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According to a survey by Marie Haynes, many SEOs still employ guest posting as an SEO tactic. 44% of respondents answered ‘no’ when asked if they use guest posting for SEO purposes, whereas 32% answered ‘yes’ and 12% answered ‘sometimes.’

Google declared in 2014 that guest posting was dead for SEO reasons and has penalized many guest posting networks since then. Google said in 2021 that it has many methods to detect and filter out guest posts, urging SEOs to refrain from following those links and declaring them worthless.

Despite Google’s guidelines explicitly prohibiting guest posting for SEO purposes, there are still a lot of SEOs who do so.

Forum discussion found on X.

Clark Taylor: Guest blogging has been terminated, effective January 20, 2014, by Matt Cutts. He believes you need to know the guest blogger personally to publish their content. Cutts agrees that guest blogging is still relevant for various reasons, including branding, exposure, and expanded reach, as long as it is published on quality websites. After some uproar, Cutts conceded that guest blogging might be helpful for various reasons, including exposure, branding, increased reach, and community building. He feels that most people can figure out whether a blog post is just an SEO ploy or a quality piece of content if they’re reasonable. However, Google has improved at detecting whether a blog post is SEO-focused. There is still value in promoting your business or your expertise on other relevant, high-quality sites for branding and exposure, as well as some SEO benefit.

Joy Sikdar: Guest posting is against Google’s policies, but it still works. Is that true? If SEOs guest posts, Google will be in big trouble, correct? Guest posting is not permitted. What is your profession?

Muhammad Junaid: There are still three paid ads showing in that screenshot.

Myung Hwan Hong Replied: Paid ‘dofollow’ links are not just myths; they are as clear and official as described in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. According to the guidelines, Google does not permit paid links unless they are designated ‘nofollow, sponsored, or U.G.C.,’ all of which are paid traffic and advertisements, not tactics to improve search rankings.

Google uses algorithms to detect shady link-building patterns to determine whether a website is purchasing links. Their ‘human team’ and ‘human investigation’ constantly monitor for Google violations. Google’s algorithms can quickly analyze a site’s linking behavior by looking at the links and characteristics of the pages that signal them to Google. They notify Google of violations through a ‘human team’ and ‘manual action,’ and it’s difficult for you to outsmart them ‘forever’ if you do SEO according to Google E.A.T. and real user engagement. Google’s system no longer uses traditional algorithmic systems such as Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird as of 2022. Google has invested heavily in A.I. for the last decade, and their Panda algorithms have been retired mainly because Google has much more sophisticated technology than Panda.

Ammon Johns Replied: It’s OK to do guest posting for traffic, as long as you don’t use ‘nofollow’ links. They specifically say not to do guest posting for links or links that only affect search engines.

Ammon Johns: I’ve been having this discussion with Google employees for years, and things have stayed the same since the days of Matt Cutts. It all depends on how/what you define as ‘guest posting,’ whether you’re the writer or the publisher. Can you program a machine to distinguish between a freelance writer who gets published in The Times without working for it or a guest post? It should be pretty easy for a human to give several answers, most of which imply what I consider a ‘guest post,’ but creating a single rule that suits all cases and scenarios will be challenging.

Creating a high-quality article for a site that doesn’t employ you full-time is perfectly fine, regardless of whether it is considered high-end guest posting. On the other hand, sites that publish any old junk without editorial concern for quality or utility, whether it is their post or one written by a guest, are doing everything wrong.

Joamuk: These answers need more context, so we cannot deduce why guest posting is not occurring. The number of guest postings might increase if cost were no longer an issue for them—Google fear/cost, etc.

David S Freid: my company and I have never supported P.B.N.s or other methods not supported by Google. (without G’s support)

Joamuk Replied: What is your preferred method for earning backlinks if you (or your colleagues) don’t participate in guest posting?

Kes Phelps Replied: Creating content people want to link to is what I do.

Joamuk Replied: It only sometimes works well in some niches.

Myung Hwan Hong Replied: To summarize, the issue is that it doesn’t matter whether or not there are people who don’t link to something. While many new content marketers need help, paid guest posts to have negligible value on spammy websites (sites filled with low-quality content and paid guest post buses). You can boost organic linkages by publishing content on shoulder niches, where you can find many liberators. It appears to function for a short period and get some traction. Still, in the long run, the ranking will surely tumble again, and you will have to live with the risk of the Google penalty for regular networking with shady blog networks that don’t exist for humans but do for selling links.

Joamuk Replied: I’m not sure what you mean by shoulder niches, but it’s something similar to the original niche but with better potential.

Kes Phelps Replied: Which areas are you having difficulty with?

Snuffy: I still receive at least a dozen monthly guest post offers. I mark all of them as spam in Gmail. After looking at numerous of them, I realized that none were worth the time it would take to read the review and create a page for them. Many “product reviews” and “ultimate guides” are published on prominent websites. I believe that many of these pieces of content were submitted to the publisher by third-party writers (just like a “guest post”) and consider them to be of “low quality” and “inaccurate content.” Even so, these pages are often found on the first page of Google SERPs for commercial queries, typically in the top five positions. I think these pages are no different from “guest posts.” In addition, these pages lack E.A.T.

When I hear Google declare that they use E.A.T. to create every SERP and that guest posting is dead and that they discard poor quality content, I question if Google is observing the amount of junk that comes through their SERPs or if they favor specific content formats so much that they give anything with that format a ‘free pass.

Read next: Google Search Essentials is Replacing the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Reach out to one of our SEO experts at Pushleads to schedule your FREE consultation TODAY!

 

Choosing the Right Strategy

With Google Ads, it’s all about choosing the right strategy. Using a solid strategy will increase your conversions, lower ad costs, and take your performance to the next level. Do you know what you’re doing? If you don’t, you can blow through your entire budget in just a few days. But, making the right moves means boosting your campaign performance to new heights. One study from Medium found that changing Google Ads bidding strategies lead to a 142% increase in conversions. In the post, we’ll look at different types of Google Ads bidding strategies, and how to use them to your advantage.

Google Ads Bidding Strategies

Some users prefer to use the exact same ad strategy for all campaigns, while others opt for more flexible strategies. Always keep in mind that you’ll need to use multiple strategies to target your audience.

One way to stay focused is to use bid strategies on different campaigns. Using different bid strategies allows you to set up different bids for each campaign, so you can create a more efficient ad spend. You can set bids for a fixed price, a fixed cost, or bid on a CPA. Bid strategies also give you the ability to specify how many impressions you’re willing to pay for, and the total budget. But, most importantly, you can set bids to match your budget, and the resulting ads are guaranteed to have the exact same results. Another strategy that many marketers use is to split the Google Ad budget across several bidding strategies.

Google Ads Bidding Strategies

Some users prefer to use the exact same ad strategy for all campaigns, while others opt for more flexible strategies. Always keep in mind that you’ll need to use multiple strategies to target your audience.

One way to stay focused is to use bid strategies on different campaigns. Using different bid strategies allows you to set up different bids for each campaign, so you can create a more efficient ad spend. You can set bids for a fixed price, a fixed cost, or bid on a CPA. Bid strategies also give you the ability to specify how many impressions you’re willing to pay for, and the total budget. But, most importantly, you can set bids to match your budget, and the resulting ads are guaranteed to have the exact same results. Another strategy that many marketers use is to split the Google Ad budget across several bidding strategies.

