5 Reasons Why You Should Avoid Cheap SEO Packages

VIP CONTRIBUTOR Joshua Daniels 2.6K READS Even in the digital age, there are a few marketing practices that polarize opinion quite like SEO. From those who consider it redundant or an inconvenient cost to the marketers that commit a large portion of their budgets to search engine optimization, it continues to inspire debate throughout the industry. SEO is arguably more important in today’s competitive online marketplace than it has been at any point in its history. The key lies in your execution, and an innate ability to distinguish good SEO services from those that are merely cheap or accessible. Below, we’ll explore this in further detail, while revealing the key reasons to avoid SEO packages that are marketed as being ‘cheap’ or ‘quick win.’ The Importance of SEO Let’s start by evaluating the importance of SEO, which remains the single most effective marketing technique for scaling traffic online. However, the practice is increasingly challenging, particularly in highly competitive industries where a large number of brands continue to strive for a viable market share. It’s clear that brands who invest in good quality SEO and are able to secure consistently high rankings will achieve a competitive advantage over their rivals. This leads us to the changing nature of customer behavior, which has evolved considerably as the web has enjoyed exponential growth. More specifically, consumers are increasingly likely to source, reference, and purchase goods online, as they leverage the web and its tools to seek out key points of information such as comparative pricing and availability. This is borne out by statistics, with more than 3.5 billion searches per day on Google alone. So, brands that rank well in Google’s organic search results in relation to pivotal keywords and phrases are in an ideal position to educate customers and compete for their business,...

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source https://andlocal.org/5-reasons-why-you-should-avoid-cheap-seo-packages/

Law Firm SEO: 5 Things You Can Do to Start Seeing Traffic & Results

Alex Valencia 2.1K READS Is your law firm website guilty of bad SEO? I’ve witnessed it far too many times. Law firm got bad advice. The law firm didn’t do any link building. The law firm didn’t add any content – or, if they did create content, it ended up being incredibly similar to other content already on the website, low quality, and without purpose. Basically, their websites are just broken. Broken links, broken redirects, broken everything! The result of all this bad SEO? Not enough traffic due to poor organic search visibility. Sound familiar? But now isn’t the time to pass judgment. Now is the time to get it right. Ready to find out how? You’ll need to get links that drive traffic to your website. You’ll also need to get your technical SEO right. A content strategy? Yep, you’ll need that. And you’ll also need to do some good old-fashioned marketing. Here are five ways you can bail out your website and start driving more traffic and results. Now. 1. Connect YouTube & Your Website Correctly So many lawyers are creating and posting useful and helpful videos on YouTube. Yet many law firms are failing to link strategically from their YouTube to their website. This is a huge mistake. These are pretty much the easiest links you can get! YouTube is one of the most popular websites, with more than a billion users every month. Any link from YouTube is valuable. Although YouTube links may be nofollowed, remember our goal is driving traffic. We’re not worried about rankings right now. Two things to do here: Make sure you link to your website from your YouTube channel. Go through any videos you have posted. Within the description, be sure to link to the most relevant page(s) on your website,...

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source https://andlocal.org/law-firm-seo-5-things-you-can-do-to-start-seeing-traffic-results/

How to Optimize Your Anchor Text Strategy For SEO

The early days of SEO were like the Wild, Wild West. Blackhat SEO experts were doing everything imaginable to rank their sites on Google. That included keyword stuffing and creating spammy backlinks on a regular basis. And for a time, it totally worked. But these days, those older SEO hacks are long gone. Now we deal with a much more sophisticated algorithm that pushes innocent-sounding updates like Hummingbird and Panda. But as innocent as they sound, they can create some real problems for your ongoing SEO efforts. One of those updates that affected SEO forever is known as Penguin and it specifically dealt with how Google uses backlinks to evaluate page rank. And with Penguin now a part of the core Google algorithm, the anchor text you use in your backlinks and internal links is more important than ever. So in this guide, I want to show you how to optimize your anchor texts so that they will positively impact your SEO. But before we go there, you have to understand how anchor texts work at all. What is anchor text, and why bother? Even if you don’t realize it, there’s a good chance that you use anchor texts on a daily basis. Anchor text is the clickable text that you see in a hyperlink. So if the Internet is a highway, then you can think of anchor texts like signs for upcoming exits. They send signals to both your website’s user and search engines. And when used correctly, they will connect you to a different “lane” by allowing you to source credible information from another website. They also play a role in helping users navigate your site as well. If you were to look into your site’s code, you would see a line that looks like this: This is the part of...

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source https://andlocal.org/how-to-optimize-your-anchor-text-strategy-for-seo/

How to Explode Traffic with the Right Content

VIP CONTRIBUTOR Tom McLoughlin 3.9K READS “Content is king” is a phrase that gets bandied around the web an awful lot. I’ve written before about how content is no good without promotion, and I stand by that. But if you do promotion right and have a relatively established website, there are a few things you can do with your content that can help explode your traffic. And I don’t use that hyperbole lightly. Too many people fall into the trap of churning out blog content for the sake of it, without much thought and research, or without delivering on that research once it’s been done. Here’s how to stop that happening, and to create informational content that will truly shine and bring lots more people to your website, in a consistent way. The starting point for all effective content (that targets search traffic at least) is keyword research. You need to ensure you are writing pieces of content that target phrases and topics people are searching for. For this process, our focus is on informational content so you should be looking for the kind of things your audiences are searching for higher in the buying funnel before they reach the commercial queries that are more likely to directly convert. Questions A great way to find this is looking for questions that people are asking about your topic. Fortunately, Ahrefs has a handy little tool for that which will tell you what questions people are searching for around your topic: In this example, if I had a client who offered trips to Italy, I would put Italy in and see what comes back. I could then start typing in more specific locations like Rome or Florence and get another batch of ideas. You could then go the other way and broaden the search...

