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What’s The Difference Between Keyword Research and Prompt Research?

August 10, 2026 weathergirl15

Over the years, we’ve talked a lot about both keywords and keyword research in our digital marketing agency’s blog (you can view a list of those keyword-related blog posts at https://allintheresults.com/category/keywords/), so we won’t repeat all of the valuable information about the keyword-research benefits shared there. Such research is just one piece, but an important piece, of an overall SEO/GEO/AEO strategy, and often is the foundation of all other SEO/GEO/AEO (search engine optimization/being found online) tactics, particularly when it comes to being found in traditional search engines.

Keyword research and prompt research differ on a number of fronts, including the factors outlined below.

How Keyword Research and Prompt Research Differ

Nature of What Is Entered In Search Tool By Searcher/Prompter: Traditional keyword research is/was all about discovering what topics (in the form of one word or several words (a phrase or statement)) individuals, in geographies your organization serves) are/were entering into traditional search engines on an average monthly basis. Eventually, keyword research expanded to “light” question research, using tools like Answer The Public. Prompt research is about discovering the various questions vs. statements or phrases that individuals are putting into an AI search/answer engine, like Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, or ChatGPT, to get an answer to a specific question.
Geographic Focus: as discussed above, keyword research is/was focused on understanding what terms/phrases/words target audiences in an organization’s geography were entering into traditional search vs. AI search tools to determine which phrases the target audiences were using most. With prompt research, there is far less geographic/physical-location focus, and it is far more difficult to obtain what questions individuals specifically in your geography are putting into an AI search tool, like ChatGPT, to get their question answered.
Ultimate Search Engine Optimization (SEO/GEO/AEO) Goal/Objective: Keyword research is all about helping an organization “rank well” in relevant search results fo relevant searches. Prompt research is about identifying the types of questions anyone anywhere is entering in an AI/answer engine that are either directly, tangentially, or very indirectly related to the products or services your organization offers.
How Research Is Used: Keyword research is used to inform the content that one includes on their website — whether it be post or page content — but particularly, the words used in/the phrasing of headers and subheaders, and behind-the-scenes meta/SEO tags. Prompt research is about identifying which content on your own website or a competitor’s website is being cited (linked to) by AI search engines, and therefore, being served up to “prompters” in the answer they spit back. This research can help inform the format and content nature of future blog posts or Q &A (housed in an FAQ website page). In addition, a different set of prompt research should be conducted to learn the exact phrasing/the nature of prompts that your target audiences are regularly putting into AI search/answer engines.
Tools Used To Conduct Research: Free and paid tools exist to conduct keyword research, and our team uses the free keyword planner tool in Google Ads to conduct such research. Prompt research involves the two types/branches described above and can be conducted by 1) adding the “first user source” dimension to your Google Analytics “pages and screens” report (see image below) and entering the names of various AI search engines, such as Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini, into the search query bar so you can see to which pages/posts on your site AI search engines are referring visitors. If you have a visitor coming to a specific post/page on your website, then the AI engine in-question must have cited (provided a link to) the website page or post in-question; and 2) using a paid tool like SEMRush which has a distinct “prompt research” tool within it to gather broader/more general target-audience prompt behavior, and therefore, behavior that goes on beyond your particular website.

This image is a print screen from a Google Analytics report where the page report has an added dimension of the first user source name so the user can see what AI search engine is referring traffic to which pages and posts of their website.

Need Help Conducting Prompt Research Or Keyword Research?

Reach out today for a complimentary discussion regarding keyword research and prompt research to support an overall SEO/AEO/GEO strategy!

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Our Journey With LLM Advertising: How To Optimize and Set Up ChatGPT Ads

June 22, 2026 weathergirl15

We never like to recommend, or try to implement, a new form of online advertising, until we’ve tried/tested it with our own business. That way we can understand the pros and cons of running advertising on a new advertising vehicle, plus all the “inputs” we’ll need to provide to the tool to launch the campaign. That makes it easy to know what questions we need to ask of our clients related to a new ad campaign launch on a vehicle that is new to them, or what we need their approval on.

