We've all heard about Google's Zero Moment of Truth. It's the moment before the traditional customer journey when a consumer decides to research online about a product or service that they are interested in. 

The Zero Moment of Truth is absolutely real! And if marketers don't take it seriously, it is at their peril.  

However, just because someone at Google created a new "term" for research before the purchase, does NOT mean that the old rules of marketing no longer exist! 

In fact, they are probably more valuable today than ever before.  

People believe all kinds of crazy things. And just because people believe something, doesn’t mean it's true. SEO has more than its share of untrue beliefs, and these myths keep good sites from ranking well because the owners of the sites don’t know better.

As part of the LeadG2 series on "The 10 Commandments of Inbound Marketing," this post looks at the ninth of The 10 Commandments of Inbound Marketing is: "Thou shall not publish content for the sake of Google. Write for humans not Google." (Tweet This)

As part of the LeadG2 series on "The 10 Commandments of Inbound Marketing" we're looking at several principles that you can't succeed without. The eighth of The 10 Commandments of Inbound Marketing is: Do not ignore SEO / Organic search. This is your website’s lifeblood. (Tweet This)

A couple of weeks ago, we had a scare. I logged into the HubSpot dashboard to see that our search engine rankings had plummeted. We were now ranking for only 3 key phrases in the top 10 results. The day before, we had been ranking for over 180 key terms in the top 10. Many of these were high-value terms pulling $17-$21 per click in AdWords. We get a lot of our visitors from the search engines, and we rely on our rankings.

Needless to say, we were freaking out for a little bit. But after some quick research, I discovered that Google had done a core ranking algorithm update. We weren’t expecting anything like this, because we knew the Penguin update wasn’t ready to come out yet. But Google is constantly working on their algorithm to make sure that their users are finding exactly what they’re looking for in the search results.

At the INBOUND conference this past week, we learned a lot about where things are headed with technology and the marketing industry. One of my favorite sessions was on the future of online search.

Will Critchlow from Distilled, an SEO-focused agency, gave us some insight on the latest developments in online search and what we need to do to help our clients' sites rank higher in search results. Here's what you need to know.

We all want to get found online, right? Our website is our new storefront--and that’s a fact whether or not you have an actual brick and mortar store. The consumer journey almost always starts online and if you aren’t showing up in search results that apply to your industry or business, then who is? Maybe your competitor.

When we are discussing inbound marketing strategy with new clients, one of the most often said things at Lead G2 is, “write for humans, not for computers.” That doesn’t mean we necessarily ignore the rules of SEO but we certainly don’t make ourselves slaves to them. Here are a few ways to write for humans vs. writing for computers. PS. you can use “search engines” interchangeably with “computers” in this case.