Digital marketing

One of the greatest values of data visualization tools is being to connect different types of data tables to calculate results, illustrate trends, or discover outliers. Relationships between your tables are necessary to create these connections. Relationships in Power BI Relationships in Power BI have multiple configurations, including cardinality and cross-filter direction, which determine the way that your tables connect and interact with each other.… https://ift.tt/2NSghJg

Two weeks ago, Joost shared his vision on open source . Today, we introduce yet another WordPress fanatic: Felix Arntz. As a freelancer Felix works part-time for Yoast. Half of that time he’s working on and consulting with the SEO plugin, and the other half Yoast sponsors him to contribute to WordPress core, mainly focusing on the multisite functionality. Learn what open source means to him and get pro tips on how to start contributing to an open source project yourself! Q. Why is open source so important to you? “For me personally, there are tons of reasons other than that I simply believe in it. Open source has given me work, new friends, the chance to travel the world, the trust and resources to improve as a developer and as a person. It has given me a passion, and every day when I go to work (which means I get up out of my bed and turn on the computer, in whichever country that may be), I’m looking forward to it.” Q. In what way do you contribute to open source projects? “I hav...

Writing content for another site as guest author or blogger can have many benefits. It could help you get more exposure, especially if you’re writing for a site that’s a lot bigger than yours. Working with other sites also gives you the opportunity to build potentially worthwhile (business) relationships and broaden your network. You might even get paid for your guest articles. Another obvious advantage, of course, is gaining valuable backlinks to your site. Now, this doesn’t mean you should start sending out loads of mediocre articles to every blog that’s even remotely relevant to your own. A better strategy: guest-write great content for the right website, perhaps a few guest posts, and engage with the audience: you’ll surely get noticed. But, once you’ve invested a lot of time in writing a great article that you’re very proud of, odds are you also want to put that content on your own site. Preferably without creating duplicate content issues. What are your options, in that case? ...

There have been moments in the past year that I wanted to quit my blog . My inner critic would tell me I wasn’t good enough to play with the big bloggers out there and I would tell myself over and over again the blogging world is oversaturated and in particular the mom blog niche. Instead of quitting, I took breaks, started blogging for Yoast and found my love for my blog and my writing style again. And it’s safe to say: people start to recognize my personal brand. How I did this and how you can achieve this too, is something I want to explain today. And the good news is: you do not need 10,000 followers on Instagram and 100,000 visitors on your blog! Background and statistics Before we dive into the world of personal branding, let’s go back to the article I wrote a few months ago about my goals and statistics . Maybe you remember me saying I wanted to reach 100K of unique visitors a month at the end of 2018. Although I still want to grow to these numbers, I am not working on growin...

Google has just celebrated it’s 20th anniversary, which signals another new milestone for one of the world’s largest technology companies. During this milestone event, the company was able to make big and important announcements as well, with announcements like Google Lens being integrated into Google Images , a rebranding of their news feed, and the introduction of activity cards. These new features aim to make Google an even more versatile search engine that is able to deliver informative and comprehensive results. Google has been launching numerous updates this 2018, and with more bound to arrive, expect the SEO industry to create new strategies and techniques to help make search work better for websites. Another new and important feature that was announced by Google is the usage of the Neural Matching algorithm. Much of Google’s algorithm is still a mystery for a lot of people, even SEO professionals, and for Google revealing information about it is always big news in the search...

Imagine this… You’re checking positions for a page you wrote, and you see something that stops you in your tracks… Another site has taken your content and has claimed it as their own. There’s no link, no byline, nothing. They copied your page and pasted it into their site. What’s worse, the page is positioning for the keyphrases https://ift.tt/2N4JUS5

It’s hard to imagine a life without a search engine that knows what it’s doing. I remember the days of AltaVista and co, search engines that just dump random pages on you for every given query. I was so excited to see Google enter the scene and immediately do everything right — the results were great, it was fast and it had no ads. Didn’t take long before I was hooked. But a lot has happened in the past twenty years and a lot will happen in the next. Starting today, Google is looking to change search for the next twenty years. Google’s Future of Search Event On Monday, Google held a small event to celebrate its 20th anniversary and it took the opportunity to offer a sneak peek at the coming years. Google introduced three paradigm shifts in how it sees search in the future: A shift from answers to journeys A shift from queries to providing a queryless way to get information Plus a shift from text to a more visual way of finding information I’ll dive into this below. Changing how...

