Don’t Copy the Competition’s SEO
One of the most frustrating (and frequent) comments I hear from my SEO clients is “Well, the completion is doing it so why can’t we?” “It” can be any one of a number of black hat SEO tactics including link schemes, keyword stuffing, buying links, article spinning and so forth. As a business owner myself I can understand why it’s frustrating to see the competition investing in SEO tactics that supposedly are banned by the search engines and actually benefitting from it by ranking better in the SERPs. If they can get away with it why can’t I? How bad can it really be if my top competitors are doing it AND profiting from it? There are billions of sites online and a far percentage of CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Steps to Make Sure Your SEO Doesn’t Disappear When Re-Designing Your Website
This is a guest post from Amanda DiSilvestro of HigherVisibility Optimizing your website takes a lot of time and energy, so it’s important that you don’t let all of these efforts go to waste when it comes time to revamp the layout and design of your site. Just because you want things to look nicer does not mean you want to start over when it comes to Google rankings, so you have to follow a few precautions to save yourself the headache. Unfortunately, many companies and blogs are quick to change the design of a website with the assumption that SEO will transfer over. In some cases it might, but in other cases you have to manually make sure that your SEO is surviving. This leads CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Can Be Frustrating But Don’t Give Up Hope!
As a small business owner I am responsible (with the help of the Brick Marketing team) for creating, executing and maintaining my own SEO campaign—so I understand firsthand how frustrating the SEO process can be. Yes, SEO can be incredibly frustrating and a little confusing if you don’t fully understand what you’re getting yourself into but that doesn’t mean you should give up on your SEO program! Here are 3 ways SEO can be very frustrating and how to keep the faith: Frustration: Google does what it wants when it wants. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, it’s a Google world and we all just live in it. I know that for some site owners, and plenty of SEOs, it feels like Google just does what it wants when CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Your SEO Agency Being Completely Transparent with You?
In my opinion, the best SEO agencies should strive to be as transparent as possible with their clients. After all, your SEO agency should be as invested in the long term success of your website as you are! A good agency-client relationship needs to be built on trust and mutual understanding and it’s incredibly hard to do that if your SEO agency is hiding behind smoke and mirrors. Here are 4 ways in which a good SEO agency should be transparent with you: 1. Sends completed link building reports. At the end of the day, the SEO agency you decide to hire is responsible for helping your website do better in the SERPs and drive targeted, organic traffic back to your website. One, among many, of the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Give Your SEO Partner a Hand!
In my experience, the best SEO vendor-client relationships are the ones where the site owner treats their SEO company like a partner, and not just a service provider. And being partners with someone means doing your part! Your SEO partner is there to offer expertise, knowledge, advice and guidance to give you the best SEO campaign possible, but a little help on your end can go a long way to taking your campaign to the next level. Here are 4 things a business owner or marketing manager can do to ensure their SEO Partner can do their job: 1. Implement onsite SEO recommendations. I’ve worked with many clients over the years that don’t implement a single onsite SEO recommendation (which is their prerogative) I give them and CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Red Tape Hurting Your SEO?
In my experience, red tape is often the death of any SEO campaign. Because SEO is so long term it can take a while to build momentum and get all the wheels moving in the right direction. This is due to a number of factors including the competitiveness of your niche, how old and trusted your website is, what kind of SEO and link building you’ve done in the past, and many more factors. But when you add red tape and internal office politics into the mix getting an SEO campaign off the ground becomes even harder which means it takes that much longer to start seeing the results and reaping the benefits. Before you start optimizing your website and investing in an SEO campaign CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What to Look At When Hiring an SEO Company
Deciding to hire an SEO company to manage your business’s SEO can be a big investment for many businesses. The trick is, with so many SEO companies and consultants to choose from (and throw in a few black hat SEOs just to keep things interesting!) how do you which SEO provider is the right fit for your brand? Will small or large firm handle your site better? Should you look for an SEO provider that also manages social media marketing? Would you better off working one on one with a consultant? It’s even harder to pick the right SEO company if you don’t have much experience with SEO yourself, so how do you know what you’re supposed to look at when deciding? Here are 3 things CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Investing in Small Business SEO
I recently had the honor of sitting down with link building guru (and yes, he deserves to be called a “guru”) Eric Ward. Eric has been doing white hat link building for clients since before Google even existed—he’s literally seen and done it all. I got the chance to interview him about his experiences and where he thinks link building is heading, and he had a really interesting comment about website owners struggling to make the time to invest in their small business SEO. Here’s what he said; Some folks simply do not want to invest in their web site. They want to invest in tactics to make the site they have rank high, regardless of the quality of that site. That’s CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Your Site Living Up to the Promises Made By Your SEO Campaign?
