The world of search engine marketing and search engine optimization is changing every day.  That's why we wanted to bring together our opinions on trends, tactics and strategies for SEO keyword research in 2020.

Let's start with what I call evergreen strategies.  Processes that will most likely never be old or outdated and have proven themselves over time.

What is keyword research?

Every high quality search optimization and marketing campaign must begin with in-depth keyword SEO analysis.  Start with what you think is the top keyword for the service or product you want to rank.  This would be the main or primary keyword.

In our case we try to create a ranking for SEO related keywords.  We would start with the primary or starting keyword "SEO".  If you are a plumber, you could start with "plumber" or "plumbing services".  Our goal is to find all the keywords related to our main topic.

What do you need for the keyword search?

It is quite basic and simple.  Here are the items you need to do a proper keyword research strategy session:

• 30 minutes time
• Internet connection and a browser
• Excel or Google spreadsheet
• Really?  Yeah, it's that simple.  Now get to work.

Google trends

I start my keyword research with Google Trends.

• Enter your primary search term in the search bar on the Google Trends page.
• Select the location of the search traffic.  By default, it is set to worldwide.  I refine my search to include the United States.
• Select the time frame. I usually stick with the last 12 months, but I increase it to 5 years for local or less common trends.
• Scroll down to the bottom right of the results.  You will see a box for related questions.
• It is set to increasing by default, but I usually choose above.
• Related queries are the first group of keywords you want to retrieve. There are 25 suggestions.
• You should use the option to download to a csv file.

Google's Related Searches

Next, I will use a regular Google.com search.  I noticed that a related keyword in Trends was "SEO services".  I will start with this term.  Just run a regular Google search, and as you type, look at the terms suggested by Google.

Google will give you suggested or related terms below your search.  Make a note of them and enter them into the csv file from your trend research.

Run the search and then scroll to the bottom of the Google results page.  You will notice "Searches related to...".  Copy these suggested terms into your sheet as well.

Repeat this process by clicking on some of the suggested topics/keyword phrases.  These suggestions are great for new page ideas, but especially for blog content ideas that you can write about as support pages for your most important keywords.  I have selected "SEO services for small business" and here are the other suggestions.

Expand the keywords further and collect more phrases.  Fill your keyword table with all data you want to load into it.

People also ask

Halfway through the Google search results, did you notice a section called "People ask too"?  This is an amazing resource for finding other related topics to your primary search.  Save them as potential blog entries to support your main pages.  My search was "keyword research" and they suggested that people should also ask the questions below.

Professional Tip: If you unfold and collapse one of the topics, Google will give you more related questions that people ask. Keep doing this until they start to become irrelevant.

Keyword Research Tools

I use a few other services to improve this process and hopefully generate dozens or hundreds of possible keyword phrases.  These are free:

Google Adwords Keyword Planner - you need a Google ad account to use this.
Google Search Console - Set up a search console on your website and see what keywords you are already ranked for and find out how to optimize for a better position.

I like to use a website called Answer the Public.  It helps me find topics that can be used to support blog posts that are related to, but not always in competition with, the most important keywords.

Adding local relevance to your keywords

Most readers could be a local company serving either a physical location or a service area radius.  You must therefore add a geographical modifier to your keywords.  This is as simple as keyword + city or city + keyword.  For example, plumber Los Angeles.  Plumbing Los Angeles.

Why is keyword research important for SEO?

Here the old saying applies: "You don't plan to fail, you don't plan".  As with all things in life, you need to take some time in advance to plan a strategy for executing tactics.  Keyword research is the foundation of great SEO work.  Your competition is getting smarter every year and they make better content, so you have to make yours better than theirs.  Do this by including all related and relevant keywords in your content.  Answer any questions a reader might have about the topic, the service, the product you want to rate.  Establish your website as an authority in your niche.

Suppose you need to find an address for a restaurant. Maybe you're looking for the nearest gas station. Or you wonder which ocean is the largest.

What do you do then? Google it.

You probably use it almost daily, but do you know how search engines actually work? We'll discuss the basics of what search engines are, how they work, and why it's important for businesses.

What is a search engine?

A search engine is a website that creates an index of web pages on the Internet. Search engines collect information from the entire World Wide Web and rank these web pages based on their content.

Search engines provide answers to people's questions every day. The purpose of a search engine is to provide the most relevant websites in response to search queries. The most popular and widespread search engine is Google. Google has reported that 100 billion searches are made on its website every month.

How search engines work

Search engines are complex computer programs. To fully understand every aspect of a search engine, one would have to study a lot and gain a deep understanding of computer algorithms. To save you trouble and confusion, we will go through the basics of how search engines work.

Basically, search engines work by sending bots called "spiders" or "crawlers" to any website on the Internet. These spiders crawl through your site and capture certain information, such as URLs, headers, navigation, site structure, and more. This information is indexed and stored. So when someone performs a search, search engines return results based on this information.

These spiders also follow the links on your page, which causes them to crawl further and further on the Internet, pick up information and store it in the search engine's index. For this reason, internal links on your page are useful to keep your content indexed and updated by search engines.

Indexing by search engines

When spiders or search engine bots crawl your site, they look for information that helps them identify your page so they know where to look on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Among the things these crawlers look for are several things:

• Keywords: What keywords are on the page? What is the page about?
• Type of content: What kind of content is included (text, images, video, etc.)?
• Timeliness: How fresh is the content? How recently was the page created or updated?
• Engagement: How fresh is the content? How engaged are visitors with the site or domain? How trustworthy or popular is the site?
• URL: How relevant is the URL to the content of the site?
• Linking: How trustworthy or popular is the site? What inbound and outbound links are associated with the site?

Once the spiders or crawlers store this information in an index, it is available for a search when someone performs a search. The algorithm takes this information and ranks the search engine's result pages according to what seems most relevant to the search term.

Algorithm of the search engine

When you perform a search with a search engine, an algorithm determines which results are displayed in which order. Search engine algorithms are complex, and they are not the same for every search engine. The results that appear on a Google results page might not be the same or in the same order as the results of a Bing search.

Based on the indexed information, a search engine algorithm ranks the web pages hierarchically for each search. The order is based on what the search engine considers to be most relevant to the search terms and on the pages that are most likely to return the answer that the searcher was looking for.

Other factors that can influence search engine ranking are:

• Location: Some searches are based on location (e.g. "gas station near me"), but often if the search engine can determine your location, it will return local results, even if the location or location indicators such as "near me" are not included in the search.
• Language: Search engines try to deliver results in the same language as your query, provided the language is recognizable.
• Device: Some websites may not be mobile friendly, so search engines may return different results depending on the device on which the search was performed.
• Previous searches: If you use the same search engine

Search engines and SEO

SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization, and this name essentially tells you what SEO experts do: they optimize your website so that it appears on the relevant SERPs and ideally ranks above your competitors.

Since most people use search engines to find new products, shops, restaurants and much more, SEO is important to direct visitors and customers to your website.

The explanation of SEO can be complicated; there are many factors that influence how search engines rate websites. SEO professionals study the algorithms of search engines and learn the best methods to place web pages on the first page or pages of results. Find an SEO company that is transparent in its practices to help build the SEO of your website.

So you've outsourced search engine optimization (SEO) to a reputable agency - or perhaps you've outsourced it to your in-house team.  You wait a few days and enter relevant keywords into Google or another search engine and you feel like you're hitting a brick wall: your ranking doesn't change.  So what happened?  Why don't you see the instant improvements you anticipated from all the SEO efforts?

It doesn't happen overnight

Before you bring your employees to the table or start yelling at the agency you just paid for, you need to understand a few facts about how SEO works.  Fact #1: Improving rankings through SEO doesn't happen overnight, or even necessarily in a few weeks.  In fact, companies that try to put their thumb on the ladder to speed up SEO results may actually see their rankings drop (for example, if they link too quickly).

So, how long does it take for SEO to work (i.e. for it to work), and why does it take longer than you'd like?  The answer is (as is so often the case when processes are complex), "it depends".  Let's see why.

The three pillars of effective optimization

The effective optimization of your website relies on multiple factors, but some are more important than others.  As the Search Engine Journal explains, three of them are particularly important:

"The truth is that it takes a long time to analyze several variables for your own website compared to the same variables for your competitors' websites.  Three specific criteria play a significant role in how long it will take for your SEO: competition, inbound links and content".

So how do you make sure that each of these criteria is met?  Here are some basic principles:

Who are you competing with and how competitive is what you are selling?

If you sell authentic Amish lace doilies or quilts in your local market, chances are you don't have as much competition (i.e. as many competing websites).  On the other hand, if you have a national law firm, you will have a lot of competition.

In other words, the more companies that sell what you sell and the more websites that showcase those products and services, the more competition there is and the longer it will take you to see the results of your SEO efforts.

There is another important caveat about the nature and extent of the competition you face.  If your website is currently poorly ranked in search engines (for example, if you are not even on the first three pages), you will see a faster progression than if you are close to the top.

The lower the ranking of a given website, the easier it will be to surpass it, because lower ranked sites, like yours, are generally not well optimized.  The higher your site climbs, the slower your ascent will be.

How many high-quality inbound links do you have, and how did you create them?
What is a "high quality" link?  It is a link from a reputable website that many people visit and trust, and that provides accurate and useful information.  In other words, an incoming link from New York times is of better quality than a link from your local Penny Saver.  While both the quantity and quality of inbound links are important, quality always outweighs quantity.

In general, the higher the volume of high quality inbound links to your site, the higher your search engine rankings will be.  There is, however, another caveat.  Sites that increase their volume of inbound links too quickly can be penalized, especially if their linking campaign violates search engine guidelines (see this Google article on "link systems" for an idea of how this works).

Is the content of your site valuable and useful to the visitor?

Remember that the goal of search engines is to give users the best, most accurate and relevant information possible.  Most of this information comes in the form of posted content, from blogs to case studies, white papers and how-to articles.  If the content on your site is reliable and accurate, you will get a higher ranking; if it is second-rate or contains questionable statements, you will get a lower ranking.

So what if your site's content is of little use or poor quality?  Here there is an important difference with link building.  Search engines do not penalize sites that quickly develop their content pool (provided, again, that the content is good).

If you have a solid content library ready to be published, publish it.  It is also interesting for search engines to publish new content on a regular and long-term schedule.

Conclusion

Of course, SEO can be a complicated business, usually not a do-it-yourself project.  If you're serious about improving your site's ranking and thereby increasing traffic (and hence the quality of leads, conversions and sales), take the time to find a reputable agency that can do the work for you, and do it well.

