Samuel Edwards

Chief Marketing Officer at SEO Company

In his 9+ years as a digital marketer, Sam has worked with countless small businesses and enterprise Fortune 500 companies and organizations including NASDAQ OMX, eBay, Duncan Hines, Drew Barrymore, Washington, DC based law firm Price Benowitz LLP and human rights organization Amnesty International.

As a technical SEO strategist, Sam leads all paid and organic operations teams for client SEO serviceslink building services and white label SEO partnerships.

He is a recurring speaker at the Search Marketing Expo conference series and a TEDx Talker. Today he works directly with high-end clients across all verticals to maximize on and off-site SEO ROI through content marketing and link building. Connect with Sam on Linkedin.

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SEO for Intellectual Property Lawyers copy
Samuel Edwards

SEO for Intellectual Property Lawyers: Content Marketing Strategies for IP Attorneys

As an intellectual property lawyer, you need a flow of hot leads to keep your law firm running. Chances are, you’re already using some kind of digital marketing strategy, like Pay Per Click (PPC) ads, but if you aren’t using search engine optimization (SEO), you’re missing out. While paid advertising is an excellent way to generate leads, it stops working when you stop paying for ads. SEO, on the other hand, will help you generate a natural flow of leads long-term with minimal maintenance. How SEO gets leads for intellectual property (IP) lawyers There are always people looking for legal help with issues concerning patents, trademarks, and copyrights. There are also thousands of IP attorneys out there, all competing for the same clients. Since the market is highly competitive, it can be challenging to get your law firm seen. However, law firm search engine optimization can get your law firm’s website in front of more people who need your legal assistance. SEO is essential if you want leads who are searching for: Patent law firms  Trademark law firms Copyright law firms  Trade secrets law firms  Licensing law firms  And any other practice area involving intellectual property law firms  What is SEO for intellectual property lawyers? SEO is the process of optimizing your IP law firm’s website for online search. This involves optimizing your website to get search engines to start ranking your content better so it shows up in search engine results pages. For example, after receiving a false copyright claim on a website like Etsy, a user might search Google for information on how to fight false copyright claims. Chances are, your website isn’t one of the top search engine results, and may not even show up on the first 10 or even the first 100 pages. The law firms that have the top spots have spent a lot of time and money getting there. SEO is a requirement to get your website to show up for users searching for legal help concerning intellectual property. If you’re not familiar with SEO, the basic components are: Keyword research and implementation. Keywords are words and phrases people type into the search engines to find what they’re looking for, as well as related words and phrases. For example, “trademark law” is a main keyword, while “fighting a trademark lawsuit” would be a related phrase. You want your website to contain the words and phrases people are searching for so that search engines know your content is relevant to their search query. Local search optimization. Search engines