SEO Archives Page 3 of 7

How can I tell if my website is SEO-optimized? – Ask EZ

While most small businesses understand that SEO is important you might not know exactly how SEO works, or how you can check your website’s SEO performance. Here are five simple things you can look for and some tools that can help you tell if your website is optimized or, needs help to rank. Keep watching.

Hi, I’m Tom Malesic, founder and president of EZMarketing, and you’re watching AskEZ. This is where small business owners go to get real answers to their marketing questions.

Is Your Website Already Optimized?

Before I jump in the simple answer to “Is my website SEO optimized?” is NO, because SEO is never done. SEO is an ongoing process. You constantly need to be adding changing and optimizing your content to stay on top of Google.

So if you’re not actively doing SEO your site is definitely not optimized. But if you are doing SEO or have done any in the past here are some things to look for.

5 Ways to Tell if Your Website is SEO-Optimized

Are You Getting Leads?

As a business owner the number one thing you should care about with SEO is are you getting leads from your website? Are they filling out forms or picking up the phone and calling you? And if you have a shopping cart on your site are you getting sales?

If you’re getting leads from your SEO, everything else is secondary. Your SEO company or your marketing team might be tracking 20 other things, but leads are key.

If you don’t know where your leads are coming from you should be tracking them. We have a leads dashboard where we can track all your form fills and phone calls and show you where each and every lead is coming from!

Titles, Metas, H1s

One of the easiest ways to tell if your site is SEO optimized is to look at your title tags, meta descriptions, and H1s. The title, description, and headers on each page should include keywords that you want your page to rank for.

For example, you can see that our web design page is optimized for the keyword ‘web design company’. It’s in the title at the top of the browser window and it’s in the main headers on the page.

And if you search for web design company on Google, you’ll see the keyword again in the title and the description on the search engine results page.

You can check each page on your website individually like this or we use a tool called Screaming Frog to crawl your entire site and show you all your titles and metas.

Keyword Rankings

Next if your site is SEO optimized you should be ranking for keywords that are relevant for your business.

Googling your keywords is one way to check rankings, but it can be inconsistent. So, we use a tool called SEMRUSH that can track all the different keywords you’re ranking for, how they change over time and even how your rankings compare to your competitors.

Site Speed & Mobile Friendliness

Google prioritizes websites that are fast and mobile-friendly, and their recent core web vitals update made site performance a ranking factor.

Bottom line: an SEO optimized site should load fast and provide a great experience especially on mobile. Google has a Page speed test and a mobile-friendly test where you can check to see if your website is optimized to meet Google standards.

Technical Site Audit

Finally, if your site is optimized for SEO, it should be relatively free of technical errors like broken links, 404 errors, uncompressed images, or other issues.

Using SEMRUSH we can do a site audit to improve the overall health of your site. Most of our clients start with a score of less than 50 percent and we work to keep their site health score at over 90 percent.

Have You Checked Your Site’s SEO Performance?

Again, SEO is an ongoing process is never truly done. But if you’re wondering if your site is SEO optimized look at your leads first, then dig into the details like your meta tags, rankings, and site performance.

Or even better contact me for a free SEO audit and I’ll run the reports for you and then walk you through how you can get better results from your SEO.

And of course, if you like this video, don’t forget to like and subscribe.

What You Need to Know about Google Analytics 4 – Ask EZ

Q: What is happening with Google Analytics, and what should you do about it?

As you may have heard, Google is introducing a new version of analytics called Google Analytics 4. The existing version is called Universal Analytics and it’s going away. Today I’m going to cover what you need to know about Google Analytics 4 (GA4), and what it means for you.

How Much Does SEO Cost? – Ask EZ

Video transcription:

How much does SEO cost? If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO company, you’ve probably seen prices across the board.

When you Google search, there are tons of ads claiming to be the #1 SEO company with services starting at only two hundred dollars. Meanwhile, you know big businesses are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on SEO.

To find out what’s realistic and how much your small business should pay for SEO, keep watching.

What Questions Should You Ask Before Hiring an SEO Company? – Ask EZ

Why Does SEO Take So Long? – Ask EZ

A question I get asked all the time is, “Why does SEO take so long?” Now imagine you’ve just hired a new SEO company. You’re excited. They’ve walked you through their strategy for how they’re going to get you found on Google and drive all this traffic to your website.

But you’re about two months in and nothing seems to be happening so what’s wrong? Well probably nothing, the truth is SEO takes time. Google actually says it takes 4 to 12 months to really start seeing results.

But why does it take so long? And what does that mean for you? If you want to learn more keep watching.

Hi, I’m Tom Malesic, Founder and President of EZMarketing, and you’re watching Ask EZ. This is where small business owners go to get real answers to their marketing questions.

SEO Has Changed

One of the reasons we hear this question is people have an outdated perception of how SEO really works.

In the early days, it used to be a pretty simple formula right? You pick some high volume or really popular keywords, you put them on your website just a ton of times over and over again, and then you get lots of links back to your website, and bingo: now you have results.

If it were a math equation it would look like:

A+B+C=Success!

But now the equation looks a little more like this:

Today SEO is MORE complicated with MORE variables which means it just takes a lot more work to get through.

How Long DOes SEO Take?

It Depends on Your Content

Great content takes time. Effective SEO relies on high-quality content that’s relevant for your customers. This is things like copy on your website, maybe blog posts, guides, infographics, or even videos like this one.

Look SEO takes time because great content doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. It takes time to write it, to design it, to optimize it, to promote it. And certainly to get backlinks to it. The point is if you want results from your SEO you have to invest the time to create the best possible content.

