Cases

Page load speed is one of a site’s quality indicators. It matters to both users and search engines, but it doesn’t guarantee higher rankings: it’s one of many signals they take into account. Below — how to measure speed correctly, what most often keeps a site from loading quickly, and in what order to check…

Choosing an SEO provider doesn’t start with a list of agencies — it starts with the task: what the site needs, who will implement the changes, and how much time your team has to work with a provider. The task determines the format: an agency, an independent specialist, or an in-house hire. Formats differ in…

Generative search is a mode where the system assembles an answer from several pages itself, instead of just showing a list of links. We covered what this is and how it differs from regular SEO in detail in the article on GEO — optimization for generative search. This isn’t theory — it’s a practical checklist:…

Every server response carries a code — three digits that tell a browser or a crawler how the request was handled. This matters for SEO: search engines treat a page differently depending on whether it responds with 200, a redirect, 404, or 410. Below — what each class of codes means, how 404 differs from…

A commercial page is a page on a site that sells a product or service: a product page, a service page, a catalog category. “Commercial ranking factors” is a term from Russian-language SEO, used mainly in discussions of Yandex rankings, for the signals that set such a page apart from an informational article: how easy…

llms.txt is a Markdown-format text file placed at a site’s root. It was proposed as a way to give AI systems a short, structured description of a site instead of having them parse HTML pages. Two facts need separating right away. The format wasn’t proposed by a search engine or a standards body, but by…

Free online SEO analysis tools crawl a page or a site in a few seconds and return a list of findings: some flagged as errors, some as warnings, sometimes all rolled into a single overall score. It’s a convenient first look at a site, but this kind of check has a limit — it looks…

Brand positioning is often confused with a tagline, a USP, or a mission statement. This guide explains what it actually is, how the brand pyramid and the positioning map describe it, and a five-step method for putting it into words for your own company.

An email newsletter is a message sent to a list of subscribers; email marketing is the ongoing practice built around it. This guide covers the types of newsletters, what a first send requires, what a preheader is, and the legal requirements for ad email under Russian law.

End-to-end analytics brings together ad, website and CRM data along one customer path, from an ad click to a closed deal. This guide covers what it includes, which services are used, and what a company needs to set it up.

Online advertising covers several channels: PPC (paid search), the Yandex Advertising Network, targeted social ads, and Telegram ads. This guide explains how each works and how to pick the right one for your task.

Lead generation has a reputation as a trendy marketing term that gets dropped into slide decks without much explanation. In practice, it is an ordinary part of working with customers: noticing interest in a product before someone gets around to buying it. Below: what counts as a lead, the types of leads by readiness to…

A redirect sends a visitor from one address to another: the server responds with a code in the 3xx range and gives the new address in the Location header, and the browser or search engine crawler follows it. Which code you use — 301 or 302 — determines how the search engine treats the old…

Ranking is the position of a link to your site in search results for a specific query. You can check it manually in a browser, in Yandex Webmaster (Yandex’s counterpart of Google Search Console), in Google Search Console, or through a third-party rank-tracking service — and each method has its own accuracy. Each method has…

There’s no single SEO timeline that applies to every site. Google notes that changes to a site show up in search at different speeds: sometimes within a few hours, sometimes only after several months, and on average you can expect to assess the result within a few weeks. The result itself appears in stages: pages…

The term “SEO specialist” usually comes up not out of curiosity, but at the point where a decision is already needed: hiring an in-house employee, working with a freelancer, or going to an agency. Understanding the profession itself isn’t the point here — what matters more is understanding what this person should do and whether…

A self-service SEO audit is a review of a site using open, free sources: Google Search Console, Yandex Webmaster and the site itself. It doesn’t replace an expert audit, but it helps you see what’s happening with the site right now and decide which problems you can fix yourself and which need a separate review.…

Performance marketing is an approach where advertising is planned and judged by a specific, measurable result: inquiries, sales, the cost of acquiring a customer. Every campaign is checked against clear metrics, and budget is shifted to wherever the data shows it benefits the business. Below: how this approach differs from display advertising, the principles it’s…

Through Yandex Direct, ads can be shown in Telegram channels connected to the Yandex Advertising Network. The Yandex Advertising Network (YAN) is a system for placing ads on Yandex’s services and partner placements; in this case the placements are messenger channels. This isn’t a feature inside Telegram, nor is it Telegram Ads, Telegram’s own official…

Technical SEO is about how a site is served to crawlers and browsers: what a crawler can scan, what makes it into the index, how the site responds to requests, and how fast it loads. Unlike copy and links, this isn’t about a page’s content — it’s about how soundly the site is built technically.…

