Latest Posts
Are You Everywhere Your Audience Is?
The three main components of any inbound marketing campaign are SEO, social media, and content marketing. The goal of inbound marketing is to build your brand up so that you are everywhere your audience is when they need you. You aren't trying to break into their world the way traditional advertisin...
5 Questions to Consider When Developing a Business Blog Strategy
A business blog is an essential component of an inbound marketing campaign. The purpose of a business blog is to publish thought leadership content in order to be viewed as an expert and increase traffic to a website. Blog posts should answer the questions that target audience members may have and p...
Social Media Channels Can Deliver Instant Traffic
Sometimes SEO feels very much like a complicated game of “hurry up and wait.” You spend so much time and effort optimizing your website, but until Google recalls your website and recognizes what is new those changes might as well not even be there! You spend hours every week creating fresh conte...
Don’t Base an SEO Strategy on Perceived Search Engine Weaknesses
If you think that SEO is a way to “game the system”, you’re wrong. This perception is why the SEO industry as a whole has earned a bad reputation. Looking for search engine weaknesses to capitalize on in order to gain short-term results is no longer what SEO is about. Unfortunately, too many w...
Are People Still Searching for Your Top Keywords?
One of the most important things to remember about SEO is that it is constantly changing. The search spiders get smarter with every update; meaning old tactics that used to work incredibly well are now useless (or potentially dangerous). For instance, in the last few years Google has gotten a lot be...
You Can’t Control Who Links to You
It's an SEO Catch-22. You need a powerful, varied link profile to help boost the organic value of your website, but at the same time, if you build (or earn) too many of the WRONG links you actually cut your SEO program off at the knees and could inadvertently harm your website. So even while you're ...
Simple Ways to Protect Your Website from SEO Failure
With every algorithm update, SEO becomes more complex. However that isn’t to say that as a website owner, you don’t have any control. There are certainly simple, straightforward ways to protect your website from any SEO related fallout. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here’s...
Conduct a Content Audit to Fill Your Content Gaps
When was the last time you conducted an audit of your content? If it’s been awhile, now is as good a time as any to review what you’ve accomplished up to this point. Aimlessly creating content just for the sake of creating content results in missed opportunities. Even though we’d like to belie...
Use a Ranking Report to Improve a Content Strategy
There are many reasons that we advise clients to not get hung up on the keyword ranking report. After all, it’s not the most accurate way to measure SEO success. Keyword rankings fluctuate on a day-by-day or even minute-by-minute basis and are based on factors that can’t be controlled including ...
Find the Right SEO Firm for You
In 10 years of business I have vetted thousands of potential SEO clients. Everything from local roofers to mid-sized B2B businesses to international software companies and in that time one of the biggest lessons I have learned that not every client is right for every SEO firm, and not every SEO firm...
5 Ways to Get Your Content Noticed
Once you hit “publish” on a piece of content, don’t think that your work is done. Think of all of the new pages of web content published each day. That’s a lot to compete with! If you want to ensure that the right people see your content it’s necessary to not only share it in the proper ch...
B2B SEO Should NOT Push the Envelope
More than once a B2B SEO client has come to me after a year or so of work (and great success I might add!) and asked "what else should we be doing?" It's as if there was some secret level 2 SEO tactic that I had been holding back from them! But here's the real secret to SEO; it's not sexy, it's not ...
Avoid the SEO Firm That Promises the Moon
For a few months I've been testing targeted Twitter ads, seeing if any decent leads came through the pipeline. As a way to pre-qualify any visitors, I wrote the ad copy to include a base price so I don't have to pay for tire-kicking traffic or worry about sorting through potential leads that aren't ...
Social Media Automation Rules to Follow
Social media automation tools are great. They help keep things organized and on schedule and allow users to plan out their social media messages ahead of time. However, some users fall into the automation-only trap and forget what social media is really about- being social! A social strategy that’...
Don’t Forget the “Marketing” in Content Marketing
Content marketing should really be viewed as a two-step process: first is the creation of the content and second is the promotion, or marketing, of that content. Of course, how content will be marketed may determine how it’s written/produced, etc. The content itself is nothing without the promotio...
5 Tips for Curating Social Media Content
If you’ve decided to make this the year that you really take action when it comes to content marketing and social media- congratulations! As you’ve probably noticed (and likely why you’ve waited this long to get going in the first place), it takes a lot of hard work and time to create high qua...
Measuring Year Over Year Organic Growth
Now that January 2015 is well under way, it's time to look at year over year organic growth and evaluate how much of an impact your SEO program had in 2014. This is especially important if you have a year's worth of SEO work under your belt and can compare all of 2014 to all of 2013. Were there any ...
