by Marcus Ledbetter | May 1, 2013 | Hubspot, Inbound Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO for Small Business
Have you spent thousands of dollars with an SEO Consultant and found yourself wondering where the money went? Or have you spent countless hours following every bit of advice you could find to optimize your own website with nothing to show for it? The problem most likely isn’t that your SEO consultant stinks, or that you don’t know what you are doing – the real issue here is that we put too much stock into SEO in the first place.
The most common problem businesses face with their own SEO strategy or their SEO consultant’s strategy, is that the goals of SEO are not in line with the overall goals of your business!
Your Goals vs. SEO Goals
Let’s look at this further. If your SEO consultant comes to you after 6 months of work and proudly shows a report indicating that you have taken the top slots in search engine results for all of your desired keywords, that’s a win right? Well – it is for the SEO consultant. In fact, that’s all the SEO consultant is really worried about – your site ranking high in the search results. In the end, that is the primary goal of SEO – building a rank and placement advantage over your competition.
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by Marcus Ledbetter | Apr 5, 2013 | Consumer Trends, Email Campaigns, Facebook, Google, Inbound Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO for Small Business, Social Media Marketing, The Gravity Strategy, Twitter, Web Marketing
We are pleased to introduce a new video we produced to go along with The Gravity Strategy eBook and blog posts. We are excited about this concept because it makes it super easy to explain Inbound Marketing and it’s benefits for your business. Enjoy!
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by Marcus Ledbetter | Mar 25, 2013 | Blogging Ideas, Case Study, Inbound Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO for Small Business
As you know, growing organic search engine traffic takes time. Or does it?
We launched a new site for an Inbound Marketing client last month. Here is an 8-day snapshot of the client’s organic search traffic. Keep in mind this is not branded traffic based on the client’s name. This is a brand new site no-one had ever heard of.
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by Marcus Ledbetter | Feb 15, 2013 | Hubspot, Inbound Marketing, SEO, SEO for Small Business, Social Networking
If you have had a chance to read up on the features and benefits of Hubspot, then you know what a game-changer it has been for Inbound Marketing professionals. Hubspot makes managing your Inbound Marketing campaign simple and effective. What’s more, the integrated reporting makes showing your results and ROI a piece of cake. The only part of Hubspot that many see as a downside is that it is Hubspot Pricing. But as with most products or services that cost money, you can’t just look at the dollar going out – you have to consider the dollars coming back in, AND, the dollars saved as a result of using Hubspot. (more…)
by Marcus Ledbetter | Jan 24, 2013 | Author Rank, Facebook, Google, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO for Small Business, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking, Twitter
Want to know how Google is going to get users to leave Facebook and use Google Plus? They are going to pay them to do it (indirectly).
Author Rank is only being talked about in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing circles at the moment, but the effects of the coming SEO earthquake it causes could be felt by everybody before it is over. It is not just a tool to improve their search engine. It is an asset they intend to use to take over social media. I’ll explain . . .
If you’ve followed social media over the last few years, you’ve seen Google launch round after round of social platforms, each with a characteristic belly-flop ending — Friend Connect, Lively, Wave, Buzz, and Plus. But slow down. Maybe we’ve written Plus off too quickly.
A Bunch Looked, The Geeks Stayed
Plus launched in 2011 and didn’t gain a lot of marketshare. The tool itself seems to be excellent, but there wasn’t a good enough reason to leave Facebook and Twitter for the (more…)
by Marcus Ledbetter | Jan 16, 2013 | Author Rank, Google, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO for Small Business
UPDATE JULY 19, 2013: The information below was posted in January 2013. We have since seen a client’s author verification take place in 6 days. We used Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to make sure the verification was set up correctly and that may have sped the process up. Now back to our previous post . . .
So how long does it take author info to show up in Google results? We’ve seen this take months (example 1 example 2), but our answer is 3 weeks. We would love to think that Google just loves us that much more than the other folks, but it may just be that they are speeding the process up as it becomes more refined.
Leave a comment letting us know the date you set authorship up and your domain/page and we will track how long it takes on an ongoing basis! (That will make this post an even better resource for those who come after you.)
We made the changes on December 21. We’ve checked daily (weekdays) since then and noticed it showing up yesterday, Monday, Jan 14. That’s actually 24 days, but we’ll give Google the benefit of the doubt and say it happened when we weren’t watching over the weekend, which is right at 3 weeks.
Here’s a quick look at how the authorship verification looks in SERPs . . .
NOTE: In Google’s example image of this author display, the author’s name shows up in bright blue. The example author is in over 800,000 Google+ Circles, which may have something to do with his name displaying in a different color than mine. 🙂
Google’s authorship verification system involves linking your Google+ Profile to any content that you write. You can do this adding the site to your “Contributes To” section in Google+, and either verifying a branded email address with site itself or inserting a “rel=author” code snippet to any page with your content. We inserted the code snippet.
[sam id=”10″ codes=”true”]
Why Bother With Author Verification?
Besides being vain and liking having your picture show up on a SERP, what advantage is there to bothering with Author Verification?
There is a lot of strong speculation that “Author Rank” will play heavily into Google’s algorithm very soon (they’ve been working on it for years) and that may make huge waves in the SEO industry.
What we do know is that authorship verification means that Google trusts you and that you should receive more click-thrus because of your picture and profile info showing up in SERPs, regardless of if it actually affects the rankings themselves.
Do your blog a favor and take just a few quick minutes to verify your authorship. And let us know how long it takes in the comments.
