Richard Chavez

It’s a well-known fact that SEO and paid search practitioners often work separately — even though both teams share the same goal of developing keyword strategies, content, and tactics to attract more visitors and sales.

But have you ever wondered what would happen if these teams combined their efforts and broke down their silos? Find our more...

Unlike a traditional, HTML page containing all website content, a SPA will only include the basic page structure. The actual wording, however, appears through a dynamic API call.

For SEO, the above means that a page contains no actual HTML in the source code. As a result, all the elements Google would crawl are not there.

SEO teams develop different strategies to measure the SEO ROI. Yet, many fall under scrutiny from their CFOs and other stakeholders. Oftentimes, this is due to the unclear metrics on which they report.

In this post, I will help you overcome this challenge. I’ll show you a strategy for proving the ROI of SEO many of our customers have already used successfully.

For any SEO, high-quality links mean popularity, trust, authority, and higher rankings.

But note that I said, “high-quality.” That’s because backlinks from low-quality sites – untrustworthy or those irrelevant to your industry - can set your SEO efforts back.

The most blatantly spam ones could even get your site out of the index. With little chance of ever getting back, at that.

The thing is, toxic links happen. It’s not always because of something you did, but you will… Show more

For any SEO, high-quality links mean popularity, trust, authority, and higher rankings.

But note that I said, “high-quality.” That’s because backlinks from low-quality sites – untrustworthy or those irrelevant to your industry - can set your SEO efforts back.

The most blatantly spam ones could even get your site out of the index. With little chance of ever getting back, at that.

The thing is, toxic links happen. It’s not always because of something you did, but you will get some. Show less

The Google Hawk update landed with little fanfare or any announcement last year. In fact, it appeared so suddenly that many SEOs may have missed it at first.

And for the most part, it seemed to primarily focus on fixing some of the most glaring errors of Google's 'Possum' update, bringing a sigh of relief from local brands whose listings it so severely affected.

Even though both teams’ focus is to develop keyword strategies, content, and tactics to attract more visitors and sales. They both do a pretty good job as both channels drive the majority of website traffic. According to PMDigital and ClickZLive Study, for example, SEO attracts about 30% of visitors while SEM is responsible for another 40%.

This post serves as an introduction to Javascript for SEO. After reading it, you should have a good idea why you should embrace the programming language into your skill set.

Fact: to many businesses, the holiday season represents the biggest selling time of the year.

And for retailers, it can represent 20% – 30% of their annual sales in the span of about four weeks.

No surprise that a lot of eCommerce companies begin preparations for the holiday season early. Most of the planning starts with their merchandising strategy, then promotional cadence with the optimization of the offers and deals competitively, then their advertising plans, and updating the… Show more

Fact: to many businesses, the holiday season represents the biggest selling time of the year.

And for retailers, it can represent 20% – 30% of their annual sales in the span of about four weeks.

No surprise that a lot of eCommerce companies begin preparations for the holiday season early. Most of the planning starts with their merchandising strategy, then promotional cadence with the optimization of the offers and deals competitively, then their advertising plans, and updating the stock, etc. Show less

There has been a lot of talk of Google algorithm updates over the past week. Speculation continues to determine the root cause of these ranking fluctuations. Is this side-effect of Fred? Or is this something different? At a deeper view, seoClarity researched keyword rankings across a variety of verticals and found some interesting insights.

As the holidays approach, I’m sure plans for your SEO campaigns for 2017 is last on your mind. However, it’s important to plan now and prioritize activities to make most impact in the shortest time to sustain YOY growth based on your KPIs. Now that we have some good, broad targets, let’s look at some quick activities that can be completed this month to layout priorities and timelines come January.

Whether balancing brick, catalog, B2B, International, or pure digital businesses; understanding how to strategically utilize SEO is critical for all marketing channels.

This presentation was shared at the Kibo Commerce Summit in Half Moon Bay, CA on March 24,2016.

As of June 2015, DDG records at least 10 million daily searches. While this is not nearly at the same level as Google, it is a significant audience.
Organic results are sourced primarily from Yahoo, Yelp and its own crawler—DuckDuckBot. IOS Safari and Mozilla Firefox offer DDG as an available search engine.

Content creation should carry the brand throughout the customer journey that 1. aids the customer decision process and 2. integrates the brand in their everyday lives. This can lead to increased conversions, repeat visits and much more.

Amazon will launch its inaugural Prime Day next week. What does this mean for brands? Piston has provided a POV on what brands should to best manage their SEO and SEM campaigns.

