A Guide To SEO For Entrepreneurs In Locally Serving Industries

For personal injury lawyers, chiropractors, dentists, and other practitioners in locally serving businesses, SEO plays a major part in attracting clients and achieving success. Unfortunately, you can mess up in a heartbeat if you aren’t careful. Let’s look at how to appropriately deal with SEO in ways that are pleasing to both search engines and your audience.

The Value of SEO for Locally Serving Industries

According to Lawyernomics, the second most popular way to find an attorney is via Google , Bing, or Yahoo . A healthy 21.9% start their search in the little text box on their internet’s home page. Another 10.5% look elsewhere on the internet. That means nearly one in three clients is starting their search for an attorney online.

While those numbers are specifically geared towards lawyers, the statistics for other local industries is similar. Whether you’re a chiropractor, dentist, or some other practitioner, you can expect a large percentage of your new client traffic to come from online sources – specifically search engines.

The Difficulty of Understanding SEO

Sounds pretty easy, right? Invest heavily in SEO, and you’ll begin to see your business grow and expand. If only it were that simple. Like anything else in the business world, it takes hard work to be successful.

The trouble with tapping into SEO is that Google and other search engines are continually changing their algorithms and rules. What’s true today may not be true tomorrow. They are free to update as they please – and they do quite frequently. As a result, it’s almost impossible for practitioners with fulltime jobs to learn the best SEO practices in their free time. As soon as you learn how to do something, the rules will change. This is where SEO professionals come into play.

Investing in Professional SEO Help

Conduct a search for SEO help and you’ll find millions of results. SEO is a booming industry, and people with knowledge of how it works are eager to find a place in the market. Unfortunately for entrepreneurs, lawyers, and others with little experience in the industry, it’s challenging to determine which SEOs are experts and which are salesmen.

As a credible law firm or business, you can’t afford to associate yourself with an SEO “professional” that doesn’t know the rules. You could (A) end up wasting lots of money, or (B) damage your online credibility. Often, it’s both.

One industry expert relates the SEO frontier to the “Wild West Era” of American history – and there are a lot of good analogies to be gleaned from this example. Much like the western frontier was largely unknown in the 18th and 19th centuries, there is still a lot to learn about SEO. That means so-called “experts” will take advantage of this fact and advertise their “skills” without any real understanding of how it works. Just keep in mind that anyone can advertise and look for reviews and testimonials when selecting a professional SEO.

The Latest Algorithm: Google Hummingbird

When searching for SEO help, it’s valuable to understand some of the basics about how search engine optimization works. While you may not have the time to study the intricate details of the practice, a fundamental understanding of what’s legal, what’s not, and how Google’s latest algorithm works will allow you to have productive conversations with SEO candidates.

Three years ago it was Google Panda. Google Penguin released later in 2012, and Google Hummingbird followed. Released in October 2013, Hummingbird is the most sophisticated algorithm to date. One of the most interesting and important elements to note is the focus it puts on semantic search and local results. For lawyers and locally serving practitioners, it’s important to understand what this means. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• High-quality content. Regardless of what you’re told, high-quality content is still the most important aspect of SEO. Your practice needs to focus on its core practice areas and hone in on semantically pleasing content.
• Contact info matters. Because Hummingbird seeks to give searchers local results, your contact information needs to be accurate and appropriately displayed. This means setting up and maintaining social media profiles, including Google Plus.
• Keywords have their place. When discussing what strategy an SEO professional will implement for your practice, pay attention to how they discuss keywords. While they are diminishing slightly in value, they still matter. There needs to be a healthy balance.
• Banding Together for Knowledge and Power

For professionals in locally serving industries, it’s important to band together to preserve and build your online presence in an ever-changing world of SEO. Instead of attempting to handle it on your own, consider joining forces with industry peers to learn how to best attack the issue and gain internet visibility.

Take, for example, Michael Ehline of Ehline Law Firm PC. In an effort to teach and share information about SEO guidelines, search practices, and information, he started the Circle of Legal Trust. This group consists of attorneys, consumers, and search experts all focused on improving ethical internet practices and helping professionals improve their understanding of how to operate in an increasingly internet-based marketing world.

For those in other locally serving industries, there are similar groups and organizations. While it’s difficult to fully understand SEO without an extensive background in the industry, it’s easy to grasp the significance of maintaining a healthy presence online. By partnering with other professionals and groups, you can ensure your practice is in good hands.

SEO: How to Identify Low Quality Links

Links are the lifeblood of organic search. But the quality of those links can boost or kill a site’s rankings. This article suggests methods to determine the quality of in-bound links to your site. At the end of the article, I’ve attached an Excel spreadsheet to download, to help you evaluate links to your site.

Importance of Links

Search engine algorithms have traditionally relied heavily on links as a measure of a site’s worthiness to rank. After all, links are, essentially, digital endorsements from the linking site as to the value of the site to which it is linking.

Google was founded on this concept of links indicating value. In addition to the relevance signals that other engines used in their algorithms, Google added PageRank, a method of calculating ranking value similar to the way that citations in the scientific community can indicate the value of a piece of research.

When site owners began creating artificial methods of increasing the number of links pointing to their sites to improve their rankings, the search engines retaliated with link quality measures. Google’s Penguin algorithm is one such algorithmic strike intended to remove the ranking benefit sites can derive from poor quality links.

What Makes a Low Quality Link?

Unfortunately, the definition of a poor quality link is murky. Poor quality links come from poor quality sites. Poor quality sites tend to break the guidelines set by the search engines. Those guidelines increasingly recommend that sites need to have unique content that real people would get real value from. That’s pretty subjective coming from companies (search engines) whose algorithms are based on rules and data.

The “unique” angle is easy to ascertain: If the content on a site is scraped, borrowed, or lightly repurposed it is not unique. If the site is essentially a mashup of information available from many other sources with no additional value added, it is not unique. Thus, if links come from a site that does not have unique content — i.e., a site considered low quality — those links would be low quality as well.

Search engines can identify unique content easily because they have records of every bit of content they’ve crawled. Comparing bits and bytes to find copies is just a matter of computing power and time. For site owners, it’s more difficult and requires manual review of individual sites.

