End-to-End

Technical marketing — what we do here at UpBuild — can be hard work. Not in an overwhelming way, but in a way that stretches the mind and forces a push toward the limits of one’s own ability. I’m thankful because that’s what keeps me interested, excited, and fulfilled after nearly fifteen years of doing this. 

When I began to explore potential topics for a blog post (what has become this post), I was facing a wickedly-hard technical challenge to which there was no clear, easy answer. At least that’s the way it seemed when I was brought in. 

I don’t actually do a lot of hands-on technical marketing work at UpBuild these days; I’m busy running the business and leading UpBuild’s team so that THEY can do the hands-on work. Yet I found myself being brought in to help in whatever way I could when all else seemed to have failed. I love being able to help out in that way and aim to carve out more time for it in the future, but that’s a subject for another post. 

Returning to the main thread: a deadline was fast approaching, and progress had stalled. Each issue resolved in the project seemed to give rise to two more. 

[Read more…] about How to Solve Challenging Technical Problems in 8 Steps

With machine learning and automation becoming a hot topic, you may have thought about getting started with learning a programming language, like Python. Seeing really cool case studies at virtual conferences or finding discounts on coding courses during the pandemic could be driving that desire too. Before you can start running scripts, you should ensure you have the essentials down first! While this post will focus on setting up a Python environment, many of these tips can be applied to setting up other programming environments as well. 

• What tools you need to start programming
• How to install Python
• Packages and how to install them
• How to edit and run a Python script

[Read more…] about Getting Started With Python: Set Up An Environment

2020 has been interesting for several reasons, and search marketing is no exception. Between privacy-focused web initiatives, political unrest on the web, and economic changes driven by a pandemic, search marketers have a lot to adapt to. 

We’ll dive into why marketers—especially PPC or paid ad marketers—will have to adapt or have their marketing campaigns die.

[Read more…] about A Win for Users and a Headache for Marketers

SEO and PPC are two closely aligned channels: they both focus on optimizing for keywords in order to drive traffic and conversions from search engine users. However, the strategies and tactics for each are wildly different. At UpBuild, we know what we’re experts in (technical SEO, web analytics, and digital marketing strategy) and what we’re not (PPC, among many other things). We’re always happy to partner with our clients’ PPC vendors to align on overall marketing strategy, but periodically a client will ask for our help crafting their PPC campaigns, and we’ll have to explain that since it’s not our field of specialty, we can’t really provide the kind of expert guidance that they need.

One question we often get from clients as they’re shopping for PPC consultants, or attempting to build their own in-house PPC campaigns, is “Can’t we just plug our list of targeted SEO keywords into Google Ads and go from there?” We get this question frequently enough that I thought I’d explain our thinking on this topic in more detail.

[Read more…] about Can My SEO Keywords Be My PPC Keywords?