How To Find An SEO Expert

Services like SEO can be very frustrating to find. Agencies will charge astronomical prices and can have middling results while freelancers are a complete guessing game most of the time. As a small to medium (or maybe even large) sized business, just know that you’re not alone.

Over the years, we’ve talked to so many companies that got scammed by their previous SEO, found someone who didn’t know what they were doing or got slapped with a penalty due to the SEO using outdated practices that are now banned. We’ve heard the pain, believe me.

How To Find A Good SEO

Whether you need a consultant, a local expert or an agency, the best thing you can do is ask other companies/business owners. Even if that means attending a Chamber of Commerce get-together and asking around then do that. The real secret is: the best SEOs are often hidden. That may sound counterintuitive, but most of the scams come from two places:

• Agencies that spend all their effort marketing and don’t train their SEOs, relying on the fact that the industry is “mysterious” and the client won’t know how to properly pay attention.

• Freelancers who promise the world but have no idea what they’re doing

When you ask someone for an SEO reference and they give you one, then ask them how much their traffic and rankings have increased. Ask them if they’re getting additional business and if that business was brought by the SEO. SEO can be hard to measure so you may not get a direct 1-to-1 (unless it’s an eCommerce site), but make sure the person themselves isn’t just guessing.

Let me say this clearly: Advertising presence does NOT mean good SEO. While I can’t mention their name, the area where I live has a huge agency. They don’t train their SEOs, they’re only allowed to do content and meta tags (SEO is way more than that) and they have a massive marketing budget. When an SEO leaves? No worries, they just grab some college graduate to act the part.

I know this because I interviewed for new SEO positions and interviewed several of them. None of them had any experience and they were not allowed to learn SEO past a certain point or they would literally be fired. Insane.

What if I can’t find a good SEO?

As a freelance network, we locate the actual good SEOs and allow them to work remotely. A lot of them work for some of the top agencies as their main job, so there’s the trade-off of them not always being readily available, but we pay them a higher percentage and don’t have overhead, so we can charge you less on top of that. That’s why Esseo Digital was designed: to get rid of the headache of finding a good SEO.

If you’d like, then reach out to us! As the owner, I personally oversee and act as Project Manager on every project. As I have 16 years of SEO experience then I can also guide your account managers if I feel they’re taking a wrong turn. Although, to be honest, I never need to hold their hand on anything anymore.

You can reach out to us using the form below. We look forward to talking with you, and be careful out there. The world of SEO is filled with scam artists, so please be careful not to get burned.

Why Backlinks Are Important

We've already talked about the first three pillars of SEO: Keywords, Technical, and Content. We will now cover the fourth SEO pillar, Backlinks. Backlinks have been and remain the primary ranking factor for websites for over a decade. This isn't just our experience; it's backed up by a ranking factor study that SEMRush conducted.

Do Backlinks Help SEO?

Yes, SEMRush discovered that domains with more backlinks have higher SERP positions. We briefly touched on this in the Domain Authority blog; backlinks can be thought of as confidence votes that this website is valid and its content is useful. However, not everyone's vote (backlink) counts for equal authority.

You may be surprised to find that some backlinks are hurting your rankings and can cause a penalty on your site. This illuminates a darker side of SEO full of malicious intent known as 'black hat' SEO. 

I must issue a word of caution before continuing on this topic. Backlinks are a narrow path surrounded by temptation to do things the wrong way. I cannot stress this enough: Do Not Buy or Pay For Backlinks. Google will issue what's known as a manual penalty and it will severely cripple your rankings and ultimately your traffic.

Do not try to scheme the algorithm. Google's algorithm is far too comprehensive to get away with buying backlinks these days. Trying to recover from a manual penalty will cost much more than doing things the right way. 

Before attempting to get new backlinks, you must take stock of your existing profile of backlinks. You can use Google Search Console to view your backlinks for free. Alternatively, SEMRush offers an audit tool that rates backlinks' with a 'toxicity score'. 

How to Check Backlinks in Google Search Console

Navigate to Google search console, then select your property in the top left of the dropdown menu. On the left menu, scroll down to Links. Go to Top Linking Sites to see a list of domains linking to you. Clicking on these domains will provide more detailed information about specific target pages and number of links. On the top right of any report, you can also click Export to your preferred spreadsheet. 

Is a Backlink No Follow or Not?

While on the page that the link is coming from, press CTRL+U to view the source code (in Chrome/Firefox/Brave), then CTRL+F to Find your domain URL. Here you'll be able to view the anchor text and see if the link is nofollow or not.  Simply check if there is a 'nofollow' tag. If there is not a nofollow tag there, then it's a do follow.

It's wise to check some of these domains to make sure they are legitimate and not part of a linkfarm. This is where an experienced SEO specialist can really benefit you. It's difficult to accurately describe signs of a link farm as they are constantly changing and evolving tactics. If you suspect the link could negatively affect you, there are a couple of options we can go into later. 

The Links page in the Search Console has External Links, Internal Links, Top Linking Text and Top Linking Sites. Internal links allow you to examine your domain's internal link structure. Backlinks are basically what's known as external links from other sites to your domain. 

It's a good idea to check the Top Linking Text section. If the anchor text in this list is mostly the same exact terms, it could look unnatural and lead to a penalty. For example, if you had a long list of exactly the same anchor text, Google would suspect this as manipulation. 

How to do a Backlink Audit with SEMRush

If you have a subscription to SEMRush, you can use their backlink tool to easily conduct an audit. Open SEMRush, navigate to the link building section, and click Backlink Audit Tool. Create a project and run an audit. You will be provided with an overall toxicity score. If your site has a high toxic domain percentage, we can handle it in a couple of ways.

The first is to work on getting better quality backlinks. Easier said than done. However, this will offset the negative impact of low quality backlinks. If the backlinks are of really poor quality, you can attempt to remove them by reaching out to the site. If this fails then as the final solution, you may disavow them through google.

What is a Disavow?

Disavowing backlinks can have a negative impact on your SEO performance if you are not careful and this should really be a last resort. You're essentially losing all authority gained from any links you disavow, good or bad. 

How to Build Backlinks?

Here are some basic guidelines for acquiring backlinks. First, ensure the link is relevant to your website. For instance, if you run a wedding venue, you should get backlinks from wedding sites and bridal bloggers.

Second, it needs to be a real website with organic traffic, not a fake front propped up by bots or paid traffic. This is a bit of a cyclic chicken or the egg, but if it has organic traffic, then Google probably trusts it. The opposite is likely true if there is no organic traffic and caution should be taken.

Thirdly, the site is authoritative. This may be hard to gauge, but using an authority estimation tool can assist greatly. Moz offers a toolbar, and SEMRush can also gauge domain authority. Simple rule: Higher authority domains offer higher quality backlinks. SEMRush also has a backlink opportunity tool to show if it's worth pursuing that opportunity or not based on its organic traffic and other metrics. 

Thanks for following along and we really hope that you find this backlink explanation helpful. Esseodigital is a digital marketing service providing agency experience at a freelance price. If you’re interested in boosting your business’ marketing success, please contact us.

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Content Centric SEO

Previously, we covered the first and second pillars of SEO, Keywords and Technical. Let’s talk about the third pillar: Content. You’ve already figured out good keywords, and you have fixed your technical performance. The next thing to do is enhance your content. There is an easy method to improve a web page’s content for SEO.

What is Keyword Cannibalization in SEO?