Read More... Reasons Why Your Business Needs to Focus on SEO

SEO is a necessary component of a good digital marketing strategy, but many companies do not understand and implement SEO. A July 2018 study found that only 44% of companies invest in SEO, perhaps because many companies turn to social media advertising rather than Google. If social media marketing is important, SEO should not be put on the back burner.

A study by Moz has shown that more than 70% of searches click on a website on the first page of SERPs (search engine results pages). This means that almost all search engine traffic goes to websites on the first page of results. SEO can help your website receive some of this traffic, resulting in increased brand awareness, leads and profits when those leads turn into customers.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the optimization of search engines. This means that SEO optimizes your website so that your business appears at the top of the search engine rankings for the keywords you want. If you run a bakery in New York City, you would want your bakery to appear first if someone searches for "NYC bakery". SEO can help you achieve this goal.

Misconceptions about SEO

Some companies avoid referencing, especially if they have already tried it and have not obtained results. There are many misconceptions about search engine optimization among those who do not fully understand it.

The most common misconceptions are the following:

• SEO is outdated and not worth your time/budget
• SEO is suspicious
• SEO doesn't work

These misconceptions are largely explained by the history of SEO. When SEO developed, many people used shady SEO tactics, now known as "black hat" SEO.

Before search engine optimization was controlled by sanctions such as Google's penalties, companies were free to use any trick they wanted to get their website ranked well in search engines. Keywords were stuffed into pages, content was either bad or non-existent, and many of the first results on search engine result pages were irrelevant, spam, or both.

SEO has improved since then, and if "white hat" SEO makes it harder for your website to get to the first page of Google, "dirty tricks" are no longer effective. From now on, search engines like Google display the most relevant and qualitative content first. To be successful in SEO, you need a qualified SEO company and a quality website.

Why SEO may not have worked before

If you have already tried SEO, you may be hesitant to invest again. But before giving up search engine optimization completely, consider two factors: time and quality. Time is important for SEO - it doesn't happen overnight. Good SEO practices can take at least six months to a year to get your website on the front page for your main keywords.

It can be hard to be patient while you pay for services and don't see results, but any company that claims to put you on the first page of Google in a week is either lying or cheating the system, which will eventually hurt your website.

You may also have invested in SEO with a company that was not transparent in its practices. If your previous optimization provider used questionable tactics or was unclear about what they were doing with your website and why, you may not have achieved your optimization goals. Good SEO takes time, but you will eventually see the results. Find a good SEO company that is transparent about its practices and has a proven track record.

Why you need SEO

SEO is important for a variety of reasons related to your company's online presence and digital marketing strategy. We've provided some reasons why SEO is critical to your digital marketing plan in 2019.

SEO brings relevant traffic and runways

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a way to generate traffic to your website. A good SEO will help your website rank on the first page(s) of Google search results for relevant keywords related to your business. This means that if your business is a construction company in South Jersey, SEO can place you in the first search results for "construction company in South Jersey", which will bring you web traffic interested in your business.

By bringing relevant traffic to your website, you can improve your brand recognition, attract potential customers and turn visitors to your site into paying customers. SEO helps you get targeted traffic based on keywords related to your products or services.

Local SEO increases visits and sales

Google reported that 50% of consumers who made a local search visited the store on the same day. If your business is located in a brick and mortar location, SEO can drive customers physically to your door.

Optimizing your web presence also means that it will be easier for potential customers to find your address, phone number, business hours and other information that can lead them to your website or store.

Good SEO can improve PPC

If you've ever used pay-per-click marketing, you know that the quality score influences your campaign. A higher PPC quality score can reduce the cost per click and help your ads perform better, making your advertising more profitable. Optimizing your website using SEO can improve the quality score of your PPC campaigns, helping these two digital marketing strategies work hand in hand.

SEO also works with other marketing strategies. The combination of SEO and search engine advertising improves the effectiveness of your ads and can improve traffic by up to 50% according to a Google study. SEO can also improve retargeting efforts and increase brand awareness.

Most consumers do research online before buying

Various studies have shown that consumers tend to research products and services online before making a purchase. A study by BazaarVoice showed that approximately 82% of consumers research online before making a purchase in person. It also found that 45% read online reviews before deciding to buy in-store, and 56% read online reviews before buying online.

SEO makes it easier for customers to find your business online during the search phase of the purchasing process. To win these customers, your business must be easily discoverable on search engines. A good SEO will bring relevant and interested customers to your site and increase the likelihood that they will become customers.

SEO creates trust and credibility

How often do you see page two or three of a Google results page? Probably not very often. If a customer is looking for a business and it doesn't appear in the first results for the corresponding keywords, this can trigger red flags. They might think that your business is not the best in your field, or that you are inexperienced or irrelevant.

A high ranking of your company in search engine results creates a sense of credibility for customers. Consumers are more likely to trust businesses whose websites rank well in search engines like Google.

Conclusion

If your company's digital marketing plan does not include SEO, you should consider changing your strategy today. For more information on SEO, you can visit our blog or contact us today to find out if SEO is right for your business.

Read More... What are the Best SEO Platforms?

Many people think that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a basic element of business, such as email, offices, and, well ... basic elements. But in reality, search engine optimization is not something that all businesses need, especially small businesses with modest marketing budgets.

If any of the conditions below apply to your business, it is better to invest in marketing campaigns other than search engine optimization.

Low volume of keywords

There's not much point in getting a ranking on the first page of Google for keywords that are only searched for a few times a month. If the keywords most relevant to your business have a minimal volume, it is unlikely that you will reach the critical mass of clicks necessary to generate a return on investment for your SEO. (Companies fall into the trap of investing in low volume keywords because they feel good when they see themselves ranked high. The moral of the story is this: Always follow the sales leads or revenue generated by your SEO campaign and evaluate the results on that basis).

You serve a small local market

If your business serves a small or medium sized market - dental office, restaurant, etc. - you may want to consider the following - then standard SEO will not work because the keywords targeting your specific market will not be sufficient to generate a return on investment. In this case, consider a local SEO campaign, which is a specialized type of SEO that uses different techniques from those that are important for a standard SEO campaign (i.e. national in scope).

Competition is too strong

If your maximum SEO budget is $1,000 per month and you are facing competitors spending $20,000 per month, your chances of achieving high rankings for strategically important keywords will be close to zero. SEO in some sectors, such as insurance and banking, is dominated by a few large players with very deep pockets. You may be able to compete on keywords that go unnoticed, but you will need very sophisticated research on keywords and competition to determine if even this can succeed.

Your budget is too low

It takes more than a few hundred dollars a month to make a successful SEO. Producing and marketing content, exploring the territory for link building opportunities, developing new tactics and a host of other tasks require a lot of time and expertise. SEO does not lend itself to mechanical execution, the assembly line, the formula. How much is enough? The answer to this question depends largely on the competition and the current state of your visibility in organic research, but as a general rule of thumb, you can estimate that it will cost you at least $1,000 per month to move the dial.

Your website is an SEO disaster

For SEO to have a chance of success, Google's robots must be able to find and accurately evaluate the relevance and authority of your website's content. If your website hinders Google's ability to do this, then Google will not be able to figure out how to match your content with searches for your target keywords. Old or poorly built websites will need to be redesigned before an investment in SEO makes sense. The problems encountered by websites looking for a full range of keywords are generally as follows: Poorly constructed URLs, missing or poorly written title tags, unfriendly design for mobiles, lack of pages for the main target keywords and faulty internal link structure.

You have a radically new product or service

Companies with something really new have many interesting marketing options to choose from, but SEO is not one of them. If you have something that people don't know about, then they won't look for it online. Once the market has become familiar with your offer and you have a critical mass of brand recognition, SEO can be an interesting option. In the meantime, save those precious marketing dollars for more cost-effective options.

Start with research

If you have the slightest doubt about the effectiveness of SEO for your organization, the best solution is to invest in professional preliminary research to properly evaluate the opportunity and cost.

The worst thing to do - and the thing most companies actually do - is to try SEO. A small budget and timid effort is not only a waste of money, it can lead you to the wrong conclusion, preventing you from seeing the true potential of a professionally managed SEO campaign. Successful SEO campaigns always start with excellent research.

Search Engine Optimization consists of multiple strategies, actions and best practices, all of which have the ultimate goal of improving your website's position in search engines - this is why it is called "search engine optimization".

There are two types of SEO: on-page and off-page. On-page SEO consists of everything you can control on your own website to improve your ranking. This includes things like the speed of the site, the presence of keywords, the header text, etc. On the other hand, off-page referencing consists of everything that is done on other websites that can influence your ranking. Usually it is just links.

It takes time, a good knowledge of SEO and a successful implementation of the desired on and off-page SEO factors to optimize your website for high search engine rankings. If the collective power of your site or the referencing of an individual page is more powerful than all the others, with regard to a specific query, you will be ranked #1.

Since SEO involves many ranking factors, you can consider the #1 site as a kind of triathlon. In a real triathlon, the winner of the race part is not necessarily the winner of the whole race - and the same goes for SEO. The site that has the most links, the most pages or the most visitors is not necessarily the #1 site. It's their overall performance that determines who comes out on top.

Why is SEO important?

Search Engine Optimization is Google's way of determining which sites deserve a good ranking for each query entered into its search engine. Without modern SEO, it would be extremely simple to manipulate search results so that the site with the most links or pages - all easily generated by software - is consistently ranked #1.

SEO is important because it helps to keep search results fair. It reduces the possibility of manipulating these results as much as possible, so that the sites appearing in each search are there because they deserve it. Hard work and a website that attracts visitors are correlated with high search engine rankings, so if your site meets these criteria, you will have a better chance of appearing in the results.

Users trust search engines, and a high ranking in search engine rankings tells searchers that your site is a credible source. The higher your ranking in the results pages, the more clicks and traffic your site will generate. SEO also improves the user experience, which increases the chances that customers will become repeat buyers.

And SEO is profitable. Competitive industries can spend large amounts of money on paid website traffic. Of course, you can always buy advertising space, but if you are working on a tight budget, SEO is a great way to generate qualified traffic to your site without having to pay for it directly.

What would research be like without SEO

Without SEO, it is difficult to say how we could find websites, companies or the information we are looking for on a daily basis. Search engine results would be too easy to manipulate, and as users, we would have to search much longer and harder to find interesting sites instead of simply manipulating the results to get to the first page.