The Cost-per-Click (CPC) Bid Strategy

The CPC bid strategy is the most straightforward. You bid on your ad and wait to see what Google will give you back in return. Click-through rate (CTR) is the most important metric for your ads, so increasing your CTR will increase your conversions, and CTR is directly related to CPC. Every type of CPC bid strategy works, and it’s all based on how Google chooses to show ads to the searchers it’s tracking. The keyword you target is the only thing they’ll factor into this decision. As long as you’re adjusting to your target keyword, this strategy will yield you the best results.

The Target Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) Bid Strategy

One of the simplest bidding strategies is the Target Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) Bid strategy. This strategy uses a combination of bid prices, ad position, keywords, and ad copy. It’s a very popular approach, with Google Ads showing over 15 billion in total ads for this bidding strategy. Target cost-per-acquisition bids work best with ad copy that is simple and actionable.

For example, if you want to sell tickets to a music concert, you might write in your ad copy:

Join www.buy.ticketleap.com and get tickets to the sold-out Drake concert on Wednesday. Buy a ticket to the sold-out Justin Timberlake concert on Tuesday.

This simple copy is simple and measurable. By adding this simple keyword, your conversion rate is going to be much higher.

The Target Cost-per-impression (CPM) Bid Strategy

CPM bidding is the simplest of all Google Ads strategies, and it’s the most inexpensive way to run a targeted ad campaign. The CPM model only requires a simple divider: Cost-per-impression (CPI) is the amount you’re willing to pay per impression on your ads. The conversion rate (CTR) is the number of conversions a user experiences on your ad. You should use Google Ads CPC bidding when you have a very low CTR and your CPI is high. To increase your CPC, start by lowering your CTR. This is known as “channel regression.” Use this conversion rate calculator to analyze your CTR. A low CTR indicates that your ads are getting lost in the noise. Once you know your CTR, you can go back to the conversion rate and start decreasing your CPI. For example, if your CTR is 0.

The Quality Score Bid Strategy

Another type of Google Ads bidding strategy is the Quality Score Bid strategy. Quality Score Bids are a great way to increase conversion rates by making your bids more competitive. It works like this: Under Quality Score Bids, you bid below the minimum bid (typically $0.30 or $0.50). After your bid, you’re evaluated against competitors. If you beat their bid by more than $0.05, you’ll be marked “High Quality.” If you beat it by less than $0.05, you’ll be marked “Low Quality.” This is a very effective bidding strategy for the campaigns that are easily performing (and have a high potential for higher conversion rates). To learn more about Quality Score Bids, check out this article from Criteo.

Using the Right Strategy

Before you go all-in on any marketing strategies, make sure you’re using the right ones. Your Google Ads strategy is crucial to growth and helps you gauge the right balance between conversions and costs. If you don’t get your strategy right, your ads will be too expensive, and you’ll be wasting time and money.

What’s Your SEO Score?

Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.

If you are the victim of a negative SEO campaign, John Mueller of Google gives you pointers on how to handle it.

Someone believes they are the target of a negative SEO campaign and is seeking assistance. He responds when someone asks Google Search Advocate John Mueller how to handle negative SEO attacks, such as rivals building spammy links to his domain. This is the issue that Mueller addresses in the r/SEO forum.

Ignore the problem, Mueller says. Here is his complete answer:

“I’d disregard them.”

 

“Consider it this way. If your rivals are competent, they won’t build links for you. The links won’t contain any effect if your competitors are incompetent.”

 

According to Mueller, a competitor competent enough to build links probably wouldn’t waste their time with negative SEO attacks. Why would someone build links to a competitor’s site? That is Mueller’s response, which is direct and to the point.

Google ignores numerous links, such as low-quality links that a malicious actor may create in large quantities to harm a competitor’s rankings. Website owners and SEOs, therefore, should not be concerned about such assaults, as Google will not count the links against a site’s rankings.

Although negative SEO has been a topic of discussion for years, Google’s position on the subject is worth reviewing again. With so many search updates released in recent years, it is worth revisiting Google’s approach to this matter.

That tool is designed to help you recover from manual penalty actions. According to Mueller’s advice in the Reddit thread, using the disavow tool is consistent with his previous advice. Furthermore, he has previously stated that you should take your time disavowing spammy links if you are worried about negative SEO. Google ignores blatantly spammy links, so there is no need to disavow them.

According to voting on Twitter earlier this year, most SEO professionals don’t utilize the disavow tool on spammy links. There is a lot of confidence in Google’s capability to handle them automatically. However, there is no harm in using the disavow tool if it makes you feel more comfortable.

Read Next: Google Search Essentials is Replacing the Google Webmaster Guidelines

CLICK HERE to schedule your FREE consultation TODAY!

What’s Your SEO Score?

Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.

Learn about the complete history of Google’s Penguin algorithm and how it affected SEO practice.

The Penguin algorithm was released by Google ten years ago, and since then, the link-building approaches have become less common. Over the years, the algorithm has been updated several times, and now it is an integral part of Google’s algorithm. Penalties are still present, albeit less frequently than before, and may be either partial or complete.

Google says it usually ignores many poor-quality links online. However, it is still vigilant for unnatural patterns such as link schemes, private blog networks, link exchanges, and unnatural outbound linking behavior.

Penguin Algorithm Introduction

 

Google officially launched the “webspam algorithm update” in 2012 to fight against link spam and manipulative link-building techniques. Matt Cutts, head of the Google webspam team, later dubbed the Penguin update algorithm.

There is no explanation of where the name Penguin came from for Google’s algorithm, but there is a good chance that it came from the same source as Panda’s name, which came from one of the engineers involved with it.

Penguin naming theory is one of my favorites because it references The Penguin from Batman DC.

Before the Penguin algorithm, link quantity had a more substantial influence on a website’s ranking when Google crawled, indexed, and evaluated them. Because some low-quality websites and content received higher rankings on organic search results pages than they should have, link volume played a more significant part in determining a website’s ranking.

Search results pages ranked websites and pieces of content using these scores, and some low-quality websites appeared in more prominent positions than they should have, resulting in these scores being used to rank websites.

What Drove Google To Create Penguin?

Google’s only tool to eradicate poor-quality content has been the Panda algorithm. In addition, the Penguin algorithm was created to help stop the same thing. The Penguin algorithm was created to prevent black hat link building, which has become popular recently. Cutts said at the SMX Advanced 2012:

“We conceived of Penguin as a way to target low-quality content. Panda was the first such tool; afterward, we noticed that spam was still prevalent.”

Penguin was created to reduce the number of spammy links by refining the method by which websites and web admins earn links. Penguin observes how links are earned and processed to downrate manipulative and spammy ones to ensure that natural, authoritative, and relevant links are rewarded.

Google looks at the site’s incoming links but not the outgoing ones. Penguin only looks at the site’s incoming links.

