Google Analytics 4 “Gotchas” We Have Painfully Learned
A number of companies approached us near the Universal Analytics shut-off-of-data-acquisition date of July 1; between those and our existing clients, June was pretty much Google Analytics 4 months 24/7 for us – a lot of midnight oil was burned, as it was throughout the industry. Many clients we had transitioned earlier, but what we […]
Digital Marketing Strategy for Health Insurance in Competitive Markets
Health insurance, a highly regulated space with large players, tends to be a “late majority” market in terms of adopting new technologies (as opposed to “early adopters”). Having to partner with an exchange where tracking data is limited, the pressure of open deadlines, new creative formats, hard deadlines, and the always watchful eye of the […]
The Entire SEO Industry is Wrong about Panda
In 2011 Google rolled out an algorithm called “Panda” which was designed to identify low-quality or “thin content” sites. Sites that got hit with it lost roughly 80% of their traffic, so it was pretty devastating. At the time, lots of people did analyses of it, and the most common denominator was that many of […]
How We Identify Toxic Links, for Penalties or for Hygiene
Recently we had a client inquire about whether they should be disavowing links on a routine basis, just sort of a “good hygiene” type thing. Resulting from that we took a look back into this aspect of the industry that we haven’t paid much attention to for awhile. It seems like much of the advice […]
Two Academic Papers You Should Read ASAP If You’re Worried About AI and its Impact on SEO
We’ve been using text generation tools to generate thought-starting content for clients articles for the last four years, and two years ago these sorts of tools managed to hit roughly the 6th grade level. This past November ChatGPT clearly hit the 10th grade level. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if these […]
Configure All-in-One SEO Properly
All-in-One SEO is a WordPress plugin that has been around *forever*. We used to use it back in the day before Yoast got big (in fact, we can remember when it had dashes in its name ;-). Now that Joost retired and sold Yoast to someone else , our expectation is that the product likely […]
Freelance Google Ads Managers – Where To Find Google Ads Management Services
If you don’t have the time or knowledge to manage your own AdWords campaigns, it’s time to ring for help. You have two options; first, you can hire an SEM agency, which has the advantage of bringing multiple people with different specialties to bear on the account – an account manager, someone who handles tracking […]
Google Ads Management Contracts – What Should They Cover?
Having negotiated, and signed, numerous Google Ads management contracts with clients over the years, I do have substantial business experience in this area; that said, I am not a lawyer, and you should run any contract language by one to make sure that whatever you are doing is appropriate for your business. That all said, […]
Google Ads Management Pricing Models and Fees – What’s Typical?
Online marketing agencies are similar in many ways to more traditional advertising agencies, but there are four AdWords management pricing models they use: – Percent of Spend – Flat Fee – Hourly Rate – Performance Deals Percent of Spend AdWords Management Pricing Model For monthly media spends of $20,000 or more (let’s say for instance […]
Google Ads Placement Exclusions for Mobile Traffic
Recently, Google Ads had some changes that make it more difficult to exclude mobile traffic. Many advertisers, particularly B-to-B ones, prefer to completely exclude mobile traffic for performance purposes. Teenagers playing video games for instance may not be the best target for enterprise software; and if your call to action involves viewing a white paper […]