The first thing to watch for is keyword cannibalization. Keyword cannibalization occurs if multiple pages are focusing on the same search phrase. This will hurt your SEO efficiency because it’s putting the burden on google to make a decision. The decision is to choose the most well-suited page for the keyword. Any time we leave a decision to google, it’s using more of their resources, and they don’t like that happening too much. Also, they don’t know as much about your site as you might. As SEOs, it’s our task to guide google.

The search advocate at google, John Mueller, said the following about Keyword cannibalization:

“We just rank the content as we get it. If you have a bunch of pages with roughly the same content, it’s going to compete with each other, kinda like a bunch of kids wanting to be first in line, and ultimately someone else slips in ahead of them. Personally, I prefer fewer stronger pages over lots of weaker ones - don’t water your site’s value down.”

How to Avoid Keyword Cannibalization?

The easiest way to find keyword cannibalization is to use SEMRush’s position tracking tool: Go to Keyword Research and click on Position Tracking. Click on New Position Tracking to start a new project. Enter your target keywords and start the scan. Once it is complete, open the project and then click on the Cannibalization tab. This report will show you occurrences of keyword cannibalization for the keywords you entered earlier.

How to Optimize Content for SEO?

The second content check is easy. Does the page need to be upgraded? Your SEO pages should be unique and better than the content already there. Third content check - is the page optimized well? On just about every page, your primary keyword should be in the following areas, as long as putting it there sounds authentic to the user:

• URL

• Title

• H1 Tag

In order to step up your performance, it’s a good idea to use SEMRush’s on-page SEO checker. Go to the On Page & Tech SEO section on the left column, click on “On Page SEO Checker” and start a new project. Click continue to import keywords and pages. Then you can select what you want to do. For this example, use the Manual option to enter a target URL and the exact keyword phrase to rank for and then click collect ideas. SEMRush will then offer a multitude of ways to optimize the target page from a strategy, content, semantic, technical, UX and link building perspective. It’s a good idea to benchmark where you stand today and then act on the recommendations SEMRush offers.

The fourth content check you should ask yourself is, does the page have enough internal link coverage? Back on the Audit page, check if your target page is getting enough internal link coverage. The fifth check is does the page need more topical authority? If you think the page doesn’t have much in terms of internal link coverage, then it probably lacks topical authority as well. You need to create more keyword-driven content to support that fundamental resource.

Check out the next pillar of SEO, Backlinks. Esseodigital is a digital marketing service providing agency experience at a freelance price. If you’re interested in boosting your businesses marketing success, please contact us.

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How to do Technical SEO

Previously, we covered the first pillar of SEO, Keywords. Now we'll be moving on to the second pillar, Technical SEO. You might think to yourself, “self, I've used some awesome keywords but why hasn't my site started ranking for any of these?” I'll tell you.

How Important is Technical SEO

Your site will not rank without optimizing for technical performance. You can imagine technical as if it were a house's foundation. A foundation alone probably won't get you first page rankings but you have to build on something solid in order to get to the top. Otherwise your site will keep sinking. We can discuss in-depth SEO audits in a future blog. However, let's go over some quick methods to easy gains real fast.

How to Conduct a Technical SEO Site Audit

First, go into SEMrush and on the left menu near the bottom of the SEO section, look for "On Page & Tech SEO". Click Site Audit, then add new project, type your domain in and a name for your project. Before going any further, open a new tab to google.com and type the following: site:yourdomainhere.com. For example, if we use site:esseodigital.com, google has indexed 34 pages at the time of this writing.

So back on SEMrush, I'll select 100 pages per audit. You will just want to set a limit above the number of pages your domain has indexed. The rest of the settings should be fine. Click start site audit to begin, and once it's complete it can be quite overwhelming. SEMrush shows a ton of data and opportunities. If you were able to snap your fingers and fix all these immediately, that'd be quite a perfect world.

However, all fixes take time, so we have to prioritize the most effective fixes and solutions first. This is really where the experience in being an effective SEO comes in to play. Some of these opportunities will have a much larger reaching impact on performance. From a top level, we need to optimize three core categories to accomplish excellent technical SEO performance.

How to Prioritize Technical SEO Tasks

First things first. Your site must be crawlable and indexable. Kind of like Layer 1 of the OSI model, it's like physically plugging in the equipment. Many elements influence your crawlability and indexability but the most prevalent is your site's architecture, page experience, robots.txt, and noindex tags. Some of these could prevent google from crawling some or any of the pages on your site. So back in the SEMrush audit section, click on the Issues tab, then click category dropdown, and select crawlability to see all the possible issues that will negatively impact your site crawlability.

Then change the category to indexability to view what could prevent your site's indexation. Focus on fixing these errors as soon as you can, because if google cannot crawl your pages then they're not going to be indexed. And that means if they're not indexed, it's impossible to rank.

Second, you need to optimize for user experience (UX). One of the most important UX factors is page loading speed. If pages take too long to load, this is the biggest reason people will get frustrated and leave your site. You must do everything in your power to improve loading speed and page experience. While in the overview tab of the SEMrush audit, you'll see the new core web vital score. Click view details and you'll be able to see exactly which pages need improvement.

The nice part about focusing your efforts for core web vitals is that any of this work will have positive influence site-wide. This means you won't have to go to each and every page optimizing for core web vitals for the lion's share of your pages.

Are Internal Links Good for SEO?

The third technical backbone you need to improve is the flow of your site design. In other words, the architecture of your site. How do you use internal linking to guide users along through your site? There are a number of core principles when it comes to internal linking. The first is pages should not be any more than three clicks deep. Any more can hurt crawlability and indexability. Back in the SEMRush audit, click on the crawled pages tab. Click 'more filters', under the dropdown menu select Crawl Depth. To the right of this box, select 4+ clicks and apply filters. This will show you the pages you need to move up in the architecture.

The second step of site architecture optimization is finding the pages that have limited internal link coverage. SEMRush's Audit has an internal link rank that's an easy way to locate these pages. Under the same Crawled Pages tab we just used, select Internal LinkRank (ILR) from the drop down. This is a score mechanism used by SEMRush to measure estimated domain authority and link equity of the pages on your site. If there are many internal links from pages with many backlinks, the ILR score will be higher. A lower score indicates inadequate internal link coverage. You can filter these results by selecting 'Less than 10' from the drop down menu and apply filters again. This will show you all the pages that need more internal link 'TLC' attention.

This has been a quick overview of Technical SEO optimization. There are boundless depths to dive into with Technical SEO that we can cover in a future blog. If you are in search of a Technical SEO specialist, feel free to contact us. We have a plethora of knowledge on the topic and would love to help improve your business' success.

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How to Use SEMRush for Keyword Research

Any successful SEO campaign is founded on keywords. They are what people use in search engines to solve and answer their problems. The aim is for your site to rank for keywords that your quintessential customers are using in searches. So with all things considered, the first step of researching keywords is to find keyword opportunities.

How Do I Know if My Site Ranks for Keywords Already?

Now, how you want to do this will hinge on if your site already has existing organic search traffic or not. Here's how to find out if you have existing organic keywords and search traffic: open SEMrush, enter your domain into the search bar, go to organic research (left tab menu), and look under 'top organic keywords' near the bottom. If you already have some organic keywords, then that's the ideal place to start. It indicates that you're already doing something right.

How to Pick Good Keywords

If there's already a few organic KWs, you'll need to identify easy pickings. These are simply just keywords ranking from #2-15 positions. While in SEMrush, click on the positions tab, and then the positions drop down, and enter 2 and 15 into the custom range. You'll now be able to view all of your "easy pickings" keywords. These are the keywords on which you will need to concentrate. With simple optimization and maybe some backlinks, you can drive these rankings up. You'll begin to see a big rise in organic search traffic this way.