are flooded with content from millions of law firms, and that makes it nearly impossible to get a top search engine rankings. Local SEO is the key to getting seen in search results and avoid competing with millions of law firms nationwide. When you optimize your website for local SEO, you’re telling the search engines what geographical locations you serve. When someone from your area searches for an IP attorney, non-local law firms will be excluded from the results. This drastically narrows down your competition and makes it easier to rank. Technical SEO. These are all the technical aspects of your website, like your headings, URL structure, alt tags, and schema markup. On-page SEO. This involves the factors you have full control over on your website. For example, technical SEO is part of on-page SEO, as well as your site content quality, internal links, image optimization, and page speed. Link building. Although link building has been around forever, it’s still a key ingredient in search engine optimization. However, today, it’s about quality over quantity. Content creation and content marketing. To rank in the search engines, you need content on your own website and you need to get content published on other people’s blogs to get backlinks that will increase your ranking and generate organic traffic. These are just several key components involved in search engine optimization that are a requirement for getting your IP law firm’s website visible in search results. Here’s a more detailed look at how law firm SEO can help you get leads. Keywords lay the foundation Keywords and phrases are the foundation of SEO because they play a central role in how search engines determine the topic and relevance of your website. For instance, there’s a difference between a site about trademark law and a trademark lawyer’s website. The former is informative, while the latter is offering actual legal services. The keywords you use throughout your website help search engines make this distinction. You want search engines to know you aren’t just an informational site, and that you offer legal assistance because that’s how you’ll show up in search results when people search for legal help. If search engines think you’re just another informational website, you won’t show up when people search for an IP lawyer. Local SEO reduces fierce competition Normally, you’d be competing with millions of other law firms all over the nation for search phrases like, “trademark attorney near me” and “help with filing a patent.” Thankfully, search engines, like Google, narrow down the pool of potential results for some searches based on geographical data, like zip codes. This makes it easier to rank your content. However, to take advantage of this, you need to optimize your website so that search engines can know what areas you serve. By adding a new page for every area you serve, and using zip codes along with the names of cities and counties, you can tell search engines exactly where you are locally. Technical SEO tells search engines your site is legit Technical SEO won’t do much to increase your ranking, but a poorly built site won’t rank because search engines will consider it low-quality. Unlike major Google ranking factors, like backlinks and content quality, technical SEO is more about getting the framework right. Some examples include: Proper use of title tags Good meta descriptions Adding alt tags to images Using featured snippets Adding schema markup Good page speed Technical SEO

