Category: Data

It’s our existential question as SEO professionals — is SEO still growing? Or have Google’s actions reduced the opportunity potential? I see this phrased in all sorts of ways: Are there more searches on Google this year than last year? Is Google taking more of the search traffic for themselves? Do more or fewer clicks go to the organic results…

In late November/early December of 2015, I ran a survey of consultants and agencies asking deep questions about their structure, fees, employees, projects, and more. Thanks to responses from over 400 folks around the world, I’m able to share what I hope will be some of the most useful data from that project. Survey takers were primarily founders, owners, and…

Google’s Search Suggest is a wonderous feature. Not only does it save humans beings around the planet millions of key entries each day, it’s also a phenomenal keyword research tool for marketers. For reasons that likely center around its commercial intent bias, Google’s Keyword Planner Tool often doesn’t show large swaths of data around keywords, e.g.: If you take the…

Sigh… Every few years, there’s a renewed effort in the worlds of shoddy journalism, clickbait, and cheap pageviews to claim the death of SEO. Recently, a few articles, a handful of folks on Twitter, and some presentations I’ve come across have been using this chart to PROVE that this time, SEO really is dying: Google Trends Search for “SEO” See…

For a long time, folks in the search, technology, and marketing worlds have surmised that Google is using query and clickthrough data to bias search result rankings. I recently observed several examples of this via some industry colleagues (that, unfortunately, I cannot share publicly), and thought, “what the heck, let’s give it a spin.” On April 30th, at 6:03pm Pacific,…