Defining an SEO Penalty

The only “true” or “official” penalty happens when Google takes a “manual action.” This happens when a human from Google looks at your website and moves you down the SERPs because you’ve violated their Webmaster Quality Guidelines somehow (e.g. attempting to manipulate Google’s search index). It’s different from an “algorithmic devaluation” that happens when your website loses ranking because Google has rolled out a general algorithmic update.

How a Manual Action and Algorithmic Devaluation are Different

There are many ways in which these are different, including:

• Manual actions are site specific whereas algorithm devaluations aren’t
• Manual actions are carried out by a human whereas algorithm devaluations are carried out by the Google bot
• Manual actions happen when Google believes you’ve violated their Webmaster Guidelines whereas algorithm devaluations occur because Google has changed their algorithm
• Manual actions can be known by looking at Google’s support page whereas nobody knows about algorithms except for Google themselves
• Manual actions allow you to submit a reconsideration request whereas with algorithm changes you can’t submit such a request and must wait until their bot crawls your website again

How You’ll Know if You Have a Manual Action

Google will inform you via their search console’s message center when they’ve applied a penalty directly to your website. This is why every website should have their search console set up.

Some of the times when Google may choose to apply manual actions include:

• Spam – either user-generated or on a free host you’re using
• The way your data is structured (e.g. creating a sneaky mobile redirect)
• Unnatural links to or from your website
• Thin content that doesn’t provide much value
• Cloaking (a.k.a. images, sneaky redirects)
• Keyword stuffing or hidden text
• AMP content mismatch

Google’s search console has a drop down for each item so you’ll know how to fix it. Unfortunately, this can sometimes be quite complicated. However, once you identify and fix the issue you can re-submit your website for what’s known as a “reconsideration request.” Essentially this is you asking Google to remove the SEO penalty they’ve manually applied to your website.

Why Algorithmic Devaluations Aren’t Penalties

Algorithms aren’t a type of SEO penalty although they can devalue your website, decrease its traffic, and bring you down in the SERPs. These things may occur when you haven’t met Google Webmaster Guidelines’ best practices. However, when your algorithm is strong enough it’ll increase your website’s value so you’re more visible in the search engine and thus receive more traffic. In this way your algorithm can be thought of as a type of penalty since your website is negatively affected.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, SEO professionals will probably never stop using the term “SEO penalty.” After all, it’s much easier for them to tell their clients that they’ve lost visibility and traffic than to try to explain an “algorithmic devaluation” even if that’s what’s truly happened. Nevertheless, it’s still important for you to understand what’s happening so that you know what the appropriate actions are to take – if there are any at all that you can take. For additional help with this matter you should contact the Affordable SEO Company. Over the years they’ve been able to help many clients avoid getting an SEO penalty and work their way up in the SERPs so that they received more traffic and visibility instead.

The post Understanding The SEO Penalties Given By Google appeared first on Affordable SEO Company for Small Business.

Know What Your Marketing Objective Is

It’s important to know what your specific marketing objective is before you choose your website’s keywords. Your keywords will help you attract your ideal cases and clients. When you’re setting up your law firm SEO here make sure you ask yourself:

• Is your practice specific to a city, region, or state?
• Is your practice specific to a metropolitan area? If so, what common names are used there?
• Will people be searching for you by your city, county, ZIP code, or area code?

Answering these questions helps you target your metropolitan area.

Make Sure to Include Your Areas of Practice

Another important part of law firm SEO lies in targeting your specific area of practice. This ensures that you’re marketing to the people who are seeking your specific services, thus improving your lead quality. To help you with this, ask yourself:

• What are your specific practice areas?
• What type of clients are you trying to attract? If so, what specific terms do they search for (common phrases, not legalese)?

Utilize Keyword Tools

Now you’ll have a clear marketing objective for your law firm SEO. It’s time to compile your keywords. There are many great tools to help you with this including Google Keyword Planner, Answer the Public, and Uber Suggest.

Incorporate Your Keywords into Your Website’s Content

Armed with your keywords you can start incorporating them into your website’s content. Don’t overdo it though or the search engines will think that you’re spamming and not list your website at all. Instead, make sure that you include your keywords naturally in your content so they’ll flow seamlessly within your sentences. Make sure you also use them in your page titles, headings, and meta tags.

