Category: SEO News

(from Google Bard)
Here are 5 reasons why organic traffic is on the rise:

1. The rise of mobile search. More and more people are using their smartphones and tablets to search the web, and search engines are prioritizing mobile-friendly websites in their rankings. This means that websites that are optimized for mobile devices are more likely to rank higher and receive more organic traffic.

2. The increasing importance of quality content. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to rank high-quality content higher in the search results. This means that websites that create informative, engaging, and relevant content are more likely to attract organic traffic.

3. The growing popularity of voice search. Voice search is becoming increasingly popular, as people are finding it more convenient to speak their search queries than type them. Search engines are optimizing their algorithms for voice search, which means that websites need to be optimized for voice search as well.

4. The increasing use of featured snippets. Featured snippets are short summaries of answers to search queries that appear at the top of the search results page. Search engines are increasingly using featured snippets to answer users’ questions, which means that websites that are optimized for featured snippets are more likely to receive organic traffic.

5. The growing awareness of SEO. More and more businesses are becoming aware of the benefits of SEO and are investing in SEO strategies to improve their organic traffic. This increased competition for organic traffic is driving up the overall quality of websites and content, which is ultimately benefiting users.

Google’s Bard continues to impress with it’s ability to “see” images. The days of alt tag dependency are over with this new technology.

Google Bard, set with image recognition capabilities, makes the reliance on alt tags a thing of the past. Upload images alongside your prompts and watch Bard expertly analyzes the photo to provide valuable insights and assistance.

Google Bard’s enhanced image analysis is one more milestone in how AI is hyper-evolving digital marketing.

The year is more than half over so here are SEO statistics for 2023 that you should be aware of if you were thinking about increasing your website’s search engine performance:

The first organic search result enjoys an average click-through rate (CTR) of 25.6%. This means that for every 100 people who see this result, 25.6 of them will click on it.

The top three organic search results collectively receive 54.4% of all clicks. To maximize organic search traffic, it’s crucial to ensure your website ranks within these top three results.

A significant 75% of users never go beyond the first page of search results. If your website doesn’t appear on the first page, you’re missing out on substantial potential traffic.

Google currently considers over 200 ranking factors, implying that a comprehensive approach is needed to optimize your website for search engines effectively.

Local SEO has become increasingly vital, involving the process of optimizing your website to rank better in local search results, particularly crucial for attracting customers from your vicinity.

Content marketing remains the most effective strategy for generating organic traffic. By producing and publishing high-quality content on your website, you can attract visitors and boost your rankings in search engine results. Content helps with SEO performance since content is a requirement of SEO.

These are just a few of the essential SEO statistics for 2023 that should guide your efforts in improving your website’s SEO.

Call today to put an SEO plan together and in action: 585-622-1126

March 2018 was a bleak time for cryptocurrency. It was shortly after Bitcoin had the whole world’s attention and ran up to a record price of 20,000 dollars per 1 BTC and then crashed before entering into a multi-year bear market.

Immediately Following the crash, Google, Facebook and Twitter banned banned crypto ads. This sent a ripple throughout the digital advertising sphere. A bit later, in September 2018, Facebook and Google partially lifted the ban, allowing advertising of cryptocurrencies and related projects from pre-approved advertisers in the U.S and Japan.

Now, in 2021, Google announced that they would open up crypto advertising through their Google Ads platform on August 3rd. As of writing this, that date is today.

Google’s Interest In Crypto has gone back several years and made headlines when Buttercoin, a crypto exchange backed by Google closed it’s doors back in 2015 due to a lack of interest in crypto investing at that time. Looking at 2021 current crypto prices, most likely a regrettable mistake to these would-be investors.

Google’s 2021 Cryptocurrency Policy

The updated Google policy for advertising cryptocurrency will require “advertisers offering cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets targeting the United States” to meet certain requirements and certifications if they wish to advertise those products and services within Google platforms such as Google Search and other Alphabet platforms, including YouTube, Gmail or Blogger.

As of August 3rd, 2021, advertisers who wish advertise crypto-related products and services must:

Be duly registered with

(a) FinCEN as a Money Services Business and with at least one state as a money transmitter; or

(b) a federal or state chartered bank entity.

Furthermore, advertisers must comply with relevant legal requirements, including any local legal requirements, whether at a state or federal level and ensure their ads and landing pages comply with all Google Ads policies.

Cryptocurrency Awareness

With new digital publishing of cryptocurrencies and other crypto-related products and services it is safe to say that this can only bring more awareness to people who either have never heard of cryptocurrency (specific cryptocurrencies) or other crypto-backed finance vehicles provided by US authorized entities.

Crypto’s Future With Big Tech

The question is “Will big tech continue to embrace crypto and utilize blockchain technology?” and the answer is being heard as time goes on, year after year, with continued crypto backing and support from big tech.

The online marketing tool giant SEMrush, a tool that I use frequently, is going public with stock shares available for purchase. As an investor in stocks I must admit I am highly interested.

For starters, SEMrush is one of the few SEO tools that I would actually consider a “quality product” that is contantly being updated. I have been using SEMrush for years now as a way to analyse sites to help me find ways of improving sites for an increase in search engine rank.

Here is what is known about the intial IPO from SEMrush:

• $100M is the aim to be raised for the initial offering
• Venture capital backers include Greycroft, Siguler Guff, and e.ventures
• SEMrush claims to have more than 67,000 paying customers, including big names like Tesla, IBM, and Walmart.
• $144M in annual recurring revenue with a 50% compound annual growth rate between 2016 and 2020

As new information unfolds I will update this post. For now, it is clearly exciting to see a giant in search marketing like SEMrush enter the stock market. For me, as someone interested in stock investing and SEO, this is a dream come true.