It Depends on the Competition

Asking how long SEO will take really depends on a lot of things. One of the biggest factors is your competition.

So asking how long it will take to rank on Google is kind of like asking how fast do I need to run to win the race? Well it depends on how fast your competition’s running, right? If you’re running against a bunch of slowpokes you probably don’t have to work real hard to win. But if you’re running against very trained marathon runners you might be in trouble. So chances are, your competitors are doing SEO and winning is a moving target.

Also, some keywords in industries are naturally more competitive than others. So if you wanted to rank for “industrial powder coating service” that’s going to be relatively easy to rank for compared to if you wanted to rank for “auto insurance” which is insanely competitive.

It Depends on Your Budget

If you’re outsourcing your SEO service, how long it takes also depends on your budget. Look there’s a lot that goes into SEO: we have things like site audits, writing content, optimizing your website, building backlinks.

Look it all takes time and if you’re only spending a couple hundred dollars a month, you’re not giving your SEO company very long to work, and it’s going to take them longer to get results.

Now that doesn’t mean that you should have to wait 4 to 12 months to understand what your SEO Company is doing for you. They should be able to explain what they’re doing and why and be able to show some level of progress.

Get Long-Lasting SEO Results

SEO does take longer than other types of marketing, but the good news is it also lasts longer. Unlike Google Ads that disappear the second that you stop paying for them, SEO builds over time. You still need constant maintenance, but once you rank, you’re going to keep getting results and traffic will last longer.

If you want to get better results from Google I invite you to fill out the form below so that we can give you a FREE SEO Audit.

We’re going to give you a report and lots of suggestions on what improvements you need to make to your website to get better visibility on Google. And of course, if you like this video don’t forget to like and subscribe.

What Are the Top Google Ranking Factors? – Ask EZ

What are the top Google ranking factors that affect the search results? Getting your website to rank on Google can be a real challenge. Google has over 200 ranking factors, so which ones should you really worry about?

To find out which Google ranking factors make the biggest impact on your website keep watching.

How does SEO work? – Ask EZ

Is LinkedIn really useful for business? – Ask EZ

This Week’s Question: Is LinkedIn really useful for your business?

What can I do to get found online? – Ask EZ

This Week’s Question: My customers can’t find my business when they search on Google. What can I do about that?

How do I get my business name out there? – Ask EZ

This Week’s Question: How do I get my business name out there?

Transcription:

Have you ever found yourself saying, “how do I get my name out there? People just don’t know who I am.” Many small business owners they feel like they are the best-kept secret.

In the marketing world, the problem that you’re solving is brand awareness. It’s how do you get people to recognize and remember your business. We know that people are more likely to buy from a business that they’re familiar with. If you’re tired of being the best-kept secret, keep watching!

Hi, I’m Tom Malesic, founder and President, of EZMarketing, a marketing company in nearby Lancaster, PA, and you’re watching Ask EZ. This is where small business owners go to get real answers to their marketing questions.

how do you build brand awareness?

So how do you build brand awareness? It really comes down to three things: being recognizable, being relatable, and being active.

Be Recognizable

Let’s start with being recognizable. When you see this shape, what company do you think of?

Combined with their famous red and white logo, Coke is the world’s most leading recognizable iconic brand. Over 94% of the world will recognize that Coke bottle.

So how do you be recognizable? It starts with your logo, it’s the colors you use, it’s the fonts that you select. It’s really about being consistent from one advertising source to another. So that if somebody looks at your website design, and then they look at your business card, and then they look at your social media marketing, and they look at a print ad, does it all look like it’s the same company? It sounds so simple but most small businesses, they just don’t do it.

Be Relatable

Getting people to know about your business isn’t just about your logo and the visual identity, it’s also about your message, your values, and what you say you do. It’s being relatable, especially for small businesses, people buy from people, not from nameless, faceless companies.

Does your prospective customer feel like you can really solve their problem? When someone reads your website do they come away with, yes, finally somebody gets me!

Does it create an emotional connection with that prospective customer? An
example of this would be our customer, Blessings of Hope. They’re a food bank, for food banks. Their old website just kind of talked about what they did and really didn’t pull in that emotional connection. When we changed it we really focused on their message, which is, “peace begins, when the hungry are fed.” It’s not what they do, it’s why they do it.

Be Active

But being recognizable and relatable it’s still not enough if you’re not spreading the word about your business. So our last tip is, be active. You have to do something. You can’t just sit at your desk, in your four walls, and wave your magic wand and think people are going to know who you are and want to buy from you. It takes five times for someone to hear about your business so that they actually remember you.

And this speaks to doing a lot more marketing. So it’s doing a great website design, it’s social media marketing, it might be print ads, it could be a variety of things, it could be wrapping your car with your logo all over it, you could sponsor an event, you could even leverage some of your existing customers by having a referral contest or asking for reviews.

The point is you need to do a lot more marketing so that people will remember who you are.

Your Homework

So here’s your homework:

I want you to take all of your marketing materials, whether that’s your business card, a printout of your home page, it could be some printouts of your social media ads, any direct mail, and I want you to lay it all out on a table.

Then I want you to look at it and say does it look like it came from the same company? Is it recognizable? Then I want you to read the copy, is it relatable? Are you getting your message out there correctly? And then last, I want you to look at it all, and say what aren’t I doing right now and pick one more marketing tactic, and do more marketing to take action.

If you’re talking with marketing agencies in Lancaster, make sure you give us a call. Our marketing company specializes in small businesses in Central PA. We’re happy to help, and don’t forget to like and subscribe!