4 Pieces of Startup SEO Advice
A few years ago I was working with one of those lucky startups. By lucky I mean they had a decent amount of VC funding and weren’t completely bootstrapped for a budget. They even had allocated a set amount of their marketing budget for a startup SEO campaign because they wanted the full SEO/social media marketing/online advertising enchilada. They wanted everything, and luckily for them they had the money to get what they wanted. Most startups aren’t in such a good place. However, just because your startup might have the funding for an SEO campaign, that doesn’t mean you should just throw money at it and expect great things to happen. This former client, in my opinion, wasn’t doing enough to differentiate their brand in an CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Optimizing H1 Tags for SEO — SEO Video Lesson
H1 tags serve as the headline of your webpage. They are helpful in SEO as they are a great place to add priority keywords and are beneficial for the user experience as they let the reader know what to expect. Watch this week's SEO video lesson here! For more on site SEO lessons, check out the Brick Marketing Internet marketing video lesson CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Fresh Content Keeps B2B SEO Alive
Many B2B companies are faced with the same problems when it comes to their SEO. They do a great job with their keyword research and onsite SEO, they build and execute a solid link building plan and things seem to be trending upward. But then somewhere around month six it feels like their B2B SEO has hit a wall---visitor growth isn’t where it should be, nothing too dramatic is happening with lead generation and so forth. What’s the problem? Is their B2B SEO campaign suddenly failing? If your B2B SEO campaign has hit a similar wall, it usually boils down to one thing—content, or a lack thereof. SEO is an ever evolving world, and tactics that used to work great on their own five years ago CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How to Drive In-Store Traffic with SEO
An e-commerce SEO client recently asked me how their SEO campaign could drive physical traffic to their stores. While their e-commerce site was holding strong in terms of sales, actual in-store sales had been trending downward. They wanted to know if there was anything their SEO could do to help drive in-store traffic. Here’s what I told them: 1. Create store pages for each location with a map and directions, phone number, call-to-actions and a short paragraph of unique content. You want to make sure each of your store locations have a unique page on your site that can be properly crawled and indexed by the search engines. Those pages need to be optimized for hyper local keywords; there may not be a ton CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why Don’t SEO Companies Want to Make Money?
I had a pretty unusual conversation with an SEO prospect a few weeks ago and it was too interesting not to share. Let’s just say from the get-go my warning bells for a bad SEO lead were ringing loud and clear. To kick things off, this prospect called my company and the first thing he wanted to know what was wrong with the SEO industry. He claimed to have called over 40 SEO firms in the past two days and only 8 businesses had picked up the phone. “Is your industry stagnant or something?” I told him I couldn’t speak on behalf of the other companies he reached out to, but I understand how frustrating it can be when you’re trying to get CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Does Your SEO Company Charge for Extra Work?
I was talking with one of my SEO clients the other day about a secondary site their company owned. The site had been hit by Penguin and they needed some help pinpointing exactly where they went wrong and what actions they needed to take to address the issue. Even though this site wasn’t part of our SEO contract or normal monthly work I agreed to take a look at site and walk the site’s manager through the recovery process. It wasn’t a full SEO audit, but I tried to give them a good outline of where they had been caught by Penguin and what they needed to do to rebound. After the meeting, my SEO client commented to me and my team CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Never Trust an SEO Guarantee – SEO Video Tip
If an SEO company is offering an SEO guarantee and promising certain results consider it a red flag! There are too many offsite factors that are out of your control to guarantee SEO results. Any company offering an SEO guarantee might resort to black hat SEO tactics that are designed to produce quick, but short lasting results. Watch this week's SEO video lesson here! For more Internet marketing lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing Internet marketing video lesson CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO: Do the Work!
I came across this great post on SEOMoz a few weeks ago and I had to share it, especially lesson #9—“Stop Scheming & Get to Work.” Author Peter Meyers claims this is the most important SEO lesson anyone could learn, and I have to agree with him; DO THE WORK! (Peter says it with a little more force and an expletive in his post). As Peter points out, your website is your business and your livelihood. It’s what pays the mortgage, college tuition, car payments and grocery bills. How can you not have the time to do quality Internet marketing and great SEO? How can you afford to not have the time?! I can completely commiserate with the small business owner—I’m one as well. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Are You Siloing Your SEO?
