Search Marketing FAQ

No - publishing content for LLMs tends to produce thin, derivative pages that humans don't engage with, which hurts both SEO and GEO. The play is to publish primary-source content that earns engagement and is structured for LLM extraction. Same content, optimized for both audiences.

in GEO Program

FAQPage schema is JSON-LD that tells search engines and LLMs that a page contains explicit question-answer pairs. It directly increases citation rates because it gives the AI reranker a cleanly delimited Q&A block to extract from. Pages with FAQ schema and direct-answer formatting routinely outperform same-topic pages without, by a wide margin.

in GEO Program

Search ads target intent - text ads on the SERP for keywords users actively type. Display ads target audiences and contexts - banner ads across Google's display network. Shopping ads showcase products with image, price, and merchant - driven by your product feed. YouTube ads target video audiences - pre-roll, in-stream, discovery. A complete Google Ads program selects the network that matches each campaign's goal, not all of them by default.

in PPC Program

ROAS (return on ad spend) is revenue divided by ad spend - gross. ROI (return on investment) is profit divided by total investment - net. A 4:1 ROAS sounds healthy but can still produce negative ROI if your gross margin is 20%. We optimize PPC to a target ROAS and check that it clears the ROI threshold for your specific margin structure.

in PPC Program

Quality Score is Google's 1-10 rating of how relevant your ad, keyword, and landing page are to the searcher. Higher Quality Score = lower cost-per-click for the same position. Improving Quality Score from 5 to 8 typically cuts CPC by 30-50%. We treat it as a primary lever, not a vanity metric.

in PPC Program

Negative keywords are queries you tell Google not to show your ads for - usually irrelevant variants (free X, X jobs, X login) that drain budget without converting. Every campaign accumulates negatives over time as the search-terms report surfaces wasted spend. Mature accounts run negative lists in the hundreds to low thousands.

in PPC Program

Manual CPC sets bids by hand - high control, low scale. Maximize Conversions lets Google's algorithm bid to win the most conversions for your budget - good for new campaigns gathering data. Target ROAS instructs Google to bid for conversions valued at or above your target return - best for mature campaigns with 30+ days of conversion data and accurate revenue tracking. We pick the right bid strategy per campaign per phase, not one across the account.

in PPC Program

Yes, with a structure. Performance Max combines all Google networks into one campaign powered by automation. It works when (a) conversion tracking is clean, (b) the asset library is rich (multiple image, video, text variants), and (c) it's run alongside - not instead of - branded search campaigns. Without those, it cannibalizes brand traffic and underperforms standard campaigns.

in PPC Program

Almost always yes, even though it feels like paying for traffic you'd get for free. Reasons: competitors bid on your brand if you don't, the ad lets you control the messaging and CTA, branded search converts at the highest rate of any campaign type so the ROAS is excellent, and the cost is low because Quality Score is high. Stopping brand bidding costs more in lost conversions than it saves in spend.

in PPC Program

Broad match expands your keyword to related queries Google deems relevant - historically a budget-burner because relevance was loose. Modern broad match (combined with smart bidding and good audience signals) performs much better, but it requires aggressive negative keyword management and conversion-data feedback. We use it surgically, not by default.

in PPC Program

Highly category-dependent. Branded search: 15-30%+. Non-branded high-intent: 5-10%. Display: 0.3-1%. YouTube: 0.5-2%. Benchmarks matter less than directional movement - improving CTR over time at constant position is the signal that the ads are getting more relevant.

in PPC Program

A landing page is the destination URL of an ad. Sending traffic to your homepage drops Quality Score and conversion rate because the homepage doesn't match the ad's specific promise. Dedicated landing pages - built around the ad's keyword, offer, and CTA - typically lift conversion rate 1.5-3x for the same traffic.

in PPC Program

Yes. Lead-generation PPC (consultations, demos, downloads, signups) is a major share of the spend we manage. The optimization changes - we target cost-per-lead and lead-quality, not ROAS - but the discipline (Quality Score, intent matching, negatives, landing pages) is identical.

in PPC Program

Spend should be set by the addressable demand and the unit economics, not by a percentage rule. We size budgets to (a) the search volume of the keywords that match your buyer intent, (b) the competitive auction floor in your category, and (c) the maximum cost per acquisition your margins support. The audit surfaces the ceiling and the floor.

in PPC Program

Our core programs cover search and AI-channel ads - Google, Microsoft (Bing), Amazon, Yahoo, Brave, and DuckDuckGo. Social platforms have different optimization disciplines (audience-first, not intent-first). We coordinate with social agencies on multi-channel attribution but don't manage social campaigns directly.

in PPC Program

Conversion tracking is the data layer that tells Google which clicks resulted in business outcomes (sales, leads, signups). Without it, smart bidding has nothing to optimize toward, and the agency is flying blind. We audit and rebuild conversion tracking on day one of every engagement - most accounts arrive with broken or partial tracking.

in PPC Program

Click fraud is fake clicks on your ads, usually from bots or competitors trying to drain budget. Google has internal filters that screen out most of it; the residual is small in volume for most categories. We monitor for it but rarely recommend dedicated click-fraud tools unless the IP-pattern data justifies the spend.

in PPC Program

Most accounts have a long tail of campaigns, ad groups, and keywords that consume 30-50% of spend and produce under 10% of conversions. The trimming phase identifies and pauses them, then redirects budget to the winners. It's the single highest-ROI move in the first 60 days of most engagements.

in PPC Program

No, but it changes total visibility. Branded search tends to rebound to organic when ads pause; non-branded paid traffic disappears entirely without an SEO replacement. The honest answer: PPC and SEO are independent channels with different elasticities, and pausing one doesn't compensate the other unless that's specifically what the strategy planned for.

in PPC Program

Default to Next.js with a headless CMS (Sanity or Contentful) for marketing sites that need scale, performance, and developer flexibility. We also build on WordPress when content team workflows require it, and on Shopify for e-commerce. The choice is informed by the team that will edit the site after launch, not by our preference.

in Website Development

We build custom on those platforms for clients whose post-launch workflow requires a no-code editor and whose performance/SEO needs fit the platform's ceiling. Webflow handles most marketing-site needs well; Framer is strong for design-led brands; Squarespace fits small-team simplicity. Each has hard limits on enterprise SEO, schema, and performance that we'll surface during scoping.

in Website Development

Yes, when migrations follow our SEO migration playbook: full URL inventory pre-launch, 301 redirect map covering every existing indexed page, content/metadata/schema parity, internal-link rewrite, and a 30-day post-launch monitoring window. Migrations done correctly preserve 95%+ of organic traffic; migrations done without this lose 20-60%.

in Website Development

Accessibility is built in at design and component level - semantic HTML, sufficient color contrast, keyboard navigation, focus states, ARIA where appropriate, alt text on images, captions on video, accessible forms. We test against WCAG 2.2 AA as the default standard. Accessibility is a legal and ethical baseline, not an upsell.

in Website Development

Yes - design and development are a single integrated workflow. Disconnected design-to-dev handoffs lose performance, accessibility, and SEO opportunities at the seam. Our team designs in Figma and develops in the same sprint, with constant feedback loops.

in Website Development