We waited to try this new vehicle until they offered pay-per-click (PPC) vs. just pay-per-impression (CPM) advertising because, quite frankly, most of clients are small-to-mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and nonprofits and they have far smaller marketing/advertising budgets than large firms and need their ads to really work for them and generate leads and sales vs. just awareness-generation!

This gray image that runs horizontally is a print screen of Results Communications & Research's ad running on ChatGPT and It is truncated but says "Looking For Expert Advice For Bein..Learn How We Help Organizations Appear in AI and Traditional Search..." and contain a small powder blue image that says "SEO." — Results Communications & Research’s ChatGPT Ad

As of the original publish date of this blog post, It’s been about 1.5 weeks since we rolled out ads for our own business, Results Communications & Research, on the ChatGPT LLM-powered (large-language-model-powered) answer engine/AI search platform. We’ve documented below — and will continue to document — our 2026 journey with this new form of online advertising. So, be sure to check back!

Days 1 & 2 (June 11 and June 12) – set up our ad and associated targeting for our campaign at ads.openai.com (ChatGPT is owned by OpenAI) — it was not a large lift at all! Needed to determine and document in OpenAI’s ad tool how much we were initially wanting to spend for a click (we initially put this at $3.50) and our daily budget ($25), plus in what geographies (Providence RI and Boston MA) we wanted the ads to appear. And, also provide context hints (OpenAI instructions explained this exercise this way: “describe the conversations, topics, or keywords where your products or services may be relevant; these hints guide matching, but aren’t exact-match targeting rules.” We also documented the images and content we wanted to use in our ads. We are testing two ads — one with longer and one with shorter headlines — but to keep something consistent, so we’d feel comfortable drawing conclusions about our headlines, we used the same image in both ads. We also had to share with the ad platform what page of our website we wanted ad clickers to land on (we created a brand new page on our WordPress website for such purposes — which is an online advertising best practice).
Day 2 (June 12) – launched our campaign by activating it in our OpenAI Ads dashboard.
Day 5 or 6 (June 15 or 16) – of course, being the digital marketing and analytics geeks that we are, we checked our advertising dashboard at openai.com countless times to see if the ads were being served up and generating impressions and/or clicks. Seeing zero movement on either the impressions or clicks front, we decided to expand our geography to NYC and our daily budget to $35 and what we were willing to spend for a click to $5.00, in case what we were willing to pay for a click (and the competition to have ads shown by competitors in the same geography for the same types of prompts) was causing the ads to not be shown or we needed a bigger geography to have enough opportunities for our ads to be shown to relevant “prompters” on ChatGPT.
Day 7 (June 17) – we saw in our advertising dashboard that our ChatGPT ads were starting to accrue impressions, and therefore, were being served up, but not to any great degree.
Day 8 (June 18) – we increased what we were willing to pay for a click to $7.50, and also added in the whole state of New Hampshire to our geographic targeting.
Day 9 (June 19) – seeing an alert in the OpenAI ads platform that we were often being outbid by competitors because of what we were willing to pay for a click, we increased our click bid to $10.00 from $7.50 – our first 2 clicks were achieved somewhere between the 18th and 19th, and at that point, our ads had a 0.66% click-thru rate (meaning less than 1% of individuals having our ad served up to them, clicked on it — not surprising for reasons outlined in the next bullet.)
Day 12 (June 22) – we just checked this morning and the increase in budget and what we are willing to spend for an ad click, plus the expanded geography seems to be paying off! As of this morning, our ChatGPT ads have generated 2,762 impressions (been served up that number of times), 13 clicks (a 0.47% click-thru rate), and an average cost-per-click of $6.44. We aren’t surprised by any of this. We had seen competitors running ChatGPT ads in our space when we were entering relevant prompts into ChatGPT, so we knew as a business-to-business advertiser we were more likely to have to pay more for a click than a business-to-consumer advertiser might. We also know that ChatGPT is a different animal than Google Search ads — the new form of ads discussed in this post is served up to individuals entering prompts into ChatGPT that might indicate they’d be interested in our services, but it’s not the same as someone entering “keywords” into Google and then Google serving up ads to those individuals because an advertiser provided those keywords as ones they wanted their ads to be served up for. We changed our daily budget to $50.00 today — we should have increased the daily budget a few days back in keeping with our increasing the amount we were willing to pay for a click! We also paused the shorter of our two ads since the longer ad was performing far better. To-date, we have not generated any leads — in the form of phone calls, e-mails, or appointment set-up — from these ads. We’re not discouraged by this at all, since, when it comes to a business engaging a firm for B2B services — or even reaching out to them — there can be a long lead time!
Day 17 (June 27) – we paused our ads today. Not because they weren’t generating impressions or clicks, but simply because we are a small marketing agency/SEO company who deliberately keeps our fees/rates very reasonable so that small businesses and nonprofits can afford to work with us. Going into this pilot, we planned to only spend about $300, but ended up letting the ads run until ChatGPT ads had spent $364.12, based on our daily budget and what we were willing to spend per click.

