Eric Enge says, “If you follow the world of Google and search at all, you’ve heard about Google’s intent to switch to a mobile-first index. In this post, I’m going to briefly review the main points we know about Google’s plans for this new index, but I’m going to go further and detail what we found in a mobile-specific crawl we did of one website. Based on this data, I’ll also talk about the implications of the switch and some of the challenges that Google faces with this process. Key points about a mobile-first index If you’ve already read about Google’s impending switch... [...]

Dr. Peter J. Meyers says, “Any SEO worth their sustainably harvested pink Himalayan salt knows that Google offers a variety of advanced search operators – special commands that take you above and beyond regular text searches. Learning search operators is a bit like learning chess, though. It’s easy to memorize how each piece moves, but that’s about 1% of your path toward mastery. I know that the pointy-hat guy in chess moves diagonally, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to take on Kasparov or Deep Blue. Instead of just listing all of the operators and telling you what... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, wrote a blog post explaining how SEOs and webmasters can handle site outages or closures that last for a day or longer. This is when a webmaster intentionally takes down the site for maintenance, site moves, religious reasons or other reasons. John offers three options: Block the cart functionality from Google and your users. Always show an interstitial or pop-up saying your site is offline today. Switch the whole website off for a period of time. Each option can be handled differently, but the easiest option seems... [...]

Kerry Jones says, “Do your link building results look something like this? – Start doing outreach – Get links – Stop doing outreach – No more links Everyone talks about the long-term benefits of using content marketing as part of a link building strategy. But without the right type of content, your experience may be that you stop earning links as soon as you stop doing outreach. In this sense, you have to keep putting gas in the car for it to keep running (marketing “gas” = time, effort, and resources). But what if there was a way to fill up the car once, and that... [...]

Ryan Esco says, “6 Local SEO Tips and Tricks to create a presence to attract potential clients. Local SEO is becoming critical to attract new clients. Search engine optimization is just as important today as it’s always been. However, the practice has changed a great deal over the years, and today’s SEO is much more attuned to consumer habits and web user practices. For instance, SEO isn’t really worth doing these days unless it’s tailored to a local demographic because today’s online shoppers are much more responsive to ads and information that are targeted based on proximity.... [...]

MOZ team says, “Trying to target a small, specific region with your keywords can prove frustrating. While reaching a high-intent local audience is incredibly valuable, without volume data to inform your keyword research, you’ll find yourself hitting a wall. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares how to uncover powerful, laser-focused keywords that will reach exactly the right people”. 3 Tactics for Hyperlocal Keywords – Whiteboard Friday MOZ  [...]

Michael Cahill says, “Anyone who has ever registered a domain name can tell you that there is no shortage of people out there willing to sell you search engine optimization services (SEO). While I fully endorse a business’s decision to work with an SEO consultant (full disclosure: I am one), there is quite a lot that you can do on your own to help your website rank better in Google. If your budget isn’t quite there yet, or you would rather have more control over your website’s marketing, these seven do-it-yourself SEO tactics may help you. These tactics can also help you become a... [...]

Stephanie LeVonne says, “A client wants to develop a content strategy so they can rank for more keywords but isn’t sure if they can muster the resources to create a blog. Sound familiar? When budgets are tight, it’s often tempting to put more money behind your paid media campaigns; after all, you can actually see which ads and optimizations are generating the most revenue each month. Earned media is not so cut-and-dried. However, creating and developing blog content should be regarded as a long-term investment. And as any good financial advisor will tell you, it’s best to start... [...]

Casey Meraz says, “In 2016, I predicted that ranking in the 3-pack was hard and it would continually get more competitive. I maintain that prediction for 2017, but I want to make one thing clear. If you haven’t done so, I believe local businesses should start to look outside of a local-SEO-3-Pack-ONLY focused strategy. While local SEO still presents a tremendous opportunity to grow your business, I’m going to look at some supplementary organic strategies you can take into your local marketing campaign, as well. In this post I’m going to address: How local search has changed... [...]

David Freeman says, “Search engines are advancing at the fastest rate we’ve seen in many years thanks to machine learning. These advances have allowed the search engines to focus on providing the most relevant results, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of user experience (UX). At the end of the day, what is good for the consumer is good for organic search performance — especially if we consider how machine learning is becoming ever more central to search algorithms and incorporating areas such as search sequence, as well as content quality, structure and sentiment. To... [...]