SEO Tools and Resources

Watch this video on YouTube Ginny Marvin didn’t get into PPC because she had a grand plan. She got into it because she was ready to start again. After years working in print publishing and ad sales marketing, Marvin found herself at a career pivot point. A startup magazine she had helped launch folded, and she decided it was time to move fully into digital. That meant going from marketing director to entry-level applicant. “I don’t know what I’m doing, so I’ll start from the beginning,” she recalled. That reset eventually led her into search marketing, Search Engine Land, and later Google, where she is now Google Ads Liaison. In this inte…

Understanding the ins and outs of paid media can seem like an overwhelming process when you’re first entering the field. As AI has rapidly changed ad platforms in recent years, keeping up can feel challenging. Thankfully, you’re not alone. You’re part of a supportive industry with a wealth of content and knowledge to share. Here are seven tips to help you learn and become a more confident PPC manager. 1. Be curious Curiosity is foundational to growth in PPC. You’ll learn best by taking initiative to understand ad platforms, how campaigns are structured, and what options are available on the backend. Of course, be careful about tweaking settings you’re not famil…

For 20 years, Google Ads management has followed the same basic model: you log in, review performance, make changes, and hope they work before the next check-in. Agencies, freelancers, and in-house teams all work this way, even as the tools have changed. Spreadsheets gave way to scripts, and scripts gave way to automated bidding, but the core loop never changed — someone still had to sit in the account. groas aims to change that model by introducing a system designed to automate campaign execution end-to-end. Our company announced today it has developed a fully end-to-end autonomous system that’s designed to match or exceed PPC performance benchmarks observed…

OpenAI is beginning to show ads in ChatGPT to users who aren’t logged in — a move that could significantly increase available inventory as demand from advertisers grows. What’s happening. Early reports suggest ads are now appearing seamlessly within conversations for unauthenticated users, even though OpenAI hasn’t formally announced the change. The ads are integrated into chat responses rather than displayed as traditional banners. Why we care. By expanding ads to logged-out users, OpenAI increases available inventory, making it easier to spend budgets and reach more high-intent users. If this continues, ChatGPT could quickly become a more viable and competit…

Whether you lead a scaling brand or an established global enterprise, you already know the frustration. You’re watching massive digital budgets yield diminishing returns, while agile disruptors consistently beat you to the punch. When you audit the citations within AI Overviews, ChatGPT responses, and Claude summaries, the reality is stark. Smaller, faster competitors are claiming more of the most lucrative, bottom-of-funnel commercial queries. It’s time to challenge the outdated assumption that legacy domain authority is enough to protect your pipeline. We’ve entered an era where operational agility often beats legacy brand equity. AI models demand rapid, mac…

One of the most dependable ways to grow organic visibility was to publish more content. Expanding into the long tail and creating pages around different variations of a topic often led to steady traffic growth. Many SEO teams still operate with this mindset. Content calendars are built around search volume targets, and growth is often equated with how much new content is produced. The problem is the results no longer reflect the effort. In many cases, adding more pages doesn’t lead to increased visibility and can even dilute overall performance. Large content libraries are harder to maintain, compete internally, and often result in fewer pages surfacing in search …

Wil Reynolds, founder and CEO of Seer Interactive, is challenging SEOs to rethink what success looks like in a world increasingly shaped by AI. In his SEO Week session, “SEO is a performance channel, GEO isn’t. How do you pivot?”, Reynolds said many marketers are focused on the wrong outcomes — and producing work that people don’t believe. Marketing isn’t just about being seen Reynolds opened by pushing back on the idea that visibility alone is the goal of marketing. “Marketing was never just to be seen or be visible,” he said. “You had to turn that visibility into something — believing something about your brand… And then they ultimately have to choose you…

Every brand holds its claims, and somewhere in the archive of its digital life, there’s proof to back them up. The AI assistive engine (the systems behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews) holds that proof too, scattered across its training data and retrieval index, alongside competitors’ claims. The audience has a need but no vocabulary to bridge the gap between what they want and what the brand or the engine already knows. All three lack the same thing: a frame, the interpretive context that turns scattered information into a narrative worth transmitting (for the brand), citing (for AI), and acting on (for the user). This is where the claim…

