Pro Bono SEO Works for US!
You know it’s a fact of life that business can consume one’s whole psyche. You live on your clients needs, wants, desires and can just not catch a breather at times….add in a family, office and employee issues and then those few hours of sleep that you seem to need every so often, and your life is pretty full, eh!
I hear you. And I’m the same, I totally love what I d0 and can’t wait to get up each morning and into the office and at my computer to see what’s what and who’s who in the SEO world. I receive over 300 emails daily and after deleteing all the spammy ones there’s still about half to go through….and I love it! It’s me — but I also know one more thing, that I only can go so long, so far without giving back to my community.
Huh? Well, what I mean in a larger sense is, that we provide SEO for a couple of local clients on a pro bono basis to try to give back to them and thru that donation, back to our community. Let me explain a bit better…
DIY Canadian SEO – Google LOCAL Maps!
If you’ve ever wondered what the criteria might be, to see if you need to take advantage and use the Google LOCAL Maps SEO to gain new clients or customers, then here’s a rationale that you can follow to see what’s involved.
To rank well in the Google MAPS area, or the LOCAL search engine comprises a set of tasks that must be accomplished in order to both be listed, and then ranked. But before you bother, here’s what you should know to see if this is the best way to gain that new traffic….but let me ask first, do you want new business? And if so, then this simple DIY blog post will help, eh!
Are you a LOCAL business, would be the first question?
That is, think for a moment as to where your own clients/customers come from. Do they live within say 50 miles of your offices? Or do they work within that 30-50 mile radius? Do you sell products or services that are consumed by those same clients/customers within that 30-50 mile limiation? If the answer to any of these is “yes,” then you run a LOCALLY oriented business.
An SEO Fable: Grasshoppers Beware!
With apologies to Aesop, today’s post leans heavily on the fable he wrote a few thousand years ago, on the story of the Ant & the Grasshopper.
Therein, he tried to show the reader that there were two schools of thought on hard work and preparation. The grasshopper it seems, spent the warm comfortable summer months fiddling away their time on fun and trivial pursuits — while the industrious ant on the other hand, worked hard to store up food for the upcoming hard winter.
Survey Says: Blogs help SEO!
Recently, we contributed to a web wide survey done by the folks over at TopRank Marketing, on whether or not a blog can help you increase your SEO rankings….and the word is – YES!
Asked to help by Lee Odden over at LinkedIn, our own #1 social business marketing site, we filled in the survey and awaited like the rest of the online marketers, the publication of the collated survey results. And they’re in and it’s no surprise really, that overall, blogs help a company get better SEO rankings!
Many marketing firms are familiar with this strategy and with over 300+ of us responding to the survey, it’s no wonder that over 95% of us already do blog for our firms (or our clients) online as an integral part of an online marketing strategy.
And while that’s impressive, even better is the collated number of us that answered as to whether or not those blogs deliver on the SEO promises that we make — and yes, “…87.4% of us respondents “successfully increased measureable SEO objectives as a direct result of blogging!”
Great Domain Names = Great SEO!
As search engines refine the way that they judge relevancy and authority, domain names have become a major factor. Over time, keywords within domains have become more significant and can have great a effect on a site’s SEO. Bing relies heavily on keywords within a domain name to rank websites.
In one recent case, I made a domain name change in order to test this theory. Bing immediately ranked the domain #3 overall for a competitive keyword. As a matter of fact, look at the search results for “SEO”.
- Canadian Bing Search (only Canadian pages): 8 of the top 10 first page websites have “SEO” in their domain name
- Bing.com Search: 7 of the 10 first page websites have “SEO” in their domain name Google has traditionally looked to keywords in domain names as a strong relevancy score.
Canadian Citations — Breaking News on canpages.ca!
Back about 6 months or so ago, David Mihm a very well known and respected SEO practitioner with a real bent on LOCAL skills, wrote a seminal article on Canadian Citations — the piece recommended I remember about 10 URLs for various directorys to list in, to gain LOCAL authoritative/trust backlinks to your site.
Since then, both Dev Basu and I and a few others have updated that list with some more canadion-only directories to add to your normal listings, to help all of us involved in an SEO practice — but as of today (thanks Greg Sterling!) there is some news about one of the original citation sources on our lists — canpages.ca!
While it was pretty well known then that the firm had also just bought ziplocal.ca in about late June I think and as such there was only speculation as to what that might mean to us canuck SEO practitioners. Well, word’s out as of today!
Friday: Our InfoGraphic SEO potpourri…
Hello once again, canadian seo seekers!
First thing, the title of today is my attempt to try to put out at the end of each week, the items that I’ve just been too dang busy to blog about thru that week, i.e. the ones that I didn’t have time to get too — or were ’scooped’ by the larger sites that employ writers to blog. That, as you most likely know, is not us…we work hard each and every day on our canuck seo clients accounts so while our blog is important, we’re still just a bit too small to be able to write each and every day on breaking SEO news. That said, look here most likely every Friday for our “potpourri” column on all things of note in SEO!
Malware Trojans Continue to Increase via SEO!
Having had malware infected clients before, where somehow an exploit was taken advantage of by a hacker, meant that the client site was then labelled as “Malware infected” by Google, we know that this kind of infection, leads to god-awful SEO rankings! In fact, what happens is that Google, when it detects the malware on your site via it’s automated bots, it then “blankets” your serp listings with this header –
As you can see, this is a older image that occured awhile back (for google itself even!) but the intent of course was that Google would inform users that the site that they showed in their results page, could harm a site vistiors computer, including of course, the unknowing “drive-by download” infection.
How To Farm for LOCAL SEO Clients!
It appears that after a lot of years spent doing marketing for a large Canuck brewery (admittedly just as much time spent partaking of their products!) I did learn something about channels and consumers and yes, understanding how to search for new business! Here’s the backstory on this tactic…..
It’s been said many times that asking for business from a prospective client can be difficult for many SMB owners. This “feeling” is very prevalent in all industries across all channels and a simple visit to a business networking event shows all. Watch the folks who know “how” to work a room…and notice what they’re doing? They are NOT there at the Chamber or Board of Trade or business network group meeting to “hunt” for new business. Instead they’re “farming” for same….expecting fully that who they meet and the cards they gather will not bear fruit tomorrow, but instead at some point in the future. Farming works, simply put…whereas hunting doesn’t.
Google Targets SEO Practitioners!
Well, the word is out and I’m more than a bit upset by this news…it appears that Google is “targeting” us SEO practitioners in their web search engine index! How’s that — well, backstory first.
Go to Google.ca, and say search for a “Hamilton plumbers” or “Hamilton plumbing firms” and what do you see? Yes, a web search results page that includes the Google Local search map with a 7-pack showing business names and addresses, URLs etc for those chosen by Google to be shown. Fine. I like that. We’ve got lots of clients who come up in these web results pages for services and products throughout the region and this is how it should be. This is a good thing, and we continue to do well for our clients knowing that Google offers up these listings for one and all….or do they? Here’s a shot of that google.ca search results screen….
We're in the Globe!
We're in the current Canadian Dealer News Magazine!
