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Now offering SEO audits

Robert Carter — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:07:51 +0000

I prefer to work on a monthly basis for a number of reasons, but mainly because SEO isn’t something that you do once and then shazam, you have lots of traffic. It’s something that takes continuous work and adjustment.

Nevertheless, some clients are not ready to make the leap of faith and add me to their team on a monthly basis. I recently did a project for a client that wasn’t 100% sold on my services or SEO in general. His marketing budget was tight and he was cautious about investing money in a service that he wasn’t familiar with.

So I met him half-way and did and SEO audit for him, which consisted of an hour speaking to him on the phone about his existing site, what changes he wanted, what his goals were, and how the site had performed in the past few years. Then I spent hours researching his site and compiling a report of all the recommended changes, keywords, and strategies that he should use to improve his site’s traffic and conversion rate.

In the end, it came out to 20 pages, including a nice brief overview of SEO, inbound marketing, and conversion rate optimization for a small business whose site is focused on lead generation.

The client was so happy with the report that he hired me to implement the changes myself (with some of the design changes going through his web designer).

Because of the success of this first audit, I’m now offering SEO audits to everyone as an introductory service for only $250. It’s an affordable way to get started with SEO and I think it’s a real bargain considering my experience and knowing what other companies charge for similar services.

Local businesses should have mobile versions of their websites

Robert Carter — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:38:43 +0000

Web browsing on mobile phones is up, up, up! Don’t believe me? Look around and notice how many people in your life have iPhones, Android phones, and even iPads. I could take the time to Google a study that shows that mobile phone browsing is up x percent but we both know that it’s true.

Naturally, your customers are finding you on their phones. That is, if you are findable on a mobile browser. If your website runs on Flash, then your site will not work on an Apple device. And it won’t work on the average Android device either. If you’re not sure if your site runs on Flash, you can usually tell by looking at your site–does it have a lot of fancy animation? When you click on links within your site, does the URL in your browser change, or does it stay on yoursite.com when as you navigate?

If it’s a fancy site or the URL isn’t changing, you’re probably running Flash. Even if your site is not on Flash, there’s a very good chance that it hasn’t been optimized for the tiny screens and slow connections of a mobile phone. I have this recurring problem where I’m in a taxi cab or out on the street with my friends and we’re deciding where to eat dinner. So we want to look up the menu of a nearby restaurant before hopping in a cab. The restaurant’s website either doesn’t load at all or it’s hard to find what I need (the menu, the prices, the hours, and the address).

It’s not just restaurants that need mobile versions of their websites. It’s almost any business where a customer may need to visit your location. And really, it’s almost any business at all, because people are using their phones to do research all the time.

The bottom line: if your website doesn’t run well on a smartphone browser, you’re either a) losing potential customers or b) annoying customers because they have to do a lot of extra legwork to track down what they need.

I started another company to solve this problem, and while I’m targeting the Chicago area for now, I’m happy to take on clients anywhere. I’m offering affordable hosting and design of simple mobile websites for businesses that need them. Contact us or check out the site for more information.

Don’t run your business website on a Blogger.com or WordPress.com domain

Robert Carter — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 05:19:18 +0000

I was working at one of my favorite cafes in Chicago the other day and well, actually I was procrastinating, looking at their website. Before I say anything, I don’t think that SEO is really a huge deal for cafes–I think they get a lot more business from sites like Yelp.com and the local Google listings (and walk-in traffic of course).

Anyway, they’re running on Blogger.com, but not their own domain, so it’s something like myfavoritecafe.blogspot.com. And the site works fine. It has the contact info, the hours, and some really nice blog posts by the owner. But I always cringe a little when I see a small business running on a hosted Blogger or WordPress domain/subdomain. There’s nothing wrong with the software–for a cafe, there’s no need to have an amazing customized WordPress theme or anything, but not having your own domain can cause you a lot of headaches down the road.

Because one day, the business owner might decide that business is good, it’s time to expand, and it’s time to start paying more attention to the web presence of the business. And when that day comes, they’ll probably want to get on their own domain, e.g. www.myfavoritecafe.com. And then there’s a problem. Because it’s a pain in the butt to redirect a hosted blog to a bespoke domain (yes I just used the word bespoke). It can be done, but it’s not perfect, and you’re not going to get access to the .htaccess file on Blogger.com’s server so it’s not going to be a true 301 redirect.

