The Hwy52 Blog

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, you might be wondering if Google Ads still pulls its weight. With new platforms and strategies constantly emerging, it's a fair question for any business owner or marketing manager focused on achieving tangible results. The short answer? Absolutely. Google Ads, when implemented strategically, remains a highly effective way to connect with potential customers actively searching for what you offer. In this post, we'll explore why this platform continues to be a cornerstone of successful digital marketing.

We have been asked many times over the last few months about whether using AI tools such as Chat GPT, Gemini, Copilot etc. to generate content for your website is a good SEO strategy. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of creating and structuring web pages in a way that will help them rank higher in the Google search results for the various search queries that are important to your business. There exists the mistaken impression that you can quickly and easily increase your search rankings with little effort by just using AI generated content.

If you have been learning about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, you may have come across the term "Backlink". For those of you who have not, you may be wondering what exactly is a backlink, anyway, and why do you need them?

A Backlink, also known as an inbound link, is simply a link from another website to yours. Backlinks are important for SEO because search engines like Google and Bing use them to help rank websites in their search results. Backlinks are something like votes from the web - the more "votes" (backlinks) a site or page has, the more authority it is considered to have by the search engines. There are many other factors that are used, but backlinks are one of the most important. Basically, if you want to show up high in the search results, it is good to have a lot of backlinks.

I attended an event in Toronto recently that was hosted by Google Canada to kick-start the recently launched "Google Engage for Agencies" program. The Engage for Agencies program is new and its purpose is to provide training and support for agencies (like us) that help businesses with their AdWords efforts.

The event was first class and featured a keynote presentation by Chris O'Neil, director of Google Canada, as well as presentations, training and Q & A by other "Googlers" from the AdWords division.

Here is some information from the event you might find interesting.

Every day in North America more individuals than you may realize use the major internet search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) to search for products and services that you sell and provide. Chances are that if you are not on the first or second search results page for your keywords or phrases you are not going to get that call.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a term that refers to the art and science of getting people to find your website on the internet. It's a bit of a misnomer actually as you do not "optimize" the search engines but rather you optimize your website to be found and to rank high on the search engines.

I can say from my own observation that SEO is a science that it not fully exploited in the majority of businesses. Most likely do not have an SEO strategy and have not given this subject the priority it deserves. Consequently, there is a real opportunity for businesses that develop appropriate strategies to lead in this area.

For those of you unfamiliar with RSS you no doubt will have seen the standard RSS button on websites and wondered what it was. RSS is essentially an internet web feed format designed to share web content such as blogs, news, audio, video and a variety of other on-line content. RSS mostly stands for "Really Simple Syndication" but is sometimes referred to as "Rich Site Summary". In this article I would like to take a closer look at RSS, what it does, and how it can help your business.

The typical internet user may have several sites or more that they frequent for their content. They may visit Yahoo News, CNN and The Wall Street Journal for current events. They may also visit several entertainment or personal interest sites like PGA.COM or MLB.COM in addition to trade related sites like Hwy52.com. This ad hock method of information retrieval is very inefficient and can be quite time-consuming.