I’ve been spending a lot of my time working in Power BI lately. Why? Because I’m able to quickly connect data that would have taken hours of stacking vlookups in spreadsheets. I can find new opportunities looking at the same data through multiple lenses.… https://ift.tt/2OaSgMH

After introducing a slew of new features, an improved meta box, and fully supporting Gutenberg in the previous three releases, it’s time to take a little breather with Yoast SEO 8.3. That’s not to say that this release is nothing but fluff — one look at the changelog will make you think twice. This release is all about fixes and enhancements, a lot of them suggested by our loyal users. Let’s get going! Community help A big part of Yoast SEO 8.3 is about improvements as suggested by our users on GitHub . As you know, our plugin is open source , and we encourage everyone to add their fixes or enhancements to GitHub so we can do something with them. So, if you have a good idea for a feature, please add it! Encounter a bug? Please add it! While we find and fix a lot of stuff ourselves, we can’t fix something we don’t know about it, right? In Yoast SEO 8.3, no less than five user contributions made the cut. These range from fixing the link to a particular article (thank you Nikhil Barar !...

Introduced in 2017, Google Lens is one of the newest visual search tools that enable users to be able to receive information through the images that they take. Compared to other visual search engines that are currently available, Google Lens stands out as one of the best. With Google celebrating its twentieth anniversary, one important announcement that they have made is that Google Lens will be coming to Google Images. With the update scheduled to be launched on September 27, this update aims to provide more functionality into Google Images and make it an even more reliable and versatile visual search engine. With the integration arriving in a few days, here are some of the features that you should know about. Featured Videos Google Images aims to provide more quality visual content to its users, and this means integrating video to allows users to have a better context of what they are searching for. Featured videos will be able to show videos related to your image. This comes in...

I’m a visual thinker; I love looking at images. If I think about my search behavior, I catch myself looking at images quite often, for instance when I want to know what city X looks like. Or if I’m looking for a product I’ve seen somewhere, without knowing the brand or where I can buy it. You can imagine that there are a couple of cases when an image says more than a thousand words (I know, cliché) and that image search can be more useful than an overall search. The question is: how can I find out if I get traffic from image search? Let’s find out! Google image search First off, some basics: what’s a Google image search? Google offers a search service that allows you to search the world wide web for images. You can go to  https://images.google.com/  or just click on the images tab on  https://www.google.com . If you search for Yoast SEO in an image search, you’ll see something like this. We consider our images very important and put a lot of effort into them, as you ca...

Mobile usage has drastically increased over the past few years, with more and more users accessing websites through their devices. This led to Mobile SEO becoming much more important than before. Recently, Google has increased their focus on mobile search, with the Google Speed update adding mobile page loading speed as a ranking factor. With Google going into a more mobile-first approach, mobile optimization has now become a priority for a lot of websites in order to attain or retain their search rankings. With so many people accessing the internet using their mobile devices, not doing this will lead to poor results, which can definitely screw up your SEO strategy. With that in mind, here are some of the best mobile optimization strategies that will answer your questions. Should we implement AMP? Google has been pushing forward to having AMP implemented in numerous websites across the internet, as it allows for a better user experience. In fact, AMP has been integrated into some...

In 2011, Google, Bing & Yahoo announced Schema.org which got SEOs all excited to start marking up website content to turn it into “structured data.” The benefit would be that search engines would be more certain that a text string of numbers was in fact a phone number, or at least they would be more certain that you wanted them to think it was phone number. The search engines could then turn the structured data into eye-catching fripperies designed to seduce searchers into surrendering their clicks and revenue to your fabulously marked-up site (aka “Rich Results). It also could help your fridge talk to your Tesla. So pretty much every SEO marked-up their audits and conference presentations with recommendations to mark up all the things. LSG was no exception. And we have seen it work some nice SEO miracles. There was the ecommerce site that lost all its product review stars until we reconfigured the markup. There was the yellow pages site that got a spammy structured data manual...

