SEO Archives - Baggies Web Solutions

March 15, 2023March 16, 2023

9 Things to Consider When Hiring a SEO Company.

Are you ready to get the results you desire? Call Baggies Web Solutions at 214-446-2240 or go to our contact page and fill our our form.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important aspect of any business’s online marketing strategy. It can help drive traffic to a website and improve the website’s visibility on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Many businesses opt to hire an SEO company to help with their internet marketing efforts. However, not all companies are created equal.

Here are some things business owners should look for when choosing an SEO company.

1) Experience and Expertise

When choosing an SEO company, it’s important to consider their experience and expertise. Look for a company that has been in business for several years and has a track record of success. You want a company that has experience working with businesses similar to yours and can provide examples of successful campaigns.

2) Transparency

Look for an SEO company that is transparent about their strategies and techniques. They should be willing to explain their process and provide regular updates on their progress. You want to avoid companies that use black-hat techniques, such as keyword stuffing, link farming, or cloaking, as these can result in penalties from search engines.

3) Customized Approach

Every business is unique, and so are their SEO needs. Look for a company that takes a customized approach to each client. They should take the time to understand your business and its goals, and create an SEO strategy that is tailored to your specific needs.

4) Communication

Communication is key when working with an SEO company. Look for a company that is responsive and easy to communicate with. They should be available to answer your questions and provide regular updates on their progress.

5) Results

Ultimately, you want an SEO company that can deliver results. Look for a company that has a proven track record of improving website rankings, driving traffic, and increasing conversions. Ask for references and case studies to get a sense of their success rate.

6) Price

Price is always a consideration when choosing an SEO company. While you don’t want to sacrifice quality for price, you also don’t want to overpay for services. Look for a company that offers competitive pricing and has a clear pricing structure.

7) Up-to-Date Strategies

SEO is an ever-evolving field, and strategies that worked a few years ago may not be effective today. Look for an SEO company that stays up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in the industry. They should be knowledgeable about Google’s algorithms and the latest updates, and be able to adjust their strategies accordingly.

8) Local SEO Expertise

If you have a local business, it’s important to choose a company that has expertise in local SEO. Local SEO involves optimizing your website for local search results, such as “plumber near me” or “restaurant in [city name].” Look for a company that has experience with local SEO and can help you improve your visibility in local search results.

9) Reporting

Finally, look for a company that provides regular reporting on their progress. They should provide detailed reports on website traffic, rankings, and other metrics that are important to your business. This will help you track your ROI and make informed decisions about your SEO strategy.

In conclusion, choosing the right SEO company is essential to the success of your online marketing efforts. Look for a company that has experience, is transparent about their strategies, takes a customized approach, communicates well, delivers results, offers competitive pricing, stays up-to-date with the latest trends, has expertise in local SEO, and provides regular reporting. With the right SEO company by your side, you can improve your website’s visibility, drive traffic, and increase conversions.

Are you ready to get the results you desire? Call Baggies Web Solutions at 214-446-2240 or go to our contact page and fill our our form.

January 12, 2023March 18, 2023

How to Setup a Google My Business Profile

Do you need help creating your Google My Business Profile? Call Baggies Web Solutions at 214-446-2240 or go to our contact page and fill our our form.

Setting up a Google My Business profile is an essential step for any business that wants to establish an online presence and attract more customers. With Google My Business, you can create a detailed profile that appears in Google search results and on Google Maps, providing valuable information to potential customers such as your business hours, location, and reviews. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the steps of setting up a Google My Business profile.

Step 1: Sign in to Google My Business

To get started, you’ll need to sign in to your Google account and navigate to the Google My Business homepage at www.google.com/business. If you don’t already have a Google account, you’ll need to create one before you can set up a Google My Business profile.

Step 2: Enter your business name and address

Once you’ve signed in to Google My Business, you’ll be prompted to enter your business name and address. Make sure you enter the correct information, as this will be used to create your business listing on Google.

