A Year in Search: Google Search Trends from 2018
2018 has come to a close and Google has released their most popular search trends for the year. This list is a great way to see how search has changed in Google over time – now that the search engine has turned 20 years old. The annual Year in Search is a good reflection on the changing search trends, the latest cultural moments or events that shaped the most popular searches, but also what we can learn from all of these. Here are the most popular search trends of 2018: 1. People...
A Technical SEO Breakdown for Business Owners
There is a deeper, more technical side to search engine
optimization SEO on your website that is just as crucial, if not more, than quality content and
strong backlinks.
Even if you’re not the one implementing this technical
SEO foundation, it’s still good to have some idea of what is going on in
order to ensure you are getting quality work done on your website.
1. Robots.txt File
If you work with a developer, you may have heard this term
before.
The robots.txt...
How Does Voice Search Affect Local Businesses?
The current search engine optimization SEO landscape is already tricky for local business. Google Maps trimmed its business listings down from seven to three listings in search, plus with new features that display information directly in search, people no longer need to visit your website to get the information they need – resulting in fewer clicks to your site. Then add in voice search. 2018 has already been a big year for voice search and virtual assistants, with Alexa making its way...
Why Technical SEO is More Important Than Ever
If you’re familiar with the term search engine optimization SEO, you may know about how titles, meta descriptions and alt tags are a crucial part in getting you more traffic from search engines such as Google. But what you might not know about SEO is that there is another, more technical side that can affect your website. While search engines are getting better at crawling, indexing and understanding information, they’re not perfect. Therefore, it doesn’t really matter how...
5 SEO Essentials for Boosting Your Ecommerce Website’s Organic Traffic
When it comes to websites and search engine optimization SEO, ecommerce websites are almost considered a different animal. While many of the fundamentals remain the same, ecommerce websites tend to run into certain issues that traditional websites don’t experience – or at least not as often. Here are five things that are essential to the success of an ecommerce website that is optimizing for search: 1. No Duplicate Content Duplicate content is often an immediate trouble area for...
How to Get A Featured Snippet in Google's Answer Box
Google has long been a place people turn to find a solution to their problem or an answer to their question. So it makes sense that the search engine giant took another step out of the equation and created a feature that helps users get their answer even faster. Back in 2015, Google started testing what we now know as the Google Answer Box, which is a featured snippet embedded into the search results. However, it wasn’t until recently that brands have started to utilizing this feature to...
3 Hidden Factors That Might Be Affecting Your SEO
If you’ve decided to read this article, you probably already have some idea of how important search engine optimization SEO is for your website and your business. Despite a huge growth in social media, a ton of people still use search to find solutions to their problems. In fact, the powerhouse that is Google continues to get over 100 billion searches every month. That’s a lot of searching. This drives home the point that although other avenues of driving traffic are becoming...
Google Set to Increase Mobile-Friendly Ranking Signals Again
For those of you who heeded our warning about getting a responsive website back in April 2015, you don’t need to fear. However, if you are still operating with a website that is not mobile-friendly, Google has announced it will be making another shift to strengthen their mobile-friendly ranking signals again; which means your website could drop farther down the mobile search results than ever before solely based on this ranking factor. While the initial data after what most marketers...
SEO Starter Kit for New Business Owners
As a new business owner, you may already have your business plan, products and services ready to be released to the world, but you may not have a customer base yet. If you are a business with a physical storefront, your physical location may be your first priority, as it should be. However, after that or perhaps if your business operates solely online, you will need a website in order to drive traffic and attract new customers. Having an aesthetically pleasing website is important, but almost...
How Email Can Drive SEO Results for Your Business
While the connection between email and SEO isn’t as cut and dry as some of the other methods of search engine optimization, it can be a very useful tool to keep your audience engaged and directing traffic in a way with which other marketing channels just can’t compete. Google doesn’t crawl your individual emails, nor does the amount of subscribers equate to higher rankings, but here are some ways that email can impact your SEO efforts. 1. Audience Engagement Through Email...
Should I Rebrand My Website?
