Importance of SEO for Whitby Businesses

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SEO for Whitby companies is more important now than it has ever been since the inception of digital marketing. It’s not enough to have a nice-looking, navigable website anymore. That would be like trying to work with an analog Nokia flip phone in the generation of AI. The right tools are everything, and when it comes to running a business, whether it’s online or not, SEO isn’t just another tool––it’s your entire toolkit. 

We are experiencing an unprecedented time in history, right now––and we’re all in it together. COVID-19 hasn’t left anyone out of its reach. The economic impact on Durham and the Whitby Region leaves many of us feeling unstable, uncertain, and unable to plan for the future. Logical Mix has seen first hand the devastation on local businesses from attending local meetings and events.

Whether you own a small, large, or medium-sized business, Change has grabbed you by the throat, sat you down, and told you how things are going to go––nowhere within your control. Indeed, that’s the way it feels. 

Foot traffic has slowed and people just aren’t shopping the way they used to. Restaurateurs are suffering from a lack of visitors, and even online businesses are getting slapped in the face by a major increase in competitors––seems everyone is scrambling to start on online business now just to make ends meet. 

The word of the day (year) is adjust and adapt. That’s two words, but as 2020 continues to show us, rules are just statements of intent––the real rules aren’t up to us.

Am I painting a frightening picture? Admittedly, I am not the artist, nor can I make any promises about a renormalized future for local business in Whitby, Durham, or the world. However, I can give you my strong recommendation that comes from a place of diverse experience and 10+ years in an industry that has seen a LOT of change: SEO for Durham companies is your greatest asset right now. That goes for small, medium, and large businesses, online or offline, in any industry, with any ROI goal.

Everyone is online, which means your presence needs to be relevant, current, and interesting. You need to reach customers with the motivation of a mother wolf protecting her pups, without making rookie errors out of desperation. You also need to do a little sweep of antiquated digital marketing methods (ie. last year’s)––a classic “out with the old, in with the new.”

SEO Is A Toolkit

SEO is easy to explain, but a bit tricky to implement. Many people think SEO is just about showing up on the first page of Google SERPs. Let’s use the word “just” with care––ranking in the top results is certainly a must-reach goal of SEO, but maintaining that status is what SEO is really about. It’s like losing weight. What’s the point of kicking off 20 kg, only to gain it back the following week? It’s a lot of hard work for nothing. 

SEO has a lot of moving parts––researching and analyzing the competition and strategizing how to be better. Loads of relevant, interesting content. The right keywords––not 100 of them slapped all over your page like a fiver-year-old’s sticker book, but a handful of the most effective ones, strategically placed. Backlinking done right. Meta tags. User experience. Local SEO, etc., etc.

Let’s use a few examples so you can understand where your business fits in. 

Restaurants need their locations optimized. Why? People don’t have the desire to waste time looking for stuff. This is especially true of the hungry. Their searches are very specific––”best ravioli in Whitby,” “sushi restaurants in Durham that serve hamburgers”––you get the idea. This is what SEO does. It researches those frequently-searched terms and uses them to optimize your location.

Local breweries too can capitalize on their delivery programs by tailoring their SEO efforts in that direction. Brock Street Brewery has done an excellent job of not only adjusting their business strategy to include delivery services, but also optimizing their site to target the right audience.

If you’re in ecommerce, SEO is critical for creating not just good user experience, but an intuitive one. People don’t want to read sales pitches or waste time navigating a site that is designed for the business, not the customer. They want an empowering buying experience where they feel in control of all the decisions they make because––let’s face it––the ability to feel any semblance of control in these times is worth a million.

In normal times I always recommend taking a stab at SEO independently, using the 12 SEO Steps To Success. A few tools of the trade are always useful and in most cases helpful. But in these not-so-normal times, you may wish to consult an SEO expert.

SEO for Whitby companies is available locally right now with Logical Mix. We can keep your business growing and your site optimized for buying customers. Give us a call today to learn more about how we can help implement SEO for Durham companies.

Until next time. Stay safe during these uncertain times.

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Logical Mix

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Backlinking Done Right: How Backlinks Benefit Your Business

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If you’re reading this, you already deserve a pat on the back because backlinking is a part of SEO that most people groan about. And because it’s the way Murphy’s Law goes, it’s also one of the most critical parts of SEO. 

We tackled Link Building 101 in a previous blog by taking a look at some simple ways you can get links to your site. 

For a recap, backlinking is one website linking to another website. It’s like earning a vote that positions your site as a credible and reliable source of whatever it is you’re providing.

In this blog, we want to break down why backlinks are important for SEO.

But let’s keep something in mind as we go through this: Backlinking can be done well and backlinking can be done poorly.

Like a Thai monk once told me when I asked him why there are monks who smoke, drink, and have sex while claiming to lead ascetic lives, he said, “just like people, there are good monks and there are bad monks” (I’ll stick a sic in here because monks are still people). 

