Category "SEO"

As a premier digital marketing agency in Philadelphia region, we see all different types of small businesses that need SEO. You can create a hyper local SEO strategy that will work for your business. Using the data from Google Search Console can be key to success. Today we break down the Google Search Console for you.

How do I drive traffic to my website? It is a question posed by thousands of business owners out there. And to be honest, driving traffic is not as easy as it sounds. Pulling traffic, especially organic, is more of a dream than a reality for many businesses. However, this should not be the case. There are free tools that assist you to rank better for your intended keywords. Google Search Console (GSC) is free, and one of the most powerful tools for SEO. You need to create the correct foundation when you are starting with an SEO strategy. Google Search Console will have the data for you to get started. Let’s learn about the Google Search Console and how it could benefit you.

What is Google Search Console? GSC, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, is one of the robust tools owned by Google. It is not as popular as Google Analytics, but boy, it packs a punch. GSC monitors the performance of your website. It is also proficient in pointing out areas where to optimize your organic traffic.

How to use GSC to optimize SEO
SEO is vital for most businesses and especially online businesses. Not only leads to a surge in traffic, but leads to an increase in conversions if you leverage the data correctly with your user experience. If you are wondering how to improve your ranking for your site, then you are reading the right article. Below, we shall point out how to use one of Google’s gems, Google Search Console, to improve your SEO.

To boost rankings of underwhelming keywords
You have heard people emphasizing the importance of appearing on page one of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Well, it is indeed essential to appear on page one of search results. In most cases, users do not look for search results beyond page one. Lower rank means you are losing out on tons of traffic. Therefore, GSC becomes a vital tool in identifying keywords of your website that rank beyond page two. You then work on these keywords to rank better.

Establish what users do with the results
GSC performance report enables you to determine the interaction of users with your website. It helps track the number of clicks, impressions, and click-through rates. These metrics guide on the corrective action you should take to improve SEO for your online business.

Fix indexing issues
At times, developers put tags on pages that prevent search engines from crawling them. Fortunately, GSC identifies such problems for you. GSC provides a report of such issues with the exact pages not indexed and the reason for not indexing.

Other ways GSC can help online businesses improve SEO include:

• Establishing sites linking to your website
• Help determine that your site is mobile-friendly
• Assist in optimizing pages whose organic traffic is dropping

To wrap it up, GSC is underrated yet a robust tool that gives a lot of insights about your website. There are lots of pros to using Google Search Console, and just one con: you can’t see competitive data there. An easy fix is to use a professional Google rank tracker 3rd party tool. Make it your SEO strategy. It is free but super powerful when leveraging data to grow your business online.

What many business owners don’t know is that almost half of all transactions happen on mobile phones. Entrepreneurs and business owners who want customers to engage with their company website have to take the time to invest in mobile search engine optimization.

Mobile SEO acts as the optimization of your website to rank a lot better in search results and keep the leads that you get from mobile on your page.

You will learn about mobile SEO, why it’s important to your bottom line, and why you should consider creating a mobile SEO strategy for your business.

What Exactly is Mobile SEO?

It’s the optimization process of your website to make sure that your website looks great and works well on mobile devices. When you or a staff member performs mobile SEO, you’ll give your users a great user experience. The positive user experience comes from the fact that your site looks great on any device.

In the past few years, the use of mobile devices have increased exponentially. Over 70 percent of people shop on their mobile devices. As more and more people gain access to these devices, these numbers will only increase in the future.

A lot of business owners don’t realize the importance of having a website that’s mobile friendly. But if you don’t have a mobile friendly website, your website SEO will suffer. So will the way that potential customers perceive your business. One study even showed that over half of all customers will not visit a business again if they had a bad mobile experience. To prevent negative mobile experiences, optimize your business website so that it works well on mobile devices.

Why Is Mobile SEO Important?

