UpBuild

Values-Driven Technical Marketing

Mike Arnesen

Leveraging Machine-Readable Entity IDs for SEO

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Once upon a time, I had a boss who would often describe my ideas as “bleeding edge”. I never much liked the description, because — frankly — it sounded disgusting. However, the term is meant to describe something a step beyond the cutting edge. An idea or strategy “so new and untested as to be potentially unreliable and carry a higher risk-to-reward ratio.” I’m not sure that applied to much of what I was doing back then in 2014 (well, there were a few things) but it certainly applies to this.

You’ll want to apply “potentially” and “theoretically” qualifiers to pretty much everything in this post. I think it’s worth taking action on this, but the benefits are as yet unproven. Note that, contrary to the definition of “bleeding edge” above, I think the risk here is almost non-existent while the potential upside is high.

Without further ado…

Let’s talk about machine-readable entity IDs in search and how to use them to your great advantage. Read on for more on the why and the how, and to get your free bookmarklet, too! [Read more…] about Leveraging Machine-Readable Entity IDs for SEO

Filed Under: SEO

UpBuild Turns 3 Years Old Today

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“Wow. This thing is really working.”

It's working!
You know it, Ani!

This is an exact thought that went through my head at the beginning of this week. Yesterday was a new team member’s first day (Hi, Nick!) and, as such, there was a lot going on. On top of that, we also were kicking off a new client (Thanks for going with us, Jenni and Helen!). On top of that, we ran into a big issue with a keyword research project for a current client that had to be dealt with before EOD. Oh, and it was a Monday, so there’s that, too.

My point is that there was a lot in motion and, in the startup agency game, that’s typically when things start to break down and fall apart. The great thing is…nothing did.

All of this was particularly fitting for the eve of UpBuild’s three-year anniversary — despite it being one of the most active days in recent memory, everything worked. Sure, there was stress and, yeah, no one got to Inbox Zero that day, but when we all logged off in the evening everything was stable and humming along nicely. The team could rest easy and know that we’d have tomorrow to sort the rest of it out.

To me, that’s a huge deal. [Read more…] about UpBuild Turns 3 Years Old Today

UpBuild is TINYpulse’s Happiest Company of 2017

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Earlier this year, TINYpulse — a lightweight employee engagement tool we use at UpBuild — announced that UpBuild earned the award for “Happiest Company of 2017” in the Marketing & Advertising category! This was based on our team’s average happiness ratings from our weekly mini-surveys throughout the year. We came back with an average score of 9 out of 10, beating the Marketing & Advertising industry standard by 22%!

This is an incredible honor and I think I can speak for the team in saying, “We’re super pumped to be acknowledged as the happiest company in Marketing & Advertising”! As icing on the cake, TINYpulse even sent us a physical award. This gorgeous thing (which is nearly impossible to photograph well) now sits in UpBuild HQ and may have to make an appearance at UpBuild’s next Team Day. [Read more…] about UpBuild is TINYpulse’s Happiest Company of 2017

Rocking the Client Vote at UpBuild

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When I founded UpBuild in 2015, my primary goal was fairly singular: create the company I’d want to work for. Like it or not, my work is directly tied to my personal quality of life and, fortunately, I don’t think I’m alone in that. If I have a bad day (or days) at work, my personal life suffers, which in turn causes my work to suffer. With UpBuild, I suppose you could say my goal has always been to systematically create as many good days as possible while minimizing the bad ones.

But this isn’t UpBuild’s origin story; this is a post about one specific aspect of who we are, which is directly related to this overarching vision. [Read more…] about Rocking the Client Vote at UpBuild

Implementing Semantic Markup with Google Tag Manager

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Why Semantic Markup & Structured Data?

It’s almost 2018. Do we still need to have this conversation? Structured data is no longer a “nice to have”; it’s as good as a requirement at this point. I’d go so far as to say that having some basic organization and maybe breadcrumb markup on your website is little more than table stakes — having it doesn’t really give you much of an advantage but not having it means you’re not really taking the (SEO) game seriously.

Making sure your website has descriptive yet concise title tags is SEO 101. No one would argue otherwise. I’d love to see basic semantically-organized, structured data get added to that checklist. It’s that foundational and essential.

Why?

SEO is in large part about minimizing ambiguity. It’s about getting specific. Specificity beats generality every time. SEO is about making sure nothing gets lost in translation between the web experiences we create and the programmatic applications that are built to digest and index them. [Read more…] about Implementing Semantic Markup with Google Tag Manager