I’ve heard many horror stories about when an agency uses another agency for their clients services. White label in theory sounds amazing for all but if the partnership is not solid, then things can go south really, really fast!

When looking for a white label SEO agency you are looking for a partner. Don’t think of them as just a company that fulfills the work for your clients. A successful white label agency can increase your revenue FAST!

Think about it.

If someone else takes care of all your client work and gets them results then you will have a ton of time to build your business. You get a client, the works gets done by the other agency. As long as the work is of high quality and is getting your clients results, you just keep selling.
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If you own a small business or are looking to do online marketing for your website then you should know the difference between SEO and SEM (PPC).

SEO stands for search engine optimization and it’s a strategy to get your site listed in the organic results of Google. That is the results displayed in the image below.

You do this by blogging, building citations, getting reviews to your site and link building. Yes I said link building. Not the spammy type of link building but building links organically.

SEM (search engine marketing) is when someone pays for a placement on Google. You can see those listings below in the image.

When I talk about SEM I usually just stay PPC (pay per click) since it’s basically the same thing. You’re paying each time someone clicks on your ad. Of course there are many variable to this but that’s the basics. [Read more…]

If you’re a small business owner or someone looking to increase traffic to your website you want to educate yourself about SEO. SEO helps you rank higher in Google and results in increasing traffic to your site. There is a TON of nonsense online about SEO and it’s easy to get lost. I’ll go over some of the SEO basics so you can make sure your online marketing strategy is in order. If you’re wondering about PPC head over here.

The 3 SEO Basics

So what I always focus on when working on my site or a clients site are the 3 factors below.

1. Onsite optimization
You always want to make sure your site is optimized perfectly. Google weighs this when ranking your website. If your site is all jacked up then you’ll want to fix it. I offer awesome website reviews that you can order and then either fix the problems yourself or hand them off to your web developer.

Make sure your content isn’t thin (shoot for 400+ words per page), you link internally to other pages on your site and you have clear CTA (call to actions) like a phone number or web form.

2. Quality Content
Like I mentioned above you should aim for 400+ words per page on your site. Why? Because Google’s crawlers reads that content and then determines what your website is about. It can read images if you insert alt tags but looks at your content for relevancy.

NINJA TIP! – Make sure your About us page is really good. People love to read a story and find out what you’re about. Believe it or not it’s one of the most visited pages on most of my clients site. [Read more…]

In my last post I showed you how to compile a list of keywords. One of the first few things I do when working with a client is compile a list of keywords and then enter them into Serp Rank Checker (a keyword ranking tool) to see where they stand in Google. This tool will go out and look at Google, Yahoo and Bing and see what spot you are ranking in for that particular term. If you’re ranking in the 11th spot for “Austin dentist” it will simply report that you are in spot 11 (not groundbreaking stuff but very useful). It checks multiple times a day and will update you on how many spots you increased or decreased for that ranking.

WARNING: Tracking your keywords and seeing how you rank compared to your competition is great to do but I don’t want you to get obsessed about it or I’ll have to erase all this wonderful free content on my blog. 🙂 [Read more…]

Keyword research is very important for your business. Whether you are paying someone to do your SEO (hopefully me) or you’re slaving away doing it yourself, you need to start with researching what people are searching for. Google will tell you exactly what your customers are searching for! Craziness, and I’m going to teach you how to find out. And if they are searching for it, they are sure as heck ready to buy or use your services. But let’s first start with the basics.

What the heck are keywords?

They are words (or phrases) that a user types into Google. Whoa Steve, really good explanation!

Don’t like my profound definition above? Fine, I’ll give you an example. If you’re looking for a dentist in Austin TX the keyword you might type into Google is “austin dentist.” Google will then display the results that best fit your search term (or keyword) and give you a list of websites.

Since I’m so darn super cool, I’m going to show you exactly how to pick keywords for your market. Our goal is to make a nice list of keywords that you can track and use as a reference. You can use this list of keywords we’re going to create in many ways. Use it to:

– Create blog post or other content on your site
– Track how your website ranks in Google
– Keep tabs on the SEO agency you’re working with (ummmm → should be me)
– Create an Adwords PPC traffic campaign

It’s valuable information for you to have for your business. Ok enough with that, roll those sleeves up and let’s do this!

1. Create a Seed List

Open up a word doc or grab a nice number 2 and some good old paper. We’re going to make a seed list of keywords that we will use in later steps. Think like your customers and get inside their wonderful heads, then list 5 keywords in your seed list. Think how they would think. What would they type into Google to find your business (and no not your business name)? Take a look at my seed list below: [Read more…]

So everyone is talking about SEO. You’ve probably had phone calls from sales people trying to sell you SEO. You think you know what it is but sometimes you find yourself saying, What is SEO and should I do this for my business? The short answer is yes but I’ll get to that later.

Explain SEO to Me Please!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the organic rankings you see in Google.

The listings on the top and sides are Google adwords listings or PPC (pay per click). Those adwords listings are ads that you pay Google and every time someone clicks on your ad you shell over money.

SEO on the other hand helps your listing rank in the organic section. The site that Google sees more as an authority and provides the user with the best content will get ranked higher than the others. It’s as simple as that (but it’s really not that simple).

What Helps My Site Rank?

If you’re wondering this great question. There are a bunch of factors that you’ll need in order to get your website to rank (SEO Basics). I’ll list some of the main ones below:

A quality website
Your site needs to be optimized and must have clean code. Google does not like flash and really wants to see that your site is responsive (mobile friendly). It pays to have a professional look over your site and optimize it. Some of the things that you want to optimize are: [Read more…]

You’re a small business and you want to do something for your web presence. Congratulations! Most small businesses don’t think about improving their Google rankings and waste money in old school techniques like YellowPage ads or snail mail advertisements. Below I’m going to outline 3 small business SEO steps that you can start doing today (or tomorrow if you have the day off :))! If you’re not exactly sure what SEO is, read more here.

Follow these Small Business SEO Steps for Success!

Let’s jump right into it. I’m going to layout what you need to do to get started.

1. Setup a blog
This is crucial in the SEO world. You need a blog on your website. If your are skilled then I suggest setting up a self hosted wordpress blog under your domain name. What this means is that your blog URL will look like this:

www.yoursite.com/blog

If you’re not sure on how to do this then either have your web developer do it or contact one. We can help if you don’t have one. It should only cost you a few hundred dollars to get this going. I mentioned wordpress because WP is a super easy platform that you’ll be able to manage in the future. It’s a blogging platform (great for SEO) and a skilled web developer can easily setup a self-hosted WP blog on your site. Then once complete, you’ll be able to add articles to your new blog. [Read more…]