How Successful Was Our ChatGTP Ads Campaign?

Because businesses often take some time before purchasing business services, and therefore, like to research a number of companies before they decide to reach out to the one organization or the few organizations whom they are most interested in, we have yet to receive any inquiries from our ads, but still hope to get some inquiries from those who have clicked on the ads. At least we’ve generated some “awareness” among appropriate parties. We’ve also found in our many years of running online ads for our own business, that often, fellow marketing agencies/competitors click on our ads to see what we are offering and what we are all about. We did ensure our landing page for our ad clickers adhered to best practices, such as demonstrating why we are experts, including “social proof,” therefore, a review or testimonial, and much more!

Ultimately our ChatGPT ads yielded:

11,321 impressions (this number of sets of eyeballs viewed our ads as part of entering an appropriate prompt into ChatGPT)
46 clicks
0.41% CTR (we aren’t concerned or scared off by this low click-thru rate — we’ve seen similar with Reddit and nextdoor.com ads
Average cost-per-click (CPC) of $7.92 – not horrible for a B2B (business-to-business) lead

As we recommended at the top of this blog post, keep coming back to learn more about our ChatGPT advertising journey! We’re all in this together when it comes to understanding this particular form of new advertising and how effective it will be in generating leads and sales, not just awareness, and if ROI makes sense for advertisers like our clients who need their ad $$ to work for them pretty quickly.

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The Challenges Of Display Advertising, A Form Of Push Marketing

February 23, 2026 weathergirl15

While our firm has developed a specialty in, and has gotten well known locally for search engine optimization (SEO), i.e., both paid and organic tactics that drive individuals who are actively searching to identify someone who offers the products, services, and solutions to products you do to your website, we also have a lot of experience with “push marketing.” Unlike SEO-related marketing and tactics (pull marketing), push marketing is all about putting the idea about your organization’s products, services, and solutions into the heads of individuals who aren’t actively searching to identify someone like you, but who still might be a great fit for your product, service or solution, based on various demographics and behaviors. And, our blog post is focused on one form of push marketing — display advertising.

Who Does Display Advertising Target?

Like all forms of push marketing (think print, e-mail, and radio marketing), display advertising (advertising that includes an image vs. just text) allows you to target individuals and/or businesses based on one or more of these criteria about the individual or business:

the geography in which they live or are located
their age, gender, and household income, if an individual
key life events, such as graduating from college, having a baby or retiring, if an individual
their hobbies or interests
their role at a company
their recent purchase, or research conducted related to a potential purchase
the size or nature, if a company

So, What Is The Biggest Challenge Of Display Targeting?

Over the years, in both corporate marketing and consulting/agency roles, we’ve run a decent number of Google Ads, Facebook/Instagram, Reddit, Nextdoor.com and other “display campaigns” that have employed the targeting detailed above. But, with recent campaigns, it’s really struck us what one of the biggest challenges is related to running such campaigns to pursue individuals who aren’t necessarily looking to buy your products, services or solutions, but who might be a good fit for them.

And, that display advertising challenge is this. Many consumers and/or individuals associated with a business often click on ads, not because they have an immediate need for the product, service, or solution advertised nor will they ever have such a need. But rather, they click on ads out of what we call “the curiosity factor.” Something about the language and/or image in the ad — known as the “ad creative” sounds interesting or intriguing to them and they click on the ad to learn more just because they are curious.

This image shows part of the face and only one eye of a boy with dark hair and dark eyes peeling back brightly colored blue, gold, and purple curtains to look out the window.

