Before we start, I’d like to make a statement. The article you are reading is not from a digital agency owner promoting his search engine optimization agency. Instead, this article is from an agency owner who has seen many models through the decades. Throughout this article, I’ll suggest some questions worth asking as you choose…
Every year, it seems like there’s a new “next big thing” in SEO – some big release that causes a bunch of chatter – it’s the future of search! Some become an integral part of the ranking algorithm, like BERT and progress in the natural language processing space, and some fizzle out like AMP. This…
Part 2 of a series on SEO reporting best practices (ICYMI: Part 1) Traffic data, found in Google Analytics, helps you quantify your site’s engagement level. Using this data, you can understand more than just how many users visit your site. Traffic data can reveal what information users find useful and help you prioritize optimizations…
Part One of a series on reporting best practices Marketers rely on metrics and KPIs, whether it’s to manage expectations, track progress, or just establish a common internal vocabulary to discuss projects and goals. Understanding the sources and limitations of each type of data point you collect directly informs the insights you can gather–and the…
E-commerce competition is cutthroat, both in SERPs and beyond, and only grows exponentially more complicated as you increase the number of product SKUs your business sells. Success relies heavily on product taxonomy, both an art and a science. But how do you balance providing prospective customers with a seamless user experience–at every stage of the…
The purpose of this article is to serve as a reference to the current state of Google requirements, specifically as they pertain to scholarly literature. Several of our clients must satisfy guidelines as part of Google Scholar, one of the most widely used free academic search engines. We aim to optimize our clients’ content for…
If you are interested in some accessibility support for your SEO, or if you’d like to inquire about our services, we would be happy to chat with you. In this presentation for Pubcon, we talk about web accessibility as a component and driver of SEO in 2021 and beyond. Far from being a big thorny…
A Brief History of HTTP If we’re going to talk about the transition from HTTP/1.1 to HTTP/2, it’s worth taking a quick trip back to the flannel-soaked 1990s. Back then, HTTP was a simple protocol for a simple job – transporting documents from a web server to your computer as efficiently as possible. This is…
Monthly search volume has long been the reigning metric to determine SEO opportunities for page creation and optimization. But given that only 50% of searches result in a click, how do you determine what searches are best to target for your business? If your KPIs depend on searchers clicking through (and ultimately, converting), monthly search…
We all know the keywords we want to rank for, but that doesn’t mean Google actually wants to rank your content for those queries. Google’s algorithm may have already decided the intent of a query directly conflicts with the page you would like to rank. By understanding SERP intent, you can help serve up a…
The complexities of SEO are exacerbated by the limited visibility we have into Google’s algorithm. Google claims more than 200 signals make up the main web search algorithms. When Google told us content, links, and RankBrain are the biggest contributor, it didn’t exactly unravel any mysteries of how to improve rank.
We recently had a client launch a new site in Wordpress. It was appropriately in a staging area before launch. Instinctively upon hearing the news of the launch, we decided to look for a robots tag. Sure enough, every page was marked as “noindex, nofollow”. The client was able to make the change before Google crawled the new site. Above I said “instinctively” because, well, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen a site launch set to block search engines. It’s probably not even the 50th. I worked on an eCommerce platform where many sites launched with this issue. Wordpress – as fine a platform as it is – makes it super easy to launch set to noindex. Since developers often build sites in staging areas, they’re wise to block bots from inadvertently discovering their playground. But, in the hustle to push live an update or new design, they can forget a tiny (yet crucial) check box. I’ve gathered up three different ways you can monitor your clients’ sites, or even your own, without the use of server logs or an education in server administration. There’s different kinds of website monitoring (e.g., active, passive), but I’m keeping it simple and applicable for anyone. I wanted to pick a few that were diverse, free or affordable
