Google has quietly introduced a new behaviour on its home page: users can now upload a file or image directly into the main search bar, and instead of opening a standard results page or Google Lens, they are taken straight into AI Mode. It is a small visual change with a significant implication. The experience users see after uploading something is no longer the familiar list of search results but Google’s expanding AI driven interface.

What is AI Mode in Google

AI Mode is Google’s more conversational and generative search experience. Instead of showing a list of traditional links, AI Mode uses Google’s Gemini model to produce direct answers, summaries and recommendations. Users can then refine their query within a chat style interface.

The core idea is that Google handles more of the thinking for the user. Rather than searching through multiple webpages, AI Mode interprets intent and provides a single structured response. This makes the experience faster for users but offers fewer opportunities for websites to receive clicks.

A subtle update that changes user journeys

Previously, uploading an image through Google would trigger Google Lens or a traditional image search. The new upload button routes people directly into AI Mode. This reflects a wider pattern. Google has increasingly been guiding searchers towards AI Mode in multiple parts of its ecosystem. Examples include AI Overviews appearing more frequently, the AI Mode tab becoming more prominent, and even the Chrome address bar offering AI Mode as a pathway.

Although Google once stated that AI Mode would not become the default search experience, its product decisions suggest the opposite direction. Every new feature seems to reinforce AI Mode as the primary interface for search, discovery and query resolution.

Why this matters for digital marketers

For marketers, the shift brings real consequences. AI Mode does not behave like a standard results page. Users see fewer traditional links, and click-through rates are lower. The journey is more conversational and less oriented toward visiting websites.

This means brand visibility inside AI Mode becomes increasingly important. Marketers need to understand:

• How their brand or content is being cited within AI Mode
• Whether their site is referenced at all
• How rankings differ from traditional search

The performance you see in classic SERPs may not translate into this new environment. AI Mode often answers a query directly without sending users away, which makes measurement and optimisation more complex.

Preparing for an AI first search landscape

Although the shift is gradual, the direction is clear. Google is shaping a search experience where AI Mode plays a central role. Digital marketers will need to adapt strategies to ensure visibility in both traditional results and AI generated responses.

Checking your presence in AI Mode should now be a routine part of search monitoring. As this becomes a bigger part of how people search, early understanding will give brands an advantage while others wait for the shift to become impossible to ignore.

Google is quietly testing a new feature inside Google Ads called Website Optimiser, and it’s already capturing the attention of performance marketers. While the tool isn’t widely available yet, early indications suggest Google is preparing to bring website testing and optimisation back into its ecosystem, something advertisers have been missing since the phase-out of earlier tools. If launched broadly, Website Optimiser could give marketers a more streamlined, data-driven way to improve landing page performance without relying on external platforms.

A Modern Take on a Familiar Concept

For seasoned marketers, the name “Website Optimiser” may feel like a throwback. Years ago, Google offered a tool by the same name that eventually evolved into Google Optimise. With Optimise discontinued, many teams lost a simple, native way to run controlled experiments. This new iteration appears to reintroduce that capability, but in a more integrated form. Placing the tool directly inside Google Ads and potentially automating some setup steps, suggests a focus on ease of use and faster activation.

Why This Matters for Advertisers

If Website Optimiser performs as expected, advertisers could benefit from a centralised, more efficient workflow. Testing landing pages, user experiences, and conversion paths directly inside Google Ads would reduce technical barriers and help teams iterate more quickly. It also has the potential to give marketers a clearer view of performance by connecting ad data and on-site behaviour within a single environment. Ultimately, that means better insights, smarter optimisation decisions, and the ability to increase ROI without adding more tools to the stack.

What Marketers Should Watch For

While excitement is building, key details are still unknown, including how flexible the testing options will be and how soon they will roll out. Even so, the appearance of this feature signals Google’s renewed commitment to supporting experimentation. For marketing teams focused on continuous improvement, Website Optimiser could soon become a valuable tool in the arsenal. Keeping an eye on updates now will ensure you’re ready to take advantage of it as soon as it becomes available.

