General SEO

Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, general SEO can help you improve your website’s ranking and reach. Discover the best practices, tools, and strategies from the leading SEO experts.

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General SEO5 min read

Your Guide to Understanding Google's Sitelinks Search Box

Have you ever Googled a website only to find a second Google search box embedded underneath the first? That’s a recently updated Google feature, the Sitelinks search box. It has the capability to streamline your own website’s search function, but opinions are mixed regarding the benefit it provides. Here’s the rundown on how Google’s Sitelinks search box works, both sides of the controversy about its usefulness, and how to maximize your own benefit.

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General SEO5 min read

Google’s Fetch and Render: Why It’s Important

Lots of folks think that SEO is about “gaming the system.” Well… that’s true of “black hat” SEO, but those of us who are trying to make pages easy for Google to crawl and evaluate are working towards what I like to think of as “natural” SEO. We put in all the right meta tags, make sure that your page is about what you tell search engines it’s about in your description and generally try to streamline things so that spiders won’t be caught in traps or leave pages entirely. So, let’s say that you have recently built a new website. Is it search friendly? Or more importantly, is it Google friendly? No, Google certainly doesn’t pay me and I don’t worship at the Google altar, either, but let‘s face it. Google brings the most traffic and for some reason, that traffic seems to convert. That’s why we want to please the gods of Google as much as we possibly can.

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General SEO8 min read

How To Identify and Fix a Google Penalty

Experiencing a large drop in rankings can be confusing and frustrating. It could also mean a significant loss in leads or profits for your website. If you don’t have the know-how or the means to fix the issue quickly, the future of your company’s income could be in danger. The first step in recovering from a large drop in rankings is identifying what type of penalty you have. Depending on the type of penalty there will be a very different set of steps you need to take towards regaining your traffic and rankings.

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General SEO4 min read

How To Use the Semrush API in Google Sheets

Semrush is my favorite competitive research tool that I use for everything from organic and paid keyword research to understanding market share in a specific region. A few months ago, I was working on a large project where it made sense to look beyond the Semrush interface and pull data directly from their servers via the Semrush API. The problem was that I’d never used an API before and wasn’t able to locate any resources for a noob like myself to get started. As luck would have it, I work with some pretty smart people who were able to point me in the right direction. Now that I understand the basics, I want to pay it forward and create a resource for others who use Semrush, but not familiar with using the API.

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General SEO4 min read

How To Use Excel for Data Collection on Ecommerce URLs

The following Excel trick is best used when you have data located inside of your URLs. This happens a lot when you have an ecommerce website that generates dynamic confirmation URLs after a purchase is made.In one particular case, one of our clients reached out to us hoping to find a PPC management company. He had a unique situation: he couldn’t afford to take his ecommerce store and migrate it to a modern CMS or even redesign it, but wanted to still have the ability to provide ecommerce data from Google Analytics. The problem was that installing ecommerce tracking within Google Analytics was going to require hundreds of hours of programming time, and he simply could not afford it. We were able to use our data-driven marketing techniques by using the following formula.

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