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March 11, 2022 by Bill Treloar 2 Comments

Monitor Your Search Rankings and Visibility

On March 11, 2022 / analytics / 2 Comments

Search engine rankings - visibility graphSearch rankings are always in flux

While organic rankings achieved ethically often tend to be stable for months and years without further attention, they aren’t permanent.

As your business changes, you’ll update your website and may inadvertently de-optimize parts of it.  As competitors conduct SEO programs and more effectively  compete for rankings, your visibility may drop.

The danger is real

You don't want your search rankings to disappear without knowing it.
Don’t let this happen to your own search rankings.

A former client of ours had achieved and maintained enviable search rankings when we last checked his rankings. But that had been five years before. At the time, he was so busy from the SEO we did that he was reluctant to do continue active SEO lest he be unable to keep up with the business.

Five years later (in 2009) he was blaming his slow business on the recession going on at the time. But a quick check showed that as a result of changes to his web site that partially de-optimized it, his search rankings had slid dramatically over those 5 years.

It was much harder to get his rankings back at that time than it would have been if we’d attacked the problem in a more timely manner.  If we’d only been able to keep an eye on them periodically, he would have maintained his level of business.

Monitor Your Search Rankings and Visibility

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Don’t neglect monitoring your search rankings

That’s why our SEO Monitoring  program checks your rankings in a detailed report every month. If you don’t want a formal monitoring program like our search ranking reporting, you need to at least check your important rankings manually. And you need t do that on a regular basis so you’ll know when you start to lose visibility so you can take corrective measures promptly.

[Updated from the original post in December, 2009]

Have a story to share? We welcome your comments below.

June 27, 2018 by Bill Treloar 3 Comments

10 SEO Mistakes Small Businesses Make

On June 27, 2018 / analytics, copywriting, keywords, links, SEO practices, user experience / 3 Comments

Small business SEO isn’t obvious

SEO is not magic. We explain 10 common small business SEO mistakes.I often explain that despite the “Magic” in our company name, SEO isn’t magic, and there really should be no secrets about how it works. Nevertheless, it does require a little shift in how you think about your website to understand what works and why. Small business SEO mistakes can be pretty easily avoided if you know what they are.

Startups and small business owners, especially those with cash flow concerns, often try to do things for themselves. We found that there are some common SEO mistakes that small businesses make which are easily avoidable. Here’s a list of the top ten things small business owners often mess up when trying to do SEO. (Needless to say, if you want or need professional help in optimizing your site without making these errors, Rank Magic is here to help.)
Much of what follows comes with a tip of the hat to the folks at Search Engine Watch; if you’d like to read a bit more about this from their perspective, here’s their article on the subject.

Ten SEO mistakes that small businesses make

Neither are some of these ten common mistakes

1) Waiting too long

Small business owners often spend months or years designing their websites and creating content. Without an SEO strategy in place from the beginning, they often find their efforts to be sub- optimal. When they come late to the SEO process, very often much of what they have worked on so diligently on the website needs to be redone in accordance with SEO best practices. The best time to start SEO is when you start designing (or redesigning) your website. This may be the single most common small business SEO mistake.

2) Avoiding low-competition keywords

It’s easy to think that you should focus on the keyword phrases everyone is searching for all the time. It feels like a waste of time to optimize for niche keyword phrases that receive fewer searches. But for a new business or a new website, the reverse is actually true. It takes months and years to develop the online authority to rank highly for those keyword phrases – you may be trying to compete with Amazon or Wayfair or Costco for those super-high volume keyword phrases. They’re the most competitive.
Optimizing for appropriate low competition keyword phrases is easier and much more likely to result in success over the shorter term.
For local businesses, niche keyword phrases might include a county, town, or neighborhood. Think electrician on the upper East Side or Indian restaurant in Morristown. Those kinds of keyword phrases narrow your competition dramatically and make it much easier to achieve first page rankings. At Rank Magic, we do extensive keyword research and analysis for our clients.

3) Optimizing for Google instead of the customer

Design for humans, not Google.Just about anything you do on a website specifically for Google, is likely to fail to address the needs of your customers. As Google has improved over the years, it’s gotten very smart about identifying websites that are helpful to users as opposed to being focused just on Google. It’s important to bear in mind that the user experience on a website is a ranking factor at Google.

