Latest Posts
Use Your Business Blog as Bait
When developing your blogging strategy, it’s important to understand the purpose of your business blog. A business blog should be designed to lure target audience members to your content and as a result, to your business website. You may think of bait as what we put on the hook to attract and catc...
3 Things to Know About Your Target Audience Before Creating Content
Online marketing today is all about content, content, and more content. This might lead you to believe that quantity is what matters. But content isn’t for your bosses that are focused on hitting quotas and it’s not for the search engines to improve your SEO (even though that is an important ind...
SEO Clients Can’t Disappear From the Process
If you’re in the market to hire an SEO firm, here’s one important thing that you need to understand: you will need to be an active participant in the SEO process. If you think that you’re outsourcing the work so that you don’t have to deal with it and you can just review monthly reports you ...
Questions to Answer While Developing a Blog Strategy
If you’re just getting started with blogging, the first step is obviously to hire a developer to integrate a blog platform with an easy to use CMS into your website. As the developer is working on that, you should get started on creating a blog strategy. Once the blog is up and running it’s in y...
The Internet Is Immediate. SEO Is Not.
One of the hardest things for site owners to wrap their heads around, especially those struggling with a penalty, is that SEO is not an immediate form of marketing. The work you do today doesn't help you today...or even next week. Sometimes it takes months to feel the true effects of your SEO work. ...
Blog on a Daily Basis (If You Can)
According to HubSpot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report: Seventy-nine percent of companies who have a blog report a positive ROI for inbound marketing this year, compared with just 20% of those companies that do not have a blog. In fact, 82% of marketers who blog on a daily basis acquired...
Why Readers Lose Interest in Your Content
Ongoing content creation, publication, and distribution have become crucial components of online marketing success. Great content has the potential to increase not only website traffic and social media follower counts, but over the long term is what nurtures leads and generates sales. Some companies...
Do’s and Don’ts of Responding to Negative Social Media Comments
If you’re willing to put the time in, social media is great for business. It serves as an outlet to inform your target audience, gain exposure, and make connections. Yet, it’s not always going to be sunshine and rainbows. A social media page opens your business up to receiving comments of any va...
Content is For Your Target Audience First, SEO Second
Any good SEO company is going to tout the benefits of producing high quality content on a regular basis for SEO purposes. Content is what fuels an SEO campaign, generates natural inbound links, and improves social media efforts. However, it’s important to note that ultimately, content needs to be ...
Why B2Bs Should Be Using Facebook, Not Just LinkedIn
There’s no question that B2Bs should be active on LinkedIn. After all it’s a social network with a business focus. People sign in to their LinkedIn account to read business related articles, make business connections, and update their professional profile. That’s why it’s no surprise that in...
How to Conduct an SEO Friendly Website Content Audit
As a business evolves, its website needs to evolve along with it. A website redesign is recommended every few years to keep things fresh, but what also needs to stay fresh is the website content. When redesigning a website, it’s a good time to conduct a content audit too so that the new site launc...
5 Things to Do When Curating Content for Social Media
Online marketing is about content. Specifically in the B2B sector, content is what gains brand visibility and generates leads. Every company should be creating content, publishing it on the company blog, and sharing it in social media. Of course, creating quality content is no easy task. I...
What Makes Content “Share Worthy”?
Content creation doesn’t come easy. It takes a lot of time, effort, and resources to create quality content. If you’re investing so much in content, you obviously want to get the absolute most out of it. To some, the goal is to create content that will “go viral”. Let’s be honest here, of ...
3 Ways to Get More Twitter Followers
Twitter can be used to gain visibility and as a lead generation tool for businesses. Sure, Twitter has lots of noise to compete with, but that just means that a Twitter strategy requires some time and effort. Simply obtaining a Twitter handle, uploading an image of your logo, adding a brief descript...
Reasons Why Your Content Isn’t Getting Shared
There are many reasons to be creating content on behalf of your business. Content informs your target audience and establishes your business as a thought leader in the industry, which generates trust. This is the top goal of content, but another goal of content should be to get it shared. Conten...
Where to Look for Content Inspiration
A necessary component of online marketing today is content. Marketers must be writing and publishing content on an ongoing basis. This content improves SEO efforts because it helps to generate natural links back to a website. Content also improves brand visibility across the web. Unfortunately, cont...