Interesting data: according to a study "Backlinko" conducted, the #1 spot gets approximately 31% of the total clicks for a keyword, while the #5 spot only gets 9% of those clicks.

How Many Clicks Do Top KWs Get?

Google Organic CTR Breakdown by Position

• #1 31.73%

• #2 24.71%

• #3 18.66%

• #4 13.60%

• #5 09.51%

This means that if you go from position #5 to #1, it will produce gigantic gains in traffic. That's why it's such a good idea to put all of your beginning effort on these easy pickings. Next you might also be asking yourself, how do you increase the rankings for these keywords? I'll get to that in a moment.

How Do I Start Getting KWs From Scratch?

What to you do if you have no organic keywords? This might be because you haven't done any SEO yet or you have a brand new website. Here's the steps you need to do: go to SEMrush, on the left tab menu under SEO click on keyword gap. Type your domain and also type a few of your top competitors' domains. If you want to know who your top competitors are in organic search, go to keyword research and keyword overview. Next, type a keyword related to your industry.

For example, if I use 'seo tools' then scroll down to SERP Analysis and refresh the metrics. Here you can see which domains have the most search traffic. Keep this tab open, and on the left tab menu again, under the competitive research section, open keyword gap in another tab (Shortcut: click with Middle Mouse Button or hold Ctrl + click). Type your domain into the first field, then copy and paste a few of your competitors from the prior tab into the other fields of the keyword gap tool, and click Compare.

On the next page, click on the position drop down, mouse over competitors and select "Top 10". Scroll down and look under "All keyword details for". Now you can sort these keywords from miscellaneous options. Two of these options are most interesting. Missing and Untapped are keywords for which one or all of your competitors are ranking but your website is not.

What’s the Secret to SEO?

Now that you know how to find easy keyword pickings if you do or don't have existing organic traffic, let me spill the beans on a secret. Anyone can find keywords; the real trick is knowing how to sift through these keywords and choose specific KWs that are worth going after.

Here are some more things to consider when trying to select keywords. First, what is the searcher's intent? You should always focus on keywords with transactional intent. You know, the ones near the bottom of the sales funnel. The best way to understand this is to know the five main categories of intent:

What are the Five Types of Search Intent?

• Informational

• Investigative

• Comparison

• Transactional

• Navigational

All solid SEO campaigns go after keywords at each stage of the funnel. Let's say you're building a keyword strategy for Esseodigital. At the top of the funnel, Esseodigital would want to target keywords with informational intent such as "What is SEO" or "How to Check if Google Analytics is Working". These keywords are extensive and will drive the most traffic.

The next step of a search journey is to target keywords with investigative intent like "SEO services" or "best SEO service". Take note that this is much more relevant to what Esseodigital offers. At this point the person searching is probably aware of brands, meaning they know about heavy hitters in the SEO services market like Esseodigital. That means they'll probably begin searching keywords with comparison intent such as Esseodigital versus X or Esseodigital reviews.

As you can tell the searcher is getting closer to their decision. They're probably contemplating their options. This brings us to keywords with transactional intent, which in the case of our example, would be something like "Esseodigital services" or "Esseodigital contact". The conversion rate for these keywords would be through the roof.

Finally, the last type of intent is navigational which would just be "Esseodigital". You won't need to spend too much time on these because the branded KWs will just rank on their own. So all things considered, you should always start at the bottom of the sales funnel and work your way up.

How To Know What Keywords To Go For

The next question to ask yourself about your KWs is "can I actually compete for this keyword?" You can use the keyword difficulty tool on SEMrush to swiftly sift through all of your KW opportunities. Type your target domain (or a competitor's domain) into the search bar, then go to organic research on the left menu. Then click the positions tab, and click the KD filter (Keyword Difficulty; not your favorite FPS gamerscore). Set this to very easy just to start off, then work your way up over time.

These are more "easy pickings" keywords you want to single out first because they don't require as much to rank. So in review, you'll want to focus on keywords with high transactional intent and low competition first. There are many more steps that go into keyword qualification and prioritization that we can discuss later. In the next blog we will move onto the second pillar of SEO, Technical.

Esseodigital is a digital marketing service providing agency experience at a freelance price. If you’re interested in boosting your businesses marketing success, please contact us.

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How to Check if Google Analytics is Working

Setting up tracking scripts for Google Analytics can be frustrating. Even more frustrating is thinking it’s installed and good to go, then finding out months later it hasn’t collected any data. Here are several ways to check if Google Analytics is working correctly.

Use Realtime Reports to Check Web Traffic

If you just set up Google analytics for the first time, it's going to take about 1 to 2 days to show web traffic in your reports. However, you can see if it's working properly or not immediately if you check the real-time reports. This is the fastest and most convenient way to double check that GA is working correctly.

In order to access these reports, go to your GA4 property, then under Reports click on Realtime. If you're using Universal Analytics, look under Realtime and click Overview. If your IP hasn’t been excluded, it should show pageviews when you or others visit your site.

Google Tag Assistant Tool

The Realtime report can tell if there is tracking data, however it can't specifically tell you if there's a duplicate tracking code installed and data is being reported twice.

If you used Google Tag manager, you may want to check for duplicate tags on your site. Check out the Google Tag Assistance tool at https://tagassistant.google.com/. You can use the website to check a domain, or if you have many domains to check, there is a chrome extension.

Click Add domain and enter your domain to check. After clicking Connect, a new window of the domain you entered will open. Leave this open and out of the way or minimize it to see the Tag Assistant tool working.

Check Source Code for the Analytics Tracking Code

A quick and simple way to verify if analytics is working is to view the source code then using Ctrl+F (Command+F for Macs) to find it. This option is best for someone who is not afraid of looking at code.

First, right click the page and select View Page Source or press Ctrl+U. From here you can Find (Ctrl+F) the code. It should look something like this for users with Universal Analytics. GA4 tracking is similar but slightly different:

<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->

<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-1337814885-1"></script>

<script>

  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];

  function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}

  gtag('js', new Date());

  gtag('config', 'UA-1337941315-1');

  setTimeout("gtag('event', 'No Bounce', { 'event_category' : 'Adjusted Bounce' })",20000);

</script>

Google Analytics Debugger

If you'd like to use a different extension, this is a popular dev tool straight from Google. Once installed, you can enable the Analytics debug mode by clicking the extension icon in the extension bar. Next, go to your website and right click on empty page space and click Inspect.

Then click on the Console tab and where gtag.js is spelled out big in ASCII like an old-school text file, then you know your tag is installed. Like this:

        _                _     
       | |              (_)    
   __ _| |_ __ _  __ _   _ ___ 
  / _` | __/ _` |/ _` | | / __|
 | (_| | || (_| | (_| |_| \__ \
  \__, |\__\__,_|\__, (_) |___/
   __/ |          __/ |_/ |    
  |___/          |___/|__/     

Or if Universal Analytics is installed, it will spell "google analytics":

Hopefully this helped you verify your tracking data is working. If you’re interested in boosting your business’ online success, get in touch with us.

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What is Screaming Frog SEO Spider?

Today we're going to talk a bit about Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which is a powerful tool for both SEO specialists and website owners alike. It can show a sky high overview or a close up detailed inspection of a website. We will cover how to configure the tool to start a crawl and then how to start a basic analysis of the data.

How to use Screaming Frog to Audit Sites Quickly

If you just want to take a quick look at a prospect's website, you can use these settings. It will speed up the crawl if you skip the images, CSS, javascript and SWF when you're just trying to get a basic idea of what's going on with the website. 