These keywords will also help you choose content for things like blog posts. For instance, if you’ve chosen to work with the keyword phrase “Clearwater FL DUI attorney” some of the topics you may wish to create content for include:

• Should a first time offender get a Clearwater FL DUI attorney?
• Will a Clearwater FL DUI attorney be able to get you out of jail?
• How’s a Clearwater FL DUI attorney able to get your case dismissed?

Conclusion

Creating valuable content that includes keywords that are appropriate for your website will help you to easily optimize it better. Of course, you shouldn’t expect your rankings to increase overnight. In fact, it may take over a year to see any type of increase here. However, if you work to steadily increase your website’s value, you’ll improve your law firm SEO and gain traction in the search engines. This will then help you to start being noticed by potential clients.

It’s important to remember that keywords are the backbone for your law firm SEO. Choose the ones you believe will work best for you then make revisions along the way. If you’re still struggling here though, simply reach out to the Affordable SEO Company and leave it in their more than capable hands.

The post How to Choose the Best Phrases for Law Firm SEO appeared first on Affordable SEO Company for Small Business.

Start by Conducting Keyword Research

Considering that 75% of people only read Google’s first page, it’s important to be as close to the top as possible. This requires a wise choice of keywords that you’ll incorporate throughout your entire website. Since your business is hyper-local, this shouldn’t be too hard. Start by narrowing down the area where you practice then combining it with keyword phrases like “dental practice” so you’ll have less competition. While this may result in long-tail keywords, they’ll also result in a better opportunity for your practice to stand out amongst its competition.

Use Google My Business to Manage Your Local Dental SEO

Google is like the modern Yellow Pages that people use to find local businesses. To improve your visibility here, you must create a free Google My Business account with your practice’s name, address, phone number, description, website link, and photos so Google can index it. You should also connect this to Google Maps so patients will immediately be able to locate and call your practice. It’s also a good idea to encourage your patients to leave a review.

Create a Robust Content Strategy

“Content is king” when it comes to dental SEO. By routinely publishing new content (e.g. blog posts, videos) you’re encouraging Google to frequently re-index you which helps improve your ranking in the SERPs. To create this content, make sure you rely on your keywords to guide you to a better understanding of what your patients are searching for.

Develop a Strong Social Media Presence

Your social media presence is like your content strategy in that they help build your credibility. Both also help build your presence so people realize you exist. In specific, make sure you spend time on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.

Reduce Your Website’s lag Time

People won’t stick around if your website doesn’t load fast enough. Google will penalize you if this happens which will give your competition more traffic as you’re likely to be listed beneath them. This is why you should visit Google Analytics to see what your site’s average load speed is. If it’s higher than it should be, spend some time compressing your images without compromising their quality. You may also want to make sure that you’re hosted on a fast, reliable server.

Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Responsive

Many people look at websites on mobile devices today. Each of these screens will have a different dimension. For this reason, your website must be able to adapt to the device’s size. This is why your designer should create your website with mobile responsiveness in mind, meaning there are fewer elements on the page and the font can easily be scaled to fit the page.

With all that you’re already doing for your business, it’s no wonder that having to do all this dental SEO seems like such a big job. Fortunately, it isn’t something you have to undertake on your own. The Affordable SEO Company has successfully done this work for many other websites. Contact them today so they can do it for you too.

The post How To Improve Your Local Dental Practice’s SEO appeared first on Affordable SEO Company for Small Business.

The first tip that we can offer is used keywords that are specific to your website. What keywords are driving a lot of traffic to your site? Law firm SEO should be using keywords that have high search impressions.

You should have a primary keyword and then a secondary keyword phrase for law firm SEO. Your primary keyword phrases will focus on the content of your page. Examples of this may include Divorce attorneys in Clearwater, Florida or Tampa Family Lawyers. Secondary keyword phrases are great to use when relating to your content. These may include Penalties for Drug Charges in Clearwater.