There are other known indicators of low-quality sites as well, such as overabundance of ads at the top of the page, interlinking with low-quality sites, and presence of keyword stuffing and other spam tactics. Again, many of these indicators are difficult to analyze in any scalable fashion. They remain confusing to site owners.

In the absence of hard data to measure link and site quality in a scalable way, search engine optimization professionals can use a variety of data sources that may correlate with poor site quality. Examining those data sources together can identify which sites are likely to cause link quality issues for your site’s link profile.

Data such as Google toolbar PageRank, Alexa rankings, Google indexation and link counts, and other automatable data are unreliable at best in determining quality. In most cases, I wouldn’t even bother looking at some of these data points. However, because link quality data and SEO performance metrics for other sites is not available publicly, we need to make due with what we can collect.

These data should be used to identify potential low-quality sites and links, but not as an immediate indicator of which sites to disavow or request link removal. As we all know, earning links is hard even when you have high quality content, especially for new sites. It’s very possible that some of the sites that look poor quality based on the data signals we’ll be collecting are really just new high-quality sites, or sites that haven’t done a good job of promoting themselves yet.

While a manual review is still the only way to determine site and link quality, these data points can help determine which sites should be flagged for manual review.

A couple of reports can provide a wealth of information to sort and correlate. Receiving poor marks in several of the data types could indicate a poor quality site.

Google reports the top 1,000 domains that link to pages on your site. “Links” refers to the total number of links that domain has created pointing to any page on your site. “Linked Pages” refers to the number of pages that domain has linked to. So a domain may link to 10 pages on your site, but those links are on every page of their own site. If the linking site has 100 pages, that’s 1,000 “links” to 10 “linked pages.”

You can also download this report that shows a large sample of the exact pages linking to your site. In some cases the links are from domains not listed in the Link Domain Report, so you may want to add the domains from this report also.

Red flags. Generally, higher numbers of “links” and “linked pages” indicate that the domain is a poor-quality site.

This plugin turns Excel into an SEO data collector, enabling you to enter formulas that gather data from various websites.

What to use. For link quality I typically use the following.

• Home page Google PageRank. Shows Google toolbar PageRank, which is only updated every three months and may not show accurate data but useful as a relative comparison. Higher numbers are better.
• Google indexation. The number of pages Google chooses to report are indexed for the domain. The pages reported by Google are widely believed to be a fraction of the actual number, but it’s useful as a relative comparison. It’s the same as doing a site:domain.com search. Higher numbers are better.
• Google link count. The number of links pointing to a domain according to Google. Wildly underreported, but just barely useful as a relative comparison. Same as doing a link:domain.com search. Higher numbers are better.
• Alexa Reach. The number of Alexa toolbar users that visit the domain in a day. Higher numbers are better.
• Alexa Link Count. The number of links to the domain according to Alexa’s data. Higher numbers are better.
• Wikipedia entries. The number of times the domain is mentioned in Wikipedia. Higher numbers are better.
• Facebook Likes. The number of Facebook Likes for the domain. Higher numbers are better.
• Twitter count. The number of Twitter mentions for the domain. Higher numbers are better.

Cautions. Every cell in the spreadsheet will execute a query to another server. If you have many rows of data, this plugin will cause Excel to not respond and you’ll have to force it to quit in your task manager. I recommend the following steps.

• Turn on manual calculation in the Formulas menu: Formulas > Calculation > Calculate Manually. This prevents Excel from executing the formulas every time you press enter, and will save a lot of time and frustration. Formulas will only execute when you save the document or click Calculate Now in the aforementioned options menu.
• Paste the formulas down one column at a time in groups of 50 to 100. It seems to respond better when the new formulas are all of the same type (only Alexa Reach data, for example) than if you try to execute multiple types of data queries at once.
• Use Paste Special. When a set of data is complete, copy it and do a Paste Special right over the same cells. That removes the formulas so they don’t have to execute again. I’d leave the formulas in the top row so you don’t have to recreate them all if you need to add more domains later.
• Use a PC if you can because Apple computers tend to stall out more quickly with this plug in.

Manual Quality Review

If a site has high numbers in the Google Webmaster Tools reports and low numbers in the SEO Tools data, it should be manually checked to determine if it’s a poor quality site, sending poor-quality links your way. The following are the quality signals I use for manually reviewing link quality.

• Trust. Would you visit this site again? Do you feel confident about buying from the site or relying on its advice? Would you recommend it to your friends? If not, it’s probably low quality.
• Source. Is this site a source of unique information or products? Does this site pull all of its content from other sites via APIs? Is it scraping its content from other sites with or without a link back to the source site? Does it feel like something you could get from a thousand other sites? If so, it’s probably low quality.
• Ad units in first view. How many paid ad units are visible when you load the page? More than one? Or if it’s only one, does it dominate the page? If you weren’t paying close attention would it be possible to confuse the ads with unpaid content? If so, it’s probably low quality.
• Use Searchmetrics. Enter the domain in the Searchmetrics’ search box to get search and social visibility, rankings, competitors, and more. It’s free, with an option to subscribe for many more features. I’ve included this in the manual review section because you have to paste each domain in separately. It does, however, provide a balancing analytical approach to the subjective nature of manual review.

Finally, when reviewing sites manually, don’t bother clicking around the site to review multiple pages. If one page is poor quality it’s likely that they all are. In particular, the home page of a site typically represents the quality of the entire site. Download this Excel spreadsheet to help organize and evaluate links to your site.a

How The Apple Watch Could Change The World Of Local SEO

Apple recently unveiled the up-and-coming sixth generation of its iPhone, as well as its next gadget, which will arrive in stores in early 2015—the Apple Watch. SmartWatches have been experimented with by other companies in the past, but Apple’s foray into wearable smart technology could mark the beginning of a new tech era and some radical changes for the world of local SEO.

If you represent a local business trying to boost online visibility for your brand, it’s time to start looking at how the Apple Watch is changing the rules and think about what you can do to stay ahead of your competition.