Basically, SEO is important because it ensures that ordinary people don't have to search for more than a few seconds to find the information or products they want. It establishes a kind of online "natural order" that would be absent without it.

Marketers believe that SEO is critical

In addition, many marketers believe that search engine optimization is essential to their work. 50% of marketers believe that search engine optimization is the most effective digital marketing strategy.

SEO is very important - and without it, you might even spend too much money on other marketing activities!

Is SEO important for every type of business?

If you're reading this article, you may be wondering if SEO is really that important to you. You may have a business in an industry where there is little or no competition, and you may already be in first place. Or maybe you're struggling to rank and are wondering if there are other options besides SEO to give you the visibility you need.

Whatever your situation, if you have a website for your business, SEO is important. Whether your business is new or old, struggling or thriving, small or large, SEO is crucial to your online success. In fact, even if you're the only one in your industry, SEO is always important.

Here are a few examples of sectors and businesses that can benefit from SEO:

• Manufacturing
• Health Care
• Retail Sales
• Home Services
• HVAC
• And more
  

Why is that? It's for a very important reason: your SEO is something you can control.

There are a lot of things in your business that you can't control. You can't control when a new competitor appears, how your customers react to the launch of a new product, or your quarterly profits.

But with SEO, you can control your rankings. This means that, to a certain extent, you can control the number of visitors that come to your website, which has a direct impact on the number of sales or online leads you get, which has an impact on the amount of money you can earn by being online.

If you invest in search engine optimization, you are investing directly in your website's visibility and profitability. So no matter what happens tomorrow, if your SEO is consistent, you can count on that visibility to help your business grow and prosper.

That's why search engine optimization is so important, no matter what your business is doing. And given the evolution of search engines, it is unlikely that SEO will lose its importance in the near future.

Is SEO more important for some companies than for others?

You may be wondering if investing in SEO for your website is really that important. Are some businesses or industries more in need of search engine optimization than others?

Every website has different search engine optimization needs.

But it is rarely the company or industry that determines these needs. They are usually factors such as :

• The stage of growth of the website
• How visitors react to the website
• Which keywords does the company want to classify
• The degree of competition for these keywords
• Whether or not an ESO has been carried out in the past
• Whether or not the website is subject to any sanctions by Google

It is in the area of competition that the industry can have an impact. If you create an online jewelry store and are determined to rank for the keyword "jewelry", your listing will be more expensive and time consuming than a children's jewelry store targeting "beautiful children's jewelry". Indeed, the competition on this first keyword is much, much higher - so it will take much more work to reach the top positions.

But that doesn't make SEO more important for your jewelry site. It just means that it is more of a challenge. SEO is just as important for every business, regardless of industry or competition. Again, it's because you can't control many of the factors around you, but you can control your SEO. And if you could directly influence your website's traffic, ranking and sales or leads... why wouldn't you?

Can a company stop doing SEO once it has been successful online?

Let's say that in a few years your business will be very successful online. Your website will easily gain links, your visitors will arrive in a steady stream and you will see a steady growth in sales. Can you stop worrying about search engine optimization once everything looks good?

No! In fact, no matter how successful you are, you should never stop optimizing your website. Even the largest and most profitable companies in the world still use some level of SEO. However, because of their success, they may have changed the amount of time and resources they have decided to devote to each SEO tactic.

Here's what we mean: if your website is brand new and you're looking to make it very authoritative, you can link to it aggressively. But in five years, you may find that you naturally gain a lot of links. That doesn't necessarily mean that you have to stop linking altogether, but it does mean that you can reduce the amount of time you spend manually spreading them.

But when it comes to SEO, nothing is certain. Right now, Google places a lot of importance on the number, quality and relevance of the links pointing to your website. In a few weeks, however, it may declare that links are no longer as important and that the amount of content you have plays a greater role in determining your ranking.

As SEO is constantly evolving, it is essential not to rest on your laurels or assume that your site, in its current state, will always be ranked where it is. Search engines take into account the freshness of your content as well as when other sites have linked to you. If you don't update your content, you may not get new links, and your site will lose relevance over time.

Your competitors will always strive to outperform you, and search engines will always be evolving. If you don't keep up with the pace of your site's optimization, you won't have much chance of maintaining the success you find online.

In short, you shouldn't stop doing SEO once you've been successful. If you do, you will probably find that your success is very short-lived.

Finding the right SEO firm

The SEO industry is constantly evolving, and you need to stay abreast of the latest trends to maintain your ranking in search results.

You need a trusted SEO partner who fully understands your business and works with you to implement SEO solutions designed to help you reach more people and earn more revenue online.

When choosing an SEO company to work with your business, it is important to consider several key factors.

Past performance

Leading SEO companies will publish portfolios and customer testimonials online. This allows you to review their past work and determine whether or not the company is suitable for your business.

You need to choose an SEO company you can trust, and reviewing the company's track record will help you feel more confident in your decision to work with them.

Area of expertise

You should also consider the company's area of expertise.

For example, you will need to determine what you want to improve with your online presence and choose a firm that specializes in that area. Is the company specialized in search engine optimization or does it specialize in e-mail marketing?

This will help you choose the company that will best help you achieve your business goals.

Prices

When selecting a listing company, price alone should not be the decisive factor.

Although you probably don't have an unlimited budget, it is important to remember that with SEO firms, you often get what you pay for. If a company promises "cheap" SEO services, you risk sacrificing quality.

Companies need to provide personalized services at fair prices and quality that allow you to get the most out of your SEO campaigns.

Read More... Effective Link Building and SEO Strategies

SEO is important for improving search and visibility, but it offers more real value than that. Here are 12 reasons why companies need SEO to take their brand to the next level.

Many brands and companies know (or think they know) that they need SEO for their digital properties, and the benefits they will derive from SEO work done on their behalf.

SEO will certainly improve the searchability and visibility of a website, but what other real value does it offer? Why is SEO so important?

These 12 reasons should clarify, regardless of sector or company size, why companies need SEO to take their brand to the next level:

Organic search is most often the main source of website traffic

Organic search is an important part of the performance of most corporate websites, as well as an essential part of the shopping funnel and ultimately user conversion or engagement.

As marketers know, Google has a significantly larger share of the search market than competitors such as Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, DuckDuckGo and many others.

That's not to say that all search engines don't contribute to a brand's visibility - they do - it's just that Google has about 75% of the overall search market. It's the undisputed leader, so it's important to follow its guidelines.

But the remaining 25% of the market held by other engines is obviously also valuable for brands.

Google, being the most visited website in the world (especially in the US), also happens to be the most popular email provider in the world (with more than 1 billion users). Not forgetting that YouTube is the second largest search engine.

We know that a clear majority of people who have access to the Internet visit Google at least once a day to get information.

Being highly visible as a trusted resource by Google and other search engines will always play in favour of a brand. Quality SEO and a quality website will bring brands there.

SEO builds trust and credibility

The goal of any experienced SEO is to establish a solid foundation for a beautiful website with a clean and effective user experience that is easily discoverable during a search thanks to the trust and credibility of the brand and its digital properties.

There are many elements involved in establishing an authority on search engines such as Google.

In addition to the factors mentioned above, authority is acquired over time through such elements as:

• Quality profiles for inbound links
• Positive user behavior
• Machine learning signals
• Optimized elements and content on the page

But establishing this authority will do more for a brand than most, if not all, other digital optimizations. The problem is that trust and credibility can't be established overnight - like in real life. Authority is earned and built over time.

Establishing a brand as an authority requires patience, effort and commitment, but it also depends on offering a quality and valuable product or service that allows customers to trust a brand.

Good SEO also means a better user experience

Everyone wants a better organic ranking and maximum visibility. Few people realize that an optimal user experience is an essential element in achieving this.

Google has learned how to interpret a favourable or unfavourable user experience, and a positive user experience has become an essential part of a successful website.

Customers know what they want. If they can't find it, there'll be a problem. And performance will suffer.

A clear example of creating a strong user experience is how Google has increasingly become a response engine offering search data directly on SERPs (search engine results pages) for users.

The goal is to provide users with the information they are looking for in fewer clicks, quickly and easily.

Quality SEO integrates a positive user experience, leveraging it to work for a brand.

Local SEO means increased engagement, traffic, and conversion

With the growth and increasing dominance of mobile traffic, local search has become a fundamental element in the success of small and medium-sized businesses.

Local search aims to optimize your digital assets for a specific neighborhood, so that people can find you quickly and easily, bringing them closer to a transaction.

Local optimizations focus on specific cities, regions and even states, to establish a viable medium for a brand's message at the local level.

SEO professionals do this by optimizing the brand's website and its content, including local quotes and backlinks, as well as local listings relevant to the location and industry to which a brand belongs.

To promote local engagement, SEO professionals should start by optimizing a brand's Knowledge Graph panel, Google My Business listings and social media profiles.

Emphasis should also be placed on user ratings on Google, as well as other rating sites such as Yelp, Home Advisor and Angie's List (among others), depending on the industry.

SEO has an impact on the buying cycle

Clients do their research. This is one of the biggest advantages of the Internet from the buyer's point of view.

The use of search engine optimization tactics to relay your messages of good deals, innovative products and/or services, and the importance and reliability of what you offer to customers will make a difference.

There is no doubt that it will also have a positive impact on the buying cycle if done well.

Brands need to be visible where people need them so that a meaningful connection can be made. Local SEO enhances this visibility and allows potential customers to find the answers, and the companies that provide them to respond.

Best practices in SEO are always up-to-date

It is good to have SEO tactics implemented on a brand's website and all of its digital properties, but if it is a short-term commitment (budgetary constraints, etc.) and the site is not re-evaluated consistently over time, it will reach a threshold where it can no longer improve due to other obstacles.

The way the world of search evolves, essentially at Google's discretion, requires constant monitoring of changes to keep ahead of the competition and hopefully ahead of page 1.

Being proactive and watching for major changes in algorithms will always benefit brands that do so.

We know that Google makes thousands of algorithm changes a year. If you fall too far behind, it will be extremely difficult for you to go back. SEO professionals help to avoid this.

Understanding SEO helps you understand the web environment

With the ever-changing environment that is the World Wide Web, it can be difficult to keep up with changes as they occur.

But to stay on top of SEO, you need to be aware of the major changes taking place in the research field.

Knowing the web environment, including the tactics used by other companies and comparable local competitors, will always benefit these brands.

SEO is relatively inexpensive

Of course, it costs money. All the best things do, don't they?