In SEO, there are white hats and black hats. Most of us land somewhere in the gray area, but essentially, white hat tactics are going to give you better, more sustainable, long-term results,  especially when it comes to backlinking.

The moral? Don’t be a bad monk. And, take the honest route to gaining backlinks. At Logical Mix, we’re coining that route Backlinking-Done-Right.

What is Backlinking-Done-Right?

To start (with an embedded hint), we’ll share the primary reason backlinks are so important for your business:

According to MOZ, out of 200 possible influences, backlinks are the number one factor that affects ranking. 

Wondering what we meant by embedded hint? That info came from MOZ, which is an SEO authority. We’ll get into what that means for backlinking and why it’s important.

But first––

Backlinking-Done-Right has three main purposes:

  1. It generates more relevant traffic to your page
  2. It shows you’re part of a community, which helps establish trust
  3. It helps Google recognize you as a credible source of information and therefore, it improves your rank in the SERPs

That doesn’t mean that you want to get any and all backlinks to your site. Quality stands above quantity. Remember the monks? There are good backlinks and there are bad backlinks. Spammy links and irrelevant links don’t just not help you, Google can actually penalize you for it. 

SEO

What influences your chances of ranking when it comes to backlinks?

According to Neil Patel (an authority):

  • How many links you have
  • How many links you get over time (demonstrates a natural progression)
  • How related those websites are to yours to determine relevance
  • Domain authority (what that means below)

What are the features of high-quality backlinks?

  • Domain authority (DA) shows that an authority supports you, which influences traffic
  • Relevance deals with the same subject matter or niche as your site
  • Traffic means they have a large number of visits, social media presence, and active followers (for example, a blog) 
  • Uniqueness means authority sites link to your page and not your competitors’

There are some general characteristics and some overlap with what influences your ranking chances. But there is a main difference, as there is in many aspects of life: the what and the how. The two can work in tandem and they can sometimes produce very different results. 

For example, I can have lots of links from highly-credible sources (the What) but if I gained them all overnight (the How), it looks a bit shady and it might appear to Google that I paid for those links (black-hat tactic).

See the difference?

Here’s another example:

Perhaps I gained all my backlinks over time, naturally, by way of a link-building campaign, but it wasn’t so well thought-out so I ended up with 79 crappy, spammy, irrelevant backlinks pointing to my site. (But obviously, if you’re investing time in a campaign you’re going to be choosy about what sites you’re reaching out to).

Weed Out The One Hit Wonders

In MOZ’s 2019 study of link-building as a ranking factor, both Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) scores combined were a stronger indicator of ranking potential than the number of links.

DA evaluates the predictive ranking strength of an entire page.

PA evaluates the strength of individual pages on a site. 

When we interpret this finding, quality stands out in a couple of different ways. 

First, DA and PA combined indicate that a link’s authority depends on both factors. A site may have one page that randomly ranks really well for a specific keyword (kind of like a one-hit-wonder band) but have a low DA. It’s not bad to have that page linking to your page, it’s just that there are better links out there that beat both metrics.

While both are important when it comes to evaluating quality backlinks, Google does not use DA as a ranking metric, and it has no effect on the SERPs. 

Jumping back to the authority hint I mentioned near the beginning, an authority link is super valuable because it means that a highly-credible source thinks your site or page is great. It means they voted for you.

What is Link Earning?

Remember that give-a-man-a-fish, teach-a-man-to-fish adage? Link earning is a bit like that. 

Whereas with link building you can acquire links easily, link earning is a bit more involved. 

If an authority just gives you a link because you asked for it, that’s great and obviously you’ll use it, but they don’t all come that easily. 

Link earning has greater staying power because it establishes trust in the name of fair exchange. You offer something to another site owner, not just in exchange for a link, but because you want to contribute something of value community to which you belong. 

You build your reputation as a fair player with a strong work-ethic and everyone respects those guys. As a bonus, you get a high-quality backlink. 

It aligns with teaching a man to fish because as he learns his power to draw on his inner resources (his fishing skill), he is able to feed himself his whole life long. You do the same with link earning.  

Round-up posts are an example of a great link-earning strategy from Neil Patel:

Email every expert in your niche, asking them the same question about a hot topic. Then write a blog showcasing their responses. Email the participants and ask them to share it on their favourite social network. 

BOOM. 

Here’s another:

A website that links employers of schools with English teachers searching for international teaching jobs needs links to build a database of teachers. 

Where is the best place to find teachers looking for a unique international experience? Fourth year university. 

So the site owner contacts every university across the country offering its students the chance to win a scholarship. All they have to do to qualify is register for a free teacher profile and write a 500 word essay on why they want to teach abroad. 

Two winners are chosen each semester and receive a $250 scholarship. In the meantime, the site now has dozens (or hundreds) of universities (often authority sites) pointing to it.

