With the boom of online shopping, mobile browsing, and online-first businesses, the search engine has become the “new normal” when looking for great products and services. A big part of internet traffic is found in search engines, which businesses need to leverage by doing search engine optimization (SEO) to increase revenue.
However, despite the success of SEO as marketing, many companies are still unsure of what it really is, and if it’s worth it. Visual Objects reported that 47% of small businesses are not investing in SEO due to the intricacy of SEO strategies and the lack of immediate results from SEO efforts.
If you’re one of the skeptics who are still in doubt about what SEO can do to your business, getting an SEO company to help you might do the trick. Learn about SEO’s benefits and ask yourself these questions before you make an investment in an SEO company.
Understanding what SEO is can help you determine if hiring an SEO company is the right move for the business. SEO is a digital service that aims to enhance visibility, generate traffic, boost sales, convert website visitors into customers, and grow business revenue. With the search engine’s popularity among customers, businesses employ SEO efforts to gain attention and attract more audiences faster.
Basically, Google will put the top spot in a search engine result page (SERP) to whichever website has the best answer to a searched query from an internet user. In order to be at the top, there are factors that you need to improve such as the keywords, quality of links you use, content structure, and others.
SEO can be a powerful addition to your other digital marketing strategies like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, email marketing, and video marketing to maximize online success. Many companies employ various web marketing strategies altogether as it can have an enormous influence on your internet marketing tactics and increase the rates of success.
If it seems too much, getting an SEO company to do the job would be better. They can come up with a cohesive plan that will involve all your digital marketing strategies working together, which gives bigger and better results for the business.
Like any worthwhile investment, SEO takes some time before you see results. If your company can manage to invest in traditional marketing strategies, then it’s important to invest the same way in SEO and digital campaigns. If done properly, SEO can even have a lasting effect on your online presence and gain more revenue than you can imagine.
Don’t believe in an SEO company when they tell you that they can produce results overnight or within a week. Hiring an SEO company for the long run will give you access to the latest marketing technology, experienced SEO specialists, and evolving SEO knowledge that you can use for future purposes.
Talent, technology, and time are some of the important resources that your company must have to do SEO. It’s a big responsibility to implement and manage the SEO strategies you will come up with, aside from doing other functions in the company. But even companies with abundant resources for online marketing are finding it challenging to juggle in-house strategy management.
With an SEO company, all the basic resources are already provided. They have specialized team members and technology, and their expertise in the field will help your business yield better results.
Do you find your website somewhere in the second or third page of a SERP when you type in relevant business keywords? SEO can help you fix that. A survey reveals that 98% of internet users are more likely to click on the first set of results in a SERP.
An SEO company can help guide you choose the most effective keywords for your website. They will test the search volume of your chosen keywords and optimize your pages once they’re set.
SEO has a wide array of benefits that can put your business at the top of the ranks in a SERP, but hiring the right SEO company that fits well into your business and gives you desirable results will generally make everything easier to navigate. Take your time to explore different SEO agencies and be aware of the signs of someone doing unethical SEO practices.
With SEO Defend, you’re ensured with customized strategies that will benefit your business in the long run. We will give you regular updates on your campaigns, and provide you with keyword-rich content and structure that will optimize your site. Contact us to know more and get a free trial today.
SparkToro reported that 92.96% of global traffic is from Google Search, Google Images, and Google Maps. However, the search engine market has become a competitive battleground since all businesses want to be at the top of search results.
When a good SEO campaign is running, your visitors convert into customers. That's why you should have a team of experienced professionals who know how to drive traffic. But over the years, figuring out which SEO agency is the best has become challenging.
This post will guide you on how to choose a reliable SEO agency for your business:
A great SEO agency will ask about your goals or objectives early on. It can be related to return of investment (ROI), converting leads, or anything that would mean "success" to your business. They can help you with the research, but it's important that you have a clear vision of what your company wants to achieve with the help of SEO.
Take a look at how long the company has been in the industry. Often, the longer they've been around, the greater their experience and the more diverse the clientele is. Ask how they carry out their customer service, how they promote thought leadership, how they treat their staff, and how much transparency they can provide once they collaborate with you.
Being in the business for a long time also means they know what works and what doesn't in SEO campaigns. Check their portfolio to see if the agency has successfully optimized sites for search engines. See if their clients have good rankings on Google.