But SEO is relatively cheap overall, and the gains will most likely be considerable in terms of profits and results for the brand.

It's not a marketing cost, it's a real business investment. A good implementation of search engine optimization will hold up for many years. And, like most things in life, it will only get better if it gets more attention (and investment).

It is a long-term strategy

The SEO can (and hopefully will) have a significant impact in the first year of action, and many of these actions will have an impact that lasts for more than several years.

It is true that as the market evolves, it is best to monitor trends and changes closely. But even a site that has not been subjected to a large number of search engine optimization recommendations will improve on the basic optimization best practices used on an honest website with a decent user experience.

And the more time, effort and budget spent on search engine optimization, the longer a website is able to remain a valuable competitor in its market.

It's quantifiable

Although natural SEO does not offer as easy a return on investment as paid SEO, you can measure almost anything with proper monitoring and analysis.

The big problem is trying to connect the dots in the background, as there is no definitive way to understand the correlation between all the actions taken.

Nevertheless, it is useful to understand how certain actions are expected to affect performance and growth, and we hope they will.

All good SEO aims to improve performance, so connecting the dots should not be a challenge.

Brands also want to know and understand where they were, where they are and where they are going in terms of numerical performance, especially for SEO when they have a person/company that is paid to perform on their behalf.

There is no better way to show SEO success, either. We all know that data never lies.

SEO highlights new opportunities

Quality referencing will always allow brands to discover and exploit new opportunities, not only to be discovered, but also to shine.

Offering quality SEO to brands means immersing an SEO team in everything that constitutes that brand. This is the only way to truly market a brand with the passion and understanding that brand stakeholders have for it: becoming a stakeholder.

The better a brand is understood, the more opportunities there are for it to thrive. The same can be said of search engine optimization.

If you're not on page 1, you don't earn the click

It's no secret in the SEO world that if you're not on page 1, you probably won't kill the organic search game.

A recent study shows that the top three positions in the organic search rankings result in nearly 40% of all clicks, while up to 30% of all Page 1 and Page 2 results are not clicked at all.

What does this mean? It means two things:

• If you're not on page 1, you must be
• There are still too many cases where a user types a search query and doesn't find exactly what they are looking for

Conclusion

The implementation of a strong and quality SEO on a brand's website and digital properties will always benefit the brand and its marketing efforts.

It is considered a "new era" marketing technique, but it is essential to a brand's presence on the web in this day and age, especially as data availability and rival competition continues to increase and develop.

Read More... What are the Best SEO Platforms?

Link building is one of the most important things you can do in terms of off-site search engine optimization. As you may know, search engines like Google tend to rank pages higher in search results depending on the number and quality of links to those pages. In essence, the more links you have, the more likely you are to get a good ranking if someone searches for keywords related to your site.

Some of the most common ways to link to a website are the following:

Link requests - Here you simply ask another website owner to create a link back to your website. These will actually hit or miss and depend on how well you can convince the website owner that your link on his website is beneficial to both him and his visitors.
Link purchase - This is the big taboo, but it still happens. Instead of politely requesting a link from a website owner, you approach them with a business instead. Some consider it advertising in the form of a link instead of a banner, but Google believes it's a good reason to punish a website.
Directories - There are a vast number of directories - general directories, local directories and niche directories. Some allow you to create an entry free of charge, while others are paid. The latter does not constitute a "bad link purchase", even if you pay for the link.
Content links - There are many ways to create links about content, from creating articles to article marketing networks to guest blogging with a link in your author biography.
Social links - I'm not just talking about links in your social profiles (although we will be addressing these). This refers to all the ways that online social business (blog comments, forum posting, answering questions, and using social media) can lead to links.

For this article we will not focus on the first three (inquiries, purchases or directories), but on the last two - in terms of content and social aspects. Why? Because the chances are good that you are already doing most of them or know that you should!

The reason why these two are so important is that they are not just about creating links for an SEO value (although some of them will have some SEO value anyway). It is about creating links that people are likely to click on. So instead of waiting for clicks and conversions from higher rankings in the search results, you could get both immediately through the link itself!

Linking with content

Content creation is a great way to get valuable backlinks to your website while demonstrating expertise in your industry. There are three ways in which you can get links from other websites besides your own blog, where you should also have great content.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is a great way to get your name, company and link out to a new audience. Once you have some good content on your own blog as an example of your writing, you can start reaching other blogs in your industry whose listeners could be potential customers. Since you have success with smaller blogs in your industry (success is posts with a good level of social engagement and comments), you can use them as examples to introduce them to larger blogs in your industry.

Below are some tips for building links for guest blogs:

• Don't just think of guest blogging as an exercise in link building. Think of it as a way to position yourself or your brand as an authority in your niche and drive visitors back to your site. In this sense, create great content that fits the blog and its audience
• Read other guest posts on the blog first. See how they format their posts and follow them accordingly
• When it comes to links, you will most likely add them via an author biography. Look at the biographies of other guest bloggers to see how many links you can have and where they should lead (your website, blog, and/or social networks)
• Make sure that the keyword phrase and the page you link to in your author biography appeals to the blog's audience to maximize the number of potential clicks

Article Marketing

Many popular article marketing sites like EzineArticles experienced a huge success when the Google Panda update came out. Since then, they have been working to update their networks to focus more on quality than letting everyone get away with quantity. However, it is not certain how much real value is created by link building through article marketing on these sites.

My suggestion would be to look for article communities (not just directories, but real communities) whose audience fits your demographic. And when I talk about communities, I mean sites like HubPages and Squidoo, where members can connect with other members through private messages, comments on their profiles/articles, or even by hanging on forums. This way you can find other members in your industry or members who would be good potential customers, contact them and finally lead them to your articles and websites.

Videos

Another great type of content that can be used to build links is video. Most video networks (YouTube and Vimeo are my favorites) allow you to add a link to the description of your video.

This means that someone who comes across your videos through search or on YouTube itself can go directly to your site. Therefore, your videos, like your written content, should be informative and aimed at attracting the right kind of audience for your business.

Remember, videos don't have to mean anything too crazy (or even something that gets you behind the camera). You can convert PowerPoint presentations into movie files, you can upload pre-recorded webinars, or you can use screencasting software to create a video tutorial with a recording of your voice and computer screen. All these options make for great video content!

Link to social profiles

If you participate in social media, you are likely to be sitting on several plots, which may contain one or more links. Let's take a look at where you can put your links, where and how they affect you.

Twitter

On Twitter you can set links in two places - in the web and organic section of your profile. To edit your profile, go to Twitter and use the drop-down list to find your settings. Then edit your profile to include a link in the Web and Bio section of your profile. This way you will have two links in your profile.

How does this affect the establishment of connections? There are many other sites that will access your Twitter profile information and use either your bio-information only or your bio and web link. Having a link in both means that you are covered in both cases as you get more links to your sites.

Facebook

While there aren't as many sites on Facebook that retrieve your user information, your Facebook page has many places where you can place a live hyperlink.

These help visitors to your Fan Page see your other social properties, blogs and websites. Try to use links that are as short as possible, but at the same time, don't just use bit.ly or other shortened links, as these are often used by social spammers to trick involuntary visitors into clicking on shady links. Bit.ly works well if you want to shorten a Facebook or LinkedIn profile, as it uses its own short domains on.fb.me and linkd.in, which only lead to these pages.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn allows you to have three links in your profile, each with customized anchor text (although they do not count for the SEO value). Think of the anchor text as a way to get visitors to click on the links. To edit your websites, click Edit Profile under the Profile drop-down menu. Then click on the Edit link next to the links of your website. Be sure to use the Other option in each drop-down menu to get the customized anchor text.

Personal Google+ profile

Google+ offers you the possibility to add a large number of links. Try not to make it look like spam, but be sure to take advantage of this opportunity. To add links, go to the Info tab in your Google+ profile and click the Edit Profile button. Then click the Other Profiles, Contributor to, Recommended Link and Introduction sections to edit them. In each of these sections, you can enter links to your websites (and the pages they contain) with custom anchor text.

Please note that the following links should be of a certain type:

Other profiles - These links should lead to pages that revolve around you, such as your info page on a blog or website, and other social profiles.
Contributor to - These links should lead to your own author pages that you write for, such as your own blogs, blogs you contribute to, or other important websites you contribute to.
Recommended Link - These links can lead to any other website of your choice.
You can create the same types of links on your Google+ pages, except that you only have the Recommended Links option in the right sidebar.

YouTube

Thanks to the new YouTube channel design, you can have more than one link to your other websites at the top of your channel profile. To edit the new channel design for adding links, click the Edit button next to the About section. Then add the title (custom anchor text) and URL for each link.

While the downside is that these links are nofollow (or otherwise ignored by search engines), the upside is that you can add more of them for visitors to click on!

Linking with commitment

Working with the communities in your niche / industry will help you build your personal, professional and business brand. Below are ways to combine building relationships with your commitment to get the best of both worlds.

Blog comments

Whenever you start blog commenting, make sure you comment on posts because you want to say something important, not just because you want to leave a link. If you do it because you have something to say, your comment will make an impression that will make others curious about you. This curiosity corresponds to a click on your link.

Hints on how to make others want to click on your link in blog comments (besides just filling out the Website / URL input field in the form) include the following:

• Get a Gravatar - Use the email you comment most often, sign up for an account, and assign a photo to each email address you comment with. This ensures that on most blogs that use WordPress, a photo appears next to your comment, and helps blog owners distinguish spam from legitimate comments. Because as a blog owner, I almost never approve a comment without a Gravatar unless I recognize the person's name.
• Always use your real name in the name field of comments. The only exception are WordPress blogs that use the KeywordLuv plugin. These will be known to you because somewhere near the comment form there are instructions on how to use your name@your keyword in the name field, so that your website is linked to the anchor text you specify. This means that you still use your real name in your comment!
• Search for blogs with CommentLuv - search CommentLuv keyword on Google to find them. Whenever you comment on a blog with the CommentLuv plugin, you'll get an additional link to your most recent blog entry below your comment when you enter a blog URL in the website field of the comment form.
• If a blog uses a third-party system such as Disqus, sign up for a profile so you can add your website link and photo to your comments. You will also get a link from your profiles on these networks and a way to track your comment development (see this profile on Disqus for example).

Forums

Forums can be a bit difficult when it comes to getting links. Some communities are happy to accept it, while others call anyone who adds a link to their own site a spammer. You can find great forums in your industry by searching Google for the keyword BoardReader or "powered by vbulletin". Once you find these forums, go to a public post to see if the forum users are allowed to use signatures. They are displayed at the end of each post.