How Does The Curiosity Factor Impact Display Advertising Results?

Here’s how individuals clicking on display ads simply out of curiosity impacts display advertising results:

Since for display ads, you often pay for ad “click,” you often pay for clicks that will never become a lead or sale.
The conversion rate for your ads is far lower than what you see with “paid search” campaigns (where ad clickers are in active search mode to identify someone like you) and your cost-per-conversion may end up being far higher than what you see with push marketing. The last statement depends on how much your cost-per-click is for your display campaign since often the cost-per-click is far lower than for a paid search campaign.
Ultimately your campaign ROI or ROAS (return on ad spend) ends up being quite low and doesn’t warrant continuing to spend on the campaign even though you’ve generated a lot of awareness of your products, services, and solutions thru your display ad spend.

Need Help Determining Whether Or Not It Makes Sense To Run A Display Advertising Campaign?

Our team is glad to chat with you on a complimentary basis about whether or not piloting a display campaign would make sense for your organization. Schedule a complimentary display advertising discussion today!

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Looking For An Additional Way To Be Found Online? The Answer Might Be Right Next Door.

January 31, 2026 weathergirl15

Read on to learn about both free and paid opportunities to create awareness of your organization and its products and services on the Nextdoor social media platfform!

And, keep in mind, that while your organic/free presence may only reach local consumers and businesses, your organization can purchase online advertising that can be served up to businesses and consumers throughout the U.S. And, you can choose the city or state location of individuals to whom you want your ad served up!

Free Promotional Opportunities On Nextdoor.com

If you or your organization is not familiar with, and maintaining an organic/free business page on the social media platform geared toward sharing community news and event — nextdoor.com — you are likely missing out on a free and easy way to create awareness of your organization’s products and services locally. Once you set up a business page — something our digital marketing team can help you with — and provide documentation to nextdoor.com to verify your business is legitimate, fans of your organization can start posting recommendations/reviews to your page. Plus, you can start posting updates to your nextdoor.com business page the way you do to other forms of social media and to your Google My Business Profile.

Paid Advertising/Promotional Opportunities On Nextdoor.com

In addition, nextdoor.com offers the opportunity to run display ads (image ads) that are similar to ads that you can run on other social media platforms, like Instagram or Facebook, or on discussion-forums like Reddit. We are currently testing this advertising vehicle for our own business, as well as for a client’s business, and will be sure to provide updates on our experience with the tool and the results it does or doesn’t deliver!

With answer-engine use (think ChatGPT, Google AI modes, etc.) on the uptick, it can be much harder to be found online by relevant searchers. So, maybe it’s time to get creative, think outside the box, and consider this “push” marketing activity, in addition to “pull” ones that you’ve relied on in the past. Learn more about the difference between pull and push marketing and why, particularly, with the introduction of AI, you’ll want to create and implement both a push and a pull marketing strategy.

Need Help With Setting Up A Nextdoor Business Page Or Nextdoor Paid Advertising Campaign?

Reach out today to schedule a complimentary discussion about whether or not your organization would benefit from an organic and/or paid advertising presence on Nextdoor and how we can help!

Acceptance of Circumstances, Being Found On Bing, Being Found on Google, Bing Ads, digital marketing agency, Google Ads, Google Analytics, integrated marketing, lead generation, marketing agency, marketing best practices, marketing consultant, Marketing Planning, online presence, paid search, pull marketing, Results Analysis, SEM, Setting Marketing Budget, traditional marketing

You Won’t Know Unless You Try: Why Sometimes The Only Way To Know If A Particular Marketing Activity Will Be An Effective One Is To Test It

April 21, 2025 weathergirl15

As we mentioned in our blog post about our digital marketing agency and SEO company celebrating our 11-year anniversary, recently we’ve been testing more print advertising and Google Display advertising for clients. Sometimes, your organization and/or your marketing consultant or agency either doesn’t have enough experience employing certain types of advertising or marketing, or they don’t have enough experience employing certain types of advertising or marketing related to your organization’s particular industry, challenges, and opportunities.

The above-mentioned scenario means the only way to know for sure whether or not a particular marketing vehicle or marketing activity might generate great awareness, leads, sales, or engagement for services for your organization is to test that vehicle — run a pilot campaign using that particular vehicle and see what results reveal.