The Initial Launch and Impact

Google estimated that Penguin affected over 3% of search results when Penguin was first released in April 2012. In May 2013, Penguin 2.0, the algorithm’s fourth revision (including the initial release), impacted about 2.3% of all queries. On release, Penguin was said to oppose two specific deceits, particularly link schemes and keyword stuffing. In general, link schemes categorize manipulative link-building techniques, including exchanges, paid links, and other unnatural link tactics described in Google’s link scheme documentation. The initial Penguin release also targeted keyword stuffing. A practice that has since become connected with the Panda algorithm (considered a content and site quality algorithm).

Major Google Penguin Updates And Refreshes 

Penguin has seen many updates and improvements since it was first released in 2012 and potentially several other undocumented algorithm updates.

March 26, 2012: Google released Penguin 1.1.

Google was refreshing its data for the first time since the Penguin algorithm launched. Websites that had previously been affected and had cleaned up their link profiles were seeing some recovery, while others that were missed the first time around saw an impact.

October 5, 2012: Google launched Penguin 1.2.

The English language, as well as international queries, were affected by this data refresh.

May 22, 2013: Google Penguin 2.0 was released.

Penguin 2.0 was a more sophisticated version of the Penguin algorithm, and it changed how the algorithm affected search results. Around 2.3% of English queries were affected, as well as other languages proportionately. This was the first Penguin update that looked beyond the website homepage and top-level category pages for evidence of link spam being directed to the website.

October 4, 2013: Google Penguin 2.1 was released.

Google provided no official explanation for the refresh to Penguin 2.0 (2.1) on October 4 of the same year. Still, data suggests that the 2.1 data refresh improved how deeply Penguin inspected websites and crawled further and whether spammy links were present. 1% of queries were affected.

October 17, 2014: Google launched Penguin 3.0.

Google+ user Pierre Far revealed in a post that although this update was marketed as a significant innovation, it was, in fact, another data refresh. Those harmed by previous updates could escape and recover, while many others who had used spammy link practices and had evaded the previous impacts saw an impact. Far said it took “a few weeks” to disseminate fully. Less than 1% of English search queries were affected by this update, Far said.

September 23, 2016: Google launched Penguin 4.0.

Penguin’s last update was released almost two years after the 3.0 refresh. The most significant alteration with this version was that Penguin became a component of the fundamental algorithm. When an algorithm becomes an integral part, it does not imply that its functionality will be altered or changed significantly.

Penguin runs with the core, monitoring websites and connections in real-time. You can see reasonably immediate results from your link building or rehabilitation efforts. This indicates that Google’s perspective on the algorithm has altered, not the algorithm itself.

Penguin Version 4 was less generous in devaluing backlinks than the previous Penguin updates, which penalized the backlinks themselves. Although link-based penalties are still prevalent, they still exist, according to research and my personal experience. Seeing

SEO professionals‘ data (for example, Michael Cottam’s) and algorithmic downgrades through disavow files lifted after Penguin 4.0 reinforces this notion.

Algorithmic Downgrades of the Google Penguin

Web admins and brands that had used manipulative link-building methods or filled their backlink profiles with copious amounts of low-quality links soon noticed a drop in organic traffic and rankings after the Penguin algorithm was released. Not all Penguin downgrades were site-wide—some were partial and affected certain keyword groups that had been heavily spam and over-optimized, such as essential products and, in some cases, even brands.

It has been found through research and experimentation that Penguin’s impact cannot be eliminated using a 301 or 302 redirect and that problems may arise if domains are switched. The old one was redirected to the new one. John Mueller of Google Webmasters Forum concurred that using meta refreshes from one domain might cause issues.

“Meta-refresh redirects should generally be avoided, as they could mislead users (and search engine spiders, who might mistake them for an attempt at redirecting). “

Read next: The Significance of Google’s May 2022 Fast Core Update.

Recovery from Google Penguin

Even though Penguin is now a component of Google’s main algorithm, the disavow tool has still been an asset to SEO practitioners. Reports and theories have been published arguing that disavowing links does not help with link-based algorithmic downgrades or manual penalties, but Google employees have publicly dismissed this theory.

Google recommends that the disavow tool be used only as a last resort when fighting link spam. Disavowing a link is far less time-consuming (and more effective) than seeking reconsideration for worthy links.

A Disavow File Must Have:

To remove all of the wrong links from damaging your website; you can provide Google with a disavow file, which tells them to ignore all of the links in the file. Because of this, Penguin, for example, will no longer negatively impact your website rankings.

However, too many quality links in your disavow file will no longer benefit your rankings. You may include notes in your disavow file for reference but not for other purposes. You may include links alone or not include anything at all.

Google processes the disavow file without ever reading it, so don’t bother including notes about when URLs were included or how to contact the webmaster about getting a link removed. Some find it helpful to include internal notes.

After you’ve submitted your disavow file, Google will send you a confirmation. However, Google will not immediately discount those links until the disavowed file has been processed. Google will still have to crawl those individual links you included in the disavow file, but the disavow file itself won’t prompt Google to crawl those pages. Therefore, submitting the disavow file won’t instantly recuperate you.

Unfortunately, Google Search Console still reports discounted and non-discounted links, so there is no way to determine which ones have been discounted.

Google will replace your old disavow file with your new one if you’ve submitted one. Thus, be sure to include any previously disavowed links in your new disavowed file if you’ve previously disavowed links.

Google Search Console always provides a current disavow file download.

For example, if you want to sell tickets to a music concert, you might write in your ad copy:

Join www.buy.ticketleap.com and get tickets to the sold-out Drake concert on Wednesday. Buy a ticket to the sold-out Justin Timberlake concert on Tuesday.

This simple copy is simple and measurable. By adding this simple keyword, your conversion rate is going to be much higher.

Domains vs. Disavowing Individual Links

Choose to disavow links on a domain level rather than individual links, as long as there are some exceptions where you would want to disavow individual links. For example, you would want to disavow individually specific links on a significant website with quality and paid links.

Google will discount a link on your site based on a domain-level disavowal for most links. However, Google must crawl one page on that site to discount the link on your site.

When using domain-based disavows, you do not have to worry about links being indexed as www or non-www, as the domain-based disavow considers this.

How To Find Your Backlinks

A link audit and removal or disavowal of low-quality or spammy links may be necessary if you think your site has been negatively impacted by Penguin.

The Google Search Console backlink catalog lets site owners see all the links to their site, but be cautious because it also includes nofollowed links. Whether a link is followed has no impact on your website. However, be mindful that the site may remove the nofollow without warning at some point.

Some websites block third-party bots from crawling their site, so they cannot show you every link to your website. Some high-quality, well-known sites refuse to waste bandwidth on those bots, but some spammy websites use this technique to conceal their low-quality links.

In addition to monitoring backlinks, it’s essential to stay on top of any negative SEO attacks since our industry is not always honest. Many people refer to ‘negative SEO’ as the reason behind their site being caught by Google for having poor links. When your site gets caught by Google for having spammy links, your competitor may have purchased them and pointed them to your site.

On the other hand, Google is pretty good at spotting this type of issue, so most website owners do not need to worry about it. Consequently, it is a good idea to proactively use the disavow tool without a clear sign of an algorithmic penalty or a manual action notice.