I once got a frantic email from one of my former clients wanting to know why their organic traffic from Google had disappeared overnight. They had logged into their Google analytics account one morning to find their visitors had completely bottomed out—100% of their traffic was gone. Normally I would tell my SEO clients to not worry over slight dips in traffic but 100% is something that needs to be addressed right away. I spent the whole day coming through their site, Webmaster Tools and Analytics account trying to figure out what had happened. The traffic loss didn’t coincide with any Google updates, so I knew that wasn’t an issue. There weren’t any penalties or messages from Google in their Webmaster account and the site CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
This Is What an SEO Spammer Looks Like
This is an actual email that one of my SEO clients received a few days ago: Hi I recently visited your website during a routine survey of sites which may be capable of higher search engine performance through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Efficient SEO brings an increase in online sales or leads. I hope this information may be of use to you, if not then I apologies for any inconvenience caused. So, here's a summary of my findings on your site: - Your Google Page rank is 0/10 - You have 0/10 back-links - Your website has 0/15 pages indexed I'm going somewhere with all this... I wanted to do my homework and research your website because I want to show you that I have applied some research to your website CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why is Ranking Well NOT A Good SEO Metric? – SEO Video Lesson
The search results are getting increasingly personalized. This means that a person's search history, social signals, location and other factors are all influencing what kind of results they see in the SERPs. Because ranking can fluctuate from hour to hour ranking is not a good SEO metric. Watch this week's SEO video lesson! For more Internet marketing lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing Internet marketing video lesson CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Does Reading Other Blogs Help Your SEO?
For many marketers and website owners, our daily to-do list is already taking up the majority of our day. However, all you need is 15 minutes each day (I like to do it first thing in the morning or while eating lunch) to read a few other industry blogs. Why waste your time reading other peoples’ blogs? Well, aside from using their experiences and expertise to further your own knowledge and keep up with industry trends, reading other blogs can actually end up helping your own SEO. Here are a few ways reading other blogs can help your SEO: 1. Inspiration for your own content marketing. One of the biggest complaints I hear from my SEO clients is that they don’t know what to write about for CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
If the Web is Immediate, Why is SEO Slow?
SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—SEO is a slow, ongoing process that you just can’t rush. This is the number one SEO lesson I strive to teach my clients. On more than one occasion I’ve been asked by a full-service SEO or SEO consulting client, “But Nick. I can publish a blog post/article/video/changes to my website and it goes live immediately. Why doesn’t SEO happen immediately too?” There are actually a few factors that impact how quickly your SEO takes effect. Here are 3 of them: Too much content for it all to be immediately searchable. Yes, you can publish a 100 blog posts at once if you want, hoping your content CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
The Wrong Things to Think When Hiring an SEO Company
Fair warning, some of these thoughts may come across as a little ridiculous (especially for site owners that understand SEO), but after 13 years of Internet Marketing I’ve run into my fair share of ridiculous! If you are looking to hire an SEO company, here are six ideas you don’t want popping into your head during the process. 1. They’re an SEO firm, if they say my site isn’t doing well they must be right! Believe it or not, I probably get one or two calls a week from other SEO companies telling me that Brick Marketing is doing poorly in the search engines and isn’t generating enough visitors. First off, you’d think an SEO company would do a little better research before they CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Advice for Small Business Owners
Even small businesses can benefit from a strong SEO program. We live in an online world, and even 50 year old mom-and-pop pizza joints have a basic web presence nowadays, even if it’s just a one page website with their address and phone number. If you are looking to take your small business SEO to the next level, here are three pieces of advice: Try to learn the basics of SEO for yourself. In my opinion, small business owners shouldn’t be so quick to outsource their SEO the minute their website is live. Take a year (which gives your site time to age and gain trust) and learn the basics of SEO for yourself! Maybe signup for a local SEO workshop or download a few SEO 101 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