1. Your Customers Spend Most of Their Internet Time on Smartphones
   Users spend over 70 percent of their online time on their mobile devices. If your customers are spending most of their internet time on their smartphones, your business website will need to be ready. A poor mobile experience could mean losing lots of valuable leads.
2. Your Customers Will Return If They Have a Good Mobile Experience
   It’s an intuitive leap to figure that your customers are more likely to return if they have a positive mobile experience the first time. When customers return again and again, these leads turn into valuable sales.
3. Your Customers Will Hold Your Business in Higher Regard
   A large part of creating a mobile friendly website is giving your customers the best experience possible. When your customers have a positive mobile experience, that makes it more likely that they will experience what you have to offer in a way that’s fruitful for both parties.

Mobile SEO is a vital part of growing your business in the online space. To help your company grow through SEO, account for customers that access your website through their mobile devices. A thorough and creative mobile SEO plan helps you reach potential customers.

SEO Locale offers full digital marketing packages that include mobile SEO naturally. Ranking you on Google is our priority, but seeing your return on investment is just as important, give us a call today!

Showing up on Google’s Top Stories is a huge advantage for gaining exposure. When you show up in Top Stories, your articles gain more visibility than the standard search results. Formerly, you had to have Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to even have the chance to show up on Top Stories. Since many saw the value in Top Stories and AMPs were a requirement, a lot of people embraced AMPs. However, there is a big change coming. 

Google recently announced that they will start using Core Web Vitals as a factor in search rankings and Top Stories. The announcement also detailed that Google will lift the AMP requirement around the start of 2021. This announcement makes the future of AMP unclear. Will it be easier for developers to optimize the mobile experience without AMP or to continue using AMP versions of their pages?

AMP Definition

 AMP is Google’s open-source, HTML framework that developers can use to create faster-loading mobile web pages. You can use AMP to build websites, stories, ads, and emails in a straightforward way. The content you create with AMP “prioritizes the user experience above all else”. The top benefits of AMP include:

• Faster web page speed, which equates to better user experience. 
• Apply AMP across numerous web touchpoints. 
• SEO benefits (for now). 
• Performance increase. 

Downfalls of AMP

While AMP has some key benefits, it also has its fair share of downfalls. If AMP is not a requirement for Top Stories, will people just stop using it? Potentially. Here are some of AMP’s major cons, and the reasons people may abandon it. 

• There are alternatives. Previously AMP was a requirement for Top Stories, however, it soon won’t be. Once AMP ceases to be a requirement, people may opt for alternatives. There are other solutions for optimizing user experience and site performance, and some businesses may have just been using AMPs to remain eligible for Top Stories. 
• AMP doubles your site maintenance work. With AMPs, you must essentially maintain a second version of your site. This process is not only time consuming, but it is also expensive. 
• It will no longer provide a competitive advantage. Formerly, you could not appear on Top Stories without AMP. When that changes, will it make sense to continue using it?

Testing the Waters

After the official update, people can “opt to prioritize page experience factors to get their content into the Top Stories section, instead of maintaining AMP versions of their pages.” Google’s new algorithm intends to rank web pages and Top Stories based on user experience from the signals of Core Web Vitals. 

However, not all of Googe’s algorithm updates have had much of an impact before. While it would be a good thing to update rankings and Top Stories based on positive user experience, the actual impact is unclear. Before making any major changes to get rid of AMP, people should wait and see how the updates play out and how the competition fairs. 

The big decision for publishers currently running on AMP will be the time they must majorly change their site. When it comes time for a redesign or CMS adjustment, then they should look closely at the costs of updating to AMP vs opting for another method to optimize the user experience. 

After the update, publishers and site owners need to compare the Top Stories. Are the majority of Top Stories from AMP sites or non-AMP sites? Without strong evidence that non-AMP sites are ranking in Top Stories, it doesn’t make sense to drop AMP. Additionally, “the requirements for non-AMP pages to appear in the Top Stories section may turn out to be more stringent than maintaining AMP.” In that case, it would actually be easier to maintain AMP than to meet the incredibly strict requirements for non-AMP sites. 

AMP: Should it Stay or Should it Go?

