Who decided to put the 4th of July on a Tuesday this year? 2 off, 1 on, 1 off, 3 on…that’s a tough schedule to like! Anyhow, we hope you made it back to the office with all your fingers.

Let’s get down to business.

SMX Advanced is a high-level search engine marketing conference that takes place in Seattle every year in June. This was the 11th year and I was honored by being invited to participate again!

SMX Advanced June 2017 in Seattle, WA

 
Ginny Marvin from Marketing Land moderated the “A Year of Change In The Online Ad Universe” session for which my presentation is titled “Welcome to the New Normal of Paid Search Ads“. It’s a detailed look at the changes in pay per click marketing over the past year and how they affect paid search ads.

A few days ago, we received a request for a quote for ranking a handful of very specific keyword phrases.

As it was towards the end of the day, I responded back to the lead letting him know that we don’t give quotes for ranking specific keywords, that we don’t have set in stone one size fits all pricing and that each quote is typically backed by a quick site audit and competitive analysis, which I would be happy to provide.

I asked if we could schedule a time to talk the next day, so that I could learn more about their company, their online goals, and what they ultimately were looking to achieve through SEO.

Their response: “Well please provide me with a quote of what I can expect then because every other company we contacted seems more flexible with what they can offer”

Picking an Digital Marketing Agency isn’t as simple as swiping left or right.

More flexible? Um, ok. Great if you are a gymnast or yoga enthusiast, but not necessarily a key trait for selecting an SEO agency. Is flexibility something you want out of your accountant, lawyer or doctor?

Now that we have our winter clothes offically in storage, we’re excited to see what summer 2017 brings! We hope you are as well.

In this month’s digital update, we look at Lessons from Voice Search, Local SEO Tips, Yelp, and more.

Ready, Summer, GO

We all know by now that it’s important to put your keywords in as many places as you can, within reason, to get the most SEO value out of them. But are there any places that work, that shouldn’t? I decided to find out.

I placed a made up word in various parts of the source code of several different pages to see if I could get my pages to show up in search results for that term in Google. Here are the places I tried:

• Image Alt
• Class or ID Attributes
• Title Attribute
• Meta Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• < !–comment– >
• A Hidden Element
• A Javascript Written Element
• Words that are part of an image

I used each of these only 1 time per page. I wanted to make sure I didn’t have any skewed results. Let’s see how they did!

The April showers are gone, now we’re looking forward to the May flowers!

In this month’s digital update, we look at Voice Search, HTTPS, Facebook vs Google Ads, and more.

Let’s spring right into it!

The Portland Guide To Pay Per Click Advertising covers building high performing and deeply segmented paid search campaigns localized to the Portland, Oregon metro market.

Hopping right on past the first quarter of 2017, we hope you are all having as great a year as we are!

In this month’s digital update, we look at Social Preference, State of Searcher Behavior, Facebook Reactions, and more.

Let’s HOP to it!

”And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife…and you may ask yourself well…how did I get here?” – Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

I have the beautiful wife.

My house is nice, although too many paternity-leave hours spent holding a sleeping baby and watching HGTV leaves me doubting just how beautiful it is.

I drive a nice mid-sized automobile. I’m an Oregonian, I don’t do large vehicles.

So…how did I get here?

Or better yet…why am I still here?

WebRanking’s 2006 Christmas Party – Look at How Young We Looked!

GoTo.com, a ground-breaking pay per click search engine from the Dot Com era, launched a new Alpha version on March 28th, 2017 with a nostalgic design but to little fanfare.

This time it’s billing itself as “A human-powered search platform” with Organic search results instead of Paid listings.

GoTo.com Searches Again!