Recently, we’ve been working with a client in the food space that offers a food-related service vs. offering a food product that you can buy at the grocery store. They were already running Google Search ads that were served up to individuals specifically looking for their particular service. We suggested they also:

run search ads (search engine marketing (SEM) ads/paid search/paid SEO) for people looking for a solution to a problem, challenge, or opportunity who weren’t aware of, or necessarily thinking about, the client’s service as an option for addressing their need.
employ Google Display advertising and have image/display ads served up to people reading about relevant topics as well as people to people who had researched relevant topics in the past and/or had bought products/services similar to theirs in the past.

Evaluating A New Marketing Activity: What Does A Conversion Cost You?

While both of the new campaigns had strong click-thru rates, and the Google Display ads had an extremely low cost-per-click, when we did a really deep dive to determine which, if either, of the two new campaigns were generating conversions, i.e., calls, submitted inquiry forms, etc., we determined that the Display ads were NOT generating conversions — ultimately, making the cost-per-conversion crazy high for the Display ads, even though they had a very favorable cost-per-click.

Are we glad we tested both of the new types of campaigns? Certainly. The client is still somewhat in start-up mode, and is still testing and trying a number of marketing vehicles and activities to determine what will work best for them as far as lead- and sales-generation goes. And, we wouldn’t have learned the Display ads wouldn’t be effective if we haven’t tried. We spent short money and only ran the campaign for about six weeks. Our money and time investment wasn’t huge, and we learned this type of ad doesn’t make sense from an ROI standpoint — too many people clicking on ads because of the “curiosity factor,” likely, because the ads were food-related and images included in them were enticing and inviting.

We’ll continue to run the other new Google campaign — the Search one — because it is generating conversions, and we’ll keep an eye on the cost-per-conversion to determine if we should continue to run it, but the ads have only been running for 2 months and we need more time to get a sense of the advertising ROI.

This image is a gray rectangular that runs portrait vs. landscape and reads "you won't know unless you try: why sometimes the only way to know if a particular marketing activity is an effective one is to test it. It contains an image with it that says "test" in a font that looks like some kind of programming code and also contains the image of our Boston SEO Company, Results Communications and Research."

Need Help Testing A Particular Marketing Vehicle Or Activity?

Reach out today to schedule a complimentary discussion of your particular marketing challenges and opportunities!

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11 Years and Close To 150 Customers Later…

April 1, 2025 weathergirl15

We can’t believe it either, but today (April 1, 2025) marks 11 years of Results Communications & Research (Results C & R) being in the marketing agency and SEO company business.

As we always have been, we are very grateful to the many talented marketing consultants, marketing agencies and their staff, and other marketing professionals we’ve had the pleasure to collaborate with, and to learn from. We mention a few of those marketing collaborators on our Our Team page, but the list is so long, it’s hard to give a shout-out to everyone we’ve enjoyed meeting, knowing and working with the last 11 years!

And, we are incredibly grateful to the close to 150 client organizations — both for-profit and non-profit — with whom we’ve brainstormed and strategized to achieve the best possible level of awareness, sales leads, and actual sales (both product and service sales). Many of our current clients have been with us a number of years. You can access a list of our past and current clients to see examples of industries we’ve served by visiting the Clients page of our website.

Lastly, we’d be very remiss if we didn’t give a huge shout-out to the various students or recent-college- or recent-graduate-school graduates who worked for us over the years, and to our Principal’s late sister-in-law who greatly supported our mission, contributed to our success, and believed in us. All of the aforementioned individuals will always be a part of Results C & R’s rich history!

What’s Next For Our SEO Company and Marketing Agency?

In general, it’s full speed ahead with serving the same type of customers we’ve always loved serving — small to mid-sized for-profit and non-profit organizations. But, right now, we are enjoying spending more time getting up-to-speed on anything new and different going on in the Google Ads space. We love helping clients create awareness, sales, and leads with Google Ads and always have, so we are refreshing our Google Ads skillsets (even though we’ve taken and passed a number of Google certification exams in the past), particularly, Google Performance Max ones, so that we are not missing out on any opportunities to maximize our clients’ Google Search, Google Display, and Google Performance Max campaigns. Think of this latter campaign type as of a hybrid of the two former Google Ads types of campaign, and one with an AI component, like Google Display.