Primary keywords need to be listed at least once on a page. Another idea is to use alternatives to this, as you do not want to be guilty of keyword stuffing. Alteratives will just give you another option as to how to word something. An example of this is if your keyword is child support attorney, you could refer to it as a lawyer or see if you are able to make it readable by changing support to payment if possible. However, do not change words if the text is not going to be readable.

What about adding high-quality links? Did you know that in law firm SEO, these are very valuable? If you want to grow your search engine optimization, this is an exceptional way to do it.

One trending behavior on the market today is infographics. Here you will be able to put a link, along with a lot of data that can be divided down into bite-sized chunks. The excellent thing about these infographics is that they are commonly straightforward to read, allowing the user to get more out of them. And if you design an infographic, you can ask other businesses to use it on their site as long as they provide a link to your site. As an added plus, if somebody finds it newsworthy, they will share it on social media.

Videos are another great way to boost a website’s rankings. Not only are they engaging for people to read, but they can provide valuable information. Consider doing a how-to on a topic related to your field. Perhaps you could do a few questions and answer segments. Or another fun idea is to do mini-interviews with members of your law firm so others can get to know them better before hiring them.

You may also want to upload your videos to Youtube and then place a link to your website within your video to draw potential customers to your site.

The speed of your site should be checked over frequently. A super slow site will probably be one that is not visited very often.

If you do have a slower speed, check on your bounce rate and engagement rate. One way to improve these is to add some videos. You should also make sure to add more valuable information.

Law firm SEO is something that every attorney’s office could benefit from. SEO will help to improve traffic, thus bring more potential clients to the attorney’s office.

If your office is not too sure about SEO, consider hiring a professional law firm SEO company to help you with all your search engine optimization needs.

The post Law Firm SEO Tips To Increase Search Traffic appeared first on Affordable SEO Company for Small Business.

When Searchers are presented with ads they’re more likely to click on organic results.

This is something that’s been proven time and time again by research – some of which was conducted by Google itself. It’s also why so many marketers are busy bidding on brand searches today. Of course, there are still those marketers who say this won’t work, even though research shows otherwise.

When someone has already been exposed to your website through Google Ads, they’re more likely to click through and convert.

When you have a higher click-through rate and a higher engagement rate, you’re more likely to also have a higher ranking in the organic SERPs. This is why it’s so important to get your brand out there in front of people. Once they see it again, they’ll gladly click on your site and buy something because they already have a strong association with your brand. This isn’t as likely to easily occur with a new brand, company, or website. This is why PPC can help your SEO efforts.

When it comes to certain queries, you’ll find that PPC strongly impacts organic SEO.

On average Google Ads receive 2% – 3% of all clicks while organic receives 47% – 57% of all clicks. This has truly changed the landscaping, especially when it comes to SERP click-through rates. It may honestly have something to do with Google’s layout which shows you rich image ads at the top that you can sort through and select different ones followed by more ads, paid text ads, and eventually if you scroll down far enough you’ll find the organic results. This design gives 25% – 50% of its clicks to PPC ads which makes click-through rates highly biased. In fact, there are times when your bids for Google Ads can change the entire click-through rate curve for that SERP.

Your organic SEO may be improved by more links, mentions, coverage, and shares.

PPC ads can cause a ripple effect. They may cause someone to link to a certain page, mention it somewhere, give it media or social media coverage, or otherwise share it. When this happens it may either directly or indirectly boost the site’s rankings. This is why when you grow engagement, your website’s overall traffic will increase and boost your rankings. Of course, the way that the website is shared must be valuable and useful – not just commercial.

Bidding on Google Ads affects the broader market by causing a higher demand or incentive for that website.

This is so subtle it can be difficult to understand. However, when you use PPC you short change the market because you’re changing how people think about content creation, monetization, and a query’s value. As such, terms that people never gave much thought to in the past will start seeing some competition after a while. This is where you need to be careful when bidding on Google Ads because you can start to attract so much attention that you change the whole dynamic of how the search query is working in that sector.

With all this information in mind, hopefully you now have a better understanding of how these different types of marketing work together. When you need help engaging in all these things for your own website, make sure you reach out to the Affordable SEO Company.

The post The Effects Of Google Ads PPC On Organic Results appeared first on Affordable SEO Company for Small Business.