The Apple Watch: Bringing SmartWatches Back Into the Spotlight

SmartWatches have occasionally popped up on the market for the past few years, but none of them have really caught on with the public. Wearable technology, like SmartWatches and Google Glass, have generated significant interest, but only on a theoretical level thus far; the devices have generated word-of-mouth buzz, but sales and reviews have been lukewarm at best.

The Apple Watch seeks to change that landscape and bring wearable technology into public favor. Featuring the now-familiar voice-activated digital assistant Siri, Apple Play, Apple Music, and surely thousands of downloadable apps, the Apple Watch is stepping ahead of its SmartWatch competitors.

The most popular feature of the new device, and the most significant for local SEO, is its new mapping feature. Rather than showing a map and speaking audible directions, like smartphones and older navigation systems, the SmartWatch will use a system known as “haptic feedback” to provide hands-free, eye-free directions with directional buzzes. Time will tell how functional and practical this system is for navigation, but the early buzz seems to indicate an overwhelming excitement for the new product. If Apple delivers the same level of quality in its SmartWatch as it has its many generations of iPhone, it could be a true game changer.

Siri’s Relationship with Bing

Local search today is still dependent on search engines. Google is by far the most popular search engine, especially for local results, so most SEO campaigns cater specifically to Google. The popularity of smartphones keeps rising, leading many to perform searches on their mobile devices rather than on their home computer. The result of these trends is that search queries are changing; rather than typing search queries on a keyboard, users are speaking the search queries into their smartphones’ microphones.

With the dawn of the Apple Watch, Siri may accelerate this trend. The Apple Watch’s small screen and location on the wrist may make it more difficult to use your fingers to input data, encouraging users to speak search queries rather than type them.

Tell Siri to search for a “burger restaurant,” and she’ll populate a handful of local results. But currently, Siri uses Bing to populate that information. That means that local search marketers, in order to capture the attention of Apple Watch users, will need to adjust their strategies to focus on Bing Local results (instead of just relying on Google). Fortunately, many fundamental strategies will still apply—such as optimizing listings on local directories like Yelp—but Bing may soon see a surge in popularity due to Siri’s reliance on it.

Optimizing for Apple Maps

The Apple Watch will come with Apple Maps as a default navigation system. While many iPhone users have opted to use Google Maps on their devices instead, the Apple Watch could foster a new generation of Apple Maps users. That means local search markers will need to take extra steps to ensure their businesses can be found on Apple Maps.

Apple Maps treats local businesses differently than its contemporaries. It doesn’t offer a “claim your business” style system, like Google does, that allows business owners to identify themselves and present accurate information for their directory. Apple Maps does provide an opportunity to report mistakes in listings, but this is not as accurate, transparent, or efficient as the similar system that Yelp! offers.

Apple Maps does pull at least some information from local directories and other information providers such as Yelp!, TomTom, Factual, and Localeze, so it’s possible to improve your listing on Apple Maps simply by updating your information on third party sites. This is already a best practice for local marketers, but it will take some extra effort to claim and update your information on some of the lesser-known third party local platforms.

“Super Local” Searches

Local search results are already impressive; Google can detect your general location when you search for, say, “Mexican restaurants,” and show you a list of Mexican restaurants near your current location (usually based on your IP address). While the notion is speculative for the time being, it seems reasonable that the onset of SmartWatch popularity could give rise to a new level of local search using GPS location information. Instead of focusing on results for a given query within a city, the SmartWatch could give you results within a given city block.

Again, this “super local” search is merely speculative at this point, but it pays to look to the future. Optimizing for a very specific crowd could eventually become more important than optimizing for a city or region.

Mobile Coupons and User Engagement

Mobile coupons have already become popular with smartphones, and interactive elements like QR codes have given smartphone users a chance to use their technology in real life for some kind of benefit (like a discount or more information). This trend will increase in sophistication as the Apple Watch arrives on the scene.

Users will demand even more immediacy, so if you can find a way to cater to those users faster than your competition, you’ll be on top of your local competitive market. While there are currently no details on specific offers local retailers can make to serve the Apple Watch crowd, it’s an idea to keep in the back of your mind as you rethink your local optimization strategy.

Overall, the fundamentals of local search will remain the same—ensure accurate information across all your local directories and give users an excellent mobile experience—but the Apple Watch will mark the beginning of a new series of trends. Business owners and marketers will have to spend more time optimizing for Bing and Apple Maps specifically, and will have to be prepared for the onset of super-specific local searches. Keep an eye out for more details about the Apple Watch as we get closer to its 2015 release.

Humanizing Your SEO Keywords

The Death Of Traditional SEO

Traditional SEO is dying and has actually been dying for quite some time now. Google, holding the lion’s share of the search market, has been on a quest to humanize big data. The company wants a world where our search technology values and prefers quality content over the “black hat SEO” infused garbage that cluttered the digital world.

You might not have noticed it. This change came in the form of penguins, hummingbirds, pandas, etc. The major algorithm updates Google has pushed over the recent years have all focused the search engine’s sights on high quality, human content. From these updates, it has become harder and harder to utilize traditional SEO methods. In fact, many experts and practitioners have made radical changes to their SEO approach.

Whether this is all for the better is still up for debate. What isn’t up for debate, however, is the need to adapt.

The Death Of The Keyword

In the past, one “go-to” SEO technique was the keyword: a simple word or phrase to include in the content and metadata of a site. We did this to get noticed by search engine crawlers: add a keyword here and there in the body, title, metatags, etc, and you’d be good. Unfortunately, this approach became abusive. It became too easy to create content that was effective for search crawlers, but not quite as much for human readers.

In Google’s string of algorithm updates, the preference for traditional keywords has decreased. In fact, Google has been known to penalize sites where this traditional SEO tactic has been used at the loss of quality content. Because of this change, a new approach is required to fill the gap left in the keyword’s wake.

Humanizing Keywords

It turns out you don’t have to radically change your approach to SEO keywords. Instead, you have to use keywords in a more human manner.

Dr. Andy Williams, author of “SEO 2014 & Beyond” asks a simple question, “Does your article (or site) sound as if it was written by an expert?” The answer to this question is a litmus test for how human your content appears to Google. The more human, the better. The key lies in the choice of keywords, the variety of keywords, and how these keywords are used.