As of right now, the future of AMP is not too clear. There are some challenges associated with AMP that sit producers may be eager to get rid of once Google officially renounces it as a requirement for Top Stories. When it is no longer a requirement, site owners will be able to experiment with other methods for optimizing user-experience without creating a second version of their site. However, there may still be advantages to keeping AMP, especially if you are already using it. 

Companies should not make the choice right now on whether or not to continue using AMP in the long-term. The first thing to do is to see the impact of Google’s Core Web Vitals update and how AMP fairs when it is not a requirement. It is important to monitor your competition closely, and assess if AMP is still fairing better than other options. Currently, it is not clear if AMP will have a future once it disappears as a requirement for Top Stories. 

While COVID-19 has hardly been the first pandemic to ever shake the world, it is the first in recent history. What has made COVID-19 so exceptional is its fast infection rate and deadly symptoms. This has resulted in the systematic closing of businesses across the world. Those who were strictly brick and mortar businesses are feeling the strain the most. Yet, like their competitors who choose to venture into online markets as well, it isn’t too late for them to start earning profit. The secret rests in properly understanding and implementing SEO. 

What is Search Engine Optimization?

For those who are new to the game, SEO, or search engine optimization, is the careful use of keywords and other content to score well on Google’s search engine algorithm. An example might be if someone were to search for “HVAC companies near me.” When inputted into Google’s search query, a list appears that best fits the results that the user is looking for.

That list wasn’t generated randomly. It was compiled from a careful set of algorithms that Google keeps secret. However, content creators and SEO specialists have uncovered most of the secrets in determining how to better your SEO score.

Why Does SEO Matter in a Pandemic?

As a business owner, your first thought may be to shore up expenses and wait through the pandemic. However, you could actually be injuring yourself further. Instead of saving money, it’s a better idea to invest in the right kind of resource. SEO is that resource. Business may have stopped in the physical realm, but it’s still alive and kicking in the virtual world.

By creating a website for your business and implementing SEO, you can not only drive new customers to your business during a pandemic, but you can also increase your traffic during a normal market. SEO can help save your business by bringing it the attention of more people. The pandemic hasn’t stopped people from wanting to shop and purchase services. It’s merely limited the ways in which they can make those purchases and order those services.

By using SEO, you can bring your business to their attention. You may experience more growth than you’ve seen in years.

How to Get Started with SEO in a Pandemic

It’s never been easier to begin SEO practices while the pandemic is brewing. People are looking for more information about the virus. If you want to get started with creating content that will drive your business forward, then use the pandemic as a source to bring attention to your business. 

Contact the Professionals

SEO can be the key to surviving any pandemic. Utilize SEO professionals to capitalize today. Our SEO experts in Philadelphia & Jenkintown are ready to help your business shift with the times to keep the customers coming.

You may be an experienced digital marketer or a novice, but there are several ways to improve your auditing skills for Search Engine Optimization. I’ve been in this space for 16 years now and had to deal with over 1,000 website problems. Personally, I enjoy the auditing aspect of SEO, it is always changing and new issues arise over time. Your SEO auditing process should differ from platform to platform and campaign to campaign. For example, a local SEO and national SEO auditing process will be very different. Generally speaking I will provide you some of the key components of an SEO audit process. Let’s get started with these quick tips on how to improve your SEO auditing skills.

Start with an Auditing Tool

First, start with an auditing tool like SEMRush. There are several auditing tools out there to get you started. It is a simple process of getting initiated without any expert assistance. This will be able to crawl your entire website quickly without you missing thousands of issues. We’re constantly fixing website issues month over month, so make sure you provide your fixes in priority order during your audit process. An example of an SEO audit below is from SEMRush for one of our clients. As you can see there are false positives. We tackle items by priority starting with errors and work our way into warnings and notices over time.

Manually Inspect & Browse Your Website

There are several items we manually inspect while an SEO auditing tool is running in the background. Look for the XML sitemap. Find pages, posts and demo content that may have been left in there from the development of the website. Run through the website and see if you can find an HTML sitemap as well, is this website easily crawl-able? Are you having a hard time finding pages? If you are you will want to increase the crawl-ability of the website. Right-click on Google Chrome “inspect”, click on the console tab, do you see any errors or warnings? Fix them. We run into this problem and usually have issues with websites not being fully secure because they are calling http:// rather than https:// on an element on the website.

