EDGE of the Web - The Best SEO Podcast for Today's Digital Marketer

Is Google Over-Reaching Into People’s Lives? One of Google’s recent patents appears to be geared towards sending people relevant purchase decision information while they’re in physical stores, including remote help and even sending a store associate to them.  YouTube Cleaning Up Its Act on Children’s Content As part of its $170 FTC settlement for violating the privacy of children under COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act), YouTube is now implementing big changes affecting advertisers. Wall Street Journal Accuses Google of Changing Search Results The WSJ’s far-ranging descriptions of how Google is manipulating search results to shape what users see had very little evidence to back it up, and showed a lack of understanding for how search works.

There aren’t very many people who got involved in SEO from the very beginning and then stuck with it all the way to now. When you have the opportunity to book a guest who basically invented SEO and popularized the term itself, you take it, right? We had the opportunity to have the one and only, Father of SEO, Bruce Clay on EDGE of the Web episode 333! If you don't know Bruce, he is the Founder and President of Bruce Clay Incorporate. He speaks at leading industry conferences (over 300) and conducts training courses for students worldwide. He's also been featured in various publications such as The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, PC Week, and many more. We deep-dived into the recent Wall Street Journal's recent article on November 15th, "How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results: The internet giant uses blacklists, algorithm tweaks and an army of contractors to shape what you see". Learn about the truth and miscommunication between The Wall Street Journal and Google as we break down this lengthy article into sections to analyze the information!

Don’t miss another digital marketing news roundup on this week’s episode of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast where we discuss busting EAT myths in SEO, Google shopping ads in more markets, and key takeaways from the Google Webmaster’s conference!

Getting great SEO results means making sure your audits are strategic, understandable, and actionable! With more than a decade of international SEO consulting under her belt, Aleyda Solis, Founder of Orainti, has learned just how important it is to maximize the growth from SEO audits. Tune in to episode 322 to get EDGEucated from the best of the best, Aleyda! Key discussion points from the show: Aleyda Solis's presentation on SEO Audits that Maximize Growth from SMXL19: https://www.slideshare.net/aleydasolis/seo-audits-that-maximize-growth-smxl19 SEO tools for crawling, link popularity, and rankings How the SEO audit focus will change based on the project goal, business, Website size, and SEO Maturity How to simplify the process of SEO audits

On this week’s EDGE of the Web show we discussed top trending digital marketing news ranging from new WordPress plugins and Facebook video metrics! Check out this week’s trending news:   Finally, Google’s Site Kit for WordPress is Ready After languishing in beta-mode for six months, Google has finally released its Site Kit WordPress Plugin allowing users to access aggregated Google data from multiple sources within the site’s dashboard. Unlike Facebook, Twitter Bans Political Ads Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says social media platforms have a responsibility to protect public discourse from false claims, deep fakes, and misleading info, and he thinks the best option is banning all political ads.  Facebook Shakes Up its Video View Metrics 10-second video optimization and metrics are out, 15-second video optimization and metrics are in via ThruPlay, theoretically because the 15-second approach gets better results. 

When you’re going the extra mile for clients in your SEO work, it should feel like you’re being a detective. Your digital marketing clients need to feel confident about your SEO skills, abilities, and results, and that means sharing SEO reporting with them but it’s got to be the right kind of reporting to be effective. Providing your client with a high-quality and understandable SEO report has become very important when discussing SEO with someone who isn't in the SEO world. This week's EDGE of the Web featured guest Bill Sebald, Managing Partner of Greenlane Marketing, has been creating SEO reports for a wide range of high-profile clients since 2005, and he’s got some incredible insights to share with you. Don't miss the EDGE episode that can help prevent you from digging yourself a hole by providing reports that cannot be understood by your digital marketing clients by getting great advice from Bill!

Love it or Hate it, Another Major Google Algorithm Change is Coming BERT-optimized natural language processing (NLP) means Google will look at more of the words in a search query to better understand context and intent to return better results to users.  Facebook News is Coming The Facebook News feature was created in partnership with the journalism industry. The “Today’s Stories” content will not be auto-selected by FB algorithms. Instead, a dedicated team of journalists will hand-select those stories. Can High Link Velocity Result in a Google Penalty? Are sites penalized if they acquire lots of backlinks quickly? John Mueller says it’s about the quality of the links, not the speed at which they’re acquired. Link velocity is only bad if the links are unnatural.

Too many digital marketing and SEO professionals leave something out of the strategies they present to clients: Robust backlinks are the missing pieces of the puzzle, but they have to be done right in a Google-friendly approach to see success. When Adam White, founder, and CEO of SEOJet, want to get SEO results, one of his main go-to strategies is building great backlinks. But unfortunately, far too many digital marketing professionals don’t actually know how to do it right. Luckily, Adam is this week's featured guest on EDGE of the Web episode 330. He is on a mission to help bring new levels of legitimacy to SEO practices, and he wants you to know that YES, you CAN (and must) build awesome, Google-friendly backlinks that will do wonders for your sites. Check out this episode to get EDGEucated and practice digital marketing tactics correctly

The H1 Debate Continues Google has previously said the use of H1 is not important to SEO because semantic analysis is the key. Others, however, note how H1s do impact SEO in terms of what appears in SERPs.   Transparency Boosts Data Sharing by Consumers When companies are more transparent about how consumer data is used, people are more willing to share their data, to the tune of 73% in 2019 as opposed to only 66% in 2018 according to Accenture Interactive.   New Lead Form Extensions Being Tested by Google Ads Businesses can capture more customer information with a strong special offer that can only be accessed after filling out a lead form, which advertisers can customize.

When your ultimate goal is to improve your site’s search position, there’s no better way to get started than with a search engine optimization audit. Everyone wants to boost the search position for their website but fewer realize that you start chasing SERPs after you conduct an SEO audit.  This week's featured guest is Andy Drinkwater, SEO Consultant and Owner of IQSEO. Andy got involved with SEO work in the early days of the industry. Over the years he has developed an incredibly comprehensive SEO audit process, which is the starting point for figuring out how to boost your site’s search position. Check out episode 329 of EDGE of the Web to watch Erin geek out about SEO with Andy. They review all the SEO tools available and how each tool can help you with specific SEO factors!