If you don't happen to know everyone on the forum (because it's new or you're the owner of the forum), I'd suggest that you make a few posts in the forum before adding your signature links. Once you've gained some recognition as a valuable member of the community (maybe 15 to 20 posts, preferably not in a day), go to your forum profile and add your signature. If everyone else seems to have just one link in their profile, just add one in your profile. If people have three, take three. Once you've posted a bit in the community, you'll know what works best.

Also make sure (as with any other website) that you fill out your member profile completely. This usually includes at least one place where you can link, and it will help other members get to know you.

R&D Networks

Question and answer networks are great places to build your authority and occasionally drop a link as part of an answer to a question. The major question and answer networks - Quora, LinkedIn Answers, and Yahoo Answers - all have a resource box where you can add links as a reference to your answer or a place to search for more details. In this case, having a blog is handy, as your blog entries will provide better answers than a product link. The latter will probably brand you as a spammer, unless the question is specifically "Where can I buy this product..." and you happen to have it for sale on your website.

As for profiles on these networks, Yahoo Answers does not offer a profile where you can add links. Quora, on the other hand, is one where you will make sure that you fill it out as much as possible. You may have links in your main biography.

You can also have links as part of the topics you follow. When you follow a topic, you will be asked to describe your experience with that topic. In this section, simply add a short blurb with your link.

Bonus Tips

I decided to make a few bonus tips that have nothing to do with content or social engagement, but are also simple ways to naturally generate more links to your website.

Link to the Us page

The first bonus tip is to simply add something to your website that helps others easily link to you. Call it your "link to us" page and make sure it contains the following.

Badges & banners are just simple images that people can use on their website. If possible, create them in a range of different standard sizes so people can find the right one for their site. 125×125, 468×80, and 300×250 are fairly standard banner sizes.

In addition to your badges and banners, be sure to include the HTML code that people can use to link to their site, as shown in the example above. The easier you make it, the more likely people will link to you.

Widgets

Can you imagine a simple widget that fits your website? If so, create a widget that people can place on their website. And make sure that this widget has a link to it!

Email links

Do you send many e-mails? Do you use an online email service like Hotmail, Gmail, AOL or Yahoo? If so, use WiseStamp to create visually appealing email signatures with links to your websites, or simply add links to your websites under your name.

Several people have clicked on these links in my signature and then sent me back an email saying they did not know I write, blog, or photograph freelance. After visiting my website, they wanted to ask about services or photo prints!

Statistics Check the links

Would you like to see some interesting statistics about your website (or someone else's) while creating some quick links to it? Try searching for your domain on the following pages. They will give you some useful information and create a profile page for your domain with a link back to it.

Alexa - On this website you will learn how your domain ranks in global traffic and in your own country. It will also give you additional details, including the number of sites linking to your site, top queries for your site and additional statistics.
Built with Technology Profiles - This site tells you what your domain uses on its website, including content management systems, analytics, frameworks, server information and more.
Quarkbase - This website provides you with the latest Twitter comments related to your domain, traffic statistics and social statistics. For blogs, even the latest and most popular blog entries are retrieved!
About the domain - On this website you will find basic SEO information about your domain such as title, meta description, headers, incoming links and even the Google Analytics ID #.
Similar Site Search - This website tells you websites that it thinks are similar to yours, based on keywords and content.

You May Also Want to Read: Things That Every SEO Strategy Needs

Digital PR and connection building is an evolving industry, so what worked a few years ago may not necessarily work today. Although many of Link building techniques are still applicable today. This article is based on the recent research conducted with entrepreneurs about the other strategies they use to build high authority links to their sites.

Here are their souvenirs based on strategies they use to build high authority links to their sites:

Use the 'scholarship' effect

One of the most popular trends of recent times is scholarships. This is a variant of the 'local sponsorship' strategy I mentioned in my previous post - only much more effective. The scholarship angle basically works like this: Each year, your company announces between $500 and $1,000 in scholarships for students in your local community.

This announcement is posted on the External Scholarship Opportunities pages of all your local university websites, and as a result you receive valuable .edu links to your website. Brian Stumbaugh of Startup Garage says his company routinely secures 40 to 50 links to each of their client websites using this technique.

Do the legwork of the journalists for them

This is one of the most legitimate ways to get coverage from high authority websites. The technique involves investigating the types of "interesting" stories reported in certain media, and then creating your own unique studies and research that journalists in those media find interesting.

Marcus Roberts, owner of Mirador Wealth, a financial advisory firm, reports on a recent study conducted by his team members in which they asked 100 randomly selected individuals from each of the 50 American states how they would spend $1 million. The results of the study were so interesting that media such as Huffington Post, Investopedia and MarketWatch reported on them.

Correct any misinformation

As a bootstrapped entrepreneur, you may not have enough resources to be quoted in major media. But you could use your expertise to correct misinformation about these publications and gain recognition for it. Eric Brantner of CutCableToday told me that he recently discovered some discrepancies in a GeekWire post and wrote a blog post with the corrected information. He then shared this blog with the author of GeekWire.

This promptly gave him a link from the original article that referred to his article on the same topic. To standardize this process, Brantner recommends that you create a Google Alert for all your standard industry conditions so that you are notified of the latest industry articles. This way, every time you come across an article that contains incorrect information, you can post a blog post with the correct information on your site. Next: Notify the original authors of the errors on their site.

Target the 'Media coverage' page

A number of new product releases have a press or "media mention" page where they proudly share links to all the rave reviews their product has received from various users. According to digital marketing strategist, Kevin O' Brien, a good way to build links is to review such products on your website and inform the target company of the new review. O' Brien points to a review of Quuu, a social media enhancement tool that earned his company a mention on the Quuu press page.

Don't forget about HARO

Unlike the other ideas mentioned above, the "Help a Reporter Out" service for earning links is a fairly well-known strategy. But how effective is HARO? Last year, Kari DePhillips, the owner of The Content Factory, conducted an experiment in which she "pushed hard on HARO"; the result was that out of 21 pitches, she could be quoted and linked 11 times (not to mention the link from the same article that happened after she responded to my HARO request).

DePhillips points out that while it is difficult to quantify the effort in dollars, the more than 100 links she has acquired through HARO in six years have contributed significantly to the success of her company's online content strategy.

Read More: Reasons Why You don't Earn Enough Links

The exact details of Google's search algorithms are not known to the public, so it's a bit difficult to know exactly what the search giant is looking for on high-quality websites.

One of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of these quality rankings is the importance of "white-hat" link building as part of a sound SEO strategy. The term refers to the desire to create a good product or service that people want to link to and that over time can increase your search ranking.

The confusion about the "white hat" was sparked during a Google hangout in February 2015 with John Mueller, one of the search company's webmasters: Mueller warned against the practice of "spammy link building," which means that companies violate Google's policies by buying links from sites or making irrelevant sites link back to theirs.

In November 2015, Google helped alleviate the problem by publishing a comprehensive 150-page guide explaining the company's search quality rankings. The aim was to enable webmasters to proactively create relevant websites to avoid the penalties associated with frequent updates by Penguin and Panda (Google algorithms that troll for violations such as duplicate or low-quality pages).

For those of you who haven't had time to read the extensive Google Handbook and all the subsequent forums, blogs and comments that Google has produced, here are some tips on how to get high-quality inbound links that will move your website up in search engine rankings.

Explore what your competition is doing

The first step in creating a link building strategy is to understand what works for others. No matter what you are looking for online, there are already a number of results for it. If you want to compete with these existing sites, you need to play the same game as them.

One of my favorite tools for examining the incoming links to any website is the Common Backlinks Tool (my blog lists more of my favorite backlink tools).

With the Shared Backlinks tool, you can enter up to 10 websites to see what backlinks they all have in common. If everyone has an inbound link from a specific website, that website is likely to be a trusted and respected source for your industry.

You don't want to be the only website that focuses on entrepreneurs and you don't want to be found on big websites like Entrepreneur (you know the others). It is an indication that you are not a trusted source on this topic.

Once you understand what the competition is doing, you can develop a targeted link building strategy that will put you in the top tier of the business community.

Establish business relationships

Now that you know who to turn to, it's time to build business relationships with these influential companies.

Journalists and other business people hate spam and often ignore requests from people they do not know. To get their attention, you need to get involved in their communities.

On a website like Huffington Post, it's as easy to get the blogging team's attention as linking to your Facebook account and leaving relevant comments on articles. HuffPo is a community-oriented blogging site that values and encourages its members' contributions. You can also reach out to employees by finding their names and email addresses, either on individual articles or in the company's imprint.

Each company has contact information that can be found on the company's website. Start a conversation with the company, introduce yourself and give the employees valuable information and tips. This puts you and your company in front of the right people who are more likely to notice when you post relevant content on your website and use you as a source.

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is another great place to register as a source (and even as a blogger, if that's true). When you sign up for this service, you will receive targeted emails three times a day with a list of stories that journalists are looking for sources that are currently being researched. If you provide relevant information, these authors will often provide a back link to your site when they quote you for their stories.

Guest article with relevant content

If you want something done right, it is of course best if you do it yourself. A guest report directly on relevant websites is one of the best ways to consolidate your status as a professional. Unfortunately, guest posting is such a common practice for marketers (and fortunately for readers as well) that publishers are becoming increasingly selective about what content they will accept from whom.

To successfully offer a guest post on a blog, you need to understand the tone and voice of a publication. Then you can create specific, actionable and relevant content that complies with the site's guidelines.

To use guest posting effectively as an SEO strategy for link building, you need links within the content with a varied anchor text that shows Google that your site is a relevant source for one to five word keywords on the subject.

Think about how you see a television program compared to an advertising spot. Although a commercial is an effective marketing tool, you want your content to be part of the show. Instead of selling directly, demonstrate a value that leads readers to you when they have problems that you can solve.

Look for dead links

There's nothing more frustrating than clicking on a link to find more information, only to be presented with a 404 splash page (a "page not found" notification). However, as an experienced online marketer, you as an online marketer have the opportunity to get a valuable backlink to your site when others fail to keep the links up to date.

Whenever you come across a broken link while researching information about your industry, contact the publisher of the publication to point it out and offer an alternative within your website.

If you can successfully explain to the publication why this backlink is affecting their web traffic and how your information can help readers, you will not only get a backlink, but you will also build trust in the publication. This is also a great opportunity to suggest a guest blog and even win an editorial column, since you have just proven your worth as a trusted source.