However, 38% of SEOs maintain that they never disavow backlinks, according to a survey conducted by SEJ in September 2017. Examining a backlink profile and determining whether each linking domain is a link you want or not is not a simple job.

Link Reduction Outreach

Before disavowing wrong links, Google recommends that you attempt to reach out to websites and web admins to request the removal of those links.

Google recommends that you never pay to remove links. Include those links in your disavow file and move on to the following link removal, rather than paying to have them removed.

Link-based penalties can be recovered through outreach, but it is not always necessary.

The Penguin algorithm evaluates the link profile and the proportion of high-quality, natural links versus spammy ones. A penalty may still be applied even if it is only applied to specific over-optimized keywords (Impact). Link maintenance and monitoring should keep you safe.

Some webmasters go so far as to include “terms” within the terms and conditions of their website and actively seek out websites they believe should not be linked to them.

Determining Link Quality

Many people have difficulty evaluating link quality. Please do not assume it is high quality because a link comes from a .edu website. There are plenty of spammy .edu domains on which students sell links from their websites, which should be disavowed.

There are also many hacked sites on .edu domains that have low-quality links. Do not make automatic assumptions about domain types. However, you should not automatically assume all TLDs and ccTLDs, just as you should not with .edu domains.

Google has stated that domain names alone do not impact search rankings. You must, however, examine each case individually. There’s a long-running joke that no quality pages have existed on any .info domains because so many spammers have used them. However, several excellent quality links are coming from that domain, which illustrates the importance of evaluating links individually.

Be Careful Of Links From Presumed High-Quality Sites

Be careful when evaluating links from specific websites; just because you have a link from Huffington Post or the BBC doesn’t mean that Google will think it’s a great link. Don’t just look at the list of links; determine whether each link is of high quality.

Those sites also sell links, though some masquerade as advertisements or has rogue contributors selling links in their articles. These kinds of links from high-quality websites have been confirmed by many SEOs as being low-quality, as they have received manual actions that include links from these websites in Google’s examples. Furthermore, they may have contributed to a Penguin issue.

There are also a lot of sites that are selling links, albeit some of them are disguised as advertisements or are being sold by rogue contributors within their articles. Many SEOs have recognized these links from trustworthy sites as low quality precisely due to their inclusion in Google’s link manual actions. It’s also possible that they might contribute to a Penguin issue.

In the future, more links will be flagged as low-quality because of increased advertorial content. Always investigate links, particularly if you plan on keeping any of them just because they are on a reputable site.

 

Promotional Links

Be careful when using paid links; they may still be considered promotional links. Even if money is not exchanged for the links, paid links are still risky to use.

Google views any link exchange for a free product for review or a discount on products as a paid link. Years ago, such links were acceptable, but now they must be nofollowed.

A link still provides value, but rather than aiding rankings, it provides brand awareness and traffic. For example, you may have links from old promotional campaigns that now hurt a site.

Individual link assessment is vital for all these reasons. You want to remove the poor quality links because they are negatively impacting Penguin or might cause a future manual action, but you don’t want to remove the good links, which are helping your search rankings.

When links are not nofollowed, they can also trigger the manual action for outgoing links on the site.

 

No Sign Of Penguin Recovery?

It’s common for webmasters to notice no rise in traffic or rankings after they’ve gone to great lengths to clean up their link profiles. The following are some possible reasons for this:

  • Before being penalized by the algorithm, the site experienced an unjustified (and likely short-lived) boost in traffic and rankings from bad backlinks.
  • No attempt has been made to obtain higher-quality backlinks once links have been removed.
  • Some harmful backlinks still need to be disavowed/removed, and the proportion of removed links is not high enough.
  • The problem wasn’t based on links, to begin with.

Ranking at the top for your high-traffic keywords right after Penguin is lifted will probably be out of reach. Many site owners erroneously believe they will begin ranking at the top for their most popular terms as soon as Penguin is lifted.

Many site owners have trouble evaluating link quality, so you cannot expect your rankings to be as high as they were before. In addition, since some high-quality links are inevitably disavowed, contributing to higher rankings, you cannot expect everything to be as good as before.

There are several things to consider when optimizing for Google. The first is that Google’s ranking algorithm constantly changes, so things that benefited you before might not be as much now, and vice versa.

Myths and Misconceptions About Google Penguin

It’s lovely to be involved in the SEO industry, as it’s a lively and dynamic community, and new findings and theories are posted online every day. Of course, this has led to several misunderstandings and myths about Google’s algorithms. Penguin is no different.

A few things about the Penguin algorithm have been misunderstood over the years.

It is a myth that Penguin is a penalty. The biggest myth about the Penguin algorithm is that it is an algorithmic adjustment (Google’s term for a manual action). Penguin is purely algorithmic and cannot be removed by Google. Although both algorithmic changes and penalties can result in big website rankings declines, there are some significant differences between them.

When a member of Google’s webspam team responds to a flag, checks, and decides to penalize a website, a penalty (or manual action) occurs. You will receive a notification via Google Search Console relating to this penalty.

In addition to reviewing your backlinks and disavowing the spammy ones that go against Google’s guidelines, you must also submit a reconsideration request to the Google webspam team if you are hit with a manual action. If successful, the penalty will be lifted; if not, you must reconsider your backlink profile.

Penguin downgrades occur without Google team members becoming involved. It is all done algorithmically. Previously, you would have to wait for an update or refresh, but Penguin now operates in real-time, making recoveries happen much faster (if enough remediation work has been accomplished).

It’s a myth that Google will inform you if Penguin hits your site. It is false that the Google Penguin algorithm notifies you when it has been applied. The Search Console won’t notify you if your rankings have dropped as a result of the application of the Penguin.

Algorithms don’t inform you if you’ve been penalized, but Penguin recovery is similar to penalty recovery in that you are notified if you have been penalized.

It is a myth that disavowing Bad Links is the only way to reverse a Penguin Hit. Google Penguin evaluates the proportion of good-quality links versus those of a spammy nature. This approach is an utter waste of time and resources, and it is also time-consuming.

It may be wiser to focus on generating more high-quality links to your website rather than removing the low-quality ones. This will significantly affect Penguin’s percentage more than if you remove them manually.

It’s a myth that you can’t recover from Penguin. Sure, you can recover from Penguin. However, you must be familiar with Google’s unpredictable algorithms.

Instead of trying to remove the Penguin penalty from your website, focus on gaining quality, editorially-given links. By forgetting all of your current links and beginning to gain new ones, you will make it easier to release your website from Penguin’s grasp.

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What’s Your SEO Score?

Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.

In the digital marketing world, businesses often choose between investing in paid advertising or search engine optimization (SEO) for faster returns on investment (ROI).

However, the truth is that SEO and paid advertising are not mutually exclusive. Studies have shown combining both can produce better results than relying on one channel alone.

To shed some light on the topic, Dean asks our SEO expert, “How do you suggest a business invest in paid instead of SEO?” Here are some recommendations to help you maximize ROI through a combination of both paid advertising and SEO.

Open Communication Channels

The key to successfully implementing both channels is ensuring that the SEO and paid advertising teams communicate effectively. This is especially crucial when different agencies handle the two business channels.

