SEO Articles
Ranking is Not a Metric to Grow Your Business
The ultimate goal of a good search engine optimization campaign is to help you grow your business. There are some misconceptions associated with this, and perhaps one of the biggest is concerning "page rank". The theory is that if you improve your website's Page Rank score, then you will automatical...
SEO, Content and Social Media All Work Together
The way people search for information online isn't necessarily linear, which means that they may arrive at your website in unpredictable ways. Will they find your website based on search results, social signals, or a combination of both? The reality is that social media and SEO work together and ...
Keywords Should Align With Audience
When putting together a digital marketing plan, SEO is certainly going to be part of it. Keywords are always at the core of any good SEO plan, but the days of coming up with long lists of keywords are over. While this may have been commonplace ten or fifteen years ago, Google's many algorithm change...
Why Security Is Important for SEO
There are many factors at play in search engine optimization. Some may depend on the search engine you use. There are various factors that impact SEO such as keyword optimization, technical considerations such as the URL structure of each link, site content, and also other factors such as the qualit...
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...
SEO Basics Never Change
When it comes to search engine optimization, things change constantly. SEO strategies that worked five years ago may not work today, or worse – they can cause penalties. It gets especially sticky when Google rolls out another algorithm change. SEO strategists and web developers often scramble to...
Have Realistic Goals for Your SEO Program
It's true that search engine optimization is an important component of digital marketing. When done correctly, it helps attract people to your website via organic results in the search engines. SEO enables your site to get noticed in search results. It can even result in your website holding the top...
SEO Results Can’t Be Promised
One of the first questions that prospects often ask during the sales process about our SEO services is, “So when can I be on the first page of Google?” While it seems like a fair question to ask an SEO firm, the response that we give is always the same. We cannot promise that kind of result from...
How to Make Content Marketing Work for SEO
Content marketing has been a big part of SEO as a whole for a long time now, and it has certainly evolved over the years. Many of the perceptions that you may have about creating content for SEO may not be accurate any longer. However, we can't deny that it is still important. However, no matte...
6 Tips to Create an SEO Friendly Blog
One of the most important SEO tips today is to add a blog to your business website and publish new, high-quality content there on a regular basis. This is because new blog posts keep the site updated and “fresh” which brings the search engines back to the site to re-crawl and index it, every blo...
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...
SEO Tips for Seasonal Businesses
While your business may have slow and busy periods or even close entirely for parts of the year, the Internet never stops, which essentially means that ideally your SEO program shouldn’t either. Sure, there may be more SEO related work to do during certain parts of the year but since your website ...
Using SEO to Improve Branded Search
The primary goal of any SEO campaign is to attract people to your website. In general, this means getting people over to your website when they search for non branded keywords. However, a certain portion of your traffic will find you in branded search. You can easily use branded search to attract th...
Be Sure to Check SEO Statistics for Year Over Year
There's no doubt that search engine optimization is all about the long game because it could take some time before you can really assess how effective it is. If the SEO program is executed well, you will surely see results. However, when those results happen could be somewhat unpredictable because a...
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...
3 Things You Can Do to Earn Natural Links
Inbound links (or links from other websites pointing to your website) are one of the top Google search ranking criteria, but it only works out week if they are obtained naturally. While an important part of a search engine optimization campaign is to actively seek out link building opportunities, it...
Why You Should Launch a Blog for SEO
From a marketing standpoint, there are lots of reasons to launch a business blog as a part of your website. Blogging is a way to demonstrate your expertise in your niche and a blog is also a convenient outlet for sharing product updates and company news. However, blogging has plenty of additional SE...
What to Do if You Have Unnatural Links
As a part of its effort to be more transparent about its practices, Google has been sending out a notification to webmasters alerting them when unnatural links are detected. The notice itself serves as an FYI and doesn’t necessarily mean that a penalty has occurred (yet). The only way to really...
Broken Links Can Hurt Your SEO Efforts
Broken links are a part of owning and/or managing a website and if they're not addressed, they can hurt your long term SEO efforts. In fact, they're bad from both a search engine perspective and a user perspective. Marketers need to continually monitor broken links and address them before they can...