What is colour psychology?

Colour psychology refers to the subconscious reactions our bodies and minds have to certain colours. These responses are incredibly useful to understand when designing a website to promote a behaviour (to buy a product or service).

Does colour psychology impact user experiences on websites?

Colour plays a key role in our day-to-day life; we may not realise the true impact it can have on the brain, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Your brand colours inform the way customers perceive your business.

Colour can often influence:

• The way customers interact with a brand subconsciously influencing their behaviours and responses.
• Becomes an identifying feature for businesses, think of McDonald’s with their stark red and golden yellow arches. These iconic colour palettes become synonymous with the brand.
• It can be a great tool for demonstrating different product variations. Colour can be useful for showing a whole range of products. A common example of this is with haircare products, using different colours for different hair types for easy identification

Do certain colours lead to more conversions?

Absolutely, colours convert, especially when properly picked and placed in contrast to brand colours. We’ve created a wheel showing examples of great colours for converting, and poor ones.

The key to conversions is contrast and urgency; colours like red and green are particularly effective at doing so. Red is great at provoking a feeling of urgency; it is attention-grabbing and often associated with dangers or warnings. Which can then help to draw the eye to the call to action.

Whilst green is known as being a reliable colour, it often creates a sense of trust and reliability for the customer. Whilst it doesn’t work to create a sense of urgency, its vibrancy works to pull the focus, which is particularly effective for a converting button.

How to pick the right colours for your business’s brand?

Picking the right colour palette for your brand can be tricky, but there are a couple of ways you can establish the most appropriate colour palette for your brand.

1. Undertake competitor research, look at if there are patterns are repetitions in terms of colourways being used.
2. Identify the type of feeling you want your brand to create for customers, then look at colours that are associated with that.
3. Start with the primary colour in your palette; this can really influence the remaining colours. Picking complementary shades for subtle but aesthetic outcomes or contrasting colours for visual impact.
4. Test out palettes on a test site and with asset mock-ups. Visualisations allow you to definitively identify what does and does not work.
5. Find balance in your colour palette. Whilst bold is great, make sure your content is accessible and legible. Sometimes dark and vibrant colour palettes can impact the customer’s ability to read, which then creates a poor experience.

Final Thoughts: Using Colour Intentionally to Drive Conversions

Colour isn’t just a visual accessory; it’s a powerful psychological tool that shapes how users feel, behave, and make decisions on your website. By understanding the emotional influence of colour and applying it with purpose, you can guide your audience toward the actions that matter most to your business.

Whether you’re aiming to build trust, spark urgency, or create a seamless user experience, the right palette can elevate your brand and strengthen your conversion strategy. Take the time to experiment, test, and refine your colour choices. With thoughtful application and consistent evaluation, colour can become one of your most effective assets in turning visitors into loyal customers.

WordPress is the most used Content Management System, hosting over 43% of websites on the internet. Despite users having all the tools available to implement SEO successfully at their fingertips, Ahrefs recently released a study that showed 96.55% of pages get zero organic search traffic from Google. This highlights that while there is a broad knowledge of SEO within the online community, its implementation for most sites leaves something to be desired.

Now you may be wondering, How do I know if my site is SEO-friendly? Well, you’re in luck as this article will cover features to look out for on your site to optimise and tools you can use to help with this.

Tools

Google Search Console

There are many tools you can use to check the SEO effectiveness of your site, some of them free and some of them paid. Google Search Console is one of the most important tools that you can use to track SEO performance. Search Console is a free platform offered by Google which allows users to monitor and adjust their presence in Google’s Search Results. One of Search Console’s most important features is that it allows you to monitor if your pages have been indexed in Google; if not, you can submit them for indexation. It also allows you to submit a sitemap (a map displaying your site structure) so Google can easily crawl and index your site to improve SEO performance.

Page Speed Insights

Page Speed Insights is another free tool offered by Google. With this tool, users can submit specific pages on their site for a speed performance analysis, which will also give actionable insights into specific tasks they can do to improve page speed performance over time. This is a key metric for SEO performance, and understanding if your pages are performing to Google speed requirements helps with understanding the SEO friendliness of your site.

