Some SEO professionals may advise you not to bother chasing rankings for competitive keyword terms, but columnist Stoney deGeyter believes you can build your authority for these keywords over time by focusing on the long tail.
Contributor Stoney DeGeyter argues that you should optimize with an eye toward conversions and let the rankings take care of themselves.
Keyword research isn't dead, but it has changed over the years. Columnist Stoney deGeyter shares how keyword research can be used to gain insights into the needs and interests of your potential customers.
Search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing have a lot of overlap, but they're still separate disciplines. Columnist Stoney deGeyter discusses who should ultimately own content optimization.
Google may have shifted its focus from keywords to "entities" in recent years, but columnist Stoney deGeyter reminds us that keyword research is still an important and useful part of the SEO process.
You've done everything right with your SEO, but you're still not getting the results you want — what gives? Columnist Stoney deGeyter discusses the ways amplification can help take your SEO efforts to the next level.
Every site has different SEO needs, but contributor Stoney deGeyter provides some quick wins to get your SEO program started on the right foot.
Columnist Stoney deGeyter believes we have moved beyond "traditional" keyword optimization and should now focus more on building topical authority. But just how do we do that?
Columnist Stoney deGeyter reviews some of the elements of website design and development that make it easier to perform search engine optimization later on.
Columnist Stoney deGeyter notes that the best SEOs don't try to reverse-engineer algorithms -- instead, they focus on delighting users.
Columnist Stoney deGeyter presents this beginner's guide to marrying great content with strong SEO to maximize search visibility.
Columnist Stoney deGeyter shares the ups and downs of his longest-standing SEO client -- including a rather surprising result to site architecture tweaks.
Even Hollywood makes branding and SEO mistakes. Contributor Stoney deGeyter shows us how we can learn from a recent example.
I am, according to those who know me, a very structured person. In order to function, I have to live by spreadsheets, task lists and processes. Without them, I’m lost. It’s just life. Isn’t everyone like that? But despite my obsession with structure and process, I don’t like giving clients a one-size-fits-all web marketing campaign. […]
It wasn’t all that long ago that our world came crashing down around us. In a very short span of time, Google took keyword research and ripped out its heart and shoved it down its throat. Then, it put all our keywords through a meat grinder. Then cooked them up, ate the dish with a […]
My wife and I had a conversation with our daughter the other day about responsibility. The gist was she wanted to do something that interfered with commitments she already made. We talked to her about how you have to honor your commitments, even when they get in the way of something else you want. As […]
There isn’t much I dislike about Web marketing, but dealing with clients whose expectations don’t align with reality has to top the list. While many might gripe and complain that the client “just doesn’t get it” (often a true statement), the client’s absence of reality often has more to do with the marketing team than […]
I made a mistake. It was a classic SEO blunder. Don’t judge me — it was one that you (and almost every other SEO) has probably made as well. What did I do? I allowed a client to sign a contract without fully vetting them first. I didn’t ask the right questions, and I wasn’t […]
Landing page optimization is big business for successful PPC campaigns. Google’s weighting of where a paid ad will show and how much each click costs is factored, in part, on the quality of the landing page the ad leads to. But, on the SEO side of things, you don’t hear a lot about “landing pages.” […]
Almost three years ago, Google announced that it had begun factoring site speed into their ranking algorithm. Since then, SEOs have debated how significant an effect page speed has on actual search engine rankings. While Google may be using it as a signal, it’s clearly not an overwhelming signal. Still, regardless of the algorithmic weight page speed has […]
Getting website sales isn’t all about product pages and shopping carts. Many business owners forget there is a whole conversion funnel every visitor goes through before choosing whether or not to make a purchase on your site. One of the most important aspects of that funnel is the “Contact Us” information and page on your […]
Every e-commerce operation relies on the ability of its website to sell their products. Without the ability to have salespeople roaming the floor asking customers, May I help you?, businesses rely on the their website to sell, sell, sell. Many business owners rely on content to push the customer through the sales process. There is no […]
Any marketing veteran will tell you that before you begin developing a business marketing plan, you first need to know who your target market is, along with what they want and how to appeal to them. This is just as true online as it is offline. When pursuing an online marketing campaign, whether it be […]