Niche Vocabulary

If you open up a textbook on any subject, you will find a natural list of terms and words that are often used when talking about said subject. In many ways, these words makeup a unique language for the subject. To humanize your content, you have to identify and use this unique subject vocabulary.

• Discover the Language – just like with traditional SEO keywords, the first step is to figure out what words and terms you should be using for your topic. If you are a subject matter expert writing in your expert field, then chances are you naturally know this niche vocabulary. If you aren’t familiar with the language, however, then some research will be required. Search for a list of common terms, or analyze a few other articles written with the same topic, to see the language others use with a given subject.
• Use the Language – once you know the niche vocabulary, you have to use it in a natural way. The days of randomly seeding an article with loosely connected keywords are gone. Your content must be written in the way an expert would write or speak about it. The easier it is for your audience to read it, the more Google will likely value it.

The reason why all this works is simple: niche vocabulary is natural vocabulary. Before, keywords that might been useful for SEO wouldn’t have necessarily been the most relevant to the subject. Conversely, terms that were most relevant to the topic might not have been the most obvious choice as a traditional SEO keyword.

A Public Speaking Case Study

As a speech educator, I’m naturally writing articles about public speaking to share with the world. In the past, my traditional SEO keyword approach would have been straightforward: find a keyword generator, type in “public speaking”, and then pepper my content with the top five keywords that came up. Sometimes this approach would have resulted in a natural sounding article, but more often than not, my SEO trickery was blatant to human readers.

Given that I’ve been doing this whole “public speaking” thing for over 12 years, it’s safe to assume I’m pretty familiar with the niche vocabulary. Once I began to realize and embrace the changes that Google brought with its algorithm updates, the process of making more optimized content actually became easier. All I had to do was write articles in the same language I would use elsewhere with real humans. Suddenly, less relevant keywords (ie “fear of public speaking”) that I would mention many times in an article disappeared. Relevant terms (ie “delivery”, “attention grabber”, “ethos”, “topical organization”) that would have never come up in a keyword search had more importance. The terms that related more to the actual topic became more important.

Embrace The Change

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Niche vocabulary is a method for not only making your content more search engine friendly, it also makes your life easier. This allows you to write in a way that is natural for you, your readers, and the search engines. So, the next time you’re tempted to use that keyword generator, take a breath and just write. Chances are you will make something more optimized with a lot less work.

You Need a Modern SEO Strategy. Here's How to Shape One.

You probably know that search engine optimization (or SEO) can help more people find your company's website when they search for businesses like yours online. But when’s the last time you ensured your SEO strategy is following best practices -- and getting the results your business really needs?

Here’s why you need a modern SEO strategy, along with tips on how to build a program that helps you gain tangible results (customers) not just a high ranking, from organic search.

You can use SEO to drive traffic to your business website. But if your visitors can’t find your site or contact you, then you haven’t added much value to your business. First make sure that your website is optimized to convince interested visitors to contact you. That means you need an updated, responsive website design.

If your site isn’t built for today’s best practices, it may not even show up in search results. And outdated sites that don’t provide a great user experience raise a red flag to potential customers. This is amplified if your business doesn’t have a mobile site now that Google warns users when a site is not optimized for mobile viewing. And with scores of consumers searching for local information via mobile, having a mobile site is simply not optional any longer.

The next step is to drive more conversions of site visitors to customers. A great, mobile-optimized design will help with that, but your site also needs to feature multiple contact methods like a phone number, email address, web form and chat so that visitors can reach out to you when they are ready -- and through the method they prefer.

When you have this trifecta of a modern, mobile, and conversion-optimized website, you’re on your way to converting more of the website traffic you get from SEO.

Creating content for search engine optimization.

Search engines love content that’s recent, relevant and authoritative. One of the most challenging aspects of modern SEO is creating content that’s relevant to your business.

Both foundational website content and fresh, timely content (like blog posts) focused around the main topics and keywords of your business can help searchers find your website. To create compelling, search-friendly content, start off with a topic or keyword list that’s relevant to your business, products or services and target location.

Then create relevant, ongoing content about those topics to so that search engines will continually index your site in the search results. The most effective way to do this is to set up a blog and regularly post unique, informative posts that your audience will enjoy.

But, customer-facing content isn’t the only material to focus on. Populate your pages’ metadata fields with important keywords and accurate descriptions of its content. In addition, including on your site semantic markup code (like that found at Schema.org) will emphasize specific information about your business, like the name, business type and location. These back-end tactics can improve how quickly and easily search engines can match your site to specific, localized searches, helping it show up in organic search results.

Using social media and local sites to drive traffic.

Modern SEO doesn’t end with attending to your website. You also need to develop your offsite presence on social media sites, local listings and directories that can help amplify your site's SEO. A presence on social media sites and local directories increases the amount of information that consumers can find about your business when they search.

That’s because social signals and properly configured listings (or “citations”) might influence how search engines surface your website in organic results. Making sure these pages are active and optimized for search can also help them appear in organic-search results for your company's branded or key terms.

Set up your company's profiles on top social media sites (like Facebook, Twitter and Google+) and within important local listings (like those appearing on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Yelp and CitySearch), populate them with optimized, accurate content and link them back to your business website.

Not only are these third-party sites a key destination for local searchers, but these sources can also signal to search engines that your business website is authoritative and relevant, helping boost its visibility in the search results.

Getting a return on the investment.

Here’s your final test for a truly modern approach to SEO: Once you’re getting site visitors, converting them into customers is the next step involved with gaining a return on the SEO investment. This first means responding to and following up with your site's visitors regularly (via phone and or email) so that they actually become customers.

But also track them back to the marketing source and figure out whether they came to the site from your SEO efforts so you can know if your marketing is working. This can be done through a manual or automated process, but it does require ongoing measurement and monitoring so you can see trends, view results and make adjustments to your program.

SEO considerations when moving from HTTP to HTTPS

Back in March 2014, Matt Cutts gave the audience at SMX West a little tip that making a site secure (i.e. using Secure Sockets Layer or SSL encryption) was going to trend in 2014. Matt wanted to ensure that sites that utilize SSL encryption would see a ranking boost within Google, however at the time there were some people at Google that did not agree with him, nor did they want this to happen.

