Latest Posts
Quality User Experience is a Google Ranking Factor
While nobody knows the specifics of the Google search algorithm, what we do know is that Google focuses on quality. High quality sites are going to rank higher than low quality sites. That’s why Google released the Panda update that concentrated on the quality of website content and the Penguin up...
Basic SEO Items to Execute Right Now
Not all business website owners are SEO experts, however that doesn’t mean that business website owners get off the hook completely when it comes to SEO. The purpose of having a business website is for target audience members to learn more about what you do/sell and hopefully to encourage them to ...
How to Increase Traffic to Your Blog (and Website)
A blog is a crucial component of a business website. There are many reasons to blog but ultimately what it comes down to is that a blog can help generate traffic to your website and those website visitors can then in turn learn more about your business and products and consider buying from you. By i...
5 SEO Tactics that Will Never Hurt You
One of the most exciting things about SEO is that it’s constantly evolving. While this certainly keeps things interesting, it also causes fear and anxiety. SEO rules are known to change which often makes website owners hesitant. They understandably don’t want to invest time and effort into somet...
Does Google Adwords Help Your SEO?
It seems to be a common question that new SEO clients ask. “If I run an AdWords PPC campaign in Google, will it help with my SEO program?” The thought is that if you are paying Google some money, maybe they will help you out organically, too. It actually doesn’t work that way because Goog...
The Top Reasons to Maintain an Active Business Blog
One of the most important components of SEO is content. After all, it’s what the search engines crawl in order to determine what a site is all about and how/where it should rank. Any decent website is going to have the basic content in place: what services are offered, what products are sold, who...
3 Steps to Take to Prepare for an SEO Campaign
Ready to jump into an SEO campaign? Not so fast. While it might be tempting to get the ball rolling as quickly as possible, the campaign will be much more fruitful over the long term if you take important steps to prepare for it. Trust us, SEO success is slow to build. The difference between startin...
SEO Blog Writing Myths to Ignore
Blogging is an essential part of an SEO campaign. Every blog post is a new page on a website that creates an additional opportunity to rank prominently in search, driving organic search traffic, and to be linked to, helping to earn SEO trust. While there’s an abundance of advice out there about ho...
3 Ways to Increase Your Chances of Earning Natural Links
Inbound links are still considered to be one of the top SEO ranking factors, which is why link building should remain a priority. Of course, link building has changed. The quality of inbound links is much more important than the quantity of inbound links. And when it comes to link quality, a link th...
Turn Broken Links into SEO Wins
Inbound links remain one of the top search engine ranking factors, which is why it’s in the best interest of website owners to continue to seek out relevant inbound link opportunities over time. While it’s important to create entirely new links from a diverse profile of relevant websites, perhap...
What Does an SEO Campaign Look Like?
If you want your website to rank organically in the search engines and generate targeted organic traffic over time, you need to launch an SEO campaign. Or, you need to hire an SEO professional to launch one for you. But, what does that mean exactly? What does an SEO campaign look like and what does ...
Don’t Forget About Technical SEO
Most of the articles and information you come across about SEO tend to focus on the marketing piece of it: website navigation, keyword research, keyword incorporation, content marketing, link building, and social media. What doesn’t seem to get as much attention, even though they are equally impor...
Need a Blog Topic? Here’s Where to Look
Blogging is an important component of an SEO campaign. Updating a blog with high-quality content on a regular basis keeps the website “fresh” which ensures that the search spiders continue to come back and crawl it, provides opportunities to target long-tail keywords or questions that people are...
How to Prepare for an SEO Campaign
Are you new to SEO? Or maybe you’ve been out of the game for awhile and are looking to re-start? If that’s the case, you might be wondering what the first steps are and how you can prepare yourself for an SEO campaign. Here are 5 of the most important steps to take: Research SEO It’s in your...
SEO Tasks to Complete Daily
One of the most important things to understand about SEO is that efforts need to be ongoing in order to maintain and improve a website’s presence in search results. Unlike an ad campaign, you can’t turn it off and on as you please without impacting performance. In order to achieve steady organic...
