Latest Posts
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...
Tips for Hiring an SEO Consultant
If you own a small business, it probably doesn’t make financial sense to hire someone to do your SEO in house. Small to medium sized businesses can benefit from outsourcing the work to an SEO firm, but we understand that sometimes that isn’t financially possible either. The next best thing is to...
Understanding User Search Patterns for Effective SEO
Every SEO strategy begins with keyword research and in many ways, information gathered during the research phase will set the tone for the entire campaign. Every good keyword list will incorporate hard data gathered from keyword and analytical tools with manual tactics, such as creating lists of rel...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
A Guide to SEO Hats
In the SEO world, there’s a lot of talk about white hats, black hats, and gray hats. When talking amongst fellow SEO co-workers or others in the industry, we know what’s being discussed when one of these terms pops up. But what if you’re somewhat new to SEO? Do you have any idea what these SEO...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Have Realistic Expectations for SEO Success
It's true that when you're involved with SEO, you need to make sure that the expectations are realistic. Part of being an SEO agency means educating our clients and making sure that they understand the rules of SEO, see the big picture of what SEO actually entails AND ensure they understand that SEO...
Why You Still Can’t Beat Your Search Competition
SEO is a long term process. You aren’t going to see results quickly, but within six months to a year of an SEO campaign you should start to see some improvement in your search ranking. What if you’ve been working at it for a year and don’t see any significant change? What if you just can’t s...
Yes, Branded Pages Should be Optimized Too
SEO best practice is to optimize every page of a website by writing unique titles and descriptions for each page and optimizing on page content where applicable. A common mistake that we see some website owners make is to only optimize their “priority pages” which are typically their primary ser...
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 ...
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....
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...
Your SEO Firm is Your Partner
There's an art to choosing the best SEO firm for your business but once you do, it's important to make the most of it. What you really need, though, is a firm that treats you like a partner and not just a client. However, it does work both ways. If you treat them as "hired help" and not like a true...
Are You Making the Most of Your Content?
A solid SEO program requires ongoing content creation, something that our clients are often hesitant about. We’ll certainly agree that deciding on topics, dedicating resources to content creation, and promotion of this content isn’t always easy and takes time. But what’s important to understan...
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...
Reasons to Hire an SEO Professional
Are you thinking of hiring an SEO professional? By now, any company that wants to find success online should know that search engine optimization is mission critical. After all, if a website can’t be found in the search engines, what good is it? Sure, there are other ways to promote a website (w...
Technical SEO Best Practice Checklist
The SEO best practices that you probably hear about the most include posting fresh, optimized content on your website regularly, looking for relevant linking opportunities, and sharing content in social media. What you might not hear about as often are technical SEO factors. No matter how great your...
How a PPC Campaign Complements an SEO Campaign
Everyone today knows how the search engines work and that there are two sections on the search results page: paid listings and non-paid listings (PPC and organic). So as a business and website owner – where should you dedicate your time and resources? Obviously, we’re an SEO firm so we’ll stro...
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...
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...
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’...
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...
Is Your SEO Program Working? Here’s How to Tell
It’s common knowledge today that if you want to increase website traffic, you should be implementing an SEO campaign. However, the execution of an SEO campaign is really only one part of it. What’s the point of investing in an SEO program if you have no idea how it’s performing? While results ...
5 Ways to Get More Website Leads from Organic Traffic
The purpose of running an SEO campaign is to increase organic traffic to a website from the search engines. And while an increase in traffic typically results in more leads, it’s important to ensure that your website is set up in a way that makes it easy for website visitors to fill out your lead ...
3 Easy Ways to Elevate the Quality of Your SEO Content
You might not think that there’s anything easy about writing SEO content. And to some extent, that’s true. Writing SEO content certainly requires an investment of time and resources to ensure that what you’re publishing is high quality and will actually generate traffic, clicks, and links to b...
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...
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...
Don’t Forget About These Pages for SEO
On site optimization is the process of incorporating targeted keywords into the on-page content, title tag, meta description, and URL of each page of the website so that the search engines can match the page with related search queries. While primary service/solution/product pages are certainly a pr...
3 Signs It’s Time for a Fresh Start with a New SEO Provider
If you’ve been working with an SEO provider for some time, that’s great! Clearly you recognize the importance of an organic search engine presence and think it’s worth an investment. Hopefully your experience has been nothing but positive. Unfortunately, it’s not always the case. Even if a r...
Link Building Blunders That Will Set Your SEO Campaign Back
SEO informed website owners know to stay away from spammy, low-quality links and that it’s the quality of their inbound links that matters more than the quantity. A huge inbound link portfolio means nothing unless all of the links are from well-respected, authoritative industry websites. However, ...
Thinking of Outsourcing SEO? Here’s Some Advice
While it might be nice to have your own in-house SEO specialist, it’s just not the reality for the majority of businesses (websites). Experienced SEO specialists require a salary (and other overhead employee costs) which is why for the majority of businesses, and website owners, outsourcing SEO is...
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...
Basic SEO Items to Execute Right Now
Not all business website owners are SEO experts, however that doesn’t mean that business website owners get off the hook completely when it comes to SEO. The purpose of having a business website is for target audience members to learn more about what you do/sell and hopefully to encourage them to ...
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...
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...
Does Google Ads Help Your SEO?
It seems to be a common question that new SEO clients ask. “If I run an AdWords PPC campaign in Google, will it help with my SEO program?” The thought is that if you are paying Google some money, maybe they will help you out organically, too. It actually doesn’t work that way because Goog...