Latest Posts
Make Sure Your SEO Strategy Helps with Branding
Over the years, it has become clear that Google favors business websites that show a strong brand presence in addition to creating a website that users will find valuable. Back in 2008, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, said that, "Brands are the solution, not the problem," and that they give us ...
How to Set Yourself Up for SEO Success
How do you know if your SEO program is up to par? How effective your SEO program is depends largely on how you prepare. In other words, there is a right way to do things and then there's a wrong way. There is also a bit of an in-between where your actions could be effective, but your SEO program cou...
How to Measure Organic SEO Traffic
In my opinion, one of the best ways to measure to overall success of your SEO campaign is to look at your organic SEO traffic. Rank just isn’t a good SEO metric for a variety of reasons including the increased personalization of search, the impact of social signals on the search results, the effec...
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...
Pros and Cons of Hiring Different SEO Service Providers
You know that you need some with your SEO and for this, you have a few options. You can hire various SEO service providers to improve your SEO program, including: SEO consultants, SEO firms or agency, or you can do the ongoing SEO work in-house. How do you know which choice is the best? Well, there ...
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...
Make Sure You Have Time to Work With Your SEO Firm
When you hire an SEO firm, it's important to make sure you have enough time to work with them. Sure, you trust their expertise. You have complete confidence that they'll deliver great results. However, if you don't have enough time to work with them, it will make it harder on them to execute the ...
Today’s SEO Link Building Best Practices
Despite what you may have heard, link building is still an important part of SEO. That’s because the search engines still use a website’s inbound link portfolio as a ranking factor. The more high-quality, relevant links a site has, the better. However, it’s true that link building has drastica...
The Two Parts of an SEO Campaign
No two SEO campaigns are going to be exactly the same, because no two websites are exactly the same. The details of an SEO campaign for the website of a small, local business are going to be different than those for the website of a large, international corporation. However, at a high-level, all SEO...
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...
How to Tell if a Link Will Be Beneficial to Your SEO Program
At a very high level, SEO really comes down to two things; the quality of your website content and the quality of your inbound links (links to your website that exist on other websites). If your content is well-optimized, it can appear in the search engines. And links that point to web pages on your...
Technical SEO: How Is Your Website Performing?
There are so many things that go into a successful SEO campaign. And that’s because there are so many search engine ranking factors. The search engines are looking at what visitors are seeing on your website to determine rank, but they’re also looking at what visitors aren’t seeing; the back-e...
Pre-SEO Campaign Launch Checklist
Like any other marketing initiative, taking the time to plan ahead and get all of your “ducks in a row” before launching an SEO campaign helps to set it up for success long-term. SEO work takes time and results can be slow to build, which is why taking a few extra weeks or months to set the camp...
3 SEO Reasons to Have a Business Blog
There are many benefits of operating a business blog and updating it with quality content on a regular basis. Writing, publishing, and sharing blog post content is a great way to share expertise and insights about the industry in addition to sharing company updates and news. Over time, a blog can be...
Local Business SEO Tips to Follow
If you operate a local business, you might not think that SEO is all that important, especially if you’re successful and already have a steady stream of business coming in. You might think that the advertising channels you’re already using are working just fine. However, even with a basic SEO pl...
3 Ways to Make Your Website Conversion-Friendly
SEO works to increase organic search engine traffic from target audience members over time. It’s a necessary part of a marketing campaign today, since pretty much everything is web-based. But we understand that website traffic isn’t the ultimate goal. What you really want is for website visitors...
A Straightforward Guide to What Matters for SEO
SEO really isn’t complicated. Of course, that’s easy for us to say. But it’s true. Even though the search engine algorithms are complex and remain a secret, when you strip all of that away you’re left with the tried and true SEO methods that have been increasing organic search engine traffic...
Make the Most of B2B SEO by Following These Website Conversion Tips
Leads are the lifeblood of any B2B organization. As a B2B SEO campaign gains traction, it should result in an increase in organic traffic that correlates with an increase in web leads. If you’re seeing the increase in organic traffic, but those visitors aren’t converting, there could be a conver...