SEMRush | SERanking

SemRush and SERanking are just two examples of many SEO all-around platforms that give you key insights into the SEO Performance of your site. With these SEO tools, you can analyse your keyword rankings, analyse content, run technical SEO audits and more. This allows you to always know if your site is SEO optimised and constantly enables you to make tweaks and improvements.

Content

When making sure your site’s SEO performance is doing well, one of the first and most important aspects you need to look out for is making sure your content is optimised for search engines. This includes making sure your titles, description and headings are concise and include your target keywords, while your images are also the right size, format and accessible.

Most importantly, you need to make sure your content is relevant to your audience and contains insightful, new information for your audience that is both relevant and authoritative to appear higher on search engines.

Technical

The technical aspect of SEO is an important step for a fully optimised website. You can use an SEO tool such as SERanking or SEMRush to crawl your site and identify issues such as broken page links, redirecting pages, site speed and image sizes. These tools will give you tips and recommended fixes to allow you to improve the SEO and UX of your site, increasing performance.

Making sure you understand the different aspects of SEO performance to track and the tools you can use to help you improve performance are both beneficial and worthwhile to your website and overall business strategy in the long run. It is imperative for businesses in the future that they understand the fundamentals of SEO performance and how they can implement them.

When optimising a web page, titles and descriptions are two of the most fundamental elements for improving SEO and boosting performance. Titles themselves are a ranking factor, which means search engines, such as Google, will analyse your titles and their relevance to your content and the audience before deciding where they rank. Google does not use descriptions to determine where you rank, but they are still important for improving click-through-rate (CTR), the number of customers that see your webpage versus the number that click on it.

Updating titles and descriptions can often be a lengthy process, as some sites have hundreds, if not thousands, of pages, so going into each web page to manually edit the titles and descriptions one by one can be a task that takes several months. In today’s guide, I will be taking you through the process of optimising titles and descriptions in bulk for a WordPress site to improve efficiency and increase SEO performance.

Step 1: WP All Export

To be able to edit the titles and descriptions in bulk, you first need to pull them out of WordPress onto an Excel sheet, which means you can edit them all in one place. To do this, I used a plugin called WP All Export, which lets you export different types of data, including posts, pages, taxonomies and custom post types. Once you’ve decided what type of data you want to export (let’s say you’ve decided you want to edit the titles and descriptions on all your blog posts), then you can choose which data will be exported with your posts on your Excel sheet.

For example, if exporting blog posts, the data we would want (and need for our import to work later on) is the ID column, and any relevant custom fields you use on your site to add titles and descriptions to your web pages. Most people use either Yoast or Rank Math to input their metadata. For Yoast, you would want the_yoastwpseo_title (title) custom field and the yoastwpseo_metadesc (descriptions). The ID column is the most critical column you need when exporting data. This is the ID of each post you are exporting, and without it, WordPress won’t know which metadata belongs to which post when you re-import later on.

Step 2: Microsoft Excel and ChatGPT

The next step of the process, once you have exported the data, is to actually write your new titles and descriptions. You can obviously do this meticulously by hand, but as mentioned, with a large number of pages on your site, this may be exhaustive, even if you can now do it all on one sheet. Using ChatGPT to create new engaging titles and descriptions based on your existing ones is the quickest way to optimise performance while maintaining consistency and clarity. However, make sure when using ChatGPT, you follow some key rules, such as setting character limits. Titles that are too long are truncated and changed by Google. Also, descriptions should be short and snappy to attract users’ attention. For Titles, the character limit is typically between 50-60 characters, whereas for meta descriptions, it lies between 140 and 160 characters. You also run a risk of having your titles and descriptions rewritten by Google if they are too short. Typical minimum character limits include 30 for titles and 70-90 for meta descriptions. Also, try not to get it to create all your titles and descriptions in one go if you have a lot; trying to do too many at once can cause issues. I’ve found updating in batches of 50 is usually safe, but make sure you are double-checking for any errors. Here’s an example of a typical prompt I would use below:

Step 3: WP All Import

Once you have created your title and descriptions, The Import is the most crucial stage of the process because it has the most potential for things to go wrong. Understanding how to import with the correct settings is crucial in order to map your new titles and meta descriptions to the correct post.

