Inbound Marketing Blog

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? 

I don't know who needs to hear this, but it's time to stop having your interns, admins, and legal assistants also be responsible for your online marketing strategy. While your support staff is surely there to help with important aspects of the business (including marketing), the time they're spending creating social media posts and managing your Google PPC ads is taking away time that could be better served assisting with intake, research, and other important aspects of client work to assist your attorneys.

It's time to outsource your online lead generation and hire a digital marketing company that can strategically build your pipeline with ideal cases.

Something that we run into quite often is a lack of understanding between the basic principles of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). These are two very important terms in the world of Digital Marketing and can mean a lot of new traffic for a business. Not to get all philosophical on the situation, but we can confidently postulate that all SEO is SEM, but not all SEM is necessarily SEO.

A better way to think about it is to think of SEM as the CEO or owner of a company. That company employs SEO, Pay-Per-Click Advertising, Social Media Marketings, Content Marketing and Website Design. Each of the employees work together, and they all work for SEM.

Here we'll break down SEO and SEM for you so that you can better understand and distinguish the difference.

Keywords have traditionally been the focus of Google and other search engines since the mid-nineties. So after twenty-plus years of focusing search engine optimization efforts around a short list of keywords to work on and rank for, times have changed. With updated Google algorithms, the focus is no longer just on keywords, although those are still relevant. The greater focus is on topics that answer the questions that users are searching for via  desktop computers, mobile devices, and voice command devices. Let's delve into what this change means for you.

What Are Meta Descriptions?

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. 

If you've had your website for a while, chances are you have a significant amount of old content. For many sites, this means blog posts from the early days of your site until now. It's likely that some of that content is outdated, or that older posts are not even getting any traffic. 

One thing that is often overlooked by companies after their site has gone live is checking the website for broken links. Broken links on your site are links that lead to pages that don’t exist—you know, those 404 errors that you get when you’re trying to navigate somewhere.

You may have decided that you want to hire out SEO services in order to get your site in the best possible shape for organic search. So, how do you find the right person or agency? What questions should you ask, and what answers should you be wary of?