SEO Tools and Resources

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 …

Search campaigns often see strong early gains — more visibility, traffic, and conversions. But that growth doesn’t last forever. At some point, performance stalls, whether it shows up as a plateau, volatility, or rising costs. That slowdown isn’t necessarily a failure. More often, it signals limits in demand, targeting, conversion, or execution — the challenge is figuring out which one. Search performance doesn’t stay linear, and once early wins are exhausted, quick gains become harder to find. When growth stalls, the instinct is to do more — launch campaigns, publish content, increase spend. But without understanding the constraint, that effort can miss the mark.…

Many search teams are seeing better rankings, more visibility, increased traffic, and more leads. Yet feedback on pipeline, revenue, and sales outcomes isn’t showing the same positive results. When SEO KPIs are green and graphs are up and to the right, business outcomes don’t always reflect the same success. Why strong search performance doesn’t translate to business outcomes Search performance can look healthy on the surface while breaking down in places search teams don’t own or fully see. It’s tempting to turn immediately to attribution models, data quality, or KPI definitions. Ultimately, the issue is often how performance breaks down after th…

Content has long been the fuel for SEO, and its importance continues as AI-driven search relies on rich, trustworthy information. I’ve always believed in doing the “good” and “right” things when it comes to creating content at scale – but even good things can become problems when overdone. Too often, SEO and AI visibility efforts get reduced to publishing more blogs, landing pages, or articles in the pursuit of quick wins that executives want to see. While content is critical, treating SEO as a production machine creates the illusion of progress. Activity without performance bloats sites with duplicative, commoditized, or low-value pages that both search…

Privacy laws are tightening, browser extensions are blocking data, and ad platforms are demanding cleaner data. As a result, how you track user behavior online is changing fast. Server-side tagging can help you reduce data loss while collecting cleaner, privacy-compliant data. Here’s what server-side tagging is, when it makes sense to implement it, and our experience with providers like Elevar and Littledata. What is server-side tagging? Traditionally, tracking scripts like Meta Pixel or Google Analytics run in the browser. This is client-side (browser-side) tagging. With server-side tagging, those scripts run on a server you control instead of the visitor’…

Google’s AI Overviews frequently surface affiliate content without sending traffic or clicks back to publishers. The good news for publishers is that affiliate businesses do not need to rely on Google alone. To kick off the new year, here are other sources of traffic and ways to diversify income while sticking to what you do and love. These are strategies I help partners with regularly. This article was inspired by a podcast conversation about whether this was the end of affiliate marketing. It isn’t. Affiliate marketing is more than Google, and it will continue to thrive. Skool and educational platforms Skool and similar platforms let you launch a…

In long sales cycles, a lot of what happens after lead submission involves people. When you optimize campaigns to final sales, you’re teaching the ad platform to respond to how well the sales team performed that month rather than lead quality, and that’s a problem no amount of campaign changes will fix. The common advice is to “optimize the full funnel” (i.e., track media spend to revenue, optimize campaigns to sales, etc.). But beyond lead capture, most of what drives sales has little to do with your paid media. It’s about who’s on the sales team, how busy they are, and dozens of other factors you can’t influence through targeting or creative. When your sales tea…

Branded search is often treated as predictable and easy to manage. In practice, it isn’t. PPC teams see rising CPC on brand terms. SEO teams see declining branded CTR, even when rankings hold. These issues are usually investigated separately, with different dashboards, hypotheses, and fixes. Both signals often stem from changes within a single SERP. What look like two separate problems are, in reality, one shared environment reacting to shifts in competition and visibility. The issue isn’t a lack of data. Most teams already have basic reports and brand monitoring tools, including PPC and SEO platforms. The problem is how the data is used. To understand wh…

When technical issues hold your SEO program back, progress stalls. Yet technical SEO remains a top priority for leading SEOs and Google, and a key factor correlated with rankings in Backlinko’s 2026 Google ranking factors report. One of the biggest hurdles for in-house SEO programs is the lack of resources to implement changes to the website. Up to 67% of respondents cite non-SEO dev tasks as the biggest reason technical SEO changes can’t be made, according to Aira’s State of Technical SEO Report. This is costing businesses an additional $35.9 million in potential revenue each year, seoClarity estimates. When you can’t do everything, focus on the techn…