There is a lot to consider when deciding if rebranding your website is the right move. Some businesses bought exact match or partial match domains in the past, such as FlowersAndVases.com, and they are starting to rethink those choices in favor for more brandable website URLs to better match their social media and content marketing efforts. The website FlowersAndVases.com doesn’t stand out at all; it could be any flower shop. Whereas a URL that corresponds with a more definitive business...
What’s Trending in SEO: Long-tail Keyword Optimization
In the early days of search engine optimization SEO people relied on using short phrases or words to find what they were looking for. As the Internet has evolved and websites offer more and more, people and search engines have changed and are relying on longer search queries to find what they’re looking for. For instance, ‘red dress’ might become ‘red strapless cocktail dress’. This change in search habits changes the way that Internet marketers implement SEO on a...
3 Tips to Make Your Blog Posts More SEO-Friendly
Writing an SEO-friendly blog post starts with the ability to write for your audience. Creating an easy to read and digest blog post will improve important factors that help with your SEO efforts for your website, such as Session Duration and your site’s Bounce Rate. It is also much more likely that your content will be shared if people actually read it and enjoy it, which helps increase your website’s reach. Creating fresh, quality content for your website is becoming increasingly...
How to Use Your SEO Content to Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Does your company have a SEO strategy? Then you should already be creating excellent content that adds value for your customers. But did you know that you could take this existing content and gain even further reach and help with your sales conversion beyond your website by using a content marketing strategy? As we have expressed in our previous article on how SEO has changed, SEO now requires fresh, high quality content to be successful thanks to the Google algorithm Panda update. What this...
Choosing the Right Orlando SEO Company for You
Whether you’re the CEO of your company, or you’ve been tasked with finding the right Digital marketing company for the company you work for, it can be a daunting task to sift through the pages and pages of SEO firms in your area. As an Digital marketing company ourselves, we hear too many horror stories from people walking through our door about bad service and unfulfilled promises. That’s why we made this list of some good and bad things to watch for when searching for an...
How SEO has Changed… and Continues to Change
The Internet has evolved in many ways over the past few
years. As Google’s algorithm sophistication has increased, so have the tactics
used for SEO, probably for the best. Search engine optimization used to be
considered a unique knowledge of how to manipulate Google’s search rankings
with secret, sly tricks that only a select few possessed. Since then, the SEO industry has evolved. It is now a
multifaceted online marketing discipline that no longer relies on these sneaky
tricks...
Say Goodbye to the Yahoo Directory
Its time has come. Once a staple of the Internet, the Google of its time, the
Yahoo Directory is coming to a close.
Yahoo announced the news today that they will be closing the Yahoo Directory
after a 20-year stint. The directory, which before the dawn of Google was a
hand-compiled list of websites organized into topics, is being sent off with a
meager goodbye.
Yahoo’s post
says this:
Yahoo was started nearly 20 years
ago as a directory of websites that helped users explore the...
Google Introduces Structured Snippets as Part of Search Results
Earlier this month it was discovered that Google had begun testing a form of knowledge graph data in the search result snippets. Google is now referring to this added information as Structured Snippets. These structured snippets have been released under many different types of searches. Everything from comic book heroes, popular events, company profiles, and product specifics can have snippet information added through the collaboration between Google Research and the Web Search team. Here are...
How to Boost Your SEO Tactics for Free
Search Engine Optimization SEO doesn’t require a huge budget for small businesses and startups but it does require a major time investment. With Google algorithm updates like Panda, Penguin and others, you need to constantly be on the look out for what will throw off your organic rankings next. If done well, DIY SEO tactics can still have great results. Here are some things that you can do to better your SEO for free: 1. Consistently Maintain a Blog Maintaining an active blog filled with...
What Is Panda 4.0? What You Should Know.
Since we specialize in digital marketing and SEO, hearing that Google is releasing a new update is something we don’t take lightly. Whenever Google makes changes, they shape our marketing strategies and what we do for our clients. Recently, Google updated their well-known Panda update which was known around the world as Panda 4.0. As of today, Panda 4.0 is the largest algorithm update in 2014 and we’re here to tell you all about it. Panda 4.0 began rolling out on May 20 th...