Category: SEO Opinions

In other words, why you should choose me.

No Contract. No Monthly Fee

Did the web marketing company you spoke with try to get you to sign a contract? Let me guess..a 6 month “commitment” is required?

Why? SEO doesn’t take that long, especially for local businesses. If you are paying a company a monthly fee then they better be doing something for you like creating lots of original content that is actually getting traffic to your site.

I work on a project to project basis. What’s your goal? To get as high as rank as possible for keyword “X” or to have your ad constantly showing up at the top for half the cost that you are paying now?

Once I accomplish these goals for you the project is done. I won’t ask for a regular “fee” to “keep things going.” With me, done is done. A project goal should have a definitive end. I never heard of a project that just goes on forever and ever, have you?

Stop paying monthly fees for no reason. Stop signing contracts that rope you into legal bindings where you are forced to pay even if the company didn’t provide any value to you.

Free Consultation

Call me. I’ll answer any question you have about search engine marketing. SEO, SEM, Local SEO, Blogging, Social Media, etc. completely free of charge. I’ll even come to you and have an in-person meeting, again, completely free of charge.

You Work With Me And ONLY Me

You have a “team” of people working on your site, huh? Is that why you can never get through to the person you need to speak to about specific matters when you call the company that you hired to promote your site?

Or, is the person you need to speak with no longer working for the company you hired and now you have a whole new person that just jumped in the middle of your project so things have to be re-explained. Not very helpful, huh?

You won’t have that problem with me. I do it all and I don’t outsource anything. You start with me and you finish with me and I will always be available to help.

Over 10 Years In The Search Engine Marketing Space

I have been doing this for a while. I know what is effective and what isn’t. With me you are not just getting another “business person” who just hired a bunch of kids that don’t really have the experience or passion to get real results. I do all the work myself and I will get you real results.

I Practice What I Preach

Take a guess how I get most of my business…

The answer is: Google Ads, Google Maps, and Google Organic

In other words, most of my business comes from the first page of Google. The very solutions that I sell to my clients I utilize myself for my own business website. After all, why wouldn’t I use them? It cracks me up when I hear about companies that sell search engine marketing solutions but don’t show up anywhere in search engines.

I Learn Your Industry And Study Your Competitors

I never understood how a professional SEO consultant can claim to help create and rank content for clients when they no virtually nothing about the client’s business. I will learn your industry and study the competition.

How are your competitors beating you? What kind of solutions are people looking for in your industry? What are the current trends that will help increase your website’s search presence?

I will go that extra mile to ensure I understand your business and how you can help your clients.

I’m Available 7 Days A Week

Need help on Saturday or Sunday. No problem. I’m available 7 days a week. Is that other digital marketing company available 7 days a week too? I didn’t think so.

You can call me when it’s convenient for you, not when it’s convenient for me.

Read to start ranking your website for valuable keywords and start increasing your business revenue? Let me apply my SEO knowledge for your business.

Back in May DigiMarCon (Digital Marketing Conference) hit Rochester NY and the event ended up having quite a large turnout. I attended the event for one reason: Search Engine Optimization.

Did DigMarCon offer any new and exciting information about the state of SEO in 2018? Sadly no, but to be fair I expected this. As a veteran SEO, I rarely hear about a new technique or SEO strategy that is giving search engine marketers and advantage in the field, although, at the same time, information like this can be priceless and I never know when I will come across it so I figure it would be best to see firsthand.

Aside from Rand Fishkin, I didn’t recognize any of the speakers. To be fair, the only reason why I know of Rand is because of his useful tool that I sometimes use for my SEO projects, MOZ Open Site Explorer (backlink checker).

Overall the event was interesting and inspiring to see how many people there are in the digital marketing space even if there is really no new information or insight to be gained from the event if you have been a practioner of SEO and SEM for years. Either way, as someone who makes his living from search engine marketing (SEO being a large part of that) I feel it is still my responsible that I leave no stone unturned an always take time out (when I can) to see if there is anything in my field of work that I don’t know and that I should know.

