Digital Marketing, SEO, Analytics, and Software Reviews
With 25+ years in digital marketing, Marketing With Dave focuses on discovering, measuring, and optimizing every aspect of it.
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Your LinkedIn Profile Mastered
Get found. Build trust. Create opportunities.
Available in Kindle (ebook), paperback, and audiobook formats.
Learn how to improve your LinkedIn profile in about an hour with 17 practical improvements based on a real job search after 25+ years in digital marketing.
Step-by-step guidance to help you make the right changes the first time and build a profile that attracts recruiters, strengthens your personal brand, and creates new opportunities.
August Focus: Operations
August focuses on marketing operations, the systems, processes, and automation that ensure great marketing actually reaches the finish line.
Strategy defines the direction, but marketing operations create the consistency that turns plans into measurable results. From CRM and email automation to analytics, reporting, and campaign workflows, strong marketing operations eliminate friction, improve efficiency, and keep teams aligned.
The objective is not simply to generate more leads or send more emails. It is to build repeatable processes that create better customer experiences, improve pipeline performance, and turn marketing into a measurable driver of business growth.
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This Month
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Week in Review
This week's stories point to AI visibility becoming a discipline of its own, separate from traditional SEO or PR, and most organizations aren't set up to own it. Conductor's AEO playbook recap showed marketers what it actually takes to earn a citation now that the average AI prompt runs 23 words against three or four for a Google keyword, while Search Engine Land's 26-week case study proved the same lesson at scale: AI Overview citations jumped from roughly 5 percent to 31 percent only after SEO, PPC, reviews, and PR worked together rather than in silos. Spin Sucks put a dollar figure on what happens when nobody owns that work, tracing a Google AI Overview's invented lawsuit to a canceled $150,000 contract and a $210 million suit against Google, while Muck Rack data cited in the piece found 29 percent of organizations have no one accountable for AI visibility at all. Meanwhile the infrastructure underneath all of it kept shifting: Google reshuffled its top AI leadership as Demis Hassabis stepped back and Jeff Dean departed after 27 years, and both Kroger and OpenAI moved to fold advertising directly into AI shopping assistants ahead of Q4. The common thread: being cited by AI is no longer optional, but being cited accurately, with a named owner watching for when the models get it wrong, is where most brands are still exposed.
The AEO Playbook: How to Get Cited and Stay Visible
Conductor walked through a webinar recap on answer engine optimization, arguing that traffic is no longer the right success metric because AI crawlers now visit sites thousands of times while sending back little or no traffic. The average AI prompt runs about 23 words versus three to four for a typical Google keyword, which means brands need a custom prompt index rather than a traditional keyword list. Presenters said YouTube is the most cited site across major LLMs and that a Reddit citation signals the LLM found no better source, an opening for brands willing to publish a stronger answer. They also noted backlinks carry little weight for AI visibility even though they still matter for traditional search. Marketers should build reporting around citation and recommendation quality instead of session counts, and prioritize content freshness and technical accessibility over link building.
AI Update: A Full Week of AI News, From Price Wars to Google's Leadership Shake-Up
This week's roundup covers a broad sweep of AI developments relevant to marketers: falling model prices from DeepSeek, OpenAI, and Google are making sophisticated AI content and automation cheaper and more interchangeable across vendors; the EU has begun enforcing AI Act transparency and watermarking rules; and the IAB introduced a four-part framework (Presence, Prominence, Portrayal, Persuasion) for measuring brand visibility in AI search. Shopify reported that AI-referred traffic and orders tripled year over year for its merchants, while a federal appeals court cleared the way for Perplexity's shopping assistant to keep accessing Amazon. The digest also flags a wave of brand-safety and security concerns, including Meta removing AI-generated abusive ads and Anthropic disclosing that AI models briefly accessed real company systems during security testing. For marketers, the throughline is that AI governance, provenance, and measurement are moving from optional to expected.
How SEO and PPC Build Trust Across Search: A 26-Week Case Study
An education SaaS company coordinated SEO, PPC, digital PR, and reputation efforts over 26 weeks and tracked the combined effect on buyer trust. Organic position for core commercial keywords improved from 15.2 to 9.7, paid CPA dropped from $146 to $121 after content gaps were closed, and AI Overview citation frequency across 42 priority queries rose from about 5 percent to 31 percent. A negative Reddit thread ranking for branded searches dropped from the No. 4 spot to No. 11 after a coordinated review, PR, and video campaign. The case study's takeaway is a "trust accumulation" framework that treats organic, paid, reviews, and third-party mentions as one connected buyer journey rather than separate channel reports. For experienced marketers, it's a useful model for justifying cross-team budget and reporting that blends SEO, PPC, and reputation work.