'Configuration' -> 'Spider'

"Crawl" tab -> Uncheck Resource Links boxes: Images, CSS, Javascript, SWF. 

From here you can pick and choose if you want to check Page Links or even the XML sitemaps and shift the crawl behavior, too. 

On the next tab, "Extraction", you can choose all the different kinds of details you want to look at, especially structured data like JSON-LD, RDFa, or Schema.org. This is a good way to see if the site is using structured data.  

Moving on to the "Limits" tab, we can also choose more settings for how deep you want to go in the site crawl. Defaults are fine here, but the customization will allow you to lower settings for a faster crawl, or dive deeper with a longer crawl. 

The "Rendering" tab has options to allow you to crawl sites that are not as crawler friendly. Default is text only, but you can shift this to Old AJAX or Javascript if necessary to crawl a site that's not working well with the crawler. If you notice you're not getting links during a crawl, try using these other rendering options.

Once you're happy with the spider configuration settings, you're ready to enter a URL to spider in the box at the top of the window, then click start on the right.

Just below where you entered your URL is a long row of tabs starting with "Internal". The cells below should start populating with all the pages that are linked to the URL you are crawling. You can click on each of these to get more information down below. The boxes on the right provide many different summaries. 

How to Look at Screaming Frog Data in Spreadsheet

Go to the "Internal" tab at the top, just below the row of tabs, click the "Export" button. You can choose to build a comma separated value (.csv), .xls or .xlsx file that you can then open with excel or sheets. 

Alternatively, I find it faster to just highlight the cells I want and copy (Ctrl+C), then paste (Ctrl+V) in your spreadsheet (if the paste has a weird format issue, then undo {Ctrl+Z} and then paste without formatting {Ctrl+Shift+V}). Only issue with this method is you won't have the header row. 

How to see Screaming Frog Link Score with Crawl Analysis

Link Score is screaming frog's metric for internal links. After a crawl is complete, you can view your Link Score by clicking Crawl Analysis at the top of the program, then start. Once the analysis is complete you can scroll almost all the way to the right to the Link Score column. This is a good way to quickly analyze what pages need more internal links.

Esseodigital is a digital marketing service providing agency experience at a freelance price. If you’re interested in boosting your businesses marketing success, please contact us.

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SEO Design & Layout

The design & layout of your website is very important when it comes to having good search engine optimization. We will discuss how design and layout should look and what the guidelines are. Also we will cover the best practices to implement to make sure that it is in line with requirements and, most importantly, search engine friendly.

What is SEO Design & Layout?

First, design & layout is the overall look and feel of the website. It is also called the user interface (UI). It includes images, videos, design and content. All of these are an integral part of the overall look and feel. There are 3 parts of the website: From top to bottom they are the header, body, and footer.

What are Good SEO Design Guidelines?

Being responsive is important. This term is tricky, because you'd expect it to mean how quick it responds to user interaction. While that is an important factor to SEO, responsive actually means it displays the correctly sized layout depending on if the user is browsing on a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile device. 

This is extremely critical to SEO today and Google takes this seriously. So seriously, in fact, that Google weighs your site's mobile design more importantly than the desktop when determining your authority.

Next, make it spacious. A cluttered website looks awful to users and creates a poor experience. 

This is not like a newspaper where everything needs to be crammed together to fit on a small sheet; whitespace on a screen is a free resource. It also allows you to better focus users' attention on specific elements of the page.

Also, simplify your website’s navigation. Don't make it a confusing maze for users to find what they are seeking. Display links to your most popular content on the header menu of your home page. It should be very clear and very simple so that a user will easily find the information they want.

Use relevant images and use them judiciously. High quality images that have been optimized for both file and screen size are best and you want to make sure to only use images that are relevant to the nearby page content.

Keep your font types and sizes consistent. Try to limit how many different styles are used on the page. It helps with good organization and information structure to use Header 1 once per page, followed by up to five Header 2 tags. You can use Header 3s more aggressively and most of your content will naturally be wrapped in paragraph tags.

Finally, it must be stressed again to make the page spacious. Keep the page clean and clutter free. This is a critical element along with keeping design and content user friendly.

What are Best Web Design Practices for SEO?

• Responsive design consistent with all types of device

• Clean crisp logo at the top left of the page

• Menu bar should be on the top right or center

• Drop down bars clearly laying out appropriate links (The links have to be very clear and easy to view, making sure that they are appropriately sized for each device. It is frustrating for users when they try to click on one link and another link that is too close gets mistakenly clicked.)

• Important elements or links should be more easily found at the top

• Content should flow like a story

• High quality images.  Use clear images that are the same dimensions so that they line up with one another neatly

• Social media widgets with links should be found clearly laid out in the footer 

• The footer is a good place to list less popular links such as privacy policies, disclaimers, terms, or other services

Esseodigital is a digital marketing service providing agency experience at a freelance price. If you’re interested in boosting your businesses marketing success, please contact us.

ROI of SEO

When you’re working with businesses, it’s important to speak their language for effective communication. It may seem hard to quantify the value of SEO and all businesses want to know what the return on their investment (ROI) is going to be. There are many ways to value your service, and here’s a couple. One for starting out fresh and another for gauging improvement. 

How are Key Performance Indicators Used?

First you need to find a ‘key performance indicator’. This is going to change depending on the business you’re supporting. If it’s e-commerce, then product sales are an easy indicator. Lead generation is another indicator for most other businesses. For every X many leads you generate, a business will profit an estimated average amount. 

This can get complex, but ask the business you’re working with, “how do you measure success?” You’ll want to know at least two things. Ask how many leads convert into an average sale. And ask how much value is the average sale. If this is a young business, then this can change periodically based on its success. 

Once you have an idea of these, you can then set up a tracking element in Google Analytics to count contact form submissions or how many times a certain link is clicked. Just keep in mind some of these methods may work better than others. While designing this tracker, make sure to think critically about how the tracker might count incorrectly and try to mitigate for this as much as possible. 

How to Add Goals in Analytics:

https://analytics.google.com/

⚙️ Admin

Under the far right column:

Click "Goals" >> Add New Goal

Note: You can add a Value to Goals in Google Analytics. So if the client calculates that every lead gets them $100 on average, you can assign $100 to each goal completion and have the value inside Google Analytics.

Once that’s working properly, it’s as simple as taking the number of leads generated, and dividing that by how many leads on average to generate a sale. That gives us an estimate of the number of sales. Then multiply the number of sales by the average sale amount to find the  value added to the business. 

How to Measure ROI of SEO

The previous example is a simple way to measure ROI, and should be tracked from day 1 of working with a business. Word of warning, the next thing I’d like to get into is going to have a little more math, however it should help with calculating if certain efforts are worth putting in time or not. 

So say for example we have an e-commerce site, fidgetpoppers.com, selling an amazing niche $50 product. We’re ranked 3 for our high value ‘fidget popper’ keyword. According to Moz, organic click through rate (oCTR) is 7% on average for a 3rd position transactional keyword. (2nd is 11% and 1st is 22%). 

Our site’s traffic is roughly 14,272 visits per month. 7% of our traffic clicks through. For the sake of simple math, let’s say 1,000 of these are organic click throughs (oCTR) monthly for the specific KW we want to improve. If we say about 3% of these clicks will go on to become sales, we have a conversion rate of 3% (this is on the high end of average e-commerce %). Then remember we’re selling a $50 product. Brace yourselves, here comes the math.

oCTR Conv. Avg Value SEO Value Added

1,000 x 3% x $50 = $1,500/mo

You see, once we start establishing some of these numbers, and experimenting with different values in the formula, we can begin to see how much we stand to gain from our efforts. On average, e-commerce ROI is $2.75 for every $1 spent on SEO, however your mileage may vary. This isn’t an insert money, receive profit method. You must apply reasonable expectations and thought here.