3 SEO Ranking Signals to Improve with a Blog
The Google search engine algorithm has hundreds, if not thousands, of ranking signals. Google notoriously keeps all of these signals and how they affect each other a secret but there are some things that we’ve been able to figure out over the years (or Google has come right out and addressed). And...
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...
Can You Trust Your SEO Firm?
As the Google search algorithms have gotten smarter and stricter over the years, lots of the phony SEO firms out there got filtered out of business. However, every time we think we’ve seen the last of the outdated, spammy, black-hat SEO practices, we have a conversation with a potential client and...
3 Keys to Building a Solid SEO Campaign Foundation
If you’re just getting started with SEO, one of the most important things to keep in mind is that SEO is all about the long-term. There’s no such thing as overnight success and anyone who tells you differently is lying. This is why it’s so important to take the time up-front to build a solid S...
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...
4 Reasons to Align Paid Search with SEO
Search engine marketing (SEM) is comprised of two functions: paid and organic. As an SEO firm, we’ll obviously tell you how important the organic function is, but that isn’t to discredit the paid function. The best SEM campaign utilizes both and ensures that they aren’t operated in silos. Ther...
3 Ways to Increase Your Chances of Earning Natural Links
Inbound links are still considered to be one of the top SEO ranking factors, which is why link building should remain a priority. Of course, link building has changed. The quality of inbound links is much more important than the quantity of inbound links. And when it comes to link quality, a link th...
5 SEO Tactics that Will Never Hurt You
One of the most exciting things about SEO is that it’s constantly evolving. While this certainly keeps things interesting, it also causes fear and anxiety. SEO rules are known to change which often makes website owners hesitant. They understandably don’t want to invest time and effort into somet...
Online Advertising Tactics to Consider With SEO
If your goal is to drive targeted traffic to your website in order to increase leads and sales, SEO is an absolute must. An SEO campaign will improve a website’s organic search presence, ranking, and traffic over time. However, it’s that “over time” part that leaves some website owners wary....
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...
How to Research New Link Building Opportunities
Link building isn’t hard. It’s just time consuming. And what typically takes the most time during the process is the research, or actually finding new link opportunities. That’s why it’s so important to be organized so that you aren’t essentially re-doing the same work over and over, which...
What Does an SEO Campaign Look Like?
If you want your website to rank organically in the search engines and generate targeted organic traffic over time, you need to launch an SEO campaign. Or, you need to hire an SEO professional to launch one for you. But, what does that mean exactly? What does an SEO campaign look like and what does ...
5 Link Building and Content Mistakes to Stop Making
Link building and content marketing are no longer separate SEO entities. Essentially, they are the same thing today. In order to build valuable inbound links to your site, you need to be creating high-quality content that is going to get noticed. Even with this knowledge, there are plenty of link bu...
Where Should I Put My Targeted Keywords?
Search behavior has changed in recent years (think, voice search), but that doesn’t mean that keywords are out the window. Keywords are still used when people search which means that they should still be at the foundation of a solid SEO campaign. Keyword research still matters and helps to uncover...
How to Evaluate an Inbound Link Opportunity
Along with the quality of your website content, inbound links are one of the most important ranking factors that the search engines consider. Inbound links, or links to your website on other websites, essentially help tell the story of your website to the search engines. It shows them what your webs...
3 Ways to Make Old Content New Again
Content writing is an integral part of an SEO campaign, but it’s also often considered to be one of the most difficult parts of a campaign. In addition to requiring writing skills (which not everybody has), it also requires time and research skills. That’s why, for SEO purposes especially, it’...
Don’t Forget About Technical SEO
Most of the articles and information you come across about SEO tend to focus on the marketing piece of it: website navigation, keyword research, keyword incorporation, content marketing, link building, and social media. What doesn’t seem to get as much attention, even though they are equally impor...