Most of what people are calling “AI SEO” right now is just legacy SEO with new buzzwords. AI SEO is different. When you look at how AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Mode actually source and compress information, there are things you can do that literally did not exist in the Google 10-blue-links world. This article walks through those AI SEO-only tactics, backed with real data, not wishful thinking. The context: clicks are collapsing, but answers are not You already feel this in your numbers. A few facts to anchor the conversation: Studies on Google’s AI Overviews showed click-through rates to top organic results drop by roughly 30 to …

Most SEO discussions today center on AI — from AI Overviews to ChatGPT and other LLMs — and the concern that they’re taking traffic from business websites, forcing a shift toward GEO or AEO. For the most part, that concern is valid. AI is reducing traffic for many sites, especially those that rely on top-of-funnel, informational content. But the data suggests AI may not be the biggest shift. User behavior has been fragmenting across platforms for years, and I see this play out in agency work every day. Here’s what the data shows about how search behavior is changing across platforms, and why a “search everywhere” strategy matters more than focusing on LLMs alo…

In 2025, the SEO industry debated whether AI required a strategy shift. In 2026, we are still debating, but we are moving further into the testing and execution phase. To navigate the new search landscape, we have to kill the channel silo and let the SEO team act as the strategic quarterback for brand authority. Organic search has always been a treasure trove of insights into consumer behavior, platform changes, brand presence, and organic influence. Right now, LLMs are binging on a diet of earned media. Press releases, social media content, UGC, your website, your retailers’ sites, YouTube videos, and Reddit threads all have a huge influence on th…

Many PPC advertisers obsess over click-through rates, using them as a quick measure of ad performance. But CTR alone doesn’t tell the whole story – what matters most is what happens after the click. That’s where many campaigns go wrong. The problem with chasing high CTRs Most advertisers think the ad with the highest CTR is often the best. It should have a high Quality Score and attract lots of clicks. However, in most cases, lower CTR ads usually outperform higher CTR ads in terms of total conversions and revenue. If all I cared about was CTR, then I could write an ad: “Free money.” “Claim your free money today.” “No strings attached.” …

Most business owners assume that if an ad is approved by Google or Meta, it is safe. The thinking is simple: trillion-dollar platforms with sophisticated compliance systems would not allow ads that expose advertisers to legal risk. That assumption is wrong, and it is one of the most dangerous mistakes an advertiser can make. The digital advertising market operates on a legal double standard. A federal law known as Section 230 shields platforms from liability for third-party content, while strict liability places responsibility squarely on the advertiser. Even agencies have a built-in defense. They can argue that they relied on your data or instructi…

Now that anyone can use AI to generate keywords and spin up a paid search campaign in minutes, it’s easy to assume the hard work is done. But creating structured, scalable performance still requires a genuine understanding of how search works. Techniques like n-grams, Levenshtein distance, and Jaccard similarity give search marketers the ability to interpret messy search term data, apply client context, and build reliable frameworks that AI alone can’t produce. Here’s how. What n-grams reveal in PPC and SEO analysis Think of n-grams as the “n” words that make up a keyword. For example, in the term “private caregiver nearby,” we have: 3 unigrams (one …

GEO, AI SEO, AEO – call it what you like. The label doesn’t matter nearly as much as understanding the shift behind it. At the center of that shift lies one idea that explains everything: AI availability – and here’s why it matters. What is AI availability? The idea of AI availability comes from Byron Sharp, research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, who introduced it in a comment on one of my LinkedIn posts. Sharp’s work underpins modern brand science and shows that growth depends on availability. Brands grow through sales, and sales grow through two kinds of availability: mental and physical. Mental availability refers to the like…

Working as an office manager in my early 20s, I read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Many of its principles still hold true today, and they guided me through multiple career transitions. Success in most careers comes from our interactions with people – whether clients or coworkers. For years, those principles of human connection, combined with technical knowledge and expertise, helped digital marketers succeed. Agencies made sense of the machines for clients, and strong relationship-building allowed them to retain those clients over time. That model is now being challenged. As AI has become fully embedded in PPC platforms, the…