I think it’s important that however someone makes their living that they became absolute experts in it. Even if you don’t learn anything new this year you may learn something new the next. Never stop pursuing knowledge in your field and always attempt to became better than you are. This was my takeaway from DigiMarCon this year.

Google’s search engine evolves more and more every year. In this post I will cover “the state of search” in 2018 and what is considered best practice to ensure your rankings are the highest they can be in each of Google’s 3 main sections: Ads, Maps, Organic.

Google Ads (Formerly Google AdWords)

Launched back on October 23, 2000, almost 18 years ago, Google AdWords has been the main source of Google’s profits since virtually all of the rest of their services are free. Google has officially rebranded AdWords and changed their name to just Google Ads.

Aside from marketing aesthetics, the ads themselves have undergone some changes and now offer a plethora of informatin that can be included in an ad to heighten the value of each ad.

“we are simplifying our products for advertisers and publishers of all sizes so they can more easily reach consumers anywhere, at any moment and on any channel.”

Pricing, specs, hours of operation, even reviews and pictures can all be shown in a Google Ad, providing a considerable amount of content value to viewers before a click and site visit is even achieved.

Google Ads are clean, non-intrusive, and deliver valuable content upfront making Google Ads more powerful than ever as a marketing tool. They are a main driver of business for not just my clients but for myself as well.

Google My Business (Google Maps)

Commonly referred to as “The Map” or “Local Results” in search results, Google My Business has evolved a great deal making it a powerful marketing tool for businesses that have brick and mortar locations. A GMB (Google My Business) listing can be optimized a great deal to include things like posts, Q&A’s, booking and appointment setting, and even video.

“Showings like reviews, website content, media articles, categories, business names and other things that influence Google’s sense of how it understands the business.“

A GMB listing truly is a “mini-website” as so much content from a main site can now be put on these dynamic listings.

With all the new features added to GMB it’s quite possible to gain a considerable amount of leads for any brick and mortar business from this section (assuming you rank high). Treat your GMB listing like your website and you will go far with it.

Google Organic

Good ‘ol organic. The section that started it all. In layman’s term, this is “where the websites are” as the only real requirement for showing up in Google’s organic section is just that, having a website online. Google does have quality requirements so not every website will get indexed into Google’s search engine but in all honesty it’s got to be a pretty crappy website to not get listed.

The big changes with organic is that everything is laser targeted. Search queries match websites exactly. Algorithms like Panda and Penquin ensure that organic listings meet strict guidelines and that quality, relevant content only gets through.

“We have no further comment.“

Although not perfect, the organic section of Google has improved considerably. For businesses, a good amount of quality content related to their industry is still the single most important thing followed closely by backlinks (quality links from other authoritative websites in Google).

The two main ranking signals? Still content and links although there are others.  Google confirms this but remains secretive about what they are exactly.

With 2018 half over it will be exciting to see what the second half of the year holds when it comes to Google’s ever-evolving search engine.

 

Below are a couple of link building strategy videos from two of today’s leading SEO strategists who have devised ways to increase a website’s organic ranking. For those of you who read my blog for free information and are, unfortunately, on too tight of a budget to hire a professional SEO specialist, these videos are for you. Of course, it is always best practice to hire a professional SEO specialist to ensure that any SEO work is done correctly and will help your website rather than harm it.

Neil Patel’s Infographic Strategy

This strategy requires the ability to create infographics for SEO benefit. If creating infographics is beyond your sphere of competence, you may want to skip this video.

Brian Dean’s “Moving Man” Strategy

Disclaimer: The following strategy may be considered “blackhat” and against Google’s TOS. If you are new to SEO it is advised that you take caution when applying this technique.

This is an older link building strategy which is still quite powerful but may be considered against Google’s terms of service as it is an aggresive strategy that utilizes old backlinks that were not originally inteded for the target site.

I hope you found these videos useful. As always, take caution when building links.

WordPress and Squarespace are two of the most popular content management systems (CMS) available. However, when it comes to search engine optimization, which one really out shines the other?
The answer may or may not be surprsing but in truth neither one is really more search engine friendly than the other.