Another BOOM. 

There’s some creativity required in link earning. The man who was taught to fish had to learn and learning can be a bit painful sometimes.

But you’ve got this. You’re going to be a master in Backlinking-Done-Right.

But if you need some help acquiring the right links, just us a shout here.

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Logical Mix

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Title Tags & Meta Descriptions: What, Why & How

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You wrote an extraordinary piece of content for a new dog training product you’re about to unleash (ahem). 

You also gave it a wicked awesome H1 tag (or so you think). Concise and optimized.

The only things left are the title tag and the meta description. You’re a little stuck because even though all your site content is compelling, interesting, and unique, you’re not getting the traffic you expected or hoped for. 

You’re wise to stop where you are and do some research on writing title tags and meta descriptions that will actually convert. 

In total, only a handful of words comprise both tags. It really shouldn’t be that difficult to choose the right ones. But that’s precisely why it’s difficult. Not only that, but you also have to include the right keywords so Google will relevantly index your page. 

This guide will help you write clickable title tags and meta descriptions.

You might be asking, why should we look at both simultaneously? 

Let’s review each one separately for a better understanding.

What Is A Title Tag?

A title tag is the fastest way for a reader to recognize relevant (or irrelevant) content. 

Technically, a title tag is a line of code that surrounds the title statement, which we can see through “view page source” when we right-click on any webpage. 

Title tags appear in three key places: the SERP, the web browser, and social networks. The SERP and social networks concern us the most because they’re what people see before they decide to visit your page. 

What is a Meta Tag?

A meta tag is a brief description of an article that appears in the SERP and social media. It’s what people read after being drawn in by a great title tag. 

While Google has stated that it’s not used as a ranking factor, it will influence the click-through rate through the less technical SEO strategy of User Experience (UX). 

Now, let’s return to the previous question:

Why Title Tags & Meta Descriptions Belong Together

The first thing someone sees in the SERP is your page title. If your title is compelling enough, they’ll probably click right away. Most times though, they’ll check out the meta description before they click because they’re looking for a little reinforcement that leaving the SERP for another page will give them what they want.

Most of us are afraid of commitment. Even very small pseudo-commitments like the one required when we click on a link that will take us away from the page we’re on to another one. There are thousands of micro impulses firing off that move us toward clicking or continuing to scroll. 

I won’t get into the meta psychology of decision making, but it’s enough to know that a great title tag isn’t enough. It’s just the free bread and butter. You need to back it up with a mouthwatering appetizer that’ll make their decision to click on through to your page a no-brainer.

Your title should grab their attention. Your meta tag should reinforce that attraction and compel them to click. 

Know that we know the What and the Why, let’s get into the How.

READ THIS QUICK TIP:

A great title tag and meta description is really about writing skills. Now people study writing, practice for years to become better so I’m not going to lie and say that just anyone can write well and convincingly. That’s why expert copywriters are in such high demand. However, a few tricks will go a long way. 

How to Write a Title Tag

Punch ‘em with your words.

You want in your title what just about everybody wants in their lives: Power. Just type any keyword into the search bar and see all the boring, totally uninspiring titles that appear. If that doesn’t motivate you to make yours pack more punch, then maybe you should hire a copywriter (cause the good ones LOVE doing that stuff). Remember, power words are simple because they’re understandable and easy to remember. 

Keep it short.

60 characters is about your limit, which is roughly 10 words. I argue that’s even too much. The title of this article is verging on too long and it’s only 7 words plus 2 ampersands. 

Use a keyword.

Use one or two main keywords, if it makes sense, without stuffing or repeating. It should blend naturally into a sensible statement. 

Make it unique.

There are a ton of title generators out there, which spit out clever title ideas, none of which are unique in structure. While they’re easy to fall back on when you’re stuck, I recommend using the best title generator created: your brain. This is your best chance at producing a unique title. If you’re stuck, write the content first. In many cases, the title writes itself. If you’re still stuck, brainstorm a flurry of related words then look at how those words fit together. If your brand is powerful, include at the end.

Write it for the reader. 

Write your title, then dumbify it. In her popular course The Copy Cure, Marie Forleo suggests using the “blockhead method”, which is essentially dumbifying your title over and over and over, like you’re trying to explain what your article is about to a not-so-bright friend. I’m not suggesting your readers are dumb, only that “quick-and-easy” is the best way to serve up any kind of information if you want people to read it.

Make it relevant. 

This seems obvious, but it’s often overlooked. Remember what people type in the search bar and use that to guide you. “Dog training” while in the right category, doesn’t let us know if it’s relevant to our search. What about dog training? Tips? Tutorials? Products? Schools? 

Although this falls a little outside of relevancy boundaries, I recommend writing your title as a proper sentence with a verb. For those of you who skipped too many English grammar classes, verbs are action words and when used correctly, they inspire people to act, which in this case, is clicking.