Two weeks ago a client reset its bot-blocker, unintentionally blocking Googlebot. We had SEORadar monitoring the site so we quickly discovered the problem and alerted the client. Unfortunately, by the time they fixed the bot-blocker settings, they had lost about 100,000 daily visitors from Google. Of course, the first thing they asked was: How Long Will It Take Our Google Traffic To Recover From Blocking Googlebot? While your mileage may vary, in this case the answer is about one week. Here’s my theory on how this process works: You block Googlebot from crawling your site (the most common reasons I see are improper bot-blocking settings or adding a “Disallow: /” rule to the robots.txt file ). Googlebot gets a 403 error when it tries to crawl the site or just stops crawling because of the robots rule. After hitting the home page (or robots.txt) a few times, it gets the message and starts demoting the site’s URLs. Traffic drops dramatically within a few hours. In this case, the s...

Your engineering team just mentioned they are rolling out a new type of product landing page built with REACT or Angular or some other hipster tech name you may have seen out of the corner of your eye on your Twitter SEO feed. Your gut says this could be an SEO problem, and your gut is probably right. You search Google for “React SEO Issues.” etc. and you get a lot of smart bloggers giving you way too much information on how this technology works, when you really just need a few bullet points that you can hand to an engineer so you can move on with making that sweet pitch deck for the C-Suite. This one’s on me*: A lot of modern sites use “Single Page Applications” (SPAs) which have performance/UX benefits SPAs usually return an empty HTML file initially which screws your SEO. Google is getting better at figuring this out, but I wouldn’t trust it. When you render the app on the server first (using pre-rendering/server-side rendering) the user (and bots) get a fully rendered HTML pa...

For fans of the long-running SEO Death series , this isn’t really a new issue. About two years ago I posited Is Your Adwords Campaign Hijacking Your SEO Traffic? The answer of course was “yes.” Here’s the graph that illustrated the problem: I am re-upping this because we just got a new client that hired us because their organic traffic had started tanking, but when you looked at the data in Google Search Console, it only showed brand queries were tanking. And said tanking started pretty much when the paid traffic started increasing. We did some back of the envelope calculations on SEMRush CPC data available for their brand queries and we calculated this client is spending an additional $20,000/day to buy $50,000 in revenue*. This isn’t such a bad deal until one considers that until the increase in paid search traffic, the client was spending ~$0 to achieve that revenue. So their margins just took a 40% haircut. So, next time your organic traffic tanks, before you panic try this: ...

We have a client site whose SEO often defies description, along with canonicalization. We often have to check Google’s cache of various URLs to see what in fact Google is getting, but sometimes when you view the Full Version of the cache it just rapidly reloads like a blinking strobe light. Kind of like this: And there’s no way to get to the Text-Only or View Source versions of the cached URL as the links don’t stay in place long enough for your cursor to recognize the link and make it clickable. The good news is there’s a simple way to get the desired view of a cached URL in Google – add text strings to the end of the URL in your browser’s address bar. And here they are in their full Instant Answer/Featured Snippet glory: How To View The Text-Only Version Of A URL In Google’s Cache Replace the text string at the end of the Full Version of the cache URL with &num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0. For example, here’s the Full Version cache URL for our homepage using a Safari browser...

SEO Power BI Data Cleaning & Preparation Checklist for URLs Getting into data visualization for finding new opportunities and accelerating analysis? Me too! But there’s a few best practices I’ve learned along the way when connecting datasets by URLs. When might you want to connect by URL?  … https://ift.tt/2zqgevn

Like any service-based industry, it’s easy to have an “hours-in, deliverables-out” mentality. We all have goals to hit with limited time, and marketing consultants often default to measuring through channel-specific clicks, traffic, and keywords. But here’s the problem—users don’t care about channels and keywords (and neither do CEOs, to be honest).… https://ift.tt/2OMKxld

If I have to do something twice, I usually try to find a way to automate or streamline it. Why? Because if I spent five minutes every single day sorting or moving rows from one spreadsheet to another then that adds up to 30 hours a year.… https://ift.tt/2zqc4Dw