Understanding Each Component of SEO

Here it’s important to work with the various search engines to provide your visitors with valuable information. To do this you must understand that there are three main components at work:

• Search: Today the most common way of finding information online is by using a search engine such as Google or Bing. Here you’ll enter a search term or question that the site answers by using a complex algorithm to ensure that you receive the most appropriate, useful information. This is different than when you search through a news site or scroll through a social media site in search of this information.
• Engine: These “engines” are essential because they crawl through the web’s databases, indexes, and other areas then prioritize the information you receive. In this way you’re receiving information from indexes, not the live internet itself. Each individual engine uses specific criteria to determine what this information is though. Some things that these engines take into consideration include keyword density, meta tags, links, and other relevant information to determine where you rank.
• Optimization: If you want to be found, you must show up in the first few pages of the results for the search terms they enter. This is where optimization is important. Some of the things you must pay attention to here include making sure the search engines know what your content is about and showing that you have authority and credibility.

What SEO is and is Not

A combination of activities are at work here helping search engines find and trust your website, organize its information, and present it to the people who are most interested in seeing it. Today this is largely based on writing content for people – something that should start with conducting keyword research so you know what your audience is looking for. You’ll want to use these keywords to create content that’s both natural and useful then promote it and have others link to it so it appears authoritative.

With this being said, you should also understand that SEO isn’t:

• A single, solitary process
• A series of tricks (e.g. keyword stuffing)
• Based on a lot of secretive information
• A series of shortcuts to the top of the SERPs

These are all tactics businesses used in the past to game the system. While they’d achieve results, these were only temporary. Now that search engines are more sophisticated, people are getting “real results,” not low-quality, keyword stuffed content. In fact, such techniques are now being penalized.

Why Everyone is Using Search Engines Today

People rely on search engines to answer their questions, find companies, and teach them more about the companies’ products. For local search people also want to find reviews and directions. There are two key things these searches are doing for you:

• They help increase your traffic because you’ll be highly ranked if you offer valuable content that’s easy for the search engines to find and organize.
• They bring you free, qualified leads because these people are already actively searching for the content you’re offering.

Following these best practices to create interesting, useful content for your visitors is a lot of work. However, this is what it takes to get your website in front of more people. Fortunately, this is something that the Affordable SEO Company has successfully helped many websites with over the years. Get in touch with them so they can start helping you too.

The post Understanding SEO and its Need appeared first on Affordable SEO Company for Small Business.

They Can’t Replace Each Other

These are very different from one another with different strengths and weaknesses so they can’t substitute for each other. For instance, with paid search you can drive a lot of non-branded traffic to your website where they’ll become more familiar with your brand and move forward toward becoming a paying customer. Organic search can possibly do this, but your traffic will come from the middle of the page at best. What it will do though is drive branded traffic your way. When they work together your user will believe you’re more legitimate.

Both SEO and PPC Cost You Something

There are some people who will genuinely argue that PPC is expensive since you pay money every time someone clicks on your ad. However, even organic traffic will cost you in terms of time, money, and expertise. You must also pay for a professional to run either type of marketing campaign for you if you want things to run well.

They Won’t Pick up the Slack for Each Other

You can’t afford to not invest in both types of marketing since you’re working with two very different pools. Instead, they will help drive results for each other. When you choose to drop PPC in hopes of ramping your SEO up in those areas instead, you’ll lose out on some very important traffic.

Deceiving Statistics

In this competition you’ll find statistics to support both types of marketing. Make sure you closely review them prior to reaching your conclusions though. For instance, where is the traffic coming from? If it’s coming from a call campaign, you’ll always get low engagement numbers. While the study may be well-intended, if it’s based on incorrect information it won’t do you any good. Many times you’ll lose a lot of potential customers if you drop one type of marketing. This is why it’s so important to consider all relevant information and not just one-sided arguments.

Stop Focusing on Traffic – Start Looking at Leads and Conversions

Many of the statistics that are available today should be closely analyzed. For instance, in 2014 Conductor performed a study in which they found that organic search is responsible for 64% of all traffic meaning that paid search only generates about 6% of this traffic. Here they’re trying to infer that SEO is more effective than PPC but there are two problems with this:

• This organic search traffic number includes traffic that’s generated in every possible way – including searches where ads were and were not displayed.
• You must also consider whether traffic is your main goal or if you’d rather have leads and conversions. After all, without them traffic won’t do you any good.