Separating the Good Potential Links from the Bad
Ever since Penguin hit the SEO scene, a lot of site owners have been running scared of link building. And having seen the devastating effects that a Penguin penalty can have on a site it’s no small wonder why! I’ve seen sites get hit and take more than a year to recover, if they recover at all. ...
SEO is Part of Something Bigger
Too often we treat the various aspects of our marketing programs as individual things. Social media lives over here, content marketing lives over there and SEO is somewhere off in the distance. No matter how big or small your marketing department is, keeping all the pieces moving and in-synch withou...
Social Media Isn’t an “Either-Or” Game
In a recent article on ClickZ titled “How to Launch Your B2B Social Media Presence: A 30-Day Plan”, author Kristen Kovner had the following to say regarding where businesses should be posting: There are myriad social channels, and experts will tell you it’s not an "either-or" game but a "ye...
Are You Taking Advantage of Every Content Distribution Channel?
It’s one thing to be creating great content on a regular basis. It’s another thing to make sure that that content is found among target audience members. Content that’s not read, viewed, shared, etc. has little value. To make the most of your efforts, it’s necessary to take advantage of ever...
Plant Your SEO Garden Now!
A few months ago I was talking with a client about the long term game that is SEO. The work you do today might have an immediate influence on your social media activity, your email campaigns and your overall user experience (especially when it comes to your content creation efforts), but you might n...
How Much Organic Growth is Enough?
When we started working with a new client a few months ago they asked us what a "normal" organic growth looks like after a year of SEO. Could they expect to see a 10% change? 20%? 30%? I explained to our contact there that our clients have seen everything from as little as 2% change in organic to as...
The Blog is One of the Most Important Pages on a Website
What are the most important pages on your website? Sure, the homepage is a given. But what else? If you think it’s your primary service and/or product pages, think again. According to a recent blog post from Hubspot: Every website is different, but generally speaking, here are the four most...
Where Are My URLs?
The other day I got an email from one of our clients regarding a community site they created for their customers. Google searching on things that should be returning matches to your community are coming up with no links to site. I wonder why the Google crawlers are not picking up those pages? ...
What Are Your New Year SEO Resolutions?
A new year means a new chance to get your SEO off on the right foot. There is no denying that web traffic, both desktop and mobile, is a huge source of business for most companies. In fact, I'd argue that for the majority of our clients, organic traffic is the #1 source of visitors. So how can you g...
How Much Is One Referral Link Really Worth?
Over the last two years, ONE link has driven 238 visitors to a client’s site. Another SINGLE link on a local news site drove 380 visitors on one day. A third SOLITARY inbound link has sent 78 visitors in the last two months alone. Granted, since July 2013 this site has received over 800,000 visito...
The Benefits of Nofollow Links
The nofollow attribute (rel=”nofollow”) tells the search engine spiders to not follow a link, or essentially to ignore it. The link is not included when the search engines determine how trusted a web page is. For SEO purposes, these types of links may at first seem worthless. But trust me, these...
Are These Link Building Service Ads For Real?!
I was recently looking at (what I thought was) a trusted SEO related industry website when an advertisement on the side of the screen caught my eye. I thought, “That can’t be right”, but my curiosity got the best of me. I clicked on the ad and sure enough, it brought me to a landing page for a...
How Much Is Your Blog Worth?
One of the best ways you can plead your case for a bigger content marketing budget in 2015 is to show the powers that be just how much your blog is worth. Showing content ROI is actually very simple, especially when you know how much the average web visitor is worth to your company. The equation for...
Is That Blog Post a “Hit” or “Miss”?
A content strategy should be continually tweaked as you move along and see what works and what doesn’t. Once you have a significant number of blog posts under your belt, it’s important to take a look at the data in order to determine what was a “hit” and what might have been a “miss”. Ov...
Why Aren’t We Showing Up for [Keyword]?
Many in-house SEO managers or internal SEO champions constantly have to defend the SEO program from those who just don’t “get it.” One of the biggest things is explaining why your site isn’t showing up when they type in your top keywords. It doesn’t seem to matter how good the organic grow...
You Can’t Fool Google So Stop Trying!
In a recent article over on Search Engine Land, author Greg Gifford said the following: The most important point we try to hammer home to potential clients is that you can’t fool the nerds at Google. Everything you do, both on and off your site, should be working toward the end goal of making y...
Why You Shouldn’t Rely Too Heavily on Newsjacking
If you’re not familiar with the term “newsjacking”, here’s a quick overview. The term became popular after the publication of David Meerman Scott's book, “Newsjacking: How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage”. The title includes a brief exp...