If you found this helpful or would like to consult with us, please contact us here. Esseodigital is a digital marketing service providing an experience you’d expect from an agency at the price of a freelancer. 

What is Domain Authority and Why is it Important?

Maybe you want to explain domain authority to someone that does not work in SEO, such as friends or potential clients. SEO is a tricky term, and kind of gets thrown around alot haphazardly. Also, it can be difficult to explain SEO concepts to someone inexperienced with it. Hopefully after this quick read, you should have a better understanding and be able to communicate the idea of SEO better.

Domain authority is a very important SEO concept. Ask yourself, after I search something, why do I see certain results listed on the search engine results page, but not others? The reason is simple: search ranking factors. This is what search engines use to determine which results are at the top for that search query, phrase or keyword.

Search Ranking factors:

Keywords >> "Relevance" (On-page)

Links >> "Authority" (Off-site)

These are the two main search ranking factors, and ultimately are why any page is ranking or not ranking for any search phrase.

Are Keywords Still Relevant in SEO?

The first of these two main factors are the page itself. So, yes, keywords will always play an important role in SEO. Anything and everything on the page including the content and keywords determine its relevance to the search query. This is more widely understood of the two factors, while the next is really important and overlooked. 

Is Link Building Still Relevant to SEO?

There is also the second main factor of search rankings: Links. Does anyone link to these pages? Do other sites trust this page? Has anyone referred to or cited this page? This is known as authority. Google really innovated this early on and has become a very very important concept to SEO across the web.

• Links are credibility

• Quantity is good

• Quality is really good

You can think of a web page linking to another web page as a vote of confidence. It's like saying I am linking to this web page because it is credible and probably important. The number of links obviously is important because there are more votes saying this is a good page. However, Link quality is most important. If a site with high authority links to you, this is going to be much more valuable than a low authority site. 

And links from sites with a high authority are not just worth a little bit more. They are worth exponentially worth more. Think of a logarithmic scale skyrocketing. It is known for a fact that some links are much more valuable than others because of experiments, practice, expertise, and reading Google's patents.

Wrapping up, Domain Authority is a way Google grades sites based mostly on links and relevance. Unfortunately, Google no longer shares these ratings for sites. Third-party sites have to scan for all links between pages and emulate Google's discontinued PageRank. Moz provides a popular SEO tool for gauging Domain Authority. 

If you found this quick read helpful, feel free to link it on your site. Or if you’re interested in growing your businesses marketing success, please contact us.

Are Long URLs Bad for SEO?

To answer the question quickly and technically: yes, an overly long url is bad for SEO. Typical URL lengths should be as short as possible without losing the general idea of the page purpose and should be no more than 100 characters in length. For example, this is a really bad URL: 

https://www.reallybadawfulterribleexample.xyz/123/9810309/blog/2013/14/august/thisisareallyhardtoreadandiscomplicatedsiteurldontclickthislinkitwontgoanywherehopefully/

OK, I might have gone overboard with the bad example, but you get the idea. The URL should only be as long as needed to show the page's purpose. Google constantly changes the exact site title pixel widths and it also changes depending on the end user device. Typically there is a 600 desktop pixel-width limit on Google’s Snippets, Page Title, and Meta Descriptions (as of Feb 2022).

Who is Reading the URL?

While part of SEO is adapting to Googlebot, you’d think that a bot would love specificity. However, the main focus should be tailoring the site to best fit the person searching because, ultimately, people on the Search Engine Result Page are choosing to click on a site and we want ours to be the one they choose. We can be more user friendly and inviting than any of our competition. This means that a URL should be easily read by a human being.

What is URL Structure?

In the example at the top, there's a lot going on, so let’s break it down piece by piece. 

“https://” is the site protocol (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure). Sometimes, you’ll see just http:// which is the older non-secure version.  

“Www.” is sometimes left out for brevity and simplicity. It used to always be required, but is no longer. (DNS lookups work without the www.)

“Esseodigital.com” is the site domain. It’s always a good idea to pick a smart domain name that is either your recognized brand name or explains your site’s mission or purpose.

“/blog/” Each of the /blog/ or /'s mean a directory, or kind of like a folder if you want to compare it with Windows. This is where your site’s directory structure comes in. It should be tidy, simple, and organized. There seems to be some debate over the amount of these directory “/’s” not mattering, but take it from personal experience and advice from trusted sources; you’ll get better authority if you keep the directories to a sleek minimum. Directory structure is important, and we’ll touch on that in a future blog. 

“/are-long-urls-bad-for-seo/” This is known as the URL ‘slug’. Choosing a proper slug is critical because changing it is generally not recommended. You’ll lose some of the authority the page has gained and changing it could create dead links and problems elsewhere. Avoid changing slugs when at all possible.

What’s a Good Example?

The URL can be as simple as the page title, but it doesn't always have to match the title word for word. Here are some examples:

esseodigital.com/blog/bad-urls

Bad example: Too short and vague. 

esseodigital.com/blog/are-long-urls-bad

Good example: short, general idea of the blog topic discussing a question.

esseodigital.com/blog/are-long-urls-bad-for-seo

Good example: more specific, without adding too many characters. 

Note: Since the beginning of the text is always displayed, you should frontload the general idea at the beginning, and get more specific at the end. That way, if the URL is truncated in a search result, the person looking at the URL gets the general gist of the page. 

Best Practices For Good URL & SEO

• You should use hyphens (-) to break up words, not underscores ( _ ).

• Keep a URL as short as possible without losing the meaning or removing keywords that pinpoint specifics.

• Keep overall length under 100 characters.

• Pick a good slug and stick with it.

• Simplify your directory structure. Discuss this with your site or SEO administrator.

If you’re searching for an experienced and knowledgeable SEO team, reach out to us at esseodigital.com/contact. We have worked with many clients and have decades of experience growing organic site traffic. 

Google Core Web Vitals Update 2022

First announced in May 2020, Google’s algorithm update was delayed a few times prior to rollout. Last year it was delayed twice. It finally started rollout in August 2021 and supposedly ended that month. However, that was only part of the update. 

The August updates mostly were based on mobile user experience. So if your site saw major drops in organic traffic, it’s likely due to your site’s mobile friendliness. Most of google’s data samples are from Chrome browser users. Known as “CrUX” data, this simply means Chrome User Experience. 

What does this mean for Site Admins and SEOs?

Google has begun rollout of their Desktop updates in February, and they should conclude by the end of March 2022. These changes will begin to affect sites based on passing several factors google has chosen. Today, we will list and describe these factors, because they may not be clearly obvious and understandable at first.

What are the Factors & Metrics Google is Using?

Core Web Vitals LCP

Known by some as “Largest Contentful Paint”, this has to do with loading performance. This marks the point in page load when main content has likely loaded. This event should start within 2.5 seconds of when a page first begins to load.

CLS Cumulative Layout Shift 

This metric measures visual stability of a page. For example, when you’re reading an article and suddenly the text jumps up or down because something is loaded on the page, rearranging everything around it. This unexpected movement can have extremely frustrating results and dramatically affect user experience negatively.

First Input Delay FID

This factor is quite simple. It measures interactivity by how long from when a user clicks or taps a link or button to when the browser is able to process that interaction. This should be kept under 100 milliseconds.  