The Choice is Clear: Choose Both!

The next time you’re considering what type of online marketing campaign you should run for your website, stop. There isn’t a choice to be made here at all since neither is a substitute for the other. By understanding this and choosing to have them both work together you’re harnessing more power for your website’s marketing. Of course, this is bound to take more time too, but this shouldn’t be an argument for or against either type of marketing campaign especially when you stop to consider that there’s help available to you today. With the Affordable SEO Company you can have both SEO and PPC marketing campaigns working to bring you traffic, leads, and conversions. Many people have done this over the years, there’s no reason you shouldn’t too so contact them today.

The post Remembering Important Truths About PPC vs. SEO appeared first on Affordable SEO Company for Small Business.

Why all Marketers Must Work Together

Typically, organic SEO will drive the most traffic to your website over the long-term. This in no way means that you won’t get lots of traffic from PPC, especially since Google is continually changing its focus, pushing organic searches further and further down their page. When you have both marketing campaigns working together though you’ll be able to own more real estate on Google’s front page regardless of how they change things.

There are a few ways you can make this happen:

• They can support one another’s keyword research. For this to happen you must first determine what words your site is currently ranking for and what pages are receiving the most traffic. Once you’ve done this you should conduct a little more keyword research so you can locate new opportunities and make sure they’re properly mapped from the correct pages. By sharing this information with your PPC strategist they can then use it to start working on list building and segmenting. Your strategist can then share their results with them so they can see what is and isn’t working. This is important because even a subtle change can make a huge difference. The entire process works faster when everyone works together.
• You can use your clicks campaign to test your SEO. This is particularly good news for those websites who are making changes to certain pages in hopes of improving their conversion and engagement but who don’t get enough traffic to effectively test the effects of these changes. In this way you’re able to test every page element (e.g. titles, forms, body copy).

Benefits of Having SEO and PPC Work Together

By having everyone work together your website will greatly benefit in various ways including:

• You can use the data from one campaign to help you form strategies for the other. This is good news since Analytics’ keyword data isn’t as effective as it was in the past. Now you’ll have a way to get the data you need by watching your traffic and conversions.
• You’ll achieve better listing positions which will help you maximize your traffic – something that’ll always be much more important than ranking. Your organic data can tell you what keywords have the best conversion value.
• By watching what PPC ads your visitors are clicking on you can see how much time they’re spending on your website, your website’s bounce rate, how many pages your visitors go to, and what ads are converting best for you.
• Remaking your PPC campaigns can save you some time and effort because you can then remarket it to your organic visitors. This will keep people interested in what you’re doing while also targeting people who previously showed interest but didn’t take action. This can be as simple as creating a new ebook, white paper, or blog post.

Now that you know why you need both types of marketing, it’s time to get started. Considering everything else that you have going on with your business, the best thing to do is to find a partner to help you here. This is where Affordable SEO Company can step in and help you. Over the years they’ve helped many clients successfully manage their various marketing campaigns. Get in touch with them today so they can help you too.

The post Do SEO And PPC Go Hand In Hand? appeared first on Affordable SEO Company for Small Business.

Show Them Numerical Visuals Including Graphs and Charts

Numbers and graphs are a great way to show a person why they should spend money on a SEO campaign. While you may think that this marketing has been around for so long that you wouldn’t need to do this, studies show that only 9 out of 10 marketers are using it today. However, once someone sees that the numbers support this initiative, they’re more likely to get on board with you.

Tell Them About Their Competition’s use of SEO

Your competition is outperforming you for one simple reason: They have a SEO strategy and you don’t. Even if you have a newly implemented strategy, you can expect to get results immediately – it takes time. In fact, it could take up to a year. When you do some work but then don’t keep up with the new trends that are released with each Google update, you face a similar issue in that your website will decrease its rankings.

Explain how SEM is the Essence of Marketing Today

There’s still a place for traditional marketing in today’s world. However, as more people stop reading the newspaper and watching TV and start spending more time online it’s time to add this marketing into your portfolio. Your competition is already busy creating apps for smartphones. You should be too. This is an area you can’t afford to overlook now that people can fast forward through TV commercials and spend more time watching Netflix and Hulu on their tablets and laptops instead.