How to Write a Meta Description

Make it clear, convincing, and compelling.

Avoid sounding like a greasy marketer whenever possible. Be upfront and honest and use simple, non-slimy words to show rather than tell people what the article is about. Remember, you’re writing a brief description, not an ad.

Create curiosity.

But don’t give it all away. Leave room for a little intrigue. Example: “Make training your pup a cinch with this #1 dog training command. Hint: it’s not sit or stay.”

Keep it short. 

You have more wiggle room than you do with a title tag but 160 characters, or 30 words is about the max (the previous example is only 93 characters, or 18 words).

Use keywords.

A couple of juicy long-tails could slide in here quite nicely if you’re strategic about it. Even if meta tags aren’t ranked (which we don’t really know for sure), people still want to see familiar keywords that reflect what they’re looking for.

Use rich snippets.

Also called schema markup, rich snippets are pieces of code that you include in the HTML content on your site page to make it more informative. They more richly describe what your page is about because they contextualize the content so it’s meaningful. 

You’re probably wondering if rich snippets make a difference in SEO. According to Search Engine Land, they don’t:

“While structured data markup for rich snippets does not work as a ranking signal, it can generate indirect SEO benefits by making your page more easily indexable and providing more accurate and targeted metadata. … Rich snippets help you achieve this by pre-qualifying visitors.”

According to other experts, they do, but Google puts them through a somewhat vague incubation period until they pass. But one thing’s certain, like meta tags in general, they make for a better user experience.

You Don’t Have To Do It All Yourself!

Writing great title tags and meta descriptions doesn’t require an expert, but it certainly helps. Even if you do decide to hire a copywriter to do the creative work for you, it’s still wise to know what each should contain and why.

I hope you got what you needed from this guide. Please feel free to leave comments or ask questions. We always want to hear from you. And if you’re looking for an expert copywriter, let us know and we’ll hook you up.

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Logical Mix

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How to Create a Killer Landing Page

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Do you want to increase your ROI dramatically? 

Then you need to create a website that is user friendly, optimized for search engine indexing, and offers something the competition doesn’t.

If you’ve said check, check, check to all three of those but you’re still not getting the results you want, there’s something you’re missing and it might be a killer landing page, or at the very least, some key elements of a killer landing page. 

It may seem like a tiny detail but it has exponential significance in busting the barrier between you and an ROI that makes all the gruelling hours you’re putting in worth it.

Take five minutes and perform a mini audit of your current landing page. If you don’t have one yet, use these points as a little warm up:

Does it…?

  • Convert visitors for free
  • Make a compelling offer
  • Have a clear call to action
  • Appear well on mobile devices
  • Enable sharing to social media platforms
  • Have a clear headline and supporting, scannable copy
  • Contain important keywords in the title, URL, and metatag
  • Include attractive images that show people what they’re getting
  • Clearly outline the benefit to the customer in as few words as possible
  • Say thank you

Don’t be overwhelmed. We’re just putting it all out there so you begin to understand why landing pages are so important. 

We’ll slice it and dice it for you, but first we need to understand what a landing page actually is.

What is a Landing Page and Why Do I Need One?

Think of a landing page like a landing strip at an airport. What do people want to do when they arrive? Get off the plane. 

And how to they want to do that? With as little fuss as possible. They don’t want delays, distractions, or any other nonsense that is going to keep them from their goal.

So to start, ask yourself, what is the goal of someone arriving at my landing page? 

A landing page is a target page on your website where you offer a resource in exchange for information. 

In many cases, a landing page captures information, such as an email address, and provides the user with something for free, such as memberships, an e-book, a consultation, or a free product trial.

You need a landing page because it generates leads for your business that help increase conversions.

Is a Landing Page Different From a Home Page?

In some cases, yes, though it doesn’t have to be. 

It depends on how your business is set up to capture leads. If you have a few lead captures, then creating a landing page that targets each one is ideal for giving your potential customer exactly what they want. 

A home page is a bit too general for the reader who is interested specifically in your e-book offer, for example. You want to serve it to them straight up, without any further navigation required. We’re hungry consumers. We want what we want as quickly and as easily as possible.

To bolster my last point, I broke this landing page business down into three steps so you know exactly what to tackle and why.

STEP 1: Create the Structure

Start with what you’re offering to determine how to structure your page. 

Do you want to rely more heavily on graphics or text? Whatever your offer is, you want to get your customers to convert and shouldn’t cost them anything in time, money (just yet), or effort. 

Quickly, easily, and free are three of the most effective words in ad copy. Make the essence of those words the backbone of your user experience.