HTTPS Security 

“HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure” is a way for computers to communicate while protecting integrity and confidentiality of the data between them. It is recommended for all websites to use HTTPS, regardless of your site’s content. (Note for network admins: This is TCP port 443)

Absence of Intrusive Interstitials 

Page elements and dialogs that block the user's view of page content. e.g. promotional pop ups, or overlays covering the page. These are often very annoying to end users, and will make them not want to return to your site in the future.

Mobile Friendliness 

Part of what googlebot looks at while crawling a site is the mobile page layout. It measures to see you have properly sized buttons and elements. This makes it easy for users to read or use the site while browsing on a small screen such as a mobile device. 

Hopefully this helps clear up any confusion about the core update or helps keep your site from losing domain authority. Check back soon for more SEO information on this important update.

Do eCommerce Sites Need SEO and PPC?

If you're starting an e-commerce business, you've probably wondered how to get traffic to your site. And after doing your due diligence, you've asked yourself if you need SEO and PPC advertising? Short answer is yes. Read on to learn which kind is right for you. 

Why SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a system of honing a website to better serve the person searching for something. It focuses on a steady growth of organic traffic. This technique mostly means improving the website to be more user-friendly, relevant, and most importantly useful. 

The organic results on a search engine result page do not get there by paying money to google. Which means it is technically free. This is nice if you've taken the time to build up to that point because that traffic won't cost anything to you, and will bring many paying customers. The problem with this is it does take time and legwork. This is where PPC comes in.

Why PPC?

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a marketing structure that involves a business paying each time a user clicks on their online ads. This covers many different kinds of PPC ads, but the lion's share of PPC are paid search ads. Social media platforms often provide paid ad options. 

PPC is much like a water faucet. Because you're paying for the ads, once you turn off the faucet (PPC campaign), the water (traffic) stops flowing. If your small e-commerce site is still just a seed in a pot, this is just what it needs to grow.

PPC is often a great way to jump-start a business. It allows for building brand awareness and credibility. This is the key necessity for successful ecommerce sites. In today's age of e-commerce, brand reputation is everything. 

If nobody has ever heard of you before, they're much less likely to buy from you. Think of that green gecko selling insurance, or "it's my money and I need it now". Every company that wants to be successful has to get their name seen to bring in customers.

Why Not Both?

A very popular strategy is a hybrid approach. By concentrating on PPC early, and fixing up SEO problems on your site little by little, you'll enjoy the benefits of both. This way you won't have to buy PPC ad space forever, and your SEO work will pick up the slack in the long run.

As your site progresses, the trick will be balancing the two strategies. This is where ESSEO Digital can help you. We can assess your site's traffic performance and implement the right mix of these strategies, custom fit for you. We are well-practiced in the field of digital marketing and have helped countless businesses grow into prosperity. 

Contact us to get started.

How To Measure The Effectiveness of a Digital Marketing Campaign

Success is obviously the goal of any marketing campaign, but what is success? Well, that depends on the company and what they’re trying to achieve. Today we’ll take a look at how to measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign(s).

The End Goal

Ask yourself: “what is the end goal?” Be honest, too. For 90% or more of businesses the end goal is profit. This is generally simplified into Return on Investment (ROI) to isolate a campaign for analysis.

Now this is not always the case. Sometimes (on rare occasions) a non-profit will want to market. Perhaps a rich journeyman will start a new venture and not really care about it’s success, only that it sees eyes. The end goal doesn’t matter; only that you identify it and be honest with yourself.

Yes, we all want to be friends and have a long-lasting partnership that makes life easier on everyone, but never take your eyes off the prize of what you’re trying to accomplish. Because at the end of the day that’s the common thread linking you.

Now for the hard part:

What If I Don’t Have eCommerce Tracking?

This is the single most common disconnect we see. You want to measure return on investment directly, which requires seeing exactly how much revenue SEO has generated. However, this is impossible to track with complete accuracy. That’s a tough one for the ‘numbers’ people to handle. SEO requires a bit of trust and you have to put some pieces together, that’s just a matter of fact. Unless you have eCommerce Tracking and a payment portal and only accept online transactions then you’re going to be stuck with some guess work.

Get As Close As You Can

If you don’t have eCommerce tracking, measure leads. This includes phone calls, form submissions and anything else that brings in a potential buyer. Then measure your ‘close rate’ for these leads and simply apply it to the number of leads from that channel. This is the most common method used and either involves some simple Goal or Event Tracking.

If you don’t have a form and your site is purely informational, that’s where it gets trickier. After leads, should they be unavailable, we would simply measure Organic Traffic and Keyword Rankings. These are always measurable, so there should be no situation where you can’t use these as a baseline.

To review: Return on Investment > Revenue > Leads > Organic Traffic + Keyword Rankings

In any of these events, Organic Traffic and Keyword Rankings should be reported clearly because they’re always an important part of the equation.

Want to start a Digital Marketing Campaign with an experienced set of agency-level freelancers who will report all of this for you? Reach out to us!

How Long Does It Take For Google Ads To Work?

One of the most common questions we see in the PPC (Pay Per Click) realm is: “I just started ads, why aren’t they working!?” We’re going to take a look at why this happens and what you should do:

The “Learning” Period.

When you first develop ad copy, it doesn’t go straight onto Google. Instead, it goes into the system for a “learning” phase. Google needs to verify that your ad is relevant, doesn’t contain any bad stuff, and also figure out it’s performance. It starts small, by delivering the ads and gathering data. The more data it gathers, the more ‘confidence’ it has in the ad and the closer to final approval the ad will get.

The most confusing part is that this learning period can drastically vary in time. For some people, their ads can be live in hours with full approval. For others, it can take weeks. As a rule of thumb: if it’s been 3 days and your ad is still in the ‘learning’ phase with no traffic then something is wrong.

Edit: Google’s learning phase has been extended. It will now last 1-2 weeks on average as of Dec 15, 2021.

Google Analytics Is Crucial

For you to know if your ads are really “working,” you need to make sure Google Analytics is connected to your Google Ads campaign. You also need to ensure that auto-tagging is set up. This is what marks the traffic as “Google / CPC” inside of Analytics. Without this, it will go into Direct traffic which you won’t be able to analyze well.

It’s Been 3 Days And There’s No Traffic, Help!

We offer small consultation packages for anyone just trying to jumpstart their PPC and would be happy to help guide you. If you’re interested, feel free to contact us! As we’re a freelancer agency we don’t have the overhead or high prices that most agencies do, but that also means we don’t have a centralized location to offer a phone number with. Once you’re hooked up with a contractor then you’ll communicate with them directly.

If you’d like to give it a go on your own then use the warning messages Google provides under the “Status” column.

And as mentioned in the previous blog, I’ll be pumping out as much content as possible to help guide new users with various questions. If you have a question you’d like me to answer then feel free to comment on this blog.

Happy Marketing Everyone,

Guide on How To Analyze Data From Google Analytics - Part 1: Basic Terminology

In this week’s post I’m going to take you through some basic Google Analytics data analysis. We’ll start with a look at where you can find simple information as well as what the terms mean.

A Simple Starter Dataset

When you’re inside Google Analytics go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source / Medium. Many SEOs use this as their “homepage” of Google Analytics because it displays a lot of crucial information in a very succinct way.

Once you’re at the Source / Medium page then make sure to change the date in the top right. Typically, we report Monthly using Year-over-Year data. This is used to avoid seasonality, an example would be comparing June 2020 vs June 2019.

After that, you’ll have a line graph at the top and a giant table under it with a lot of strange words. Let’s take a look at what all these strange words mean.

