You’ve heard it before from your parents and your employers and — as annoying as it may be — the mantra, “You only get one chance to make a first impression” isn’t going anywhere. The worst part is that the mantra is actually incredibly true. Whether you like it or not first impression really do matter. However, businesses seem to be forgetting that first impressions are not only for people — it applies to a website as well. While creating a cool-looking design is an excellent start, this shouldn’t be the stopping point if you really want to make the best impression on your readers in seconds or less. Unfortunately, this is usually where businesses do stop so they can move on to something else.
Social media has been an increasingly important part of search engine optimization. Now there’s so much competition out there when it comes to promotional posts, it’s difficult to get your brand seen. Facebook has placed restrictions on how often business page posts are shown in fan feeds. LinkedIn is full of business-to-business advertising. Twitter, too, has become more competitive and thus, more restrictive when it comes to branded posts. If you write a lot of social media posts, you could simply guess at which ones will be seen and how much engagement you’ll get. Alternatively, you could use our simply ratio of engagement to promotional posts. By using the proper ratio of when you’re catering to your fans and when you’re advertising to them, you can get a lot more out of your social media campaign.
Lots of folks think that SEO is about “gaming the system.” Well… that’s true of “black hat” SEO, but those of us who are trying to make pages easy for Google to crawl and evaluate are working towards what I like to think of as “natural” SEO. We put in all the right meta tags, make sure that your page is about what you tell search engines it’s about in your description and generally try to streamline things so that spiders won’t be caught in traps or leave pages entirely. So, let’s say that you have recently built a new website. Is it search friendly? Or more importantly, is it Google friendly? No, Google certainly doesn’t pay me and I don’t worship at the Google altar, either, but let‘s face it. Google brings the most traffic and for some reason, that traffic seems to convert. That’s why we want to please the gods of Google as much as we possibly can.
Experiencing a large drop in rankings can be confusing and frustrating. It could also mean a significant loss in leads or profits for your website. If you don’t have the know-how or the means to fix the issue quickly, the future of your company’s income could be in danger. The first step in recovering from a large drop in rankings is identifying what type of penalty you have. Depending on the type of penalty there will be a very different set of steps you need to take towards regaining your traffic and rankings.
Human brain processes images faster than text — 60,000 times faster. That makes dashboards much more effective communicators than spread sheets full of numbers. Still, pretty dashboards alone will be of little help, with no analysis, proposed actions, or a picture of a better future.
Semrush is my favorite competitive research tool that I use for everything from organic and paid keyword research to understanding market share in a specific region. A few months ago, I was working on a large project where it made sense to look beyond the Semrush interface and pull data directly from their servers via the Semrush API. The problem was that I’d never used an API before and wasn’t able to locate any resources for a noob like myself to get started. As luck would have it, I work with some pretty smart people who were able to point me in the right direction. Now that I understand the basics, I want to pay it forward and create a resource for others who use Semrush, but not familiar with using the API.