So any inbound links you had to your old blog/site are going to be pointing to your old blog/site and not at your new domain, meaning you have to restart your link building. And then you have one of those pesky “Please visit our new site!” posts that sit at the top of your old blog for years, like a car up on blocks in your neighbor’s front yard. It’s unsightly, but what can you do?

And you can export your old blog posts and import them into your new CMS, but that means your new site is competing with your old site and if your old site had a lot of linkjuice, it may outrank your new site (duplicate content sucks!).

Oh yeah, and there’s the whole branding issue. It’s more professional to have your own domain, even if you’re just using Blogger.com as a CMS and mapping your domain.

Ok, I’m done beating this dead horse–just get your own domain! It’s not that hard to start a Blogger.com site and then map it to your domain so that you can avoid all of these problems. Seriously, a new domain registration is only $10 a year or so.

Now taking new clients!

Robert Carter — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:04:42 +0000

I haven’t taken on any new clients since 2010 because I’ve been so busy with my existing clients and other projects. So if you’re a small business owner in Chicago looking for help with web design, web hosting, SEO, Google Maps, or any web-related help, please contact me.

The Search Engine Marketing Job Market

Robert Carter — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:00:52 +0000

If you live in the U.S. then you’ve probably heard the news — we’re in a recession. Or a depression. Or the great recession. Whatever. Unless you live in DC then you probably know at least a few people that are struggling for work. I would hate to be graduating with a liberal arts degree right now. It was hard enough back in 2003.

Anyway, if there’s one area that hasn’t been hit by the recession, it’s search marketing:

“The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) recently announced that the North American SEM industry will grow 14% this year to $16.6 billion! This contrasts with contraction in most other sectors!”

The hyped up language is thanks to press release over-enthusiasm, but I can attest to the strength of the market, at least here in Chicago. I get at least one call or email per week from recruiters and staffing agencies looking to hire people with SEO, PPC, web analytics skills (especially Omniture), and web copywriters. So if you just graduated or you’re looking for a career change, being in the online marketing business is a great place to be. Lots of firms hire interns so you can get your foot in the door and people with just 1-2 years of experience are getting good salaries.

If you’re in the Chicago area, hit me up and I’ll send you in the right direction. There’s at least six staffing agencies here dedicated to placing people with web or creative skills.

Replacing the Old Google Keyword Research Tool

Robert Carter — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 07:00:38 +0000

Google’s new keyword tool is now out of beta and for a while they were letting you use the previous version that many of us had grown accustomed to. The new version has a lot of improvements, especially if you’re putting together a PPC campaign (it’s much better at finding related keywords), but it’s not great for doing the kind of research that involved plugging in 300 keywords and having the traffic numbers spit out nicely into a spreadsheet.

Or so I thought until I found the “Traffic Estimator” button at the top left of the screen. It’s basically the same as the old keyword tool, except now you can pull data on up to 2,500 (!!) keywords instead of just 300.

Yelp Adds New Business Categories

Robert Carter — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:28:04 +0000

I got an email from Yelp this morning saying that they added new business categories for the more “long-tail” listings. Check out the list and make sure you update your listing if there’s a new category that fits you. Here’s instructions for updating your category:

Applying a category to your business is a pretty simple process. For example, say you’re an HVAC repair service provider. Just under your business name on your Yelp listing, there’s a link that says either “[Edit]” or “[Add]” next to the “Category/Categories” line. Simply click this link, find the category that’s most relevant to you (no more than 3 categories per business), and add the category. Our user support team will verify the update within a few weeks.

Archery anyone?

Blogging to Generate Leads for Real Estate Agents

Robert Carter — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:48:29 +0000

My first blog was set up in 2006 when I was embarking on my short real estate career (the markets made sure I wasn’t there very long!). I focused mostly on the challenges and issues that I was facing at the time, while throwing in a few funny anecdotes that come with the real estate gig in Baltimore City (e.g. bums and crackheads taking residence in unoccupied homes).

If I had known better at the time, I would’ve focused a lot less on ME and a lot more on my CUSTOMERS. I would’ve written about what they wanted to know about local neighborhoods, housing trends, good deals, how to get loans (ok so that wasn’t very hard at the time–back then a pulse was the only real requirement for a real estate loan), neighborhood information, etc.

I also spent a lot of time worrying about how much traffic my blog was receiving and not much time thinking about the quality of the traffic and how to reach the people who might actually convert into leads for me.

