Latest Posts
Where to Go for SEO Content Inspiration
If you know anything about SEO you know that fresh content is an extremely important component of an SEO campaign. However, creating fresh content on a regular basis can be anything but easy, especially if you don’t have much writing experience. Perhaps the hardest part of producing quality conten...
There’s No Quick Money When it Comes to SEO
When it comes to SEO, there’s no such thing as making “quick money”. In fact, chasing fast money can do a lot more harm than good. When you hire an SEO firm, you need to treat them as a partner. This comes in especially handy when you’re presented with opportunities that may seem a litt...
We Can Help Everyone – But Are We a Good Fit?
Brick Marketing has been in business since 2005 and the Internet has changed a lot during that time period. We have a lot of experience honing and refining our techniques, while also staying current with common industry best practices. We've had a lot of different types of clients over the years, as...
Add These to Your Blog Posts Today
If you’re consistently blogging and incorporating SEO elements into your blog posts (incorporating keywords naturally, writing optimized titles and descriptions, etc.), you’re already way ahead of many websites. But there’s a good chance that you can still be doing better. We’re avid blog re...
Rankings Aren’t a Good Measure of SEO Success
Clients often come to us and ask how long it will take before they can start to rank for their keywords. While this is a great question, it also misses the point. While rankings are something that we do monitor, we have learned that this isn't an accurate measurement of whether or not your SEO progr...
SEO Responsibilities to Execute Monthly
There are essentially two phases of an SEO campaign. The up-front work like competitive analysis, keyword research, and making on-site SEO recommendations for existing content is phase one. Once that’s complete, you move onto phase two, which is the ongoing component of SEO that supports that up-f...
5 SEO Basics to Implement Today
There are many misconceptions about SEO. While to those who aren’t “in the know” it might seem confusing, the truth is that SEO on a basic level is hardly rocket science. In our line of work, we come across plenty of websites in a variety of niches every day and we’re shocked to see the numb...
Know Your Customer Journey Before You Create Content
It's true that content creation is a big part of marketing for a variety of reasons. It can help with search engine optimization, builds trust with your audience, can help generate leads, helps with search engines, and more. Great content also gives customers a chance to interact with your brand in ...
5 Ways to Keep Your Website Safe from Hackers
Cyber attacks are nothing new but have received newfound attention after the infamous WannaCry and subsequent attacks went after huge corporations, showcasing that nobody is immune. If you own a website, it’s important to do what you can to protect it. From an SEO perspective, it’s important bec...
Get to Know Your Audience to Make Decisions
In order to truly serve your customers, you need to get to know them. This is an important lesson that businesses need to learn because this will enable them to achieve true growth. There are a variety of methods that can be used to get to know the audience, your customers, and your potential custom...
Make Sure You Put Your Customers First
You've spent the last few months executing your SEO campaign. You research keywords, write great content, share your content on the social media sites, and constantly tweak things until you get the results you want. After a while, you notice that it's been paying off because your organic visitors ar...
Want to Earn Natural Inbound Links? Do These Things Now
There are essentially two ways to generate inbound links. 1. You spend time scouring the web and actively look for inbound linking opportunities, network with other website owners, and take an action (write a guest blog post, submit to a directory, post a blog comment, etc.) that will generate an in...
Traffic: It’s Important to Attract the Right Visitors
Digital marketers are focused on attracting more website visitors. Many look at the number blindly. If they see traffic increase, they believe their efforts are coming to fruition - but are they really? The hard truth is that increased traffic won't necessarily help the business grow unless the traf...
SEO Won’t Solve Your Business Problems
A search engine optimization campaign, if implemented properly, can do many wonderful things for your business. It can help improve your brand visibility in the search engines and online overall in order to bring more targeted traffic to your site. An increase in visitors to the site will generate m...
SEO Has a Gray Area
We are a white hat SEO firm, which means that everything we do is in line with Google's webmaster guidelines. Google is all about creating a good user experience through their search results, and their guidelines are designed to help encourage usability of the results when a query is made. Websit...
SEO Items to Execute Regularly
The first thing to understand about SEO is that it’s not like other marketing campaigns that you can start and stop. In order to be effective long term, an SEO program never really “stops.” The search engines favor websites that remain active by posting great content and steadily increase the ...
Online Advertising: Not Set and Forget
While SEO isn’t considered to be online advertising, because there is no money exchange for specific placement, it certainly plays in the same space which makes online advertising worth discussing. SEO and online advertising work well together. While SEO efforts gain traction slowly in the backgro...
