Our (not so simple) search marketing blog
Plain-English insights from a team with 100+ years of combined experience. No hype, just what the data shows and what to do about it.
Your Smart Bidding is optimizing for page views. Here’s how to tell.
Smart Bidding does exactly what you tell it to. If a page view counts as a conversion in your account, Google will spend your budget finding more people who view pages. Many accounts we audit have...
AI Referral Traffic is Unpredictable. Here’s Why
Marketers being asked by execs how their company is "performing in AI" is the new “what’s our ROAS”. A simple question, a not so simple answer. While people continue to adopt alternative/AI search...
Is AI Max Worth Using? Advantages and Disadvantages in Our 2026 Breakdown
Every advertiser wanted to sink its teeth into Google’s newest, AI-first campaign type - Ai Max, but it appears that it’s not built for every industry. And it definitely wasn’t built for every...
2027 SEO/AEO Prediction: Your Website vs. Off-Site Properties
Classic SEO = Content, Technical, Backlinks, Strategy, and let’s face it, a website is the “easiest” property to optimize for SEO and LLMs. Good backlinks are hard to build without strong...
YouTube Is Not Just Social Media. It’s One of the Most Important Search Engines
When organizations think about YouTube, it's often treated like another social media platform; a place to publish videos alongside Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or TikTok. But that mindset misses...
Is Your Robots.txt File Hurting Your SEO?
How a post-hack crawl restriction can accidentally block an XML sitemap When was the last time you audited your website’s robots.txt file? For many marketers, it is a set-it-and-forget-it technical...
Google Ads 2026 Landing Page Best Practices to Beat New Policy Flags
Key Takeaways Show your work. Build something useful. Know your stuff. Use original visuals. Multi-use landing pages that leverage SEO best practices support performance for Google Ads landing pages...
2026 Google Ads Premier Partner
Happy Dance, time! Proud to announce that we have retained our Premier Partner Google Ads status for 2026. A massive thanks to all of our clients who trust us and to our stellar Paid Search team!
Optimizing Content for LLM Discovery (Without Overthinking It)
Not that long ago, organic visibility was all about improving rankings to generate traffic and conversion. The standard SEO tactics of keyword research, content creation & optimization, and...
The Ultimate Guide to Optimizing YouTube Videos
The Ultimate Guide to Optimizing YouTube Videos Uploading a video to YouTube isn’t the finish line, it’s the starting point. If you want your videos to actually get discovered, clicked, and watched...
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