If you look at job postings on Indeed and LinkedIn, you’ll see a wave of acronyms added to the alphabet soup as companies try to hire people to boost visibility on large language models (LLMs). Some people are calling it generative engine optimization (GEO). Others call it answer engine optimization (AEO). Still others call it artificial intelligence optimization (AIO). I prefer large model answer optimization (LMAO). I find these new acronyms a bit ridiculous because while many like to think AI optimization is new, it isn’t. It’s just long-tail SEO — done the way it was always meant to be done. Why LLMs still rely on search Most LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude …

It used to be that Google searches opened up a world of questions. You searched, sifted through links, and came to your own conclusion. Today, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI platforms compress multiple sources into a single, synthesized response. In the process, nuance is flattened, and certain viewpoints can be overrepresented. This marks a fundamental shift in online reputation management. Search engines now shape the information they surface. The result is a rise in zero-click behavior, where users accept AI-generated answers without visiting underlying sources. For brands, that changes the stakes. Visibility no longer guarantees influence.…

When marketing history looks back on 2025, it will mark the year AI truly hit the road. Google has used AI in search for years – RankBrain, BERT, Smart Bidding, RSAs, Performance Max, etc. But this year, it’s everywhere. From boardrooms to one-person shops, everyone’s asking how to use it and avoid being left behind. Amid the noise, facts have blurred into hype. I’ve heard it repeatedly from new clients: “SEO is dead. Don’t talk to us about SEO – talk to us about AI.” Fittingly, in this spooky season, SEO has “died” more times than every horror villain combined – yet it always comes back. AI is a true game-changer, but the hype is louder than anyt…

The conversation has shifted. We’re spending less time optimizing for clicks and more time trying to fix the AI ROI story. AI now sits at the center of discovery, shaping what gets seen, summarized, and cited. Here’s what’s working right now, what your peers are doing, and why SMX Advanced will feel different this year. The SparkToro wake-up call: Influence happens everywhere The foundation of any serious 2026 content strategy has to start with Rand Fishkin’s landmark March 2026 study, “Influence Happens Everywhere,” an analysis of the 5,000 most-visited sites on both mobile and desktop. The finding that rattled the industry: while Google still commands 73…

As AI-powered SEO platforms evolve, they’re rewriting the economics of search engine optimization. This transformation threatens to upend the traditional agency model in three ways: Dramatically lower costs. Automate technical capabilities. Provide unbiased, data-driven decisions. Yet, this disruption might lead to industry consolidation and expansion as fewer but larger agencies emerge to serve an expanding market of SEO adopters. This article looks at how to survive the new agency economics. The economics of disruption Today’s SEO agency model typically involves monthly retainers ranging from $2,000 to $20,000, depending on the scope and co…

You’re facing a major shift as familiar manual targeting levers disappear in favor of AI-driven discovery. Platforms’ automated tools are collapsing campaign types, obscuring data, and replacing manual targeting with intent-based algorithms. This is a shift from selection to prediction. You won’t adapt by holding onto old controls — you’ll adapt by learning to engineer the inputs that replace them. Here’s how to make sure you have the tools to stay on top. The end of manual targeting as you knew it You previously relied on granular keyword lists, demographic filters, and custom exclusions to target ideal customers. You told platforms exactly who to target and p…

The shift away from fully keyword-targeted search campaigns has been building for years – but this week, it reached a tipping point. Two account managers on my team, each handling different clients in different industries, came to me with the same uneasy admission. They were leaning toward dropping some of their keyword search campaigns in favor of Performance Max. Not all of them. But some. These weren’t impulsive calls. They were data-backed decisions made after months of testing, optimization, and watching Performance Max consistently outperform keyword-targeted campaigns. Are we heading toward keywordless targeting? Not quite. But we’ve reac…

In an increasingly automated environment, paid search performance is constrained by a simple reality: Algorithms can only optimize toward the signals they’re given. Improving those signals remains the most reliable way to improve results. That sounds straightforward, but in practice, many people are still optimizing around signals that don’t reflect real business outcomes. Let’s dive into how algorithms function, how you can influence them, and where some people fail. How bidding algorithms actually work Modern bidding systems are often described as “black boxes,” suggesting they operate mysteriously. But that description isn’t helpful. At a high level…