Why SMBs Can Win At SEO
Small to medium sized business owners tend to think that they might be at a disadvantage when it comes to SEO. They have fewer resources than their enterprise counterparts and think that it’s the money that matters the most. The more money you have, the more you can “throw at” SEO and quickly...
True Facebook Promotion is No Longer Free
One of the most important places to market your business today is via social media. No matter who your target audience members are there’s a good chance that they are using social media to some extent and most people are logging into at least one social account on a daily basis. There’s evid...
Enhance Blogger Outreach Efforts with These Tactics
There are many benefits to guest blog posting. It’s a way to showcase your expertise on another industry site in order to gain visibility where your target audience members are spending time. In most cases a guest blogger is allowed a short author bio at the end of the post. This is a great place ...
Don’t Let SEO Get Stuck in the Approval Process
It happens all the time. We sign on an SEO client and we’re on the same page. The client understands that their input is important to the process and they are willing to make it a team effort. Things start off smoothly enough but then within a few weeks or months we hear from them less and less. W...
SEO and the Long B2B Sales Cycle
One of the biggest differentiators between B2C marketing and B2B marketing is understanding the nature of the sales cycle. Many B2C marketing campaigns are developed for the short term, generating quick sales from a promotion. In the B2B world, it’s often more complicated. That’s because the sal...
SEO Isn’t a Be All And End All Solution
SEO is important. There’s no denying that. Search engine optimization tactics are what help to improve the search engine presence of a website and let’s face it, the search engines are where people turn to when they are looking for the products or services that you are trying to sell. If you can...
5 Key Analytics Metrics to Monitor SEO Success
When getting started with an SEO campaign one of the first things that should be done is getting Google Analytics set up on your site if it’s not already. It’s a fairly simple process and it’s free information straight from the almighty Google. Without Analytics data it can be difficult, if no...
5 Important SEO Takeaways
If you’re just getting started with SEO you might be realizing that it’s unlike any other form of marketing that you’ve implemented before. There are lots of moving parts and variables that determine SEO success. The nature of SEO can sometimes be frustrating to website owners, but there’s n...
3 Steps to Content Marketing Success
If you want to do content marketing right, it’s not something to just dabble in when you have some free time. After all, who has free time today? Content marketing needs to be incorporated into the business and marketing plan and ample time/resources need to be dedicated to it in order for it to b...
Don’t Keep Your SEO Firm in the Dark
For many companies that don’t have the necessary time or resources in house, it makes sense to outsource SEO activities to an SEO firm. However, an SEO firm should be viewed as an extension of your own business. The SEO team is responsible for increasing traffic to your website, which is a critica...
On Site SEO Basics That Still Apply
It’s true that SEO has undergone a few facelifts in recent years. The SEO campaign that you were implementing just a few years back has hopefully been tossed in the trash and replaced with something more current. Some SEO tactics that once worked and improved a site’s placement on the search eng...
Are You Really Ready to Publish that Blog Post?
Blogging has become an important component of online marketing and SEO and what’s great about it is that is has essentially leveled the playing field for companies that are trying to build their brand up online. Any company can set up a blog on their website and publish content to be shared with t...
Keep Your Social Media Strategy Mobile Friendly
If you are using the Internet to market your business (and today, every business should be) it’s necessary to understand user behavior and the ways in which your target audience is accessing the Internet. Over time, more and more people are purchasing smartphones, tablets, e-readers, etc. The Inte...
Understanding What Content Topics Work Best
One of the most difficult things about content marketing is deciding what topics to write about. Many businesses tend to overthink it, which usually results in content marketing not getting done at all. No matter what line of business you are in, there is plenty of information to share with your tar...
A White Hat Guide to Content Marketing
There are plenty of tips out there about “white hat link building”, and many can be found right here on this blog. However, the face of link building has drastically changed over the years. In fact, we’d even say that “link building” isn’t even the correct term for generating inbound lin...
Questions to Ask an SEO Firm before Signing a Contract
Before signing on the dotted line and committing to pay an SEO firm for a specified period of time it’s necessary to have an understanding of the type of work that the firm does and what exactly is included in the proposed rate. An SEO program involves many moving parts and you don’t w...
Beyond the Visitor Report: Ways to Measure SEO Success
In order to determine how your website and SEO campaign is performing, it’s necessary to add analytics code to the site. There are plenty of website analytics tools to choose from, both free and paid. What we recommend is Google Analytics. It’s a free tool that really provides a wealth of inform...
