Why Do We Use SSL or HTTPS For Credit Cards Online
As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post, I came across yet another web design nightmare when talking on the phone with a potential new client about SEO for her small business. This was a huge nightmare and one of the many problems was improper use (or lack of use) of secure socket layers (SSL). What …
A Web Design Nightmare
A few days ago I received a consultation request via our website for local as well as possibly national SEO. After 2 follow up calls I finally was able to reach the business owner to discuss her website, market niche, and what our strategy for SEO would be. She sounded extremely interested and was ready …
A Word On Entrepreneurs And Game Changers
Small business owners. Entrepreneurs. The ones who think outside the box. The one’s who will invest everything and anything to get their ideas, concepts, thoughts, and dreams to become a reality. The ones who spend countless days and often times endless nights on perfecting their strategy, their game plan, their business. The US has produced …
Introducing Rank Tracker: A New Feature For Our SEO Clients
We’re always trying to blaze the trail in the SEO world and provide our clients with the best possible services and tools at the most affordable prices and we’ve done it yet again. Introducing Simple SEO Group’s new Rank Tracker feature–a free tool available exclusively to our SEO clients. The Rank Tracker is just one …
How Long Should A Blog Post Be?
Just how long should a blog post be? It’s one of those questions that I honestly get asked all the time–both from a reading perspective as well as an SEO perspective. In this article we’re going to talk a little more about writing blog posts, how long a blog post should be, and how to …
Getting Credit For Your Small Business
There’s no way to live or function these days without a credit card, especially for a small business. A credit card is a lifeline for many–allowing them the luxury of getting what they need today and paying for it tomorrow. This isn’t an article to lecture you on how you should or shouldn’t use a …
Stop For One Moment Today
First of all happy Friday- the weekend is almost here. We’re all busy–especially at the end of the week trying to wrap up all our projects, return all our phone calls, respond to all our emails–and as we talked about in yesterday’s blog post being a small business owner or employee at a small business …
Local SEO vs National SEO
There’s two main types of SEO out there– local SEO and national SEO–and depending on the geographical area you serve you’re going to want to make sure you choose the right type of SEO. Most SEO companies focus only on national website SEO. This is helpful for companies that offer their products/services over the internet …
Results After 1 Year Of SEO
We’ve had some clients with us for a long time, and one of our clients just hit their 1 year anniversary with us, so I want to share their results after 1 year of SEO. This client (whose website we are not going to reveal for privacy reasons) is in the financial services industry and …
Are You A Tired Small Business Owner?
Owning a small business isn’t an easy task. There are days that I would much rather be in charge of a large, publicly owned company where my own money, life, and well being aren’t on the line every single day. But there’s a gratification that also comes from owning a small business– at the end …
Google’s 13th Birthday
Today marks the 13th birthday of search engine giant Google. Back on September 27, 1998, when websites were basically all text based, search engine giant Google saw a need for indexing websites and creating a database of all the websites out there on the web. 13 years later they have transformed into one of the …
Why Use WordPress?
Wordpress is a buzzing topic for web designers, and more and more websites are being powered today by WordPress. But why use WordPress for your website? Wordpress is by far the most popular content management system (CMS) on the internet today. Simple SEO Group utilizes WordPress on the back end to power our website and …
10 DIY Projects You Shouldn’t Take On As A Small Business Owner
Since our previous post about ma and pa business owners doing their own web design and ending up with absolutely awful websites ended up being so popular, I thought I would take some time to put together a post dedicated to 10 DIY projects that you should NEVER take on by yourself and also include …
Facebook F8 Announcements And Changes
Facebook got started around 2004, introduced photos in 2005, added the news feed in 2006, added a real time stream in 2008, the like button in 2009, and has continued to make changes in 2010 and 2011. In 2004, Facebook had a mere 10 million users. Today there are nearly 800 million users and growing …
The Importance Of A Professional Website
Okay–so there’s A LOT of ma and pa type small businesses out there that setup their own website–more power to you. I have to applaud the motivation and dedication that these business owners have. But here’s the problem–99.999% of these websites end up looking absolutely terrible! I can think of at least a dozen examples …
Simple SEO Group Website Redesign
We’re extremely excited to roll out the all new Simple SEO Group website! This new website layout and theme combines a crisp, clean look with an extremely high level of usability and function. A special thanks to Aric Smith, our web design manager, for overseeing this project and getting things up and running. It’s been …
How Many People Click On Google Ads?
Have you ever wondered just how many people click on Google ads? Google themselves have admitted in the past that less than 25% of their users will ever click on a pay-per-click ad on their platform. The reality is the vast majority of users are clicking on organic search results. How Many People Click On …
Small Business SEO and Why You Should Start TODAY!
It’s important to get started with your small business SEO campaign TODAY! Why you may ask? Two main reasons: Competition and Seasonality Competition is the number one factor in SEO and determines how much time and money it will take to rank for a keyword. Every single day that your small business decides to skip …
Where Does Your Website Traffic Come From?
Do you know where your company’s website traffic is coming from, and more importantly do you know where your conversions are coming from? Small business owners often trust their web design firm to setup everything they need to have a good website. But good web design isn’t just designing a site, it’s giving the site …
How To Avoid Insane Online Lawsuits
There are some absolutely insane lawsuits out there in the internet. I read a few months ago of a small at home business that is being sued for $10 million. There’s a lot of ways to get yourself in a lot of trouble on the internet, and as a disclaimer before you read this post, …
How Long Does SEO Take?