User Experience Can Enhance Your Digital Marketing
User Experience, labeled as UX for short, is a practice that defines and describes a customer's interaction with a company, including all of its services and products. Ultimately, it seems to maintain a customer's satisfaction and happiness with the company. If this happiness and satisfaction are no...
3 SEO Misconceptions and What to Believe Instead
Even though it’s been a viable online marketing tactic for many years, SEO is still shrouded in mystery. There are plenty of business and website owners that don’t quite understand it, and it’s difficult to invest in something you don’t understand. Many SEO misconceptions have popped up over...
Seasonality Can Be Important for Content Marketing
When consumers make decisions, they often follow certain patterns of behavior. These patterns are closely tied to people's lifestyles, which are often driven by the idea of seasonality. The biggest example of this is during the Christmas season, especially for e-commerce businesses. However, there a...
How to Make Content Marketing Work for SEO
Yes, content marketing is a big part of SEO today. But content marketing in and of itself is not SEO. No matter how great your content is, it’s not going to improve your SEO efforts unless you have an SEO mindset while you create it. Here are 5 things to do to make your content marketing work for ...
Ways to Build a Solid SEO Campaign
When it comes to executing an effective SEO campaign, how it's structured makes all the difference. There are certain elements that every SEO program needs to have. Besides that, items beyond your control, such as Google's algorithm changes, can also have an impact. No matter what kind of business ...
Should You Use a Proprietary CMS?
When it comes to creating a website for your business or brand, there are two basic options. You could opt to use an open source content management system, such as Wordpress, or you could customize a CMS exclusively for your business. There are some definite pros and cons to using each of these opti...
3 Reasons to Run SEO and PPC Campaigns Together
It’s common knowledge that when someone wants to know more about, well, just about anything, they turn to the search engines and type in (or say) a search query. This means that if you have a business website, you’ll want it to be found in the search engines. There are essentially two ways to ge...
Your Business Website Should Add Value
Most of us know that a business website serves to let people know about their goods and services and to attract potential clients or customers. On the surface, the website is designed to showcase all that the business has to offer. However, potential and existing clients and customers may be turned ...
Signs That You Have Unrealistic SEO Expectations
It’s common for website owners to have a love/hate relationship with SEO. They love it because if done correctly, it means an increase in traffic from the search engines, which means more leads and more sales. They hate it because if done correctly, it takes a long time to see those results, which...
SEO Reporting: More Than Rank
In order to be successful with SEO long term, it’s necessary to get out of the “it’s all about rank” mindset. We’re not saying that rank doesn’t play a role, of course it does, but it isn’t the be all, end all metric to pay attention to during SEO reporting. Ranking fluctuates based on...
Customize a Web Marketing Strategy for Your Brand
Your business is unique and it makes sense that you want your marketing plan to reflect that. When it comes to web marketing, there are certain activities that should be in the mix, such as social media, content marketing, online advertising, such as PPC and social media advertising, and SEO. Howeve...
3 Reasons to Stop Stressing Over Rank
One of our goals when working with clients is to really educate them about SEO. What “white hat” SEO is and isn’t and that the best SEO campaign is one that follows Google’s Webmaster guidelines to a T. One of the most difficult things to convey to prospects and clients is how little emphasi...
Pros and Cons of Hiring a Local Digital Marketing Firm
These days, it isn't necessary to hire a local digital marketing firm since everything can be done remotely. Firms could be located anywhere in the world. However, businesses often struggle with this idea. They often believe that their SEO and marketing service providers need to be in their local ar...
Social Media and Content Should Work Together
There are many components that make up a robust online marketing campaign today. It’s not enough to just have a website. In order for that website to be found you need to participate in numerous online marketing tactics that need to be integrated together into one strategy. Two important parts of ...
How to Increase Organic Click Through Rate
The best indicator of a successful SEO campaign is an increase in organic search engine traffic over time. Of course, that isn’t the only reporting metric to look at. It’s also worthwhile to look at impression and keyword position data, too. Ideally, search engine results page impression growth ...
Writing Naturally and What it Means for SEO
There was a time when it was standard practice to obsessively optimize content for the search engines. Before writing an article or other piece of online content, keyword research was performed. The goal was to find the best keywords that matched the article. Everything changed after Google implemen...
