How does the Google ranking algorithm know if users are happy with a web page? You probably think that the algorithm uses data from Google Analytics to measure if a page deserves to go up or down in rankings. What if I told you that Google Analytics is there for webmasters, and not for Google […]
How Does Google Know Users Are Satisfied With a Web Page?
Setting Your Service Area on Google My Business
If you have a physically located business, you should undoubtedly have a Google My Business page for your company. Google My Business is an important piece of local SEO. Your Google My Business page is where customers leave you Google reviews, and you can add various information, like your phone number, hours of operation, and […]
Create Great Content and You’ll Get Links: Truth or Fiction?
Published August 17th, 20192 Comments on Create Great Content and You’ll Get Links: Truth or Fiction?A phrase you’ll hear a lot: Create great content, and you’ll get links naturally. You may have found it’s much harder than that. Even when you create “skyscraper content” it can be difficult to acquire links. So how do you get back links in the real world?
Why Google Added Favicons to Search Results
You may have noticed recently that Google added favicons to search results. Favicons are those little square images that sometimes appear in the address bar of a web page or bookmarked URLs. But there is a reason why Google added favicons to the search engine results pages (SERPs). This was not a feature that was […]
Google Announces June 2019 Core Update
On June 3rd, 2019, Google started rolling out a broad update to the ranking algorithm, named the June 2019 Core Update. They announced this over the weekend, and on June 2nd, 2019, there were temporary outages of Google services (Gmail, YouTube, Google Search, Google Cloud) across the world in various locations. Maybe they needed to […]
Should You Pay For a Wikipedia Article?
This is a question I see every week in SEO forums. Should you pay to have someone create a Wikipedia page for your company? Many online marketers believe that having a Wikipedia article will help boost your SEO. My advice is, unless you are a national or international company, hold off on that. Wikipedia has […]
Can You Do SEO Without Paid Tools?
Today I’m answering a great question that I saw in an SEO forum, “Can you do SEO without paid SEO tools?” When we say, “paid SEO software”, it refers to tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz Pro, Majestic, Mangools, and many others. I believe that you can do SEO without any tools except for Google itself. […]
Did the Google Search Quality Raters Visit Your Site?
What are the Google Quality Search Rater Guidelines? They are a checklist given to Google independent contractors, who are tasked with scoring the search results that Google returns for certain search phrases. If you want to see the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, there’s a link here. They were last updated publicly on July 20, 2018. […]
“We Have 100 Google Reviews, But We’re Not in the 3-Pack Map?”
Published March 10th, 2019No Comments on “We Have 100 Google Reviews, But We’re Not in the 3-Pack Map?”I saw an interesting question recently: a mattress company with over 100 Google reviews wants to know why they don’t come up in the 3 pack map. When they search for mattress company related keywords close to their location, the Google 3 pack map shows businesses farther away. These other companies have far less Google […]
Should You Change the Publish Date of a Post for SEO?
Today’s question is, “What criteria does Google look at when they are trying to figure out the last time a blog post or article was updated?” “I have some blog posts that need updating. Some need a few tweaks. Others need major overhauls.” “But I need to know what they are looking for when reconsidering […]