Use a 3-step process: 

  1. They arrive at your landing page & click “sign me up!”
  2. They complete the lead capture form to receive their freebie
  3. They receive a confirmation email (if applicable), and an onsite thank you message

Here are some extra tips:

Landing Page Dos:

  • Optimize for mobile
  • Include sharing buttons
  • Use high-quality images
  • Make the page scannable
  • Include 1 or more testimonials
  • Include a relevant lead capture form

Landing Page Don’ts:

  • Make it confusing to convert
  • Distract readers with a navigation menu
  • Use a default token in your confirmation email. Personalize it
  • Forget to include a thank you page

STEP 2: Write SEO Content Like A Pro

You need four basics here: 

  • Attention-grabbing title
  • Scannable copy
  • Title, H1 & Meta Description
  • URL

Each one should be keyword optimized. 

The metatag is arguably the most important piece for users finding your page through an organic search. It needs to be short, descriptive, and compelling enough to make them click through.

Depending on your product or service, the copy should also be short and feed the scanners everything they need to know to convert. 

While some experts recommend longer copy for more expensive offerings, remember, no one is buying anything at this point. They’re just giving their email (or some other information) in exchange for your free offering, which will hopefully (certainly) have them converting with cash soon enough. 

You don’t have to hire an expensive copywriter to do this for you. However, we recommend you find a creative that has experience with digital marketing and SEO, and knows the difference between a landing page and her left thumb (believe it or not, so many don’t). That doesn’t have to cost what a bulletproof Starbucks every day for a month does (if they actually made them), but understand that price is usually indicative of quality so try to get the best quality content writer you can.

A couple takeaways here are:

  1. Focus on the benefits (what the customer wants to achieve), not the features 
  2. More isn’t better; copy should be short and strategic to elicit the right kind of attention

STEP 3: Customize Your Call to Action

Don’t be afraid to sprinkle some personality in your CTA but know that clear is more important than clever.

Buy now, complete form, submit request, get access, are clear commands but they graze the edges of boring. How can you spice up these commands without losing the directness of the message?

Tailor them to your product or service offering. 

If you’re offering an e-book about dog training, a command like “undumbify my dog” is clever but not totally clear (and potentially offensive for the serious dog owners). 

What If You’re Crazy Indecisive?

If you’re looking through piles of images and banging out awesome copy and having super ideas for CTAs and lead capture forms and all the creative ways to say thank you, you might be curious to know which ones are winners.

If in doubt, split test the crap outta several templates (see Crazy Egg’s Complete How To Guide).

This isn’t rocket science, but you also don’t want to treat it like a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey either. 

Image credit

Here are your key (free) takeaways from all of this:

  • Don’t make your homepage your landing page
  • Use a 3-step structure: landing page, lead capture form, thank you
  • Customize at every opportunity
  • Make it fast, easy & free
  • When in doubt, test it out
  • When 100% sure, still test

Logging out,

Logical Mix

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Logical Mix Chats with Nat from Whitby’s Chamber of Commerce

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I recently had the pleasure of catching a ride through Brooklin with Whitby’s Chamber of Commerce CEO, Natalie Prychitkoas, a guest on her YouTube series “Chat with Nat”.

I was a bit awkward at the start. I tend to wear an expression that makes you expect to see a couple of stray feathers sticking out my mouth, a little tweet tweet echoing from inside me. That expression intensifies when I’m a bit nervous and then I stumble over my words a bit.

For example, she asks me––

“You’ve got young kids, don’t you? You know how I know? Because your front porch is full of young kid plastic stuff,”

I reply as my usual witty self with this awkward gem:

“You didn’t think that was me?” I joked, as if to suggest I spend my afternoons wearing swimmies, splashing in a kiddie pool or practicing my golf swing with a Little Tykes 3 Wood.

Because as a guy in the digital marketing biz, that’s exactly the image I wish to portray.

But permanently-etched mental images aside, Nat was correct. Our house is overflowing with every kind of plastic toy you can imagine because my wife and I have two young boys (three, if we include my afternoon antics). The point is, I know I’m awkward but that perma-grin is really because I’m just kind of a big kid inside.

She asked me about my history and why my family and I moved to Brooklin from Toronto. My wife and I grew up in Toronto and we loved living there but once we had our first son, our house became a bit too cramped for us so we entered Suburbia. We chose Brooklin because it’s a little bit like Pleasantville––everyone waves and smiles, and smiles and waves. There are paths connecting this street and to that park and to Heber Down (if you haven’t been to Heber Down, do yourself a favor and check it out), and there are some really great burgers right in town. What more do you need in a community than great neighbours, nature trails, and good grub?

And then we moved onto business. Nat asked about what I do and why I do it and what I’m anticipating for 2018.

I love this question and it’s one of the reasons I’m happy I got the chance to chat with Nat. I love having an SEO company in Whitby and I want to tell everyone who will listen.