You could click on the not secure notice next to the website address, on top of your browser, and it will explain why the website is not fully secure. Example below:

Search Google for Your Main Keyword or Brand

During the SEO auditing process, we want to spot any inconsistencies or issues when websites are being crawled. Manually searching for a keyword you may rank for, or search your brand, and check if you see the intended meta description. If you do not, go and check your robots.txt file or see if there is a NoIndex tag implemented on the website.

Run Site: in Google Search

Sometimes our manual process or tools will not pick up some pages so running site: urlofyourwebsite.com in Google search could result in some other findings that can be holding back your website’s SEO.

SEO Auditing Process

Now I only covered only about 1/10th of the entire SEO auditing process, but our workflows and SEO auditing process shifts based on the website and platform. Auditing a website on Shopify versus WordPress can differ due to the structure. If you are interested in a free website audit you can contact us today, no catch! If you own an agency and want to start a white label SEO package with us, you can!

Recently we’ve been getting slammed with new inbound leads at SEO Locale. The team is still working through the shutdown. Sadly we have not seen our team members for almost a month now. As a company we had our setup prepared for a catastrophic event like this. Our team members were up and running immediately after we shut the offices down.

Luckily in our industry the internet is still turned on. Online shopping is increasing and businesses are starting to thrive more with our digital marketing product. We’ve had clients that had to shift their marketing and SEO to be geared towards the virus. The SEO Locale team is moving fast on these shifts for all of our clients.

Marc and myself sat down and evaluated some campaigns since the shutdown period. The statistics below are prime examples of how SEO still works during these stressful and tough times for business owners.

Results measured starting March 15, 2020 – April 2, 2020 vs March 15, 2019 – April 2, 2019

✔️ eCommerce Client +467.51% Increase in Revenue
✔️ Another eCommerce Client +2,298.77% Increase in Revenue
✔️ Local Franchise Gym +181.24% Increase in Leads
✔️ Service Industry Business (B2B) +492% Increase in New Users
✔️ Local Law Firm +389.62% Increase in New Users
✔️ B2C Client +129.57% Increase in New Users

🏆 Beat your competition with SEO. Our clients are seeing massive results during these tough times.

Here are a few marketing tips we compiled for a pandemic like this and how you can stay ahead of your competition:

1. Is your product or service in high demand for your customers. If so look at your approach to see if you can make adjustments to increase your SEO visibility.
2. Create a notification pop to alert your customers you are still operating.
3. Start creating posts on social media that help your customers understand they can still use your services. Most people are bored at home and browsing the internet and social media.
4. Increase your brand awareness. This is the perfect time to jump in front of your potential customers with your brand.
5. Start a community involvement initiative. Provide help of those in need. Don’t use this as a sales tactic, but getting involved will help the community come together.
6. Start increasing your conversion rate with new marketing tactics. Focus on your business during these times and beat your local competition.

All of our clients at SEO Locale get monthly reports they can understand. We don’t send you hundreds of pages with numbers. We show you the growth or possible decrease in traffic, we don’t need to always tell you a good story. We’re pro-active in our approach and have the problem solved before your traffic takes a down fall. Learn more about our monthly reporting from Mark Rippons at SEO Locale.

1. What is Monthly reporting? Monthly report is showing you data from month over month, quarter over quarter, and year over year if there is data to compare to.
   
2. What is the client portal? The client portal is a new system that we developed from the ground up, put a lot of man hours in, to make it easier for you to understand where your keywords are ranking, and the highlights of your website traffic.
   
3. Why does having this portal set you aside from other SEO companies? This portal is unlike anything else you will see from any other SEO company. Nick our COO took the time to build this system from the ground up. This is a one-off portal that no other SEO company has or is able to duplicate. It’s very simple to use and easy to understand.
   