Make These Website Conversion Improvements to Enhance SEO Results
The goal of an SEO campaign is to increase targeted, relevant organic visitors to a website over time. However, while increased organic traffic is certainly great, it’s not doing anything directly to improve the bottom line. A company is only going to see a return on investment if those visitors a...
Why Blog Commenting is Important
When it comes to search engine optimization, blog commenting is always considered an important part of the strategy. It's also one of those strategies that only gets better over time. Long term consistency that actually gets results. If you complete a certain number of blog comments per month, it'...
5 Questions to Ask an SEO Service Provider
The SEO industry has come a long way in recent years but it sometimes still can’t shake that “shady” vibe. Well, that’s because, unfortunately, there are still plenty of shady characters trying to sell SEO services to inexperienced and naïve website owners. If you’re thinking about workin...
4 Things SEO Content Must Be in Order to Have an Impact
Website content is what generates inbound links (helping to create trust) and establishes keyword relevancy for the search engines. That’s why content marketing plays such a huge role in an SEO campaign. Yet, there are still plenty of website owners and SEOs that aren’t taking a good approach. T...
Traffic Should Come From a Variety of Sources
One of the chief functions of online marketing is to increase website traffic. Of course, that doesn't quite tell the whole story. The traffic needs to be highly targeted because the underlying goal is for marketing to use these traffic generation tactics to help the business grow as a whole. How...
SEO Shouldn’t Be a Standalone Strategy
If you own a website, SEO should be a part of your online marketing strategy. However, notice that we said “a part of.” It certainly shouldn’t be the be all end all of the entire strategy. An SEO strategy works best when it’s integrated with other online marketing efforts. That’s because S...
Don’t Rely on Sales Departments to Generate Leads
We all know that in order for a business to be successful, plenty of new business needs to be generated through the combined efforts of the marketing and sales teams. Too often, however, companies make the error of relying on sales professionals to keep the pipeline filled with prospects. Known as r...
5 Signs You’re Working with a Reputable SEO Firm
SEO requires a significant investment, mostly because it’s a service that never really “ends.” An SEO campaign should really be ongoing, so unless you have the resources to do the work in-house, you’ll always need to be outsourcing it to an SEO firm. Of course, you want to make sure that you...
6 SEO Reporting Items to Look at Every Month
An SEO campaign is only worthwhile if you’re going to take the time to analyze its success on a regular basis. Reviewing monthly SEO reports allows you to see where you are making progress and what areas might need additional work. Our SEO reporting go-tos are Google Analytics and Google Search Co...
Technical SEO Items to Execute Now
You can break SEO up in many ways: there’s on-site vs. off-site SEO, content vs. link building, etc. but another important distinction is separating these things from the technical aspect of SEO that is essentially web design/development. If the website isn’t technically SEO friendly, all of the...
3 Things to Earn from Your SEO Content
SEO is all about great web content. Without great content you not only have nothing to optimize, but there’s nothing to set you apart from your competitors and encourage target audience members to invest in your product or services. When creating SEO content, it’s important to keep in mind the f...
Do Keywords Still Matter for Content?
When it comes to writing content, you might be wondering if keywords still matter for SEO. There was a time when keyword stuffing was the general rule of thumb when it came to ranking higher in the search engines. Keywords and phrases were used throughout pages whether or not they flowed with the co...
The Hard Work That’s Behind Natural Links
Inbound links are important for SEO because they remain a top search engine ranking factor. Inbound links pass trust from one site to the next and convey relevancy to the search spiders. You’ll hear that the best links to earn are “natural” links, or inbound links that occur naturally over tim...
Don’t Let SEO Get in the Way of Branding
When search engine optimization first became a household name, it had negative connotations because it was associated with shady tactics and subpar content. In today’s online world, the climate is much different. Businesses who merge effective SEO tactics while still building their brand identity...
Consistency is Important in Content Marketing
Successful content marketing strategies are an essential part of every business because they serve a variety of purposes. Good content is something that is engaging and informative that captures your audience's attention and helps build brand awareness, can generate traffic, and is also a vital part...
B2B Social Engagement Is About Lead Nurturing
Social media is different for every business and there is no one size fits all strategy. For B2B companies, social media is all about lead nurturing, and it will serve a similar purpose as email marketing does. Since the sales cycle is fairly long for most B2B companies, your goal should be to not o...
Sales and Marketing Need to Work Together
Departments in businesses tend to function in their own little bubbles. This isn't a good approach because many of these teams could easily cooperate with one another and make their jobs easier, while also help the business as a whole. This is especially true with the sales and marketing departments...