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Over the past few years, Google has made a lot of changes that can be challenging for modern marketers and SEO experts to keep up with.

Recently, Google started indexing according to mobile search results, cracked down on intrusive pop-up ads, and removed right-side ads. What do all of these changes have in common?

Google has been making changes to its algorithm, search engine results pages, and policies based on user behavior and preference. They’re observing what users are doing and making the search engine work more intuitively for them. This is great for the frequent Google searchers in all of us — Google processes more than 2 trillion searches per year — but it can make it challenging to adapt your strategy and achieve your SEO goals. INBOUND event, Moz Co-founder and former CEO Rand Fishkin unpacked the ways Google is changing and what marketers and SEO pros can do to improve their results in 2017.

4 Ways Marketers Can Strengthen Their SEO Strategy in 2017

1) Diversify your traffic sources to keep earning visits from Google.

Fishkin encourages a distributed content strategy designed to help you earn traffic from a variety of different sources. This approach ensures that your traffic numbers aren’t entirely contingent on people directly searching for your brand name.

Video marketing is an engaging content format that can diversify traffic. For example, Moz videos are published on Wistia first, then on YouTube. This multi-channel strategy allows them to generate traffic from different sources. In the same vein, written content can be published on blogs, LinkedIn Pulse, and Medium publications. However, it’s important to tailor your content to different audiences where they consume content, whether it’s on social media or YouTube or guest posts on other blogs, to keep earning traffic and links from a variety of sources in Google search.

2) Evolve your keyword targeting strategy.

There are many new elements on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) that make it harder to generate clicks. With Google’s Answer Box and Carousel search results, there is less real estate on Google’s search engine results page than ever. Check it out below — if you Google the term “blog,” a large portion of the page is taken up by Google Ads, news stories, and an Answer Box:

Because Google’s real estate is this competitive, it’s harder to get onto page one of the search engine results page, which is proven to have higher clickthrough rates than other results. In fact, did you know that the first position in Google gets 33% of search traffic?

The solution? Changing your keyword targeting strategy so your content is better geared toward the changing ways people are searching on Google. Use keyword research tools such as Google AdWords and HubSpot’s Keywords App to determine the long-tail, conversational keywords your audience is searching for. Then, plan a blog post strategy based around topic clusters so your website is more likely to rank higher in Google search results.

3) Invest in a link building strategy that can scale.

Inbound links pointing toward your website give it massive levels of authority in search engines, so link building is still an integral part of your inbound marketing strategy. Fisher says that, in order for link building to be successful, you need several elements: link goals, a strategic approach to achieving them, tactical initiatives, and metrics to track. Link building takes a long time to show results, so there is usually a significant time gap between when you start experimenting and conducting initiatives and when you see the benefits of your efforts.

For that reason, SEO marketers need to balance their efforts between long-term investments and short-term hacks so you’re constantly generating links while investing in the future health of your site’s inbound link generation. You’ll want to make sure that these approaches are white hat link building tactics that offer a benefit to your site and sites linking to you, and not spammy tactics that can hurt your site.

Long-term investments have high upfront costs and are slower to return on their investment, but they earn links while you sleep and don’t put you at risk of any spammy behaviors. These tactics primarily consist of publishing high-quality content and promoting it in hopes that other sites will link to it. Short-term hacks can show results more quickly, but these strategies can sometimes be viewed as spammy. Such tactics include guest posting and sponsored content.

With a balance of long-term and short-term strategies, you’ll be able to ensure your domain’s authority immediately while you work to build up your blog to the point where it is newsworthy and linked to organically.

4) Increase searcher engagement with your content.

With the introduction of RankBrain, Google’s new machine-learning algorithm that helps determine search engine rankings, how the searcher interacts with Google is now being weighed as one of hundreds of ranking signals. While Google is still figuring out how RankBrain operates themselves, but metrics such as clickthrough rate and time on-page already contribute to how high (or low) your site ranks in Google.