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Samuel Edwards

SEO for Real Estate Lawyers: Fundamentals & Best Practices

For real estate lawyers, there’s arguably no better digital marketing strategy than search engine optimization, or SEO. Digital marketing, of course, is increasingly important in a world where people looking for real estate lawyers usually begin their search online. If you want to grow your real estate law practice, digital marketing is now a practical necessity. Law firm SEO, when executed properly, can increase your rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs), ultimately increasing the visibility of your real estate law practice, generating more organic traffic, and ultimately resulting in more converted leads. But how exactly do you practice SEO as a real estate lawyer? And why is it so valuable? Real Estate Lawyers and SEO: What’s the Point? Let’s start by addressing the high-level consideration: why should real estate lawyers practice SEO? The benefits of law firm SEO can be incredibly powerful for your legal practice. Ranking highly in searches relevant to real estate law means more people will see your practice, more people will visit your website, and more people will ultimately work with you. If you can dominate the competition in SERPs, you’ll earn the majority of real estate law clients in your area. SEO is also loved by real estate lawyers because of its inexpensiveness and accessibility, especially when compared to other digital marketing strategies. As you’ll see, the foundational elements of SEO are neither prohibitively complicated nor ridiculously expensive; simply creating content, building links, and occasionally auditing and tweaking things can be enough to help you rank higher in search engines. That said, it is important to have a solid high-level strategy in place. Some real estate lawyers also love SEO because of its long-term nature. It does take several months to get going, but once you have that momentum, it can continue paying off for years or even decades. Every asset you create for your SEO strategy will be functionally permanent, and as long as you keep executing a law firm SEO strategy, you can continue reaping the benefits. The Core Elements of SEO for Real Estate Lawyers The basic elements of SEO for real estate lawyers include:       The SEO vision. First, you need a vision for the SEO strategy you’re going to build. Who are your top competitors? Who are your target demographics? What types of keywords and phrases are your real estate law clients searching for? Of those keywords and phrases, which are the most important and which are merely secondary considerations? Once you have the blueprints in place, executing your SEO strategy becomes much easier.       Onsite technical SEO. You’ll also need to practice onsite technical SEO. Essentially, this means adjusting the code and presentation of your website so it’s more favorable to your brand in the eyes of Google and other search engines. Your website needs to function quickly and efficiently, and it should be organized and presented in a way that makes it easy for both search engine crawlers and users to understand.       Onsite content writing. If you know anything about law firm SEO, you probably know that content is an important constituent element of it. That’s largely because onsite content serves a few different purposes simultaneously. It allows you to optimize for specific keywords. It allows you to build your authority and credibility. It even gives you anchors on which you can build inbound links.       Link building and offsite content development. It’s technically possible to rank in search engines without aggressively building backlinks, but at the very least, backlinks should be a consideration in your SEO strategy. That’s because the more links you have pointed to your website, and the more authoritative those links are, the more authoritative your website will be seen to be. And of course, websites are ranked in large part based on authoritativeness.       Metrics and analysis. Finally, you’ll need to routinely monitor your metrics and analyze your performance. This way, you can figure out which tactics are working, which ones need to be abandoned, and which future strategies are going to help you succeed the most. To be fair, law firm SEO is a somewhat complicated strategy, so consider this list merely an introductory guide. How Real Estate Lawyers Get Started With SEO (Keyword Research and Beyond) How are you supposed to get started with SEO services for your real estate law firm? There are literally hundreds of search engine ranking factors to consider and hundreds of little tweaks you can make to improve your website. On top of that, to preserve and continue building your SEO strategy, you’ll need to make an ongoing commitment to develop content and build new links. But everything starts with an initial analysis. For most real estate lawyers, that means an exhaustive audit of your existing law firm’s website, detailing potential SEO problems so you can correct them one by one. This also includes a competitive analysis, so you know who the top real estate lawyers and law firms in your area are. Beyond that, you’ll heavily focus on keyword research, specifically tailored to real estate law firms. Your law firm SEO strategy will be guided by a list of strategically valuable keywords and phrases; you’ll optimize your website and content for these keywords and phrases so you can rank for them when people issue them as search queries. The best keyword targets are ones that are highly relevant to real estate law, high in search volume, and relatively low in competition. These are some example keywords and phrases law firms can target to help you start brainstorming:       Residential and Commercial Transactions       Landlord-Tenant Disputes       Zoning and Land Use       Property Development       Eminent Domain The Technical Side of SEO Services for Real Estate Lawyers After you’re done with keyword research and selection, you can turn your attention to technical onsite SEO services. As you might imagine, there are hundreds, if