If you operate a service-based business that doesn’t have a physical storefront, such as a plumber or landscaper, you can choose to hide your address and only show the service area you cover. This is a useful option for businesses that operate out of a home office or other non-commercial location.

Step 3: Verify your business

Before your Google My Business profile can be published, you’ll need to verify that you are the owner or authorized representative of the business. Google offers several verification methods, including phone, email, or postcard.

If you choose to verify your business by postcard, Google will send a verification code to the address you provided in step 2. Once you receive the postcard, you can enter the verification code in your Google My Business account to complete the verification process.

Step 4: Add your business details

Once your business is verified, you can begin adding details to your Google My Business profile. This includes your business hours, phone number, website, and other important information that potential customers may need to know.

To add these details, navigate to the Info tab in your Google My Business dashboard and click on the pencil icon next to each section you want to edit. Make sure you fill out all of the relevant information to provide potential customers with a comprehensive view of your business.

Step 5: Upload photos

Adding photos to your Google My Business profile is an effective way to showcase your business and attract more customers. You can upload photos of your storefront, products, services, and staff, as well as any events or promotions you’re running.

To upload photos, navigate to the Photos tab in your Google My Business dashboard and click on the Add Photos button. You can then select the photos you want to upload from your computer or mobile device.

Step 6: Manage your reviews

Reviews are an important part of any Google My Business profile, as they provide social proof that your business is reputable and trustworthy. You should encourage customers to leave reviews on your profile, and respond to any reviews you receive, whether they’re positive or negative.

To manage your reviews, navigate to the Reviews tab in your Google My Business dashboard. From here, you can read and respond to reviews, as well as report any reviews that violate Google’s guidelines.

Step 7: Monitor your insights

Google My Business provides valuable insights into how customers are finding and interacting with your business online. You can use these insights to make informed decisions about your marketing and advertising strategies, as well as to identify areas where you can improve your online presence.

To view your insights, navigate to the Insights tab in your Google My Business dashboard. Here, you can see data on how many people have viewed your profile, how they found your business, and how they’re interacting with your profile.

Do you need help creating your Google My Business Profile? Call Baggies Web Solutions at 214-446-2240 or go to our contact page and fill our our form.

August 5, 2022

What is Zero-Click?

A new phenomenon is taking a hold of the search engine results pages. It’s called zero-click searches and it’s forcing business owners and website developers alike to rethink how the content on their website functions.

What is Zero-Click?

Zero-Click means that the person who is conducting the search never clicks on a website or ad.

Example: I’ve recently considered hiring a company to mow my lawn on a bi-weekly basis. So I’ve done a bit of research on landscape companies who offer this. I’ve most recently done a search for “lawn maintenance in McKinney, Texas”. As with most location-based searches, the first thing that pops up in the map pack. This offers enough information to make a quick decision on who to call based on the proximity to my search AND the star rating.

There is enough information here to allow me to contact 3 companies and get quotes from them for their services.

What does this mean?

It means that all of the SEO work that has been done on these companies websites is being circumvented. A focus has been placed on managing their presence via Google My Business, which is where this information is being pulled. With all of the information necessary for me to make a quick decision presented to me within the search engine, I don’t need to click on anything further. It’s all right there in front of me.

A Few Different Options

There are also a few different styles of Zero-Click searches that you can run into. One of the most popular is answering a question. In my decision to search for a lawn maintenance company, I searched for “How often should I mow my lawn?”. Again, I was given the answer without ever having to click on a website.

By creating more opportunities for Google to provide information to searchers without ever taking the user to a website, they are effectively redirecting traffic from websites and keeping it in-house. At some point in time, I fully believe in a future where we may not have to leave the Google, Bing, etc. environment to navigate the web.

What does that mean for SEO?

Without beating around the bush, it means you have to have your ducks in a row. All of them. Since a zero-click search won’t show up in website analytics reports, you have to rely on Google Search Console stats to see how successful your site is in providing answers.