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source https://andlocal.org/how-to-explode-traffic-with-the-right-content/

SEO-Friendly Hosting: 5 Things to Look For in a Hosting Company

VIP CONTRIBUTOR Amelia Willson 2.9K READS As SEO professionals, we have no shortage of things to worry about. There are the old standbys: backlinks, content creation, sitemaps and robots.txt files. And there’s new(er) stuff to get excited about as well: voice search, featured snippets, the mobile-first index. Amidst the noise, one factor often goes overlooked, even though it can impact your site’s uptime and your page speed – both of which are essential elements for maintaining positive organic performance. I’m talking about web hosting, folks. The web host you choose determines the overall consistency of the site experience you offer organic visitors (and all visitors, for that matter). If you want to prevent server errors and page timeouts – and stop users from bouncing back to Google – you need a solid web host you can rely on. Ultimately, you want a web host that supports your organic efforts, rather than impeding them. Let’s look at five key features that define an SEO-friendly web hosting company. 1. High Uptime Guarantee Your host’s uptime guarantee is arguably the most important factor in whether they’re SEO-friendly. Uptime refers to the percentage of the time your site is online and accessible. The higher your uptime, the less likely visitors will visit your site only to discover it’s down, sending them back to the search engines and potentially risking your rankings in the process. Better, more reliable hosts offer higher uptime guarantees. For best results, choose a host with at least 99.9 percent uptime guarantee (or higher, if you can get it). That translates to roughly 1.44 minutes of downtime a day and 8.8 hours per year. Not bad. However, be wary of any host that claims 100 percent uptime. There’s always going to be some downtime. The key is to keep it as...

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source https://andlocal.org/seo-friendly-hosting-5-things-to-look-for-in-a-hosting-company/

SEO Pricing: How Much Does SEO Cost in 2018? [Industry Research]

Joshua Hardwick Head of Content @ Ahrefs (or, in plain English, I’m the guy responsible for ensuring that every blog post we publish is EPIC). Founder @ The SEO Project. Article stats Share In May 2018, we surveyed the SEO industry to find out how much they charge for SEO services, and what pricing models they use. Here’s everything we learned from the 357 respondents. I’ll begin with our most significant finding… … Matt Cutts has left Google and is now in the SEO game. He offers his services worldwide and charges just $500-$1,000 per month. A bargain really, as I’ve heard he knows his stuff. I started with this example to illustrate that we didn’t just throw a survey into the air and blindly pull results in Google Sheets. We manually reviewed every submission to remove duplicates and spam, such as this Matt Cutts troll entry. Two other notable points: We disallowed anonymous submissions to keep the original dataset as “clean” as possible. All respondents had to give a company website or freelancing profile. We didn’t restrict the survey to our audience. We promoted it heavily on Facebook to reach a broader range of SEOs. We ended up with 348 “clean” submissions, from which I pulled insights relating to: Hourly rates Monthly retainer rates Per-project fees I delve into specific findings for each section below. But first, a few takeaways… SEO Pricing: 10 Top Takeaways Here are my top 10 personal takeaways from the data: Most SEOs charge a monthly retainer for some or all of their services. 74.71% of respondents charge clients a monthly retainer fee. Pricing for this varies significantly from country-to-country, but it almost never exceeds $5K/month (94.23% of all respondents priced their retainers at $5K/month or below). Many SEOs offer numerous pricing models, although the...

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source https://andlocal.org/seo-pricing-how-much-does-seo-cost-in-2018-industry-research/

Local SEO in 2018: 12 Tips to Build Local Engagement

STAFF Angel Niñofranco 2.2K READS This year, local businesses need to step up their game to get online visibility. Competition in the local SERPs is getting more difficult and “your website doesn’t matter” anymore. Dana DiTomaso, President and Partner at Kick Point, recently spoke about local SEO in 2018 and beyond during PeepCon 3.0. DiTomaso explained why businesses need to focus more on optimizing for local search and how they can get better online visibility through local engagement tactics. This is a recap of DiTomaso’s PeepCon 3.0 presentation. Local SEO: Today & Beyond Local search is undergoing a few challenges, including review spam and listing spam. But Google is making steps to address them. “Spam is like whack-a-mole,” according to DiTomaso. “Spammers try new stuff, Google smacks it down.” To improve the quality of its listings, Google introduced the Local Guide program where people provide relevant information about local businesses to Google. When people search for businesses, visit their location and review them from your Android phone – all with your Location Services turned on, then Google knows where you’ve been. Most people only have one phone and searching for a business, going there, and reviewing it are all measures of local engagement taking place on mobile. What’s more, it’s hard to fake location data. Currently, local search comprises of about one-third engagement, one-third local data, and one-third traditional SEO. But in the future, DiTomaso said, engagement will become a more significant factor for local SEO – as it is the best way how Google can differentiate the quality of businesses. Google knows so much about people – from the topics you’re interested in and the videos you watched, to the places you went to, and the things you said. Through these bits of information, Google has a complete snapshot of...

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source https://andlocal.org/local-seo-in-2018-12-tips-to-build-local-engagement/