Negative keywords and negative keyword phrases are words and phrases whose presence in a search query stops an ad in Yandex Direct from showing. They exist so your ad doesn’t reach people searching for something else: free options, job listings, “do it yourself” instructions. Below: how Direct applies negative keyword phrases, how to pick them…

An advertising post in a Telegram channel or on a social network must carry the label “advertising,” identify the advertiser, and include an advertising identifier — erid. Erid is assigned by the ad data operator (ORD). The same operator passes advertising information to the Unified Register of Internet Advertising, which Roskomnadzor maintains. Below: what counts…

CPL (cost per lead) is the cost of a lead — one contact from a potential customer: an inquiry, a sign-up, a callback request. It’s calculated like this: the cost of acquiring leads divided by the number of leads over the same period. Below: how to calculate CPL on your own data, what to include…

Promoting a VK community means making sure the right people find and read it. That takes setting the community up for the task, regularly publishing useful content, using the platform’s free tools and advertising, and checking what works from the stats. Below is a step-by-step plan with no manipulative tactics: what to do at each…

Retargeting is showing ads to people who have already interacted with a business: visited the site, browsed the catalog, left their contact details, or bought something. In Yandex Direct, these people are selected through audience segments built from Yandex Metrica, Yandex Audiences, and CRM data. Remarketing is the same mechanism under a different name: Yandex’s…

ER (engagement rate) measures how actively an audience interacts with posts: liking and reacting, commenting, sharing, and saving posts. It’s expressed as a percentage: the number of reactions divided by a base — followers or reach, and sometimes views. The result depends on the base. The same post can get a different ER in different…

ROMI (return on marketing investment) is a measure of how well marketing spend pays off. It shows whether the money put into advertising and promotion came back, and how much came back on top of it. Yandex Advertising’s educational materials give this formula: subtract advertising spend from the revenue it generated, divide the result by…

Reach is the number of unique people who saw a post or an ad: someone who saw a post several times is counted once. Viral reach on VK is people who saw a post without being subscribed to the community. For example, they noticed a friend’s repost (a post the friend shared on their own…

Keyword cannibalization in SEO is a situation where two or more different pages on the same site answer the same user task. As a result, search shows now one of them for a query, now the other, or not the one you consider the primary page. It’s not one page duplicated under different URLs: the…

ROI (return on investment, a “return-on-investment ratio”) is a metric that helps you tell whether an investment turned a profit and was worthwhile. Yandex Advertising’s training materials calculate it like this: subtract the cost from the revenue, divide the result by the cost, and multiply by one hundred to get a percentage. If ROI is…

A Telegram channel is a tool for broadcasting messages to a large audience: there can be any number of subscribers, and only the owner and designated administrators can publish posts. For a business, it’s a way to regularly deliver news, expertise, and offers to people who chose to follow you. Below: what to choose for…

Google Indexing API is a programmatic interface through which a site tells Google that a page has appeared, been updated, or been deleted. According to Google’s documentation, it only supports pages with JobPosting structured data (job postings) or BroadcastEvent embedded in a VideoObject (livestreams). A successful response to an update notification only means that Google…

YAN stands for the Yandex Advertising Network: a system for placing ads on Yandex’s services and partner placements. An advertiser launches impressions in the network through Yandex Direct — the same system that shows ads in Yandex search. Below: where exactly ads appear, how the network picks an audience, how a network impression differs from…

AI in marketing is the use of neural networks and machine learning algorithms for marketing tasks: preparing content, managing advertising, analyzing data, and replying to customers. It speeds up repeatable preparation and processing of information, while leaving decisions, verification and responsibility for the result to a person. Below: which tasks you can hand to a…

PPC (paid search) advertising is paid ads that a search engine shows in response to queries related to keywords the advertiser has chosen. The advertiser pays for the result of a showing: for example, for a click on the ad, and in Yandex Direct you can also choose to pay for conversions. SEO is work…

UGC content is user-generated content: material about a product, service or brand that the audience creates, not the company itself. Examples include reviews, photos with the product, posts with recommendations, comments. A business doesn’t produce this content — it receives it from customers and, with their consent, uses it in social media, on the site…

In marketing and advertising, CTR (click-through rate) is the share of impressions after which a person clicked the ad or link. To calculate it, divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions and multiply by one hundred — that gives you a percentage. The metric appears in ad platforms, for example Yandex Direct…

Competitor keywords are the search queries that bring up pages from other sites in your niche. They’re also called competitor search queries or competitor key phrases, and the whole set is referred to as a competitor’s keyword set. You look at these queries to find wordings and demand groups you’re missing, and to see which…