The number one question in the world of small business SEO is How Long Does SEO Take? There’s no straight answer for that, but let’s take a quick look at two scenarios to help answer the question of how long does SEO take: How Long Does SEO Take? Scenario 1: You are a small business …
SEO Friendly Website Design
If I only had a nickel for every time I saw a website that was designed with no thought given to SEO…I probably wouldn’t be working for an SEO company right now and would be retired on a private island in the Caribbean. No seriously I’m not even kidding. SEO Friendly Website Design If you’re …
How To Use Social Media & Facebook For Marketing
There’s already thousands of articles on the internet explaining how to use Facebook for marketing purposes, but I really feel most of them do a terrible job explaining how to actually market on sites like Facebook. They leave vague comments like “Engage your audience” or “Start communicating with users” but no one is bold enough …
What Is The Main Difference Between SEO and PPC
SEO and PPC are two words thrown around all the time in the online marketing world, but there are very distinct differences between SEO and PPC, and in our opinion there’s one option that is more profitable for the majority of small businesses. Let’s first examine what SEO and PPC actually are then compare the …
A Must Read For All Small Business Owners
This article is going to be a little long but it is a must read for ALL small business owners. I repeat this article is a must read for all small business owners. No one knows your small business better than you. Most of you have poured your time, money, energy, blood, sweat, and tears …
Held Hostage By A Web Design Firm & Poor Web Design
When you ask most people what makes up a good website, they’ll tell you a good layout, good graphics, good animations. Basically all aesthetic aspects of the website. Yes, aesthetic aspects of a website are extremely important, however there are some even more important aspects that are often overlooked by web designers–or worse yet aspects …
Great Results Start With Customer Service
Customer service is the cornerstone of small businesses. For decades people have chosen to do business with small businesses instead of large corporations because of that added customer service factor that exists–from getting to know your account manager on a first name basis to inviting a small business owner over for a family barbeque. Customer …
Financial Consulting Firm SEO Case Study
To protect the privacy of our clients, only general information will be provided in this SEO case study. The name of the company and keywords targeted will not be provided unless our client has permitted us to utilize this information. Background Information: Sometimes ranking for certain keywords doesn’t mean you’ll make money online, and that …
Why SEO Delivers A Higher ROI Than Other Marketing
The yellow pages used to be the number one place for businesses to advertise. There’s a good reason behind this. Do you know what it is? Let’s first step back and think about some other forms of advertising. Direct mail, cold calling, telemarketing, billboards, radio ads, TV ads, banner ads, yelling from the rooftop of …
Best Color For A Website
It’s surprising how many people throw together a website and put virtually no thought into the actual color scheme. Sure you may have already spent money designing a logo for your company or themed your company with certain colors, but there’s actually a science to picking colors for a website based on the purpose of …
Search Engine Honeymoon Period
The honeymoon period. That special time between newlyweds being madly in love and wanting to kill each other. For some, the honeymoon period is the best period of their marriage–they are happy, newly married, and off on their honeymoon vacation. This truly is a golden time. When it comes to search engines, the honeymoon period …
Most Important Aspect Of SEO
Singling out the most important aspect of SEO can be a somewhat impossible task. There’s hundreds of different factors that go into deciding where a website ranks. However in 2011 I think there is one factor that tops all others and that is content. Content, content, content. So what exactly is considered content for SEO? …
Small Business SEO Results
Here’s a look at a small business SEO campaign we’re managing for one of our clients. We did extensive on site optimization work and content creation for this client as well as extensive off page optimization and the results are paying off! This particular small business SEO campaign has been in progress for about 12 …
Branding Your Business With SEO
Obviously the number one goal of any SEO campaign is to drive more customers to your small business website which ultimately leads to more sales and more revenues. But there is an extremely important side effect of SEO that in some cases is equally as important as website traffic and that is branding. Branding is …
The Google Panda Update And Search Engine Rankings
Google Panda. One of the hottest topics for the last few months in SEO. The Google Panda update is a name given to the most recent Google algorithm changes. For those who don’t already know, Google utilizes a complex, secret algorithm that analyzes hundreds of aspects of websites to determine where they should rank in …
How To Get Reviews For Your Small Business
Let’s face it, it isn’t easy for a small business to get reviews online. I’ve seen excellent small businesses with a great product/service and a very strong online presence that have been in business for years only have 5 or 6 reviews online. I’ve seen other businesses that have made a few small mistakes and …
Why You Can Afford SEO
About 4 months ago we started working with a local electrician on a small sized SEO campaign consisting of 5 local keywords. To date we have all 5 of these keywords ranked on page 1. We usually don’t take about prices in our blog posts, but this client is paying only $297 per month for …
Small Business Motivation
When you own a small business it can sometimes be easy to lose motivation and energy. The stresses, pressures, and drawbacks that small business owners face can be downright depressing at times and leave your motivation on empty. If you find that your small business motivation is slipping, here are some excellent tips and tricks …
Small Business SEO Campaign Results
We’re all about the numbers, and chances are as a small business so are you. The luxury of unlimited marketing budgets that large corporations have simply don’t apply to small businesses, and we fully understand that. As a small business SEO company, we’re result orientated and we want to see your SEO campaign succeed and …
Properly Tracking Online Marketing Results
In just the past month we’ve had a bunch of new SEO clients sign up with us to help improve their website rankings. Virtually every single one of these clients has done some sort of alternative marketing for their website– whether Google Adwords, other Pay Per Click advertising, Pay Per Impression advertising, some have done …