Are Keywords Really That Important?
Search engine optimization is an important part of digital marketing. Many of us look at keywords as an important starting point when it comes to SEO. While that is the case, it is important not to get too attached to the idea of using keywords to help a website get noticed by the search engines. ...
Reasons to Stop Obsessing Over This SEO Metric
Reporting is an important part of an SEO campaign because doing so on a regular basis essentially tells you how the campaign is performing and what tweaks need to be made to improve it. There are many SEO metrics to review and report on, but for whatever reason we find that the one that some webs...
The First 3 Steps of an SEO Campaign
For those new to SEO, it can be a little daunting. There’s a lot involved: keyword research, on-site optimization, link building, content marketing, social media, etc. Where do you start? What’s the best approach: all at once or start with one thing and build to the next? Different SEO firms wil...
You Can’t Predict or Forecast SEO Results
When you implement an SEO program, it's only natural that you want to find a way to predict results. In fact, people ask me this very thing all the time. They wonder if they can not only forecast their SEO results, but also their website visitor growth and the ROI of their overall SEO program. While...
3 Easy Ways to Enhance Your SEO Content
The word is out: content is king. We’ve been hearing it for years but it’s clear that website owners are finally getting behind the statement. Essentially, everyone is creating content. The problem is, a lot of this content is sub-par, at best, which means that there’s still opportunity for yo...
Patience Is A Necessity When It Comes To SEO!
Once you have decided to implement a search engine optimization campaign, it’s important to understand that the desired outcome may not come for months, sometimes many months. Even if you have done everything correctly you aren’t going to get instant results. However, the wait will be worth it! ...
Resolve Technical Issues to Help With SEO
Concerning search engine optimization, it is easy to forget that there are some technical items that need to be addressed. Most of us know that we need to perform certain activities, such as finding great keywords, regularly publishing new content, and having a well developed and high quality link p...
Brand Strength Correlates with SEO Results
It's true that brand strength correlates with SEO results. You’ll often hear SEO professionals talk about branded keywords vs. non-branded keywords. It’s all fairly straightforward. Branded keywords include the brand, company name, branded products or services, etc. as part of the search term. ...
No Need to Focus on Search Rankings
When it comes to SEO, most people think that the best way to measure success is to achieve excellent rankings for as many keywords as possible. While this is surely the mark of a successful SEO campaign, it isn't necessarily the best way to go about measuring success. In fact, rankings should be ...
Don’t Overlook These SEO Steps During a Website Redesign
Website redesigns often make sense every couple of years in order to keep a website fresh and relevant. If you’re considering a redesign, it’s important to pull your SEO provider into the conversation as early as possible. If you aren’t working with an SEO professional, it’s a smart idea to ...
Let Us Know Your Digital Marketing Concerns!
It's true that we help our clients increase their organic traffic through white hat search engine optimization practices. We have a proven track record of success and we know that our methods produce great results. Although this is what we focus on, we have learned that marketing should be looked at...
What to Do as You Start an SEO Campaign
The most important thing to understand about SEO is that it is a long term process. This means that you need to set up your SEO program and consistently execute it so that you can see the results you desire. It can take months or even years to begin to see traction on your campaign, and if you are...
Top Reasons Why SEO is Slow
One of the most important points that we try to make to prospective full service SEO clients is that SEO is a slow and sometime very long process. It’s not the kind of marketing tactic that’s going to have immediate results or a quick ROI. The complete opposite is true. In fact, it can take ma...
Do These Things Regularly for SEO Success
The key to achieving SEO success and maintaining SEO success is to keep at it regularly. It’s not the sort of campaign that you can turn off and turn back on, expecting to be right where you left off. If you take any time off from SEO work it will likely coincide with a gradual dip in organic traf...
Why Fixating on Rank is a Waste of Time
It is a misconception that rank is a measurement of how well your SEO is performing. These days, while it is still being measured, the end result is one that doesn't seem to have much of a bearing as to how well your website is performing organically overall. Also, at the end of the day, none of tha...