Yandex Webmaster is Yandex’s service for site owners. It shows which pages of a site are eligible to appear in search, how the crawler crawls the site and what response codes it gets, what problems Yandex found on the site, and which queries the site shows up for in search results. To see this data,…

Yandex Direct is a Yandex service that helps companies promote products and services online. Through it, ads show in Yandex search and on search partner sites, as well as on Yandex’s services and the placements of the Yandex Advertising Network’s partners. The advertiser chooses what to promote, where and to whom to show ads, sets…

Targeted advertising on VK is launched in VK Ads — VK’s unified advertising platform for promotion across its properties and its advertising network. Setup goes top to bottom: first a campaign with a promotion object, goal, bid strategy and budget, then an ad group with an audience and placements, then the ads themselves. After that,…

To set up Yandex Direct yourself, first prepare your site and Yandex Metrica with goals, then create a campaign and choose a strategy. Next, pick keyword phrases, write ads, pass moderation and top up your balance. After launch, check which queries triggered your ads and whether they bring in inquiries. If you’re not yet familiar…

To get a neural network to write a useful post, give it the inputs: the goal, the audience, the platform, the main point and verified facts. The model will produce a draft and variants, but it can generate information that sounds plausible and is still wrong. That’s why a person checks the facts, the tone…

An internal link is a link from one page of a site to another page on the same site. Internal linking is the system behind those links: which pages are connected, where the links sit, and what text labels them. Internal linking serves two audiences. For the user, it points to the next step: more…

Site visibility is a calculated estimate of how often and how high a site appears in search results for a chosen set of queries. The SERP is the results page a search engine shows in response to a query. Search engines themselves don’t give you that number. Google Search Console and Yandex Webmaster have impressions,…

UTM parameters are parameters added to the end of a link so an analytics system can tell where a visitor came from: the source, the channel, and the campaign behind the visit. They’re also called UTM tags. An example of a link with UTM parameters: Here https://example.ru/ is the page address, and after the “?”…

Title is the HTML element <title> in a page’s <head> section. Its text is visible in the browser tab, and search engines use it as a source for the heading shown in search results. Description is the <meta name=”description”> tag with a short page summary: Google and Yandex may show it in the snippet, that…

Targeted advertising — also called targeted (paid social) advertising, or just “targeting” — is advertising that a platform shows to a chosen group of users: by region, gender and age, interests, or online behavior. The key difference from search advertising is that what triggers the ad isn’t a person’s query, but characteristics of the audience.…

Site structure is how pages are grouped into sections and levels, and how that hierarchy is reflected in the menu, links and URLs. For search engines, it affects how the crawler finds pages and how long it can take for deep sections to get indexed. For you, it’s about which page answers which group of…

A sitemap is a file with links to a site’s pages that tells search engines about its current structure. The main format is XML: Google calls it the most versatile, while Yandex supports both XML and a plain text file. A sitemap helps search engines find pages, but it doesn’t mean all of them will…

SEO copy is page text that answers a specific search query: it helps the person solve their task, and it helps the search engine understand what the page is about. The quality of this text isn’t determined by keyword density or length. It’s determined by a clear page purpose, a complete answer to the question,…

SEO results aren’t one number, and they aren’t rankings for a list of queries. They’re changes at every step of the path: pages get indexed, they show up in search, they get clicks, and visitors from search submit inquiries, call, or buy. If there’s no result, you first look for the step where it’s getting…

A keyword map is the set of search queries people use to find what’s on your site, grouped by meaning and assigned to pages. It helps to think of it not as a spreadsheet of keywords but as a model of search demand. That model drives your site structure, the page you pick for each…

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler application for Windows, macOS and Linux. It crawls a site by following links from a starting URL and collects technical data for each URL: response code, redirects, title and description, canonical, and robots directives. Below: how to prepare and run a site crawl, which reports to check…

robots.txt is a text file in a site’s root directory with instructions for crawlers: which addresses they’re allowed to crawl, and which they aren’t. It controls crawling, not indexing. A page blocked in robots.txt can still remain in search. Below — how the file is structured, which directives Google and Yandex honor, which rule wins…

There are three main ways to advertise on Telegram. The first is Telegram’s own advertising platform, Telegram Ads: short sponsored messages in public channels. The second is seeding: buying an ad post from a channel owner, either directly or through an ad exchange. The third is ad systems that place ads in the Telegram channels…

Subscribers come to a Telegram channel through three groups of methods: a business’s own resources (website, newsletters, other social networks, offline touchpoints), cooperation with other channels, and paid promotion — Telegram Ads, placements in other people’s channels, ads on other platforms. This only works if the channel already gives people a reason to subscribe. Faking…