1. Upload your CSV (Excel Sheet)
2. Choose a post type to modify – This will be posts for this, as we are updating blog titles and descriptions, but could also be pages or a custom post type.
3. Choose which Fields to Modify – This is one of the most important steps, as you need to tell the plugin when it runs your import, what fields you actually want it to update. For this import, it will be Yoast titles and descriptions as discussed previously.
4. Extra Settings – Make sure to click the box “Attempt to match to existing WordPress [posts before creating new posts” and then use Post ID as the identifier so it knows what post to attach your titles and descriptions to. If you don’t select this, it will create new WordPress posts and not try and update your existing content, leaving you with a slew of blank posts with descriptions and titles that you will then need to delete.
5. Make sure to tell WP Import to only update the custom fields you have specifically selected. You can see where to select this below.

Once you have updated all these settings correctly and are ready to run your import. It should only take a few minutes, and hundreds of your web pages will be updated with new and improved titles and descriptions.

Google has quietly rolled out two much-requested features within Google Business Profiles: the ability to schedule Google Posts and the ability to publish posts across multiple locations at once. For digital marketers and busy in-house teams, this update removes one of the most time-consuming parts of local optimisation.

What has changed

Google Posts can now be prepared in advance. When you create a post, you will see a new option titled “Schedule this post”. Once selected, you choose the date and time you want your update to go live.

According to Google’s Lisa Landsman, this means you can plan an entire week or month ahead and let posts publish automatically at the moment that suits your audience.

The second update supports multi-location publishing. If you manage more than one branch or storefront, you can create a single post and apply it to several locations in a single action. This is particularly useful for brands with regional or national footprints that want consistent messaging without repeating work.

Why it matters

Local marketers know how easy it is for Google Posts to slip down the priority list when days get busy. Scheduled posting gives teams the flexibility to create content during quieter moments and still have a steady stream of updates going out.

For agencies or brands handling multiple sites, the multi-location option reduces duplication and supports stronger consistency. One well-planned post can now be shared across all appropriate profiles with minimal effort.

What you should do next

There are two practical steps worth taking:

• Build Google Post planning into your workflow for campaign launches, events and seasonal promotions.
• Create a central content template that can be adapted and published across relevant locations.

With the holiday season approaching and customer search activity at its highest, these new features arrive at a good time. They offer a more organised and efficient way to keep your Google Business Profiles active, visible and aligned with your wider marketing calendar.

In one of the biggest shake-ups the SEO world has seen in years, Adobe has announced plans to acquire Semrush for 1.9 billion dollars. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2026, pending regulatory approval.

For marketers, SEOs and digital teams, this is more than just another technology merger. It is a major moment that could reshape how brands approach visibility in search and, increasingly, in AI-driven recommendation systems.

Why this matters

Semrush has long been a major force in the SEO industry. Over the past decade it has grown from a keyword research tool into a full ecosystem for search visibility, content strategy, competitor intelligence and, more recently, GEO (generative engine optimisation), a new category focused on visibility in AI assistants and AI-powered search.

Adobe, meanwhile, sits at the centre of enterprise digital marketing. With tools such as Adobe Analytics, AEM and the newly launched Adobe Brand Concierge, it already influences how many of the world’s biggest companies manage customer experience.

By bringing Semrush into the Adobe universe, the lines between SEO, AI search, content creation and customer experience will become more closely connected.

A sign of where search is heading

The backdrop to this acquisition is clear: search is changing rapidly.

Consumers are no longer turning only to Google. They are increasingly asking AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini for recommendations, information and purchase decisions. Adobe’s own Analytics data shows that traffic from generative AI sources to United States retail sites increased by 1,200 percent year on year in October.