Google updated its spam report page for the second time in the past week or so, this time to say that if you include personally identifying information, the spam report will not be processed or used. This comes just a week after Google said that information would be used and passed along to the reported site. What changed. Google posted on its spam report page a new highlight box which says two points: (1) Don’t include personally identifying information in your spam report. (2) If you do include personally identifying information, then Google won’t process your submission. The text block reads: “Don’t include any personally identifying information i…

Take a look at your SEO to-do list. Most of it is probably the same rote, repetitive tasks. Turning everyday work into faster, easier outputs is easier than ever with AI. Besides obvious tasks like note-taking and team reminders, you can automate tasks such as content audits, page outlines, and keyword research. Start with simple strategies to save time on the repetitive work you do every day, then expand into using AI tools for automation. Always do a final check yourself, rather than trusting 100% of your work to LLMs, which rarely get things exactly right. Identify automation opportunities One simple way to decide what you can automate is to ask yourself…

Microsoft teased new AI reporting features within Bing Webmaster Tools that enhance the AI performance reports and other reports around AI. The new features that were showcased include citation share, grounding query intent, GEO-focused recommendations. More details. Several shared screenshots of this presentation that was given by Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft at SEO Week today in New York City. Here are some of those slides: Bing Webmaster Tools just dropped some VERY COOL stuff at #SEOWeek 2026 Citation Share, Grounding Query Intent (15 pre-defined intents), and GEO-focused recommendations. The gap between Bing's transparency and Google's is getting harde…

As ad dollars begin shifting toward ChatGPT, ad tech firms have started working to make that transition as seamless as possible. What’s happening. Adthena launched a new tool, AdBridge, designed to convert existing Google Ads campaigns into formats ready for ChatGPT advertising. The pitch is simple: don’t rebuild from scratch — repurpose what already works. The tool analyzes advertisers’ search campaigns to generate keyword lists, negative keywords, and competitive insights that can be directly applied to ChatGPT campaigns. It also surfaces which brands are showing up in specific auctions, how often they appear, and which prompts are triggering those placements — …

LinkedIn is rolling out Off-Platform Event Ads, giving marketers a new way to promote events without needing a native LinkedIn Event Page. What’s happening. The new format allows advertisers to run Event Ads that link directly to external destinations — such as webinar platforms, landing pages or livestream sites — instead of keeping traffic on LinkedIn. This marks a shift from platform-contained experiences to more flexible, marketer-controlled journeys. How it works. Marketers can create an Event Ad using a third-party URL, add event details like date and format, and choose from objectives including awareness, engagement, traffic or lead generation. Clic…

SEO sits at an interesting crossroads. One camp insists on optimizing for large language models (LLMs) and AI engines, and the other insists on doing SEO the same way we’ve always done it. But there’s another way to approach it: combining the fundamentals of SEO with an understanding of how LLMs operate and why. With this approach, you can keep what’s always worked — like on-page SEO and backlinks from reputable sources. Yet you can also look ahead to new tactics, such as optimizing for query fan-out and emerging prompt intents. Since 2023, and the rise of tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, I’ve been researching how AI engines display search r…

In November 2024, with SE Ranking’s research team, we began a 16-month experiment to test how AI-generated content performs in organic search. We launched 20 websites across different niches and tracked their performance over time. But we didn’t stop there. We wanted to look beyond rankings and understand how AI systems discover, interpret, and cite information. So we expanded the project into a more ambitious set of experiments on AI search and LLM visibility. For the next phase, we created a new fictional brand in a real niche with real competition to see how quickly AI systems would pick it up and whether it could be cited alongside or above trusted industr…