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White Label Google Ads copy
Samuel Edwards

White Label Google Ads Management: Scaling with the Right Reseller Partner

When you offer pay-per-click (PPC) ad services to your clients, like Google Ads, it takes quite a bit of time to onboard clients, manage Google Ads accounts, check analytics, and make the necessary changes to improve click through rates. If your priority is to grow your business, that’s hard to do when you’re constantly weighed down with clients. There are only so many hours in a day, and at some point, you won’t be able to take any more clients. If you’re struggling to grow your business because you’re maxed out, or if you’d like to expand more easily, consider outsourcing your Google ad services to an experienced white label SEO reseller partner. A white label Google Ads agency will do all the work, while you resell the services as your own. Once you’re set up, the process is fully automated for you, and all you need to do is check in to see how each campaign is going so you can report back to your clients. The benefits of white label Google Ads Using white label Google Ads services will give you several advantages: Offer more services to your clients. Outsourcing Google Ads allows you to provide a wider range of digital marketing and advertising services to your clients without having to do the work yourself or hire an extra team. Many customers today expect marketing agencies to offer a full suite of services, and Google Ads are at the top of that list. The more services you offer, the easier it is to generate more clients. Scale your business with freedom. White label ads give you the flexibility and freedom to scale your services as needed without having to keep a full Google Ads team on payroll year round. The resources you’ll save can be reinvested into your business in other ways. Deliver better results to your clients. Running Google Ads campaigns can be difficult, especially for certain industries. If you do it wrong, you’ll waste your clients’ money and they won’t get much out of the deal. Running paid ads really is a science. Certain keywords are highly competitive, and it can be hard to know how and what to bid. When you hire a white label PPC agency to handle it for you, they’ll have experts working on your clients’ Google Ads campaign. If you want to impress your clients with bigger returns, a white label solution is exactly what you need. How paid search management works With white label paid search management services, your white label agency will do all the heavy lifting. You’ll sell Google Ads services to your clients like any other offering, and they will always report directly to you for updates and to request changes. On the back end, your white label partner will be working hard to build your clients’ PPC campaigns, optimize them for a better cost per click, and to drive more traffic directly to their website. Your white label Google Ads service provider will also manage all remarketing and retargeting campaigns as well. Remarketing helps to increase PPC conversion rates, and is an essential part of white label PPC services. Since it can require an advanced strategy to be successful, it’s best done by experts who know PPC inside and out. Here’s how remarketing works. Some people will click on an ad and instead of making a purchase, they’ll either bounce or go look around for other options. Remarketing will show ads only to those people who have clicked on a previous ad or interacted with an ad in some way. Over time, after they see the same ad impression over and over, they’ll be more likely to finally make that purchase. By offering remarketing services to your clients, you can get them better conversion rates, more sales, and a higher ROI. If you offer marketing services, you need to run Google Ads Almost every business owner serious about their brand will want to run paid ads at some point, and most will start with Google. As a matter of fact, around 65% of small-to-medium-sized businesses run their own Google Ads campaigns, and many of them are stuck and need help. When you expand your services to include Google Ads, you can acquire more clients who either just want help with ads or need other digital marketing services and want a full suite of services from one provider. While running ads on other platforms is a good idea, almost everyone wants to run Google Ads. Since the ads show up at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), above even the organic search results, many business owners use paid ads on Google to generate traffic without having to wait for their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts to start working. Depending on the brand, some businesses will do better with ads on Google over platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If you’ve never offered Google Ads management services to your clients before, white label services make it possible for you to add paid ads to your list of services right now. Whether you’ve been avoiding it to save money or resources, or you don’t know how to run ads for your clients, working with a white label SEO reseller partner will eliminate all of your concerns. You’ll have a highly qualified team of Google Ads experts bidding on the right keywords that will get your clients’ ads in front of their target market. Make SEO.co your white label Google Ads partner Successful Google Ads campaigns require expertise. If you want to offer paid ads to your clients and get them the results they deserve without having to hire an in-house Google Ads team, do your own keyword research or account set up, we’d love to be your white label partner. You manage your clients, we’ll manage your ads. It’s that simple. You’ll get a dedicated account manager who will provide premier white label PPC management for your clients. Contact us today to learn more about

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SEO for Immigration Attorney copy
Samuel Edwards

SEO for Immigration Attorneys: Content Marketing Strategies for Immigration Law Firms

