Small Business Search Marketing

Judging from the amount of inquiries that have come in this year via my contact form, there are a lot of small businesses that are just now starting to dip their toes into this whole SEO thing. I’d love some cold, hard stats to back up what I’ve seen … but short of that, gut [...]

I’ve been contacted twice in the last three months by small business owners looking for SEO help — but needing PR and social media a lot more than SEO. In both cases, the companies offered what I’d call fairly innovative products and services. The problem is that no one would ever think to use Google, [...]

Janet Meiners wrote a good article Monday on Small Biz Trends: Practices of Top SEO Companies for Small Businesses. It’s designed to help small business owners understand the basic/minimum services that an SEO company/consultant should be providing.
But what about the cost of small business SEO? What should a small business expect to pay when [...]

John recently emailed me with a situation that isn’t uncommon for business big or small: a variety of spellings/versions of the primary business keywords. John wants to know the best way to optimize for these variations, and specifically if he needs to create tons of landing pages to target each one. I haven’t seen John’s [...]

The structure of a Web site’s URLs can have a dramatic impact on crawlability, SEO, and user-friendliness. A good SEO already knows how to craft effective URLs, but web developers, IT staff, and management may not understand why the web address matters. In this article, I’ll share a list of best practices for choosing URLs [...]

This great question came in today from Mary Ann:
I am helping a small dance/fitness business with local SEO. Keyword research yields zero (0) search volumes (Keyword Discovery) for keyword terms once I add the location or any variation on the location/general area (Westport, Connecticut). Any suggestions as to the best keyword strategy in such cases?
My [...]