Do You Need to Improve Content for SEO?
It is true that content can help boost your organic search results because it is closely tied to your SEO program. Content marketing programs will naturally change over time, and they will also differ depending on the nature of the business or the industry. Although most content marketing schedules ...
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? On some level, traffic dips are normal. But, when they are noticeable enough, they can really attract your attention. It is important that once you see these traffic dips that you ...
Website Usability is Important to SEO
There is a clear link between website usability and digital marketing, particularly with SEO. However, it can be a struggle balancing usability with the desire to get the website noticed in the search engines. Although SEO is the primary traffic source for a substantial amount of website owners, th...
It’s Impossible to Put a Timeline on SEO Success
When a potential client is interested in getting started with an SEO campaign one of the first questions that they ask is, “how long will it take for this to work?” Unfortunately, it’s a question that’s nearly impossible to answer, especially since a successful SEO campaign looks different t...
Why SEO Shouldn’t Wait Until “Later”
Are you getting your business website up and running? There’s so much to do, it can be difficult to prioritize your tasks. In the beginning, you’re likely focused on tasks that are immediately important, such as making sure your site looks great, is easy to navigate, and has some decent content ...
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...
4 Things to Do Before Launching an SEO Campaign
If you’ve finally decided to get around to the whole “SEO thing” that’s great! Welcome aboard. However, before you get started there are a few things to take care of. Doing so will ensure that the campaign is as effective as it can be. Here are 4 things to do before launching an SEO campaign...
Can You Prove That SEO Works?
There's no way to avoid this - receiving organic traffic from the search engines is something that has to be earned over time. When executing an SEO program, it could take months, if not a year or more, to really see that the consistent efforts of the program are paying off over time. However, when ...
Your SEO Firm is Your Partner
There's an art to choosing the best SEO firm for your business but once you do, it's important to make the most of it. What you really need, though, is a firm that treats you like a partner and not just a client. However, it does work both ways. If you treat them as "hired help" and not like a true...
Don’t Take a Cookie Cutter SEO Approach
Are you looking to hire a digital marketing service provider to take care of your search engine optimization? If so, it's important to do your research in advance so you can know if you are a good fit to work with one another. Depending on the industry you are in, you might find that there are SE...
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...
SEO Can’t Stand Alone – Diversify Your Digital Marketing
When it comes to digital marketing, it is so important not to rely on any one strategy. Many believe that it is okay to pick a strategy, like SEO, and then completely rely on it while ignoring the rest. The truth is, all the methods for marketing digitally work in tandem with each other, and it is n...
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 keywords that will get them noticed in the search engines. At face value, the question is an innocent one, and is designed to assess the results of the SEO program. However, the question also completely misse...
SEO Mistakes Web Developers Make
SEO and web development go hand in hand. SEO work in conjunction with web development work attract both the search engine spiders and target audience members to a website. However, web developers aren’t SEO professionals (just as SEO professionals aren’t web developers!). Sure, they might have s...
Technical SEO Audit – Check Your Website for Problems
SEO is an important piece of digital marketing because it is responsible for increasing organic traffic over time. The technical SEO audit is always the first thing that occurs when it comes to SEO because you need to check that the technical elements of your site are best poised to optimize results...
Handling Multiple Cities and Locations with SEO
When it comes to search engine optimization, several factors need to be taken into account. One of them is the question of whether or not you need to optimize on the national or local level. We believe that optimization should happen on both a national and local level, but the strategies should chan...
When Business is Slow Don’t Give Up on SEO
One thing that I am constantly stressing to my clients is that they can’t let month-to-month fluctuations (visitors to site, ranking in SERPs and so forth) shake their faith in their SEO campaign. Too often, site owners panic during a slow month and decide that SEO isn’t working for them and the...
Website Mistakes that Harm SEO
We might not know everything about Google’s search algorithm that determines where websites should rank for keyword searches, but Google has given us enough hints over the years about what’s important. At the top of the list: quality. Google wants to rank sites that fulfill the needs of searcher...
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...