It's your responsibility as a business owner to familiarize yourself with the basics of SEO and the ethical ways it can be realistically achieved. Before deciding on an SEO agency, make sure they adhere to the guidelines of search engines. Negative SEO approaches are considered unethical (and sometimes illegal), which only produce quick traffic, but eventually get penalized or banned from making any websites.
A good SEO agency should have good customer/client reviews. Besides their online testimonials, it is important that they have reviews on their websites as well. Check testimonials and reviews and see if the positive outnumber the negative.
Another thing you can do is to check how the SEO agency responds to reviews on their site and social media sites. Are they active? Do they react professionally to constructive and non-constructive criticisms? This will give you an overview of their reputation and how they treat clients.
It's important to set budget parameters within your business so you can easily filter out agencies regarding size, scope, and fit. Be upfront with the SEO agency on that information and ask how they can help you with the initial strategy or audit every step in the SEO process.
On the other hand, a great agency will let you know the risks that your budget level can bring. Although internet marketing is generally affordable compared to other strategies, SEO doesn't guarantee overnight success. Anything cheap, fast, and easy will likely bring subpar results to your business. Setting a monthly or annual contract to ensure that the agency maintains results and promotes your site is better.
If your business is actively looking for a great SEO agency, don't forget to discuss these five factors with them and see if they fit well with your company. Without resorting to shady practices, a great SEO agency can help grow your business and deliver realistic results. SEODefend customizes every strategy for every client and provides updates and satisfying results. Click here to learn more and get a free trial today.
Many companies practice white hat SEO approaches to optimize their websites for search engines. But sometimes, you still see fluctuations in your organic traffic despite playing by the book. These are often caused by algorithm updates.
However, if you still find your website’s organic search traffic decreasing, a possible cause would be negative SEO. While positive approaches aim to get your website to the top of the ranks of a Google search, negative SEO wants to bring your website down so other competitors can get ahead.
Businesses are encouraged to proactively monitor their website’s progress to avoid these negative SEO attacks and incur penalties from Google. Let’s break down negative SEO and how you can detect and protect yourself from this attack.
Negative SEO involves using "black hat techniques" to manipulate search engine ranking. These techniques sabotage the ranking of your website and allow your competitors to rank higher in search results. One of the effects is a decrease in your site's ranking and incoming traffic. This "black hat SEO" is unethical.
An efficient yet expensive on-page tactic, hacking a website to decrease its search engine visibility is considered a negative SEO attack. Without proper SEO black hat protection, a hacker can hack and alter your code without noticing its effects immediately unless you look at the backend of a certain webpage.
Some hackers would also edit your robots.txt file, which tells a search engine crawler how to interact with your website, including the pages to crawl and not to crawl and index. If they tell the crawler to ignore your site's most important pages or the entire site, it's game over.
Your competitor can also build unnatural or "spammy" backlinks from untrustworthy websites and send them to your site for Google to penalize it.
This is the practice of duplicating websites or content, hotlinking, and spreading these duplicates all over the web. Plagiarism is a strict violation of Google's SEO guidelines, which is why it will likely remove duplicate websites or choose one over the other.
Reviews can help your website become visible to your target audience, but too many negative reviews will bring the opposite effect and impact your business’ reputation. Competitors can do this tactic easily since it’s easy to manipulate.
Setting up a Google Webmaster Tool will help you monitor your site for malware attacks, pages that aren't indexed, and minor penalties from Google. At the same time, you can strengthen authentication methods by using multi-factor authentication, creating backup files, and setting stronger passwords.
Various tools on the internet help monitor duplicated sites. To leverage your website against possible plagiarism and content copying, revise your Terms of Service and indicate that republishing any content originally from your domain is not allowed.
Adding canonical tags to your well-performing content will also help prioritize ranking to your website instead of the duplicated ones. A canonical tag like <link rel="canonical" href="[URL]"> will inform Google of the original URL where the content was used.
Constantly interacting and responding to your audience’s queries and reviews will also help you detect negative reviews popping up about your website. You can easily report these fake negative reviews pretending to be a customer or associating themselves with your business on Google.
Many sites offer monitoring of backlink profiles, like SEODefend. If you discover backlinks that have been mysteriously added or removed, you can contact the webmaster and request their removal.