Agencies should work together and understand each other’s boundaries to avoid unnecessary competition. It’s also important for in-house teams to sit down and talk regularly to avoid missing out on opportunities.

Avoid Cannibalization

Cannibalization occurs when SEO and paid advertising campaigns bring in the same visitors, resulting in duplicate costs. To avoid this, it’s important to have open communication channels between both teams. Typically, branded keywords are the worst offenders for cannibalization.

While it’s true that visitors will find your site when searching for your brand, investing in branded paid search can improve conversions and ROI. However, it’s essential to analyze data for both scenarios to determine the best strategy for your business.

Maximize Your ROI

SEO and paid advertising are complementary channels that can boost your ROI. SEO and paid advertising campaigns can affect your click-through rate on search engine results pages.

Thus, it’s important to have both teams collaborate and test to determine the best strategy for your business. It’s never a good idea to cut your SEO for PPC or vice versa, as both channels have their place.

By running both channels together, you can maximize your ROI, improve your online visibility, reach new customers, and drive sales.

Conclusion

Businesses shouldn’t have to choose between SEO and paid to advertise when investing in digital marketing. Both channels have unique benefits, and when combined, they can produce better results than relying on one channel alone.

Open communication channels between SEO and paid advertising teams are essential to avoid cannibalization and maximize ROI.

In addition, testing and analyzing data can help determine the best strategy for your business. By running both channels together, you can enhance your online visibility, reach new customers, and drive sales.

See also: 2023 SEO Forecast: Expert Insights on Google Algorithm Changes.

CLICK HERE to schedule your FREE consultation TODAY!

What’s Your SEO Score?

Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.

The sunset date for Universal Analytics 360 properties has been moved from October 1, 2023, to July 1, 2024, as Google prepares to sunset the feature.

Google has just made several updates to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), including a new homepage design, real-time behavioral modeling reports, and custom channel categorization.

Machine Learning Provides Insights

With real-time reporting, advertisers can view a complete picture of client behavior as it happens, preserving user privacy. With machine learning, behavior modeling fills in the gaps in your familiarity with customer behavior when cookies and other identifiers are unavailable.

Advertisers will soon be able to receive real-time updates to track customers across devices and channels as they happen.

Customers will now see a tailored home page experience when they visit AdWords. It includes real-time behavior and the most popular reports, machine-learning-driven trends, and idea generation.

Achieve Better ROI Through Integrations

Data-driven attribution (DDA)
Google Ads has been using data-driven attribution (DDA) since the beginning of GA4. Custom channel grouping will be released soon, which allows advertisers to combine various channels and evaluate cost-per-acquisition and return on ad investment using data-driven attribution. For example, paid search brand performance will be comparable to non-branded campaign performance.

Integration with Campaign Manager 360
This integration will give you a more comprehensive picture of your campaign performance and web and app behavioral metrics.

The GA4 Setup Assistant Process Updates

To make the migration to GA4 as painless as possible, Google will automatically set up standard UA users’ GA4 properties next year. You can opt-out of using the Setup Assistant if you wish. Google has created a step-by-step guide to help you migrate to GA4 if you prefer not to use the Setup Assistant. If you want to use the Setup Assistant, you can access it in the Admin area of your UA account.

Google says Setup Assistant, due to be released early next year, will create a new Google Analytics 4 property for each standard UA property that does not already have one. You should also note that the new GA4 properties will be connected with the corresponding UA properties to match their privacy and collection settings and offer the same basic features, such as goals and Google Ads links.

360 Customers Have to Meet New Migration Deadlines

Google is urging 360 customers to push the migration deadline from October 2023 to July 2024 so that the migration will be successful:

“We understand that configuring Google Analytics 4 to fit your requirements takes time and resources, particularly for large businesses with complex Analytics 360 setups. To allow enterprise customers more time to transition to Google Analytics 4, we are delaying the sunset date of Universal Analytics 360 properties from October 1, 2023, to July 1, 2024.”

Dig Deeper – More information about the new features is available on the Google Marketing blog.

Most advertisers are delaying the implementation of the new Analytics property in GA4 until the last minute. That may be an overstatement, but it’s an inconvenient thorn in the marketing garden.

It’s time to get started on GA4 if you haven’t already. Start collecting data using the Setup Assistant immediately, and come back later to create new dashboard and view combinations. These new features are only beneficial if you use the product.

You might also like: Google Creates Ads Distinguishable From Organic Results.

Schedule your FREE consultation TODAY!

What’s Your SEO Score?

Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.

1. Ensure that HTTPS is enabled

An SSL certificate lets your website visitors know that your site is secure, which improves your rankings. You can either purchase or obtain an SSL certificate free of charge. To ensure that your content is served via the secure protocol after installing an SSL certificate, use a plugin such as Really Simple SSL.

2. Optimizing URLs

WordPress allows you to structure permalinks from the moment you install it, but you can enhance it with plugins to get the job done.

Optimizing URLs for specific search queries and keyword phrases on your site would be best. Setting your primary keyword in the URL is best for on-page SEO. When a search engine crawls your site, it is easy for them to understand your content.

3. Using an SEO plugin is recommended.

nstall one of these recommended plugins to diagnose and improve both technical and on-page SEO recommendations. Consider installing one of these recommended plugins.
Yoast SEO is one of WordPress’s most popular plugins. Using Yoast SEO, you can optimize your content for SEO and improve overall readability for free.


The Rank Math plugin provides an easy-to-use panel on your page or post that shows how to improve your SEO rankings.

4. Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions or tags are content summaries. They briefly describe what a search engine will find when visiting your website. Google only displays 275 characters, so meta descriptions should not exceed that length.

An excellent meta description can bring you more traffic, improving your SEO ranking. Including your keyword in your meta description and content will ensure seamless searches.

You might also like: How Long Does it Take for SEO to Work?

5. Creating quality content is key

One of the best practices to improve your SEO is to produce high-quality content. Good quality content goes beyond the material posted on your website. To best capture your audience’s attention, be particular that you have a thorough understanding of the subject you write about and conduct some keyword research.

Avoid creating duplicate content on your site, as it will negatively affect your SEO score. The E-A-T model establishes trust with your users and improves your overall SEO ranking. This model focuses on establishing clear and concise communication with your target audience.

Google’s search quality standards ensure that a site’s content is ideal for users. It’s not an SEO ranking variable but affects how your content is perceived. E-A-T denotes the author’s expertise, the content’s authoritativeness, and the material’s reliability. Creating an about us page will demonstrate your expertise and authoritativeness to your visitors. Because of this, you are collaborating with other experts will enhance your SEO.

6. Optimizing your site is critical

Speed is now essential in SEO optimization because delivering content as fast as possible is what many people require—every second counts. You can increase the performance of your WordPress site by using NGINX or Redis for server-side caching, for example.

An intelligent cache is created using NGINX on InMotion Hosting’s Ultrastack WordPress hosting to save memory by caching frequently-used resources.

Large images or pictures that take a lot of time to load can make your website sluggish. Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to deliver your content is one way to speed up load times. Jetpack provides an image CDN free, but other hosting providers like Cloudflare are available. Caching plugins, such as W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket, can be used if your current hosting provider does not offer server-side caching.

