Digital Marketing Blog

Ten ways local search work shows up in profit rather than traffic, and how to tell which of them your own business is missing.

One rule sits underneath most SEO advice, and it is not about search engines at all. What it is, and what follows from it for a small site.

Pinterest works as a visual discovery engine rather than a general search engine. What it is good at, where Google still wins, and when to use each.

Most guides to choosing an SEO agency are written so that no agency could fail them. Every criterion is soft enough that everybody passes, which means the guide has not helped you narrow anything down. This one is written by an agency, so read it with that in mind. It includes the situations where we are the wrong choice, because a list of criteria that cannot disqualify anyone is not a list of criteria. Here is the order that works. Decide whether you need an agency at all.

Ten tools that monitor search engine rankings, what each is genuinely good at, and the part most lists skip: what a ranking position is actually worth now.

The sections a search engine marketing report should contain, what each number is telling you, and which parts you can safely ignore.

A traffic drop has a small number of likely causes. How to tell them apart with free tools, and what to fix first in each case.

Crawlers, user agents, robots.txt, sitemaps and the algorithms behind them. What each part does, and which ones you can control on your own site.

Five tools that show which of your pages a search engine can actually reach, what each one reports, and what to do with the errors they find.

The questions small business owners ask most often about local search, answered plainly, including the ones with uncomfortable answers.

Keyword research is the easy half. What to do with the list once you have it, in the order that gets pages ranking rather than written.

Search engines have one job: return the most useful answer to a query. Here is what that means in practice, and what it changes about how you build your site.

Use the minus operator, quotation marks and a few search operators to exclude keywords from your Google results. Examples you can copy and use now.

How duplicate content affects search visibility, how to find it on your own site, and the fixes that work: canonical tags, redirects and consolidation.

If your web host has offered you something called a Search Engine Jumpstart, you are probably trying to work out two things: what it actually is, and whether you need to pay for it. This page answers both, including the case where the answer is no. The short version. A search engine jumpstart is a one-time setup job. It is real work and it is worth doing. It is also work you can do yourself in about an hour, and the reason it gets sold as an add-on is that most people do not

Start 2024 with 5 tips on how wedding photographers can use SEO for their wedding photography business website.

What ongoing SEO actually involves week to week, who it suits, and how to tell whether a one time project would serve you better.