Marketing

Spoiler: Rand Fishkin is keynoting SMX East!

You read that right: Rand Fishkin returns to the SMX stage in New York City this November! Don’t miss your chance to see the consummate advocate for search marketers deliver his opening keynote, Google: From Everyone’s Search Engine to Everyone’s Competitor. Here’s your exclusive sneak peek, straight from Rand himself… In years past, Google has

WP Engine announces Flywheel acquisition, HubSpot partnership

WP Engine, a WordPress digital experience platform, has announced a deal to acquire competitor Flywheel, while also launching a new partnership with HubSpot. Both announcements bring together technologies that seek to create better experiences for marketing and sales users within the WordPress ecosystem. Flywheel acquisition Financial terms of the agreement have not been shared, but

Millions of fake Google Maps listings hurt real business and consumers

Google Maps carries approximately 11 million illegitimate local listings, with hundreds of thousands more getting created each month, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. These fake listings push real businesses further down the local search results, impacting their ability to reach customers and make unsuspecting users easy targets for scammers. Google says it is

How ransomware targets WordPress sites

What would you do if you found yourself locked out of your own business website by criminals? That’s exactly what happens to approximately one business every 40 seconds. Not all of these ransomware attempts are successful, but those that are cost the average company about $133,000.  Can your company or client afford that kind of

How I Grew My Dying Facebook Traffic

Is it me, or does Facebook just want to keep you on Facebook? Every time I post a link to my site, I get less and less traffic. And it’s been this way for years. In other words, my organic reach on Facebook was dying. And to make matters worse, they give you hope every

UK regulator says real-time bidding violates GDPR

A recent report (.pdf) from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) addresses the question of whether real-time bidding (RTB) is compatible with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As currently constituted and operated, the regulator’s answer seems to be “no.” Report puts the industry on notice. ICO says that it published the report “to provide

Creating landing pages that convert

If you’re looking to gather leads for your business, you need to have a landing-page strategy. Just like every other marketing tactic, this can be done well or it can be done poorly. To see the greatest return on their investment, businesses need to build effective landing pages, then test and optimize them to maximize

Conversion optimization is an operating system (not a tactic)

I know it sounds banal, but I’d like to revisit the question: “What is conversion rate optimization.” If you search Google, the answer seems obvious enough. The first result, from Moz, defines it as, “the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action — be that filling out a

Welcome to the next era of social media marketing

At this year’s F8 Developer’s Conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stood on stage and announced, “The future is private.” It was a bold statement coming from the guy who has spent the past eighteen months tackling a firestorm of criticism over misusing customer data and information. Still, the intent – that Facebook is shifting its

SMXcast: Tactics to improve your YouTube video ad performance

For search marketers, YouTube offers access to 1.9 billion logged-in global users per month, making it the second largest search engine. And, Google reports that advertisers buying YouTube video ads in addition to search ads see, on average, 8% higher search conversion volume, 3% higher search conversion rates and 4% lower search CPAs (compared to