4) Ignoring or avoiding long-tail keywords

Long-tail keyword phrasesLong tail keywords are easier to rank for. are more precisely focused on your products or services than more general terms. A new plumbing company may optimize for the keyword plumbing.  But most people searching for that phrase are looking for general information about plumbing — or perhaps jobs in the plumbing industry — rather than looking to hire a local plumber. The keyword plumbing services receives fewer searches per month but is much more closely focused on the needs of the plumber’s customers. An even longer-term phrase for one of this company’s services might be sump pump repair or sump pump leak. Our new plumbing company is likely to have much better success with these long-tail phrases.

10 SEO mistakes that small businesses make

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5) Ignoring the code

I see this often, especially with new businesses that have tried to create their own website using one of those do-it-yourself sites like GoDaddy or Yahoo Site Builder. The code that runs the website is not visible on the page and is easy to ignore. But that code includes lots of information critical to search rankings and to conversions once you do show up in a search. Things like
Meta tags are in the HTML code that runs your site and they tell search engines about your page.

  • The page title, which shows up as the headline of your listing in Google,
  • The meta-description tag, which often shows up as part of your listing in Google,
  • Page and image file names,
  • Image alternate text,
  • URL structure and more.

These items all relate to the underlying code of your web pages which either A) help Google understand what the page is about and the value it offers or B) contribute to the likelihood of someone clicking on your listing when it shows up in Google.

6) Keyword stuffing

The now-ancient practice of keyword stuffing involves using a keyword phrase over-abundantly on the page in the hopes that it will convince Google the page is really, really, really about that phrase.
It doesn’t work. And it makes the user experience on the page really crappy, driving people away instead of converting them to paying customers. This is a small business SEO mistake that was usually made many years ago and has just never been fixed. If it applies to you, it’s time to fix it.

7) Forgetting internal links

Once you have people on your site, you want them to stay long enough and learn enough about you so they want to do business with you. Internal links – links among the various pages on your site foster those more extensive visits on your site.

8) Not measuring results

This chart of search traffic is an example of result tracking.You need to know if your efforts are working or not. If they’re not helping, you know you need to change things. How are your search rankings doing over time? How much traffic are you getting from search? Is it improving? You need to know this. Rank Magic provides extensive reporting to our clients on the essential things they need to know but if you’re not a client of ours you should take steps to track results yourself.

9) Focusing on features instead of benefits

You’re enmeshed in your business and are proud of the features of your products or services. Small businesses often get bogged down in the details of those features and go on at length about them.
Guess what? No one cares.
Your customer cares about benefits, not features. They want to know how you can address their concern or relieve their problem. They won’t search for a high tech toilet float valve — they want you to stop their leaky toilet.
This is one of those SEO mistakes that small businesses make that requires you to change your perspective about what to tell people about your business.
Learn more about customer-focus in this blog post.

10) Forgetting about calls to action

Order a hamburger at any fast food restaurant and I’ll bet the person taking your order asks “You want fries with that?” They sell a lot more fries because they ask. That’s known as a call to action.
This Buy Now button is a clear call to action.We all think our website copy is going to make us irresistible and will make users reach out to us without us having to ask. We’re delusional about that.
What do you want your website users to do? Buy something? Call for an appointment? Subscribe to your newsletter? Ask them.
To finish up this post, here are a few examples of calls to action:

If your small business is not ranking well and bringing in customers — Rank Magic can fix that!

Did you find this helpful? If so, please share it with the buttons on the left or the Click To Tweet above.

We welcome your thoughts in the Comments section below.

August 5, 2016 by Bill Treloar 2 Comments

How Many Incoming Links Do I Really Have?

On August 5, 2016 / analytics, links, PageRank / 2 Comments

Your Link Profile Is an Important Ranking FactorWe rely on Moz for link count data because they have the most comprehensive coverage of the Internet.

Your website’s link profile is an essential ranking factor at Google. It’s a reflection of how important or authoritative information on your website is. Your link profile is based on the number and sources of inbound links to your site. I estimate it counts for 40-50% of where you rank on Google.

And while link quality outweighs link counts, many of our clients still like to know how their link counts are doing.

Where do we get your link counts?

In the past we’ve tracked inbound link counts from a number of sources, including Moz, SEMrush, Majestic, and ahrefs.

We track the number of inbound links you have grapohically and report it to you regularly. Link count him him him him hims is one of the factors that goes into your Domain Authority.
We track the growth of inbound link counts and report it to our clients regularly.

