Search Engine Marketing

Rand Fishkin recently sparked debate with his SparkToro blog post, “In a Zero-Click World, Traffic is a Terrible Goal.”  He pointed to a HubSpot survey where 60% of marketers said their top website priority is “increasing traffic,” and 59% listed “overall traffic growth” as their primary key performance indicator (KPI). Then, Fishkin delivered the digital […]

Advertisers have long debated the merits of broad match versus phrase match in Google Ads.  But while arguments around query control and relevancy remain valid, a less discussed but more decisive factor has quietly shifted the landscape: cost.  Recent data shows phrase match is becoming significantly more expensive, often without delivering better results. Google’s long

Brand bidding is the practice when your affiliates or competitors run paid ads on your branded keywords to capture your traffic and potential customers. You can ignore brand bidding, but your budget and customers won’t. Recent statistics show that: CPC for branded keywords can increase up to ×10 due to aggressive brand bidding. When a

As AI-driven platforms increasingly shape how brands are represented online, marketing leaders face a new imperative: ensuring their narrative remains accurate, consistent, and strategic. In this webinar, technical marketing expert Myriam Jessier and Gerald Murphy, Evangelist at Semrush Enterprise, will introduce the Brand Control Quadrant—a practical framework for understanding and managing how large language models

Advertisers are leaning into AI to help optimize pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. But how reliable is that AI guidance? Five popular AI tools – ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Meta AI – were asked 45 PPC-related questions by data Insights company Wordstream. The result? One in five answers were flat-out wrong. The experiment. The