Resources
The Robots.txt File: What It Is and Why It Matters
For decades, the humble robots.txt file served as the de facto regulator of search engine crawlers. Thanks to AI, that democratic supremacy may be over. This small piece of code is tasked with restricting crawlers from sensitive areas of a website, and, to their credit, the likes of Google, Bing, and Firefox have honored those…
AI Keyword Research Tools: Gemini, ChatGPT, and More
Keyword research is the heart and soul of SEO science, but dedicated SEO tools are cost-prohibitive for most in-house marketers and small agencies. As ChatGPT and Gemini improve, more marketers turn to AI for keyword research, using specific prompts to generate quality keyword lists to support new and existing pages. We’ve put together a few…
Asana vs. Teamwork: Which Is the Best Project Management Software for Marketing Teams?
The world runs on software. In-house marketing professionals and agency staff rely on project management software like Teamwork and Asana to organize marketing assets, deliver campaigns on schedule, and collaborate in real-time and on asynchronous working schedules. Having the right platform is a big part of working efficiently and putting everyone in a position to…
Screaming Frog vs. Lumar: Which Is the Best Site Crawl Tool?
Few tools are as valuable to SEO marketers as a reliable website crawler tool. Whether you’re looking for opportunities to improve performance for your organization’s domain or managing multiple properties, crawling your site offers a wealth of actionable information to shape forward strategy and prioritize technical SEO improvements. We’ve put in a lot of time…
A (Truly) Data-Driven Customer Experience
Businesses spend billions of dollars each year on surveys, customer service staff, and customer rewards programs to attract, understand, and retain customers. In today’s digital world, improving the customer experience is an ever-increasingly data-driven process that’s generating real results for brands, big and small. Customer Experience Analytics: What It Is and How It Works Customer…
Zapier: Integrations and Automations for Marketers
There are never enough hours in the day to get it all done, but Zapier automations could save you enough time to drink your morning coffee before it goes cold. Zapier and no-code alternatives like Make and Integrately are smart ways to automate repetitive tasks and free up more time for big-picture thinking. If you’re…
Ethics and Marketing: A Line in the Sand
Marketing ethics go beyond industry regulations or platform terms of use. Ethical concerns in marketing go deeper, forcing organizations and agencies to evaluate strategy, content, and tools to respect consumers’ rights. In an industry known for toeing the line, modern technologies like artificial intelligence and murky privacy rules have made doing the right thing murkier…
Media Literacy and the Rise of Stealth Marketing
You’d be forgiven for confusing this piece’s title with a Star Wars film, and the parallels are close enough to justify an extended (but not over-extended) metaphor. Media literacy (an informed, perhaps cynical understanding of how products, ideas, and services are marketed) is a force for good and the best way to combat stealth marketing….
11 Tips for Ecommerce Product Page Optimization
Ecommerce brands spend considerable time and budget driving customers to product pages – but is that page the best it can be? Optimizing product pages is a cost-effective way to increase conversions and maximize the value of your marketing efforts. Whether your site has a dozen product pages or hundreds, we have seven tips to…
Why Consistent Branding Is Important (And How to Stay on Track)
Establishing and maintaining brand consistency is no mean feat. Digital marketers work across dozens of channels and platforms, often in divided, asynchronous teams, making it all too easy to sacrifice consistency for convenience. But we all know that consistent branding is worth the work, and it’s easier than you think with the right systems in…
Why You Shouldn’t (Always) Post Links on Facebook
Meta designed its two marquee platforms to win the attention economy. The underpinning algorithms that shape the user experience on Facebook and Instagram are constantly optimized to serve users personalized content – the right cat video at the right time. Everything these algorithms do is meant to keep users on the platform. That’s a big…
Why First-Party Data Is Important to Your Brand
Businesses rely on data to make smart decisions, but not all data is created equally. First-party data collection is a vital (and undervalued) component of digital marketing, often assumed to be something only the biggest brands can do efficiently. That’s simply not the case! Brands of all sizes can develop a first-party data strategy to…