Well, only a couple of weeks ago Google announced that using SSL encryption will give sites a ranking boost within Google’s SERPs. Although away on leave, Matt Cutts did tweet about this new update on the 7th August 2014:

Matt Cutts tweet

Within the post tweeted; Google has published some clear guidelines on what they expect to see from a site using HTTPS (aka HTTP over Transport Layer Security or TLS). They also confirmed that due to the positive response, they’ve made this a positive signal for ranking websites, however they also state that this is a very “light-weight signal” and will only affect less than 1% of global search queries. The secure signal will apparently carry less weight than other signals such as a website containing high-quality content, but may become a stronger signal in the future.

It’s still early days and although Google has given some guidelines on what they want to see from a website, there are a number of other aspects from an SEO perspective to take into account when moving your website from HTTP to HTTPS.

Tips when moving HTTP to HTTPS

Moving your website from HTTP to HTTPS is very much like migrating your website to a new URL structure, or even moving to a brand new domain. Past experience has told us that there’s so much that can go wrong if things aren’t implemented correctly.

Google has given some guidelines on moving to HTTPS here and here, and Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable covered the topic too. There are also a few other SEO aspects that you should take into consideration before you commit to moving your website to HTTPS.

Firstly, you need to choose the right level of certification (i.e. 2,048 bit certificate) from an accredited/trusted provider. Once you’ve completed this step, there are a few other SEO considerations that will be important to migrating successfully:

• Ensure all your internal links point to the new HTTPS URLs.
• Ensure any external links and new social shares point to the new HTTPS URLs, if you’re still getting links to the old HTTP version of your website Google can become confused and you won’t see the benefit that these new links have the potential to pass on to your website structure. Google won’t be able to decipher which is the most authoritative page that deserves a higher ranking.
• Ensure that all rel=canonical tags within your HTML don’t point to the old HTTP version. Once you move over to HTTPS these tags must be changed to the new HTTPS URLs, as this helps Googlebot understand which version of the page should be used to rank. Again, if you still point to the HTTP version then Google will once again become confused over what page should be ranking in the SERPs.
• Ensure that you’ve mapped out the new HTTPS URLs on a page-to-page level – you basically want an exact duplicate URL structure the only thing that is changing is that ‘http://’ will become ‘https://’.
• Once you’ve got these in place you then want to implement a permanent 301 redirect on a page level. Do not 301 redirect everything (either via global or via a wild card redirect) to the home page as this will kill all your rankings overnight.
• Finally, you need to watch your Webmaster Tools account post go live and monitor for any issues Google may be having with your new HTTPS website.

Following these points will ensure that your website has the best chance of maintaining its current rankings. The reason why I say best chance is because with Google, any major change to a website, even if done correctly, can still result in either short term or long term ranking drop or fluctuation. This could be from just a small drop in one or two places for a few days to some major drops that could last for weeks or even months. Rectifying any problematic change to a website can take time to recuperate, especially with Google’s re-crawl and re-indexation rates.

Here’s an example of a website that recently underwent a URL migration mid-2013, and then a domain migration in early2014 of which the above recommendations were not followed (N.B. this was a standard migration and not a HTTP to HTTPS migration, however the move is essentially the same and as you can see, this particular website hasn’t yet fully recovered):

URL migration example

On a side note and from a business perspective, it might be a good idea to implement this level of change during a quiet period of the year. If Christmas is a busy time of year for you for example, then I’d recommend holding off on this change until the New Year. That way if any major mistake is made, or if Google takes a while to update things, it won’t affect your revenue stream from Google too much. This also gives you a little bit more time if something does go wrong and you need to fix things, whilst you wait for Google to re-index and rank the HTTPS URLs

Reasons NOT to move to HTTPS

One other consideration is to not make the move from HTTP to HTTPS if you have an already existing issue or penalty with Google in place. If you make this move whilst under a manual or algorithmic penalty, it may cause Google to think that you’re trying to escape the penalty and they may lose even more trust with your website making things even harder to recover from. I’d recommend that you fix any existing issue Google is having with your website first, whether it be a links based (Penguin penalty) or content based (Panda penalty) issue and then make the move over to HTTPS.

Finally, if you think that moving your website to HTTPS is going to fix any existing issues or is going to happen without any difficulty, then think again. In the eyes of Google this will be seen as a massive change to your website, and you have to be very careful to get things right to avoid damaging your rankings. With regards to any existing issues or penalties, Google will eventually figure things out and pass on the existing penalty to your new URL structure.

The important thing to remember is to treat the migration from HTTP to HTTPS as important as a URL or domain migration -if done wrong it can have a detrimental effect on your organic visibility within Google. It’s also important to bear in mind the signals your website is sending to Google. If any signals around your HTTP URLs remain, or are created in the future, this can cause Google to become confused and they may rank the wrong page. Help Googlebot to find the new HTTPS pages on your website by keeping things simple; any confusing signals can take Google a long time to figure out and update things in its SERPs.

Finally, do expect some ranking issues -as mentioned earlier, even when done right, a site can hit some ranking turbulence while Google works out the change. Following these recommendations will give your website the best chance of holding its current position.

Just remember, if you don’t get this right it can completely destroy your rankings within Google and can take a lot of cleaning up on your part. If you’re unsure, or need further support on moving your website from HTTP to HTTPS, then get in touch with us and we’d be more than happy to help.

How To Prove The Value Of SEO Without Drowning In Data?

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Having a tough time communicating the value of SEO to your C-Suite? Erin Everhart provides some tips on how to tackle this common issue.

We’ve come a long way as an industry. Since our humble beginnings in 1995 – arguably the birth year of SEO — to the serious identity crisis we’re in today, it’s sometimes easy to forget how much progress we’ve actually made in making this a “legitimate marketing tactic.”

We’ve moved past the hat identifiers and (most of us) have given up spam tactics. We’re better than keyword stuffing and keyword density, over-optimized anchor text and the mentality that “links aren’t for driving traffic, just providing link juice.”

