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4 Things Your SEO Program Cannot Control
There are 200 and some odd factors in Google’s ranking algorithm and it’s constantly evolving. While we know that certain factors help your website do better organically, we cannot say quantifiably exactly how much of each factor equals success (and anyone who says otherwise is selling something...
Are People Still Searching For Keywords?
Month over month organic traffic is going to ebb and flow, especially if your business is heavily influenced by external factors such as seasonality (no one searches for “Christmas tree farm” in June, for instance). Like so many other things in SEO, search volume is completely out of your contro...
PPC Is Essential for Branding in SEO
When creating your brand, there are many strategies that effectively work together. It's a collective effort between your company's website, logo, social media presence, and search engine optimization. Pay per click advertising is also a big part of this, especially when it comes to branding that is...
With SEO Good Writing Matters
These days, writing content that is optimized for the search engines is about more than just including keywords in the content. In fact, too many keywords in your writing can hurt more than help. These days, it’s good writing that really matters. Not only that, but you also need to please two audi...
Performing Content Research for Blog Posts
Research is an essential part of the writing process, especially in the beginning stages. In order to write effective content for your blog, you’ll definitely need to put some research into it. This will help with things like content structure, to generate ideas, and to even give an existing artic...
Don’t Forget Off Page SEO!
While it’s true that great content is the lifeblood of your SEO campaign, it’s all too easy to spend the majority of your time on that. However, off page SEO shouldn’t be ignored, either. Both strategies work together to give your site its best chance to be successful. In the old days of SE...
Adapting Your Content to the Customer Life Cycle
When was the last time you made a major purchase? What was the process you used to buy it? Let’s say you decided you needed a new car. What’s the process you take to buy it? If you’re like most people, chances are pretty good you’ll start by researching the various cars that are out there un...
Don’t Get Left Behind When SEO Tactics Change!
SEO has changed much over the past decade. In fact, some of the strategies that worked well back then could negatively impact your site if applied today. Whenever the search engines change their algorithms, you need to be ready to adapt or suffer the consequences. If you don’t adapt, this could re...
Brand Building and SEO Should Work Together!
Brand building and SEO strategies aren’t mutually exclusive. In the past, it used to be that marketers needed to choose between the two. This is no longer the case. Many of the strategies that are used for one are also used for the other! Though brand building can include strategies that fall out ...
Mobile Device Usage Affects SEO
With increased mobile device usage, it makes sense that Internet usage has increased as well. People who use their mobile devices to go online are doing more than just making simple web searches, too. They play games, read the news, check their email, use social networks, and basically use it to do ...
Don’t Forget Local Search in Your SEO Plan!
These days, if you aren’t utilizing the search engines’ local search features, you’re completely missing out. When people are in need of an electrician, for instance, they look for one that operates in the area in which they live. Most tend to search for this information online and not their a...
Why You Should Invest Resources in Your SEO Strategy
Have you invested resources in developing and implementing your SEO strategy? If so, how long ago was that? These days, it’s hard to go online without being conscious of search engine optimization strategies. The very phrases we enter into search boxes are closely tied to it! However, knowing t...
SEO Tweaks That Could Help Your Site
SEO has changed a lot over the years and some of us are guilty of using old strategies that not only don’t work, but also could cause a penalty. These are the big, obvious strategies such as developing quality content that isn’t “too optimized”. Some tweaks, however, are almost too subtle to...
The Way We Search Online Has Changed – Has Your SEO Strategy?
How do you search online? Chances are, your search style has changed and you may not have even realized it. Thanks to Google’s continual algorithm updates, it makes it easier than ever for people to search for information. In the past, it was almost a necessity to use specific keywords to find the...
Audience Driven Engagement Affects SEO
Yes, it’s true that audience engagement drives your SEO campaign and can help make it more successful. Brands that have a high social presence tend to experience better search engine rankings for their website. However, people drive audiences and a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work. What wo...