Required Elements of a Modern SEO Campaign
SEO has undergone multiple transformations through the years. During the early days, the focus was on building links to your website. At one point, nearly any link would help. However, that’s no longer the case. The only way a link is going to help your SEO efforts today is if it generates traffic...
Characteristics of Content That Gets Shared
Online content is only worthwhile if people are actually finding it and reading it. The first step is to optimize the content so that it will appear organically in the search engines for related search terms over time. However, in order to create content that is “share worthy” and generates inbo...
Are You Expecting the Impossible from Your SEO Program?
One of our full-service SEO clients has experienced tremendous SEO success this year, with a 210.27% growth in organic traffic. I wish we could deliver such incredible reports to all of our clients because I know as a site owner if I saw that kind of YoY organic growth I’d be jumping for joy. But ...
How to Make Your Blog Work for SEO
One of the most important components of a search engine optimization campaign is content since it’s what can be optimized using keywords and is what generates natural links. That’s why a blog should be incorporated onto your website. However, just adding a blog to the site isn’t going to magic...
How to Measure SEO Campaign Success with Analytics
SEO is an online marketing function that is built for the long term. If you start SEO one month, there’s a very small chance that you are going to see much improvement the next month. However, as the SEO campaign moves along and you are producing SEO content and generating quality inbound links yo...
Why Blogging Matters for SEO
When considering whether a new potential SEO client is a good fit there are a number of things that we take a look at. When reviewing the site one of the first things that we do is check the navigation to see if the site has a blog. If the site already has an active blog up and running, that’s a p...
Business Changes That Your SEO Firm Needs to Know About
Many companies choose to outsource SEO work because they don’t have the resources to handle all of the work that needs to be done in house. However, it’s imperative that an SEO firm still be viewed as a part of the team. A successful SEO firm/SEO client relationship is like a partnership and one...
Trade Shows As a Source of B2B SEO Content
Perhaps the most difficult part of delivering B2B SEO content on a regular basis isn’t the actual writing itself; it’s mostly deciding what to write about. B2B SEO clients often over think the content marketing component of SEO. What it really comes down to is simply creating content that your t...
3 Types of Posts to Share to Keep Your Blog Active
There are numerous benefits to operating a business blog. It’s an avenue to share your expertise with target audience members and be viewed as a trusted source of information. It helps SEO efforts by adding an additional page of content to the site each time a blog post is published that can be c...
Content is the Most Important Component of B2B SEO Today
With all of the SEO rules changing as often as they do, and SEO tactics that were once beneficial now on the “bad” list, website owners that want to improve their search engine presence are now left wondering, “what can we do?” What we always tell our clients is that the most important thing...
SEO Won’t Guarantee Conversions
The purpose of a search engine optimization campaign is to conduct activities that will capture the attention of the search engine spiders, and in turn get your website content to rank prominently in the search engines for related keyword search terms. If you are able to improve your search engine p...
The Benefits of Evergreen Blog Posts
Whenever clients ask what kind of content they should be writing to share in their blog, we always recommend that the content be evergreen, meaning that it will be just as relevant in the future as it is now. This is something that website owners sometimes struggle with. It’s much easier to write ...
Why SEO Success Won’t Happen Overnight
If you’re looking for a marketing solution that is going to generate a quick response and result in an uptick in sales, leads, conversions, etc. in the short term- SEO isn’t it. What’s frustrating to most website owners about SEO is that it is a necessary evil. It’s necessary because people ...
What Lazy SEO Looks Like
There are many SEO industry professionals and it’s likely that nobody takes exactly the same approach to an SEO campaign. However, if your business website is in the market to hire an in house SEO professional, an SEO consultant, or an SEO firm the one thing that you want to make sure of is that t...
Recognizing the Small B2B SEO Successes
Depending on what B2B niche your company operates in there might be a ceiling when it comes to how much new organic traffic you can pull to your site for certain keywords. For instance, “live chat software” has a monthly search volume of 5,400. If your website is already pulling in 3,500 visitor...
How to Start SEO for Your New Website
If you’re a start up and you’ve just launched a business website, it’s smart of you to already be thinking about SEO. After all, SEO is a slow moving process and the earlier you get started at it, the better off your site will be. However, we don’t recommend that new website owners hire an S...
Is My Social Media Campaign Working?
Unless you have been living under a rock over the last few years, you know how important social media has become to our everyday lives. People are constantly connected to others through numerous social networks on many devices including their desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, etc. It’s not just...