The number of people that call SEO a Jedi magic trick are dwindling every day, but that far from means they get it. They may recognize SEO as important, but when it comes to allocating budgets or making business decisions about the website, it’s usually the first thing to get pushed to the side.

That just means we have to fight harder to prove SEO’s value – and thankfully, we have the data to prove it. Now, it’s about using it correctly to tell the right story.

Drowning In Data
The amount of data we have available to us as SEOs is both helping and hurting us. On one hand, we have more actionable proof that what we’re doing drives more traffic, engagement and revenue than most marketing channels out there. Entries, visits, instances, page views, bounce rate, exit rate, pathing, conversion rate, AOV, revenue – each is important in their own regard, as they each tell a slightly different story.

The problem is that we have no idea what to do with it, so we end up reporting on every number available, which is both meaningless and will fall on deaf ears.

No one likes data as much as SEOs (especially the C-suite), so if you go into a meeting armed with 15 different numbers, you’ll be on the receiving end of a handful of blank stares. Reporting on everything is meaningless. Just because you have the numbers doesn’t mean you have to use them.

Isolate & Dominate Your Base Metric
The best way to avoid this data puke (hat tip to Avinash Kaushik for coining the phrase) is isolating your most important metric or metrics and only reporting on that. Most of the time, that’s going to be:

• Organic revenue
• Visits compared to last month
• Visits compared year-over-year

Regardless of whether things are up or down, some of your stakeholders are going to want to know why — and that’s where you can either keep your supporting metrics in your back pocket or put them in an addendum to your main report.

A good rule of thumb whenever you’re reporting is to start with the highest level possible (revenue and visits) and then drill down to the metrics that support that story.

Relate Back To The Overall Business
Every marketing segment gets stuck in their own world, and far too often we search marketing professionals only think about SEO. We view it and report on it myopically, without thinking of the overall business impact.

Now that you’ve isolated organic visits and revenue, the next step is comparing that to overall traffic and the other individual traffic-driving channels. Saying that SEO accounted for $20,000 in revenue in great, but showing that SEO accounts for 45% of your total revenue is an even more powerful statement.

The same goes for the reverse if you’re showing the negative impact of what happens if you stop doing SEO. Don’t just show loss of ranking or traffic and how that affected just organic search. Show the bigger picture – how the lack of SEO has impacted the whole business — and you’ll have an easier chance of fixing the problem.

Remember: SEO Extends Offline
According to its annual multi-channel shopping survey, PWC found that 88% of US respondents first research online before buying a product, where they’ll either buy it online, buy online and pick up in the store, or go to the store and then pick it up.

SEO plays a key role in that. If you’re not ranking while people are researching, you’re immediately out of consideration for when they decide to buy the product offline. Customers can’t buy what they can’t find, so whenever you’re showing revenue, don’t forget to mention the assumed offline impact that SEO brings for the online researchers.

Getting hard data on those numbers is murkier, because alas, we can’t have cookies following them and tagging their source code when they’re note wired into the Internet.

Five Ways To Boost Your SEO Strategy

A new startup is born every day.

In garages, dorm rooms, and basements all around the world, people are bringing their business ideas to life. But this surge of entrepreneurial energy isn’t limited to actual startups. Big brands like Coca-Cola and Red Bull are adopting lean and agile methods to mimic the flexibility and rapid innovation of Silicon Valley’s hottest up-and-comers.

While it may not be practical to adjust every aspect of your company to be more like a startup, adjusting your SEO strategy at the enterprise level to mirror a startup’s methods can help you stay ahead of the game.

Here are a few SEO tips ripped right from the entrepreneur playbook:

1. Remove Bureaucracy

When you have to submit a request and go through multiple layers of approval to make even the smallest change, it squelches productivity. SEO is no different.

Your SEO team should constantly be adding and altering keywords and phrases. If every change has to be approved by the legal team and the board of directors, it destroys efficiency.

Cut the red tape, and place your trust in your SEO team. Make sure they can easily access web files, CSS, and other privileged information.

2. Stop Keyword Stuffing

SEO operates in a pyramid structure, where main terms are targeted on the home page, ancillary terms are placed on secondary pages, and so forth.

For example, if you have 1,500 terms you want to target about smoke detectors, your home page will target “smoke detectors,” and your internal pages will target long-tail keywords.

However, big companies often try to bypass this process by placing all their keywords on the home page. This method can produce quick results, but Google will ultimately penalize them for bad SEO practices. This year, we saw quite a few big brands — including eBay — tumble down search results for trying to game the system.

Cramming in low-quality links with too many anchor texts will yield feeble SEO results. Instead, hire a qualified PR professional to get you on reputable sites like CNN. The organic, healthy links will filter in naturally and boost your SEO without keyword stuffing.

3. Be Relentless About Creating a Great User Experience

Ultimately, startups succeed due to their commitment to producing the best possible user experience. Big brands can harness this mentality simply by striving to build a better site than their competitors. By producing superior content and increasing your website’s load speed, you nurture a positive brand image.

The Internet marketing blog ShoeMoneyonce described this idea as the “screw Google” mentality, which suggests that you manage your website as if Google doesn’t exist. This will keep you focused solely on building a great website that customers will return to again and again.

4. Embrace Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have a larger impact on SEO than you think, and startups know this. The most successful ones know that creating a community around branded content begins a cycle that ultimately elevates a site’s SEO.

When you create attention-grabbing posts and your followers click through, Google notices your site’s traffic spike, and you boost brand awareness.

It may not be a traditional SEO move, but it’s a great one for your site.

5. Don’t Take Shortcuts

Every entrepreneur knows there’s no substitute for hard work and dedication, and that includes a sound SEO strategy.

Back in 2007, SEO “specialists” advised their clients to set SEO bait, which tricked viewers into organically linking to a site. On Myspace, users often took quizzes that produced results in easy-to-copy banner ads. When they embedded them on their Myspace profile, it artificially inflated that site’s visibility. Google eventually caught on, and sites were penalized.

There aren’t any shortcuts to good SEO. It all comes down to great content, an engaged audience, and a solid SEO team that gets your customers the information they’re looking for every time.

While the Internet landscape is constantly evolving, SEO has remained a valuable marketing tool for businesses of all sizes. If there’s one method your company can steal from startups, it’s this: Get to work.