In this new landscape, traditional SEO alone is no longer enough. Brands need to understand how they appear not only in search results but also inside AI-generated answers. This is exactly where Adobe sees Semrush adding value.

What Adobe gains

Adobe is investing heavily in becoming the go-to platform for brand visibility in the AI era. Semrush brings more than ten years of SEO experience, along with rapidly developing GEO capabilities. This gives Adobe a direct route into SEO teams, an area of marketing where it has had limited presence until now.

For enterprise marketers already using Adobe tools, this could eventually create a seamless way to understand:

• how their brand appears on traditional search engines
• how it is surfaced in AI-generated answers
• how content performs across different channels
• where visibility gaps exist

In simple terms, Adobe wants to be the single source of truth for brand presence across the entire digital landscape.

How the SEO industry could change

This acquisition is likely to trigger wider shifts across SEO and martech.

1. SEO will become more closely aligned with AI – As GEO becomes a formal discipline, tools will need to measure and optimise brand presence inside AI-generated answers as well as traditional search results.

2. Enterprise SEO will become mainstream – Adobe’s influence will push SEO further into senior marketing conversations, presenting visibility as a key part of customer experience.

3. More consolidation is likely – Competitors may feel pressure to seek partnerships or acquisitions of their own in order to keep pace.

4. Content, search and analytics will move closer together – Traditional silos between SEO, content teams and customer experience platforms are likely to become less distinct.

The bottom line

This is not simply Adobe buying another tool. It is a clear sign that:

• SEO is evolving
• AI-driven search is becoming unavoidable
• Brand visibility will become the next major battleground for marketers

For SEOs and digital teams, the acquisition sets the stage for a future where search visibility, AI behaviour and customer experience are all connected within the same ecosystem. The speed of this shift will depend on how Adobe integrates Semrush although one thing is certain: the SEO industry has entered a new era.

One of the most crucial aspects of any SEO strategy is backlink generation. Backlinks are links from other sites to your own, which can be gained by acquiring links from authoritative sites. This is beneficial for SEO as sites that Google sees as authoritative lend your site some of their credibility and trustworthiness. In this article, we will discuss different strategies for acquiring backlinks to help grow your business.

Broken Backlink Fixes

When running a backlink audit on your site, it will highlight key issues for you, such as broken backlinks. Site managers may have accidentally put in the wrong URL or a URL that has since changed when linking to your site. Reaching out to these sites in order to fix the broken link and restore equity is a good idea, as not only does it boost your SEO potential, but no one wants broken links on their site, so you are actually also doing them a favour in return.

Create Linkable Content

One of the easiest and most natural ways that users can generate backlinks is by creating content that generates natural interest. Some types of content that are good for generating links include:

• Research and Data Studies
• In-Depth Guides
• Infographics

When people are crafting content, there are certain materials, such as infographics and data studies, that users don’t always create for themselves due to time constraints. Creating this type of content yourself makes it infinitely linkable and can improve your backlink profile.

Promote Content

Creating great content is obviously important for visibility, and using organic methods such as SEO is great, but expanding reach through other methods can also improve potential for backlink generation, further expanding SEO potential in the future.

Backlink Gap Analysis

SEO websites such as SERanking and SEMRush have backlink gap analysis features. This feature allows its users to track the links that their competitors are gaining and see any potential gaps. If your competitors are gaining links from reputable sources that you are not, creating a piece of content or running a campaign and reaching out to these sources to gain a link is a valuable strategy. (As you already know, they are willing to share links within your industry.)

Using a combined approach of all the aforementioned tactics will help to grow your backlink profile over time. While no one can say how much one link can add value to your site, making sure your backlink profile is much larger than it was before will certainly help Google see you in a different light as a more credible business in your industry.

Did you know that winning or even being shortlisted for awards can strengthen your SEO and overall digital presence? Awards don’t just celebrate your success — they’re also powerful marketing tools that can improve your website’s visibility, build brand trust, and attract new customers.

How can an award benefit your business?