AI Is Not New To Google Ads/Google Ads Is Not New To AI

Related to our above desire to continue to grow our Google Ads skills, we want to remind our readers that AI is not new to Google Ads and Google Ads is not new to AI. For years, Google Ads has been able to offer “display” ad campaigns that are targeted to individuals who show affinity to certain products or services because of past buying or researching of them, having interests related to them, visiting websites focused on them, or reading about them on a variety of diverse websites.

AI and Writing Website Content, Particularly Blog Posts

And, speaking of AI, another area in which we hope to do more client work in the coming year is blog writing for clients. We’ve offered blog-writing services for years — and a number of clients have taken us up on it — but because we really enjoy writing, we hope to do more of this work for clients.

We don’t think AI search-engine/tools like ChatGPT will, or should ever, replace humans when it comes to website content and blog post writing. There’s great evidence that, at least some of what is spit back by AI search engines is not accurate. Plus, we don’t think an AI tool can ever bring the behinds-the-scenes knowledge or heart ‘n soul of an organization to website content writing or blogging. Only the organizations, themselves, truly understand what challenges their target audiences face — what their pain points are — and what they most need help with and how the organization’s products and services make a difference in their client’s/customer’s lives.

Traditional Marketing Opportunities Are Often Missed Ones

And, we always enjoy — and hope to do more of this in the coming year — helping our clients out with traditional marketing opportunities like print, radio, and TV/cable/streaming advertising, transit advertising, outdoors (billboard advertising) and more. We’ve got years and years of experience related to it and can help you gather information on possible traditional marketing opportunities and evaluate them! By dismissing traditional opportunities because they aren’t online/digital ones, organizations can also miss out on reaching target audiences who don’t spend a lot of time on the internet!

An image of our digital marketing agency's Founder and Principal, Gail Snow Moraski who is wearing glasses and who has shoulder-length blonde hair and who is weraing a red dress, a black cardigan and a sliver necklace. — Our Principal, Gail Snow Moraski, in a photo from around 2014, the year she founded Results C & R

Many Thanks and Let’s Catch Up!

Many thanks to the clients and marketing professionals we continue to collaborate with!

If you’re a past client, a prospective client we spoke with, or a fellow marketing professional with whom we collaborated in the past, or if you’ve interned with us in the past, let’s catch up. Schedule a time to do so today!

Acceptance of Circumstances, AI Search, Being Found On Bing, Being Found on Google, Google Ads, keeping up with trends, marketing best practices, Marketing Planning, Objectives Setting, paid search, pull marketing, push marketing, Search Engine Optimization, search terms, SEM, SEO, SEO tags, strategic planning, target audiences, Target Marketing, Understanding Your Environment, website

Like SEO, Keyword Research Is Not Dead

March 20, 2025 weathergirl15

Some SEO experts are saying identifying and focusing on ranking for keywords, i.e., high-volume appropriate search terms your organization wants to be found for in search engines in relevant geographies, isn’t as critical to SEO success as it used to be. In keeping with our recent blog post about SEO (search engine optimization) still being relevant, keyword research is still quite relevant to both for-profits’ and non-profits’ success.

Here at Results Communications & Research, we still believe and see evidence from the SEO rankings audits of clients’ websites that we conduct, that understanding the search terms that target audiences are entering into Google, Bing, and other search engines and capitalizing on them (as explained in this previous blog post about how to interpret and use keyword research) is still an important SEO tactic and one that moves the SEO needle.

We don’t see the day coming (for a long time, if ever) on the SEO front where clients aren’t going to want and need to remove their blinders and not rely on internal speak and internal knowledge to inform both their SEO and their overall business strategy. Keyword research allows them to take those blinders off.

Non-SEO Benefits Of Keyword Research

Keyword Research Is Not All About SEO, It’s Also About Your Marketing and Business Strategy

Even if keywords were no longer important to SEO, keyword research still allows you to determine:

What products and services target audiences are searching on which can help an organization to decide to eliminate products or services or add new ones
The volume of individuals who are searching in an organization’s market area (geography) to help inform whether push or pull marketing is warranted

Read our blog post about why keyword research informs more than an SEO strategy.

