Franchises, and multi-location businesses gathered in Seattle recently for a unique new conference. The Creative Search Strategy Team was also onsite at the first ever LocalUp, an advanced local search conference on February 7th 2015. From the novel of notes we took, we pulled out six takeaways...

Authoritative online entities, such as WebMD, Amazon, Wall Street Journal, and Buzzfeed have enough domain authority to rank on the first page of Google for just about any search term they'd like. So how do regular folks such as you and I compete when these entities have more budget, more...

No matter how good your SEO team is, if your website isn't becoming the virtual salesperson of your business, overtime Google and other search engines will notice a trend in the ratio of people who return to their search results to choose a different listing. Without putting time and energy into...

How to Hire an Technical SEO Web Developer A programmer is a programmer, right? Wrong. There are so many variables to consider when hiring someone as your in-house webmaster that it's almost impossible to figure out where to start. Programmers are a culture all of their own. Depending on their...

For an inbound marketer, there is no feeling worse than watching a competitor game their way to the top of search results. While you're out there spending money on public relations, helping the community, and building the absolute best reputation of anyone in your industry, your competitor has his...

With up to 35% of web traffic now coming from mobile devices, optimizing for mobile users has never been more critical. There are two components to mobile optimization to consider: Conversion Rate Optimization (MCRO) and Search Engine Optimization (MSEO). Conversion rates could affect search...

Most online authors and publishers try very hard to avoid duplicate content when producing articles and posts that hopefully can convert to sales. A smaller group of authors however, live off the sweat of other people's website content and it is no wonder many of them are referred to as...

What Exactly is Big Data? You've been to conferences and hear the phrase thrown around quite a bit lately, or you see the buzzword emerging at Inbound.org, but do you really "get" what the phrase big data refers to? Allow me to give you my interpretation: On an ecommerce website, I like to...

A few weeks ago, we wrote a post entitled Content is Not King, explaining a pull-back from search engines such as Google from giving too much emphasis on external ranking signals like links and social media. For those of us who come from a grassroots SEO foundation, this change was extremely...

On January 22, Debbie Hemley, a social media consultant and blogger wrote an excellent post describing "stuff you can do" to improve your social media activities. 26 things actually, and in no particular order. Even though my interest has always been natural SEO, I've been following Social Media...