Latest Posts
When Business is Slow Don’t Give Up on SEO
One thing that I am constantly stressing to my clients is that they can’t let month-to-month fluctuations (visitors to site, ranking in SERPs and so forth) shake their faith in their SEO campaign. Too often, site owners panic during a slow month and decide that SEO isn’t working for them and the...
Don’t Take a Cookie Cutter SEO Approach
If you’re in the market for an SEO service provider, it’s important to do your research and check with references before making an informed decision. Depending on the industry you are in, you might find that there are SEO companies that specialize in it. At first glance this might seem like the ...
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...
3 Advertising Mistakes That Can Negatively Affect SEO
It’s important to take an integrated approach to online marketing and advertising efforts. SEO is important but as an SEO firm, we’ll be the first to admit that it often isn’t enough in today’s crowded web space. It’s worthwhile to invest in other online marketing opportunities and seek ou...
How FAQ Pages Can Help SEO
Frequently asked questions pages are obviously useful from a user experience perspective. If a website visitor has a question, they can head over to the FAQ page to (hopefully) find an answer. Having this content listed prominently on the website also makes the lives of the customer service/sales te...
Everyone in Your Organization Should Learn SEO
Most people delegate SEO to the marketing department without giving it much thought. If the marketing department isn’t equipped to handle it, they outsource it to a specialty firm. No matter which scenario your company embraces – outsourcing or doing it in house – it’s important for everyone...
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...
On Page SEO Is More Complex Than You Think
There is a lot that goes into an effective full service SEO campaign. You need to produce great content on a regular basis, earn quality links, and your on page SEO needs to be as effective as possible. In the past, it was enough to come up with a bullet list of things that need to be addressed as p...
How to Maintain Your SEO Rankings
After continually working your SEO program for at least the past six months, you're now starting to see how much the program is paying off. You've been regularly publishing new content, sharing posts on social media, and earning valuable links in the process. As you continue to do these activities,...
The Argument Against Specialized SEO Services
Many companies understand the importance of SEO, but just don’t have the time or resources to do it themselves. So, they make the smart decision to start looking for an SEO company or consultant to assist them. When researching SEO options you may come across companies that specialize in SEO withi...
Local Search: Optimizing for “Near Me” Searches
There’s no question that search behavior has changed drastically since the advent of mobile search. People can now search whenever and wherever they might be. On the go searches have resulted in the “near me” search phenomenon and Google launching mobile-first indexing. For local businesses, i...
Moving from Local SEO to National SEO
Generally speaking, there are two different types of SEO campaigns, local SEO and national SEO. With all of our b2b full service SEO clients, we carefully consider whether it’s best to focus on local SEO or national SEO when developing our strategy. In most cases, we incorporate a combination ...
Outbound Linking Guidelines to Follow
When it comes to SEO, website owners are so concerned about generating inbound links that they sometimes forget that on the opposite side of the spectrum, outbound links matter, too. Yes, it’s important to generate inbound links because they instill search engine trust in a website, but outbound l...
Scam Alert: Negative SEO Extortion Emails
Spammy SEO firm emails are certainly nothing new and we’ve covered this topic before in the blog. Still, these emails are still prevalent as poorly run and spammy firms try to suck unknowing potential clients in by using negative, fear based tactics. Here's a look at what these emails look like an...
Find a Balanced Working Relationship with Your SEO Firm
Signing on to work with an SEO firm is a big step for any company. It’s an attractive option for SMBs that don’t necessarily have the budget to hire an SEO professional to work in-house, but understand how critical the work is. Outsourcing to a trusted firm is the next best option. Yet, the clie...
4 Ways to Supplement an SEO Campaign
Probably the most frustrating thing about SEO is that it takes time for a campaign to have a positive impact. It can take months, or in some cases, years, for a website to be rewarded with a ranking boost in the search engines after on-site optimization, posting great content, and building high-qual...
Do These Things Regularly for SEO Success
The key to achieving SEO success and maintaining SEO success is to keep at it regularly. It’s not the sort of campaign that you can turn off and turn back on, expecting to be right where you left off. If you take any time off from SEO work it will likely coincide with a gradual dip in organic traf...