3 Easy Ways to Elevate the Quality of Your SEO Content
You might not think that there’s anything easy about writing SEO content. And to some extent, that’s true. Writing SEO content certainly requires an investment of time and resources to ensure that what you’re publishing is high quality and will actually generate traffic, clicks, and links to b...
How Your SEO Program Can Add Value
When it comes to search engine optimization, we tend to go through the motions. There are certain elements that need to be executed - such as checking the technical aspects of the site that can impact SEO, researching and optimizing for keywords, posting regular articles to the blog, and making post...
Is Search Engine Rank Important for B2B?
When it comes to marketing your B2B business, there are many strategies available. For those wanting to promote their businesses online, having a website will be at the core of the strategy. From there, other digital marketing strategies, such as content marketing and social media marketing will be ...
Match SEO Keywords to User Intent
When doing the keyword research for your site, it’s tempting to simply choose the ones that get the most searches and leave out the rest. Though this is the general idea, there has to be a little more thought that goes into it. Factoring in user intent while assembling your keyword list will not o...
SEO Musts for Local Business Owners
The days of searching for a local business in the Yellow Pages are long gone. Today, when someone is looking for a local business, they type what they’re looking for into Google and pick from one of the top results. This is why it’s so important for local business owners to invest in local SEO. ...
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...
Don’t Create Pages Just for SEO
When we visit a website, we have certain expectations concerning what we want to gain from this website. In other words, we are looking for a certain experience or specific pieces of information, and since we clicked the link to visit the website, we have this expectation that the website will deliv...
Keywords Help You Connect to Your Audience
On the surface, search engine optimization may look like it has the simple task of boosting a website's prominence in the search engines. While this is certainly true, there is more to it than that. The process of SEO actually provides you with a way to connect more deeply to your audience, because ...
Building Links Should Be Natural
It is true that building a high quality link portfolio is an important part of your SEO program. There was a time when SEO experts would talk about link building all the time, and the tactics that were used back then were very effective. The algorithms were written differently back then, and methods...
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 ...
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...
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...
Don’t Let Your SEO Process Define You
It's true that SEO is a valuable part of any digital marketing strategy. It's a long term strategy and one that is effective at eventually bringing in a steady stream of targeted, organic traffic. Since success through SEO is something that needs to be earned over the long term, it can be tough to s...
Don’t Let Analytics Make SEO Too Complicated
It's true that there is a lot that goes into creating a great SEO program and one that is tailored to the specific needs of the business. However, there are certain components that will always be present, such as content marketing, social media, and link building. Despite that, there is still a d...
How to Make Social Media Work for SEO
When someone tells you that social media doesn’t impact SEO, they’re only half right. It’s true that there aren’t any direct ties to your follower count, number of likes and shares, and links that you share in the search engine algorithms. Yet, that doesn’t mean that social media doesn’t...
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...
Why Your New Website Isn’t Ranking Yet
If you are launching a new business website you certainly have a few things going for you. It’s a fresh slate and you can really take the website in any direction that you choose. You have the opportunity to hit the ground running by implementing on site search engine optimization right from the s...
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...
In Addition to SEO, What Can I Be Doing?
A common question we often hear from SEO clients is, “what else can I be doing to get more traffic to my website?” Since SEO is a long-term strategy (slow and steady wins the race), if a client has the budget, we often recommend executing additional online marketing efforts to coincide with the ...
5 Ways to Get More Website Leads from Organic Traffic
The purpose of running an SEO campaign is to increase organic traffic to a website from the search engines. And while an increase in traffic typically results in more leads, it’s important to ensure that your website is set up in a way that makes it easy for website visitors to fill out your lead ...
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...
Don’t Forget About These Pages for SEO
On site optimization is the process of incorporating targeted keywords into the on-page content, title tag, meta description, and URL of each page of the website so that the search engines can match the page with related search queries. While primary service/solution/product pages are certainly a pr...
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...
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 ...
Why Communication Matters
When we take on a client, we know that we can really improve their SEO. We have a trusted and established process that really produces results and our clients have had a lot of success. Not only that, but we are a white hat firm and we know exactly what needs to be done in order to produce the resul...
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...
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...