Search intent is the task a person wants to solve with a search query: to learn something, to reach a specific site, to choose between options, or to take an action right away. Google describes the order like this: to show relevant results, it first needs to understand what the person is actually looking for.…

noindex is a rule in the robots meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header that blocks a page from showing up in search results. nofollow comes in two forms: in the meta tag it applies to every link on the page, and in the rel attribute it applies to a single link. Google’s robots usually…

n8n is a workflow automation tool: in a visual editor, you build a workflow out of node-based steps, and it then runs on its own — on a schedule, or when data arrives from another service. You can use it in n8n’s cloud or install it on your own server, and connect language models and…

Structured data, or markup, is a description of a page in a standard format that search engines understand: what kind of object the page represents (an organization, an article, a service, a product) and what properties that object has. Most markup types draw on the shared Schema.org vocabulary. Markup helps a search engine understand a…

Conversion is the share of people who completed the action you wanted: submitted an inquiry, bought something, signed up. It’s calculated like this: the number of target actions divided by the number of opportunities, multiplied by a hundred — giving a share in percent. In marketing the word means exactly this, not a currency exchange.…

A content factory is a structured process for producing content on a regular basis: from strategy and the brief for a piece through editing, publication and reviewing the results. Each stage has an owner, and each piece has a clear path from idea to release. In this process, AI speeds up drafting text and options,…

A content plan is a document that lays out, for a given period, what a company publishes, where, when and why: topics, formats, platforms, dates and who’s responsible. It ties posts to business goals and makes running social media a regular habit, rather than something that happens “when there’s time.” Below: how to build a…

PPC (paid search) advertising is ads shown to people based on their queries, interests and needs. In Yandex Search, an ad appears in response to a query alongside the regular results; in the Yandex Advertising Network, it appears on sites and in apps if the ad’s topic matches the page’s topic or the person’s interests.…

Keywords for a website are the words and phrases people use to search for what a page offers. They’re also called key queries, or in trade jargon, just “keywords.” A page doesn’t answer a single word — it answers a primary query plus several supporting phrasings of the same task. Choosing keywords isn’t about collecting…

Keyword clustering is grouping search queries by the principle “one page can answer them.” The result is a set of groups (clusters), and each group is assigned exactly one target URL on the site. In clustering by search results, queries are grouped together when the search engine shows largely the same pages for them. This…

An AI agent is a language model that doesn’t just answer a question — it decides for itself which steps to take and which tools to use in order to complete a task. You can build one without programming: describe the task precisely, give the agent instructions and access to the files it needs, and…

Claude Code is an Anthropic tool that runs in the terminal, in a code editor, in a desktop app, and in the browser: it reads a project’s files, edits them, runs commands, and connects to other tools. You give it a task in plain language, and it plans the steps itself and shows you the…

Site indexing is how a search engine processes a page: a crawler downloads the page, the engine analyzes its content, and stores information about it in its database — the index. Indexing is necessary for the search engine to make full use of a page’s content in search. If a page isn’t indexed, you can’t…

Neural networks are useful in SEO where you need a quick draft or to make sense of data you already have: suggesting query wordings and grouping them, sketching a page outline, title and description options, a draft text, explaining an export or a report. But a language model doesn’t have your data on demand, search…

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It’s the work of making a site and a brand legible to systems that don’t just show a list of links but compose an answer to a question from the materials they find. GEO doesn’t replace SEO — it extends it: Google and Yandex, in their own documentation, link…

An SEO audit is a review of every area that affects a site’s visibility in search: the technical foundation, structure, keyword research, content and metadata. The result of an audit isn’t a list of errors — it’s an answer to two questions: what’s holding the site back in search, and which tasks to tackle first.…

SMM (social media marketing) is marketing in social networks: promoting a business, brand or product through social networks and messaging apps with content, advertising and audience engagement. It isn’t just publishing posts — it’s regular work with a clear goal: who you want to attract, what people should learn about you, and what step they…

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is work on a site that helps search engines better understand its content, and helps people find the site in regular, organic search results. Organic results are the ones a search engine selects and ranks on its own. Below: how Google and Yandex find and display pages, what SEO consists of,…

Canonical (rel=”canonical”, a canonical link) tells a search engine which address to treat as primary when the same page is available at several URLs. It’s a hint, not a binding rule. Yandex treats canonical as a recommendation, and Google can pick a different primary page even if you’ve specified your own. Below — how to…

SEO automation is when repeatable tasks — data collection, site checks, monitoring, reports — run on a schedule or trigger without manual work, and the result is checked against set rules. Automation on its own does not promote a site and does not replace decisions about strategy and structure. Below: which processes to automate first,…