Left to my own devices, I probably wouldn’t have thought to spend last Wednesday night watching a panel give a live website review.
If your business has its own website, you’ve most certainly received emails or contact form submissions from “SEO experts” promising to “boost your SEO fast,” “get you to the first spot on Google in four weeks,” or “triple your web leads this quarter.”
In the spirit of AMP – which is all about instant gratification – I’ll give our take on this right away.
We often hear from business owners who are anxious to be ranked at the top of the first page of Google for the keywords they are targeting. We can’t blame them – being one of the first search results that a person sees can be huge for a business (especially when you consider the fact that only 8.5% of online search traffic makes it to the second page of results in their Google search). But is it realistic to expect that your website can get to page one of Google?
In a move to promote better online security practices, Google has announced that it will start using website encryption as a ranking signal. While encryption will be a lightweight signal at first – affecting less than 1% of global queries initially – the move by the search giant likely forecasts lower search rankings for sites that fail to make the security update.
With 78% of small businesses gaining new customers via social media, there’s no surprise that Twitter is at the top of just about every small business owner’s mind. One of the most common things we hear from our clients is that they know they should be on Twitter but don’t think they have the time or resources to make it worth the effort.
Last week, Google unrolled its most recent webspam algorithm: Penguin 2.0. As SEOs dissect, analyze and speculate about every word in the announcement from Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, let’s take a step back and consider what these updates mean on a broader scale and what implications there are for small businesses.