Search marketers are like waiters. I have to admit that I didn’t come up with the brilliant and spot-on simile myself; Dave Ragals over at Search Engine Watch did in this article I read a few weeks ago. I even left a comment saying I was going to have to steal his simile for my own use, so here it goes! In his article, Dave makes this great point about search marketers; We can answer questions about the menu, help our customers order the right meal based on their taste, make sure it’s delivered properly and even “dynamically” generate offerings for those with particular tastes or needs. But we don’t actually cook the meal. When the dish comes out from the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Looking to Sell Domains? Why SEO Still Matters
This is a guest post by Amanda DiSilvestro of HigherVisibility. More and more people are beginning to understand the importance of a domain name. Parents are buying the “.com” version of their child’s name when he/she is born, people are buying domain names that sound important (and maybe worth some money), and others are buying domains in the hopes of creating something profitable. Whatever the reason, it seems as though everyone has a domain on their hands. The only problem: Not everyone knows how to use it. Of course a domain name can sit there for no reason other than to hopefully sell it or use it in the future, but it’s best to gain a little bit of authority in your spare time. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why Are My Visitors Trending Downwards?
No website owner likes to see their visitors trending downwards. After all, the point of SEO is to drive more traffic to their site, right? While fluctuations from day to day are bound to happen, if you notice a downward trend (I like to look at three months worth of data) in your visitor count here are four things to consider: 1. Search volume is down. If people just aren’t searching using your keywords to search than it’s completely reasonable to see a downward trend in visitors. For instance, a company that sells Christmas decorations probably sees huge spikes in traffic starting in October (maybe even a little earlier), but that traffic all but disappears on December 26th. Why? Because after Christmas is over people just aren’t CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Take Advantage of Seasonal SEO
Every business, regardless of industry, is subject to seasonality. For some companies, their seasonality actually aligns with the seasons. For instance, a pool cleaning company isn’t going to have much business during the fall and winter months, but business booms come summertime. Other companies’ seasonality coincides with the sales cycles of their usual customers. If IT budgets need to be approved before the holidays, then IT services companies probably expect to see an influx in leads come the New Year when their customers’ budgets have been green lit. SEO can’t control the amount of search volume in your given niche (which in turn impacts visitor count and your site’s conversions rate) but seasonal SEO can put your website in the right place at the right CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Slow Page Loads and SEO
Slow page loads are affected by where the site is hosted, but also by the content on the website itself. A page can take longer to load if it has large, non-optimized images, or old pieces of code left over from CRMs and other applications that at one time were used with the site, but are no longer. A slow page load impacts SEO as Search Engines look at user experience when ranking. A clean and well organized web page is much easier to find and index. Cleaning up your web pages not only helps to improve SEO, but it gives your site a better overall user experience. In this week’s video tip, I explain page load time and its impact on your site’s Search Engine CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
3 Pre-SEO Questions to Answer Now
Before you dive headfirst into your SEO campaign (and I applaud your enthusiasm!) there are a few pre-SEO questions that need to be answered so you make sure aren’t diving into the shallow end! 1. Who is your real online competition? Sometimes the online market and the offline one don’t line up exactly. Small, offline competitors that you wouldn’t normally consider a threat can have a huge online presence, especially if they’ve been at it for longer than your brand, making them serious competition for non-branded visitors. If someone isn’t looking for your company directly, your brand name won’t have as much of an impact on the SERPs as you’d think. Contrarily, big brands that you normally can’t hope to beat out in traditional advertising outlets offline CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Can SEO Make a Difference with Branded Keywords?
Theoretically, every time someone searches for your company or product by name your website should always be in the number one spot. If you weren’t dominating the SERPs for your own brand I’d actually be a little worried because it means that you don’t have a strong online presence or someone else is piggybacking off your brand value to get their site listed ahead of yours. Again, in theory, your site should automatically be ranked #1 for any branded keywords, right? Here’s the thing though, ranking #1 for your branded keywords isn’t enough. You want to make sure your own as many of the top 10 spots (and more) as you possible can for your branded keywords. That’s where SEO can help. Most site owners don’t CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Journal is Written by
Brick Marketing Founder,
Nick Stamoulis:
Nick Stamoulis - SEO Bio.
Tel. - 877-295-0620
nick@brickmarketing.com
Connect with Nick Stamoulis
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