In addition to being a dad and a husband, I’m also a digital marketing geek who started up his own biz in 2011. Before that, I worked for a company called Contractors.com, which did internet marketing for tradespeople. It was awesome and the site was receiving 200K visits per month right up until Google changed its algorithm that removed ranking authority from domain names. I sat in on one of their meetings and was fascinated by how Internet search engines could be so strategically manipulated. That was essentially how I got started in digital marketing, which led to the creation of Logical Mix.

Nat asked––“Why did you join the Commerce and what are you anticipating for 2018?”

When I moved to Whitby, it felt like a good time to immerse myself in the community so I joined the Java Jolt––a member-led group of business people who meet up to help each other out and build a supportive network. They opened my eyes to the Chamber so I checked them out and like their vibes––Bob’s your uncle.

As for my 2018 goals––well, basically, I’m a community guy. I want to help people and the way I do that is by helping local businesses grow and build their online exposure. It’s what I know and what I do. It’s why I’m so proud of the work the Whitby Chamber of Commerce does for the community. They are true ambassadors for businesses in Whitby and the Durham Region.

I’m grateful to Nat for her time and for sharing our chat on YouTube––check it out below:

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DG’s Roundup Summary: What SEO or PPC Advice Would You Give Yourself?

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I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Delta Growth (DG), a big boy in Toronto’s SEO & SEM industry, specializing in e-commerce. Eugenia, DG’s SEO/PPC Implementation Specialist reached out to some of the industry’s local brainers to ask a SEO/PPC question that few of us ever ask ourselves during our careers:

What advice would have changed your SEO or PPC career?

It’s the kind of question that encourages us to reflect on our business moves of yesteryear. But it also makes us want to nail our thumbs to the floor for the dearth of knowledge our brains now overflow with. If only a DeLorean time machine were as accessible as a Zipcar.

But alas, DG talked to leading SEOs, so we did something right even back then! As a SEO Specialist in Whitby at Logical Mix I was humbled to be regarded in this mix and appreciated the opportunity to reflect on the ghosts of SEO past.

Whether you’re a blogger, consultant, strategist, or a newbie copywriter, Delta Growth’s Round Up about SEO/SEM career advice from leading industry experts may surprise you. It seems success lies in some good old-fashioned values and technical know-how.

Make Great SEO & SEM Relationships

Relationship building is the cornerstone of success in any business. Regardless of how great we are at the technical stuff, there is a person behind every move we make and that person is either going to trust us or bounce. We don’t want bouncers. Stoney Degeyter, Founder and CEO at Pole Position Marketing urges us to always, “focus on the customer, not the algorithms”.  Make the user’s experience your priority. It’s not enough just to know SEO. A grasp of marketing fundamentals is essential to reaching your audience and garnering the staying power that will bump up your conversion rates. What is the crux of Marketing 101? Know your customer. So, know your customer.

Tor Refsland says that if he could go back in time he would have told himself “to grow some b*lls and become uncomfortable much sooner!” He would have started getting new clients right away, face-to-face. So get out there and show face.

Check in with industry peeps too. Nobody gets very far alone. The e-comm community is huge. Learn from as many people as you can. Garner good quality links by offering something of value. Bump up your social media presence.

Give TOFu and BOFu Equal Opportunity

We want to pay attention to everybody at every stage of the conversion cycle so we’ve got to know how to structure our content appropriately. The experts give a few suggestions here. Nail in on long-tail keywords to reach the BOFu kids. Stick to one topic at a time. Create pages to rank for individual head terms and focus on the low-competition keywords in your niche.

But the awareness phase is critical and you can’t gain interest unless you give people something useful. Steve Wiideman insists on links to free tools, guides, and checklists as a marketing strategy for garnering tons of TOFu interest.

Invest In Yourself

It’s easy to forget about our own brand when we’re focused on making it awesome for our clients. John Rampton and Michael Cottam urge us to take the advice we give our clients. Clients come and go with their millions. “What will stick with you is your own brand and assets. Build those and invest as much resources (sic) in those as you would your clients’ sites” (John Rampton, Founder and CEO, with over 1 million Twitter followers). Capitalize on what you practice everyday and know one or two things really well – this is your expertise. And study what you’re not practicing everyday to maintain an edge in the industry.

Craft Awesome New Content Every Week

The demand for high quality content won’t change anytime soon so unless you’re a blackhat you’ll want to maximize your content and repurpose it – a ingenious hack from Oleg Korneitchouk. Several experts commented on how they wished they’d known the value of investing in a marketing campaign, with regular, meaningful content at the top of the priority list. Josh Steimle, Founder of MW1 says it’s simple: “High quality work will attract high quality links. It’s a lot of hard work to create great content, but it’s a simple recipe.”  Good quality content helps the customer alleviate their pains and achieve their goals. This points back to relationships and making our brand trustworthy. But it has to be ongoing. Fresh content each week is essential to high organic ranking and traffic.

