What’s the value of an unlinked mention for SEO?

What’s the value of an unlinked mention for SEO?

Apparently yesterday on SEO Twitter there was a back and forth between a Times journalist and a bunch of self-styled SEOs. I thankfully missed it somehow (I guess because I don’t follow the journalist and missed all the replies, and no one was subtweeting her), but upon looking back at it the flow went: Journalist […]

How Long Does SEO Take To Start Working?

How Long Does SEO Take To Start Working?

In my line of work, it’s common to get the “how soon can I expect results?” question from new or prospective clients. Many SEOs say that it takes a few months to many months to really start seeing results. And whatever you are seeing after 2 to 3 months pales in comparison to what you will see at 12 months if you are doing SEO right.

I’ve always struggled to pitch the longterm value of SEO and that it takes time for many reasons:

  • You need to allow time to do the audit
  • You need to allow time to get the work implemented
  • You need to allow time for Google to recrawl everything
  • Building links takes a lot of time if you’re doing it scalably as you build the rest of your business

One of the reasons why I love having my own site(s) is that I can show specific case studies.

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The Week in Links – December 4-11

The Week in Links – December 4-11

Happy two weeks before Christmas! Q4 is always a busy time for marketers, but hopefully you’re finding some downtime to hang out with your family, remember that life is pretty darn good, and do some good reading! I read this Jim Rohn quote recently that resonated: “Poor people have big TV’s. Rich people have big […]

Why Doesn’t ESPN Own 538.com?

Why Doesn’t ESPN Own 538.com?

I’m (unfortunately) pretty outspoken about politics this year, as any of my friends on Facebook will tell you and most of my Twitter followers know. I’ve avoided writing about politics here so far. And I’ll continue that with the brief mention that you should have a plan for voting tomorrow. With that out of the […]

Solving Enterprise SEO Duplicate Content Issues

Solving Enterprise SEO Duplicate Content Issues

I don’t do much solo consulting these days, but when I do it is almost completely with digital marketplaces (if you want to chat with me about your marketplace, you can do it here). These sites always struggle with mass duplicate content issues, which is likely why you are here today.

A marketplace (like my own B2B marketplace Credo) seeks to balance both the supply and demand sides so that a) sellers can make a profit from their involvement and b) buyers have enough variety/choice to have a great experience on the site or service.

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Why I Switched My WordPress Hosting to WPengine

Why I Switched My WordPress Hosting to WPengine

Sometimes in life we know that something needs to change, but we keep putting it off until it becomes big enough of an issue to force our hand and cause a change. For years, I’ve been wanting to move my sites off of the disparate cheap shared hosting where they previously lived and onto WPengine for a long time.

In the last few months of 2015 I realized that my livelihood moving forward, as long as I work for myself, is all going to come through my own channels. I have become convinced over the years, after seeing slow and fast sites, of the importance of speed for websites. While it often won’t help smaller sites from an organic perspective, on very big websites with millions of pages you can see a lot of improvement in both traffic and conversions by speeding up your sites.

All of my sites are on WordPress at this point because of the easy extendability of the open source platform. I began my career online developing on the Joomla platform and still remember looking at plugins that supported SEO friendly (SEF is what they called them) URLs. While Joomla worked fine for what I needed at the time, WordPress has moved ahead of them leaps and bounds so basically all my websites have been exclusively WordPress since 2011. I tried building out a few sites with other providers (SquareSpace, Shopify, etc) but they didn’t really suit my needs as someone with a web developer background who wants the freedom to extend things as I wish.

These are the reasons I switched. Some of them affect SEO, some of them don’t. All of them could help you build your business. Read more about Why I Switched My WordPress Hosting to WPengine

SEO Packages Need To Die

SEO Packages Need To Die

I’m sick of SEO packages. You know the kind, where you get an email asking you to send them a proposal for what you would do for their company and what your packages and pricing are. I’m tired of companies that offer things like “10 blog posts for $150.”

Why?

This is old school small scale thinking. If you want 10 blog posts for $150 and your hourly rate is $30 per hour, write a blog post every 30 minutes for 5 hours. I bet the quality will be a lot higher than paying someone random to do it for you. Marketing “packages” don’t work. Marketing that works isn’t a product that is plug and play for every business. Depending on your business and who your customers are, and your current stage of company, different channels are going to work better or worse for you to actually get you results.

I’ll give a lot of businesses asking for packages the benefit of the doubt because they don’t know what else to call them, but the language underlying it signals to me that they view marketing consulting as transactional – I give you this and I get that. I’m sorry, but that’s not how marketing works. That’s not even how business works! If business were that easy, everyone would run their own business.

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The Full Stack Marketer’s Valley Of Sorrow

The Full Stack Marketer’s Valley Of Sorrow

I recently read this post entitled The Curse of the Full Stack Marketer. I tweeted a few brief thoughts (a brief rant really) around this post, but now I think it needs a longer treatment. I also realize that there have been a few posts written as follow-ons but I’ve purposefully not read them so as to make this my own thoughts.

I think that there are a few elements at play that make this an interesting and tough topic (especially as someone who feels the tension very personally). Those include:

  1. The rockstar problem
  2. The meritocracy problem
  3. The individual vs manager dilemma
  4. The small vs big company challenges and differences

Let’s unpack each.
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When Do I Use a Canonical Vs a 301 Redirect Vs a 302 Redirect?

When Do I Use a Canonical Vs a 301 Redirect Vs a 302 Redirect?

I don’t often write about technical SEO issues anymore on this site, but I have over time often come across questions about when it is best to use a 301 vs a 302 vs a canonical tag on duplicate content. I thought I’d take the opportunity to talk about each in depth with the pros and cons of each, as well as a few examples of when to use them. Read more about When Do I Use a Canonical Vs a 301 Redirect Vs a 302 Redirect?