Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are two very important terms in the world of digital marketing and can mean a lot of new traffic for a business. One important principle is that all SEO is SEM, but not all SEM is necessarily SEO.
So, you've started optimizing your site for search engines. Your big question is: how long will it take for my SEO efforts to show results? It's a valid question, but a tricky one.
The question of whether a business should focus on organic or paid traffic when it comes to their website is a question nearly as old as Google itself. The answer to this question is, of course, it depends. It depends on the company's goals, its budget, the market, and many other factors.
Website graders and SEO tools offer website owners and marketers an opportunity to learn what's happening with their site, from site speed to errors and more. But which one is best? How do you know what information matters? Today we're looking at three popular tools: Hubspot's Website Grader, SEMrush's Site Audit Tool, and Google Search Console's error reports.
One of the first search engine optimization tactics you want to implement is to create a sitemap and then submit it to Google. Let's take a look at why you want to do that and how to submit it correctly.
SEO tools are useful for businesses and marketers alike. There are many tools available—including SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs, and others—so anyone wanting to track keywords, check website health, or conduct topic research has plenty of options to choose from.
Many of the SEO tools available have options that help you audit backlinks. While this can be a useful tool for tracking backlinks in general, it can be alarming for a lot of site owners or marketers who see things about "toxic" backlinks or warnings about harmful links pointing to your site. It's natural that while you're working hard to generate traffic to your site and leads from that traffic, you want to do whatever you can to keep the site in good health.
So if a tool is warning you that your backlinks are toxic, you should get rid of them, and the easy way to do it is by disavowing them, right?
Those short blurbs you see on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) below the page title is called a meta description. It's used to let searchers know what the page is about so they can decide whether to visit that page or not.
Keeping up with Google can sometimes be tricky—the search engine giant is constantly updating in an effort to improve searcher experience. They are not always forthcoming about what sorts of changes are in the works, nor do they give away any behind-the-scenes info that illuminates why or how they evaluate any one specific thing. Instead, we get the occasional blog post about core updates or changes to Ads, in addition to Q&A sessions with people like John Mueller, Google's Search Advocate, or Danny Sullivan, Search Liaison. Rarely is anything concrete, and sometimes info feels contradictory to best practices or what SEOs actually see in their work.
With more than 2 billion websites in the world and 2 trillion searches a year, Google has its work cut out for them when it comes to connecting users to the information they need. How does it manage all of that? With a complex set of algorithms, of course.
Here's what you need to know about Google's search algorithms and how they impact SEO.