It’s been said that the people will come if you build something. But that’s never been true when it comes to the Internet. You need to find your target demographic, sell them your unique value proposition, get them to your online storefront, and convince them to buy your immigration legal services. According to Forbes, there are around 1.09 billion websites worldwide. That number is growing steadily with 252,000 new websites going live daily. So, it’s an understatement to say that the average website is, proverbially speaking, a needle in a haystack. IBISWorld reports there were 17,588 immigration attorneys and lawyers in the U.S. last year, up 7.9% from the year prior. Assuming that most of these legal professionals have websites, you must consider how best to reach your target demographic and sell them your services. Again, just because you have a website doesn’t mean would-be legal clients will ever find you online. When people search online for help with visa applications, green cards, or citizenship, they want immigration lawyers with the right skills to achieve the desired objectives. But here’s the thing — people generally favor the lawyers at the top of the first page of search engine results.  They believe the lawyers at the top of the page are more trustworthy. After all — they reason — why would Google list certain lawyers at the top of page one if these experts weren’t the crème de la crème? While that’s the rationale of many, it’s a partially true perspective.  The reality is that the immigration lawyers listed high on the first page of search engine results aren’t just there because of their skills — as vital as skills are. They’re also there because of their successful search engine optimization strategies that align well with Google’s algorithms. So, your immigration law firm SEO strategy is essential to grow your practice. You must optimize your law firm’s website for keywords related to immigration law. While it’s not rocket science, there is a science to doing it well, finding leads, and converting them to clients. Here are some things to consider about effective SEO strategies for immigration law attorneys. Research Keywords Relevant to Immigration Law Firms Since you want potential clients to find your website, you must know what keywords they’ll type into online search engines. The chances are you can come up with some off the top of your head. People looking for immigration attorneys will want help with asylum, visa applications, deportation defense, green cards, and citizenship. So, focus on those keywords. But don’t stop there. You can find tons of keyword research tools online. Examples include — but aren’t limited to — Google Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, Ahrefs, and Semrush. Use these tools to find popular keywords your target demographic uses in online search engines. These specialized tools do more than find keywords applicable to people seeking immigration attorneys. You can use them to understand search intent, uncover new trends, learn about your target demographic, and more. An effective SEO strategy starts with keyword research. Often keyword research will lead to your finding ancillary and tangential terms (e.g. employment law) that could relate to what your ideal clients are searching for on the web. Website Optimization for Immigration Law Firms  Your next step is to optimize your immigration law firm website for SEO. Doing so effectively will ensure your law firm performs better on search engine results pages. You can do the following to accomplish this:  Designing an Effective Website: Eight in 10 consumers are open to spending more for a superior user experience. You can create a better website by, among other things, making it easy to navigate with well-thought-out menus, effective call-to-action buttons, and better sales funnels that guide people from the “leads” stage to the “clients” stage.  Optimize Content Strategy: A website optimization strategy must include a content marketing and SEO plan. You need SEO-friendly content that your target demographic finds interesting, useful, and relevant. It makes sense to publish content covering topics your target demographic searches for online. Print and video content make sense. And consider publishing content in other languages based on the ethnic populations in your area. Enhance On-Page SEO: On-page SEO is also essential. You can do this by optimizing images and URLs, adding internal links, improving page speed, optimizing headings, using meta descriptions, and using keywords strategically.  Speed Up Website Loading Time: Many would-be clients will abandon their searches if your website takes too long to load. It shouldn’t take more than two seconds to load — in a perfect world. While three seconds is considered okay, anything more than that won’t be tolerated by many people. They’ll go elsewhere. You can find free tools online to test loading speeds.  Provide Mobile-Friendly Site: Mobile devices account for around 50.48% of online traffic, while desktop devices make up 46.51%. Many people looking for immigration attorneys do so from small screens like smartphones or tablets rather than desktop computers. So, your strategy must ensure people using mobile devices can properly see, navigate, and interact with your website. Otherwise, that’s a lost opportunity.   On-Page SEO: On-page SEO includes pursuing link-building. That’s an SEO strategy where the goal is to get websites to link to your immigration law website. Linking with other reputable sites will improve your website’s performance on search engine results pages. Local SEO. Optimize your Google Business Profile (GBP) with proper reviews and local link citations. Focus on Local SEO Local SEO is about leveraging SEO to increase search visibility, boost brand awareness, and increase traffic for local companies, including your immigration lawyer site. This will factor into your keyword research. If you’re based in, say, New York, you’ll want to reach out to people who go to a search engine and type in search terms like “immigration lawyer in New York.”  As part of your local SEO strategy, it makes sense to create a Google My Business profile. It’s a way for businesses to manage their online presence. You

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White Label Facebook Ads copy
Samuel Edwards

