Updating Website Content – SEO Video Tip
It's important to make sure that your website content is up-to-date so both the search engines and your visitors can find the more relevant information. That's why it's worth updating your website's content every two years or so. Make sure all product pages, services and more are 100% current. Watch this week's SEO video lesson! For more content marketing lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing Internet marketing video lesson CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Social Media Can Not Replace Your SEO
Some site owners have a hard time understanding that when it comes to social media marketing and SEO, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. In fact, the best online marketing campaigns leverage social media WITH SEO in order to be successful. However, every now and I then I hear a blogger recommending that a company dump all their time/money/energy into social media marketing and forget about SEO. (SEO is dead after all, right?) But forgoing your SEO in favor of social media marketing isn’t the way to go and puts your whole online presence at risk. Here are 3 reasons why social media marketing can’t replace your SEO: 1. You don’t own your social profiles. I’ve made the comparison before, but I think CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Content Marketing Creates Great Links
Traditional link building, things like blog commenting, online PR, creating business profiles and so forth, are all critical elements to any well-rounded SEO campaign. The search engines like to see a diverse approach to link building, so the more link sources in your link portfolio the better. You want your link building to appear as natural as possible so as to not raise any red flags, especially since the Penguin update came down hard on web spam tactics like the over use of exact match anchor text. However, SEO is constantly evolving and traditional link building alone, while still important, might not always be enough to catapult your website to long-term online success. A strong content marketing campaign is what is going to propel your 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...
Happy 4th of July!
Happy 4th of July everyone! I hope everyone is enjoying their mid-week holiday with a fantastic fire works show, good food, good friends and family and maybe even a trip to the beach! Since Brick Marketing is based in Boston, I felt like I had to share this great clip of the Boston Pops 4th of July Fireworks Spectacular! I might be a little biased, but Boston really knows how to celebrate the 4th of 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...
Exploring the Benefits of Branded Keywords
Guest post by Jessica Sanders of ResourceNation.com Branded keywords: You don’t have to work for them; they rank you organically, and are unfortunately often underused. Commarketing.com defines branded keywords as, “Keywords or keyword phrases associated with a brand. Typically branded keywords occur late in the buying cycle, and are some of the highest value and highest converting keywords.” These keywords come from your continual use of them online – in the title of your website, in blog posts, in various pages; essentially your website and social platforms are covered in them. Because of this, they are valuable for your search engine rankings, but also for your PPC marketing. Fix a struggling campaign by placing the right keywords in the right places or boost CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What Are the Online Goals of Your Website?
It's important to know what your online goals are long before you start to worry about SEO. SEO is a great way to drive traffic, and hopefully new business, to your site, but it is not a magic solution to all your online marketing or business issues. If you don't have a clear list on online goals your SEO might not actually be doing much good for your website. 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...
Google Analytics “Not Provided” Is Getting Worse
Last year Google announced that they would start encrypting search data when a user is logged into their Google account. Google Analytics would still track these visitors once they arrived on the site, but the keywords searches used to find the website would now be listed under “Not Provided”. Google assured site owners that the encrypted search would only impact about 10% of analytics. Although it’s less than ideal, I was still confident that I’d be able to make valuable SEO recommendations for my SEO clients based on the remaining data. However, it became quickly evident that the 10% was a far cry from what was actually happening. It’s been less than a year since Google announced their encrypted search update, and 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...
Who Are Your Resource Links Actually For? – SEO Video Lesson
On many websites, a "resource center" is really just a page dedicated to link exchanges. Google bans links exchanges (you link to me and I'll link to you) in the Google Webmaster Guidelines and site owners should away them and any other black hat link building tactic. If you want to get links from other businesses, build real partnerships with long term value. Watch this week's SEO video lesson! For more white hat link building lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing link building video lesson CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Don’t Be Blinded by the Search Volume!
“Insurance” gets almost 25 million searches each month in the US alone (according to the Google Keyword Research Tool). “Small business insurance” only gets a measly 60,500 searches in comparison and “small business insurance agency” only has a monthly search volume of 320. Clearly “insurance” is the best keyword right? After all, it has the largest search volume by several orders of magnitude and that’s what counts—more searches mean more visitors. And in a perfect world, that’s exactly what should happen. But we don’t live in a perfect SEO world and search volume is not the most important thing when choosing which keywords to target with your organic SEO. It’s very easy for DIY SEO site owners to get blinded by the search volume of various 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
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