3 Non-SEO Items That Will Kill Your SEO Program
There are a lot of things that can derail your SEO program: a lack of content, low-quality links, being socially inactive and more. And while I cannot stress the importance of those SEO items, there are actually several non-SEO things that can ruin your SEO program before it even gets off the ground...
Is Your Enterprise SEO Campaign Guilty of These Things?
If you think an enterprise organization has it easier than a small business when it comes to executing an SEO campaign, at first glance you’re right. After all, enterprise organizations have bigger budgets, more resources, and typically have strong brand recognition that gives an SEO campaign some...
Ways to Maximize Your Content Marketing Potential
It’s one thing to be “doing” content marketing. Nearly every business today can say they are “doing” content marketing to some extent. It’s another thing to have a strategic content marketing plan and to be taking advantage of all of the resources and outlets available to you in order to...
Has Google+ Lost Its Way?
Has Google+ lost its way? According to former Google+ UX designer Chris Messina, yes it has. The whole thing started when Messina “called out Google+” on Twitter claiming that they were no longer maintaining Google+ and had stopped doing QA. Turns out he was wrong and he openly admits it in a po...
Are You Paying for a Keyword Ranking Tool?
The other day my boss was reminiscing about how the world of SEO looked when he started in Internet marketing over 13 years ago. One of the things he remembers the most is having a dedicated computer that sat in the corner of his office, running keyword ranking reports 24-7. They set up some kind of...
Stop Overthinking Your Blog Posts!
We find that website owners come up with all sorts of excuses as to why they don’t have an active blog on their website. The two most common excuses are that they don’t have time to blog and they don’t know what to write about. To these website owners/businesses we say, stop overthinking it! ...
Are Your Employees Using LinkedIn?
LinkedIn may not have the same numbers as Facebook or Twitter, but that doesn’t mean that it should be ignored, especially if you’re in the B2B sector. LinkedIn has become the news source for professionals. It’s the social media site that focuses on business only, without all of the other nois...
Panda and Penguin: It’s Not so Black and White
I recently read a great article by Dave Davies over on Search Engine Watch that had me thinking. Titled "Which Update?” Is The Wrong Question, he says: “Most people don’t fully understand how the algorithms themselves can impact your rankings and thus looking to a single algorithm tends...
How Much Content Are You Sitting On?
At the B2B Marketing Profs conference back in October I attended a great session entitled "Content Marketing at Scale: Heavy Hitters." The panel included Doug Kessler of Velocity Partners, Joe Pulizzi of The Content Marketing Institute, Jeannine Rossignol of Xerox and Michael Brenner of NewsCred. Th...
Content Audit – Keep, Tweak, or Kill
It blows my mind sometimes that I can not only turn out at least one blog post a day for the Brick Marketing blog, but I am easily writing 2, 3, if not 4 client blog posts a day on top of that (plus all my other SEO work). If me, all by myself, can write 3-5 pieces of content every day, how does a m...
Blog for Better Customers and Clients
There are so many benefits to business blogging. It’s a way to share your industry knowledge and be viewed as an authority figure. It’s a way to earn trust, inbound links, and grow your brand online. Tied together, this results in generating better customers or clients for your company, customer...
Put Some Money Behind Your Content to Increase Visibility
First things first, There is ALWAYS money (budget) that supports your content and if you’re taking content marketing seriously, you should be putting a significant portion of your online marketing budget towards content creation, publication, and promotion. You need to invest in creating and build...
How Do You Really Prove the ROI of Content Marketing?
At the end of the day, ROI (return on investment) isn't about engagement or brand building or authority--it's about the money. It's not something many marketers like to drill down to (especially when the numbers aren't as good as you would like them to be), but if you want a better content marketing...
The Content Marketing Bar Has Been Raised
Content marketing is where it’s at. Slowly but surely, brands and businesses of all sizes and in all industries are realizing this and are throwing their hat in the ring. This means that the content marketing bar has been raised and it’s becoming harder and harder to stand out among all of the c...
Just Enough SEO Knowledge to Be Dangerous
In my experience, the site owners that "goes it alone" when it comes to SEO fall into three distinct categories. Category A - they take their time and move cautiously, make small changes here and there and just let what happens happen. Category B - they hire an SEO firm and let them handle most of t...
How Small Businesses Have a Content Marketing Advantage
Small businesses often have limited marketing budgets in comparison to their large business counterparts. But that doesn’t mean that small business owners should just sit back and think that they can’t compete with the big guys. This is especially true when it comes to online content marketing, ...