and keeping the momentum going, you can dramatically improve your local visibility and stay competitive in your market. Learn how to build and manage a Google review strategy that works in 2025 – helping your business grow,…

Google started rolling out new image optimization tools for Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. The feature, first announced last month, gives Google’s AI more control over how images appear in your ads. The shift to default-on image enhancements signals deeper AI involvement in creative decisions, potentially affecting ad look, feel, and performance without advertiser awareness. What’s new: Image Enhancements: Google’s AI can now automatically reformat uploaded images, adjusting layout and style to drive better results. Landing Page Images: PMax may pull visuals directly from your website to dynamically populate ad creatives. Between the lines. If y…

The U.S. Department of Justice has released several new trial exhibits as part of the ongoing remedies hearing. These exhibits include interviews with two key Google engineers – Pandu Nayak and HJ Kim – which offer insights into Google’s ranking signals and systems, search features, and the future of Google. Key Google search ranking system terminology Nayak defined some key Google terminology and explained Google’s search structure: Document: What Google calls a webpage, or its stored version. Signals: How Google ranks documents that ultimately generate the SERP (search engine results pages). Google talked about using predictive signals from machine lear…

Google is rolling out a new feature in Google Business Profiles named “What’s Happening.” This feature offers restaurants and bars a new way to highlight events, deals, and specials prominently at the top of your Google Business Profile. Google said, “What’s Happening” puts your timely updates, like “Today’s Special” or “Live Music on Saturday,” front and center!” What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of this feature in action: Eglibility. To be eligible to appear in this new space, share What’s Happening at your business via Google Posts or connect your Facebook, Instagram and/ or X profiles to your Google Business Profiles for automatic syncing. …

Google is facing a legal reckoning across Europe, with at least €12 billion ($12.9B) in damages sought by price comparison sites who say the tech giant abused its dominance in search to siphon traffic and revenue. The civil suits stem from the EU’s landmark 2017 decision to fine Google €2.4B for antitrust violations related to its shopping service. With that ruling upheld, plaintiffs now only need to prove financial harm – not the legal wrongdoing itself – opening the door to massive payouts. Driving the news. A Bloomberg review identified 12 active civil suits in seven EU countries. Nine of the cases have disclosed claims totaling more than €12B. The lawsuits com…

For years, SEO professionals have obsessed over rankings. What position are we in? Did we move up or down? Can we get back to Position 1? But as AI-driven search continues to reshape how information is retrieved and delivered, we need to ask a different question: Are we relevant enough to be included at all? I still remember the first time I dropped from Position 1 to 7 for a major keyword – I literally sat on the floor and sobbed. Back then, rankings weren’t just about traffic – they were validation. If Google said you were the best, it was so. Everyone believed it. Holding that top spot meant everything. Losing it – even by a few places – fel…

In the world of Google Ads, profitability remains the ultimate goal, driving PPC advertisers to constantly refine bidding strategies. In recent years, value-based bidding (VBB) has helped businesses optimize for high-value actions. But the economic pressures of 2025 – marked by volatile markets and shrinking margins – demand a sharper focus: profit-based bidding (PBB). In a climate where every dollar counts, relying solely on conversion value may no longer be enough. Are your current strategies aligned with actual profit, or are you still optimizing for actions that don’t fully support your bottom line? While many advertisers embrace VBB, a crucial q…

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a bold claim about the future of advertising in a recent interview (emphasis mine): “You’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.” Zuckerberg paints an interesting future. But it’s not quite reality. Meta Ads’ AI isn’t replacing digital marketers anytime soon. Still, its best practices – from automation to targeting –…

By now, most marketers have at least dabbled with generative AI (GenAI) tools and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. They’ve heard that their competitors are using the technology to practically create entire campaigns with the push of a button. And they’re aware that AI is reshaping marketing and perhaps are both excited and a little worried about what the future will bring. To date, much of the early conversation about putting AI into production at scale has centered on the need for good prompt engineering — the ability to ask the right questions of this powerful technology. We’ve been told our successful use of the technology hinges on thi…

