So did you see that Walmart is quietly changing their name? Yep, it is known formally as Walmart Stores, and they are dropping the 'stores' from their name! Why? Because they are the largest company in the world in terms of sales and they want to stay that way! Amazon just jumped into the grocery business, so Walmart wants to increase their online sales because they know the buying online trend is not going away! All the traditional department stores are going more and more to online sales. Once big names like Macy's, Sears, etc., are closing brick & mortar stores and moving to online sales. Malls are quickly becoming a thing of the past, with anchor stores shutting down!

Why does this matter? Why am I telling you this? I am proving that, as more and more consumers and more and more companies are competing for the NEW top location (not the corner lot at the busy intersection), the Google ranking is going to become even more important than ever. But you won't get there by accident!

​

89% of consumers now search online before making a purchase of a product or service! That means that only 11 people out of every 100 will pick up the phone and call without searching. If you don't have a website or have one that is not ranking on page one, your business is probably not doing very well. Not only that, but when was the last time you saw a phone book? Even if they are looking for a phone number, they are going to do a search. Here's another shocker, 96% of searchers never go beyond page one of the results page! That means if you're on page 2, you're not getting a lot of visits to your website.

The NEW CORNER lot I mentioned earlier is the top spot in the Google map! 33% of consumers pick the business that is in the number 1 spot. If that's you, you're getting 33 calls or visits for every 100 searches. Big DEAL? #2 gets 18%, #3 about 11%. If you take the 4% away that will continue on to page 2, you're left with 34% distributed among the rest of page 1. But there's more, of that 34%, most will have picked their company before they get to the middle of the page, which is about the 5th or 6th listing!

I promise you ONE thing, most of the time, the company at the number 1 spot in the map, has an SEO person or company optimizing their online presence! They understand that SEO is the bill that pays the bills. Generally, one or 2 sales a month will pay for their SEO costs. SEO is not a one and done activity, this is a dog eat dog world and if you become the #1 business on page 1, you knocked somebody out of that position and they WILL see a hit to their sales. You become the target, so your SEO person or company will have to fight to keep that position! Just as you have a manager for a brick & mortar business, so too do you need a person or company to manage your online presence. That's SEO!

​If you are using a blog to promote a business, enable comments. Many businesses leave their comments turned off to avoid spam. If you allow site visitors to leave comments on your articles within your blog, though, it provides new content for your blog that is unique and free. Since search engines love content that is unique, the comment section can help your search engine rankings increase on your blog.

When creating the URL for your website, use a keyword phrase. Search engines will place more value on your URL when searches are done for those keywords. By using a keyword phrase that is popular, your URL will show up more frequently in the search engines.

Any website owner can benefit from the process of search engine optimization, or SEO. For your business to thrive, your website needs traffic. Making your website search engine friendly to bring in traffic takes some effort. In this post, we will help you learn more about optimizing your website to make it search engine friendly and bring in more traffic.

When working on the meta-tag section of your webpage, do a little research on your keywords so you can include every variation and misspelling on your list. This will increase your visibility as the search engine bots analyze your meta-tags and include them on your website.
​
Even though there are several search engines available, your focus should be on the big ones. Google is the main search engine available, with Yahoo and Bing following behind. As you optimize your website, research what these three search engines look for and customize your site to get their attention. It’s not worth your time and money to optimize your site for MSN or Ask, or any of the other smaller search engines.

For about the last 2 years Google has been silently changing the way have been ranking sites. Well, silent to the majority of the worlds' population, but if you're in Web Design or SEO and you don't know about it, you're living under a rock! With the increased use of smartphones and tablets came the increase of Google searches from these devices. This, couple with the fact that more searches are now done from mobile than desktop PC's, Google decided to rethink it's ranking practices. Google is just like every other smart company, they are constantly trying to improve the experience for their consumer, and adapting their core product in order to do so! Who is Google's consumer? Well there are many Google products, but mainly their Search Engine. Google processes 40,000 searches per second, 3.5 BILLION per day, and 1.2 TRILLION a year. So, with that many customers, you want to make sure your product gives them the best experience possible.   

The answer to that question should be pretty obvious! If you have 40,000 searches per second, and now close to 60% (about 24,000) of those are from a mobile device, you gotta make a change! So they started giving websites that are mobile friendly a higher ranking. This is a nice way of saying that if your site is not mobile friendly you got pushed down the ranks. This has been dubbed in the SEO space as Mobilegeddon!

So now, the next phase of Mobilegeddon! Google is call this phase "mobile-first indexing." With this update, they will be using a mobile versions of sites first, which is obvious why they named it as such. Currently they are still using desktop versions of sites to rank sites and supplementing it with mobile versions found and bumping them up accordingly!  

Don't believe me?  I get it, I mean who am I? To read all about it check out the full article from Forbes magazine by clicking here, or click on the image below this post! 

