Every company will have dissatisfied customers.I don’t care how good you are – someone is eventually going to be dissatisfied with your product or service.I’ve spent most of my career involved in crisis communication in some form or another.My first big crisis assignment was also my biggest – managing the digital communications strategy for American Airlines during the events of [...]
Today’s Ask an SEO question comes from Johnny in California, who asks:“I’m an artist with gallery pages full of images of my paintings and very little text. How do I get those paintings to rank better? I’ve also noticed that Google ranks photos much faster and better than images of paintings.”I’m not a very visual person.Just ask my wife.When we [...]
The biggest mistake I see SEO newbies make is what I call the “quest for the right way.”Passionate newbie SEO professionals, drunk with visions of the possible traffic, sales, and money that should follow a number one ranking for a high-value keyword, spend hours reverse-engineering the search engine results pages looking for a magic bullet that will push their site [...]
Backlinks are a significant ranking factor because of implicit authority signals.But… doesn’t this mean that the top search results will eventually be the sole domain of big brands that can afford to invest in high-end content and backlink strategies?For consumers, the monopolization of the SERPs by powerful brands surely can’t be a good thing.It’s certainly not a good thing for [...]
Google Ads is not for small businesses anymore.Increasingly, my agency and many others are seeing the effectiveness of Google Ads waning for new clients spending less than $3,000 per month media.Just a year ago, we saw businesses with new small accounts (under $3,000/month) averaging a return of advertising spend (ROAS) of 3:1 after the first month of advertising across all [...]
Today’s Ask an SEO question comes from Christian in the UK. Christian asks:Is there a contextual way to address the search so that it looks for the blank [in this case, “what”] in a question (e.g., vegan is to meat as what is to garlic)?Words mean things.My journalism school professor constantly repeated this phrase to me and my classmates when [...]
Your SEO agency won’t tell you everything.There is an excellent chance that you aren’t getting the most out of your agency relationship because of what you don’t know.If you are a bad client, you are leaving money on the table.If you delay or make things difficult when your agency needs something, you leave money on the table.If you treat your [...]
When I first started working in SEO, it was easy to find success.In the days before Google, all you had to do was look at the pages that were ranking for the term you wanted to rank for and copy the on-page tactics they were using.You were pretty much assured a decent ranking in the SERPs by mere imitation.In fact, [...]
Today’s Ask an SEO question comes from Muhammad in Karachi. Muhammad asks:What’s the best “sales pitch” to persuade clients to follow SEO guidelines?What is important to you is not necessarily important to other people.This is true in both life and the world of search engine optimization.Over the years, I’ve had countless conversations with SEO professionals in which we’ve recounted nightmare [...]
Let’s face it — link building is hard.It’s challenging for businesses to create content that people are interested in linking to.It’s difficult for businesses to find contacts at the right websites, who want to link to the content you’ve created.And it’s tough to know which links are going to positively impact your SEO efforts versus those that will just sit [...]