Reading Time: < 1 minI shared earlier this year that we need to avoid the mistake of giving Google credit for when other sources are really where your company was found. A few years ago I shared the story of how we found our CPA firm, and how they could have wrongly attributed things to Google. In a recent […]
SEO
Using Google as a leapfrog
Reading Time: < 1 minWe all know that the nature of using Google is changing. Between people switching to using AI instead of traditional search, and Google keeping more users on their site, it’s all changing very quickly. While listening to the annual “State of the Apps” episode of the Cortex podcast, the hosts shared some personal use cases […]
97% of web pages get zero traffic from Google
Reading Time: 2 minThings are changing quickly when it comes to getting your site to rank well on Google. A big one, as I shared a few months ago, is that 64% of visitors that use Google never end up visiting a traditional website, instead getting the answer from Google itself or from a related Google product (Maps, […]
Creating “zero click” content
Reading Time: 2 minAs I mentioned a few weeks ago, a growing problem with Google is the number of “zero click” searches on there — searches that don’t lead to another click, because Google answered the question for you. It’s generally a good thing for users, but it’s a bad thing for companies wanting to get more website […]
The balance between lift and attribution
Reading Time: 2 minI’ve shared a few times on here how precise attribution of online activities is becoming more and more difficult to track. It feels like companies are collecting every bit of information that they can about us, which is true, but it’s becoming trickier to put all of the pieces together. Ad blockers and cookie policies […]
The majority of Google searches don’t lead to websites
Reading Time: 2 minIt’s a trend that has been growing for years, but the number of “zero-click” searches on Google continues to grow (where a zero-click search is one where the user doesn’t ever click through to a website). In a recent post on the SparkToro blog, Rand Fishkin points out that in 2024 only 360 of every […]
Build a brand outside of Google
Reading Time: 2 minThere was recently a huge leak from Google that detailed much of how their search algorithm works, and it was quite eye opening. One of the best overviews of the leak comes from Rand Fishkin, and you can read it here. In digging in, he had a few very insightful thoughts that I wanted to […]
Don’t ascribe attribution to Google when other investments drove the real value
Reading Time: 2 minWhen monitoring your website traffic, it’s easy to look at your sources and see that Google has sent you the most traffic, leading you to think you should double down on it. Maybe you should, but maybe not. There are certainly people that Google sends to your site that you should be thankful for. If […]
Blogs are still among the highest-ranking pages
Reading Time: < 1 minWhile it’s been well-established that users don’t click on the “blog” page for most sites, having those posts can still be incredibly valuable. The purpose of most blogs (not this one) are to drive people to the website via Google search, and then lead them to the pages that matter (registration, purchase, etc). For those […]
Artwork is signed because it matters who created it
Reading Time: < 1 minI’ve mentioned a few times on here that I’m not a fan of companies that put a “designed by” link in the footer of websites that they create. Google clearly says not to do it, and putting a link there is entirely for the (misguided) advantage of the designer, to the detriment of the site […]