SEO Strategy

Organic is old news. If I would have said something like that five years ago, you might be looking at me all cross-eyed. However, in today's SEO world, one in which SERP features dominate, such a statement actually contains an air of viability. I mean, for crying out loud, Google has tested zero organic result SERPs. Why? Why does it feel as if Google is increasingly giving more weight to its own SERP properties? Why would Google even test a SERP with no results?


I have a theory.

How will the tech giants handle privacy concerns? Who poses the biggest threat to Google’s empire? Which social media platforms are too saturated? Get an expert understanding of the ever-changing digital marketing landscape in this interview with Blue Thread Marketing co-founder Mordecai Holtz.

After extensive testing, Google's 'More results' button officially does away with mobile pagination. With the new mobile format users can quickly load the equivalent of another page of search results with just one click and without wait, but what are the consequences? Who benefits from this considerable change to the mobile SERP? Who loses out? What are the implications?

What is the best way to monitor your Google Ads competition? Is there even a best way to monitor your Google Ads competition?

It's complicated, and anyone that gives you a one-size-fits-all list is just yanking your chain.

I don't have all of the answers, and I am not going to pretend that I do. What I do have is a unique take on a piece of the process that might broaden the way you approach monitoring the Google Ads field, or, as the title of this piece claims, increase your Google Ads IQ.

While most of the advice content marketers get revolves around topics such as how to promote on social media or choose the best content automation tools, we've in a way forgotten what it means to be a content marketer.

The most basic truth is that content marketers are educators. Creating content means to teach. If a piece of content doesn't teach anyone anything, it's worthless.

So how do you go about effectively educating?

What would Google do just to siphon some product search volume away from its retail rival? How far would it go? What tactics would it resort to? With Amazon under no real threat of having its kingdom toppled, Google has taken dramatic action to make sure it expands its piece of the retail pie. What might surprise you is how Google's going about doing cutting itself a larger slice of the retail pie, right under your nose.

Google's very own SERP features provide it with a subtly powerful way to supplement its traditional form of income, i.e. ads. In fact, there are some unique advantages to garnering income via SERP features that ads can't provide Google with. Such advantages could be why Google has bolstered those features that do currently, and may in the future, provide it with additional sources of revenue. In fact, I would be so bold as to say that in-feature revenue is the future of Google's monetization strategy. Here's why.

Google not only has totally unique SERP features on mobile, but also quite often trends those that also appear on desktop differently than it does on mobile. The fundamental premise of this study is that by isolating the instances where Google diverges from its desktop SERP feature patterns, the search engine's entire stance on the mobile web slowly emerges. Working under the assumption that any mobile data divergence is purposeful and meaningful, mobile's unique SERP feature trends work to illuminate Google's overall relationship to the mobile SERP.

For those of you who could not make the recently held brightonSEO conference, I wanted to share some overall takeaways and highlight some of the sessions I enjoyed the most. The conference is massive, and obviously I did not hear all of the great speakers. As such, this is not some sort of definitive list, but rather a spotlight on the sessions I personally enjoyed the most during my first trip to the conference.

Watch the SEO Lounge with Mordy & Joel who discuss some myths about competitor intelligence and clarify how to use competitor data to optimize your website.

Why does Google invest so much time and energy into their SERP features? While of course the features improve the user experience, does that really explain why Google is constantly releasing a series of perpetual SERP features changes? There is simply way too much of an emphasis on SERP features over at Google to chalk their efforts up solely to "improved user experience." If so, why then does Google go to such lengths for the sake of SERP feature perfection?

This past December the largest ad fraud scam to date was unearthed. Methbot, operated by a group of Russian hackers, was estimated to have sucked anywhere up to $5 million a day from the pockets of online advertisers. Is click fraud, a as general problem, as sensational as the plundering that was executed by Methbot? What precisely is the monetary significance of click fraud? How long has it been a problem? What is being done about it? Are we doing enough? Can we do enough? Simply, how old, big, and daunting is the problem of click fraud?