Does Your Blog Have a Long Tail

Most smart bloggers try to focus on a few, key search terms in their blog content. But the reality is, your blog is probably a lot more broad than you think. Last week, I co-published a white paper with Chris Baggott, the CEO of Compendium Blogware (I’m on their advisory board). The free “Blogging’s Long [...]

7 Critical Questions When Outsourcing SEO

Many agencies without full service digital marketing departments choose to outsource any SEO work to a specialist. While I believe that the present focus on good content makes SEO easier, not harder for traditional agencies (especially PR) to handle in-house, many will continue outsourcing this critical service (or at least until I launch a “How [...]

Agency Advantage Tools #1 – Website Grader

Welcome to Agency Advantage Tools, a regular blog series at Convince & Convert that spotlights inexpensive or free digital marketing tools. There are literally thousands of different Web sites, applications, plug-ins, widgets and more devoted to helping digital marketers do their jobs better or faster. Most advertising agencies and PR firms are too busy doing [...]

Google to Show Search Volume – Another Blow to Agencies

In a LOOOOONG overdue move that provides some much-needed transparency to the PPC business, Google has added search volume data to their keyword research tool.  This means that when you use Google to research potential search terms for your clients’ pay-per-click campaign, Google will actually give you an idea of how many people actually search [...]

91% of Top Digital Agencies Not Buying Their Own Brands on PPC

In a shocking (and embarassing) revelation today, AdWeek uncovered that of the 56 world-class digital marketing agencies featured in their Annual Report Card, just 5 are purchasing their own brand names in PPC. In fairness to the firms, most of them appear at or near the top of organic search results for their own brand [...]