The Real Determining Factor: Programming Languages

If Googlebot can crawl it, It can be indexed and ranked. Both WordPress and Squarespace use programming languages that Google can crawl and rank (HTML, AJAX). So, simply put, Google has no problem “seeing” content on WordPress and Squarespace frameworks.

Squarespace Will SEO Itself…Mostly.

So where is the difference then? SEO implementation user experience. Search engine optimizing a squarespace site is not as straightforward as it should be and part of the reason is that squarespace automatically applies some of the SEO just from content being added to it. In Squarespace, the title picked for each page becomes the H1 tag. Other types of content are a bit tricky to optimize on the platform. For example, adding alt tags to images requires adding captions and then hiding them so that visitor experience isn’t poor (a picture with a bunch of keywords written below it may be confusing to some visitors).

If you know next to nothing about SEO and don’t want to teach yourself SEO, Squarespace’s on-page defaults, crawling and indexing settings, page builder, and high-quality hosting will all make your SEO better without even trying.

WordPress SEO Is More Thorough…With The Right Plugin

A lot of SEO happens at the page level, and this is where WordPress shines. With Yoast SEO or All-In-One SEO editing title tag, meta description, and image alt tags in WordPress is easy to search engine optimize. but if a plugin like Yoast SEO or All-In-One-SEO isn’t installed then it’s actually impossible to completely optimize a wordpress page (meta descriptions cannot be manually added).

With the proper plugin, on-page SEO can be completed at the header tag (H1-H6) and meta description level in it’s entirety at every single page.

And The Winner Is…

At this point one could argue that Squarespace “wins” at SEO because a plugin is not required out of the box. Therefore, if someone is not familiar at all with SEO but is familiar with developing websites, it’s much easier to “get lucky” in SEO with SquareSpace.

However, the counter-argument is that with a plugin SEO’ing a WordPress site is more throrough and therefore in this respect has a higher chance of performing well in a major search engines.
In the end, neither platform will handle 100% of your SEO needs because on-site factors are just a fraction of a real SEO campaign.

Ultimately keyword research, building high quality backlinks, and creating keyword optimized content will be the deciding factor on a page ranking high in a search engine, not the framework that the page is built on.

Artificial intelligence is no joke. It is changing the way we live and think (specifically, we don’t have to think as much). Some may interpret this as a bad thing as reliance on technology tends to make people lazy and think less, which subsequently makes them dumber over time. Pay per click advertising has been within the scope of this change for a few years now.

Growing PPC Campaigns Through Advanced A.I. Ad Automation

Manually programmed AI, machine learning, neural networks. These are 3 powerful aspects of artificial intelligence that are shaping PPC campaigns by changing ad platforms. Automated rules being created though manually programmed AI is an example of an “AI PPC manager” could exist. The rules can be preset and edited by a human. These rules can be expanded in time and a powerful AI PPC campaign manager could theoretically be created.

Machine learning is the ramp up in Google’s AI journey. Google has been using A.I. to improve it’s products like Google Translate and multiple Google apps. Of course, Google’s search engine has benefited from machine learning in the form of the RankBrain. Read more about RankBrain.

Google AdWords’ retargetting system is a sample of AI PPC (low level) machine learning. When ads are retargetted to people is a result of AI learning a particular audience.

Another example of Google’s use of machine learning is Google Flights™, an app that uses previous flight histories combined with machine learning algorithms to predict any delay of a flight.

Neural Networks Fit Into PPC Advertising As Well

Information is passed from neuron to neuron until we ultimately come to some interpretation of the signal. This is how are brains work. Neural networks also pass an input through many layers of processing. Eventually, a confidence score for each level of processing.

Deep learning consists of a multi-layer type of process. As the name suggests, the signal may pass through different “deep” paths, and the path with the highest confidence in being correct produces the result. This “result” could be a well developed, high ranking AdWord™ ad, completely created though AI.

An engineer on Google Translate gave an example of neural networks some time ago. He explained that for Google to be able to translate text captured through a camera phone in real time, neural networks are used to help with computer vision.

If you want to see a neural network in action, try Google™ Quick, Draw, As the machine gets more data from the user continuing to draw, the AI guesses improve until it finally gets the right answer.

