Welcome to our weekly roundup of the top 10 digital marketing articles of the week! In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, staying up to date with the latest trends, tactics, and strategies is crucial to success. Whether you’re a seasoned digital marketer or just getting started, our weekly roundup is sure to provide you with valuable insights and practical tips to help you stay ahead of the game.
Content Marketing
Your event content needs a destination before it needs a prompt
Lisa Shaw highlights that AI makes it easy to repurpose event recordings into multiple content formats, but marketers need to decide who each asset is for, where it will live, and what action it should drive before creating it. She recommends planning content before events, involving sales and customer-facing teams, connecting assets into ongoing journeys, and tracking their contribution to pipeline over time.
AI Search Optimization: A Practical Content Checklist
Veselin Stoyanov shares a practical checklist for making content easier for search engines and AI systems to understand, retrieve and verify. He recommends leading with direct answers, using consistent terminology and descriptive headings, backing claims with credible sources, and adding original, useful insights. The post also stresses human review of AI-generated content, noting that good optimization practices can improve content quality but cannot guarantee visibility or citations in AI-generated answers.
SEO
How Can I Tell If My Images Are Optimized For Multimodal Search? – Ask an SEO
Helen Pollitt explains that optimizing images for multimodal search goes beyond adding alt text; search engines must be able to crawl, index, access and understand the images themselves. She recommends checking image visibility in Google Search Console, reviewing crawler access, image URLs, lazy loading and sitemaps, and strengthening context through descriptive alt text, surrounding copy and structured data. The post emphasizes that solid technical image SEO remains the foundation for visibility in image-based and AI-powered search.
Pop-ups and SEO: What’s safe, what’s risky, and what to fix
Simone De Palma explains that pop-ups don’t automatically hurt SEO; the risk comes from how they affect content accessibility, page performance and search engine crawling. He recommends delaying pop-ups until users engage, keeping them small and easy to dismiss, loading scripts asynchronously, and avoiding full-screen overlays or forced redirects, particularly on mobile. The post also provides practical audit steps using Google Search Console, Lighthouse and WebPageTest to identify issues with overlays.
Google AI Mode: All You Need to Know
Si Quan Ong explains how Google AI Mode is changing search through conversational queries, query fan-out and AI-generated answers that often reduce the need for users to visit websites. He recommends focusing on traditional SEO fundamentals while building brand mentions across the web, earning visibility on YouTube and Reddit, publishing original research and first-hand insights, keeping content fresh, and ensuring technical accessibility. The post also highlights ways to track AI visibility through Google Search Console and Ahrefs Brand Radar.
Social Media
Instagram features every marketer needs to know in 2026
Instagram offers marketers a growing set of tools for content creation, audience engagement, analytics and social commerce. Alyssa Hirose and Colleen Christison cover 32 features, including Trial Reels for testing content with non-followers, AI-powered creative tools, customizable profile grids, collaborative posts, Broadcast Channels, shopping features and native scheduling.
How to use social media audience segmentation to drive smarter business decisions
Rebecca MacFarlane explains how brands can use social listening, behavioural insights and audience data to create more meaningful customer segments. The post explores four segmentation types and how AI and CRM data can help personalize content, improve engagement and inform marketing decisions.
Email Marketing
AI email previews: What happens to your offer when AI summarizes it?
Oleksii Burlakov highlights how AI-generated email previews in Gmail, Apple Mail and Outlook can distort offers, omit important conditions or misinterpret deadlines. The post recommends placing key details directly alongside offers, avoiding text embedded only in images, and testing actual AI summaries before sending campaigns to ensure customers receive accurate information.
Welcome email series: how to build one that converts
Milda Bernatavičiūtė outlines how ecommerce brands can build automated welcome email sequences that turn new subscribers into first-time buyers. The post recommends a three-to-six-email sequence covering the welcome offer, brand story, bestsellers and social proof, while emphasizing audience segmentation, personalized recommendations and timely follow-ups.
Link Building
Negative SEO: How to Spot and Stop a Spam Link Attack
Timmy Walczak explains how to identify and respond to negative SEO attacks involving sudden spikes in spammy backlinks and manipulative anchor text. The post recommends monitoring backlink profiles, documenting suspicious patterns, securing website access and requesting link removals where possible. It also cautions against rushing to disavow links, as Google typically ignores many spammy backlinks automatically.
