Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Articles
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...
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 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...
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...
Email Newsletter Marketing Helps Your SEO
When it comes to search engine marketing, there are two items at play, and both factors need to be considered when developing an SEO strategy. The first is that there are direct factor that impact rankings. Although Google hasn't publicly released statements about what these ranking factors are, the...
Analyze Page Load Time As Part of Your SEO Audit
Like any service provider, the search engines want to create a service that will keep customers happy. This means that they want to rank the best possible pages that are relevant to keyword search terms. If the websites that the search engines suggest to users aren’t relevant or are poorly develo...
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...
History of Google Panda and Penguin Updates
These days, when Google makes an algorithm update, it is part of the core updates. There was a time when this wasn't the case, and algorithm updates were majorly disruptive, often causing penalties and a dramatic decrease in organic traffic. These issues still happen today, but not nearly to the sam...
How a PPC Campaign Complements an SEO Campaign
Everyone today knows how the search engines work and that there are two sections on the search results page: paid listings and non-paid listings (PPC and organic). So as a business and website owner – where should you dedicate your time and resources? Obviously, we’re an SEO firm so we’ll stro...
Completed Keyword Research: What Happens Next?
SEO is about keywords. While it’s true that search behavior has changed and the search engines have a better understanding about the meaning of a search (as opposed to exact keyword match), it’s still about keywords. If your content includes the words and/or phrases that match up to what someone...
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...
Be Careful When Optimizing Pages With Different Keywords
It's true that optimizing pages with keywords is a key component of search engine optimization. However, it isn't enough to place keywords sporadically throughout the page. A lot more thought needs to go into this than you might expect. The ultimate goal is to match each page on the website with ...
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...
Have Realistic B2B SEO Goals
It’s necessary to take a strategic approach to B2B SEO. In the campaign planning process a business needs to determine what the goals of the campaign will be to measure the success of the campaign as it moves along. The important thing to remember when setting B2B SEO goals is that they need to be...
Optimize Every Page of a B2B Website
After reviewing the competition and the industry online, the next phase of a B2B SEO campaign is to conduct keyword research for every page of the business website and then incorporate selected keywords into the content and meta tags naturally in order to generate organic search engine traffic. Whil...
Follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for White Hat SEO
When a digital marketing or SEO firm says that they use white hat Google SEO strategies, what exactly does this mean? The marketing industry has borrowed the term "white hat" and "black hat" from theater and movies, particularly in the silent film era, when it was typical for the hero of the story t...
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...
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...
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...
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. ...
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...
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...
Don’t Over Optimize Your Site
For all of our full service SEO clients, we start the process with on-site optimization. This involves conducting keyword research for each page of the site, writing new and better targeted Meta tags and descriptions, and tweaking H1 tags and page content to seamlessly include the new keywords. The ...
Benefits of Running a Link Audit
Every site owner should run a link audit on their site at least once a year. When conducting a full link audit, it’s important to visit each and every link in your link portfolio no matter how many links there may be! For some site owners, this may mean you have thousands of links to check out. In...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...