4. How do I know who will be working with my account? In the client portal at the top you see the team at SEO Locale that is dedicated to your account every day. Someone is in the account everyday checking where your ranking, checking goal completions and making sure that everything is on the up and up.
   
5. I have an e-commerce website. Will this show data for that? Yes, we just need eCommerce data tracking set up in Google Analytics, we can show you how many transactions you had, the sources that the transactions are coming from. We can show if the sales are coming from direct traffic, Google Organic traffic, and Google PPC.
   
6. What Platforms will this track? The portal will track all platforms, we can track Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We can traffic all platforms that are bringing traffic to your website.
   
7. Can I see how my keywords are ranking and which ones are successful? We have talked about the client portal, we also have the client dashboard that will allow you to see where specific keywords are ranking on Google Desktop, Google Mobile, Bing, and Local Map Pack.
   
8. What do you do with this information to improve my website? We use this information to see how where we can push the campaign, one you have so many keywords rankings on the first page of Google we add more keywords to the campaign to keep the campaign moving forward. We don’t want the campaign to stall or get stale, this can turn into revamping on-page recs and adding more content.
   
9. Will I get to visually see my position changes? You can see this on your client dashboard, you will be able to see how many positions your keywords increase or decrease. You can see how your keywords have increased since you have been with us.
   
10. I’m already a client, is this the same as the dashboard? No, the client portal is brand new for 2020. The client portal is easier to understand and easier on the eyes. The dashboard gives you more detailed technical aspects for audits on the website, specific keyword rankings, backlinks profile. The portal is to tell you that you have this many keywords on the 1^st page of Google, this many on the 2^nd page of Google, and this many on the 3^rd page of Google. The portal will also show you the traffic your website saw for the previous month and this breaks down direct traffic, organic traffic.
    
11. How do I access my client portal? Once we have added our portal email to the analytics for each account as a read/analyze only access.  You simply go to SEOLocaleReports.com and login with the provided username and password.

Backlinks are still one of the most popular ways to get traffic back to your website. If the site that publishes your guest post article is high-quality, is relevant to your own content and is already ranking in Google, then you could expect some targeted referral traffic from the guest post within the first week of publication. And if that guest post begins to rank higher in search results, then it will get more traffic and will push more of those readers to your site over time.

But the best part of guest posting is that the links themselves will help your website improve in Google rankings and get more search traffic in the long run.

Unfortunately, a lot of marketers end up getting penalized by Google and hurt their website traffic levels because they don’t do guest posts the right way.

Why Does Google Sometimes Penalize Guest Posts?

Google hates it when people use spam practices and black hat SEO to trick them into sending free, organic search traffic. Many bloggers and marketers plagiarize content or write content that is stuffed with awkward keywords just to fool search engines. But those types of articles don’t offer any real value to the readers.

Some content marketers will also publish guest posts on low-quality private blog networks and on sites that are not related to their own website. For example, they’ll put a guest article about weight loss on a blog that has nothing to do with health and fitness – and then they’ll link to a landing page that sells electronic dog collars. That’s ridiculous, and it offers no value to the readers. It also won’t convert very well.

If Google keeps ranking spam content like this, then nobody will want to use Google anymore when searching for high-quality content. That’s why Google penalizes these sites.

So, to do guest posting the right way and to avoid Google penalties, you don’t want to use these outdated, spammy black hat SEO tactics.

How to Avoid Google Penalties on Guest Post Articles

• Post guest articles on high-quality websites and blogs
• Make sure content and links are relevant to your landing page content
• Use a variety of anchor texts with long-tail keywords
• Write original, high-quality guest articles that people will want to read
• Make sure your landing pages are also of high quality
• Use white hat SEO techniques as much as possible

Some SEO bloggers out there will tell you that guest posting is dead and isn’t worth doing anymore. But they are just wrong. Many marketers today use guest posts to drive tons of traffic to their landing pages and blogs. When done the right way, guest post articles provide value to their readers, and they help your site rank higher as the months roll by.