White Label Facebook Ads: Benefits of Outsourcing Facebook Ads Management

To stay competitive in the digital marketing industry, you need to offer your clients a full suite of services, from search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing to website design and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. However, if you don’t have a full-time team of experts in all of these areas, you can’t offer the services in-house. That’s where a white label service provider comes into play. When you work with a white label Facebook Ads company, they’ll create and manage all of your clients’ Facebook Ad campaigns and all you need to do is manage your client. The white label Facebook advertising agency will do all the heavy lifting and you get to sell Facebook Ads services as if they are your own. How you’ll benefit from white label Facebook Ads There are many benefits to using white label services over trying to establish your own in-house team: Get results for your clients without hard work. Having a white label Facebook Ads agency means you’re handing off a complex task to skilled experts who can get results. You don’t have to spend months or years trying to become a paid ads expert. You won’t have to hire an in-house team. Hiring an in-house team to manage your Facebook Ads won’t be cost-effective since there will be some downtime, and you’ll need to pay your team a full-time salary no matter what. It’s also hard to recognize true Facebook Ad expertise on a resume if you don’t know what to look for. A white label partnership eliminates wasted payroll and hiring uncertainties. More freedom and flexibility. Let’s say you take on a Facebook Ads team full-time. In order to make it worth the cost of employing that team, you’ll need to constantly take on a full load of paid advertising clients. When you work with a white label Facebook Ads agency, you can scale your services up or down at any time, without having to worry about constantly adjusting the size of your team or altering their work hours. More money to reinvest in your business. The money you save through white label Facebook Ads services can be reinvested into your business in other ways. If you’ve been wanting to increase your own marketing budget, for example, selling Facebook Ads to clients through a white label agency will cost you less than if you did everything on your own in-house. You get to mark up the services. White label ad services are straightforward, making it easy for you to mark up the services in alignment with your agency’s brand and reputation. The more reputable you are, the higher you can charge. White label Facebook Ads professionals can get your clients better results If you’re not a Facebook Ads expert, but you’d like to offer advertising services to your clients, a white label partnership is the ideal solution. Having a team of experts working for you means you’ll be able to get results for your clients that you can’t get on your own. When your clients are happy, they’re more likely to continue doing business with you, recommend your services to others, and leave positive reviews online. All of these factors will contribute to the overall success of your business. How white label Facebook ad management works Hiring a white label paid search agency to create and manage ads for your clients is an easy, straightforward process. All services are flexible and customizable to meet your exact needs, and can be scaled when you take on more clients. Your white label partner will do all the heavy lifting, and your clients will report directly to you for updates and to request changes to their ads. On the back end, your white label experts will build your clients’ ads, optimize them for better visibility and more clicks, optimize the cost per click, and everything else that’s required. Your white label Facebook Ads service provider will also manage remarketing and retargeting campaigns, which is an excellent way to increase PPC conversion rates. Remarketing is an advanced strategy that involves showing ads to people who have already seen or clicked on an ad in the past, or visited your client’s website. Over time, as they see more of the same ads, they’ll be more likely to make a purchase.   Why managing Facebook advertising yourself is a bad idea So, why shouldn’t you just learn how to do Facebook advertising on your own? After all, there are plenty of tutorials out there, and everyone seems to be learning how to run Facebook Ads these days. In theory, that sounds great, but in reality, you probably don’t have nearly as much time or energy that it will take to become an expert. Plus, you’d be starting from scratch with no experience in optimizing ads for any industry, and it would take you years of experimenting to start getting decent results. It’s not fair to experiment with your clients’ money, and if you can’t get them results, it could be disastrous. You are the Facebook Ads expert with a white label partner There are many reasons business owners work with professional marketing agencies to run their paid ads. Usually, it’s because they’ve tried to run their own ads and didn’t get the best results. Although most businesses that invest in Facebook Ads do see a positive return, there’s room to do better. When you partner with a white label ad agency, you can advertise expert Facebook Ads management services and convert struggling business owners into paying clients. The average Facebook Ads conversion rate varies per industry, but it’s around 9%. That’s a lot better than email marketing, which converts at around 2-5%. However, the best results come when an ad campaign is managed by an expert with experience in optimizing conversions and cost per click (CPC). Most business owners can get some clicks here and there, and will generate some sales, but working with an ad expert can produce far better results. If you can offer expert services, most

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How to Market Your Business Online
Samuel Edwards

