Once upon a time, website owners were flummoxed by two competing desires:

• Website design and content that was compelling, usable, useful, and pleasurable for human visitors
• Website design and content that was optimized for search engine optimization (SEO).

The information architects—the people who design pages with human users in mind—often were at loggerheads with the SEO experts, who wanted pages that web crawlers could find easily and rank highly in search results. Depending on which party had more clout on the web implementation team, a website might end up optimized for one at the cost of the other.

Happily, progress in search engine technology has changed SEO best practices to the point where you don’t have to sacrifice the usability of a website in order to eke out a higher search ranking. 

There’s nothing wrong with the tried-and-true SEO tactics we grew up on. Link-building, long-tailed keyword focus, and quality content are as relevant today as they ever were, but these basic strategies aren’t the only tools in the SEO marketer’s arsenal. Below, we’d like to review a few uncommon-yet-important SEO tactics that you might not be aware of.

Half of consumers who do a local search visit a store within a day, and 78% of local-mobile searches result in offline purchases. In case it isn’t clear, local SEO is kind of a big deal. It’s no secret at this point that the cellular phone has become a bonafide human appendage. If you’re not throwing up a flag on the internet, you’re basically nonexistent to the growing portion of humanity that navigates life through their cell phone. Local SEO is a prerequisite for any store looking to wrangle some offline foot traffic.

The issue with local SEO is that digital marketers are all over the place when it comes to tactics, making it difficult to lay out industry standard best practices. Priorities span from on-site optimization to social media and email marketing to website design. If you’re new to all this, the confusion and lack of consensus can leave you scratching your head wondering how to leave your local footprint. A good strategy moves forward on multiple fronts. Luckily, we’re here to highlight the winning routes to building a quality local SEO strategy.

Typical keyword strategy involves optimizing your content for a limited number of keywords in a given piece—often no more than one or two. This single-keyword approach was a product of its time; search algorithms weren’t as advanced as they are today, and building an SEO profile was as simple as optimizing each page for a single-string term.

Things work a little differently these days. Search crawlers are now sophisticated enough to detect multiple topics and contextual clues across indexed content, and individual keyword strategies don’t hold the clout they used to.

To look at it another way, crawlers are no longer the limiting factor in keyword optimization. Why be satisfied with a few keywords when you could optimize for a hundred?

There’s one bit of marketing advice floating around out there that business owners might be tired of hearing. How many times have you been told that you need to “get your business a mobile app”?

This is a pervasive bit of pseudo-wisdom that online sources push without much rationale. They hear statistics that encourage them, such as the fact that the average American spends five hours per day on mobile devices—92 percent of which is spent interacting with apps. They hear about the importance of mobile marketing and rush to get in on the action.

But do these companies really need to invest in one? Or are they just adding more waste into their increasingly-expensive and under-utilized marketing repertoire?

Now that 2019 is in full swing, we’d like to talk about one of our favorite subjects: SEO. Last year provided some interesting updates to the SEO world, including the rise of voice queries and topic clusters, and we expect 2019 to do the same.

But today, we’d like to avoid talking about SEO strategies that take months and months to implement. If you want to hit the ground running in 2019, we suggest looking at these quick SEO wins and seeing what you can do for your own site as the year begins.

Data is the driving force of website design. Changes should never be made on a whim; every change requires an investment of time and resources, and website owners shouldn’t consider making changes before ensuring that they’re justified. This applies to both small site owners making their way in the world and bigger agencies that need to defend their marketing spend to stakeholders.

Of course, different types of testing structures provide different information on website performance. Below, we’ll review a few of the most common options that marketers use.

Many marketers consider pay-per-click (PPC) ads to be an important component of any successful marketing campaign. Strong PPC ads drive traffic to your website, increase conversions, and build brand authority using targeted keywords and complementary content. Businesses need internet users to interact with these ads in order to justify money invested in their PPC campaigns, and user interaction is most often measured through an ad’s click-through-rates (CTR).

Here’s how you can optimize your AdWords PPC campaigns to maximize CTR and create successful ads that convert.

Facebook’s ad auction system provides a flexible and cost-effective solution to digital marketing – provided that you’re taking the right approach. With different bidding options, campaign goals, and optimization choices, it’s tantamount to your success to understand the underlying mechanics in order to employ the right strategy for your marketing campaign.

Content marketing and SEO go hand-in-hand, like fries and a milkshake or peanut butter and jelly. It’s not the brightest idea to do one without the other. The issue is that SEO is a dynamic and tumultuous enterprise. As the rules of the SEO game continually shift, your content marketing strategy needs to similarly adjust. Enter: topic clusters.