One of my biggest pet peeves, when I was CEO of The Ocean Agency, was not bringing an agenda to web design kickoff meetings. Agendas are really just simple checklists that are ridiculously easy to create and imperative to have in order to run an efficient meeting. Once you create an agenda, they’re very easy to maintain. You may need to occasionally tweak the agenda every once in a while, but nothing much more than that.
At some point in time, everyone is new to digital marketing, even digital marketers. Plus every industry is different. Getting traffic to a client’s website can be very different than getting traffic to your agency’s website. In this post, I’m going to show you how to get a boatload of traffic to your agency’s website; and if your agency uses MySiteAuditor, more traffic means more leads from your free SEO audit tool.
We’ve all been there. We sitting across the table from a prospective client, talking for an hour or so about SEO strategy, past clients, past experiences, and future expected results. Then the question is asked. The question you’ve been waiting for. The clients ask about pricing. Of course, you go easy on them. After all it’s a very delicate subject. You know other SEO companies have given them a monthly price, and some have definitely lowballed them. You don’t want to scare them away with your higher prices, and you also don’t want to underbid yourself, and look like an amateur. So, you do what most SEO professionals do. You make the biggest SEO pricing blunder; you give them a price! Never offer or give SEO pricing, without getting a budget first.
Before being acquired, one of the biggest challenges I faced while running my boutique digital marketing agency was watching my employees get poached by bigger agencies who offered more money and more benefits. Being a boutique, I hired a lot of entry and junior level people. I prided myself on being able to spot potential and great personalities when I couldn’t afford a senior level person. However, entry and junior level people with lots of potential and great personalities eventually want and deserve more money and better benefits. So, over the years I learned eight simple ways to keep my employees super happy, and how to use my agency’s size to my advantage. If one of my rockstars was thinking about leaving, they’d be giving up a lot more than money and “better” benefits.
In this podcast I share everything. All of my secrets, all of my advice, and all of my experiences from owning an SEO agency in Chicago for the past 11 years. This podcast includes everything from how I actually started my SEO business to how I got acquired. It should be an eye-opening experience for anyone running an SEO business, or thinking of starting an SEO business. So, don’t waste time and don’t waste money making the same mistakes I made years ago. Just sit back, relax and listen. You’re going to love it!
Google announced they are rolling out a mobile-friendly algorithm update that will improve search results on mobile devices. Whether you perform SEO for clients or for your own website, you should find this article extremely useful. In fact, you should probably bookmark it because I will be updating it as new information is released.
I just listened to an awesome podcast by Daniel Faggella, of TechEmergence, where he interviewed Rand Fishkin, The Wizard of Moz. As always, Rand had a lot of great things to say, but one particular thing stood out to me more than anything else. He was so adamant about this point. In fact, he repeated it over and over. He strongly urged that every single digital marketer ask this one question before creating any piece of content.
How many emails do you get per day? How many do you delete? How many do you send to spam? How many do you unsubscribe from? Finally, how many do you open, and more importantly, why?
I keep seeing the same question posted over and over, “Is Google PageRank Dead?” My thoughts are yes and no. Yes, it’s dead to those outside of Google. No, it’s not dead to Googlers (people who work at Google). In other words, I still think Google uses PageRank as a part of their organic ranking algorithm. I just don’t think they will push PageRank out to the public anymore.
Launching a blog can be like going to the gym. You go for about 2 weeks, and you never go again because you’re unorganized, and you don’t have a strategy. Before my agency was acquired, I personally witnessed this happen to different companies and agencies for over a decade. That’s why I’m sharing my insight on how to launch a blog.