Reading Time: < 1 min Our agency is a big believer in data. We track website metrics, social media metrics, email marketing metrics, and pull in great tools like heatmaps to take things even further. However, a problem that can quickly arise is having too much data. It’s easy to build a giant report that shows everything, but the result […]
SEO
If you have toxic links pointing to your website, just ignore them
Reading Time: < 1 min If you run auditing tools on your website, they’ll often find “toxic” links (from spammy sites) that link to yours, and advise you to work to get rid of those links. While those links won’t do you any good, they’re not worth worrying about. Generally speaking, your best course of action when you find those […]
Website themes are not content
Reading Time: < 1 min When building websites, people are often concerned about not duplicating content across pages or sites. While there is no specific penalty for that, if Google thinks your website has the same content as another site, one of you won’t have a chance in the rankings. So what does that mean for website themes and templates? […]
Google may let machine written language rank soon
Reading Time: < 1 min There is a growing number of tools out there that can write (or at least help write) content for your website. As of today, that kind of content goes against Google’s guidelines — but probably not for long. According to Google’s John Mueller: From our guidelines it is the case that if it’s automatically generated […]
Fuel versus friction
Reading Time: 2 min When it comes to marketing, there are two main directions you want to work to push — adding more fuel, or reducing friction. This works in many areas of life, as explained wonderfully in a recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, but it’s particularly interesting with marketing. Fuel When it comes to marketing, fuel […]
News websites are starting to realize they should have worked to own the conversation
Reading Time: 2 min I’ve made no secret that I think individuals and organizations should work hard to own their content. This includes not only the primary content (like the actual story or post), but also the comments and interactions to the extent possible. The second part of that is difficult, as social media is the default for most […]
Why click through rate doesn’t affect search rankings
Reading Time: < 1 min There’s long been a myth that click through rate affects how well you rank in Google. In short, many people believe that if your results get clicked on frequently on Google, you’ll move up the rankings. It’s been claimed for years, and Google has always insisted that it’s not true. In a recent Tweet, Google’s […]
Images on your website pages don’t help with rankings
Reading Time: 2 min Over the years, much has been said about optimizing images to help rank better in Google, and it’s mostly accurate. The key is that images will generally only help you rank better in Google Image Search, not in the main search results. Google’s John Mueller laid it out pretty clearly in a recent SEO Office […]
Google sees different types of web pages essentially the same way
Reading Time: 2 min Your website likely includes a wide variety of content types. You have some normal pages, some blog posts, maybe a custom feed for podcast, some category pages for your blog, things like that. Which does Google prefer? They don’t really care. It’s not that every page will rank as well as the others, but that […]
Be careful when measuring your targets
Reading Time: 2 min A few weeks ago, Seth Godin shared a pretty simple statement from Charles Goodhart: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.“ To be honest, it took me a little while to understand what he meant. We set a lot of goals at our company, and we measure our progress […]