Every business who derives leads, phone calls, contact form submissions to sustain their bottom line needs to make sure all opportunities for Zero-Click searches can lead back to them. This means you have to be vigilant about managing your local listings. Filling out the information from top to bottom without spamming and getting removed from the indices (the exact opposite of what we’re trying to do).

It also means that the content on your website has to be top notch. It has to answer questions that your potential clients ask. In doing so, you increase the likelihood of a searcher clicking on the link to your website to read more information and find out what you do.

Us here at Baggies Web Solutions focus on making your website as good as it can be, so we can bridge the gap between zero-click and getting the phone call.

March 29, 2019September 23, 2019

What is Time On Page?

Time on Page is a funny metric. Who cares how long someone spends on your website, right? As long as the people find what they are looking for, make a purchase, fill out a contact form, or call, why does it matter? While there is no concrete proof that the amount of time people spend on your site will cause your rankings to improve, there is reason to believe that it does make a difference. According to a Google spokesperson:

“As we’ve commented on before, we use interactions in a variety of ways, such as for personalization, evaluation purposes and training data. We have nothing new or further to share here other than what we’ve long said: having great, engaging content is the right path for success. We’d encourage site owners to focus on that big picture,” a spokesperson said.

That can be interpreted in many ways, but the most direct line of thinking is to make content that keeps a person on the site longer than someone who is in your industry competing for your traffic. Google is not know for giving straight answers and, at times, can be very vague.

What does that mean for my site?

We recommend a number of things to keep people on your site.

Videos
Blogs
Long-Form Content (over 1000 words)

The benefits of these suggestions are two-fold. First, it is giving more meat to the search engines to place your site where it needs to be in the results. Secondly, it is giving your visitors a reason to stay longer and browse the site. This, in turn, helps fulfill the requirement stated by Google when they say: “having great, engaging content is the right path for success.”

October 2, 2018September 23, 2019

What is Mobile First Indexing?

A couple of weeks ago, I started receiving notifications from Google that: “Mobile-first indexing” was enabled for many of our websites. According to Google, the background of this is: “Mobile-first indexing means that Googlebot will now use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, to better help our (primarily mobile) users find what they’re looking for. Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have historically used the desktop version of your site’s content, which can cause issues for mobile searchers when the desktop version differs from the mobile version. Our analysis indicates that the mobile and desktop versions of your site are comparable.”

In short, if your desktop version and smartphone version of your website are comparable, then you should not see any effect on your traffic. However, if you are producing 2 separate websites, one for each device, then your traffic could take a hit. The Speed and Mobile-Friendliness of your site is not what attributes to mobile-first indexing. This is simply a content issue.

August 6, 2018October 23, 2020

Google’s Latest “Speed Update” Wasn’t A Game-Changer

Ever so often, Google releases a major algorithm update that’s designed to shake up the SEO community and have website managers fret over the loading speed of their sites. As with every update, it has the potential to shake up a lot of businesses, as we are never exactly sure how they will affect traffic and what the details are. Google is notoriously secretive about their algorithm.

The most recent update that was designed (we thought) to give preference to faster loading sites over slower sites, has hardly affected the search results. According to Link Assistant, the top 30 positions for over 33,500 queries across 1 million URLs did not change from before the update went into place.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why did we spend so much time getting the speed of your website as fast as possible and dedicate many hours to lowering your load time? According to the findings from Link Assistant, the optimization of speed DOES have a high correlation to the position in the search engine results pages.

So, this update was more than likely designed to weed out some of the worst offenders in load time. If you were at the top of the search engine rankings, you are still there and can continue to monitor your page speed.

July 3, 2018December 1, 2021

5 Tips to Rank Better

We are asked all the time what are some things I can do to rank better with Google. While the answer is not as simple as we all would like there are some things that we recommend to all of our clients. We call it, Essential SEO. These are the essential things every website should be doing to rank better. If you are not doing these things, then your rankings are suffering. Call us today and we can guide you through this process and get your website ranking as high as it can.