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...
The Various Types of Searches
When a user plugs their query into a search engine, they usually have a certain motive driving the search. Their reason for searching ties in with the actions they take once they get to your site. In some cases, as is the case with "questions" searches, it can even impact how google displays the sea...
The Easiest Way to Gain Inbound Links
Taking a white hat (Google approved) approach to SEO link building is hard work. It’s a manual process of finding relevant websites that have link opportunities, such as industry/local business directories and industry blogs that accept guest submissions. The days of paying for links for SEO or ex...
5 Things to Do as You Start an SEO Campaign
The most important thing to understand about SEO is that it is a long-term online marketing tactic. It can take months or even years to begin to see traction and even longer in very competitive niches. That’s why it’s in your best interest to lay the best possible foundation for the campaign to ...
Don’t Forget to Ask for These Links
Building links for an SEO program has become more and more challenging as the years have gone on and the search engines have become stricter with what types of links actually pass on any authority. The best types of links are those that appear naturally, when another website owner finds the content ...
SEO Data to Look at Regularly
When it comes to SEO reporting, the most obvious data point to report on is organic traffic growth. Unfortunately, as we know, this can be slow to build. It’s easy to get frustrated after a few months if it doesn’t seem to be increasing. This is when some website owners scale back on their SEO e...
How Bounce Rate Relates to SEO
Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors that enter a site and leave without viewing other pages on the site. It is thought that when the bounce rate improves, this could also improve search engine rankings. In this article, we'll examine how bounce rate relates to SEO and also what to d...
SEO: A 5 Step Program
Sometimes it seems like almost anything can be done in “5 easy steps” these days. Losing weight, building a business, earning extra income, getting over an ex, and the list goes on and on. SEO can also be categorized as a 5 step program, but it certainly isn’t easy. In order to find SEO succes...
The Pros and Cons of an In House SEO Expert
While most small businesses can’t afford to hire an in-house SEO expert, for some larger brands it might actually make more sense than hiring an SEO company. It might sound strange hearing that from an SEO provider but I’ve always believed in working with clients that we’re a good fit for and ...
Website Mistakes that Harm SEO
We might not know everything about Google’s search algorithm that determines where websites should rank for keyword searches, but Google has given us enough hints over the years about what’s important. At the top of the list: quality. Google wants to rank sites that fulfill the needs of searcher...
Top Reasons Why SEO is Slow
One of the most important points that we try to make to prospective full service SEO clients is that SEO is a slow and sometime very long process. It’s not the kind of marketing tactic that’s going to have immediate results or a quick ROI. The complete opposite is true. In fact, it can take ma...
Brand Strength Correlates with SEO Results
It's true that brand strength correlates with SEO results. You’ll often hear SEO professionals talk about branded keywords vs. non-branded keywords. It’s all fairly straightforward. Branded keywords include the brand, company name, branded products or services, etc. as part of the search term. ...
Get the Most Out of Your Social Media Investment
Social media marketing is finally becoming accepted practice among the higher ups, but the pressure is still there. “What are we getting out of social media?”, “Is social media getting us any leads or sales?”, and “What is our social media ROI?” are all common questions that executives w...
The Importance of Informational and Transactional Keyword Targeting
The first step of a thorough SEO campaign is to conduct keyword research to determine how target audience members are searching. When selecting which keywords to target on existing pages and within new content that will be created going forward, it’s important to keep in mind that not all target a...
How to Get Natural Links? It’s No Secret
Inbound links pointing to a website remain a top ranking signal for Google. Having high-quality, relevant websites linking over to your website is a sign of trust which is why an important part of SEO is to actively seek out inbound link opportunities. However, this type of link building is somewhat...
Voice Search SEO Best Practices
As voice search increases in popularity – is it on your radar when it comes to your SEO campaign? If not, it should be. People are searching for pretty much anything using voice search, it’s not just for traffic information or recipes anymore. Why? Because it’s so easy to use. It takes less ti...