Google Analytics Metric Meanings:

First, let’s go over everything you see in the Source/Medium column. The first one is the source, which means “the company that referred the traffic”. If Bing supplied the PPC traffic, the source would be Bing. If it was a referral, it’d be the website domain. Some examples you’ll see are Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Instagram, etc. These are the main traffic movers on the internet.

The second is the Medium which is the “method by which they entered your site”. The types of methods are:

1. Organic - People who Google a keyword and find your site in the Organic section. Not applicable for any Google.com listings with “Ad” next to them. Those will be at the very top or very bottom.

2. Direct / (None) - This is a combination of Direct, which is anyone who types in the site URL directly, and a wastebasket of users Google doesn’t know what to do with. As your site grows in traffic, the percentage of this traffic will typically fall dramatically.

3. CPC - This means “Cost Per Click” and is a strange abbreviation used for PPC (Pay Per Click) traffic. These are for clicks on the Ads that I mentioned previously in #1. When you search on Google, you typically get a combination of CPC ads and Organic ads. Why Google didn’t call this medium “PPC” is beyond me, no one uses this acronym anymore.

4. Referral - This is website-to-website traffic. If my website had a direct link to your website and someone clicked the link, your Analytics would see one referral visit from my site.

5. Custom Methods - Some types of tracking let you put in your own source and medium, which is why you may occasionally see “email”, “social” and other mediums in there. If the Medium is not one of the ones I listed above then it is a Custom Method. That’s important to know, because a lot of people think Google Analytics automatically tracks Email Newsletter Traffic, Social Media Traffic, etc. It does not, those are typically done through Pixels or something called UTM Tracking.

Other Terms from the table include:

Users - The raw number of people who visited your site

New Users - The raw number of people who visited your site who had not in the previous 30 days (this number can be altered).

Sessions - If the same person visits twice, that’s 1 user but 2 sessions. This metric just means total visits regardless of if the same person visits multiple times.

NOTE: When looking at data, either use “Users” or “Sessions” for all of your reporting. Do not mix them, it gets really confusing. Either one is valid, but only pick one.

Bounce Rate (Default) - The percentage of sessions that leave without visiting a second page. Average Bounce Rate is around 45-50% for most websites. We typically shoot for 35% here. Anything below 20% is usually indicative of a tracking error.

Bounce Rate (ABR) - The percentage of sessions that leave without visiting a second page or spending 30 seconds on site.

NOTE: ABR (Adjusted Bounce Rate) is a snippet of code you can add to improve tracking. Websites do not have this by default. It’s an amendment to the Bounce Rate definition since the base definition is extremely unfair, particularly to smaller sites. All 1-pagers, by definition, used to have 100% Bounce Rates.

Pages / Session: This is simple Total Pageviews divided by Sessions. It’s the average number of pages someone will visit per session. We typically shoot for 2.5 to 3.0 here.

Avg. Session Duration - The average amount of time a user spends on the site. We typically shoot for 2:00-2:30, though a lower number could just be the result of people converting fast as well. Oddly enough, this can be the hardest metrics to analyze and improve.

On the far right side you’ll see Goals and Events. I won’t get into these, but they’re ways to track conversions (form submissions, contact requests, etc). If you have an eCommerce site then you’ll see 3 final metrics:

eCommerce Conversion Rate: The percentage of sessions that resulted in an eCommerce transaction.

Transactions: The number of parties who transacted.

Revenue: The total amount of money gained from website sales.

I’m going to be continuing this guide series, so make sure to bookmark the blog and check back for the next part!

What is SEO? (In Easy To Understand Words)

Diving into the world of Search Engine Optimization (known as ‘SEO’) can be terrifying. The industry itself is a mystery to most people and the profession has changed so drastically over the past decade that it’s borderline unrecognizable. To help you better understand what SEO is in a simple and easy-to-understand fashion, we’re going to break it down into the bare basics. And we’ll try not to use any scary sounding terms to confuse you.

The Golden Rule of SEO

Simply put: the goal of an SEO is to improve a user’s experience on a website. Yes, there are other tasks that SEOs do. Yes, that’s an oversimplification. However, that is the very core of what we do as SEOs. It’s a simple reward system where you improve a user’s experience and Google, Bing, Yahoo and whoever else give you a reward. That reward is better rankings and more trust (which is a metric known as ‘authority’, they’re synonyms).

Think of Google as an omnipotent person. They need to decide how to rank websites and in what order to list them, but they don’t know any of these websites. So how do they know what to do? Well, think about what you would do if tasked with listing websites based on the most trustworthy ones.

Product websites? You’d list the sites with the biggest inventory.

Informational websites? You’d look for ones with a good track record of telling the truth.

Service websites? Well, what do their previous customers think of their service?

And in all of those cases you’d also want to make sure the site is safe, secure and user friendly.

Putting yourselves in Google’s shoes is something people rarely do because they’re still stuck in the early 2000s when SEO was all about ‘gaming’ the search engines. Those days are over and Google is smarter than that. In fact, they’ll penalize you for trying to game the system now, so don’t believe anyone who tells you that’s the way to go.

I want to do SEO myself, what do I do?

While we offer SEO plans ranging from small buckets of time to recurring monthly programs, many people want to try SEO on their own and we encourage everyone to at least dip a toe in the water to better understand the industry. There are a few options here:

1) You can get training from professionals. This includes individual training as well as business consulting.

2) You can start learning SEO on your own. A great resource to start out with is Moz. They have a segment called “Whiteboard Fridays” (I’d recommend the ones done by Rand Fishkin, the previous owner).

3) You can find a different website that looks nice to you and see what they’re doing right, then try to replicate that. Remember, as long as you’re improving a user’s experience or improving your visibility on search engines (Google My Business page, getting reviews from customers, etc.) then you’re doing SEO. It’s a very random field that’s essentially a laundry list of hundreds (if not thousands) of tasks.

Someone cold-called or cold-emailed me offering SEO services, should I take them?

No, run away. If someone is cold-calling you or cold-emailing you then there’s a 100% chance that they’re absolutely terrible at SEO. Ask local businesses and friends/family who they’ve used that they trust. Worst case scenario, we’ll point you towards someone. The industry has been plagued by terrible SEOs and we’ve watched countless clients get hurt and waste enormous amounts of money.

The SEO industry is hard to navigate for a business because there’s no formal training. Colleges don’t teach it and the self-taught people usually only get as far in as learning Metadata, which is the bare basics you need to know. If you plan on contracting an SEO then use your network and ask around or contact us and we’ll push you in the right direction.

What's The Difference Between SEO and PPC?

One of the most common questions we see in the digital marketing world is simply: what’s the difference between SEO and PPC? This one’s fairly straightforward and best explained using the tomato analogy.

When You Need Targeted Traffic Immediately

PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click Marketing and is controlled using Google Ads or Bing Adcenter, though Google is far more widely used due to the extra volume that Google has. It’s an excellent channel (in my opinion the second best behind SEO) and gives you some benefits but has some downsides associated for it. Let’s use the tomato analogy as an example:

Say you need tomatoes. You can grow them or you can go to the market and buy them. If you go to the market and buy them then you’re able to choose the shape and size as well as exactly how many you want and how much you want to spend. The downside? You have to pay for every single tomato.

This is equivalent to PPC. We can control the traffic that comes in with great detail (including even age, gender and income levels). We can also press start as soon as it’s set up and get you running quickly and it’s great for gap fillers (nights that need filling in a hotel, for example) and also works great as a long-term strategy to pair with SEO. However, it is not sustainable. If you turn off that campaign or cut the spend, all that traffic disappears overnight as well.

