What Should a Local Business Blog About?

August 15th, 2017 Posted by Ben Ratkey Local SEO, SEO Link Building 0 comments on “What Should a Local Business Blog About?”

Your local business should have a blog; it demonstrates expertise, builds trust with potential customers, and helps you rank higher on search engines.

Maybe you added a “Blog” section to your WordPress site, but there’s nothing living there except the default “Hello World” post. Maybe you started out writing a post every week, but it’s fizzled out because you couldn’t maintain that posting schedule. After all, when you’re running a local business, you’ve got much higher priorities than writing articles, right?

Maybe you never even bothered with the whole blog thing, and you haven’t touched your website since your nephew set it up for you last year. Whatever your situation, we want you to understand that blogging is actually crucial for your business.

Tags: blogging, Link Building, Local business, Local SEO

Tingalls Graphic Design Madison WI

Web Design Trends 2017

August 11th, 2017 Posted by Eagan Heath Guest Blog, Web Design 0 comments on “Web Design Trends 2017”

This is a guest blog post from our partner Tingalls Graphic Design in Fitchburg, WI. Check them out for inexpensive, great-looking websites!

Charlton Heston - The Ten Commandments

The 10 Commandments of AdWords

July 18th, 2017 Posted by Ben Ratkey AdWords, Google, Google AdWords 0 comments on “The 10 Commandments of AdWords”

Ask many small business owners about online ads, and you might hear something like this:

“I tried AdWords, but it just didn’t work for me.”

Or worse still, perhaps they bought ads from Yelp and received little to no return on ad spend (ROAS). Then they threw up their hands despairingly and concluded that Internet ads are no good.

(Protip: Never buy Yelp ads.)

Here’s the thing: most people don’t use AdWords correctly because, admittedly, it’s not 100% intuitive without some understanding of Internet marketing and search engine traffic. Even when you do have a working knowledge of those things, it’s not always simple to maximize AdWords to its full potential.

But on the other hand, if you do use AdWords correctly, it can be a terrific channel. Here’s how to do it right. If Charlton Heston were here today, these are the commandments he would have for you.

Tags: Conversion Tracking, Google AdWords, keywords, Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

E-commerce Marketing Plan

May 7th, 2017 Posted by [email protected] Ecommerce marketing 0 comments on “E-commerce Marketing Plan”

It’s not enough to throw up an ecommerce store on a platform like Shopify or WooCommerce and wait for customers and their dollars to roll in. You need to think through how people will get from where they are on their computer to your site so they can even consider buying your products.

Here are our top suggestions for paid ad and organic SEO strategy for ecommerce stores.

Tags: E-commerce

How a local business can track AdWords conversions

April 19th, 2017 Posted by Eagan Heath AdWords, Google, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager 0 comments on “How a local business can track AdWords conversions”

You shouldn’t spend money on digital marketing unless you have the proper analytics set up to measure the results. But what if customers aren’t buying something directly from your website like they would on an e-commerce store?

For local businesses, a conversion is usually when a lead contacts them. This can be through:

a contact form
a phone call
an email
a scheduled appointment

Luckily, it’s possible to track these website actions. Yes! It can be done with the power of an amazing free tool called Google Tag Manager (GTM).

Tags: Conversion Tracking, Google AdWords, Google Tag Manager, PPC, SEM

Link building lego man

Link Building: The Most Important Part of SEO

March 5th, 2017 Posted by Eagan Heath SEO, SEO Link Building, SEO Ranking Factors 0 comments on “Link Building: The Most Important Part of SEO”

We started ranking in the top 3 organic results on Google for “seo madison” after launching our website last July, and we believe links played a deciding role in this ranking.

Google Result page for "SEO Madison"

The paid SEO tool Ahrefs shows we’ve earned at least 184 backlinks.

That number of links would probably be overkill for most local businesses, but we needed to be aggressive in our link building to compete with six pages of competitors who also do this professionally. We knew links would be important, so we took earning them seriously. If you want lots more visitors to your website, you should take links seriously, too.

Tags: Backlinks, Inbound Links, Link Building, Links

What Do We Actually Know About Google’s Algorithm?

February 18th, 2017 Posted by [email protected] Google, SEO, SEO Ranking Factors 0 comments on “What Do We Actually Know About Google’s Algorithm?”

How Google Works

If Google’s algorithm is proprietary, how do SEO professionals know what factors can help a business optimize for top rankings in the search results? There are a couple different ways.

We can:

Look at Google’s filed patents, including the initial patent that described how PageRank works.
Follow Google’s own SEO recommendations from their webmaster guidelines, their blog, and videos Google releases about SEO.
Review the results of case studies and experiments conducted by some of the companies that offer SEO tools and tips. (See video and post below).
Refer to experience with clients we’ve seen achieve top rankings. We see local Wisconsin companies jumping to page one in the results by step 4 of The Phases of SEO for a Local Business.

Here’s a talk I recently gave at PechaKucha Madison on this subject. It’s a neat format, 20 slides in 20 seconds apiece, that forces you to be concise.

Tags: Google, SEO, SEO Ranking Factors

How to Grow Your Business Through Online Search

January 20th, 2017 Posted by [email protected] AdWords, Local SEO, SEO 0 comments on “How to Grow Your Business Through Online Search”

Huge thanks to Wegner CPAs for hosting us at their Wake Up With Wegner event at the Sheraton on John Nolan Drive. We spoke on “How to Measurably Grow Your Business Through Online Search,” touching on pro tips, strategy and tactics for SEO, Google AdWords campaigns and Google Analytics set up and tracking.

Here’s a video re-recording in case you missed or would like to brush up.

Top Google AdWords tips for Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaigns

Tags: AdWords, PPC, SEM, Video

“Hair Salon Madison WI” SEO Google Page 1 Analysis

January 4th, 2017 Posted by [email protected] Local SEO, SEO 0 comments on ““Hair Salon Madison WI” SEO Google Page 1 Analysis”

What does it take for a hair salon in Madison, WI to appear on the first page of Google?

We analyzed the top known local search engine optimization (SEO) factors to let the businesses currently ranking lower what it would take to earn a spot higher up on the first page.

Here’s an indication of the kind of monthly search volume a phrase like this gets according to Google’s keyword planner: 1300 per month! That’s real money every single month of the year for those who go after it.

Why page 1 matters and what it takes to get there in general

Here’s an overview video in which we discuss how ranking higher for popular search engine queries can grow your business. We also describe the top ranking factors SEO companies target to make gains.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization Wisconsin, SEO Hair Salon, SEO Madison

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Local Businesses – Slideshare

December 16th, 2016 Posted by [email protected] Local SEO, SEO, SEO Ranking Factors 0 comments on “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Local Businesses – Slideshare”

Here’s the SlideShare presentation about local SEO we gave on Dec. 14 to SCORE in Madison.

Search Engine Optimization SEO for Small Businesses – Why and How from Eagan Heath

Tags: Search Engine Optimization Wisconsin, SEO Madison