It’s fun to slap together a new “service” page and see fast results, because most of the time it doesn’t work out that way.  More often, you’ll need to put in a little more gruntwork before that new page can help produce organic rankings, Google Maps rankings, and customers. As usual, your process counts for ..read more

This check-up will take about 2 minutes if you’re already using UTM tracking links on the landing page URLs of your Google Business Profile page or pages (which I hope you are, because they’re mighty useful). If you’re not using a tracking URL, you can set one up in a couple of minutes now, and ..read more

Luck is engineered.  Whether you have mostly bad luck or mostly good luck depends on your foresight.  That applies to online reviews, which a business needs to succeed, especially if it’s “local.”  Your foresight influences everything, including how many people review you, how high your ratings are, how persuasive your reviews are, and how many ..read more

It’s tempting to tweak various settings on your Google Business Profile page, or to add “content” to it in any way you can, or to try out and maybe max out new features on it.  Your hope is that that will help your visibility in the Google Maps 3-pack, and a lot of local SEO ..read more

Most wounds are self-inflicted, at least in local SEO.  A weak site makes it much harder to get visible in the organic results and in the Google Maps results, and to stay there.  But you won’t grow the site to be big and strong if simple tasks are a PITA, or if you spend too ..read more

An SEO can become your trusted consigliere, an all-star utility player, lowbrow ruffian fixer, or some combination of those and more, if only you know the range of tasks that he or she might be able to handle for you or help you with.  They may not be good at everything, and you may not ..read more

When you’re trying to clean up a competitor’s dirty Google Business Profile page, it’s not enough just to be right: You also need to make your move at the right time. When’s the right time to send in a “suggest an edit”?  It’s (1) as soon as you notice a problem, (2) as soon as ..read more

If you break a leg, how long will you need to be in crutches, and how long before you can run?  If you smash your pinky finger, when can you play Chopin again?  If you throw out your back, how long until you can attempt a new personal record in the caber toss? The answer ..read more

If you want to rank more than a klick or two from your perimeter, you’ll need a few links – from other sites to your site.  Most of those sites should be relevant to what you do, where you are, or both. Those links probably don’t need to be hard to get, you won’t need a ton of them, and you may not even need them at all right now to make big gains.  How important they are depends on a lot of factors.  But you will need some solid links sooner or later, as rebar to support your other SEO work.  Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time getting ahead of your tougher competitors, st ..read more

You don’t just want to become easier to find: you want to be harder to avoid.  Higher rankings make you more visible, but alone they don’t make you unavoidable.  Your goals will require more than that.  You need multiple ways to advance your goals, and not just 1 or 2. It’s like how there’s not just one way to grow your wealth.  You can get paid more, spend less, reduce your debt, reduce your tax burden, buy assets that appreciate, turn savings into investments, etc.  It’s similar in other situations, too: There are many different ways a farm can produce more food, a ..read more