Use schema markup

Since 2013, Google has focused on including infoboxes in search results and using the knowledge graph to display relevant semantic information for the search. Instead of having to click through to a website, users could find general answers to frequently asked questions on the search page itself.

While this may seem like a wasted effort at link building, it's actually an easy way to draw attention to your site, as snippets of pages within your site appear right at the top of Google search results. You can't pay for this kind of ranking, which is superior even to sponsored posts.

The relevance of the site is an important assessment factor for SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) rankings, and Google will obviously see itself as the most relevant site on the Internet. Best of all, you don't have to be the top search result to be displayed in the info box.

To be part of the knowledge graph, you need to implement schema markup in your website. Google defines this as "code that you insert on your website to help search engines deliver more informative results for users". Schema.org, sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandax, provides everything you need to know to get started using schema markup.

Use social media

On the way to the future, social media are becoming more and more important for determining search results. Gaining backlinks in social media shows search engines that you are creating content that people actively share within their social groups.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to include social media sharing buttons on every piece of content you create. It's a call to action for every reader to share your information and helps a post or page go viral.

When Google's algorithms detect that a page resonates on social media networks, that page is indexed and presented to search quality rankers to determine why. This pulls the URL out of the unknown ambiguity of page 175648 of the search result on page 1.

Conclusion

SEO experts have debated the effectiveness of link building as an online marketing tool for as long as search engines have existed.

Although Mueller and other Google webmasters have warned against link building as an SEO strategy, experienced marketing experts know that they are actually warning against spammy black-hat techniques.

Just spamming the comment section of any website or creating fake websites to reinforce your inbound links will punish your site.

Instead, focus on creating content that is relevant to the real-life questions and problems people encounter. Become a subject matter expert and provide valuable and factual information backed up by statistics to attract readers and prove your worth.

By building relationships with trusted sources, you can become a trusted online source yourself, increasing the visibility of your brand to both readers and search engine robots.

You know that you cannot rely on questionable tactics or automated placements if you want to be successful in link building. You must do your best to build links naturally. You can use a mix of intelligent link building through guest posts or co-op opportunities, but in most cases you're trying to attract links naturally. You've read all the advice that says that if your content is good enough, everyone will want to link to you on their own - you don't even have to worry about it!

But if you're like most marketers, you've found that this advice is not entirely tenable. They only deserve occasional links, and even then they are not very authoritative. This means that your SEO growth is stalling and you need better results if you want to continue.

This is where I can help you. The concept itself is a bit misleading, but otherwise reliable - so let's find out the five main reasons why you don't earn enough links:

Your content is not good enough

It's hard to admit to this problem, but "not good enough" can mean a whole range of things here. Remember that your content must be original, well-researched, detailed, concise, useful, entertaining and surprising - all at the same time. This is no easy task, even for experienced content marketers. You also need to consider the relevance of your content to your specific target audience, the timing of your publication and the competitive environment in which you distribute it.

"Your goal must be to deliver valuable content that is relevant to your consumers," says Alana Schwamberger, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at YourHearing.com. For us, this means that people with hearing loss are looking for hearing aids. We want to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time - when they can benefit the most, and we see ourselves as a reliable resource and qualified experts on a topic they may not be familiar with.

If any of these factors are not right, even otherwise good content can be degraded from a "linkable asset" to a basic article. Do not take this as a statement that you are not capable of producing valuable content. You are capable of it. All it takes is a new prioritization of your goals and efforts. After all, invest more time and energy in a single knockout piece instead of spreading it across several different works.

Their content is not linkable

Let's assume that all your previous content was really "good". You have done research. You have offered something new. You have offered something useful, and you know that your target audience is interested. But for some reason, you don't get any links, even though you receive many posts and comments. Why is that? Because your content cannot be linked.

People link to things that generate completely new ideas, offer concrete statistics or have any medium they want to use on their own website. If you don't offer any of these things, people might love what they read, but they won't link to you.

You are not syndicating your own material

The misleading element of the idea that "good content attracts links by itself" is that you can produce good content, do nothing with it, and still generate links. This only happens if you already have an enthusiastic audience, and then building links may not even be a priority for you anymore.

Yes, your enthusiastic followers should do much of the work of sharing and distributing your material for you, but you need to give them a jump start, otherwise the cascade effect of viral sharing will not work. This means that you need to syndicate your published material on your own social media channels and distribute it on your own as much as possible. Only then will your work reach a threshold of visibility and make room for further growth.

You have not scaled

You can't write the same types of content for the same audiences through the same channels and hope to achieve ever better results. If you want to earn more links, you need to increase your efforts. Produce better content for a more receptive audience and open up new social contexts, new groups and new distribution channels. Find new multipliers to connect with and increase your engagement with your own users. Strategies do not scale by themselves. You have to make the effort to bring them to the level you need.

You are not doing enough to establish the connection

Manual link building often conjures up the idea of outdated black hat practices, but modern link building is only one way to offer a link as a valuable resource in an off-site content (a guest post). If the content is good and the editor has the authority, any manual link you create will immediately take over the authority. In addition, any external publishing channels you tap will serve as a valuable addition to your syndication and visibility network. You are guaranteed to receive more inbound links, while increasing your potential to reach new audiences and attract new links.

The sad fact is that link building is a slow process. The more authority you have, the more experience you have and the more resources you can use, the easier the process becomes. This means that there is a steep learning curve for companies new to the business. Keep this in mind when you start correcting your link building program and adding tactics, and be patient as you maintain your backlink profile for further growth.

You May Also Read : Major SEO Challenges You Will Face in Your Career

The world of digital marketing has seen more change in the last two years than in the last 10 years combined, thanks to the release of Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates. Both have changed the best practices of online marketing, including everything from how websites should be built to the creation of "backlinks".

Links that lead from another website to your website are called backlinks because they point back to your pages. Building these links back to your website can help improve the search engine optimisation (SEO) of your website.

So if you're still using outdated link building techniques - such as automatic directory listings or "10,000 links for $10" package purchases - it's time to develop a new, updated link building strategy.

For best results, focus your efforts on the following techniques:

Guest article

The process of guest posting refers to writing an article that is published on another person's or company's website. This technique can not only provide you with access to a new audience, but can also help you secure at least one valuable backlink to your own website.

To maximize the value of this strategy, work with well-known, highly respected blogs and send only your best content to these publishing sites. Guest contributions are about the relationship you build with another site and its audience. It's not a technique that can be automated by sending any old article to any old publisher blog to secure a link or two.

Creating infographics

People often like to share infographics - images that share data in a graphical, aesthetically pleasing way. If you take the time to create an interesting, attractive info-graphic, it is likely to be shared from one person to another, so that every time your graphic is referred to on another website, new links are created.

To determine whether your infographics meet these criteria or not, ask yourself the simple question: "Would I share this with a friend? If you can't answer "yes" to this question, it is likely that your graphic will need some work before it is published.

It can cost time and money to develop a worthwhile infographics, but if done right, this investment can pay off in terms of the number of links that ultimately result from the distribution of your graphic.

Building links via e-mail

As Google cracks down on sitewide links - links that appear in blog sidebars and footers that appear on every page of the site - the development of "in-content" links will be a critical part of the link building process this year. In-content links are links that appear in the main content of the referring site's pages.

The best way to find these links is a so-called email link building process, in which you contact potential referring websites by email and request that your link be placed on a relevant content page. For example, if you run a local restaurant and come across a website that lists all the small businesses in your area, then emailing the owner of the website and requesting a link to your business website is a way to generate new, valuable links.

Create viral content

You will be surprised to learn that one of the most effective techniques for link building does not involve any kind of public relations at all.

Creating viral content refers to the process of publishing very valuable, highly shared content on your website and then placing your links in popular social networks. When you create remarkable content, people should want to share it with others, ideally resulting in an influx of backlinks without your direct involvement in building each link.

Although there is no hard and fast formula for creating viral online content, you can analyze pieces that have been widely shared to get clues as to what made them so popular. Often it is content that picks up on emerging trends or is simply absurd or entertaining.

Analyze links from competitors

Analyzing your competitors' link profiles can be done with simple tools like Majestic SEO (free plan available with paid plans starting at $49.99 per month) and Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz (free plan available with paid plans starting at $99 per month). Both allow you to view the websites that link back to your competitors' websites.

Reviewing your competitors' backlink profiles should give you many ideas for potential sources that should also link back to your website. You will want to qualify these possibilities, as replicating a competitor's spam links will not do your site any favors. In your own efforts, keep strict link building criteria that focus on generating quality links that look as natural as possible to search engines.

You May Also Want to Read : Difficult SEO challenges and Creative Solutions

Choosing the right SEO platform can be difficult with so many options, packages and features. It can also be confusing and full of jargon: Algorithms, URLs, on-page SEO; how does it all fit into the theme? Whether you are upgrading from an existing SEO tool or looking for your first SEO platform, there is a lot to consider.

Not only are there hundreds of tools that could help you scale your SEO and appear higher up the SERP in search engines like Google, Bing and others, but they each offer different features. From all-inclusive platforms to more specific software that focuses on certain aspects of SEO, there are many options on the market that can help you improve your SEO strategy.

If choosing an SEO platform is a bit dizzying, you've come to the right place.

We believe that an informed buyer is the best type of client.

That's why we are here to give you an overview of the best SEO platforms available so that you can make the best decision based on the needs of your business and your team. But first it is important to note that there is a difference between SEO platforms and SEO tools. In this article we will discuss both types of SEO software.

First, what is an SEO platform?

An enterprise SEO platform allows you to research, develop, implement, manage and measure every aspect of your search visibility. It is used to discover new topics, to manage the brainstorming and production of content, and to implement search engine optimization or SEO as part of a larger digital marketing strategy - all while continuously monitoring the results.

And that's just the beginning.

To align your entire digital marketing team, an SEO platform brings all your data together to deliver a single source of truth. Instead of working with information scattered across many tools and systems, SEO teams base their decisions on the complete data picture. In essence, SEO platforms are capable of empowering large brands and agencies to perform any task within the SEO lifecycle.

The analysis and research is provided in real time, so there is no need to add updates to a spreadsheet or access and re-gather data from another source. An all-in-one platform scales your SEO results so you can achieve consistent and repeatable SEO growth.

Let's start by telling you what the following three SEO platforms offer, with a brief description of each one.