Here are strategies to think about in order to amp up your site if RankBrain starts to play a greater role in SEO:

• Think about all of the questions your audience is searching for answers to, and not just individual keywords.
• Prioritize user experience and consider amplifying or redesigning your website so that it answers multiple search queries and visitors will stay on your site for longer.
• Design your website so that it delivers content quickly and beautifully across multiple devices.
• Remove features like pop-up ads that discourage users from reading or returning to your page.
• Most importantly, invest time and resources in publishing authoritative, comprehensive content that your audience will read and share again and again.

What’s Ahead in Search

Fishkin believes that the name of the SEO game is engagement. “If you deliver dramatically better engagement than your competitors,” he explained, “they will be hard-pressed to catch up with you in SERP.” We already know that Google has changed a lot this year, and will most likely keep changing in the next year, so it’s important to get a plan in motion now for search engine optimization and link building strategies to propel your site’s growth. Watch Fishkin’s INBOUND talk in full below:

For more ideas on safeguarding your website for search engine optimization, read our blog posts about white hat link building tactics, blog post content ideation, speeding up your blog, and more.

How are you changing your SEO strategy in 2017? Share with us in the comments below.

In today’s technology-driven world, executives and marketers can no longer afford to be satisfied with gut feelings and guessing. You need granular, relevant, enriching data to measure and surface the impact your programs and campaigns have on the business (and impress your boss).

At the same time, anyone who’s ever created a marketing report from scratch knows that it can be … well, tough. From starting with raw numbers to figuring out what information your boss will actually be interested in, extracting the most important insights is no easy task. In fact, you could end up spending weeks in Excel tinkering with your monthly reports and still have missing information.

That’s why the marketing and reporting experts at HubSpot and Looker have joined forces to bring you a brand new free guide, How to Create Marketing Reports Your Boss Actually Cares About. It’s got insights on:

• What you need to measure before your report
• The best tools to help you gather and display your report each month
• How to find the data you need
• Analyzing your data to establish measurable goals
• Tips for visualizing and presenting your metrics and analysis
• How to plan for better results next month

Click here to download How to Create Marketing Reports Your Boss Actually Cares About

No project is an unmitigated success or failure. Even when it seems like a project couldn’t have possibly gone better (or worse), there are always lessons to be learned.

Thus, the project post-mortem.

The project post-mortem shouldn’t be seen as an investigation. It’s an inquiry to uncover all the lessons for the future — not a chance to assign blame or put people on the spot. A productive project post-mortem is a chance to fully unpack a project’s trajectory and dig deeper into why things unfolded the way they did.

It’s the opportunity to ask: What exactly did we accomplish? And even more importantly: what could we do better next time?

To help your agency’s team get the most out of your project post-mortem meetings, we’ve shared some basic guidelines. Check them out below and make your next post-mortem your most productive one yet.

How to Run a Productive Project Post-Mortem

Make post-mortems a standard part of your team’s process.

Post-mortem meetings should be an essential part of your agency’s process — for the big projects, and the smaller ones. Most teams run post-mortem meetings for larger projects with definitive start and end dates, but they can be equally useful for smaller scale or even on-going projects.

Even though “post-mortem” quite literally means after death, your team doesn’t have to wait for the end of a huge, long-term project to get value from a retrospective evaluation. When you’re fleshing out a project’s schedule during the kickoff phase, insert mini post-mortems at key milestones. These pulse-checks will give your team the chance to better understand how a project is progressing — and hopefully identify potential issues before they cause permanent damage.

Once the project has officially wrapped up, don’t wait too long to schedule the final post-mortem, or people will have mentally moved on. In fact, you should schedule the post-mortem when you build out the full project plan, so everyone knows it’s an expected part of the project wrap up.

Send out a post-mortem questionnaire before the actual meeting.

The meeting itself shouldn’t be scheduled for more than an hour. Not everyone will have a chance to speak up, and some smaller (but still important) issues may not get a lot of discussion time. And frankly, not everyone is comfortable speaking up in this kind of forum. Using a pre-meeting questionnaire means everyone on your team has an equal opportunity to share their thoughts, and no stray detail flies under the radar.