As consultants, it’s our role to be a true partner to our clients to help them meet or exceed business goals. But what happens when your client is pushing for something you don’t agree is in the best interest of achieving those goals?… https://ift.tt/2ONqxia

Hotjar has incredible functionality, with tons of ways to get to know your users better. Hotjar allows you to visualize how users engage with your site. Hotjar uses interactive heatmaps of their clicks and actions, recordings of their sessions, and gathering of their words from survey and feedback polls to help you build a strong, data-backed understanding of what exactly people are using your site for, and how they’re using it.… https://ift.tt/2QICuY1

Seer has continued on a solid growth trajectory and the need for great people to add to our team only continues to heighten. Until this year, “remote work” has not been in our vocabulary as a company and it’s something that’s made a lot of people uncomfortable, including our Executive Team.… https://ift.tt/2O2McWo

As much as we advocate holistic SEO here at Yoast, there will always be people turning to the dark side, employing less than savory techniques for their own gain. When someone targets a website with actions intended to lower its ranking in the SERPs, it’s called ‘negative SEO’. One way people can try to damage a site’s rankings, is by getting loads of unnatural, shady links to point to a website. Now, you shouldn’t worry about being the target of a negative SEO attack like that the moment you notice a drop in your rankings! In most cases, the cause is something else. But, if you ascertained that there’s suddenly a great many shady backlinks to your site, it may be time to take action. Google’s disavow links tool allows you to ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site. But is it OK to use this tool, and is it always necessary? Let’s discuss in today’s Ask Yoast! Shant emailed us about this predicament: I noticed about 18,000 links to my domain in G...

Redesigning even a single website can have a major impact from an analytics perspective, and should be prepared for, evaluated on, and acted on from multiple aspects. The objective of this post is to detail how your website or brand can 1) prepare, 2) evaluate, and 3) act on what is necessary for a redesign from an analytics perspective.… https://ift.tt/2QOczOH

Seer has continued on a solid growth trajectory and the need for great people to add to our team only continues to heighten. Until this year, “remote work” has not been in our vocabulary as a company and it’s something that’s made a lot of people uncomfortable, including our Executive Team.… https://ift.tt/2NZi3av

Google Analytics Overview In 2005  Google Analytics  (GA) launched an amazing free solution to our analytics problems – setting the landscape to digital reporting and analytics. Over time, its reporting and tracking abilities have expanded to include features, such as multi-channel funnel reports , enhanced ecommerce, and attribution modeling . … https://ift.tt/2xLXPqX

One of the most frustrating parts of optimizing eCommerce category pages—both product listing pages (PLPs) and intermediary category pages—is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for how to add content to category pages. If you add too much content that isn’t necessary on the page it could disrupt the user experience.… https://ift.tt/2QKBqmh

Amazon recently released their Q2 earnings report, listing what they’ve accomplished in the last quarter. At Seer, we’re continually monitoring Amazon to understand how our clients might be impacted by their expansions into new industries. Here, we’ll highlight where Amazon is most focused on expansion: voice, groceries, fashion, and international*.… https://ift.tt/2xGFpYi

Google’s UI isn’t the only thing that’s changing  – Google is now expanding their text ads to include 3 headlines AND an extra description line, and we’re not mad about it. Tell me more… Currently, Google allows 2 headlines at 30 characters each, with 1 description line at 80 characters for an expanded text ad.… https://ift.tt/2QLQUXf

Users can navigate most sites in a nearly infinite set of combinations.  If you don’t have a set way to approach this more complex data, tying back how users got from point A to B, and then ended up at Z can make you feel like a detective on the hunt.… https://ift.tt/2xG7G1a

Whether you’re the type of person to binge watch eight episodes of reality TV or the type to stand in line for eight hours for the new iPhone release, we all have strong personal interests that make us who we are.… https://ift.tt/2QH4hbj

So you found your dream job, applied, and were just invited in for an interview. CONGRATS! You’ve got the company’s interest and are one step closer to the job of your dreams. Next step: the interview. The interview is your time to share your experiences, career goals, and personality.… https://ift.tt/2xLXK6D