Need Help Conducting Keyword Research?

Our team regularly conducts keyword research to inform our clients’ marketing and SEO strategies. Reach out today to schedule a complimentary discussion about our keyword research services.

AI Search, Being Found On Bing, Being Found on Google, Bing Ads, competitive advantage, digital marketing agency, Google Ads, Google My Business Profile, keeping up with trends, marketing best practices, Marketing Planning, Microsoft Ads, organic SEO, Post-COVID-19 Marketing, post-pandemic marketing, pull marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, SEO, social media, social media strategy, social media voice, strategic planning, Understanding Your Environment, website

Does SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Still Work?

January 29, 2025 weathergirl15

As we’ve explained in numerous spots throughout our website, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of ensuring your organization is found online for relevant search-engines searches in relevant geographies. But a huge mistake in 2025, and beyond, would be to only focus on your website and Google My Business Profile being optimized to be found by appropriate searchers/target audiences, as shown in the image below.

If you’ve been regularly reading our blog or, simply, just reading whatever you can get your hands on related to SEO, you know that search engines’ focus since the 2020 pandemic has been on answering (by providing other organizations’ answers to) questions that searchers have related to a particular topic, product, service, or solution. Search engines care less and less about the source and format of that content, and they’ll snag content from just about anywhere on the internet if it answers a question in a manner that is easily understood/is absorbable, and that allows readers to take action/the next step.

Is SEO Dead? Does SEO Still Matter?

The answer to the above is “no way!” In fact, just the opposite, although some digital marketing experts are saying it is, or are reluctant to use/expand the SEO acronym or search engine optimization phrase to describe maximizing your opportunities for all and any digital assets, presences, or properties to be served up in search-engine results vs. just an organization’s website, Google My Business Profile, and paid search/search-engine ads (think Google and Bing ads).

Hey, right now in this time of constant change on the SEO front, no-one really is the one true expert or SEO guru, so we’re going to take our stand vs. following the crowd or one expert, and say that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about making sure all your digital assets, presences (think social media posts and presences and discussion forum presences) and properties serve you well related to being found online for the right search terms, questions, and topics in relevant geographies.

Let’s Chat About What SEO Means In This New Era And How Your Organization Can Plan and Respond To It!

We always love a complimentary discussion of for-profit and nonprofit organization’s digital marketing challenges, so schedule a discussion with our SEO consulting firm today!

Acceptance of Circumstances, Being Found On Bing, Being Found on Google, digital marketing agency, Enjoying What You Do, marketing agency, online advertising, pull marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, SEO, staying current, Understanding Your Environment, website

Who’d Have Thought In The 1980’s I’d End Up As An SEO Consultant?

January 22, 2025 weathergirl15

As shown in the image below, my husband, Jay, and I had the good fortune of attending a women’s basketball game this past Sunday, at my undergraduate alma mater, University of Connecticut (better known as UCONN). If you’re a fan of college basketball and/or of March Madness, you know that UCONN has had a very strong women’s basketball team for years, and in recent years, the men’s basketball team has played quite well and won the NCAA championship for the last two years! I share all of this because their great success means it’s very hard to land tickets to watch either of the two teams play. Fortunately, we were gifted some tickets from our nephew for Christmas!

Being back on UCONN’s main campus in Storrs, CT brought back so many wonderful memories of my three years spent there (I spent my entire senior year abroad in France as a participant in their JYA (junior year abroad, although as previously stated I went my senior year) program in Rouen, Normandy.

A French Major To An SEO Expert

As a French major back in the 1980’s, I never would have imagined that I would eventually become a marketing professional nor that such a powerful networking enterprise/system/solution (I really don’t know the best way to refer to something that impacts our daily lives to the degree it does) like the internet would ever exist. Heck, PCs (personal computers) didn’t exist when I was at UCONN. The only computer courses that students had access to were ones where you created punch cards that fed some crazy big computer contraption (I think it was called a mainframe computer, but maybe someone will correct me?). Of course, that meant there were no knowledge or dreams of e-mail, social media, or search engines back then!