Page Speed

Your website needs to load fast to keep your potential customers on it and one of the leading causes of abandoning a website is slow load time. Google uses several factors to determine how to rank search engine results. These factors are either related to the content of a webpage itself (text, URL, titles and headers, etc.) or were measurements of the website itself (age of the domain name, number and quality of links, etc.). However, now the speed at which someone could view your content from a search result is a signfigant factor.

Slow loading pages suffer from low user engagement (increased bounce rates, low average time on page) and Google factors this user behaviour data to influence search rankings. So users that find your page that are bouncing off a slow loading site could potentially decrease its rankings.

Using a tool like Pingdom, can help you determine what parts of your site need optimizing.

Titles and Descriptions

Title tags and meta descriptions are important elements of your website’s content. The title tag and the meta description tags should include keywords relevant to the content of the web page they describe. This helps Search Engines understand what the page is about and index your web pages accordingly for relevant keywords or keyword phrases.

When creating title tags and meta descriptions, the user is always the most important factor – not the search engine. Including keywords in your titles and descriptions is important, but you can take your titles and descriptions to the next level by considering these tags in the context of motivating a user to click, similar to an ad.

Business Verification

An important first step for any website is to claim and verify your local business’ Google My Business (GMB) listing. Getting on Google My Business can increase your chances of showing up in Google’s Local Pack, Local Finder, Google Maps, and organic rankings in general.

Additionally, over the past several months, Google has added some great features to Google My Business that companies should take advantage of that enhances your Google My Business listing and helps to grab viewers’ attention — and can increase how you rank in local search results.

Many local businesses just claim their GMB listing and forget about it. What most businesses don’t realize is that there are a variety of other features Google gives you that you can use to optimize your Google My Business listing and several reasons why you should frequently check your business listing to ensure that its accuracy stays intact.

Sitemaps

A site map is a model of a website’s content designed to help both users and search engines navigate the site. A site map can be a hierarchical list of pages (with links) organized by topic, an organization chart, or an XML document that provides instructions to search engine crawl bots.

Sitemaps are important for SEO because they make it easier for Google to find your site’s pages—this is important because Google ranks web PAGES not just websites. There is no downside of having a Sitemap and having one can improve your SEO.

SSL Certificate

Google is on a mission to reduce the chance of you visiting a site that pretends to be someone else. Malware, viruses and identity theft are a huge problem in today’s online society. By installing an SSL certificate on your website, you are letting, not only the search engines, but your website’s visitors know that you are who your website represents. Starting in July 2018, Google will begin to warn users who are visiting a website that is not secure and does not have an SSL Certificate

Google has encouraged all sites to secure visitor information with SSL Certificates. That means that whether the website collects personal information or not, Google will reward sites with SSL Certificates with a boost in search ranking.

A single-name SSL Certificate is the perfect solution for small business owners, bloggers, and for personal Websites. We encourage all of our users to purchase an SSL and we can provide those to you. Just login to your account and buy one today.

May 20, 2018September 23, 2019

Google Reverses Update of Longer Meta Descriptions

Google Reverses Meta Descriptions Update

Leave it up to Google to reverse one of the biggest visible changes to search engines in many years. Back in the beginning of the year, they announced that they would begin showing around 320 characters underneath the titles when you perform a search on their website. This was a big change, as the number of websites shown above the fold and on your screen would have shrunk by 2-5 (depending on your screen size). That meant that if your website had longer description tags, it would take up more space and valuable real estate on the already crowded search engine results pages.

Reducing Meta Descriptions

In a surprising decision, Google has reduced the number of characters shown in meta descriptions on the search engine results page from ~320 back to ~160. While this does not mean the end of the world, it does mean that your descriptions will cut off, sometimes mid-sentence.

Recently, Google has used the description tags as a suggestion, instead of a definite. For instance, if someone searches for a very specific thing and the page that relates to it does not have that term in the description, Google will randomly take the liberty of replacing it with content from the page that does.

