Lots of folks think that SEO is about “gaming the system.” Well… that’s true of “black hat” SEO, but those of us who are trying to make pages easy for Google to crawl and evaluate are working towards what I like to think of as “natural” SEO.We put in all the right meta tags, make sure that your page is about what you tell search engines it’s about in your description and generally try to streamline things so that spiders won’t be caught in traps or leave pages entirely.

Fellow SEMrush‘ers,Allow me to introduce myself. My name is David Black and I‘m the Director of Customer Success here at SEMrush. I don‘t normally take to the blog as a means of providing technical updates or alerts. But, recently, the masses have spoken and I listened. Not only did I listen, I agreed. The Customer Success Team should be as visible as possible. This includes channels like the blog, social media and even sites like Reddit.

For the most part, website stakeholders (whether it be developers, designers, marketers, or CxOs) don't take website navigation seriously enough.  The reason I know this is because I look at A LOT of websites. Rarely do I not spot a significant problem that sticks out quickly upon clicking through the site for a couple minutes (or even a couple seconds).

Storytelling has been attracting a growing amount of attention recently.As brands look for new and different ways to engage, educate and entertain target audiences, storytelling makes a lot of sense because it can drive personal and authentic connections.Storytelling can be an effective way for brands to deliver an immersive experience, rather than simply pushing product or publishing updates on social media.

SEO seems to be an evolving game of cat and mouse. Sure, the tactics used change, but the goal of upping your rankings is constant, and achieving that goal is often like trying to catch a very small, quickly moving mouse. Some people may have read up on the trend – SEO is dying  and while you may be convinced of it, the 1400% growth I achieved in simply 4 months by strictly adhering to white hat tactics demonstrates otherwise.

In a Marketing Land report, it was found that 60% of Internet access is now mostly mobile. InMobi, a mobile advertising platform, also stated that 61% of mobile Internet users are on mobile even while watching TV, while Nielsen has found that 84% of smartphone and tablet users use their gadgets as second screen devices while watching TV.

Every day, marketing professionals deal with mistakes. When you write an e-mail, you do a grammar check before sending it; when you find a mistake in your report, you recount it; when you see gaps in your quarterly results, you create a plan for filling them next quarter.This is what we do every day – checking, redoing and improving.

Ever since I became involved in the SEO industry, my focus has always been on content. I didn’t come to the industry from a communication background (although I’ve always loved reading and writing), and didn’t hear SEO ‘gurus’ or ‘masters’ all saying that you need to focus purely on great quality content (in fact, it was usually the opposite — huge volumes of backlinks are good, mmkay!).Yet I’ve always had this belief that content plays a vital role in SEO.