If you Have Analytics, Build on Them

You’ll also want to get a hold of your company’s analytics reports from places like Google so you know how much time your visitors are spending on your website. As you look through this information, make sure you also find the points within your website where your visitors are exiting because they’re not being engaged any longer. Once you find these places and start revising your content, design, and calls to action you’ll be able to start enticing more people to buy what you’re selling instead of leaving your website at those points. This is important because anytime anyone leaves your website, you’re losing money.

Introduce Them to Some Useful Tools

There are a lot of great free tools available to help you get started with SEO. These include things like:

• The Google AdWords Keyword Tool offers you some data but remember it’s imperfect because it’s filtered and estimated.
• Bing Webmaster Tools uses real numbers, unlike Google.
• WordTracker is the best tool to have in your arsenal because it allows you to cross-check your keywords’ volume and CPC data from both Google and Bing.

Consider Hiring Some SEO Help

This information can feel overwhelming to some people, which may be the reason they’re choosing not to act. If this is the case, make sure you also introduce them to us at Affordable SEO Tampa. Over the years we’ve helped many clients not only see the importance of this marketing, but also embrace it and reap rewards from doing so. We look forward to helping you as well so reach out to us today.

The post Strategies For Convincing Your Boss About An SEO Strategy’s Importance appeared first on Affordable SEO Company for Small Business.

Counteracting a Negative SEO Attack

With a little diligence you can catch these attacks before they cause irreparable harm to your website. To do so you must:

• Perform link audits on a routine basis: This will be your savior if you’re ever the victim of a negative SEO attack because it’ll allow you to spot suspicious activity before it spirals out of control. Watch for any sudden, huge spikes or drops, especially when you haven’t been working on link building.
• Watch your site’s speed: This is an important ranking factor when it comes to Google. When your website is acting sluggish and you don’t know why, you should use crawling software to see if there’s anything suspicious happening. If you’re having a problem and can’t figure out why, more than likely you’re the victim of forceful crawling – something that’ll create a heavy server load, slowing your website down and possibly even causing it to crash.
• Be on the lookout for scraped content: Over the past few years content marketing has grown in importance. Unfortunately, this isn’t an area that everyone is skilled in though. This has caused a rise in scraping – someone taking content from your website and pasting it on theirs. This has serious consequences when discovered. It can cause your content to be devalued and your website to fall in the SERPs. Copyscape and Google’s Copyright Removal form are your best allies here.
• Monitor Google My Business: While the occasional negative review will happen, when you get a bunch of them at once, it’s probably a negative SEO attack. When this happens, you must act fast to prevent your reputation from being damaged. To flag and report these reviews you should look for your business on Google Maps, click on your business, click review summary, and flag the fake ones. Make sure you also fill out the report form.
• Monitor your keywords’ CTR: User experience plays an important role when it comes to Google’s SERPs. If someone programs a bot to land on the competitions’ websites that are ranking well for these keywords then immediately bounce away from it again this will increase their bounce ratio and decrease their ranking in the SERPs.
• Pay attention to where you’re at in the SERPs: When you notice a drop in ranking or complete de-indexing (something that rarely happens) you’ll want to see what’s happened. For a full review of how your site is performing you should use rank tracking software. Sudden drops here should encourage you to look and make sure your robots.txt file is still properly set up.
• Make sure your website’s security is up-to-date: The number of cyberattacks grows yearly. You need to have applied all your software’s security patches and make sure your CMS software has powerful encryption to protect your site from such attacks. It’s also important to use HTTPS if your site has any sensitive customer information on it. Doing so will also help you in the SERPs. Doing your best to protect your site will ensure that Google doesn’t flag it as being compromised – something that will definitely ensure a hefty dip in your traffic.

Before you’re faced with a negative SEO attack, hire the Affordable SEO Company to handle your website for you. They’ve done this successfully for many companies over the years. You should call and put them to work for you today.

The post How to Protect Against Negative SEO appeared first on Affordable SEO Company for Small Business.