7. Monitor your Analytics

Google Search Console and Google Analytics are connected to track how well your website is performing. These statistics provide essential information about how visitors interact with your site’s material. Bing’s Webmaster Tools and other providers such as Semrush are among the many resources available. You may also examine your keyword rate and website speed using these tools.

Considering the tips listed above, SEO can be difficult for new website creators or small business owners; however, it can still benefit you. You can ensure that your website and media are of the highest quality by starting with the proper foundation and creating excellent content.

What’s Your SEO Score?

Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.

How to Write Good Alt Text

The best way to create image alt text is discussed in Google’s podcast. So let’s jump right in and talk about how to write good alt text! 

In a Google Search Off the Record podcast, Lizzi Sassman and John Mueller discussed alt-text writing and the reasoning behind exceptional alt text. The subsequent discussion revealed that there are problems to address, such as balancing SEO needs with properly utilizing alt text for accessibility.

Lizzi Sassman starts the discussion by wondering whether being descriptive in the alt text is the best approach or if there is another better approach.

What Are Some Ways Social Media Can Be Used in SEO?

how-to-write-good-alt-text
  • Lizzi Sassman:

“Is your alt text adequate? Is it adequately descriptive, or does it adequately describe the image? Writing the alt text forces you to think about what you could say about it. For example, a diagram might describe a Search concept.

Is the image of an event or something else? Do you start by describing what’s in the picture?Besides improving the words we use to describe an image, are there other strategies we could employ?”

Alt Text & Accessibility

In his article, John Mueller discusses the issue of image accessibility and alt text. Alternative text in pictures provides screen readers with a description of the images.

The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), the official standards body for HTML, provides a little trick for writing alt text for accessibility purposes to help you understand how alt text and accessibility intersect.

“Imagine you are reading the website page out loud over the phone to someone who needs to understand it. This should give you some idea of whether or not the images have any purpose or content.

It’s safe to treat non-links or buttons as decorative if they appear to have no informative value.”

  • Mueller said:

“It’s my opinion that you should be careful about accessibility… I’m not sure about everything related to accessibility.

Someone more knowledgeable about accessibility might be able to answer that question. For example, how alt text should be chosen.”

 

READ NEXT: Trends in SEO That Are Dominating for 2022

Image Context & Alt Text

Continuing, John talked about alt text from an SEO perspective.

 

  • He said:

 

“It is always a good idea to provide context for the image in the alt text from an SEO perspective. Don’t just say, ‘Here’s a photo of a beach.’ Instead, describe the context and describe the photo.

how-to-write-good-alt-text

Rather than saying, ‘This is the beach before the chemical spill happened,’ it’s better to say, ‘This is what the beach looked like before the chemical spill.’ In other words, if someone is looking for a beach for a vacation, it’s better to say, ‘I want to see a beautiful beach.’

 

Before the chemical spill happened, if you notice, it’s like, ‘Well, that would lend itself to different types of Search queries.'”

 

After identifying what users want from images shown in Google’s Image Search, John focuses on identifying what users want from images shown in Google’s Image Search.

 

  • He explained:

 

“Ultimately, when it comes to Image Search, people aren’t interested in pictures; they want information associated with those pictures. They want to learn about a specific topic to find out some information.

 

Adding context to an image is what the alt text does. That additional information may be what they are looking for.

 

If customers are searching for something, make it easy for them to find it.”

 

  • Lizzi Sassman answered:

 

“It’s correct. In addition to providing alt text, you can also provide context for the picture to reduce the number of required words. For example, you may introduce the beach in a paragraph rather than in the alt text.

 

Moreover, it may have more information about the location where the photo was taken, such as which beach it was taken at, what year it was taken, and so on. Because the alt text should be a manageable length, it is essential to use the space around the image.

 

Right?

 

How, then, do you decide which text goes where? Providing context is always a good idea when writing for screen readers since they read in a top-down manner.

 

It depends on the context, but if there’s a little bit of text to set the stage, like, ‘All right, like this is….’ I don’t know… ‘the background on the oil spill before the oil spill.’ Then the pre-oil spill beach is followed by more information, and the post-oil spill beach is shown. The clean-up activity is unknown. That’s the sort of thing that might happen.”

 

  • John Mueller said:

 

“Those are the kinds of things I was referring to.

 

Looking at the search documentation, you can provide additional context by describing the screenshot in the alt text, saying, ‘This is a recipe result with these five fields.”

 

You might also like Is Local SEO Still Dependent On Directory Submissions?

 

  • Lizzi Sassman said:

 

“Yes, even the way you phrased that sentence. For example, ‘This is a recipe with lots of flavors.’ That is not the best alternative text because it is a whole sentence. It starts with words that are not related to the subject.

 

People might skip through it, so one of the most acceptable practices is to begin only with some images with a screenshot of a screenshot, as it just becomes repetitive.

 

It’s already clear that it’s an image. There isn’t any need to say, ‘It’s an image of’ and then the thing. Just give the description straight away. It can also be a phrase rather than a whole phrase.

 

A phrase could be just descriptive. I think it does not have to be a complete thought.”

Descriptive Phrase With Context

Thinking about the context of an image to write an appropriate alt text is an intriguing idea brought up during this podcast. The other significant idea is to write alt texts with words to avoid describing an image as a photograph or screenshot and focus instead on the image’s context within the web page’s overall message.


If we are describing a beach before an oil spill, we should describe it as such.

CLICK HERE to schedule your FREE consultation TODAY!

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What’s Your SEO Score?

Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.

Do you need help converting target high-volume or competitor keywords? You’re likely going to need to do much more work to rank. You should look at your content and be sure that it’s highly relevant to users and your brand.

 

In 2021, Forbes suggested allocating 25% to 30% of its budget to content marketing to maintain consumers’ interest.

This 25-30% budget allocation can vary depending on the sector or the country, but it is a decent indicator of the demand for content creation and marketing services. You can also gauge the level of interest in content creation and marketing by the volume of articles, ads, and posts about those services you see online.

 

Of course, some companies have had to lower their budgets for 2023 because of poor SEO performance.

Nonetheless, the question begs to be asked this: can lower converting content be fixed? How so? Read on to find out.

 

What Qualifies As Quality Content?

Of course, most webmasters and site owners think that they have quality content on their sites. However, if you’re allocating 25% of your entire marketing budget, the content on your website has to be great, not just good.

 

Google staff wrote this in Google Search Central. “It is Google’s mission to organize the world’s information; we want to guide Google users to the highest quality content, the principle exemplified in our quality rater guidelines. Professional publishers provide the lion’s share of quality content that benefits users, and we want to encourage their success.”

The quantity of content about a specific topic depends on how popular that topic is. When SEO experts hear “quality content,” they typically think about “E-A-T” and focus on it. However, Google employee John Mueller has defined content quality as something that includes “E-A-T” and goes beyond it.

 

If you have content that could be performing better, you should consider reexamining your content creation strategy and process.

Why don't People Find my Content?

Ranking well in search results is critical for search engine optimization (SEO). If your content doesn’t obtain organic traffic, it will likely be visible in the search results; it may not rank high for relevant search queries.

