Inbound Marketing Blog

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. 

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. 

You may have decided that you want to outsource your search engine optimization (SEO) services in order to get your site to show up on search engines like Google. But, how do you find the right person or agency? What questions should you ask, and what answers should you be wary of as you start to have these conversations?

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.

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.