The value of an SEO platform

What's important with the software I'm about to introduce is that you have a team that can use it. We recommend that you focus on evaluating an all-in-one platform if at least two of the three points apply:

• You plan to hire or have at least one dedicated SEO team member
• You have content marketers who support the optimization and writing of content for your website
• Your need to scale your SEO efforts and centralize your processes and data to drive SEO growth

Due to the breadth and depth of data and capabilities, this type of technology is very expensive. So to get the most out of your investment, you need enough support to make the most of the insights. (For less expensive technology, consider a niche SEO tool).

But once that is in place, the value you get is unsurpassed. If you have the right talents, your new SEO platform will support them:

BrightEdge

BrightEdge helps clients create powerful content marketing strategies, build high-performance websites, and determine SEO results and associated ROI and competitive performance.

This SEO software provides users with research, rankings, and recommendations to help you:

• Identify what customers are looking for on the Internet
• Develop an effective content strategy that appeals to the right customers, guides them through the sales funnel
• Keeps them in touch with your brand
• Strengthen your social media campaigns
• Be visible during local searches
• Put mobile customers at the center of your SEO
  

Conductor

Conductor believes that SEO is as simple as connecting customers looking for information with your company's expertise.

They do this by offering "off-platform" services that - similar to BrightEdge - uncover new customer insights, create powerful marketing content and track SEO performance. By performing advanced SEO tasks such as tracking rankings, the platform generates insights that feed into strategic digital services such as content optimization and performance measurement.

And of course, its overall goal is to maximize the return on your search engine optimization and content marketing investments. If you want to know more, take a look at their app, which provides an instant snapshot of your customers' world.

SearchMetric

Do you want to be able to easily identify global and local search opportunities, support decision making, and link SEO to marketing strategy - all with a clear reference to revenue?

SearchMetrics offers this through:

• Analyzing the rankings and traffic of mobile search engines to optimize search across mobile devices
• Access to millions of data points in 30 countries
• Enables drill-down analysis of data for hundreds of cities in 14 countries
• Optimization of website performance with backlink analysis
• Optimal website architecture to make your website attractive for search engines
• Evaluation of the effectiveness of paid search campaigns and comparison with organic search results
• Identification of opportunities through keyword analysis and completion of websites and content
  

seoClarity

seoClarity (that's us!) offers our clients a single source of truth that enables them to simplify, structure and scale their SEO within their organization. Our platform seamlessly combines everything: content optimization, rank tracking, analysis, crawler capabilities and more.

We try to make SEO as easy as possible so that you can move from planning and preparation to strategy execution. Your customers are out there - optimize your content to get the search visibility they deserve.

Our powerful platform allows you to scale your SEO to deliver consistent results. That's why almost all of our package options come with a dedicated Client Success Manager to help you when you need it. And if you need help developing your data-driven strategies, our Professional Services team is ready to help you accelerate your SEO efforts.

If we had to sum up these Enterprise SEO platforms, we'd say that they are:

• Provide comprehensive functionality
• Have the ability to provide insight
• Create actionable roadmaps

Here is a popular resource from Search Engine Land, whose annual report on SEO tools for companies, which goes deeper into these and other platforms to give you an even broader insight into the SEO tech industry.

Niche SEO tools for specific tasks

If you don't have an SEO team to use the platform, or if the cost of an SEO platform doesn't fit into your budget, what is the interim solution that could be suitable to improve your SEO traffic and conversions?

Unlike SEO platforms, these are more specific or specialized SEO tools, such as keyword research, keyword ranking tracking, backlink analysis tools to inform your link building strategy, etc. They start from as little as $99 per month and could be useful for your business if you don't have an SEO budget or a team that acts on the findings of an SEO roadmap.

Does that sound like you? Then take a look at one of the following brands:

SEMrush - covers many different functions within digital marketing from search to social media. It works well for experienced digital marketers who can turn data into insights for themselves.
Ahrefs - best known for their ability to analyze backlinks, they have also added a number of other features to their platform, including ranking data, keyword research and competitiveness.
Moz/GetStat - this latest merger provides a tool that combines GetStat's daily localized rankings and SERP analysis with Moz's local SEO expertise and its keyword and link research tools.
Authority Labs - has a more limited list of features than some other niche SEO tools, and the price of the plans is based on the number of keywords per month. This could be suitable for smaller companies or those with limited SEO needs. If you want to include more keywords in your plan, you can scale up to over 5,000 keywords for $450 per month.
Screaming Frog - an SEO website crawling and auditing tool that can be combined with custom filters to provide additional insights
DeepCrawl - a little more expensive than some of its competitors, DeepCrawl goes further into your website and provides recommendations that help you prioritize your technical SEO website problems.

These tools all have a lower starting price than the all-inclusive platforms, but the Trade-off is that you may need multiple tools and more time and effort to provide a single view of the data you need.

What about free SEO tools?

If you don't have the budget to invest in SEO technology, you can opt for free SEO tools such as the Google Search Console, Google Analytics and the Keyword Planner.

These options are well suited for specific tasks such as developing keyword ideas, checking search volume, understanding organic search traffic, and monitoring your site's indexing. However, there are some limitations to these options, including They base their data only on Google search queries, you may not always be able to find keywords with low competition, and there may be gaps in the data that make it difficult to know what information you can trust.

You also need to spend time downloading and combining data to create a single, meaningful report. This approach is probably best suited for your business if you only do occasional SEO research or simply want to understand your overall visibility but don't have the resources to execute an SEO roadmap.

There are also many other free tools out there. Many free ranking tools that provide you with ranking data, but only as a one-time check of your ranking, or you can use the incognito window in Chrome to do a search to find out where you might rank. There are also keyword research tools that provide a few free queries per day, and even SEO audit tools that allow you to "try out" their technology with a free one-time site audit.

Next Steps

Whether you want to start with a rank tracking tool as a first step or you are ready to dive into the data, gain valuable insights and act according to a roadmap, there is an SEO platform for you.

Remember, if you are ready to scale your SEO with a comprehensive all-in-one platform, use our evaluation template to compare and contrast the different SEO tools so you can make an informed decision.

We have also outlined some important differences between us and other leading SEO software companies:

• Compare seoClarity with BrightEdge
• Compare seoClarity with Conductor

December was a surprisingly busy month for my email inbox, with questions on almost every SEO topic imaginable. In answering many of these dilemmas, one common theme emerged - that many marketers deal with SEO challenges, focusing on the most common/best practices rather than falling into a creative, imaginative mindset to find alternatives.

So here are six examples of problems I have seen where creativity could triumph over standard techniques:

No. 1 - Reputation management problems with high budgets

Several SEOs I know are currently dealing with high budget reputation management where a company, product or person is trying to gain control of search results for their name/brand. Most of the standard techniques involve linking to and/or creating positive or neutral content about the target in order to drive out the negative content.

A creative, alternative method could be to create diversity by introducing multiple brands/people with the same or similar names. For example, if a Mr. Thomas Thompson is trying to push down negative results for his name, you could try to raise the profiles/rankings of other Thomas Thompsons and create enthusiasm for them in order to get search engines to consider applying diversity algorithms to the results. Similarly, you could create fictitious profiles (pseudonyms) or characters for the same effect. Hollywood movies, television shows, short films, authors and actors may even be induced, through funding or other means, to name characters or products in a certain way.

No. 2 - Problems with indexing large e-commerce sites

A number of large e-commerce site marketers have had considerable difficulty in achieving deep content indexing. Common solutions include optimizing XML sitemaps, carefully creating internal navigation, and working on more links to deep pages, all of which are certainly recommended techniques, but they eventually reach a point of exhaustion.

My recommendations are often to try a few alternatives, including:

• The elimination of a large number of pages, especially multi-faceted navigation forms (accessible only to logged or cooked human users and using rel=canonical), but also products with very low search volume, no inventory, low margins or frustrating availability. By restricting your product catalog online, you can then achieve and build on full indexing
• Create product feeds, product category blogs and even category/product twitter accounts to send indexing signals to the search engines. A blog about each of your main categories with posts about a few products per day via a kind of tumblr blog can allow indexing of a few new URLs per day with a minimum of editorial effort. Over a period of 12-18 months, this can contribute substantially to the final result and can be reproduced. The same is true for Twitter and product feeds, although both need to offer real value to subscribers/consumers (perhaps "deal of the day" type content) to attract subscribers/followers and show search engines that they are not just empty scratches
• Rewrite or supplement the written content to a few hundred sample pages that are not indexed. I often find that what looks like a lack of PageRank/Link juice for indexing is actually a case of "not enough unique content". If the site is regularly crawled to pages that are not indexed, this is often a worthwhile exercise

No 3 - Generate unique content for a large number of pages

When you reach tens or hundreds of thousands of pages, all of which must be indexed separately, the resulting need for more "unique content" on each page can seem like an overwhelming task. The usual approaches are to either recruit/assignment/find in-house editorial writers or use user-generated content to increase the uniqueness of the content, but there are other approaches.

• Human work using sources like Mechanical Turk or similar services I have written extensively about in the past
• Create Google-style content - by aggregating the popular words, phrases and sentences that others use to describe them (with quotation, of course). For example, see how Urbanspoon quotes restaurant reviews or Rotten Tomatoes aggregates critic reviews. You could even add multimedia content using
• YouTube, Flickr or other sources. Just be aware that editorial content and review are still critical to ensuring that these sites add value, not just automatically scraped and reused
• Setting priorities. Many site owners seem to think that a project with unique content means that every page deserves the same attention, although in fact it is probably much wiser to spread 80% of the effort over 20% of the pages
• Identify the sites that offer real added value, add your content efforts there, and see the impact before moving on to the long tail

No 4 - Overcoming a competitor with a much stronger connection profile

I see marketers banging their heads and their efforts to build connections against a wall, trying to outeurize a competitor with a strong lead for a particular key phrase (or a small handful).

Instead of trying to beat them in their own game, why not work around the system?

• Try out alternative keywords that might reach the same audience before doing this particular high-conversion search
• View video content on major platforms and your own website (using the Video XML Sitemaps protocol) to get video rankings on the same page (which often generate as many clicks/visits as the first results)
• Create messages, blog entries and tweets to trigger the QDF algorithm and get alternative content types you own before the searchers and before the first "organic" result
• Win the social, branding and "mention" battle that often turns into links and recommendations over time and eventually brings you top rankings
• Influence search queries and content on the web through branding, news, social media, content creation, etc., so that Google's Suggest/Instant feature recommends more targeted search queries that you have in the rankings

No 5 - Earn natural, editorial links with optimized anchor text

Perhaps the most frequently commented complaint I see back and forth between a white hat and a black hat is that building links with a white hat never deserves an ideal anchor text. What nonsense!