6 Warning Signs You May Be Dealing With an SEO Scam Artist

We see a lot of pre-packaged, so-called "standardized" online marketing packages for SEO. They should be avoided at all costs. Not only can these waste time and money -- it can actually hurt your website in the long run.

If you are thinking about working with a SEO company, they should be transparent, have a clear track record, offer customized planning and pricing and long-term planning.

1. Pre-packaged or bundled SEO solutions.

Pre-packaged SEO is not a viable solution to grow your business in this day and age. In the late '90s and early part of the millennium, it was possible to “blast” links pointing your website to hundreds or even thousands of websites and see long-lasting results. Some SEO agencies will still offer this practice as part of their pre-packaged solutions, but be weary of the problems that can come from it:

Leads aren't qualified: Not all website traffic is the same. Pre-packaged SEO eliminates the all-important experimentation aspect that separates the professionals from the rookies. It is critical for an SEO agency to outline and continuously tweak the online-marketing strategy to increase website visitors into sales.

Temporary results: If links to your website are also being blasted to other websites, you may see results -- but these are only temporary. After a while, Google’s algorithm will catch on to your website’s “unnatural link building” and penalize your website search-engine rankings back to ground zero.

Blacklisted website: If you are part of a long-term pre-packaged SEO solution, there’s a great chance that Google will blacklist your website so that it doesn’t even show up in search when people type in related keyword.

Prior to doing business with any SEO agency, ask if they have provided SEO solutions in your market, but most importantly, if they have examples or references they can give you. They should be happy to provide them, along with a process for how to reach your specific goals under specific timelines.

2. Manual submission services.

Submission services are geared toward publishing your website out to search engines, directories, article networks and the like. With the intertwining of SEO and social-media signals (Facebook likes/shares, Tweets, etc.), it is critical that your SEO service provides sound business and market strategies, high-quality content and attract links from other people -- as opposed to link-spamming practices. Adding a blog and building authority is a good option. Think strategically about this, do the research and add the tactics into a plan.

3. Guaranteed first-page rankings.

When it comes to guaranteed rankings, it is usually a scam. Why? Even if they are able to guarantee the results to your company, what happens when a competitor wants the same keyword? Who receives priority? Does it turn into a bidding war? What if you lose the bid? Will the SEO company delete your links after their program is over?

Guaranteed rankings are not something that should ever be promised. The best way to achieve first-page rankings is to do a technical audit on your site. This is something you can take on yourself (or you can have the SEO company audit for you) with the use of Google Keyword Planner or SEM Rush. These online tools will help you research the highest performing pages in web analytics to see where you can improve. Start simple and make sure that you review:

• on-page factors (tags, keywords, internal links, site structure)
• possible existing duplicate content
• possible competing pages for the same keyword(s)
• your external link profile, and your competitors

4. Insider knowledge claims.

There are many companies who claim to know someone at Google or to have insider information about the formula. Many employees at Google do not know all the exact details of the algorithm, so it would be impossible for someone on the outside to know. The only insider knowledge for a great SEO professional is based on ongoing experimentation.

To learn more about the knowledge and skill of the agency or SEO professional you’re interested in working with, ask for case studies, check out some of their previous work, ask for referrals and call them up. Remember, case studies and hands-on experience is what makes an SEO agency great. Asking them for a light audit is another great way to get a feel for their skill level.

5. Paid advertising sales.

The sales pitch sounds amazing. You sign up and tell your friends about the incredible offer, “first-page rankings in hours,” only to quickly learn that they were not offering SEO services, but rather paid advertising services. They claim that it affects organic rankings (it does not).

Avoid confusion and be very clear on what the offer is, what you’ll receive, and the expectations on both sides. Make sure to ask about the natural search-results process. I advise you to walk away from firms like these. They are trying to create a package that is hard to refuse. Their sales teams only care about commissions and don’t offer anything for your SEO.

6. Too much focus on “technical SEO”

Services from questionable companies often include the importance of technical aspects of SEO. These companies will offer to have your meta tags fixed, add H1 tags and update your sitemap. They claim that by fixing all the technical issues you’ll get quick rankings and traffic.

Beware! An experienced SEO firm will outline issues and plans for both technical and strategic reasons. A real partner for search-engine results must include customized, strategic plans that work for your business and market. They should work closely with you to understand your business, sales, conversion strategies, content strategies, website tracking and page effectiveness, PR, marketing and overall growth plans.

Good firms become an essential partner in not only providing guidance, but planning, executing and reporting with your team. This covers all the technical details as well as working to reach your online company objectives.

Check the reputation of the company. Generic advice would be to go to Google and type in “Company Name + Scam.” This is no longer the case as many companies have dedicated online reputation-management efforts.

The best way to check the reputation of the company is to ask about specific past clients and to actually review the work yourself, and if you can contact referrals. You should determine the next course of action based on the results of these conversations.

Ask the tough questions. One of the worst things you can do is to deal with an SEO agency that simply “spins” low-quality content and puts it on your website. Be sure to ask about the content creation process.

• Is the content 100 percent original? What is the process of content creation?
• What are your ranking methods? Does the company use a "white hat" approach or does it use "black"?

When you’re ready to enter a new working relationship, be sure to understand that achieving first-page rankings with long-term results will take time. Your new SEO partner will need your help along the way and this will require you to provide information and feedback. The responsibility for success lies largely with you.

7 Things That Will Improve Your SEO More Than SSL

Since Google’s announcement that SSL may have an impact on your organic rankings last week, it’s caused a bit of a stir among the SEO industry. Bill Slawksi questioned its validity since a site’s content won’t change. Cyrus Shepard mused potential profits of investing in an SSL company. But my personal favorite?

for the record, there's about 100 things you could do right now that would have a bigger SEO impact than switching to SSL.

— Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) August 7, 2014
Never has a more accurate statement been said.

The SEO industry, myself included, is a sucker for silver bullets. At one point in our careers, we’ve all looked for that one thing that will give us top rankings with convertible traffic for as long as we hope to have them. So whenever Google announces a new factor that will influence rankings, we obsess over it.