As Google continues to update and improve it’s search engine new manual actions and disciplinary penalties have emerged in order to enforce the new changes:

Transparency Policy

A manual penalty specific to Google News. A site may be found in violation of this policy if it appears in Google News and does not provide the following:

dates and bylines
authors
publication
publisher
company or network

Medical Content is an example of where this new transparency policy will be utilized.

If you want the complete list Search Engine Journal has a good piece covering the recent update but here are the ones that will most likely deem the most governance by Google and should be content any user should be wary of:

Manipulated Media

Edited audio, video or image content for the purpose of deceiving, defrauding, or misleading.

A deep-fake video is a good example of this.

Terrorist Content

Content that promotes terrorist or extremist acts, including recruitment, inciting violence, or celebrating terrorist attacks.

An Al-Qaeda recruitment website is an example of this.

Google Search Central’s Google Search News is exactly the kind of content that search engine fanatics (like myself) love to see when it comes to staying up to date with what is happening in search, with a focus on Google of course. Engaging and informative. What more can you ask for when it comes to useful content?

Subjects covered for the month of January this year include updates, link building, indexing, crawling and more.

It’s great to see Google showing such transparency and keeping their users updated and informed.

I have subscribed to Google Search Central via YouTube and highly suggest other search marketers do the same.

Ecosia is an up and coming search engine with over 15 million active users. It was first launched in 2009.

Like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia touts itself at being a privacy-friendly search engine. Additionally, Ecosia is a green search engine in a very unique way.

Ecosia Searches are encrypted, not stored permanently, data is not sold to third-party advertisers, personal profiles based on search history are not created, and finally external tracking tools like Google Analytics are not used.

All of the above is just fine and dandy but it’s the unique business model that sets Ecosia apart from every other search engine.

Ecosia shows advertisements and is paid by partners every time a user is directed to an advertiser via a sponsored link. This also suggests that there may be affiliate marketing potential in Ecosia. Perhaps something similiar to Google Adsense will be Ecosia’s next big development.

Ecosia uses 80% of its profits to support tree planting projects. How many trees get planted in real time from using Ecosia are displayed on Ecosia’s homepage.

SEO For Ecosia

So how would one go about ranking a web page in Ecosia? According to the it’s website, “Ecosia’s search results and search ads are powered by Microsoft Bing.” and further “enhanced with Ecosia’s own algorithms.”

As far as what these proprietary algorithms are that Ecosia, the signals are a mystery.

A Search Engine With A Good Cause

Planting trees is a good activity for the Earth and it is what motivates Ecosia to continue to grow as a search engine.

At only 15 million plus in user volume Ecosia has a ways to go before it can stand along side some of it’s larger peers in search market share and maybe, in time, even take on the big G.

YouTube’s Algorithm’s Answer’s video, Search & Discovery, offers help to SEOs who struggle with YouTube’s vague search engine signals. Getting a video to appear at the top of a YouTube search is the goal of many SEOs hired to do video marketing using the platform but the transparency that is shown with Google Search has not really been as strong with YouTube until now.

Timestamps for questions:

0:09 Question 1: “Is it better to spread out videos evenly over time or is all the same for the system, if some are every other day, and some have 1-3 weeks in between when made public?” – @DAILY FUN TV

1:14 Question 2: “My channel is monetised however I don’t turn on monetisation for every other video of mine. Is it true that monetised videos have more likelihood of being recommended than non-monetised videos?” – @The Roaming Jhola

2:52 Question 3 : “It seems when I post a video about a certain keyword, it will do great. On the other hand, if I target a new keyword, the video’s performance is mediocre at best. So the question is when researching which keywords to use in our next video, what is a good way to gauge the likelihood it might work out? It seems like the algorithm only likes it when I post videos about certain phrases and if I branch away from that it’s almost guaranteed to be a dud.” @Michael Bordenaro

4:58 Question 4: “Can I take a break?” – Creator Insider (YT Channel)

Video marketing is continuing to increase in demand as more web visitors are looking for video content for both entertainment and solutions to everyday problems.

Read more about video marketing as a useful marketing strategy for affiliate marketing

WordPress users have to make the decision to use automatic updates for plugins. At least, for any respectable plugin that has some name brand recognition which is why All in One SEO’s latest non-consent auto-update feature is drawing heavy criticism.

It started yesterday when discussions first started popping up initiated by one WordPress user who noticed that the All in One SEO plugin turned on automatic updates without notifications. An upset user of the plugin voiced his anger in a WordPress support post

Just to be clear, this is nothing new when it comes to WordPress plugins but, again, it is usually not expected from the more well established plugins that have been used for years. Still, it is generally frowned upon for a plugin to iniate auto-updates without notifying the WordPress plugin user.

The reason is that an update can cause problems like broken page layouts or even keep a site from loading all together if the latest plugin update happens to conflict with another plugin’s code (a common problem with using many plugins simultaneously).

Are WordPress SEO Plugins Even Useful?

The short answer is “yes” because these SEO plugins provide the only access to meta-description fields when dealing with WordPress CMS right out of the box. Custom built WordPress websites can be made to have easy access to meta tags but many CMS sites use templates so the plugins would still be required.

However, if you are expecting one of these SEO plugins to rank your site by putting you on the first page for your desired keywords then you will be sadly disappointed. You will still need real SEO skills and knowledge to accomplish that.

Yoast, a plugin similar to All in One SEO, offers a type of “grading system” based on colors (green, yellow, orange, and red). It is somewhat useful if you are bad with content but it is still a 3rd party metric so simply following it constantly could be a giant waste of time as well. Yoast’s color grading system should be used as a guide (red needs content/keywords etc.) but it is not what Google uses to determine ranking. Keep that in mind.