If your traffic never seems to grow or shrink during a core update, congratulations, you’re likely doing things right.  SEO isn’t always about gains and losses, sometimes it is maintaining your current market positions so your company doesn’t lose on revenue, branding, and exposure.  Maintaining positions isn’t easy, and even the big brands and media houses have to constantly update and test. If you’re an independent publisher, or if your boss is asking why they’re not seeing gains, don’t stress.  This is your opportunity to open the door to testing new ideas that would normall ..read more

The client came to us because they didn’t have luck with affiliate program managers in the past.  The traffic sources were hard to determine, they found some end of sale interceptions via branded coupon phrases in Google, and lots of reviews being a source of traffic (which is value adding, but not top-funnel).  We assured them the affiliate channel can be top funnel, provide value, and be mutually beneficial for both the partners and the brand.  They gave us a chance, and below you’ll find the results with tons of actionable tips, and how we achieved them. TL:DR We removed any ..read more

Google has a new featured snippet in beta called carousels. This is one of the most exciting schema libraries to come out in years, and may be a game changer for small businesses, publishers, affiliates, and even big brands in the future.  Below you’ll find how I think it will be developed, ways different types of sites can potentially use it from service providers and retailers to bloggers, content creators, and affiliates. But first, please remember that schema and structured data are not meant to boost your SEO, they are meant to help you get rich results and more space in a search re ..read more

Yahoo’s and Bing’s knowledge panels are sometimes affiliate links, and this can impact your SEO tracking and analytics reporting.  But not every time, and it depends on the type of landing page you end up on.  Other times they’ll load coupons from coupon affiliate sites for branded search results on a knowledge panel without using their own affiliate link to the store.  I’ve included 7 video examples in the middle of this post. To fill in the missing gaps from your SEO or company wide attribution reports, find the referring URLs from the knowledge panels inside the affiliate pr ..read more

Please note that we’ve made sure the client is not mentioned on the website to keep their identity anonymous per the client’s request. The Issue The client uses retailers for distribution and wants to increase brand awareness to drive demand while being able to drive in store velocity by letting a customer database know where they can shop in person.  The other goal is direct custom acquisition so there is a new stream of revenue if a buyer decides to stop purchasing. At the time we began there was no non-branded search traffic coming in.  One of the biggest concerns was if they wou ..read more

January is one of the months that is primed for entrepreneurs as there are industries with substantial demand and room for new players to move in.  I’m not talking about building a database of couples that got engaged during the holidays, prepping for Valentine’s, fitness and resolutions, or the big famous football game in February.  Those are packed with competition and you’ve likely considered them. I’m talking about niches that spike in recurring traffic each January with plenty of room to create a footprint for yourself.  I have experience in both of the following through m ..read more

Canonical links and 301 redirects are both important for SEO, and each serves very different purposes.  They should both be used in specific situations, but the assumption that one can be a substitute for the other will almost always be inaccurate. Canonical links are used to say one version of copy is duplicate of another, and its purpose is to guide a search engine to the version that should be indexed. 301 redirects tell search engines that a page has moved to a new location and guide the search engine to where that location is. Both of these tools are used for site migrations, comb ..read more

Yes, affiliate links are backlinks and they can work for or against you when it comes to SEO.  This is because they are a link from one site to your website, and any link that points towards your website is technically a backlink.  But not every backlink passes SEO value, and that is where the confusion occurs.  Example: A link from a search result in Google, like your website’s homepage showing up in Google for your brand name, is a backlink and will help with SEO.  This is because it is a link from Google.com to your site.  But this does not technically pass “author ..read more

I’ve had the unique experience of making full URL and brand migrations for multiple companies (including nine figure ones).  The larger ones are different than a smaller brand because there’s more moving parts, and at least one was in a regulated industry adding to the complexity. But in each instance we maintained or grew SEO traffic, specifically new non-branded keywords.  The following instructions are what we do as a baseline when changing URLs and we don’t want to lose SEO traffic or potentially damage other marketing channels. Note: Each site has unique variables and instances ..read more

Scholarship and grant link building is a tactic that stems from an old myth that .edu and .gov backlinks are more valuable than others.  This idea formed because an earned link from these sites is harder to get as you have to be an accredited school or government agency to buy these TLDs (top level domains).  Because only a limited group of people can buy them, the websites must have some form of quality control. On top of the quality control, these organizations tend to have fact checking, publish research papers using data only they have access to, and they get sourced by other au ..read more