Why are metas important?

Titles and Descriptions are the first impression that searchers get when perusing the list of websites to click on for their particular search. Well-written and descriptive meta tags entice users to click on your site, so spending the time to write and rewrite them is worth it. If you have the best website in the world, but poorly written, or missing metas, your website will miss out on traffic from search engines, as you have not given searchers a reason to click on your site. Metas are one of the most important factors driving traffic to your website.

September 14, 2017October 23, 2020

SEO Takes Your Marketing Dollars Further

When your company is approaching the bottom line, marketing cannot be on the chopping block. By choosing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as part of your online marketing strategy, you can save money and reap the benefits over a longer period of time than traditional Pay Per Click Campaigns (PPC). Paid advertising has its value but once the campaign is over your exposure is over. The paid billboard comes down, the magazine does not print your name any more, and stopping PPC means your presence falls from the top of the search results. SEO campaigns encourage slower and more sustainable grains than more traditional advertising approaches. Your investment can continue to show a great return even after the campaign has ended. Your company will be able to build trust with users, save money, and drive relevant traffic.

Organic Search Results are Preferred

Research shows that 81% of users find their destination through search engines and that organic results are clicked on 8.5 more times than paid results. SEO is not about being at the top of my list but being the best presentation on the list. Customers are becoming more savvy when it comes to search engine results. Organic results are more respected and trusted and as such, are starting to skip the top ads. Users know that just because you paid the most to be there, does not mean you earned the right to be. This will also bring you better quality leads.

SEO is Cost Effective

SEO has been proven over the years to be one of the most cost-effective forms of online marketing and delivers a higher return for every dollar invested. If you implement an effective SEO strategy, you can attract thousands of targeted users to your website. The ongoing effect that SEO provides is that it continues to build momentum over time leaving you to focus on other aspects of your company while SEO does the rest.

Web traffic from an excellent SEO strategy has high conversion potential. Customers are more likely to purchase goods or use services by finding your company through organic results than paid ads. This form of campaign is highly targeted too. SEO allows you to utilize keyword analysis so you can find out just how big the market is or how many people are searching for an exact keyword.

September 7, 2017August 12, 2022

How to Dominate Search Engine Results

The internet has become a crowded, highly competitive marketplace. New technology, however, allows for more robust, direct marketing to your customers. The question then becomes, “How do you get your website and products in front of your customers?” The answer? Making sure your business website covers as much ground in the search engine results pages. Here are a few ways to make that happen.

Local SEO

In the past few years, local searches have taken over prime real estate in the results pages. Just take a look at my lunch search below! The first thing that pops up and takes up the entire page is the Map search showing you what’s around you! Local SEO means making sure your NAWP (Name, Address, Website, Phone number) are correct across all facets of the web. By monitoring your business’ web presence, you will show up in Map searches when someone is looking for your product or service in your area. After Google changed how they display local search results, businesses do not have to compete for the top spot but the top three.

Blogging

Regularly writing a blog that answers common questions that people may have about your business increases your authority and the chances of popping up in search results when someone does a specific search for that blog’s subject. If you are a HVAC repair company, you want blog content that answers a common question like “Why is my AC unit leaking?”. If you have a blog dedicated to that specific subject, your likelihood of getting clicks goes up tremendously!

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click is a great way to get people who are looking for your services and products to your website. If you set up and monitor your ads wisely you can see significant returns on your investment. The search engines’ goal is to return quality results, but not necessarily the highest bidder. If the top paying ad is not helpful, customers will never click on it. Search engines want the best ad for the search, not the highest paying.

Fresh Content

Content on your site must be fresh, keyword-centric, and well-written. Fresh content is one of the major foundations of Google’s relevancy algorithms. Do not post content that is full of errors, duplicated, or boring. A great way to stay on top is to keep Google happy.

These are just a few ways to get more of your business in the search engine results pages. For an in-depth consultation, contact us and we’d be happy to sit down with you to discuss your needs.