Have you ever gone shopping for a couple items, only to find the checkout lines too long or slow, so you drop your items and leave the store? I have, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. It may not happen all that frequently at a brick and mortar, but it does online. A […]
Just about every website has some form of navigation. Unfortunately, not every website’s navigation is good. Most of the time, a website’s navigation is put together by Web designers who know a lot about making pretty websites, but very little about marketing a website or creating a website built for the customer. Just because your […]
Many organizations rely on a website to be their #1 sales tool. They pour thousands of dollars into building just the right website with a great design, robust shopping cart and plenty of bells and whistles. At some point in the website building process, they might think about the content that goes on the website. […]
Every good story has a beginning, middle and end. It starts with the set-up, moves into the conflict and wraps up with the resolution, or climax. In the story of online marketing, each visitor to your website follows the same pattern – a beginning (What brought them there?), a conflict (Will they find the information […]
There are a lot of different schools of thought on how to develop website content that is “just right” for search engines and customers alike. Everyone has his or her own idea of what the perfect amount of content is. Unfortunately, we still hear people saying that any content is too much! The argument goes […]
I think one of the most significant problems small businesses have when it comes to growth is that they maintain a small business mindset. Now if you’re one of those that likes being “mom and pop,” then this article isn’t for you. On the other hand, if you’re a small business owner that has big […]
I’m not a blogger—I just play one on the Internet. There are a lot of professional bloggers out there. I’m not one of them. Like many small business owners that also happen to blog, I have to find ways to balance my time between the demands of running a business and pushing out information that […]
Small businesses are often left in the dark when it comes to which SEO strategies really work and which don’t. Online there is an onslaught of information freely available online, much of it contradictory. Small business owners who attempt to perform SEO for themselves are often left wondering “What strategies are more important than others? […]
I often feel sorry for small businesses. I do. Too often they don’t have the funds, time, or resources to investigate things as thoroughly as they should. Unlike larger businesses with deep pockets, small business can’t hire first-rate, high-end SEOs to do all the right things for them. All too often they have to rely […]
People often associate brands with money. And lots of it. Generally, if you try to run a branding campaign such as you see from big companies like Target, you certainly will have to fork over a big chunk of change. But we small business owners don’t have that kind of money. And from my examples […]
More and more I’m discovering the necessity of helping our customers brand themselves in the search sphere. In the past, we often felt that some clients just didn’t need to be branded in the search results. Maybe because they were smaller clients or didn’t have a nationally recognized name. But then how do companies become […]
Ever see one of those movies that show some super-secret government agency with plush high-tech interior offices that belie the exterior location? You know the ones I’m talking about. The secret spy base in headquartered in a rundown part of town in a dilapidated building that nobody but a squatter would give a second look. […]
Lately, around the Pole Position Marketing office, we’ve been discussing the cost involved in providing top quality search engine optimization. All too often we find value added services or strategic improvements that require more time than initially anticipated. How much additional value can we provide without increasing fees? While those questions continue to be bantered […]
Let’s face it, in a world where almost every conceivable metric of analyzing your website traffic is available to you, the only metric that really truly matters is conversions. Click through rates, page views, time spent on site, number of pages read, entrance and exit points, abandonment; all of these metrics are fantastic, but if […]
There are over 200 signals analyzed by search engines, creating an endless combination of tactics and strategies that can be employed to achieve exposure, rankings, and—by far the most important—conversions. To successfully deploy these tactics and strategies, however, requires a tremendous investment of time. To say that SEO is a full time job is a […]
There are many reasons why your site might lose search engine result rankings. Some of those reasons can be traced to a particular fault while others just occur in the natural course of life. In essence, rankings change because change happens. But understanding what causes typical loss of rankings can give us a better insight […]
An online business owner basically has two choices when it comes to their website marketing efforts. They can outsource it or they can do it in-house. Both of these options bring a number of secondary options to choose from and its up to the business owner to do what is best for his or her […]