It is almost scary how fast and how far Google™ is achieving growth in it’s search engine efficiency by integrating advanced AI protocols day by day.

Interface is insync with a cms like WordPress. Navigation is seemless. Adjusting variables in campaigns has a bit of a learning curve to it but it starts making sense once you do it a few times. Beyond that it’s your own strategy at work and there is a lot of strategy that can applied.

Google’s old ad vs it’s organic listing

Google’s ads are more dynamic than ever. A major improvement since Google’s first generation of ads and the multiple itinerations there of.

The ad review process is fast, within 10 minutes in some case. No more waiting until the next business day like back in the old days
Google™ Has Increased The Value Of Their Ad Clicks.

A clear example of how Google’s ads blend into it’s organic listings in 2018

Google’s ad listings now seamlessly blend into it’s organic listings. The “loud yellow box” is long gone and the listing looks clean and provides value in the form of informative content. This makes clicking on them easier than ever. It’s clear that the big G is trying to create a harmonic duality between the two. Again, it makes clicking on them easier than ever.

Not surprising since Google Adwords™ is Google’s main source of income. It’s website advertising network should work well and provide value. The newest version of Adwords™ most certaintly does. 2/3’rds of the world’s search audience is in Google. Google’s Adwords™ ads have the same dynamic structure of SEO listings, providing similar value and trust and they are at the top of Google’s search engine for most searches. Google Adwords™ is the future of search advertising as far as I’m concerned.

Recently I was hired for a rather large job: SEO for an Audio/Video e-commerce site. We are talking close to a thousand products here. This job has an upside and a downside.

The upside is “content.” A key component of SEO. This makes my job easier, in some ways. All those products are unique in their own way and major search engines want unique content. It’s part of what makes search engines valuable. A website with a thousand pages can make quite an impact in organic search engines if done right. Each product page has the potential to serve as it’s own little traffic engine, albeit, a channel of sorts, connected to the the main shopping page. All that linked content is powerful and the volume of content alone can trigger a response in search engines.

So what’s the downside?

If not done right a duplicate penalty nightmare is waiting to happen or, at the very least, a bunch of zombie pages (pages that receive 0 traffic). Either scenario equates a bunch of wasted time.

It’s important to spend time and provide unique value in the context of each page. A tedious job to say the least. There are the h1 and h2 tags, the main body of content, meta tags, even 3rd party plugins that have their own fields for each product. in some cases.

Keeping track of the SEO results of a large e-commerce site is a whole other layer of pain. Analytics reporting data starts coming in at large amounts and sifting through said data becomes quite the chore.

Don’t even get me started on the SEM side of things: Multiple ad groups for a ton of ads, split testing, conversion ratio tracking, etc. It’s a pain in the @ss job that can be quite rewarding for the client in the end when traffic starts rolling in. The job satisfaction for completing a job this size is second to none.

Have an e-commerce site you need organically ranked or a e-commerce digital ad campaign started or both? Contact me today for free SEO and SEM consultation.

If you go through a company to handle your search marketing get ready to pay an arm and a leg…

A company’s overhead is expensive (employee salaries, office space, etc) and you better believe they are going to factor that into the cost. Furthermore, I hope you enjoy being locked in a contract that could have you paying for SEO on a monthly basis for multiple years!

Furthermore, don’t be surprised if the “team” that is working on your site changes over time as people come and go, disrupting the process of SEO’ing your website and causing unecesary delays as communication breaks down between staff members.

Let’s keep it simple: 1 SEO expert. 1 SEO project. 1 fixed cost.

One of the biggest myths that people looking for SEO work get sold is “SEO is an ongoing process.” This is just a cheap ploy to get people to pay for SEO services continuosly, typically on a month to month basis. It is simply not necessary. To be honest, a full days work is often plenty of time to properly SEO a website, beyond that, it’s all speculation.

My name is Nick Fiorini and I am an SEO in Rochester NY. Don’t get sold by some expensive SEO company. Let me be your SEO guide. My work is thorough, effective, and affordable without a contract.