Online Marketing Guide: How to Market Your Business Online with SEO

Online marketing has and continues to change. The industry is moving in a clear direction: user experience matters more than anything. In this Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Business Online. we explore the nitty gritty of how you can combine SEO and online marketing to maximize the ROI of your paid and organic marketing campaigns. Without further ado, venture forth and start learning how to market your business online. SEO for Online Marketing SEO, or search engine optimization, is important to every business. It doesn’t matter if you run a small, local mom-n-pop business or a large corporation. But what exactly is it? SEO or organic online marketing is simply the process of setting up and optimizing your site so that it’s easily found (and favored) online by search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Most people, today, aren’t going to pick up a phone book when they need something. Instead, they’ll go online to search for it. If your business isn’t showing up in search results, you’re almost certainly losing customers to your competitors that do. Furthermore, users that find your website via organic, online search tend to be highly targeted, making them more likely to convert to customers. Most businesses realize they should have a website, but simply having a website is only the first step, and doesn’t guarantee that you’ll receive any significant traffic. Building an effective website that will provide a strong, consistent flow of leads or sales requires online marketing. For the purpose of online marketing, the phrase “if you build it, they will come” does not apply. Building a website without internet marketing it is akin to building a brick-and-mortar store in the middle of the Sahara desert. There are no roads that lead to it, no traffic driving by and seeing it. Even people who need your products or services can’t buy from you because they’ll never know about you. That’s where SEO improvements come in. SEO is like transplanting your brick-and-mortar store from the Sahara desert to a busy street in downtown New York. SEO makes your website visible to potential customers so that you can make sales. Take a moment to think about what someone might search for when looking for your business online. If you’re a dentist that specializes in sedation dentistry, possibilities could include: sedation dentist dentist that puts you to sleep Houston sedation dentist (replace Houston with your town’s name) Now, search Google for those terms. Does your business show up? If not, an SEO campaign, including multiple SEO hacks, is how you get there. Think about it… if you have a website and it’s not showing up in search results, it’s just the same as having customers drive right by your business while looking for what you offer, and not even know you’re there. Website Design and SEO Just as building a beautiful storefront isn’t the only factor that will result in sales, online marketing isn’t as simple as building a beautiful website. Sure, having a well-designed site is important for SEO; if visitors to your website don’t feel comfortable (perhaps, for instance, because there are too many ads), get frustrated trying to find what they need (due to a poor navigation structure) or any number of other factors that drive visitors away, then you probably won’t make the sale. But design is only the beginning. There are hundreds of factors that can affect your search rank, generally categorized as “on-site” factors (like design, UX, and content), and “off-site” factors (like external links, brand mentions, and social signals). In order for your website to be effective as an online marketing tool, both on-site and off-site SEO factors have to be included in your digital marketing strategy. On-site SEO SEO is divided into two main categories: On page SEO and off page. On-page SEO consists of the elements (such as text and meta data) that exist on your website, and in your website’s HTML code, over which you have control. Here are the three main things your on page SEO will need for effective search engine marketing: Structure The structure of your website is very important, not just from an SEO perspective, but also a user experience perspective. When building your website, ensure that your web designer is knowledgeable in SEO best practices or works in conjunction with an SEO professional. Structure includes: Optimization for mobile devices UI/UX Design URL structure Navigation (menu) structure Search functionality Page layout Internal linking Website Speed HTML & XML sitemaps Coding The code, the backbone of your website, needs to be clean and efficient if you want to win in internet marketing. Messy code will bring your website search engine rankings down and result in slower load times for your visitors. Usually, your website visitors won’t see the code, but it’s the only thing search engine crawlers will see. So, don’t cut corners with messy code. Ensure the code is up to date, and includes proper meta tags, headers, and descriptions. Using a template website, such as through the WordPress CMS, can almost guarantee that your code will be clean and efficient. However, you’ll still need to make occasional tweaks and conduct periodic SEO audits to ensure your site is running smoothly. Such tasks may include updating old content, deleting old content, updating your SEO plugins, and optimizing images. Content This is what your customers will see; the front-end text copy, images, and videos that are on your website. The content of your website is the most important part of proper SEO and online marketing, because search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms to ensure they’re delivering search results with the most helpful and accurate content. Your content should be fresh and engaging. Don’t make the mistake of writing purely “for the search engines” by stuffing unnatural keywords into the content and other old tricks that no longer work. Content should target topics you want to rank for, but it needs to be natural and fresh. Furthermore, it needs to be original,

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