There are many benefits to applying to industry awards, especially for businesses which are looking to establish their name and build trust with their audience. Some of the benefits include:

• Building your authority

If you’ve received your award from a reputable organisation, it’s beneficial for demonstrating your authority and expertise over a specific topic or sector. It lends credibility to a business to win a prestigious award.

• Signals you’re trustworthy

Viewers who see your business has been accredited with an award are more likely to have trust that you’re an authentic and reliable business.

Pro Tip: Include an “Awards & Recognition” section on your homepage or About page to visually showcase your achievements.

• Demonstrates you’re active in your business industry

Applying and attending to industry-relevant events like awards ceremonies shows your business is active within the sectors it’s in.

• Getting backlinks

Backlinks remain one of the strongest SEO ranking factors. When you win an award, your business name and website are often featured on:

• The award organiser’s site
• Industry news publications
• Partner or sponsor pages
• Local business directories

Each of these mentions can provide high-quality backlinks that improve your domain authority and organic search rankings.

• PR opportunity

When you are shortlisted or win an award, it’s a great opportunity to publicise your success. It’s a great piece of content to share with your audience, and even better for those discovering your brand to see.

• Promote team morale and brand advocacy

Whilst it’s not a direct contributor to your SEO efforts, happier and motivated teams often are more productive, creating high-quality content that ultimately does benefit their SEO strategy.

Why Awards Matter for SEO

In a competitive online environment, trust and authority are everything. Awards serve as a third-party endorsement — a signal to both search engines and users that your brand is reputable, high-quality, and actively contributing to its industry. Let’s explore how awards can benefit your online performance and search rankings.

Final Thoughts

Winning or even being nominated for an award can do more than boost your reputation; it can strengthen your SEO, expand your reach, and enhance your credibility online. By taking advantage of award opportunities, you’re not only celebrating your success but also setting your business up for long-term digital growth

It is increasingly common for websites to store images, videos, and other media assets on cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure. This is convenient and scalable, but it also creates a risk: Google Search Console may not track those files unless the cloud hosting is verified.

Why this matters

John Mueller from Google issued a reminder that any third-party cloud host used to store site content should be added and verified in Search Console. Without verification, marketers and SEO teams may be missing information about:

• Indexing and crawl issues
• Performance data
• Malware or Safe Browsing alerts

If Google cannot associate the cloud-hosted files with your domain, it cannot provide insight into how they appear and perform in search results.

How to fix it

To bring cloud-hosted content into Search Console reporting, Google recommends setting up a hostname on your own domain, such as images.yoursite.com or content.yoursite.com. This hostname can point to your cloud storage bucket through a DNS CNAME record. Once that is done, the host can be verified in Search Console using DNS verification, and you will be able to see data for those files within the same Search Console property as your main site.

This is usually a job for a developer or IT administrator. It requires access to domain DNS settings, but not code changes to the files themselves.

What happens next

After the CNAME is set up, all internal links across the website need to be updated so they point to the new hostname. Larger websites may need to run a search-and-replace across templates or sections of the site, followed by a crawl to ensure everything has updated correctly. Users should only be able to access the content through the new hostname.

If you are moving a large number of image URLs, be aware that Google Images can take longer to recalibrate. Image search traffic might fluctuate at first because Google must recrawl and reprocess the new URLs. This is temporary, and performance will stabilise once Google finishes updating.

A useful bonus

Using your own hostname to serve cloud-hosted content also makes future migrations far easier. If you decide to switch cloud providers later, you can redirect or repoint the CNAME record without losing search visibility. Because the content sits under your domain rather than the provider’s domain, you remain in full control.

Why marketers should check this

Many digital marketing teams assume Search Console only tracks web pages, but images, videos, PDF files, and other hosted assets play a major role in search performance. If some of your most valuable content lives off-site, you may not be receiving reports that could identify issues early or explain changes in organic performance.

A simple verification step can unlock more data, protect traffic, and give your SEO team better visibility. If your business uses cloud services for content hosting, it is worth asking your developer or IT team whether those hosts have been added and verified in Search Console. If not, the fix is straightforward and has long-term benefits.