Well there I go again, talking about me, and not about you. I’m telling you about my experience so that you can avoid it. If you want your blog to generate leads for you, then you have to blog about what your customers want.

Real estate people caught onto marketing way before most local niches (probably because real estate agents spend 80% of their time on marketing), but most local niches are full of small business owners that are just catching on to local marketing. That means that you can start a blog on your domain now, start blogging about your expertise, and start generating leads. The sooner you start, the harder it will be for your competition to catch up.

Just make sure that you start your blog on your own domain, and not Blogspot!

The bottom line:

Put yourself in the shoes of your customers
Establish your expertise
Blog at least once a week

And don’t expect instanteous results–a blog is about cultivating relationships with your readers (and with search engines).

Moving a Blog from Blogger to WordPress

Robert Carter — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:18:37 +0000

I left a comment on Lead-Gen SEO yesterday about moving a blog from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress and I thought the information should be shared here on my blog.

I’ve moved several blogs with this method and it works pretty well, although there’s no way that I know of that will preserve all of the backlinks to your blog.

The bottom line: avoid having to move by setting up your blog on your own domain and don’t bother with a blog at Blogger or WordPress.com. It’s a little more work to get started but it’ll save you a lot of headaches and linkjuice down the road.

This is the basic process I use:

1. Buy your domain name, get it set up with a hosting company, and upload the WordPress files to the domain. When you go through the initial blog setup, turn off indexing so your blog won’t get spidered by Google and other search engines.

2. Import the Blogger blog to the new WP blog (there’s an option within the WP control panel under “Tools”, you don’t even need to download anything.

3. Clean up the formatting of the new WP posts. This can be a real pain for blogs with a ton of posts because WP unfortunately picks up a lot of funky Blogger style tags. You can do this by going into each post and looking at the HTML/code view of the post.

You also have to make sure that the images transferred properly and that they’re being linked to their new locations on your domain, and not still pointing to where they were hosted on Blogger. Ditto for video embeds; sometimes Blogger uses its own player to embed video so you have to make sure they’re pointing to Youtube or wherever, instead of back to the old blog.

4. Write a post on the Blogger blog that the site is moving and people should update their bookmarks/RSS feeds.

4. Once the new blog is set up, you can do a 302 redirect from Blogger to the new domain (using JavaScript – http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2006/05/move-blogger-to-wordpress).

5. Turn indexing back on in WP. Use the Sitemap generator plugin to create a sitemap for the new domain and submit it to Google and Bing webmaster tools.

6. Transfer the RSS feed.. this is easier if you’re using FeedBurner. If you’re not using FeedBurner, then you can ask your current subscribers to switch over to the new RSS feed. You’ll probably lose some subscribers in the process.

6. I leave the 302 up and running for a few weeks while the new blog gets indexed. During this time you should be reminding people to subscribe to the new feed and update their bookmarks. I also email any bloggers or sites with inbound links to the Blogger domain and ask them to update their links to the new domain.

7. After your new domain is indexed and working properly, shut off the 302 redirect, write a post on Blogger that the domain has moved, and add a “NoIndex” META to the template header in blogger so you can avoid duplicate content issues. Another option is to delete all of the data on the Blogger blog, except for a “This Blog has Moved” post that includes a link to your new blog.

It’s not a perfect solution and you’ll still get people showing up at the old blog but it’s probably better in the long-run to be on your own domain. Maybe someday Blogger will allow for 301 redirects but until then…

Updating Your Business Information in Local Search and Yellow Pages Sites

Robert Carter — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:36:18 +0000

One of the keys to improving your Google Maps listing is getting your business information listed in local search and Yellow Pages sites. While the quantity and quality of incoming links is the major factor in your organic search ranking, the number of times your business is mentioned across the web is a major factor in your Google Map listing, so it’s important that you’re listed in all the major local sites.

Some of the most important places to have your business liste:

Google Local Business Center
Bing Local
InfoUSA (provides many yellow pages sites with their business data)
Yellowpages.com
Yelp.com

Make sure your business information is the same across all the local search sites and the same as it appears on your actual website. GetListed.org is a nifty tool to monitor your local business listing in Google, Yahoo!, Best of the Web, and Live Search.

When I first started adding clients to local search sites, I would manually submit them to dozens of sites. That can be quite tedious and time-consuming but now I use a nifty tool called UniversalBusinessListing.org. For $30 a year, it submits your business information to all of the major local search sites and dozens of smaller sites.