Despite most experts recommending it, paid search might still be underused. A recent report from Clutch and Ignite Visibility found that just 19% of SEO-focused businesses put resources into paid search.

Amanda MacArthur is the co-founder and content director of Lantern Content Marketing Adventure Company. Because she is quite the expert on SEO and Google, we took advantage of her knowledge for a slightly longer Q&A.

If you want to improve your Google rankings for web pages where you sell products and/or services, read on. Searchmetrics has released a new report titled E-commerce Ranking Factors 2017: Ten Things E-commerce Sites Need to Know to Rank on Google. The new study is based on an analysis of the top 20 search results on google.com for more than 6,000 online retail and e-commerce common search terms.

Gamification can even help a presentation on SEO for Publishers. During a talk last month at SIPA's Best Practices Conference on New Marketing and Sales Strategies for Customer Acquisition in San Francisco by Ed Coburn, co-president, School Family Media, a chart popped up that drew quick interest. It read Optimizing Posts and listed point values for various criteria of your posts:

One morning a couple weeks ago, Matt Bailey—a highly experienced SEO and marketing practitioner—went into Google's Keyword Planner and "checked terms like investing, investments, investment." What he found was that investment and investments are not combined but show the exact same number of monthly searches—which is probably not possible. 

Most content creators and marketers have an understanding of search engine optimization basics. The problem is, the rules of SEO are constantly changing (Google has made four major updates this year alone, including “Mobilegeddon,” the release of a new mobile-friendly algorithm that boosts mobile-friendly pages in search results). With more than 200 ranking factors for SEO on Google, keeping pace with SEO changes and making sure best practices are adhered to throughout the organization doesn’t fall on one individual or even one group, such as marketers versus editorial. It’s an enterprise-wide responsibility.