Think SEO is all About Rank? Here’s Why You’re Wrong
One of the biggest misconceptions about SEO is that it’s all about rank. To an extent, we get it. Yes, if you rank in the top positions for a search, you’re going to get more traffic, and get more sales. However, fixating on rank as the only metric that matters when executing an SEO campaign and...
Reasons Why Your SEO Campaign Needs a Blog
There are many reasons to have an active blog on your website. Publishing informative blog posts is a way to convey your authority in your niche and build a following. A blog is also a great place to share company and product news and updates. These are great reasons to have a blog regardless of SEO...
4 Steps Towards Local SEO Success
How are you marketing your local business? Sure, the tried and true traditional advertising channels can still be effective, but let’s face it: when someone is searching for a local business or service, they are heading to Google. Are they going to find your local business? If not, you’re missin...
Make the Most of B2B SEO by Following These Website Conversion Tips
Leads are the lifeblood of any B2B organization. As a B2B SEO campaign gains traction, it should result in an increase in organic traffic that correlates with an increase in web leads. If you’re seeing the increase in organic traffic, but those visitors aren’t converting, there could be a conver...
3 Key Responsibilities of SEO Clients
For many businesses, especially of the small to medium sized variety, it makes the most sense to outsource SEO work to an SEO company, rather than hire in-house SEO specialists (too expensive) or assign the work to an already overstretched current employee (the work won’t get done). However, just ...
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...
SEO Success: Are You Getting in Your Own Way?
Smart business/website owners know that they don’t want to get on Google’s bad side since SEO success translates to business success. So, they do everything to “play nice” and follow Google’s SEO best practices. They optimize their website content in a natural way, look for relevant inboun...
5 Link Building and Content Mistakes to Stop Making
Link building and content marketing are no longer separate SEO entities. Essentially, they are the same thing today. In order to build valuable inbound links to your site, you need to be creating high-quality content that is going to get noticed. Even with this knowledge, there are plenty of link bu...
3 Keys to Building a Solid SEO Campaign Foundation
If you’re just getting started with SEO, one of the most important things to keep in mind is that SEO is all about the long-term. There’s no such thing as overnight success and anyone who tells you differently is lying. This is why it’s so important to take the time up-front to build a solid S...
Why the Meta Description Still Matters
Way back in the early days of the Internet the search engines considered all of the meta information of a website as part of the ranking algorithm. But that led to problems since sneaky webmasters were stuffing the tags with irrelevant keywords designed to generate a lot of traffic. It wasn’t resu...
5 Prominent Places for Keywords to Appear
Search has certainly evolved in recent years and the search algorithms now utilize machine learning to understand the meaning behind a search as opposed to exact keyword matching, but that doesn’t mean that keywords aren’t important for SEO. Keywords are still used as search terms and the websit...
Don’t Believe These 4 SEO Linking Theories
The Google Penguin update may have been years ago now, but it’s had a lasting impression on website owners, especially those that were hit with a penalty. To some, “link building” has become a dirty word and they try to stay away from it. The problem with that approach is that inbound links re...
3 Ways to Reuse Your SEO Content
One of the most important parts of an SEO campaign is ongoing content creation. Every new page of informative, high-quality web content is an additional opportunity to rank organically for targeted keywords and generate natural inbound links. Of course, it takes time to create SEO content that’s w...
SEO Tasks to Complete Every Month
Unless you’re a powerhouse brand, you need to be doing SEO in order to generate traffic from the search engines. And, unlike other marketing tactics, SEO isn’t something that you can start and stop. SEO is all about long term gains and there are tasks that need to be completed every month in ord...
4 Reasons Why Your Search Traffic Has Dipped
Have you noticed a sudden drop (or even a steady decline) in the amount of visitors coming to your site from search? There are a multitude of things that could be affecting how well your site does organically, but here are four things you should look at and eliminate first. Seasonality Every busin...
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...
Why Fixating on Rank is a Waste of Time
Search engine rank hasn’t been a top SEO measurement for years now, but no matter how often we say it or talk about it here on the blog, we continue to get questions from prospects and clients about how we report on it. While we do pull keyword reports from Google Search Console regularly, it’s ...
