Online Business Services - Website Design & Internet Marketing for Small/Med Businesses

Standing out on Google isn’t just about having a good ad, but also about leveraging SEO best practices and the tools Google offers, so you can drive long-term organic traffic while getting clicks to your website, service pages, and blog posts. When done right, you can beat out your competitors right when potential customers are ready to buy. If you want to stay competitive in your industry, you need to evaluate your SEO and PPC strategy and create a plan that ensures you’ll stand out from competitors once and for all. Start by evaluating these seven foundational elements of your current marketing plan, each of which will move the needle for your visibility efforts. How can you stand out from your competitors on Google? Google's search engine results pages are filled with opportunities to stand out, in various forms. There are ads, organic results, local results, images, shopping results, and more. Below are some attainable ways to stand out above your competito...

I was recently performing a SERP analysis for a client and noticed some big differences in performance when comparing mobile to desktop. For example, clicks and click-through rate were much lower on mobile than desktop for certain queries. And when checking the mobile SERPs for those queries, it wasn’t long before I could see the culprit. It was a “Frankenstein SERP Feature” that’s a hybrid version of the entity carousels we have seen at the top of the SERPs for some time. It contains a combination of entity listings with carousels containing content from across the web. It’s only present in the mobile SERPs and it can take up a huge amount of real estate. It’s often titled “Found on the web” but can have different titles depending on query. If you focus on publishing content about entities contained in Google’s Knowledge Graph, then you should pay close attention to this feature. It could be impacting your performance right now or could creep into the SERPs at some point for queri...

In these uncertain and unprecedented times, when every business is facing some sort of a struggle (whether it is a lack of demand or the shortage of supply or something else), all of us are trying to figure out how to keep our businesses afloat. Can SEO be part of the solution here? For the most part, it can! Here are a few important steps to adapting your SEO strategy to survive the global pandemic: 1. Re-focus your site to what is likely to be in demand and/or available This is probably an obvious step but too many businesses are missing it: If your product and offer is not in high demand at this time, highlight products that are. On the other hand, if your primary products are sold out or need time to re-stock, shorten your product line to focus on what you can deliver fast. Don’t delete anything that is out-of-stock but rather change your home page to put more important and / or available products and deals. In most cases, re-focusing your...

Among newer SEO issues that have become a widespread problem is so-called “Mixed Content” issue. Let’s find out: What mixed content is How to spot and fix the mixed content issue What Is Mixed Content? Mixed Content issue occurs when a secure page serves non-secure content (images, videos, but also scripts, styles, etc.) Mixed content occurs when initial HTML is loaded over a secure HTTPS connection, but other resources (such as images, videos, stylesheets, scripts) are loaded over an insecure HTTP connection. This is called mixed content because both HTTP and HTTPS content are being loaded to display the same page, and the initial request was secure over HTTPS. Source: Jo-el van Bergen (Google) There are two types of mixed content: Passive mixed content : insecure videos, images,and audio files, and other resources that cannot interact with the rest of the page. Active mixed content : non-secure iframes, scripts, styleshe...

On January 11, 2021 Google announced improvements to GSC’s Index Coverage data. With the update, which is clearly apparent in the reporting, Search Console removed the generic “crawl anomaly” issue (and mapped those to more granular issues), changed how urls are reported that are blocked by robots.txt, added a new issue called “indexed without content” as a warning, and then had one final note about soft 404s. That last bullet said, “Soft 404 reporting is now more accurate.” And based on my work with large-scale sites, I was particularly interested in that final bullet. A number of the sites I help had tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of soft 404s being reported based on the nature of their content. Starting on January 5, 2021, the number of soft 404s reported in GSC fell off a cliff. I’m talking about a severe drop, like these examples: In order to understand why alarms were going off in my office, and why I’m particularly interested in those drops, le...