How to Increase Traffic to Your Blog (and Website)
A blog is a crucial component of a business website. There are many reasons to blog but ultimately what it comes down to is that a blog can help generate traffic to your website and those website visitors can then in turn learn more about your business and products and consider buying from you. By i...
Established Brands Should Invest More Into SEO
We get asked the following question from time to time: If we're a solid brand in a thriving industry, is it worth it to invest money into an SEO program to rank for other keywords in the search engines? In other words, they're asking if it is worthwhile to invest money into an SEO program so t...
SEO Tips for Developers During a Redesign Process
While SEOs and web developers are both responsible for the success of a company’s website, their jobs are very different from one another. The web developers get to use their design skills to make the website look “cool” but they usually don’t know what they should about SEO. The SEO’s wor...
How to Prepare for an SEO Campaign
Are you new to SEO? Or maybe you’ve been out of the game for awhile and are looking to re-start? If that’s the case, you might be wondering what the first steps are and how you can prepare yourself for an SEO campaign. Here are 5 of the most important steps to take: Research SEO It’s in ...
Ways You Could Inadvertently Be Hurting Your SEO Campaign
Educated website owners seem to finally be coming around to the reality of what SEO is and what it isn’t. They understand what SEO best practices are and have the best of intentions. Yet, we still find that some website owners are making the following errors that could inadvertently be hurting the...
Why A Business Blog is a “Must-Have” For SEO
If you’re a marketer (which you must be if you’re reading this blog!) we shouldn’t have to tell you what the marketing reasons are to operate a business blog. Essentially, it’s an outlet to share your expertise, gain trust among target audience members, gain followers and a community, engage...
4 Steps Towards Local SEO Success
How are you marketing your local business? Sure, the tried and true traditional advertising channels can still be effective, but let’s face it: when someone is searching for a local business or service, they are heading to Google. Are they going to find your local business? If not, you’re missin...
Improve Your SEO Content in 3 Steps
One of the most challenging things about writing SEO content is that there are so many web pages out there that you’re competing with. Unless you are the only person to write about a specific topic, there’s going to be competition. And, if you are the only person to write about a topic, it’s p...
3 Key Responsibilities of SEO Clients
For many businesses, especially of the small to medium sized variety, it makes the most sense to outsource SEO work to an SEO company, rather than hire in-house SEO specialists (too expensive) or assign the work to an already overstretched current employee (the work won’t get done). However, just ...
Think SEO is all About Rank? Here’s Why You’re Wrong
One of the biggest misconceptions about SEO is that it’s all about rank. To an extent, we get it. Yes, if you rank in the top positions for a search, you’re going to get more traffic, and get more sales. However, fixating on rank as the only metric that matters when executing an SEO campaign and...
How to Write SEO Content that Matters
There are millions upon millions of pages of web content out there. While that might seem a little intimidating, the truth of the matter is that a small percentage of it is actually any good. And if you’re going to embark on an SEO campaign and begin writing and publishing content, the only way it...
Make These Website Changes to Turn Organic Traffic into Leads
So, you’ve been working at SEO for some time now and your website is completely optimized, you’re adding new content to your blog, you’ve gained some trusted, relevant inbound links, and you’re starting to see organic growth when you look at your reports. But you’re thinking that that grow...
Online Advertising Channels That Complement SEO
While we’ll always advocate for investing a portion of your marketing budget on SEO, we’ll also tell you that there are plenty of online advertising channels that can complement your SEO campaign nicely, if you have the extra budget for it. We look at SEO as the long-term strategy that builds a ...
Making the Case for Nofollowed Links
There are two types of inbound links: followed and nofollowed. In the world of SEO, followed links are “followed” by the search engine spiders and affect PageRank and domain authority. Nofollowed links include html code (rel="nofollow") on the back end that tell Google not to follow a link, or a...
4 Key Components of SEO
If you are relatively new to the world of SEO, it can seem a bit complicated. After all, nobody can tell you for sure what every single Google ranking signal is or how much each signal is weighted in the overall search algorithm. So, what are we chasing then? Well, the key to a solid SEO campaign is...