SEO

There is a plethora of paid tools and software that can help with your SEO strategy, each with its merits. However, there is a free tool that is often overlooked or not given the credit it deserves.

That tool is Google Search Console, which offers several excellent features to enhance your SEO efforts by providing insight into how Google views your website.

Google Search Console isn’t just one tool but a collection of tools that provide information related to search traffic, crawling data, and search engine appearance. You may have heard of it under its previous names, Google Webmaster Central or Google Webmaster Tools.

To start using Google Search Console, you’ll need to complete a few steps, such as opening a Google account if you don’t already have one and verifying your website. Verification can be done in several ways, including using SEO plugins like RankMath.

You’ll also need to configure settings, such as whether your website should display with or without “www,” how often Google should crawl your site, and adding additional users if others work on your website.

Once set up, you can begin using Google Search Console’s reporting features and leverage the insights to adjust your SEO strategy accordingly. Read More

Every site owner should know that keywords play a massive part in SEO and are used extensively by Google to assess a website and subsequently rank it. Keywords can be used in multiple places as part of an SEO strategy such as your domain name, your content, anchor text in backlinks, and in meta tags. The question which then arises is ‘Do any of these keyword ‘locations’ carry more weight than the others in the eyes Google?’. The simple answer is ‘Yes’.

In the world of SEO, extensive testing takes place with some consultants having hundreds of websites which they use to test SEO strategies, adjustments, and ranking theories to see which make a positive difference to a website’s ranking. Many changes are subtle and minute such as editing a single meta tag. The accumulation of all this data has concluded that Google places more importance on keywords which appear in certain places than others.

The main principle behind that Google’s thinking on keywords is that the harder it is to use a keyword, then the more importance they will place on it. In other words, they give a higher-ranking score for the places it is most difficult to achieve the use of a keyword. Read More

Ask 10 SEO experts what SEO tools they use or recommend, and you will undoubtedly get 10 different answers. No one answer will be right, nor will any be wrong. The truth is that there are lots of tools available, and not one of them can provide you with all the information you might want for SEO purposes.

One thing that is certain; the tools which these consultants might be using will mostly be paid tools. The cost of each tool will range from as little as $10 per month to as high as $1000 per month for agencies who need high capacity and multiple user access for specific tools.

If you’re just getting started or do not like the idea of paying out for these tools, then you need to consider some tools that come from the very source that all these other tools are trying to second guess; Google. They have three tools which can help you with your website SEO, and they don’t cost you a single penny. Read More

There’s been a trend in recent years for ‘makeover’ TV shows giving our cars, our homes, our gardens, and even our pets the full treatment. In this article we are going to emulate those TV shows, by giving your website a makeover to improve its SEO, and in turn boost, its ranking on Google.

There are plenty of differences between giving your website a makeover compared to a house or a car. Firstly, it can be done with the minimum of disruption and in most cases without the website having any downtime. The changes that can be made require little more than spending time logged into your website admin panel and making the updates.

Your  SEO makeover can also be done without any expenditure, although you may want to obtain some software or plugins which can assist you. Finally, the time it is going to take for you to carry out most of the SEO makeover can be measured in minutes rather than hours. Your website’s SEO makeover consists of 7 specific tasks. Read More

A common mistake that many website owners make is thinking that improving their SEO ranking is something which can only take place away from their website. They clamour for backlinks and will make plans for a social media onslaught, and while these can help, a more sensible strategy would be to look at ways of improving the SEO on their own doorstep; in other words, their website.

One of the biggest benefits of working on your website to improve its SEO, is you are in full control of what you do. You can select which aspects of your website you want to work on, and in which order you do them.

You can choose the number of resources you want to employ in terms of time, effort, and possibly even funds, should you decide to outsource any of the work. Read More

The Internet Changed Everything for Dentists (and Every Other Business)

Rewind 20 years and the landscape for attracting new dental patients looked vastly different. You had your location, your signs, maybe some ads in the local penny saver or Val-Pak mailers. If you were really going big, a TV or radio spot. But the game has totally flipped in the digital age.

These days, when someone needs just about any service (dentists included), their first stop is the internet. They pull out their phone and do a quick search for “dentists near me.” In a matter of seconds, Google is going to serve up a list of practices in their area.

And you know what? The order of that list might as well be etched in stone. Research shows that the first couple of listings on page one of Google get over 60% of the clicks. The third gets about 10%, and it just keeps dropping off from there.

So if your practice’s website isn’t in those top few spots for your local area, you’re basically invisible online. All your marketing dollars get flushed (more on that in a minute). That new patient lead just opened up another tab and booked with one of your local competitors without a second thought. Read More