How Your Competitors Can Help Your SEO Campaign
The best SEO campaigns are the ones built on research. The first step is to thoroughly research SEO best practice. You want to know what you should and shouldn’t be doing before embarking on a campaign. Once you have a handle on this, it’s a good idea to see what your competitors are doing. Not ...
Broken Link Building How-To Guide
Broken links happen for many reasons – websites go defunct, URL changes are made and pages are removed during redesigns and the webmaster forgets to 301 redirect, etc. The end result is millions of broken links out there that are not only causing bad user experiences, but are also missed SEO oppor...
Are You Building an SEO Pyramid or House of Cards?
There is a difference between SEO best practices today and the SEO best practices of the past. Google is constantly changing its algorithm, and when it does that means there is the possibility that the methods could change slightly. Back in the early days of SEO the SEO hierarchy of needs (based on...
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...
Reasons to Add FAQ Pages to Your Content Marketing Strategy
Do you have a frequently asked questions section of your website? If not, it’s worthwhile to consider adding one. Not only is it helpful from a user-experience and customer service perspective (answers to commonly asked questions can quickly and easily be found on the website, reducing time spent ...
Using SEO to Improve Branded Search
While it is true that the primary goal of an SEO campaign is to improve traffic from the search engines from visitors using non branded keywords that are targeted in the SEO campaign, you can’t discount the importance of branded keyword search terms and how SEO affects these kinds of searches, as ...
Don’t Make These Costly SEO Mistakes
Search engine optimization is an essential component of online marketing since an organic search presence for targeted keywords will result in website visitors which can lead to sales and conversions. Most website owners know this today and understand that they need to get involved in this “SEO th...
SEO Software Won’t Do the Work for You
SEO isn’t just something that’s needed for big websites or large corporations. Every website that exists needs to be optimized in order to increase its online visibility and build brand awareness. Think about how many websites there are out there. Without an optimized site, it’s easy to get lo...
Where Do SEO Keywords Go?
While it’s true that SEO has evolved over the years, there remains one constant: keywords. Search behavior has changed and the search algorithms have gotten better at understanding the context of a search query, but keywords remain important. They are still what tell the search spiders what a web ...
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...
URL Writing Best Practice for SEO
Is your URL structure SEO-friendly? On the surface, it may not seem as if such a small detail would matter. However, an effective URL structure helps increase usability to your website, which could increase traffic and also give you an advantage over your competition. When creating your website, it ...
Social Media Doesn’t Impact SEO? Not Quite
Google has come out multiple times saying that social media (or social signals) are not used for ranking. So, does that mean that social media doesn’t impact SEO? Not at all. Social media is still a very important part of an overall SEO campaign because it indirectly has an impact on ranking over ...
6 Things to Analyze to Determine the Value of a Link
An important part of SEO is link building. It’s a manual process of looking for inbound link opportunities on other websites. A link opportunity can be a directory listing, profile page, sponsorship link, partner link, or guest post, among others. These inbound links get crawled by the search engi...
Link Building Opportunities That Are Still Relevant Today
Link building has undergone many facelifts in recent years. That is, if you’re following a white hat strategy. There are plenty of tactics that are no longer effective and can even harm a site, but there are also plenty that are still relevant today. If you’re shying away from link building alto...
Analyze Page Load Time As Part of Your SEO Audit
Like any service provider, the search engines want to create a service that will keep customers happy. This means that they want to rank the best possible pages that are relevant to keyword search terms. If the websites that the search engines suggest to users aren’t relevant or are poorly develo...
Top Local SEO Priorities
While there might be a few people out there who still use the Yellow Pages to find a local business, these thick booklets are more likely to be used as a doorstop, or tossed in the recycling bin. That’s because the majority of people looking for a local business are turning to their computers, tab...
It’s Impossible to Put a Timeline on SEO Success
When a potential client is interested in getting started with an SEO campaign one of the first questions that they ask is, “how long will it take for this to work?” Unfortunately, it’s a question that’s nearly impossible to answer, especially since a successful SEO campaign looks different t...