When it comes to PPC reporting, major online advertising platforms (e.g. Google Ads and Facebook Ads) do provide some native functionality, including recurring campaign reports and CSV exports. But these tools don’t allow you to combine multiple data sources — and they don’t help you craft a narrative that makes your PPC reporting powerful and interesting to clients. To bring your PPC results to life and tell a deeper story, you need to add context, detail, and meaning to your PPC reports. For this, you’ll need the help of PPC reporting software. And this software should addres ..read more

When you’re conducting an SEO audit, there are a lot of metrics and factors to look at — redirects, broken links, meta issues, image tags, and much more. All of these things are important to fix to keep your website healthy and capable of ranking in the search engines. However, when you’re focusing on local SEO, some factors become more important than others. To figure out which areas are the most vital to audit for improving local search rankings, we spoke with Elliott Davidson. He is a local SEO expert and founder of boutique UK-based digital marketing agency, Contrast. As Elliott says ..read more

Google launched its Mobile-first Index in 2018/19 in response to the ratio of mobile searches swinging further past desktop every year. Now, the Google algorithm assesses the mobile experience of any website ahead of the desktop experience before indexing it in the SERPs. While of course, this proves that building a mobile-optimized site is vital, just building it isn’t enough. The increasing number of mobile searches also means that mobile rankings are more important to track than ever before. Despite this, many articles about rank tracking gloss over mobile rankings. In ..read more

How do you track SEO progress and measure SEO results? Much of the content written on this topic focuses on tracking the right metrics. It’s easy to find a list (often lengthy) of SEO metrics and KPIs you should be tracking — but metrics really only scratch the surface of tracking SEO progress. Keyword rankings, for example, are a common metric for search engine optimization pros. Don’t get us wrong — rankings are an important metric, but only in the right context. To understand the true value of keyword rankings (and track your SEO progress), you need to connect those rankings to what happen ..read more

Digital marketers prioritize tracking their keyword rankings on Google, and rightly so — because Google has secured over 87% of the search engine market. In second place, Bing has a comparatively tiny share of the pie ⁠— just 5.5% according to Statistica. However, according to Bing, their PC market share is 11%, and this amounts to 11.7 billion monthly searches on desktop. That’s a lot of searches. And while Google is undoubtedly the dominant global player, there are other, more specific, factors to consider when thinking about rank tracking on alternative search engi ..read more

When you build an online SEO report for your clients, what data do you include? First and foremost, an online SEO report needs to be shareable and easy to access. But in terms of the information you include, there’s no clear-cut answer — no boilerplate list of KPIs that make for a universally good search engine optimization report. Why? Because every client is different. Many blog posts will tell you which metrics to use and perhaps even give you a template. However, this isn’t an effective way to build an SEO report that works for you and your client, because: You may not be ..read more

In this blog post, we’ll be comparing three of the market-leading SEO tools: Ahrefs, SEMrush, and yours truly — Raven Tools. There are a lot of review sites out there, but having built an SEO platform ourselves, we have a deep understanding of what makes these tools different — and the ways in which they might suit certain marketers more than others. We can tell you where Raven Tools shines, and where Ahrefs and SEMrush keep us on our toes. Hopefully, this helps you make a decision about which tool is most suitable for you. In the following comparison, we’ll give you information about: The u ..read more

Let’s say you own a roofing business or you manage the SEO of a roofing business. You’ve done a quick domain authority check for the domains ranking for common things like “roofing business,” “roofing company,” or “roofing service.” You then take a look at your site and see that your website has half the links, half the trust and citation flow (read more here), and half the domain authority and page authority (DA & PA). You may have even decided to run a website audit! Now What? The problem most beginners face is normally rooted in analysis paralysis and data confusion. You can dig into d ..read more

The rollout of Google’s algorithm update, BERT (or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), could possibly be one of the most influential updates to search results in the past 5 years. The new update is estimated to affect about 10% of searches and is being used to better understand the intent behind them. To explain Google’s reasoning behind the update, here is a snippet from Google’s October 24, 2019 press release: “With the latest advancements from our research team in the science of language understanding–made possible by machine learning–we’re making a significant improv ..read more

Keyword mapping is the process of linking keywords to target pages. The goal of keyword mapping is to provide a framework to work from and to make sure all of your keywords have a designated area. The main reasons I map my keywords is to avoid keyword cannibalization and to streamline the process for me to hand off my writing assignments to my content writer. We’ve written a guide titled: How to Do Keyword Research, and that covers the beginning of this process. If you haven’t read that, you may want to start there. I’ll attempt to make this process easy enough to understand without the extra ..read more