 

What if your content is just too generic? Consider rewriting the content to be more specific.

 

What about this situation: you have excellent content, but Google, there are 30 pages of content on the web that are more specific or just different information. Generally speaking, Google thinks that readers are searching for certain types of information when they search. If your content doesn’t have this information, this may be why you’re not ranking.

 

If your content is vastly different from what’s showing at the top of Google, the chance for your content to be visible in Google drops dramatically.

The search results for “wooden spoon” included shopping sites and pictures. On the other hand, when I searched for “tiling,” I discovered definitions, how-to manuals, and videos. In addition to pages with definitions and general “what is” content, the search results for “ceramic materials” included pages with definitions and general “what is” content.

 

No one may see your excellent article if it doesn’t have the correct elements or fit the searcher’s context.

Search Results May Vary

Reviewing search engine results pages (SERPs) for different queries in each target market is essential because the results profiles may vary from country to country. If your content performs great in one country but not the other, that could be the reason.

 

Example: There are multiple listings from the brand Dewalt in the Search results in Australia, which may be causing traffic and sales.

In the U.K., that same query returns a very different set of Search results. The brand page for this product is way down the page. The “People Also Ask” section is listed after the ad block and then a set of video reviews for the tool.

 

 

Based on the information provided, the U.K. version of the product could be performing better. In particular, the brand may want to create videos to address consumers’ questions about its products.

 

The bottom line here is that great content, all by itself, doesn’t usually rank well. Google uses a mix of many other ranking factors (such as site speed, site health, user experience, images, and videos) to determine ranking.

 

What if we look at site page load speed? This one factor alone can vary greatly from country to country. When doing research, ensure your site delivers an excellent user experience across all target countries and loads quickly. It’s essential to give the searcher an excellent user experience while they’re on your site.

Read Next: Here Are Five eCommerce SEO Trends To Keep In Mind For The 2022 Holidays. 

Who Is Your Target Audience?

Creating content to drive traffic, conversions, and revenue for your website is crucial if you want your audience to connect with your content. Even if a piece of content ranks at the top of search results, it will only convert if it appeals to its audience. We frequently see website owners focusing on high-traffic keyword phrases or adding content in line with what their competitors have on their websites vs spending the time to craft their own excellent content.

 

Creating content that receives a lot of traffic from people who are not necessarily interested in your business or product is a bad strategy. Your content should be highly relevant to your business and your target audience in terms of quality.

Be Aware of Different Markets

Do you have content that’s performing well in one country, but poor in others? The reason for this could be that audience interests vary across different markets.

 

When creating content, it’s always best to research the local interests in any market and add this local information to the main content that connects with a local audience. Of course, each market is unique. This means that some consumers in some markets require more details before they’re ready to pull the trigger.

What's Your Content's Goal?

Allocating 25-30% of your marketing budget to content that doesn’t convert or achieve your business goals could jeopardize your content budget next year. The causes of underperforming content are typically twofold: either the content was not created to drive conversions, or it simply did not drive them.

 

What conversion metrics are you tracking? This will vary greatly across different companies and websites. Making more online sales are usually the main focus of an online store, whereas a non-profit organization’s website typically seeks to boost general awareness to boost membership or donations.

 

If you’ve got content focused on ranking in multiple counties, consider multiple conversion points and routes when producing content.

Content that Focuses on Context

As we move closer towards 2023, we suggest that you start to look at your content through a global lens. Because budgets are getting tighter and every dollar counts, it’s essential that you make sure that all your existing and new content will interest your readers and also satisfy Google.

 

Content that focuses on context and doesn’t have ambiguity is crucial for your brand’s future success. If you are only pumping out expert text, you’ll likely miss out on significant opportunities, not rank well, and not connect well with your audience.

 

Just look closely at the results at the top of Google. You’ll see websites that load quickly, give the user a great experience, and provide specifics. To us, it’s obvious that Google is radically changing search results to connect better with the user by presenting content that matches the search’s intent. This should be your focus.

What’s Your SEO Score?

Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.

Prudent SEO agencies must prepare for service unbundling amidst recession rumors. Here’s how.

According to former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale, there are only two ways to make money in business. Bundling and unbundling are the methods, and SEO has been around for over 20 years. Agencies have been locked in an arms race since then, developing new tactics, tools, and approaches to help businesses improve their presence on SERPs.

For over 20 years, marketing agencies have been locked in an arms race to develop new methods, tools, and approaches to help businesses improve their rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs). As a result, they’ve developed new tactics, tools, and approaches to help businesses improve their rankings on SERPs. In addition to bundling all of their services into one price point, marketing agencies have also sought to include everything their clients need to be successful online. Businesses have been drawn to this proposition because they value cost certainty and simplicity more than bargains in a bull market. As a result, SEO agencies’ one-stop-shop offerings have been easy to sell.

The SEO industry and many other sectors will have to deal with something they have not confronted in a long time: a significant recession. During the next cycle, efficiency and frugality will determine the outcome. Except for the first half of the early 2000s and the entire year of 2008, recessions have not been a concern for SEO agencies. Because the SEO industry tends to attract a younger crowd, many of its present experts and company owners have not experienced a recession in the past. Shortly, there will be a seismic shift in SEO. The “great unbundling” is a process that I’ve noticed needs to take place. It involves preparing SEO agencies.

Businesses Must Seek Cost Savings During Recessions

Businesses look for ways to bolster their financial standing when recessions occur. Cutting back on marketing spending is one of the most frequent ways to do so. However, research reveals that recessions damage firms that reduce their marketing budgets. As a result, marketing budgets are frequently untouched in intelligent businesses. However, when a recession occurs, businesses do not always maintain their marketing budgets similarly. According to a wide-ranging study by the Harvard Business Review, approaching a recession with a mixture of defensive and offensive changes in tactics and spending is key to post-recession success.

At my firm, we’ve already witnessed this in action. Businesses are already beginning to scrutinize their marketing agencies’ gross revenue figures. Businesses are choosing to compare various individual SEO services to see whether their current provider is still the best option. They are beginning to add things up and see if they are still getting the best deal.

What Kind of Impact Will the Recession Have On Agencies?

Bundles are a marketing agency’s greatest liability shortly. Bundles combine a range of related services into one convenient package at one price, which makes them convenient for clients. As clients look at their spending habits, they will realize that it is difficult to compare the various costs of their marketing campaigns. Because bundles are presented in complex ways, it is tough to deconstruct them, which will lead to two results.

Business decision-makers will demand explanations regarding line-item expenses and why SEO rates don’t match those on the open market. The answer, of course, is convenience—the fact that the business doesn’t have to manage a team of independent SEO specialists and freelancers to accomplish its marketing plan.

Read Next: Should You Quit Doing SEO?

Due to their cost-benefit analyses, many businesses will decide to alter their marketing spending to optimize it. They will be enticed away from a bundle of nice-to-have extras in link building, content creation, and SEO tools such as Ahrefs, SEMRush, and AI content tools like Clearscope and MarketMuse. The resulting reduction in agency bottom lines could also prove to be their downfall unless they make some decisive decisions.

