Mark Traphagen

One of the ongoing debates among digital marketers is over whether brand identity or customer understanding is more important in forming a digital marketing strategy. Proponents of the former say if you haven’t clearly identified what your brand is and what differentiates it, you have no clear message to communicate. The other side argues that […]

Let’s face it. It’s getting harder and harder to get the attention for your content. People have a lot of choices, limited time, and they’re tired and weary of the same old same old. But there’s good news: It is still possible to produce content that earns and keeps the attention of your key audience. […]

Effective Social Media Flows from Strong Brand & Content Sources I speak on social media marketing at a lot of major conferences. Most of my audience and the people I meet at these gatherings are responsible for running the social media for their companies, large or small. As they talk with me, I hear a […]

Machine learning is the next great computer revolution, one that is already here. We don’t have to wait for the future; Google has been using machine learning to solve many complex search-related problems for years, and the applications keep growing, including last year’s announcement of the addition of RankBrain to the search algorithm. In this episode […]

Google+ has been written off for dead by many observers and social media experts. Indeed, there is no denying that most brands and all but a handful of marketers have abandoned it, if they ever gave it a try in the first place. And yet….Google hasn’t abandoned it. In fact, far from abandoning it, they […]

In October 2015 Google took the rare step of announcing a major addition to its search ranking algorithms. That new addition, already in operation at the time of the announcement, was named RankBrain. It was revealed to be a major application of machine learning technology to aid a better understanding of search queries made by […]

UPDATE 18 March 2015: Twitter announced today that the rollout of the algorithmic timeline is now complete to all users, and that there have been very few opt-outs. In addition, they report that since introducing the new timeline, they have seen a rise “in things like per-user favorites, retweets, replies, tweets, and daily usage.” UPDATE 10 […]

The good news about SEO is that anyone with basic intelligence and the motivation to learn can eventually, over time, become an SEO expert. SEO is a potentially lucrative and rewarding profession that does not require a particular college degree. It can be learned on-the-job and from available resources. The bad news about SEO is […]

The Google search results page ain’t what it used to be. Almost never do you see anymore the “ten blue links and some ads” that used to characterize a Google search result. In an effort to become ever more useful to its users, Google has been experimenting with many different ways of getting us more […]

In the spring of 2015 Google began implementing its recently-renewed agreement with Twitter that gave the search giant full, real-time access to all tweets on Twitter. Here at Perficient Digital we had a unique opportunity to assess how much of a difference this made. We had made before and after “snapshots” of over 133,000 tweets […]

How Good Are Backlink Tools at Finding Links? Recently we tested the three most popular backlink checking tools–Moz Open Site Explorer, Majestic, and ahrefs–to see how many links to a web page each actually showed. You can see the full study methodology and results in this post: Backlinking Tools May Not Be As Comprehensive As […]

Here at Perficient Digital one of our primary guiding principles is to be “surfing ahead of the wave” in digital marketing. That’s why we have this big blue wave on the wall of our office common area where we all see it every day. As I look back over our content from this past year, […]