We now collect our link counts from Moz for simplicity and because they have the most comprehensive scan of the web.

Link age may be a consideration: older links may count less than fresher links. Link weight is also important. the weight of a link is related to the authority of the linking page so that links from more authoritative pages count more heavily in your favor than links from lesser sources. Link relevance is a factor too. Links from websites related to your business help more than links from completely unrelated sources.

Links to your website help you rank higher in Google. How many do you really have?

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We periodically report to clients about their inbound link counts well as counts of how many other websites are linking. Some websites (domains) may link to you from multiple pages, resulting in a difference between total links and linking domains. Sometimes that difference is considerable.

Domain Authority

We track our clients' Home Page Authority and overall Domain Authority.
We track our clients’ Home Page Authority and overall Domain Authority.

Domain Authority and Page Authority are other metrics from the folks at Moz to measure the strength of a website or an individual page in terms of its likelihood to rank prominently in web search results. On a logarithmic 0-100 scale, it’s based on a number of more elementary metrics including link counts, linking domains, link quality, and more. It’s being continuously tweaked via machine learning against actual Google search results

[Updated on January 29, 2021.]

If you’d like to know more or have us track your own link  profile, just reach out anytime.

If you find this helpful, share it via your social media  — click on the square Follow buttons on the left or the handy Tweet link above.

Have something to say about this? Start or join the conversation in the comments below.

February 23, 2015 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

SEO Delivers the Best ROI for Local Businesses

On February 23, 2015 / analytics, local search, SEO practices / Leave a Comment

ROI-600x360Search Engine Land recently published the results of a survey that examines the sources of traffic and leads to local businesses. According to the 288 respondents, SEO ROI delivers the best to local businesses. The survey found organic search delivered the most website traffic and phone calls into local businesses, which justifies the effort spent on it.

Google Business Profile comes in second and delivers almost as good an ROI, although it sends significantly less traffic to local business websites.

website-traffic-600x371When asked what percent of visits to their websites come from different sources, organic search again came out on top, with local search on Google coming in second. The combination of organic search and local search account for a full 40% of all visits, dwarfing the other sources of traffic. That illustrates the importance of having good local visibility in place as well as organic SEO.

Does this agree with your experience? Or do you disagree about SEO ROI? Let us know in the comments below.

Find this helpful or thought-provoking? Please share with the buttons above and below.

Need help with your own organic and local visibility? Rank Magic can help.

October 8, 2013 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

What Does It Mean That Google Makes Searches Secure?

On October 8, 2013 / analytics, Google / Leave a Comment

Last month Google announced that all searches (other than PPC clicks) will be secure.

What does that mean exactly? The main tangible result will be that you’ll no longer be able to identify what keyword phrases people have used to find your web pages in Google Analytics. For some of us, that may be a pretty big deal.

How new is this?

Google started doing this two years ago  — they began encrypting searches for anyone who was logged into Google. The reason given was privacy. If you check your traffic by keyword in Google Analytics you will have noticed an increasing portion of your traffic shows a keyword phrase of “Not Provided”. It was annoying, but you could still get an idea of your keyword traffic based on the keywords that were provided. Now that’s going away.

Average percent of "Not Provided" searches in GHoogle
Why? According to Search Engine Land,

Google said it wanted to block anyone who might potentially be eavesdropping on a string of searches made by an individual and also prevent the actual search terms themselves from being seen by publishers, as some of them might be too “private” to reveal.

Why is Google really doing this?

Conjecture abounds.

One potential reason is the recent activity of the NSA in tracking Internet behavior of Americans. There have been National Security Letters sent to Google (and others, of course) which include a gag order. Google has been fighting in court to have the gag orders nullified so users would know how secure (or not) their Internet activity is. By making searches secure, they are encrypted and not even Google knows what you searched for.

Another popular theory is that businesses will now turn more to AdWords, Google’s Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising program, so they could see which search terms are bringing in visitors. Google denied that, saying:

We want to provide SSL protection to as many users as we can, in as many regions as we can — we added non-signed-in Chrome omnibox searches earlier this year, and more recently other users who aren’t signed in. We’re going to continue expanding our use of SSL in our services because we believe it’s a good thing for users…. The motivation here is not to drive the ads side — it’s for our search users.

Whatever the reason, you will soon be unable to tell what searches brought organic search visitors to your site.

Your comments and experiences are welcome in the comments below.

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