Google’s disavow list can also help you fix multiple bad links at once. This tool tells Google that these links shouldn’t be counted when ranking your site in the index.
Competitors trying to cheat with negative SEO practices pose a real problem that can seriously impact your business, and should never be taken lightly. Being proactive with your SEO approaches can help maintain and improve your site's ranking.
You should also employ quality protection against negative SEO from SEODefend. We have a wide range of negative SEO tools that monitor your site's overall health and keep it from incurring penalties. Just click here, and you're on your way to a free trial today.
Perhaps you’ve finally decided to invest in SEO and started the work on your own. As the marketer of your own business, you need to accept that problems and obstacles will continue to arise no matter what field you’re in, and SEO processes remain the same whether you’re a small or big enterprise.
It’s essential to prepare yourself for the challenges ahead with extensive research. In the next section, we’ve come up with a list of the common challenges you’ll likely encounter once you get into the crucial aspects of the SEO process and how you can resolve them.
Common SEO Challenges of Brands and SEO Professional Services
More often than not, with SEO campaigns, it’s been a case of “right things are happening, but we’re not sure exactly why.” Understanding the power and role of SEO can help you plan your SEO campaigns better and ensure it goes off smoothly.
Involving your internal teams in SEO can be a challenge, considering the other responsibilities they have. Take the time to explain the role of SEO within your company and allow them to participate in its success. This way, you can help everyone work together towards common goals, from generating leads to driving sales and improving customer experience.
HubSpot ranked this as the top challenge marketers usually face with brands. Search engines are constantly changing, and your competitors’ tactics also evolve with these changes. So, how do you hit a moving target?
You don’t have to make significant SEO strategy changes for every minor algorithm change. Instead, keep an eye on big industry news and algorithm changes, then overhaul your strategies accordingly. Sometimes, it’s best to do nothing but wait for a couple of weeks before implementing changes. Sometimes, Google reverts to a previous version if they find that it doesn’t work.
SEO is a long-term strategy that takes time to produce results compared to other digital marketing practices like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. It can mean that you’re likely to encounter obstacles in every step, from initial budget allocation to time pressure.
To resolve this, prepare for the long haul as you set out your plans. Utilize your customer data to keep the interest and support running for your project. Update your project’s stats, conduct mini case studies, and recognize performance highlights regularly during your SEO journey to maximize the SEO process.
Keywords have remained a staple in SEO, but Google has become more critical of a website’s keywords instead of just scanning them to determine an overall sense of authority, tone, and relevance. Professional SEO services know that you cannot simply put keywords in your content and hope for the best.
A deeper understanding of user intent and audience’s pain points will help you develop the right keywords to get noticed by your audience. You can also monitor the search volume for your targeted keywords to understand why some websites suddenly get a spike or drop in traffic.
Mobile optimization should be one of the important aspects of your SEO strategy. As of November 2022, 60.28% of all web traffic is from mobile phones. And Google has implemented a mobile-first indexing method when indexing and ranking pages, so it’s a constant challenge to make mobile versions of your content to get ranked higher.
Provide a joyful user experience to your users and see how it will reflect on Google. Figure out what your visitors come for and which tasks they mostly do on your site. Then make sure those are front-and-center on your mobile site, too. Allow people to click on your phone number to call you. Use a responsive design for your website, so it’s easier for Google to understand and index your single URL. Prioritize your site to being mobile-friendly, and everything will follow.
SEO is a long-running game that requires knowledge and patience. Nothing ever comes without threats, and being aware of the SEO challenges you might face in the future can help you anticipate different outcomes and prepare for them better. While you’re at it, enhance your SEO journey with the help of a reliable and professional SEO service like SEO Defend.
The average cost of hiring a professional to do your SEO varies depending on the type of package and all the additional installment options and upgrades you may include. Based on your individual needs for expert SEO services, you can get the correct price tailored to your company's needs.
SEO specialists know what it takes to build a website that's optimized for search. If you want to ensure optimal rankings, investing in professional SEO services is a great option.
Read on to learn what's included in SEO services and what to expect from any professional service provider.
Any SEO campaign starts with keywords. Whether you are hiring an SEO expert to improve existing content or aim toward new content creation, keyword optimization is the key.