Follow These Rules When Adding Outbound Links to Your Site
In the SEO world, all the attention seems to be on inbound linking, or obtaining links from other websites that point to your website. This is for good reason since it’s an important search engine ranking signal (one of the top 3 ranking signals, in fact). However, there’s another type of linkin...
Make the Most of an SEO Investment by Doing These 5 Things
SEO requires an investment of both time and money. Even if you decide to do the work in-house, that’s an investment of time (and time is money, right?). And when you outsource the work you’re still putting in time because you can’t disappear from the process entirely. An SEO provider needs you...
4 Things That Will Always Add Value to an SEO Program
One of the things that the SEO industry is most known for is change. Best practices come and go to stay in line with whatever Google is deeming good or bad (or relevant or irrelevant) at any given time. As the Google algorithm has become more evolved, many SEO practices have fallen by the wayside. R...
Keyword Relevancy is More Important Than Search Volume
One of the first steps of an SEO campaign is to conduct keyword research to determine which relevant keywords people are using to search for the products and/or services offered. Once keywords have been researched, the next step is to select which ones to use. When undergoing the keyword selection p...
Clean Up Organic Listings to Increase Click Through Rate
There’s a misconception that the goal of an SEO campaign is to improve your organic search ranking for priority keywords. The truth is, this is really only part of it. Improving rank is great – but is it correlating with an increase in organic search traffic? Are people actually clicking through...
Ways to Win at Local SEO
When someone is looking for a local business or service, they might ask trusted friends and relatives for suggestions, but more often than not the first place they head is Google. They type in what they want, browse the search results, and go from there, which is why any local business that wants to...
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...
Do These Things to Set Your SEO Campaign Up for Success
Getting ready to start (or re-start) an SEO campaign? If so, there are some things you can be doing right now so that when it’s time to actually launch the campaign, you’ve already done all of the necessary prep work and the campaign will get started on the right foot. Here are 4 things to do no...
Why A Business Blog is a “Must-Have” For SEO
If you’re a marketer (which you must be if you’re reading this blog!) we shouldn’t have to tell you what the marketing reasons are to operate a business blog. Essentially, it’s an outlet to share your expertise, gain trust among target audience members, gain followers and a community, engage...
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...
Make These Website Changes to Turn Organic Traffic into Leads
So, you’ve been working at SEO for some time now and your website is completely optimized, you’re adding new content to your blog, you’ve gained some trusted, relevant inbound links, and you’re starting to see organic growth when you look at your reports. But you’re thinking that that grow...
Improve Your SEO Content in 3 Steps
One of the most challenging things about writing SEO content is that there are so many web pages out there that you’re competing with. Unless you are the only person to write about a specific topic, there’s going to be competition. And, if you are the only person to write about a topic, it’s p...
Yes, Social Media Matters for SEO Link Building
If someone told you that social media doesn’t matter for SEO link building purposes, they’re wrong. While it’s true that links shared in social media are nofollowed and aren’t directly growing your SEO link portfolio or influencing the search engine algorithms, an active social media presenc...
Tips for Outsourcing SEO
For many companies, especially small to medium sized businesses, it doesn’t make sense to hire an SEO team or professional in house. At the same time, it’s also likely that the existing marketing team or professional doesn’t have the time to add SEO responsibilities onto their plate without sa...
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...
4 Key Components of SEO
If you are relatively new to the world of SEO, it can seem a bit complicated. After all, nobody can tell you for sure what every single Google ranking signal is or how much each signal is weighted in the overall search algorithm. So, what are we chasing then? Well, the key to a solid SEO campaign is...
Online Advertising Channels That Complement SEO
While we’ll always advocate for investing a portion of your marketing budget on SEO, we’ll also tell you that there are plenty of online advertising channels that can complement your SEO campaign nicely, if you have the extra budget for it. We look at SEO as the long-term strategy that builds a ...
Outbound Linking Best Practices for SEO
When SEO linking is discussed, the focus is usually on inbound links, or links on other websites that are pointing to your website. Inbound links are a ranking factor since they convey trust and authority to the search engines. What usually doesn’t get as much attention is outbound linking, or lin...