Get Your Hands Dirty

We’ve gotta be ballsy in this industry. If we want to know what it feels like to jump out of a plane, we’ve got to jump out of the plane. Take risks with what we know. Research. Experiment. Learn from the results. Experiential learning is the key to forming a knowledge base that will compound over time and support innovation. According to the experts, research and risk are our most profitable investments. Know how to code. Use PPC as a learning mechanism for SEO. Don’t be afraid to try and share with others – remember relationships? Eric Enge sums up SEO & PPC advice the best: “Establish yourself as knowing one aspect of it very, very well. Then, when you’re ready, work on adding a second area of expertise, and get to the point where you are recognized as an expert on that. Keep expanding on those things over time.”

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*Full article here: Round Up: What Advice Would’ve Changed Your SEO or PPC Career?

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12 SEO Steps to Success

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This SEO Checklist will send YOU down the Path of Internet Success.

Ask yourself these 12 SEO questions frequently during your marketing campaign:12 SEO Steps to Success printable jpeg

This list has taken the length of my career to make. Creating 12 summarized sentences to get to the heart of search engine optimization was a hard task indeed and by no means complete. It is worth noting, that over time, some of these practices will shift or become extinct altogether.

This is Logical Mix’s, 2017 version of the “12 SEO Steps to Success“.

I hope it serves you well!

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*Here is the text, if you are having a hard time viewing the image:

1. Keyword Research

Am I matching search queries to my service/product offering?

2. Competitive Research

Have I found usable insights from top organic competitors?

3. Web Analytics

Have I implemented Google Analytics & Google Search Console?

4. On-Page SEO

Am I using Step 1’s insights for page targeting & structuring?

5. Local SEO

Have I built & fixed online citations for my business?

6. Reviews

Do I have a strategy for gathering reviews from happy customers?

7. Technical SEO

Are my relevant web pages being crawled & indexed?

8. User Experience

Is my website intuitive & frictionless throughout?

9. Content Creation

Am I creating quality content that solves the searcher’s problems?

10. Content Marketing

Am I marketing the quality content I created?

11. Internet Partners

Have I been building relationships with non-competing companies?

12. Off-Page SEO

Am I building authority to my site from external websites?

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KEEP YOUR WEBSITE UPDATED

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So you have a website; while that is a great start to having a successful search engine marketing platform for your business, having that and only that won’t quite cut it to increase your overall business revenue and customers. Almost every business has a website, in fact, according to the latest version of Business 2012; seventy-eight percent of businesses have a website, over two-thirds.  Now the question to ask is this: What makes a website flourish? What are the main tools and necessary steps one needs to take to ensure that they are hosting a fast moving and highly visited website? Fortunately, the answer is neither difficult nor complex, but rather business savvy – keep you and your company updated. Websites are a social platform built to inform potential customers and current customers what you are offering and why they should be interested in what you provide. However, it is not going to be effective if your latest and greatest deals, promotions, and products were from last month or perhaps even last year. Keeping your online presence updated secures repeat website visitors; just as repeat customers are profitable and desired for your business, so are repeat website visitors. If a previous customer has enjoyed your product and would like more information on what else you may offer or promotions you are holding, instead of calling, they are much more likely to visit your website. Now, just as it is essential to have a well laid out and well managed website, keeping this information fresh with new displays, pictures, and text is important to having a repeat internet visitor.

In addition, if your website is being featured on a search engine, you’re main goal is to have it appear on the first page of Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. If your website isn’t being frequently updated, these search engines will automatically assume that your site is not achieving a high number of hits and this can be extremely detrimental to your overall marketing scheme.  Just as important as it is for a business to have a website, it is even more important to have it being updated on a continuous basis with fresh new layouts and information to keep your customers wanting more. An even better marketing idea is to have an email subscription page set up on your website to invite your customers to receive weekly emails from your company providing them with the latest deals your business has to offer. Not only does this keep your business committed to updating on a weekly basis at minimum, but you’re directly hitting and targeting customers at a personal level. It is vital for the success of your business to have a visible online presence in this day and age where online media is being used as a primary tool for advertising. It’s crucial that your business is doing everything to promote yourself online, and by keeping your website stocked with new information on a regular basis, your customers will feel that your website can be the one stop shop to finding what they are looking for and need. So rather than focusing all your time and effort into plastering your windows with your special promotions, open your internet browser and begin with informing everyone there. It may take time to get used to as you may feel as though you are throwing information into a web of space (no pun intended), that space is built up of your customers, and even though they are not visible and you are not watching them drive by, their online presence is immense, and reaching that should be the ultimate goal for your business.
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WHY IS SIGNAGE SO IMPORTANT FOR BUSINESS