AI systems are getting better at generating Spanish. They’re not getting better at understanding Spanish markets. What we’re seeing instead is a consistent pattern: more than 20 Spanish-speaking countries collapsed into a single default. Spain becomes “standard.” Mexico becomes interchangeable. The rest get flattened into statistical averages. The failure modes are structural — dialect defaulting, format contamination, and regulatory hallucination — and they’re amplified in a generative search environment where one synthesized answer replaces 10 blue links. That distinction is now a visibility constraint. Generative systems resolve ambiguity. When your content…

Google announced they are testing a new “conversational search experience to complement how you already search on YouTube.” It is called “Ask YouTube” and it lets you “dive deeper into the topics you’re curious about in a more interactive way,” Dave from YouTube wrote. What it looks like. Here is a GIF of it in action: How can I try it. If you want to try it out, you can go to youtube.com/new and try to opt into it. This experiment is currently available for YouTube Premium members 18+ in the US who opt-in. Google is working on expanding the experiment to non-Premium users in the future. What it does. Dave from YouTube posted this example: “If yo…

Fact: Agentic AI is making humans indispensable. More than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027. That is a prediction from Gartner published in June 2025, based on a poll of more than 3,400 organizations actively investing in the technology. The reason cited is not that the agents do not work. It is that the humans deploying them are making the wrong decisions. “Most agentic AI projects right now are early-stage experiments or proof of concepts that are mostly driven by hype and are often misapplied,” according to Anushree Verma, senior director analyst at Gartner. Organizations are deploying agents without a clear strategy, without unde…

Internal linking is one of the most controllable levers in technical SEO. But when tracking parameters are embedded in internal URLs, they introduce inefficiencies across crawling and indexing, analytics, site speed, and even AI retrieval. At scale, this isn’t just a “best practice” issue. It becomes a systemic problem affecting crawl budget, data integrity, and performance. Here’s how to build a case study for your stakeholders to show the side effects of nuking tracking parameters in internal links — and propose a win-win fix for all digital teams. How tracking parameters waste crawl budget Crawl budget is often misunderstood. What matters isn’t the v…

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…

Each month, we host an SEO update covering the latest in search and AI. During this month’s edition, our SEO experts Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss, cover everything from the latest advances in Agentic AI to Google’s spam and core updates and why simply publishing more content is no longer enough and in many cases actively works against you. Read this recap for the highlights or watch the April 2026 SEO Update by Yoast to delve into the latest news. Watch the full recap on YouTube to dive deeper into these topics, hear some examples and hear the answer to audience questions. SEO and AI news from April 2026 Google introduces new AI agent signals and infrastructu…

The March 2026 core update brought what Google describes as a design “to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.” This confirms the simplest truth in search: people use Google to get answers. Whether it’s solving a problem, learning something new, or making a decision, searchers want content that is genuinely helpful in their busy, on-the-go lives. If your content does that, it succeeds. If it doesn’t, no amount of SEO tricks, hacks, or magic bullets will get your content to show up on page one, let alone in AI Overviews. How modern search systems surface helpful content AI Overviews went from appearing for just 6.49%…

Reddit is quickly becoming a powerful platform shaping how people discover and perceive brands. As AI search engines increasingly surface Reddit threads and comments, these conversations now influence visibility. To understand this shift, I analyzed 117 SaaS brands on Reddit. People reveal what they really think there, which doesn’t always match polished marketing. As communities shape brand perception, Reddit is no longer optional. Here’s my analysis, plus how you can use Reddit to your advantage. How I analyzed 117 SaaS brands: The methodology My analysis of 117 brands across the SaaS industry started with identifying the verticals to address: Pr…

Google is trying to simplify one of its most complex products, helping advertisers and analysts get more value from Google Analytics without deep technical expertise. What’s new. Google Analytics is rolling out Task Assistant, a guided workflow tool that surfaces tailored recommendations to improve property setup, data collection and reporting. How it works. Available in the left-hand navigation, Task Assistant organizes recommendations into clear categories like connecting accounts, enhancing reporting and fixing data issues. Users can mark tasks as complete as they go or skip items that don’t align with their business goals, creating a more flexible setup experi…