Mike Murray has shaped online marketing strategies for hundreds of businesses since 1997, including Fortune 500 companies. A former journalist, he has led SEO studies and spoken at regional and national Internet conferences, including Content Marketing World. Founder of Online Marketing Coach, Mike is passionate about helping clients identify their best opportunities for online marketing success based on their strengths, his advice and industry trends. You can find him on Twitter @mikeonlinecoach.
If you’re concerned about your Google rankings and website page load speed, you should keep them in perspective.
Website developers and marketers buzz about page load time, especially because Google announced beginning this past July that speed is a keyword ranking factor for some mobile versions of websites.
In a Google Webmaster Central Blog post, Zhiheng Wang and Doantam Phan write:
If you want to leverage search intent with SEO keywords on Google and other search engines, it’s best to balance the methods with the false hopes.
In a moment, I’ll dive into the big intent types like transactional, informational, and navigational.
Mostly, I want to share a perspective to help you suppress your excitement about choosing the perfect keyword scenarios for SEO.
Maybe you’re like me and think of searcher intent with the end goal in mind – getting that conversion. Don’t we want to minimize traffic that underperforms?
Given your vigilance with the all-powerful search engine rankings, it is reasonable to be concerned about Google mobile-first or at least more curious than usual.
Google recently weighed in, knowing its plan led to confusion. In a series of tweets, Google touched on everything from a problem showing cached pages with mobile-first results to clarifying that “hamburger” menus are fine to use.
But confusion still abounds because of the vast number of websites and worry about natural search engine rankings.
Let’s dive into some common questions to learn whether your website is likely OK, where the biggest problems may surface, and how to keep your rankings in perspective.
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Does your online content have an expiration date?
Is it only good for 30 days? A year? Two years?
Thanks to search engines – whether you like it or not – your content is evergreen.
But while your content’s always discoverable technically, you need to think strategically about how it can be valuable all year round for searchers and Google’s algorithm.
I doubt any marketing team can perfect its SEO and content marketing efforts. Time, degrees of expertise, and changing algorithms always get in the way.
But SEO misfires abound for B2B and B2C websites and they can be avoided or at least minimized.
Let’s dive in.
Businesses should use 2018 to break the bad habit of viewing aspects of an SEO marketing strategy as a one-time exercise. Too often, some companies optimize a website page and never adjust it.
Though 61% of marketers in a 2017 HubSpot study say increasing organic visibility is their highest inbound marketing priority, they don’t always follow through.
Editor’s note: For the most recent version of this post, click here.
A key performance indicator (KPI) is only effective if you’re actively measuring it.
Key performance indicators can help provide insight into whether your marketing efforts are effective or you need to take a different approach. For example, if one of your campaigns is negatively affecting ROI, the sooner you know the better.
Marketers who measure their KPIs on a frequent basis can more easily identify bad campaigns and flip the switch before it affects the ultimate objective. Likewise, campaigns showing promise through positive key performance indicators can be further explored. Continue Reading
If you care about content marketing and SEO, you can’t ignore link building.
Google executives acknowledge that backlinks are among top three ranking factors along with content and RankBrain (Google’s artificial intelligence technology that handles search queries).Continue Reading
SEO image optimization should be second nature for content marketers, but it’s easily overlooked. Search traffic loses when haste wins.
Before I get into all of the nuances and tips, I want to be clear. Google still highlights some poorly optimized images on the primary and image search results. Why? Google is all about presenting the right information when it can. If the content is relevant to a search phrase, the image could appear high even if it misses the mark in terms of best practices.Continue Reading
It makes sense at times to produce content without worrying too much about the SEO aspects. (Please know it isn’t easy for me, an SEO professional, to write that.)
Some SEO purists suggest that website content be optimized at all times. It’s inevitable that someone – or a team – will follow an internal process and think about the content with an everything-SEO mentality.Continue Reading
