Reading Time: < 1 minA few weeks ago I was chatting with a friend and he was upset that his site wasn’t ranking first on Google for a particular keyword. We ran the search, and sure enough he was in fifth. I proposed a very simple challenge: click the top ranking, and then tell me if his site really […]
SEO
Marketing isn’t magic
Reading Time: 2 minI was talking to a friend a few weeks ago that was working with a new company. That company had been outsourcing their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work to another firm for a few thousand dollars a month, but it was unclear exactly what that other firm was doing. When asked for details on what […]
Branded searches matter too
Reading Time: 2 minWhen companies invest in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), their main focus is on unbranded terms. For example, if you’re a roofer you might be trying to rank for things like “roof replacement”, “roofing in Marietta” and other terms like that. This is a fantastic approach, but it often overshadows the value of focusing on your […]
SEO hasn’t ever really changed
Reading Time: 2 minIf you’ve ever done work on your website to improve your search engine optimization (SEO), and you’ve done it in a legit way, the techniques really haven’t changed much over the years. Google’s Danny Sullivan recently tweeted (via SE Roundtable) that very thing with two comments. First, he simply said: “Our good advice then remains […]
Location pages are no longer helpful for SEO
Reading Time: 2 minNearly a decade ago, I wrote a post explaining how Google doesn’t really change the rules when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). While they change the algorithm quite often, virtually all of those changes are simply to tighten up what they’ve been telling us for years. Now they’re coming after useless “location pages” […]
Hashtags are just words
Reading Time: 2 minYou’ll find hashtags on almost every social media platform, and occasionally on some websites. While they can be very helpful in certain cases, they tend to be wildly overused. First, they almost never help with rankings. If you include the hashtag “#DigitalMarketing” in a post of yours, the only value that brings is if other […]
AI is going to kill SEO
Reading Time: 2 minIt may take quite a while, but peak SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is behind us, and the relevance of it will only go down from here. That’s not to say that SEO isn’t important, as it still can be a major source of traffic for many sites, but the value will slowly erode over the […]
Keyword-rich domain names can cause problems
Reading Time: < 1 minIt’s long been known that keyword-rich domain names don’t really help with search rankings. If your site is “www.cheap-used-cars.com”, you’re not going to rank better for “cheap used cars” simply due to the domain name. That said, I never really saw much downside to them. They don’t help, but they don’t hurt. However, Google’s John […]
Who can see your website right now?
Reading Time: 2 minI’ve come across two very different website visibility-related situations in the last few weeks, and I thought they were interesting cases on how Google is able to see your site. They’re both related to “the magic checkbox” being misused. The first is with a friend of mine. They’re building a new site with another company, […]
Precise attribution is nearly impossible, and that’s ok
Reading Time: 2 minWhen we’re helping a company with their marketing efforts, we have a variety of tools that we employ to help track data and understand how things are performing. Starting with tools like Google Analytics, we set up data scorecards, heatmaps, trackable phone numbers, and a variety of excellent tools to help with our efforts. At […]