One thing is clear, if you don't know if your site is mobile friendly, you can test it yourself! Click on this link Google Mobile Friendly Test, enter your sites URL (example: yoursitename.com) and click the "Run Test" button! Typically, if your site was built before 2010, chances are it is not mobile friendly, but more importantly, even if it is, before this coming update you should have an SEO professional make sure your site is ready. Dropping in rank means losing sales, and we know how much business owners hate losing sales. 

Thanks for reading, and if you need SEO or Web Design, make sure you go to any page and fill out the contact form or call 864-621-8068.

I hear it all the time when speaking to new prospective clients! They are leery of hiring an SEO company because they have been burned in the past. You know what I mean? They promise you page 1 ranking, take your money every month, but you may see minimal movement in your ranks! You call them and ask them to add or change something, but you never get to speak with the person doing the work, and it takes days or weeks to see the changes! I had a large SEO company call me once, before I learned SEO, He told me he would get me page 1 ranking, I was sold! I paid that company for almost an entire year, and never got page 1! When I called and told them I was cancelling the service,the conversation went like this:

ME: You told me you'd get me page 1 ranking!

THEM: No we didn't!

ME: Excuse me? Yes you did, that's why I bought! 

THEM: We would never promise you page 1!

ME: Well you did, you said whatever would get you the sale! I'm done! Cancel me effective immediately!

THEM: Well, we can give you a discounted rate for 3 months if you stay!

ME: Why would I stay with a company that just told me a bold faced lie? Cancel it now!

Sound Familiar? So how do you avoid this same situation? I'm going to give you a few pointers on what to look for and what to stay away from!

So, I hope this post was helpful! If you need SEO or Web Design for you business in Spartanburg or anywhere for that matter, call Carpe DM Products, you'll be glad you did!

I see it all the time! Some business owners are so hungry for business that they won't get out of their own way and stick with a plan, or worse, are reluctant to move forward. They just know that they have to do something and the flight or fight reaction kicks in. Look, I get it, you have to have money coming in so that you can stay in business. If the person doing your SEO promised you page 1 immediately or ever, they did themselves and more importantly, you a great disservice! If you have someone that knows SEO well, you could very well get on page 1, but in very few instances will it be quickly! This is what creates the SEO hopper! They want the ranking NOW, and they will move from company to company trying to make that happen! This results in very little movement, and a LOT of wasted money, and time!

One of the biggest mistakes an SEO company can do is NOT set realistic expectations for their prospective client. This is because they are focused on one thing, closing the deal! If closing the deal means promising that you'll have customers lined up to the moon, that's what their promising you! Personally, I would rather be up front with you and ensure you that what I do works, but in a lot of cases, and due to a lot of variables, it likely will take 3 to 6 months to rank your site.  Now, with that being said, if the SEO company gets right to work, you should see some movement in your ranking in a few weeks. 

When figuring out what it takes to rank a website, you have to take into consideration who is the standard. Everybody knows that Google is the search king! So when you want to rank a site, you have to ask yourself what is Google's ultimate goal? Google's goal is to satisfy their customers, just like every business. 
Who is their customer? Well, anybody that has ever conducted a search using Google! Pretty close to everybody on the planet!
 
So, what's their plan? Google wants to give searchers (their customers) what every other business wants to give their customers; the best experience possible! The way they do that is to give them the absolute best information on the internet for the search topic. 

How do they do that? Glad you asked! They constantly crawl the internet for information. They use that information to form the search results. They put the best results at the top of the list, which in Google's case is in the map section and on page one of the organic listings (listngs below the map).
So now ask yourself, what gets you to the top of that list? 

Well, we said Google wants information! So, if you have the most information in your field, who do you think will be at the top?
But information is not enough. The information has to be relevant to the topic searched. Luckily people won't search for underwater basket weaving if they need a plumber, so that makes it a little easier. 

What does Google look at?

Google looks at hundreds of criteria when ranking a site. But, there are 3 main things that business owners and SEO analysts need to consider.
1. Content - The best way to become relevant is to show Google you are the authority on your topic. The more informative your site is, the higher it will rank. If your competitor has little content on their site, this is an easy fix. If not, keep adding content until you have more!
2. Citations - This is simply putting your business information on directories throughout the internet. The more times Google finds your business info, the more relevant your site becomes.
3. Backlinks - Backlinks are like votes for your website. However, you need to be careful and make sure the backlink comes from a relevant site and the more noteable the site, the better. (for example, if your site is for home construction, you'll want links from sites that have to do with this topic. A backlink from a bakery site has no relevance to home construction). Now, all links don't have the same power! Think about this, if you're running for some local office, and you get endorsed by Jim Bob, nobody cares. However, if you get endorsed by the mayor, suddenly eyes start looking at you! Backlinks are the same way, if you get a backlink on Home Depot's site and you're a home builder, how powerful is that? This was just used as an example, so don't go running to Home Depot asking for a link, they'll send you to the fence department or they'll just look at you funny!

This is just a few of the things and a big over-simplification of the SEO process, but it should give you a better understanding of why your website is not ranking or what to work on if you're a budding SEO person. 

Make sure to share this if you found the information helpful!