The next real SEO challenge for brands is not duplicate content, schema or low-quality links. No, the next hurdle is the mobile experience of your site. Brands need to prepare now. Those that currently have a responsive site or m-dot and the “mobile-friendly” label next to their mobile search listing should be fine, with no further immediate site modifications necessary. Non-compliant sites need to start the process of transitioning to responsive design now.

SEO can be a highly profitable marketing channel for brands and agencies and there has been a large surge in traditional agencies developing SEO practices to serve their clients.

Despite the generally high ROI it provides, SEO still doesn’t have the same “brand” recognition as other digital channels (SEM, PLA, Display).

This presentation demonstrates the value of integrating with SEM create incremental lift for both campaigns that creates brand awareness for brands and each stage… Show more

SEO can be a highly profitable marketing channel for brands and agencies and there has been a large surge in traditional agencies developing SEO practices to serve their clients.

Despite the generally high ROI it provides, SEO still doesn’t have the same “brand” recognition as other digital channels (SEM, PLA, Display).

This presentation demonstrates the value of integrating with SEM create incremental lift for both campaigns that creates brand awareness for brands and each stage of the customer journey. Show less

This past holiday season proved to be one of the best ever for a lot of retail brands. Having had such strong success, this year’s expectations are even higher. If last year’s SEO holiday performance is any indication of this year, mobile should continue strong growth and holiday promotions will continue to start earlier. To ensure the best SEO performance, brands should create content, optimize and publish now.

Defining and Refining Customer Journey:??How integration of SEM and SEO Segmentation Can Enhance Your Brand Identity Throughout the Customer Shopping Journey.

This presentation demonstrates the necessity of integrating SEO and SEM and managing each channel in concert through all stages of the customer’s journey. Moreover, through case studies, this presentation will clearly show that either channel cannot successfully perform independent of the other.

PM Digital analyzed YOY natural search traffic, order and revenue growth for all of its retail clients and found that the YOY growth in both desktop and mobile usage grew substantially. Topline Findings Both desktop and mobile enjoyed significant YOY growth.

I wrote an earlier post on Term Not Provided at 100% that listed some suggestions to measure SEO success sans keywords such as Google Webmaster Tools, query data and SEO / SEM Blended Reporting. It’s important to note that aggregate performance will continue to be available.

Google’s Hummingbird, which has actually been in place for about a month, is a completely new algorithm and their biggest natural search update since Caffeine in 2010. The core concept of this new algorithm is faster and more precise indexing of web content.

Creating a SEO practice in an already 20-year established agency was the biggest challenge of my career. Creating a practice that is competitive, profitable and scalable is the holy-grail. With limited resources this took a lot of planning, trial-and-error, time and patience.

Since its inception, Term Not Provided has grown substantially; on average, it drives 30-40% of total site traffic and many times higher for conversions and revenue for PM Digital’s clients. On September 23, 2013, Search Engine Land reported Google’s quiet confirmation that they will encrypt (Term Not Provided) all search clicks with the exception of SEM clicks.

Certain retailers (Amazon, Overstock, eBay, Walmart, Target, Walgreens, Home Depot, etc.) are very strong in terms of natural search rankings, creating a barrier to entry for specialty retailers. While this is indeed a challenge, there is an opportunity for specialty retailers to grow, compete and flourish via natural search. While there is a real challenge, most consumers are brand savvy and knowledgeable of the products they desire. With this stated, there is a real opportunity for specialty… Show more

Certain retailers (Amazon, Overstock, eBay, Walmart, Target, Walgreens, Home Depot, etc.) are very strong in terms of natural search rankings, creating a barrier to entry for specialty retailers. While this is indeed a challenge, there is an opportunity for specialty retailers to grow, compete and flourish via natural search. While there is a real challenge, most consumers are brand savvy and knowledgeable of the products they desire. With this stated, there is a real opportunity for specialty retailers to market their brands and grow. Show less

SEO is a constant changing process. Search engine updates keep the SEO community on its toes, and have caused the industry to reshape itself a lot over the past few years, even months.

While SEO is an evolving industry / practice, certain best practices have held true and will continue to do so for many years.

This presentation provides a summary of long-term value SEO tactics that can be shared / evangelized throughout the organization for long-term growth of SEO for your brand.

Tips to Avoid Product URL Duplicate Content Last week I had the good fortune to speak on Pagination and SEO at SMX East in New York. The primary focus was tips to avoid product URL duplicate content when merchandising products in multiple categories.

This ppt provides an overview of tactical solutions for AJAX optimization and SEO that I presented at SMX East in 2009. I presented this the same day Google launched Google Web Kit. This is one option, there are others as well.