by Kevin Bekker | Aug 21, 2026 | Marketing Strategy, AI SEO, Digital Marketing
Originally published March 2025. Updated August 2026 to reflect changes in Google Search, AI search, content strategy, technical SEO, and search measurement. SEO has always changed. Google changes its algorithms, websites change, consumer behavior changes, and...
by Kevin Bekker | Aug 21, 2026 | Marketing Strategy
If you’re already running a successful Google Ads campaign, there’s a pretty simple question worth asking: why aren’t you running that same campaign on Bing? Technically, Bing Ads is now called Microsoft Advertising, but a lot of marketers and business owners still...
by Kevin Bekker | Aug 20, 2026 | Marketing Strategy
Originally published April 2017. Updated August 2026 to reflect changes in programmatic buying, audience data, privacy, inventory quality, measurement, and attribution. Programmatic advertising has changed quite a bit since I originally wrote this article in 2017. The...
by Kevin Bekker | Aug 14, 2026 | Marketing Strategy
A client asked me last month why their “Email” channel showed almost no traffic in GA4, even though they’d sent four campaigns that quarter. The traffic wasn’t missing. It was just scattered across six different labels: Email, email,...
by Kevin Bekker | Aug 12, 2026 | Marketing Strategy
Every client who switched from Universal Analytics to GA4 asks me some version of the same question. Where did my campaign report go? The honest answer is that it did not disappear, it moved, and Google reorganized the acquisition reports in a way that trips up even...
by Kevin Bekker | Aug 11, 2026 | Marketing Strategy
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the first tool I open on every new client engagement. Before I look at rankings, before I look at content, before I even look at the Google Ads account, I want to see what a search engine actually sees when it crawls the site. Screaming...
by Kevin Bekker | Aug 10, 2026 | Marketing Strategy
Most small business owners think they cannot afford strategic marketing help. I hear a version of this almost every month from a new client. They tell me the budget is tight, the ad spend is already stretched thin, and hiring outside help feels like a luxury they will...
by Kevin Bekker | Aug 6, 2026 | Marketing Strategy
Direct traffic is the most misunderstood line item in any analytics dashboard. Marketers either wave it off as “people who already know us” or panic when it spikes, assuming something broke. The truth is messier and more interesting. Direct is less a...
by Kevin Bekker | Aug 3, 2026 | Marketing Strategy
Most business owners assume their analytics are fine once the Google Analytics code is on the site and a few reports are showing numbers. I understand why. The dashboard is full of charts, the traffic count looks reasonable, and everything seems to be working. The...
by Kevin Bekker | Jul 31, 2026 | Marketing Strategy
For years, ChatGPT was one of the only major platforms online with no ads at all. That changed this year. OpenAI now runs paid ads inside ChatGPT, and the price of entry dropped fast. Early on, you needed a budget in the hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get in...
by Kevin Bekker | Jul 27, 2026 | Marketing Strategy
If you run a professional services firm (a law practice, an accounting firm, a consultancy, an agency), your website has one job. Not selling anything directly. Getting the phone to ring or the contact form filled out. That’s what “lead-based” means,...
by Kevin Bekker | Jul 22, 2026 | Marketing Strategy
For years, the goal was simple. Rank #1, get the click, get the customer. That assumption still shapes how most business owners think about SEO, and it’s quietly become outdated. Someone can search for exactly what you offer, see an AI generated answer at the...
by Kevin Bekker | Jul 15, 2026 | Marketing Strategy
Most business owners assume an ad works like this. Someone sees it, they click it, they buy. In reality, that almost never happens. A person usually sees your ad, forgets about it, searches for you later, reads a few reviews, compares you to two competitors, maybe...
by Kevin Bekker | Jul 15, 2026 | Marketing Strategy
A quick note before we start. This is written in plain English, not marketing jargon. No made up acronyms, no technical shortcuts. If a business owner without a marketing background can’t follow it, I haven’t done my job. Every small business owner I talk...
by Kevin Bekker | Jul 12, 2026 | Marketing Strategy
Sandy businesses don’t need a national agency, they need someone who knows this market. I work with small businesses throughout the Portland metro area, and Sandy comes up often because it’s a market that gets treated as an afterthought by bigger agencies....