Bundling can be effective in a recession when the whole is less than the sum of its parts. That’s because contribution margins can make sense in hard-cost sectors such as eCommerce and retail, where inventory must be cleared. On the other hand, knowledge work inventory is time, so it is less helpful in such situations.

Navigating The Great Unbundling

Agencies that rely on bundled services for most of their income should act now. Here are a few recommendations that might make the difference between keeping a valuable customer or losing one permanently. The first step is the most obvious: Start unbundling your services and providing à la carte choices as soon as possible—even if you don’t immediately inform clients that you are doing so.

Preparing you for some of those uncomfortable conversations that will soon take place is the first step. The next step is to seek ways to automate your existing internal workflow processes. That will allow you to make your client-facing processes more efficient and less costly. Automation will become a larger piece of the conversation as a deflationary lever available in the economy shortly.

To keep your best employees, you must be ready to seize new opportunities as your rivals struggle. Automation requires a significant upfront investment, so the benefits may not be seen immediately. Agencies that neglected low-hanging fruit until now may benefit the most. A critical financial reservoir will help them take on some of the expenses as they adjust their unbundled rates to reflect what their clients can find on the open market. This is how you’ll keep paying your employees well—the ones who do the most critical work for your clients.

With automation, an organization must commit resources up front, which means that the financial advantages will not be seen for a while. Reducing costs will help the organization accomplish a few other essential objectives. You must first absorb the price as you adjust your unbundled prices to align with what your consumers can find on the open market. Next, you must keep paying your employees well—those who do the most crucial work for your clients. As your competitors stumble, you’ll be able to take advantage of new opportunities by retaining your most exemplary employees. That’s how you’ll succeed.

Without adequate data about how SEO firms will react to the recession, we cannot forecast how clients’ preferences will change. However, we know how businesses respond to economic downturns, which implies that SEO businesses will soon find their clients questioning whether bundled services are worth the extra cost. Which do you think you would be better off choosing? Choosing whether to give their clients what they want or cling to a business model developed during better times?

What’s Your SEO Score?

Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.

Introduction

It’s important to keep up on SEO because it’s an ongoing process. Here’s why.

It can be tempting to stop performing SEO for a while for several reasons—perhaps because of budgetary constraints, a poor SEO service experience, or because you weren’t pleased with your results.

Should you pause your SEO efforts? What are the repercussions?

Doing SEO is Like Running a Marathon

If you stop running a marathon because you’re easily exhausted, your competitors will leave you in the dust.

SEO is a marathon because it’s a long-term marketing strategy. It can take up to 12 months to see results from an SEO campaign.
The journey to success with SEO looks different for every company. Some choose to focus on keyword research and increasing traffic to their homepage. Others focus on link building and improving the search engine rankings of blog posts. No matter which path you choose, the one thing you can’t do is give up. If you want to see results from your SEO campaign, you have to be patient and consistent.

It takes time, effort, and dedication to reach the finish line. But compared to other marketing strategies, SEO is a low-cost, long-term approach to generating traffic to your site.

You must assess your competition before deciding to stop investing time and money in SEO. Unless you stop doing SEO, your competitors will pass you by, and catching up with them will be difficult. Every day, Google makes 12 changes to its search engine, which means you have millions of competitors per keyword and website upkeep that must be done to avoid a poor-quality website, which will make it even more challenging to rank.

Endurance is the key to SEO success. If Google ceases to alter its algorithms and all of your competitors disappear, SEO will cease to exist.

5 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Stop doing SEO

Can’t stop, won’t stop. Here are five reasons why you should not stop.

Reason #1 > You'll Drop Out of Search

Google is constantly updating its search engine. In 2020 alone, Google ran over 600,000 experiments, resulting in over 4,500 improvements to search. That’s 12 changes per day, people. Some modifications are minor, while others are significant. Many are detected, while many more fly under the radar. Many businesses aren’t competent at understanding how these adjustments affect their websites. As a result, SEOs spend hours testing and analyzing Google changes to benefit their clients and employers.

Google constantly updates its search algorithm to filter out spammy, irrelevant, low-quality content. When you stop investing in SEO, your site will likely be flagged by Google as spam and pushed down in the search results.

The bottom line? If you quit doing SEO, your website still drop out of Google’s search. For this reason alone, you can’t just throw SEO out the window.

Reason #2: Millions of Competitors Are Online

Have you done a Google search lately? 

Do one right now. Go to Google and Search “what is SEO?”

When we just did this search, we found 469M results. 

When you search on Google, you’ll notice that any query can yield millions or billions of results. 

Even though there are millions of results, your content somehow must appear on page one. Furthermore, you desire your content to appear among the initial few results on the page if you want more clicks.

Why is appearing at the top of Google so important? 

Because ALL of the traffic is on Google’s first page. 

When you pause your SEO, your competition doesn’t wait. 

While your SEO is paused, you’re letting your competition take advantage that you’re no longer improving your product, site, or content.

You can’t afford to squander time if you want to see results from SEO. 

It’s also important to remember that SEO takes time. 

  • New websites take Six to Nine months on ongoing to show at the top of Google.
  • Established businesses usually take Three to Six months of SEO to show up at the top of searches.
  • Popular businesses require at least 90 days to reach the top of Google.

Reason #3 - Doing SEO is a Full-Time Job

Quality websites can build link and traffic value over time, but SEO is not a set-and-forget procedure. As a business owner, you must stay on top of things to keep up with the technology behind your website. 

SEO is a long-term process. Not only do you have to create content, but you also have to promote it. That means you have to spend time writing blog posts, creating social media posts, and optimizing your website for keywords. While SEO takes a lot of time and effort, it’s important that you stick with it. If you don’t, your site could be left behind in the search engine rankings. That could mean fewer visitors and lost business.

Google said in it’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines that “unmaintained/abandoned ‘old’ websites or unmaintained and inaccurate/misleading content is a reason for a low Page Quality rating.”

What does this tell us? 

  1. Google cares about providing a quality experience on websites.
  2. Abandoned websites won’t show up high in Google searches. 
  3. If you stop SEO, you risk lowering your rankings.

SEO is a full-time job. When you’re working on SEO, you need to be constantly monitoring your site for errors and making changes as needed. You also need to have a plan in place for what you’re going to do when your site is finished. This can take a lot of time and effort, and it doesn’t always pay off. But if you want to rank higher and make more money, it’s worth it. Just remember that SEO isn’t easy—it takes work and dedication—and it doesn’t guarantee that you will see results right away. It takes patience and perseverance.

SEO is Essential

Many businesses give up on SEO because they do not see the desired outcomes. However, the reason is usually that they’ve hired the incorrect SEOs, don’t have adequate funding, or have mismatched expectations.

You should be able to achieve the results you desire if you budget 5% to 10% of your revenue and hire the right SEO expert. Those results typically lead to greater revenue for the company.

Businesses rarely consider stopping SEO as long as it drives revenue. You win the race if you treat SEO as an essential marketing activity for the lifetime of your business. If you give up, you lose.

Your first priority is creating great content, but you also need to optimize that content for search engines. This means making sure your keywords are correct and that there aren’t any technical issues with your site. Finally, you need to build links to your site so that it shows up higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).

What’s Your SEO Score?

Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.