Our other marketing channel compliments this strategy perfectly.

From Seed To Farm

Back to the tomato analogy, but let’s look at the other method this time.

If you have a bit of time to spare and want your own huge, sustainable farm full of tomatoes then you can plant seeds in the ground. These seeds need to be watered and fed and there will be both rainy days and sunny days, but if you keep nurturing the crops then you’ll get a mostly self-sustaining farm of tomatoes. You may not be able to carefully control the shape and size of them, but they’ll be in the ballpark.

This is akin to SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Our work doing SEO will take 3-6 months to start taking off and will be based off percentage increases. A 50% increase of 20 users is 10 users, while a 50% increase of 10,000 users is 5,000 users, meaning growth tends to seem slower right at the start. However, if you have an SEO tackling things every month then you’ll eventually have a steady stream of people coming in through the channel.

SEO is simply the strongest digital marketing channel and it’s generally not very close. It has the best engagement, the best conversion rates, the best everything. The only downside is that it’s slow and inflexible and takes a while to build. Even if you quit SEO down the road and take a break from it, the traffic won’t disappear. It might taper off slowly, but it will have a much higher ‘floor’ so to speak.

So What’s The Strategy?

If you desperately need traffic right now (particularly startups), then go with PPC. You can always get SEO rolling later, but SEO isn’t very useful if your company doesn’t survive long enough.

Not worried about short-term survival? Prioritize SEO. This channel will get you the long-term success if you stick with it and grow it up.

We understand how tough the world of digital marketing is to navigate as a business owner (we’ve heard it from plenty of them), so reach out if you need guidance on where to go next using the form below.

What Does Good SEO Look LIke?

SEO is undoubtedly the hardest internet marketing channel to determine the success of. One of the reasons, as we cover in our SEO section, is that the job is basically a laundry list of hundreds (if not thousands) of different tasks. These tasks are prioritized in a way to have the maximum possible effect, but it’s often VERY confusing to clients what is actually going on.

Transparency is the key

This brings us to the biggest indicator of what a good SEO looks like: transparency. Simply put, bad SEOs don’t want to show you what’s going on behind the hood. Up to this point, we’ve only done word-of-mouth marketing because we believe that’s the most transparent and honest way of gaining clients. Do a good job, the client tells their friends and everyone wins. Bad SEOs don’t play like this because they don’t get results.

In regards to transparency, bad SEOs will often not send out monthly reports. Let’s make this crystal clear: If an SEO is not sending out monthly reports, you need to dump them immediately. Request a report if you wish and see what their response is, but this is the biggest red flag we see. If they’re too afraid to show you the results; run for the hills.

The Breakdown

A good SEO will:

• Send monthly reports

• Not leave emails unanswered

• Come to you through word of mouth marketing or a recommendation (or sometimes just really good reviews, though those are easily manipulatable)

• Request a monthly call to review the report together

The really, really good ones will:

• Be able to tell you what to expect in the upcoming 1-3 months (this is due to a ‘lag’ period where tasks we do today take 1-3 months to have an effect)

• Ask you about your success metrics: revenue, conversion rate, etc.

• Give you homework to help out with SEO efforts. There are some tasks that SEOs can’t do as well as a company such as Google My Business postings, garnering reviews and establishing connections with local businesses and chambers of commerce.

Need more warning signs of a bad SEO? Aside from a lack of transparency, watch these red flags:

• If they cold called/cold emailed you or claimed to be referenced by someone (I.E. “I was referenced by your head of marketing), then that’s a huge red flag that they might be vulturing you. Avoid poachers at all costs.

• If they instantly bad mouth any other marketers and seem “defensive” then that can be a warning sign, though good SEOs have to do this to some degree to combat vultures.

• If the tracking goes out for an extended period of time (3+ weeks is certainly plenty) without a notice then that' shows that they probably aren’t looking at the account

• If you ask them what they did for the month and they just mention a ton of “analysis and reports” then that’s a red flag. Actual SEOs need to execute on their findings every single month.

• Watch for bad contracts that tie you in for a long time. Good SEOs will typically have month-to-month contracts with opt-outs at any time or, at worst, a 3-month contract. 3-month contracts are fine because it generally takes 3+ months to see movement.

Help, I Need Guidance!

The world of Search Engine Optimization is incredibly challenging for businesses to navigate due to a wealth of bad players and a general lack of understanding that opens the door for manipulation. If you need guidance on finding a good SEO then reach out to us. If we don’t have someone in network available, we can certainly reach out to agencies and top freelancers as many of us know one another.

And if you get scammed: don’t fret. Every single client we currently have was scammed in the past and had horror stories of their first experience with an SEO. It happens.. to almost everyone. This industry is 95% bad and 5% excellent, and once you find someone in the 5% it’s much easier to find the rest.

Stay safe and happy marketing!

Businesses, Beware! How to identify and avoid SEO Poachers

In the professional world, some call them "SEO Vultures". You might hear them referred to as "Basement Dwellers" or just simply "Poachers," but they are everywhere. Eventually, as a business owner, you're going to have an encounter with them.

Their goal? To steal your trust, your business and your money.

Good SEOs are referred to by word of mouth or through a network. The best referrals generally come from other businesses saying "you should contact my SEO, they're really good.' However, as high as the demand for SEO is, the supply is even greater.

The reason for this is that clients often don't know what SEO is. It's a foreign language to them, so they don't know how to look for one or what makes someone an SEO. That leaves the door open for:

• College graduates who need money

• Bad SEOs who can't find business and are getting desperate

• Genuinely evil people who just want your money

How to Spot a Bad SEO

The first question you should ask yourself is: "how did they contact me?" If they reached out to you and use the following strategy, you should run for your life. The most used poaching strategy is:

1. Get an audience with the client
Often through cold calling or random emails. They might even make a vague claim that they were "referred to you" even though they weren't.

2. Present a list of 'errors' the site has. These might be nonexistent, meaningless or nitpicky.
If they mention image tags, site spacing, meta keywords or optimization of useless pages (FAQs, Policies, etc) then that's an easy red flag.

3. Paint an armageddon scenario
"Your SEO hasn't addressed these!? What HAS he been doing?"

4. Convince the client to fire their SEO without communication
"It's not worth talking to them, you should just send them an email cancelling your agreement right away."

Sound familiar? Yea, you've been vultured.

You might be saying to yourself "how on earth does this actually work?" Well, it stems from most clients not understanding SEO. Because of that, they don't want to host calls because it just ends up confusing them. They don't know what minification, disavows or even Search Console are and they often don't care as long as they get results.

The problem is, that lack of communication leads to a lack of trust and opens the door for engagements like this. Let it go on the record: SEO Poachers are dangerous. I can't tell you how many battered, bruised clients have come to me because they fell for the wrong SEO and ended up with a penalty or a huge dip in traffic. Since poachers aren't good at their practice, they will effectively ruin your organic presence by either utilizing some outdated technique or doing nothing at all.

How to Avoid SEO Poachers

This is more simple than you might imagine. If someone cold calls you or emails you out of nowhere in regards to SEO, just don't respond. Block them, ignore them, do whatever it takes because you're going to get a lot of people doing that.

Need a good SEO? Ask local businesses, ask others in the chamber of commerce and do your research. Also, you're welcome to reach out to us as well. The best SEOs come from personal referrals or long-standing relationships.

Poachers are easier to fall for than some might think. Keep yourself informed and keep yourself safe, because a bad SEO can do more damage in 1 hour than a good one can fix in a lifetime.