Coming Up With Ideas for Great Content
A good website will have plenty of content that will please your visitors first, search engines second. One thing that visitors especially value is when your website is fresh and unique. There is so much information online that people who come to your site need to feel as if they are getting special...
How to Engage Your Customers With Your Blog
The next time you perform an audit on your blog, analyze whether or not it actually engages your readers. Your blog is about more than just crafting articles and posting them. In order for it to be truly effective, it also needs to interact with them. This will not only make your blog more enjoyable...
Effective Content Marketing Begins With Great Writing
To be an effective content marketer, you first need to become a great writer. In this business, the standard of great writing is measured according to how effectively the content achieves its purpose. But, don’t let the apparent simplicity of the writing fool you - many of the same tactics literar...
How to Keep Your SEO Campaign Fresh
An effective SEO campaign has several important elements - keywords, content, social media, and effective link building. Doing it the wrong way can hurt your efforts more than help. It is well worth the effort to make your campaign as effective as possible. The only problem is that it can feel stagn...
It’s Time to Fix Your Slow Website
How long does it take your website to load? Across any device, a website should ideally load within a few seconds. After all, that’s what web users have grown accustomed to. Anything longer than a few seconds results in frustration and is a scary reminder of the dial up days of yore. Nobody wants ...
Is Seasonality Driving Your SEO Program?
If you were like most of our clients, traffic across the board was probably down between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Why? The holidays of course! Most B2B businesses see a noticeable slow down in the amount of traffic, leads, engagement metrics and final orders during that time period simply because...
Strategies for Developing Compelling Content
Since a good content marketing strategy distributes content across multiple platforms as a way to attract the right audience, it stands to reason that the nature of the content you write does matter. This means that whatever you create needs to be in line with your overall strategy, otherwise it wil...
5 Signs You’re Over-thinking Your SEO Strategy
With each algorithm change, Google has website users fearful of the future. When will the next change be? How will that impact your website? The end result of this fear is that it’s all too easy to make things more complicated than they need to be. Don’t fall into this trap! Here are five of th...
Your Website is More Than Your Homepage
Your homepage is an important part of your website. It generates the lion’s share of your website traffic and essentially is like an introduction to not only your website, but also to your company. The homepage needs to be well designed, user friendly, and optimized properly. However, website owne...
SEO Practitioners Wear Many Hats
Whenever that question comes up in social settings, “So, what do you do?” How are we SEOs supposed to answer? Simply saying, “I do SEO” isn’t going to cut it. While SEO has certainly become more mainstream, we’re still likely to get the follow up, “And what does that mean exactly?” W...
Guest Blogging Should Be Mutually Beneficial
By now we all know that guest blogging shouldn’t be done strictly for links. That approach could land you in hot water with the search engines. However, guest blogging is still a worthwhile marketing tactic since it’s great for building brand exposure (for the author) and providing website visit...
The Rules for Re-Using “Old” Content
The highest content marketing priority is always quality. Never sacrifice quality for quantity. However, the frequency in which you publish content does play a role in your content marketing success, which is why you should allot as much of your marketing budget to content as possible to keep both q...
Consider Investing in PPC Along with SEO
SEO really isn’t optional today. If you have a website and you want to drive as much traffic as possible to that website, it’s necessary to invest in a search engine optimization campaign, even if it’s on a small scale. People turn to the search engines when they are looking for information, w...
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...
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...
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...
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
Over the many years working in the SEO industry 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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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, ...
Create a Content Series to Maintain Engagement
In case you weren’t aware, Google pays attention to bounce rate as one of its many, many search algorithm signals. That means that if someone lands on your content and immediately clicks away, Google takes note. Many things can lead to a bounce but one of thing that could lead to a bounce that you...
What Your Target Audience Expects From Your Content
First thing's first, when it comes to publishing content online, you need to remember who you are writing it for. Your primary target audience is prospects and current customers, not the search engines. Yes, it’s important to consider SEO and incorporate keywords naturally where you can but the co...
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...