While I’ve always been the complete opposite of a SEO hypebeast, there are times when you have to call a spade a spade and acknowledge that something big just went down. Between March 5th and April 19th, 2024, Google rolled out its most impactful update of the last decade and it marks an inflection point that will redefine how we do SEO moving forward. As the update rolled out, reports of rapid organic traffic declines flooded SEO blogs and social media. Most of the anecdotes claim around 80% traffic drops, while some of the worst-affected websites fell 97% the organic traffic department. On t ..read more

SearchWorks founder Glen Dimaandal often points out that search engine optimization (SEO) is a skill that just about anyone can learn. And this is mostly true. For the most part, becoming competent in key SEO practices like technical SEO and linkbuilding just requires you to put in the time and get your hands dirty. However, excelling at SEO will require much more than simple adherence to common best practices. All exceptional SEO professionals have a few under-appreciated abilities that set them head and shoulders above their peers. What’s mor ..read more

As a full-service digital marketing agency, we see web design and search engine optimization (SEO) as inherently complementary. A truly great website not only looks appealing but also supports SEO efforts by providing a positive user experience and aligning with search engine ranking criteria. That said, web design is, on the surface, the more dynamic of the two disciplines. Sure, there are major changes that rock the SEO practice every year but the implications of these are not necessarily visible to laypeople or even websmasters. A web designer’s outputs, on the other hand, is ..read more

At SearchWorks, we’re huge believers in the power of search engine optimization (SEO). With the right SEO team, your e-commerce site can cost-effectively amass a large number of qualified leads for a much lower cost than most other digital marketing campaigns. But, as the saying goes: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. While SEO campaigns can cost-effectively generate massive amounts of organic traffic, they cannot guarantee e-commerce campaigns on their own. You can have the most talented SEO team on your side but if your site’s design doesn’t ap ..read more

Running a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign without developing your brand signals can be compared to pedaling a bike with one foot. Sure, you might move forward. But, sooner or later, you’ll lose steam and fall over. Discussions of brand signals are often confusing because the term is used to refer to two related things: the sensory triggers that evoke people’s memories of a brand, and the online branding elements that Google and other search engines consider when ranking a website. As we’ll discuss, both types of brand signals — the ones that appeal to humans and the ones looked for b ..read more

By the time this is published, it will have been well over a year since ChatGPT and other generative AI tools disrupted the digital marketing industry and became household names. Already, we’re seeing a dramatic reduction in the resources needed to build websites and populate them with useful, actionable content. However, there are fears that Google, the de facto arbiter of the internet will, one day, clamp down on AI content, much like it did with spun articles in the past. To assuage these concerns, in February 2023, Google made a statement that AI content will not impact rankings on its sea ..read more

Picture the content landscape in the early 2010s. Modern smartphones had just gained widespread adoption and the Internet of Things (IoT) was starting to develop into what it is today. Things were moving so fast that existing web content frameworks couldn’t keep up. Older content management systems (CMS) often struggled to provide seamless experiences on the new wave of mobile devices and IoT devices. This was exactly what headless CMS platforms were meant to fix. Unlike traditional CMSs where the content is closely tied to the front-end design, headless CMS platforms decoupled content from it ..read more

While there was a time that you could create a fairly successful website without having any regard for web design, those days are long past. Today, failing to account for known web design principles is a leading cause of failure among business websites. This makes a lot of sense as poorly-designed web properties tend to offer a poor user experience (UX), leading to subpar site metrics and a poor return on investment. The zero-sum nature of marketing on the web means that you’re pretty much obligated to go big or go home when it comes to web design as well as in related areas like search engine ..read more

People are spoiled for choice when it comes to the kind of devices that they can use to view websites. According to a 2022 survey published on Statista, 92.3 percent of users worldwide accessed the internet using their mobile phones, while 65.5 percent also use their laptops or desktops to do the same. In addition to these popular devices, there are people who can even use TVs, smart home devices, and gaming consoles to browse websites. What Is Responsive Design and Why Is It Everywhere? Responsive web design makes it possible for visitors to see and use websites properly without regard for th ..read more

More and more people these days are using their mobile devices to access the internet. In fact, there are those who visit their favorite sites and ecommerce platforms exclusively through their smartphones. In order to cater to a large number of their users, search engines like Google began to implement algorithm updates that prioritized mobile friendliness. If a website is responsive and properly optimized for mobile devices, it’s given extra “points” in search rankings. If you own a small business, what all of this means is that you need to work on your website’s responsiveness. This will all ..read more