Calling it “inevitable,” Google executives expect Search to lose traffic to Gemini or rival AI answer engine ChatGPT, according to an internal document from October. Why we care. Google generated nearly $200 billion in revenue from Search in 2024. However, Google launched many new AI features and products (e.g., AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini) in the past two years that have radically changed search as we’ve known it for more than two decades. Now it’s confirmed that Google executives think it’s “inevitable” that Google will lose search traffic due to AI. ChatGPT’s impact. An internal summary of takeaways from a meeting with top execs – including Liz Reid, Vidhya S…

The newly released Dotdigital Global Benchmark Report 2025 reveals a surprising trend: email volumes rose 23.9% year-over-year, and engagement metrics improved alongside them. Click-through rates doubled. Click-to-open rates jumped by 50%. Unsubscribes remained low at just 0.13%. The report analyzes billions of cross-channel interactions across industries, offering marketing teams rare insight into how leading brands are outperforming. With smarter segmentation, deeper personalization, and multi-channel orchestration, the data suggests that more can indeed mean better—when it’s done right. Why It Matters For digital marketers, ops leads, and marketing direc…

Google is facing a potential €2.97 billion ($3.3 billion) antitrust lawsuit in Italy, accusing the tech giant of stifling competition through anticompetitive practices. The lawsuit, filed by Moltiply Group, claims Google used its dominance in the search engine market to undermine the growth of its rival price comparison platform, Trovaprezzi.it, operated by Moltiply subsidiary 7Pixel. Key allegations. Moltiply argues that between 2010 and 2017, Google prioritized its own Google Shopping service over competitors, suppressing other comparison websites’ visibility. The lawsuit leans on a significant 2017 ruling by the European Court of Justice, which fined Goo…

Google has released a detailed Q&A for advertisers to clarify how its new AI Max tool works, addressing key questions around performance, control, and automation in search advertising. With the rollout of AI Max, a suite of ad tools powered by generative AI and search intelligence, the company is pitching it as the future of automated, performance-driven search advertising. What it does AI Max uses Google AI to: Match your ads with more relevant searches – even ones you aren’t bidding on. Customize ad copy dynamically based on user intent. Send users to your most relevant landing pages automatically. Questions asked by advertisers, answered b…

Users who arrive on websites from LLMs are generally less likely to engage than those from traditional organic search. That’s according to a new study published today by Dan Taylor of SALT.agency. This new data seems to challenge claims by Google and Microsoft Bing that citations from AI search results result in higher-quality clicks. Why we care. It’s good to know that SEO remains a valuable channel. But it’s not good to know that search engines seem to be making fallacious statements to the entire community, all to support their “AI is the best thing ever” narrative. By the numbers. In most sectors, organic traffic outperforms LLM referrals in driving engage…

Google updated its Google image SEO best practices help document to recommend that you use the same image file name URL for the same image, even if you place that same image on different pages on your site. Google said you should do this to save with your site’s overall crawl budget. What Google changed. Google added the following two lines to the Google image SEO best practices help document: “If an image is referenced on multiple pages within a larger website, consider the site’s overall crawl budget. In particular, consistently reference the image with the same URL, so that Google can cache and reuse the image without needing to request it multiple times.”…

A little over a year ago, I wrote an article titled “The future of SEO in an AI-powered world.” I wanted my opening line to be dramatic, so I wrote “The Google interface we know today will be gone in less than three years.” At the time, this line sounded outlandish. Could the world’s most popular website, with close to 2.5 billion daily users, just vanish? It’s a year later, and I find myself overwhelmingly turning to LLMs over Google for all kinds of information. In my case, the prediction of three years was an understatement. I suspect the same is true of many of you reading this. Is Google dead? Not quite. To paraphrase Mark Twain, news of Go…

As AI-generated answers take over the search landscape, understanding what gets cited – and why – has never been more critical. Explore citation data across leading AI engines, see how B2B and B2C intent shapes visibility, and learn actionable SEO tactics to help your brand get found. This analysis is powered by Rankscale.ai, a platform tracking AI query visibility across the web. Why care where AI results come from? Understanding how generative AI engines cite their sources is crucial for effective SEO today. Visibility in responses from ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews hinges on getting your brand mentioned in the cont…

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…