A good piece of content is optimized with a primary keyword and additional secondary keywords and phrases common to the topic. Keywords help you appear in front of the right customers and rank higher in organic search. And since more than half of all website traffic is generated through organic search, keyword research is highly important.
Significant backlinks are the stepping stone to your web page's visibility, importance, and ranking. They signal to the search engine, such as Google or Bing, that the content found on your web page is significant enough that other web pages find it resourceful.
The more significant backlinks are earned and added, the more valuable the content becomes. The higher it will also appear on search engine results pages.
Your web page is the actual SEO client. The technical SEO tools focus precisely on this aspect - the web page's design, responsibility, and security.
Within this domain, a good SEO provider will:
Since more than 60% of users access search engines through their mobile devices, your website's UX responsiveness is crucial. An SEO provider will ensure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly.
Aside from good content and matching headings, meta titles and descriptions are the first thing clients and potential web page visitors come across, even before opening the content.
A professional SEO specialist can help you target a vast group of visitors and explain the context of your content in just a few words. After all, the goal of SEO is to attract actual visitors and avoid clients bouncing off your web page.
SEO Defend is a company that offers SEO optimization, technical SEO, and on-page security. We are the pioneers on the market, offering negative SEO monitoring services at very affordable prices to secure your website on all levels.
We also offer social media profile monitoring to mitigate threats from competitors and include professional SEO service add-ons curated for your unique needs.
Contact our team to learn more about our SEO packages. We’ll help you find one that best fits your business.
There have been many deliberations about whether the risks of negative SEO are real or whether the Google algorithm can mitigate the threat by itself. But since more than half of the entire world’s online traffic is generated through organic search, taking that chance is risky.
To shield your website against SEO threats, consider investing in negative SEO monitoring services. Read on to learn how they can benefit your business.
Negative SEO monitoring can make up for a threat-proof strategy when combined with the proper SEO optimization tools and hosting packages. This, in turn, will keep up your site rankings and continuously update your content without your effort.
Hackers and competitors will try to loosen up the excellent backlink web you have created on your content. Considering you probably have hundreds of articles, depending on the maturity of your web page, tracking each one all the time is impossible.
A proper SEO monitoring service will either alert you through email when a backlink has been modified or would mitigate the threat without bothering you. This will highly depend on the provider and package you signed up for.
Auditing a webpage from time to time is mandatory for everyone, especially if you have already climbed the SEO mountain of challenges and provided good rankings for your web page. However, juggling between optimizing old content, creating new content, and maintaining top rankings takes a lot of work.
Monitoring services for negative SEO always include site audits, and they send the reports to your email, so you can look at how your web page is doing at a particular time.
Since SEO is all about ranking, negative SEO monitoring has automated notifications every time your website’s range changes. However, taking this sole thing into consideration is meaningless, especially considering the daily upload of numerous Google algorithms and dozens of new content in your niche.
Sometimes these notifications can be a handy asset when uploading new content or keeping track of the latest Google updates.
If you’re a brand owner or a business CEO in charge of a successful company with a high-ranking online presence, your competition would be after jeopardizing your reputation. It’s the first rule of politics — making scandals and putting the competition in unpleasant case scenarios to lose ratings.
Sometimes, instead of dissing your business or web page services, your competition will come straight after you as an owner or head of the business. Monitoring negative SEO services include tracking personal social media profiles and pinpointing malicious attacks on your or your business.
SEO monitoring can be a hefty charge for nothing, but we at SEO Defend consider negative SEO a severe threat. That’s why we’ve made negative SEO monitoring services budget-friendly and affordable for big and small website owners.
We will protect your privacy, monitor your web page, and keep your rankings. But if you decide to purchase our SEO optimization package, it will be the combo to rank you on Google’s first page for life.
Get in touch and learn more about our services, including content marketing, website development, brand design, and paid advertisement.
Google has been the leading global search engine since September 2021, especially since SEO practices became prevalent. While this is excellent for search users, website owners have been left fending off damaging SEO threats.
This is especially true now that Google has established its helpful content update that focuses on eliminating negative or black-hat SEO practices and its guidelines regarding technical requirements and content authenticity.
In this article, we’ll discover the best practices for you to monitor negative SEO threats and attacks.
Google updates almost always involve new regulations regarding website links, making occasional link audits essential. If you regularly monitor your backlinks and notice unusual traffic, though you haven’t been working on backlinking and updating your content — it might not be a good sign. It could be that your links are not in order or are broken.