The fact of the matter is there is no one thing that will get you more organic traffic. Good SEO is a healthy combination of things, but it doesn’t have to be the exact same combination of things. As Ryan said, there are hundreds of things you could be doing that help your rankings more than SSL. In no particular order, these are my top seven:

Consistent URLs Everywhere

That means the link your users see, the link you use in your internal linking strategy, and the links you use in your XML Sitemap need to match. The most common mistake I see is having the canonical link still in your XML sitemap. If you update one, update them all.

Short, Non-Parameter Heavy URLs

This isn’t about having an exact-match domain. It’s about making it as easy as possible for spiders to find your URL and read it. Limit the number of parameters you have. Use words instead of numbers. Use hyphens instead of underscores. Avoid subdomains when possible.

Real, Relevant Content, Not "SEO Copy"

It’s rare you’ll see a Web page without a copy block on it now, but far too often this content isn’t really content; it’s "SEO copy," following some formulaic calculation with 300 words, three to five keywords stuffed in sentences, and five internal links with exact match anchor text.

Break this habit. Good content doesn’t follow a formula. Write content that will actually help your users making a purchasing decision.

Live Text High on the Page, Not Stuffed at the Bottom

Search engine spiders read pages very linearly and very literally.

Live text, not hidden behind a div, not masked in links pointing to other pages, is the best type of content you can have. It’s how search engines know what your site is about in order to rank you. If a spider has to crawl through 100 links and 50 images before they get to the meat of your page, it’ll consider those things more important than the copy itself. Push your content up higher.

Links

Plain and simple. Link building is not, and will never, die, and a site that has better, higher-quality links will outrank a site that doesn’t (assuming on-page optimization is equal). Linkarati put together some great link-building resources to peruse through if you need a refresher.

Strong CTA-Friendly Title Tags

Notice this has nothing to do with keyword-heavy title tags. You still need a keyword in your title tag, and it still should be one of the first things in it, but stick to just one, maybe two. I’m also partial to including action words — Shop, Buy, Apply, etc — in my title tags, since it elicits an action that the user should take from clicking on my listing, rather than just a description of what they would find.

Speed Up Your Load Time

The slower your site, the longer it takes spiders to parse your page. More importantly, users have lost all patience and won’t stick around for seven seconds just to see what you’ve got to offer.

If you’ve made a lot of updates and haven’t taken a deep look at your code, chances are you have a handful of lines that you don’t need but that are taking up space, because when it comes to your technical makeup, every bit matters.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and since no one does SEO the exact same way, your top seven may look a little differently than mine. So, what did I miss? What do you think impacts rankings more than an SSL certificate?

How to Ensure Your SEO Strategy Delivers the Right Traffic

When it comes to SEO, achieving first page rankings and getting more traffic is one thing, but what about ensuring those rankings deliver the right type of traffic to your website, traffic that will actually convert into new customers?

Here are three steps to ensure that your SEO campaign delivers the right traffic to your website.

Step 1: Identify Your Target Audience

You know your customers. So, identifying your target audience should be the easy part, but when it comes to SEO, this isn't always the case. If you offer different service or product lines, your target audience may comprise of a number of different segments. This makes identifying your target audience for SEO purposes much more difficult.

If you attempt to go after every possible customer in one fail swoop, your SEO strategy will most likely fail. Instead, methodically carve away the different segments, and target them incrementally. When you achieve success with one segment, then move onto the next. This is necessary because depending on the type of business you're in, each segment may have very different needs and wants.

How do you identify which segment to target first? It's a good idea to start with your most profitable and least competitive segment, so you can quickly start generating a return on your investment.

Step 2: Select the Right Keywords

Once you've identified which segment you want to target, the next step is selecting the keywords those prospective customers will use when searching for your product or service.

When selecting keywords, don't just look for the ones that deliver the highest search volume. Put yourself in your customers' shoes, and look for keywords that make sense from their perspective. There is a lot of "advice" out there about choosing keywords that have an ideal combination of search volume and competition. However, all of that is irrelevant if you fail to choose keywords that prospective customers will actually use when searching for your products or services.

In addition to choosing relevant keywords, take the purchase intent of those keywords into account. You can have two very similar keywords that indicate very different intentions by the searcher. Keywords with high purchase intent are more likely to convert than keywords with low purchase intent, and are typically long-tail keywords, with lower search volume, and less competition.

Example

For example, let's say a contractor that specializes in kitchen remodels is considering the following keywords, "kitchen remodel" and "kitchen remodeling contractor." The keyword, "kitchen remodel" is much more attractive initially because the data shows that it receives significantly more search volume than "kitchen remodeling contractor."

However, there are two reasons why "kitchen remodeling contractor" is the better choice. First, it has far less competition, and the contractor actually has a shot at achieving first page rankings. Second, someone searching for "kitchen remodel" could be looking for a number of things, not necessarily a kitchen remodeling service. They could be looking for pictures as inspiration for a future potential remodel, or a how-to because they intend to attempt a remodel themselves.

While it is possible that someone using the "kitchen remodel" search term could become a customer in the future, someone searching for a "kitchen remodeling contractor" is likely ready to execute their remodel, and is simply looking for the right contractor.

Step 3: Provide Content Your Customers Care About

The next step to ensuring the right visitors find your website is by providing them with content they find relevant and useful. Your website's content should be able to answer your customers' questions. So, think about what your customers typically want to know prior to doing business with you, and make sure your content answers those questions.

Here are a few examples of how this can be achieved:

Are you selling a service that requires a high level of expertise? Publish posts to your website's blog regularly to show that you're an expert in your field.

Do your customers typically want to see examples of past work? Provide a project gallery to showcase your previous projects, and supplement it with testimonials to reinforce trust and credibility.

Do you sell a product that your customers typically like to compare against other products? Provide a product comparison review that shows why your product is the better choice.

By providing content that your customers care about, you're not only satisfying their needs by answering their questions, but you're also giving them an avenue to find your website.

Conclusion

To ensure that your SEO strategy delivers the right traffic to your website, identify your target audience, select high purchase intent keywords your prospective customers will actually use, and provide them with relevant and useful content that answers their questions.