Online Business Services - Website Design & Internet Marketing for Small/Med Businesses

If there’s one constant that we can always trust, it’s the fact that Google Ads is always keeping us on our toes. This rings true as of February 18, 2021 when Google announced that Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) will now be the default ad type when you’re looking to create ads for a Search campaign. What does this mean for advertisers and Google Ads moving forward? In this post, we’re going to: Clarify what’s changing for advertisers. Compare RSAs to the former default ad type (Expanded Text Ads). Walk you through how to set up RSAs. Share input, tips, and best practices from the PPC community. Our hope is to help you to better understand and adapt to this change so your ads can keep performing their best. What does this change mean? The change in default ad type from Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) to Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) means that when you click to make a new ad, there are now only two options: Responsive Search Ads or Call Ads . This doesn't

As someone who has always been on the agency side of things, I am used to the pushback against Display advertising in Google. The number one reason I hear why clients do not want to use them is that they typically do not perform as well as Search. Of course they do not. The user intent between the networks is completely different. But just because users are not as likely to convert, it does not mean Display ads are invaluable. There are several ways you can check and see if Display Ads are impacting overall performance on Google, and we’ll be covering four of those methods in this post. The methods involve: Display-specific Google Analytics audiences Observation audiences Google Trends View-through conversions Let’s begin. 1. Create display-specific Google Analytics audiences When you are in Google Analytics, click on the Admin button in the lower right-hand corner of your window. The middle column will be your Property column in Universal Analytics. Cl

In 2016 I wrote a post covering how long it takes before urls lose signals after not properly redirecting those urls during a migration. For example, a site had urls ranking in web search, changed urls but forgot redirects, and the old urls were 404ing. In that case, how long would the site owner have to add the necessary redirects or revert the migration before the urls lost signals and would have to start over rankings-wise? Google’s Gary Illyes said at the time that you typically have a few weeks before most signals are lost . If too much time elapsed, then the urls would have to build up rankings again like they were new urls (if you added the urls back to the site, or if you finally added redirects). So, reverting a migration after letting a few weeks pass by probably wouldn’t yield a return to rankings like you had before. This was for web search and not image search. More on that soon. In addition, I covered the importance of redirecting images during a migration in a prev

As Bob Dylan famously wrote, “The times, they are-a changin’…” Well, based on Google’s frantic pace of change, SEOs could easily tweak that line and replace “times” with “SERPs”. In this post, I’ll cover two more changes that site owners and SEOs should be aware of. And those additions can have a big impact on visibility and clicks when they appear in the search results. Over the past few years, I’ve written several posts about the power of certain SERP features and how those features can impact a site’s visibility and traffic. For example, I wrote a post covering Interesting Finds , which is a super-powerful SERP feature that takes up a huge amount of real estate in the mobile search results. And then I also wrote about Found on the web , which is a Frankenstein-like feature that can also take up massive real estate while yielding multiple carousels of listings. Both of those features are important to understand, but in true Google form, there are more changes I wanted to bring to

In part one of my series on the December 2020 broad core update , I covered a number of important items. If you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend doing that and then coming back to this post. For example, I covered the rollout, timing, tremors and reversals, the impact I was seeing across verticals, and then I covered a number of important points for site owners to understand about broad core updates. Those items spanned quality indexing, the importance of providing a strong user experience, avoiding hammering users with ads, technical SEO problems that cause quality problems, the A in E-A-T, machine learning in Search, and more. My first post will provide a strong foundation before jumping into the case studies I’ll cover below. Three Case Studies, Three Interesting Lessons About Broad Core Updates In this post, I’ll cover three case studies that underscore the complexity and nuance of broad core updates. Each is a unique situation and site owners (and SEOs) can learn a