Aside from top-notch and unique content, your webpage's connectivity and response speed is a crucial asset that boosts the site’s ranking on Google’s search engine. Without a doubt, a web page’s speed can decrease due to several factors, but if you can’t find any reason why your web page is bugged and sluggish, it might be because you’re a victim of a negative SEO attack. Constantly run speed tests to avoid falling in rankings, and immediately contact your web hosting providers.
If something's off with your webpage, your visitors and customers will be the first to notice. And online reviewing has become a resourceful habit of the Internet population lately. Monitoring your webpage through Google My Business can help determine whether someone's messing with your webpage, especially if there are negative comments and reports on malfunctions or bugs on your otherwise impeccable web page.
A keyword's click-through rate is vital in many aspects, from choosing valuable content to targeting your potential clients with significant ads. If your site and content have been getting a lot of attention lately, but the visitors ' bounce' in the process - it's probably a bug.
You can check your webpage for this peculiar bug by logging into the Google Search Console and choosing Search Traffic > Search Analytics.
SERP ranking is the result of a search query. Effective SEO focuses on putting your brand on the first page of search results. If you've managed this and have constantly been going one spot up or down, there's nothing to worry about.
However, if you type a keyword which is SEO-efficient for your niche and your site's name doesn't come up - you've got a problem. Your site is looking spotless, but it's not generating results. This is called deindexing, and it's the most notorious SEO threat.
Do you need expert services to monitor negative SEO practices for you? Our team at SEO Defend can help.
We deal with anything SEO-related, like scraping, content duplication, deindexing, and more. Aside from prevention services, we also offer classic SEO tools to help you land your site on Google’s first page and maintain top rankings.
Contact our team, and master SEO without spending months learning the science behind it.
SEO is a topic you can never thoroughly master, mainly because Google updates its algorithm quite frequently over the year. In 2022, several major algorithm updates could quickly get your webpage out of the league. Like that’s not hard enough, competitors can also worsen the situation.
In the endless arsenal of tricks and scams that can easily manipulate and take down a webpage from its good organic ranking and validity, using the correct negative SEO tools can keep things under control. Here are the 5 most common negative SEO attacks that may require immediate attention.
Everyone can choose a niche and start publishing content in the field. There are millions of similar content-related web pages, which is why plagiarism and copying content from another webpage is one of the most strictly forbidden violations on the Google search engine.
Scraping uses a webpage’s content, duplicated on multiple other web pages, to fight itself. Usually, Google can handle these situations and find the original source, but it’s an easy way to disable a web page.
Affiliate or spam linking now and then can’t destroy a web page. But an orchestrated attack of using interconnected links in a web page’s content, which are entirely unrelated to its original niche, may alarm Google’s engine. It will signal that a web page is manipulating the engine, initially posting content from a different niche, while targeting something completely different.
Of course, you can link statistics everywhere or promote businesses on your webpage, but the page's niche must be consistent.
If a web page runs slower than usual, Google will automatically move down its rankings, assuming something’s wrong. Or maybe that web page is no longer being actively operated or updated, causing malfunctions.
Competitive web pages or malicious hackers can cause this by massively overloading the web page’s server, aiming to crash it eventually. So when the Googlebot tries accessing the web page several times with no response, it will most likely get de-ranked.
Modifying the web page’s content can be made either visible or totally undetectable by inputting small pieces of bugs and code defects directly into the page’s HTML code. The tools mentioned above, such as link modifying and scraping, can also be done from the web page instead of off-page.
This powerful method will leave the content untacked but remove the web page from Google’s search engine visibility. The process includes adding a ".txt file" on the web page’s code, in the HEAD area. It will look something like this:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
No-indexing is one of the most powerful negative SEO attacks because it can’t be easily detected. There’s no visible change in the web content or design, and there are no threat alert notifications. The no-indexing method can de-rank a web page overnight, but luckily, you can easily overcome the effects.
There’s an endless plethora of negative SEO attacks that can get you out of business, but SEO Defend uses the right negative SEO tools to look through them all.
From penalty removal to improving your overall content, our team can maintain the ranking you’ve been long working for or help you get it! Contact us and get one-click-away protection for your webpage.