But, after working at financial services companies post-college-graduation for a few years, I went back to school part-time, and then full-time, to get my Master’s in Business Administration (M.B.A.) at Boston University (B.U.). Post graduate-school, I worked in many a corporate marketing role, and lead various marketing teams, at healthcare and financial institutions. And then, in 2014, I hung the shield for my digital marketing agency, Results Communications and Research, where I greatly enhanced my knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO) and eventually began to specialize in it because I was so passionate about it!

If I had told my 17 – 21-year-old under-graduate self that, one day, many hours of my work day would be spent helping for-profit businesses and nonprofit organizations be found on search engines for relevant terms in relevant geographies, and be found on the internet, in general, I’m sure she and my UCONN friends would have laughed.

But, here I find myself in 2025 and I’m loving every minute of it!

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A Day In The Life Of An SEO Consultant

November 1, 2024 weathergirl15

If you’re considering a career in digital marketing, and particularly within that, a specialty or expertise in SEO (search engine optimization), read on to learn what a typical work day look likes.

How An SEO Consultant Starts Her Day

8:30a.m. – 9:30a.m.

Check/read (and send response e-mail) e-mails, which inevitably include the following:

Notifications from paid search (SEM) ad platforms (Google Ads or Microsoft (Bing) Ads) about:
- Policy changes that have caused a Google or Bing Search Ad to be disapproved
- Ad extensions and ads that have become disapproved because “page destinations” are no longer working (sometimes, clients of ours take down or move website pages to which site links (one form of ad extension/asset) point or ads point and forget to let me know that pages have been taken down, moved, etc.
- Payment form (credit card) can’t be charged — therefore, the credit card information that a client provided to Google Ads or Microsoft Ads is no longer accurate/has changed
E-blasts and e-newsletters about SEO and invites to various SEO webinars and classes (due to the large # of search engine optimization experts we follow)
Client questions about how well their website is or isn’t ranking in search engines, particularly Google
Questions or comments from other marketing professionals with whom I collaborate, including social media specialists, branding/graphic design specialists, and website designers and developers

This is an image of Gail Snow Moraski, our Boston SEO Company's Founder/Owner Who Is An SEO Consultant. Gail has blonde shoulder length hair and is waring and orange crew-necked sweater that reads "Carpe Diem" She is wearing classes and smiling and is standing in front of a field of black-eyed Susans in her backyard.

9:30 a.m. – noon

Use Google Analytics data, Google Search Console data, paid search platforms, and SEO rankings audit reports to analyze and document KPIs (key performance indicators) for upcoming monthly/standing client meetings
Have a mid-to-late morning #SEOStrong snack, particularly one with lots of protein like swiss cheese or hummus because you definitely need a sharp brain and a lot of energy to do SEO work!
Employ “Answer The Public” and Google Ads keyword planner tools to conduct keyword research in relevant geographies using approved “inputs” from client about what terms they believe their target audiences would use to identify someone who offers the services, products, and solutions to problems they offer
Check client Google Ad and Microsoft Bing Ad campaigns (including Google Nonprofit Ad Grant ones) to see how they are performing, including reviewing cost-per-click (CPC) and click-thru rate (CTR); plus, review and apply or dismiss recommendations from Ad platform to improve optimization score, and check for appropriateness of “search terms” for which ad platforms are serving up ads.

12p.m. – 6:00p.m.

Review SEO diagnostics reports to determine possible website issues and/or missed SEO opportunities related to a particular client’s website ranking situation.
Facilitate client discussion about next steps/implications of their SEO rankings audit, diagnostics reports, and/or monthly KPIs. Where do we go from here to move the SEO needle and drive more relevant searchers to the client’s website in the month ahead?
Write a blog post for my own website or for a client website to support SEO by addressing topics and answering questions that are important to clients, but also to show search engines, that the website in-question is being kept “fresh”
Write and enter SEO page/post title tags (this might be in WIX, GoDaddy, Joomla, WordPress, Expression Engine, or a propriety software such as a CMS platform used in a particular industry), and submit the revised pages/posts for indexing by Google and/or Bing using Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools.

7:00p.m. – 8:30pm

Check e-mail again and/or continue to complete client SEO work of the nature outlined above. Being an SEO consultant is not just a 9 to 5 job!

Considering Hiring An SEO Consultant/SEO Expert?

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