• Profiles and biographical paragraphs are one of the best ways to earn the desired anchor text. My professional/event biography has found its way to dozens of websites, all of which link back in the way I want. These are 100% editorially designed white hat links, often from influential media or event sites
• Press releases that are picked up by the news media often leave the link anchor text that you
• Guest writing/guest blogging for a relevant publication often allows a link back to your website. If you are creative in designing this link, you can ensure that the anchor text is ideal (or near ideal)
• Widgets, badges and embeddable content have a fully controllable link anchor text at the time of creation - as long as you are not manipulative or appear as spam, the links will link back in the way you choose/created them
• Entitling products, pages, articles and essays with the keywords you are looking for means that those who refer to the work are more likely to use these terms/phrases in the links created by others
• Requesting a specific anchor text by quoting when giving away or licensing content is another way to ensure that you create an optimal link text
• If you find friends, family members, co-workers, colleagues, etc. who link to you, and directly request a change to the anchor text, this can lead to a considerable amount of optimized anchor text

And for posterity's sake, I'll venture a prediction here that an exactly matching anchor text for commercial terms will probably be much more scrutinized by Google next year (see my previous post on how this might happen).

It is true that in many cases, basic best practices are the right way to start, and may even be the right solution. However, more organic marketers will need to look beyond the horizon as traditional SEO becomes more competitive and dominant.

From managing customer expectations to balancing the workload, learn about 11 SEO challenges you may face in your career and how to overcome them.

Whether you run a solo operation and personally oversee every detail of a campaign for a small number of clients, or manage a wide range of projects as part of an agency, there are certain challenges you will face throughout your SEO career.

No matter how diligent, organized or proactive you are, there will be:

• Disgruntled clients
• Website malfunctions
• SEO campaigns that crater without explanation
• Internal problems and logistical dilemmas.
  

Most of these challenges can be solved if they are approached with composure, but it's always good to know what's on the horizon when you start your SEO career.

How will you deal with these 11 common challenges?

Project management, aka Balancing Client Load & Task Load

You need to be ultra organized if you want to become a successful SEO professional.

There will be times when you feel that you've taken on too much, or it's simply not possible to deliver everything you promised on time and with proper quality control.

To meet this challenge, an appropriate project and task management structure is essential. This allows you to distribute the workload among your resources and reduce burnout.

In SEO, a successful campaign is not a means but an end; it is created by small, manageable tasks that are carried out over a longer period of time.

If you neglect these small moments - weekly ranking audits, routine speed optimizations, regular content publishing - your entire campaign will never achieve what it needs.

You can't go all night before a client meeting and expect results. Digestible tasks distributed over a wide time frame across your team are the recipe for success.

As you grow from one to several team members, it will be crucial that you document your processes, continuously improve them and integrate them into your project management structure.

Listen to your employees and appreciate their insights on how you can improve the daily work flow and review the process regularly.

Don't rely too long on yesterday's tactics or you will fall behind.

Manage customer expectations

This is not a lesson you want to learn the hard way after you have promised too much to a customer and delivered too little. This happens especially when you are after a "big fish" that you need to impress.

Make no mistake: if you don't meet impossible expectations, you will never impress the customer in the end, so keep your promises realistic. Stay in your wheelhouse. Impress them with results, not words.

Whether it's an exploratory talk with a potential client, an offer or proposal, or upselling an existing client, I always try to set the right expectations. You may not get the sale every time, but that is the right result because you were transparent.

Customers and potential customers will appreciate this honesty in the long run. You would be surprised how often a prospect calls six months later to resume the conversation with adjusted expectations.

Learn not only to set the right expectations for results and campaign objectives, but also to set the right expectations for project scope and communication.

A needy client who gains advantages by working for hours free of charge out of his reach or who crosses borders at any time by e-mail, telephone or SMS is rarely willing to be involved.

Set these expectations early, value your work, value your time, and you can successfully meet this challenge.

Unexpected rankings breakdowns
You can manage a successful campaign, achieve great results, witness a huge increase in traffic and enjoy a smooth relationship with an ecstatic client. Suddenly, all success collapses.

Sometimes the cause is technical, like changing a search engine's algorithm. Maybe it is due to a change in the direction in which customers are moving - maybe they have budget problems or are in the middle of an acquisition.

They need to be able to cope with the situation and turn from one moment to the next.

If you have a search problem, you should create a protocol for investigating and rescuing a ranked drop. If it is a problem on the customer side, look for ways to support them during the transition and prove your value.

Stay up to date

Expecting to keep up with the search industry, algorithm updates and Google features can put a tremendous amount of pressure on your shoulders. This can be especially challenging when you're trying to grow your business, network, and deal with human resources and logistics. Suddenly, the daily research about the industry becomes much more difficult to find.

When time is short, investment in tools becomes absolutely crucial.

Don't be afraid to invest in this new keyword research tool, tracking tool or heat map software.

Talk to your team and ask them what resources will make their day easier, more productive and more efficient. The moment you think you know everything, all there is to know is that you're out of the woods.

There's always a new social media network, CMS and a search function just around the corner. How can you make it work for you?

Rely on a single channel approach

Although specialization has great value, it is a mistake to rely on a single-channel approach. You cannot have just one tactic and expect to be successful in SEO today and in the future, no matter how well you do it.

If you change your approach from search engine optimization to online presence optimization, you will achieve better and more stable results for your customers.

Optimize not only client websites, but also social profiles, quotes and directories, and remember that everything from Amazon to Instagram has a search engine.

Think smart: Optimize Yelp for restaurants and businesses that want to be listed in iPhone searches. With a Foursquare profile, your customer can be tagged in one place on Instagram.

More than ever, optimizing your online presence in these different outlets is critical to success.

Going beyond a multi-service approach

SEO goes hand in hand with web design, content writing, paid advertising, email marketing and social media management. Offering all these services together makes logical sense and allows clients to have a consistent web presence with the convenience of doing it all in one place.

However, if you start offering related services outside of your area of expertise at a customer's request, no one wins.

If you're not careful, you could end up knee-deep in a failed email migration with a disgruntled customer, and they won't care one bit about their SEO rankings.

Stick to what you know.

It's okay to redirect email support, brochure design, and event management to another location while you focus on outperforming what you do best.

Prioritizing vanity metrics over leads and sales

Over the years you will learn that most customers only care about two things: Leads and sales.

You can tell them about the amazing SEO audit you did, tell them about all the technical changes you made to their website, or tell them that you reduced their website load time to one second.

The only thing that really counts in the end is the results.

If the phone doesn't ring or sales are declining from year to year, the customer doesn't care that the bounce rate has dropped by 6 percent.

Concentrate on which measures can increase leads and sales. Don't be guided only by rankings or vanity metrics.

Getting too comfortable

You go to a client meeting, ecstatically, to share the results. Leads are up 200 percent, traffic is up 500 percent, rankings are higher than ever, and the new website you just launched looks beautiful. You will boast about these results without knowing that the customer is about to fire you.

Regardless of the results, constant communication is so important.

Never take a customer for granted and never assume that results, efforts or successes will guarantee a customer a lifetime.

Have confidence in your skills and service, but don't be so convinced of yourself that you miss it when a client is unhappy.

Warning signs such as a sudden lack of responsiveness, longer than usual delays in paying bills, or uncharacteristic reluctance to pay are signs that they may be dissatisfied.

Breaking the customer plateau

Regardless of the quality of your work, there is usually a life cycle in an SEO client relationship.

After two or three years many clients want to try new things and change things. Sometimes this is financially motivated. Even if you have done great work for them, they are willing to invest their money elsewhere.

In other cases they consider the SEO work a success and are ready to continue. They have reached a plateau and don't see how things can improve further - how do you go from the top of page 1?

You will not be able to retain every customer, but try to reduce your churn by being a proactive communicator and you will have much better customer retention.

Work together to position SEO as yet another tool in the arsenal to help them achieve their broader business goals. You want to be seen as a partner for continued success.

Choosing the right tools

When setting up an agency, it is never too early to create an invoice in a proper CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software and invoicing tool.

If you start out with just a handful of customers, you might think you can get away with a do-it-yourself invoice or a CRM that is little more than a to-do list and address book. You will learn early on that these methods are unscalable and will leave you in a world of pain if something is overlooked.

Although SaaS like Salesforce is no small investment, it will deliver a measurable ROI by allowing you to expand our customer base and hire more people. The ability to track contacts, leads, opportunities, accounts, and projects in a central, collaborative location is so important.

As your agency scales, you'll appreciate that you've laid a strong foundation. If you decide to adopt CRM on the fly or not at all, this could slow down growth significantly.

While there are many good options on the market, you need to invest in the right email platform, CRM, ranking software/tracking tools, competitor research tools/backlink checker and billing software at the absolute minimum. They will make your work easier and give you the flexibility to scale.

Dealing with adversity

Even with the utmost preparation, processes perfected down to the smallest detail and a skilful approach, you will still encounter obstacles, if not disasters, on the way there.

Your biggest customer could run away. An aggressive competitor could eat away at your market share. Staff turnover, leasing issues, customer indisposition... Every day brings something new, not to mention more general issues such as a recession, where customer budgets are inevitably tighter and the value of online marketing services less obvious.

You will face adversity, so much is inevitable.

The question is: Will you rise or fall in the face of these challenges, big and small?

You need to be creative, flexible, confident and open. Establish a safety net so that no loss of customers, personnel or data will cause you to falter.

BONUS: Scaling campaigns

Achieving great results at the local level is one thing, but can you take it to the next level and extend it to more cities or achieve national success? This can be a greater challenge.

With local SEO you can use many crutches that simply don't scale, such as optimizing the homepage title and H1 to a single location.

Eventually you will see that strong processes and a solid project management structure will help you scale, but there will be complications along the way that you may not have anticipated.

Conclusion

SEO is a rewarding industry where your entrepreneurial spirit, creativity, technical skills and thirst for knowledge can take you far.

Nothing good comes easily, and that is the case with a career in this field.

While you can't foresee every obstacle you'll encounter, these 11 challenges are commonplace, especially as you grow from a small consulting role to a larger agency with dozens, if not hundreds, of clients.

If you understand what lies ahead, you will be better prepared to face such challenges not with fear or anxiety, but with serenity and composure.