SEO

  On March 26, 2018, Google made the official announcement surrounding the rollout of the often-discussed, long-anticipated mobile-first index. Countless SEOs and many digital marketers have stayed laser-focused on this development since it was first announced in 2016. All things considered, this should come as no surprise, as mobile searches account for over half of online traffic. We know an excellent mobile UX is important. We know Google is prioritizing this experience for users. But…

You know users and search engines both prefer fast sites, but you may be wondering how you know if your website is performing compared to site speed standards. You’re in luck — Google has a great free tool called PageSpeed Insights that allows you test pages on your site for speed. This tool reports on the performance of your pages for both mobile and desktop devices then provides you with recommendations on how to improve…

By now you’ve likely encountered what’s called a “featured snippet” in Google. The featured snippet is when a portion of a page that appears in results is pulled out onto the search engine results page itself. It looks like this: A featured snippet is aimed at answering a searcher’s query, without having to click through to a different webpage. Google tries to make the user experience easier by pulling content to directly answer the searcher’s…

If you manage a website, you’re likely familiar with Google’s suite of tools that are designed to provide important information around your website’s performance, both for you and for your users. However, the number of tools and the breadth of their capabilities can overwhelm the best of us. Google Tag Manager is one of the lesser-used tools in the Google Suite arsenal, but it’s growing rapidly.  Google Tag Manager can be extremely powerful when used…

With a market share of over 80% on a global scale, Google seems to be the undisputed and undefeated champion of search engines. It has at least 30 billion queries per month, and it’s powered by one of the most successful companies in history. Despite Google’s dominance of the search engine industry, it still has some competitors with unique benefits you may not find when you use Google. We’ve put together a list of some alternative…

The world of SEO is constantly evolving, with new terminology and features coming and going as quickly as the next Google update. Most people with exposure to SEO will have heard about nofollow links, but to the uninitiated, it’s another one of those obscure terms you may have heard but never understood. We’re going to clear things up by defining nofollow links and explaining when they should be used. But first, a bit of context….

Launching a new website is always a very tricky prospect from an SEO perspective. Without taking the proper steps and precautions, a launch has the potential to result in a dramatic loss of SEO rankings and traffic. It is essential to have a comprehensive SEO strategy and checklist for any website launch or re-design. What are the key elements of a website launch checklist to avoid SEO pitfalls? The items below are core pieces of…

Managing the online presence of a business with multiple locations will take effort to plan, execute, and maintain, but it will be time well spent. Drawing visitors to your local business as the best answer for products or services they seek online is the main goal and reward for implementing an effective Local SEO strategy. More rewards The rewards for performing Local SEO for multi-location businesses are highly valuable and multi-fold: Website traffic – highly…

At this point, there’s a good chance you’re aware that Google’s Disavow Tool exists. The disavow feature has been around for several years, and there has been no shortage of documentation on the tool within the SEO community. A quick search of “How to Disavow Links” yields roughly 397,000 results. Whew. Within this post, our goal will be to speak plain English and empower anyone with a keyboard the ability to disavow links safely, correctly,…

Regretfully, meta descriptions are often a less-loved stepchild of the SEO world. And while that analogy may seem a little brash, we jump to these extremes because, with a relatively little effort, updates to missing or poorly-optimized meta descriptions can often lead to positive change for your website. Let’s discuss how to write a meta description further, beginning first with a few basics and then transitioning into a few best practices and useful tools: Meta…