The questionnaire also provides an opportunity for people to get themselves organized before the meeting. People can dig into why certain things happened (or didn’t happen), so they can bring causes and potential solutions to the meeting — not just missteps or hastily formulated theories.

For example, if a project required the creatives on your team to work around the clock to get their deliverables done on time, why did this happen? Was the project timeline set up badly? Were inexperienced people assigned to the wrong tasks?

The responses from the questionnaire should inform the post-mortem meeting’s agenda, focusing the discussion on issues that had the biggest impact. Yet the questionnaire also means the “smaller” stuff doesn’t get overlooked in the full post-mortem process.

Select a moderator to keep the meeting on track.

The goal of a project post-mortem is to constructively evaluate what the project’s team accomplished successfully, and what could have been done better. For this discussion to be productive, someone needs to keep the conversation civil, on-point, and moving forward.

This is where the meeting moderator comes in. Establish a moderator prior to the in-person meeting who can stick to the agenda and lead the discussion in case it gets out of hand. The moderator doesn’t have to be the project manager or a member of your leadership team, she just needs to be someone who feels comfortable taking charge.

Set a clear agenda.

With so many details to cover in such a short period of time, it’s easy for post-mortem meetings to veer off track. Help keep the discussion in check by building a clear meeting agenda in advance:

Start with a recap of the project’s core objectives, briefly going over the goals and metrics established at the kickoff. This portion shouldn’t be longer than five minutes, and should act as a quick refresher on what your team set out to do.

Briefly review the results. Once you’ve gone over the primary goals and objectives, take a few minutes to review the project’s final results. This should be a straightforward evaluation of whether or not the project met your team’s metrics for success. Did you hit the targets you set out to meet?

Delve into the why or why not. Now is the time to really dig into why the project ended up the way it did, and how team members are feeling about it. This discussion should take up the bulk of the meeting. We’ve explained how to structure your examination below.

Ask the right questions.

So what exactly should a post-mortem examine? There are a few different cross-sections to frame your inquiry. Basic categories of inquiry are planning, execution, results, and communication.

Within each category, you should ask quantitative, qualitative, and subjective questions:

Quantitative Questions

These are your standard yes or no questions. Were deadlines met or missed? Did we provide all deliverables outlined in the project scope? Were pre-defined success metrics achieved? Were outline workflows and processes followed? Was there a budget overrun?

As you look into the project from this perspective, a key underlying question is always: Was the plan good? Did we follow the plan? Was the plan bad? Why? All the quantitative questions you ask should eventually lead back to this overarching theme.

Qualitative Questions

These open-ended questions should evaluate the project beyond the hard data and planning. Did we deliver work at the high standards we and our client expect? Does the client agree? Did people feel like they had the resources, information, and support they needed to get their own tasks done? Was campaign criteria or task expectations poorly defined or communicated?

In both the quantitative and qualitative inquiries, get specific about what worked well and what didn’t. Did you have delivery date for client to share their personas, but no review time built in? So the client sent them in on time (as per the project plan), but they were inadequate for the project’s needs. Did a lack of oversight by an account manager result in a new PPC campaign manager overspending against the client’s ad budget?

Subjective Questions

Subjective questions help assess how your team members are feeling, and can help leadership identify troubling signs of burnout and fatigue early on. These questions also let leadership know what processes worked best with their team, helping them plan future projects.

What did people enjoy most and least about this project? How was working with the client? What changes would they make to this type of project in the future? How could the work run more smoothly with this client or among certain departments in the future? Do you want to work on a similar type project again? If not, why not?

Make sure to close the loop.

The post-mortem meeting is just one step of the post-mortem process. The end result of the questionnaire and meeting should be a post-mortem document outlining conclusions of the inquiry and actionable takeaways for the future.

And this inquiry isn’t just about what went well or badly, but what’s going to change for the future, and how? What lead to great success here that we can bottle and use on other projects? Circulate the post-mortem roundup document to participants to get their sign-off. Then circulate the agency-wide takeaways for future projects to everyone.

A post-mortem that doesn’t impact future action is a waste of time. Make sure your post-mortems lead to greater results on subsequent projects.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.