SEO Digital Group

Posted by Whitespark In the past year, local SEO has run at a startling and near-constant pace of change. From an explosion of new Google My Business features to an ever-increasing emphasis on the importance of reviews, it's almost too much to keep up with. In today's Whiteboard Friday, we welcome our friend Darren Shaw to explain what local is like today, dive into the key takeaways from his 2018 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, and offer us a glimpse into the future according to the local SEO experts. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans. I'm Darren Shaw from Whitespark , and today I want to talk to you about the local search ranking factors. So this is a survey that David Mihm has run for the past like 10 years. Last year, I took it over, and it's a survey of the top local search practitioners, about 40 of them. They all contribute their answers, and I aggregate the data and...

Posted by MiriamEllis A thousand thanks to the 1,411 respondents who gave of their time and knowledge in contributing to this major survey! You’ve created a vivid image of what real-life, everyday local search marketers and local business owners are observing on a day-to-day basis, what strategies are working for them right now, and where some frankly stunning opportunities for improvement reside. Now, we’re ready to share your insights into: Google Updates Citations Reviews Company infrastructure Tool usage And a great deal more... This survey pooled the observations of everyone from people working to market a single small business, to agency marketers with large local business clients: Respondents who self-selected as not marketing a local business were filtered from further survey results. Thanks to you, this free report is a window into the industry. Bring these statistics to teammates and clients to earn the buy-in you need to effectively reach local consumers in 201...

Posted by rjonesx. Correlation studies have been a staple of the search engine optimization community for many years. Each time a new study is released, a chorus of naysayers seem to come magically out of the woodwork to remind us of the one thing they remember from high school statistics — that "correlation doesn't mean causation." They are, of course, right in their protestations and, to their credit, and unfortunate number of times it seems that those conducting the correlation studies have forgotten this simple aphorism. We collect a search result. We then order the results based on different metrics like the number of links. Finally, we compare the orders of the original search results with those produced by the different metrics. The closer they are, the higher the correlation between the two. That being said, correlation studies are not altogether fruitless simply because they don't necessarily uncover causal relationships (ie: actual ranking factors). What...

Posted by -LaurelTaylor- Around 2005 or so, corporate blogs became the thing to do. Big players in the business world touted that such platforms could “drive swarms of traffic to your main website, generate more product sales” and even “create an additional stream of advertising income” ( Entrepreneur Magazine circa 2006). With promises like that, what marketer or exec wouldn’t jump on the blog bandwagon? Unfortunately, initial forays into branded content did not always dwell on minor issues like “quality” or “entertainment,” instead focusing on sheer bulk and, of course, all the keywords. Now we have learned better, and many corporate blogs are less prolific and offer more value. But on some sites, behind many, many “next page” clicks, this old content can still be found lurking in the background. This active company blog still features over 900 pages of posts dating back to 2006 This situation leaves current SEOs and content teams in a bit of a pickle. What should you do if yo...

Posted by DiTomaso Organic and paid search aren't always at odds; there are times when there's benefit in knowing how they work together. Taking the time to know the ins and outs of AdWords can improve your rankings and on-site experience. In today's edition of Whiteboard Friday, our fabulous guest host Dana DiTomaso explains how SEOs can improve their game by taking cues from paid search in this Whiteboard Friday. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hi, my name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm President and Partner at Kick Point, and one of the things that we do at Kick Point is we do both SEO and paid. One of the things that's really useful is when SEO and paid work together. But what's even better is when SEOs can learn from paid to make their stuff better. One of the things that is great about AdWords or Google Ads — whenever you're watching this, it may be called one thing or the other — i...

Posted by MiriamEllis “American business is overwhelmingly small business.” - SBE Council Small businesses have created 61.8% of net new jobs in the US since the early 1990s. Local business is big business. Let’s celebrate this in honor of Small Business Saturday with 3 strategies that will support independent business owners this week, and in the better future that can be attained with the right efforts. What’s Small Business Saturday? It’s an annual shopping event sponsored by American Express on the Saturday following Thanksgiving with the primary goal of encouraging residents to patronize local merchants. The program was launched in 2010 in response to the Great Recession. By 2017, Small Business Saturday jumped to 7,200 Neighborhood Champions (individuals and groups that organize towns for the event), with 108 million reported participating consumers spending $12 billion across the country. Those numbers are impressive, and more than that, they hold the acorn of strategy fo...

Posted by randfish If you have an audience on YouTube, are you doing everything you can to reach them? Inspired by a large-scale study from Justin Briggs, Rand covers the top factors to invest in when it comes to YouTube SEO in this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about YouTube SEO. So I was lucky enough to be speaking at the Search Love Conference down in San Diego a little while ago, and Justin Briggs was there presenting on YouTube SEO and on a very large-scale study that he had conducted with I think it was 100,000 different video rankings across YouTube's search engine as well as looking at the performance of many thousands of channels and individual videos in YouTube. Justin came up with some fascinating results. I've called them out here @JustinBriggs on...

Posted by Emily.Potter Google’s increasing dominance of their own search engine results pages (SERPs) has kicked up a lot of panic and controversy in the SEO industry. As Barry Adams pointed out on Twitter recently, this move by Google is not exactly new, but it does feel like Google has suddenly placed their foot on the accelerator: I find it hilarious that SEOs are suddenly annoyed that Google is aggressively taking over some verticals with in-SERP features. They’ve been doing that for years. What do you think the EU antitrust case is about?! Or do you suddenly care because it affects your clients? — Barry Adams (@badams) March 15, 2018 Follow that Twitter thread and you’ll see the sort of back-and-forth these changes have started to create. Is this an ethical move by Google? Did you deserve the business they're taking in the first place? Will SEO soon be dead? Or can we do what we’ve always done and adapt our strategies in smart, agile ways? It’s hard to think positive w...

Posted by tomcasano If your goal is to grow your organic traffic, you have to think about SEO in terms of “product/market fit.” Keyword research is the “market” (what users are actually searching for) and content is the “product” (what users are consuming). The “fit” is optimization. To grow your organic traffic, you need your content to mirror the reality of what users are actually searching for. Your content planning and creation, keyword mapping, and optimization should all align with the market. This is one of the best ways to grow your organic traffic. Why bother with keyword grouping? One web page can rank for multiple keywords. So why aren’t we hyper-focused on planning and optimizing content that targets dozens of similar and related keywords? Why target only one keyword with one piece of content when you can target 20? The impact of keyword clustering to acquire more organic traffic is not only underrated, it is largely ignored. In this guide, I'll share with you o...