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SEO Checklist for WordPress Website Launches
Are you getting ready to launch a new WordPress website? Here is a short SEO checklist you’ll want to run through to make sure you site is setup for success right out of the gate! While this is by no means a comprehensive list, make sure these basics are in place before you launch so you won’t m...
What is Earned Media and How Does it Impact SEO?
There are two general ways that a business can get noticed. With paid media, banner ads, pay per click campaigns, and traditional offline advertising are used to generate this attention. Earned media, however, is publicity that has been generated by third party sources. This includes likes to your F...
Don’t Invest in SEO Until You Are Ready to Invest in SEO
Most businesses know now that they need some kind of SEO program in order to be successful. Every piece of information we consume, from breaking news, pop culture and sports highlights, local restaurant reviews, driving directions and even strategic business advice and services—it’s all online a...
How Many Visitors is Enough for My Website?
How many visitors a month is good for my website? This is actually a question I get asked frequently from our SEO clients, especially when we are just beginning their SEO campaign. In my professional opinion, visitor growth is the best metric for SEO success, so I can understand why a site owner wou...
Let Your Social Media Firm Do Their Job!
When people set out to hire a firm to take care of their social media, they're looking for one that has a proven track record of success for their clients. You also want someone who has plenty of experience, especially with your target market. Since they're considered experts, it stands to reason th...
Microsites: Good or Bad for SEO?
When putting together your SEO campaign, you may be wondering if it is a good idea to set up a few microsites in addition to your main website. Before you work them into your strategy, understand that there are pros and cons to using microsites as part of your marketing strategy. Think twice befo...
SEO is About the Big Picture
You’ve been told that executing a successful SEO campaign requires patience. Each task you complete, such as making sure your website is responsive and posting new, optimized content, will bring you one step closer to achieving success in the search engines. While you’re executing the campaign a...
Stop Measuring SEO Success by the Competition
A former client of ours was an international enterprise software company. And even though they weren’t even half as big as IBM or Oracle, they measured the success of their entire SEO program against those two industry giants, and not against companies they were truly competing with in terms of si...
Can You Really “Ramp Up” Your SEO Program?
There comes a point in every SEO vendor-client relationship when the client wants to “take it to the next level,” as if their SEO vendor had actually been holding back the true secret to SEO success! But the real secret is there is no secret. There are no tricks or games you can play with your S...
How to Give Old Posts New Life
When creating content for your marketing campaign, you may reach a point when you feel like every topic has been covered. It happens all the time. The problem is, that in order to keep your site fresh, you need to keep churning out new content so that your visitors will have something new to read. H...
How to Advocate for the SEO Process In-House
Putting together a great SEO strategy for your business uses up some of your resources, whether it's the time spent developing and executing the plan in-house or if you spend the money to hire an SEO company to get it done. As a result of this, it can be hard to justify to other people in your compa...
Use Custom SEO Training to Get Your Employees Onboard
Before you start worrying about link earning, content creation or social promotion, your SEO program needs to be accepted from the inside out! Without a strong internal push for strong SEO your program will never be as successful as it good be. You have to invest in SEO training for everyone in your...
SEO Won’t Fix Fundamental Problems With Your Business
The fundamental purpose of SEO is to go through a purpose that will get your website noticed by the search engines. By targeting certain keywords, creating great content, and using a variety of tactics to help your site build quality, organic links, you'll help your site achieve better search engin...
When SEO is Working Well, Diversify Your Efforts!
Your business website is performing well in the search engines. Your organic traffic has increased, lead generation is up, people are interacting with your brand on the social networking sites, and your site is getting found for all the right keywords. Are you wondering if there is anything else you...
3 Reasons Why 404 Errors Are Bad For Your SEO
Every site, especially a news organization or e-commerce site where content is constantly changing, is bound to have a handful of 404 errors lurking in the shadows. It’s also common to see a lot of 404 errors after a major site redesign when the URL structure changes. But while a few are not the e...
Make Sure Your Blog Posts Don’t Have Too Many Links!
How many links do you have in your blog posts? When people write content for their websites, they often feel the need to include links to relevant sources. In some cases, this is the right thing to do. For example, if you list a statistic or leave a quote from a medical study, you should give reader...
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...
Content Strategies You Need to Ditch
It’s true that content is the backbone of your online marketing efforts, but only if done right. There are some content marketing practices out there that can do more harm than good, especially if they’re outdated. This is especially true for strategies that are also linked to SEO. Here’s a li...
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...