Looking to get out of the SEO business? Good!

The SEO industry is becoming more difficult than ever, and columnist Jeremy Knauff explains why that is a great thing for the industry as a whole.

Jeremy Knauff on November 27, 2017 at 12:08 pm

It’s not your imagination — there’s no denying that SEO has become increasingly difficult over the last few years.
A recent thread on WebmasterWorld highlighted this fact when a poster lamented the challenges he has faced adapting to changes in the SEO industry, and he said that he was considering leaving the industry entirely. This prompted Barry Schwartz to share a poll collecting feedback on the topic from a wider pool, and I was initially quite surprised to see that a large percentage of respondents shared the same concern as the original poster.  Read more

The Difference Between Local Rankings and Google Maps

The image you see above is described as Google Local for Local Businesses. There is no cost to advertise in these spots but how do you get there you ask?  Well up to 2016 there were a lot of tools which any SEO Specialist could use to optimize the Google Plus (Google Business ) page.  In 2017 Google eliminated 95% of the tools needed to optimize for Local rankings.

Today Local Rankings in Google are based on activity, social media, and reviews about your business across the web.  That's right, REVIEWS are a huge factor right now, but as you can see from the picture above it's not how many reviews you have but possibly the quality of text in them.  And also, I don't mean keyword stuffing reviews, just good old fashion word for word comments about a service.

And now for the topic...Why are my rankings difference in Google Local and Google Maps?  The answer, Google blends ranking results from both Local and Organic and maps does not.

Think Smart Before Naming Your Company

We have been working with a company called Rosco Rags since 2010 promoting and branding their websites. Internet Marketing techniques that have really helped each website soar. RagsCo is the main rags store for cotton rags, new and reclaimed. It is really the core of all the websites because of it's very short and to the point domain name RagsCo.com. This rag store does very well in Google Search for many keywords like, recycled rags, bulk rags, shop towels, wholesale rags and other words that are similar to this industry. We also have them ranked well in Local Search.

The other store is structured more around microfiber towels. Rosco Microfiber is a supplier of quality microfiber towels which they sell wholesale, bulk and retail. Another branding name that has been catchy from day one. Easy to remember and Google seems to like the brand-able name which also has one keyword in it.

So just keep in mind when starting a business, branding is everything online and offline.  Step one is to think smart before naming your company.  It will pay off in the long run with online visibility if you choose the right company name for advertising identity, SEO and branding.

Google AMP Update

Advice for AMP-curious publishers

Columnist Barb Palser offers a framework to help publishers assess the potential benefits of Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Barb Palser on March 17, 2017 at 9:47 am

The Accelerated Mobile Pages project has some big numbers on the scoreboard: More than 860,000 domains are publishing over 35 million AMPs per week, according to stats shared by Google at a recent AMP developer conference, where the company also announced the expansion of AMP to more than a billion additional users in China and Japan. AMP already represents 7 percent of top US publishers’ web traffic, according to Adobe.
As the light, fast-loading mobile format is embraced by leading social platforms, e-commerce sites and content publishers, some digital managers are still trying to evaluate the importance and urgency of AMP with respect to their specific strategies.
The AMP-curious include smaller e-commerce sites, professional sites, blogs, academic publishers, niche content sites and even news publishers in small markets. In general, they like what they hear about AMP’s benefits and are eager to improve search performance — but are also juggling a long list of competing priorities and must be careful about allocation of resources and brain space. Their question usually isn’t whether to implement AMP, but whether it’s important enough to prioritize now.
Any publisher can benefit and learn from AMP at some level; here’s a framework for assessing how meaningful those benefits might be for your site, today.

Will AMP improve your site’s reach?

One reason to implement AMP is to increase traffic to your site — and avoid losing audience to AMP-enabled competitors. This opportunity is significant for certain types of websites and negligible for others.
Today, Google’s Top Stories AMP carousel is the main place where AMP content is explicitly and strongly advantaged over non-AMP content. The Top Stories carousel is an array of AMP-rich results for news-related queries. (Certain types of structured content, such as recipes, are also displayed as AMP carousels, but the Top Stories carousel seems to be unique to news.) The carousel dominates the mobile viewport, pushing down other results. If your content is likely to be surfaced in the Top Stories AMP carousel, then you should definitely be looking at AMP.  read more