Let me share a personal story regarding business signage I encountered a few years back. When I was living in Vancouver, BC, there was a unique and delicious family owned pizza restaurant. It was a pizza place where they prepared the pizza for you, and you took it home and cooked it, making your entire kitchen smell like freshly baked pizza. The idea was brilliant, the pizza was amazing, and the customer service was out of this world. I visited the restaurant on a regular basis until a year after opening the owners moved north, and they ended up selling the business to a new set of owners. The new owners kept the same idea, used the same ingredients, and appeased the already existing customers, yet one simple poor marketing choice cost them their business as it ended any potential for attracting new customers – they changed the signage. The original owner had a simple but bright sign that could be seen from the nearest intersection, as well as handed out flyers and coupons door to door every Saturday morning. Their strategy was simple, but it worked. The new owners however did not upkeep these strategies and changed the sign to a black and white, non-visible, size 10, Arial font banner.  They then complained about not reaching people, but the reasons were evidently clear. Simply put, their signage cost them the entire success of their business.  Soon after their six month of opening, they shut the business down as it was costing them too much to operate and they were making little to zero revenue. The spot still remains empty and vacant to this day.
Now you may believe this case to be an extreme and rare, but the experience taught me at a young age the importance of signage, especially if you are taking over an already existing business. A sign can either attract someone in such a way they want to enter your business and learn more about what you offer, or in the case of the pizza store, your sign may cause them to laugh in embarrassment at the printed paper you have draping over your windows. The importance of advertising is vital to the overall success of a business, especially with small businesses. Signage is extremely important and can end up being the make or break in the overall success of your business. Here are some simple questions you should ask about your current signage on a monthly basis:
1.      Does this sign send the right message to my customer?
2.      Is the message relevant and eye-catching?
3.      Are the colors and design bright, vibrant, and noticeable?
4.      Is the sign visible in the early morning or late evening? Does it light up in the dark hours?
5.      Is the signage in tip top condition?
If your answer to any of these questions is no, then it is time to either invest in new signage or fix your current signage to accommodate the needs of your customers. If your signage does light up, but some of the bulbs are burnt out, the overall first impression from your customer is that your business does not have the time or care to replace the bulbs and update the sign.  More often than not, customers base a business purely off of their signage because it is the first thing they notice and it is their first impression. By ensuring that your signage is noticeable and in good condition, you will have a better chance at attracting the customers you desire to attract. Have good signage (logos/branding) online too. Get noticed.
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Warmer Weather For Marketing

While many Torontonians are basking in the heat, it can be the perfect time to exercise some outdoor marketing activities.

So what does all this temperature talk how to do with your business? Well, for one, there are a variety of new ways one can market their business in the warmer weather, which we will discuss in this month’s blog. Here are five perfect warm weather marketing tips that will boost people’s attention about your company:

1) Community Events
Children are running around playing in parks, the sun is up longer, and people are outside enjoying the weather. A prime way to take advantage of this is to get to know your community, the people who drive by your location every day and may not even know what you offer or why you exist. Hold a local community event in a nearby park on a warm weekend day, as it will attract new customers as well as bring your current customers together.

2) Group Promotions
“If you tell five friends, you have a chance to win…” This always manages to attract people, after all, how easy is it to forward something to a friend or family member and automatically have a chance to win a free product or service? An easy way to incorporate this is to run group specials offering promotions based on the amount of people one of your customers brings in, either by text message or email. If one of their five friends has been referred by a current customer, they can be entered to win a prize of your company’s choice. Not only does this encourage the spread of information about your company, but it also increases the size of your database, offering more potential customers knowledge about what you offer.
3) Door to Door
While the door to door method may seem rather old-school, its overall effectiveness may surprise some. When you go door to door offering your community a special deal that your company offers, you’re putting your foot out and getting to know your customers on a one-on-one basis. While going door to door may be a bit too personal for some, handing out fliers on the street, or any sort of outside promoting is key during the summer months. People are more likely to stop and talk when the weather is nice and their being introduced to a service they may know nothing about.

4) Cool Drinks Anyone?
Is your business on a prime intersection, perhaps where many people are walking their dog or going to the park with their children? Setting up a free lemonade or cool drink stand outside your business will be a friendly invite for people to stop by and for you to promote what you are selling. It gives people a great reason to cool off and come into your location, seeing everything else that you have to offer.
5) Text Messaging
The moment you have a customer’s phone number in your database, ask them if they don’t mind receiving promotions through text once in a while. It is in this way you can build a large client phone number base where you can use text messaging as a community builder. The options are endless and range from promoting a new service, to offering polls for customers to vote on what product they like best. Monthly prize winners or even larger one time prize winners are a prime way to communicate with customers through text messaging and get people through your doors.
While there are various ways a company can advertise during the summer months, it is important to remember that it is during the summer when people may not mind as much to be approached about your service if they receive a free drink on the house. So instead of being cooped up inside this summer, remember to get out and get to know your community. It is in this way that your company can grow into a community landmark, a place your customer will remember and tell their friends about.
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