Mark Faggiano

Website consultant who loves helping others build online companies. Sold @beelya & @filelater. Working on my next cash machine: @taxjar. Crazy about golf & sports. Connect with me on Google+

So…How Does SEO Work?

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I’ve said this before, but these days practically every business owner I meet wants to talk about SEO.

Most of the time, the conversation is spent talking about their pain. Either they are frustrated with a current provider that’s not producing, or they have recently come to the realization that their website’s performance in search engines is lacking and they need help. And they need help fast.

Inevitably, the conversation will turn to our approach to search engine optimization. It’s a great question. People want to know what it is we do to get results. I always tell them that we didn’t write the book on SEO. And our methods are hardly a secret. At the end of the day, we follow a proven method that utilizes white hat technologies. In other words, we don’t cheat.

So the answer is a mix of experience, ethical practices, and hard work. All of that usually equals  success.

You can read more about our process. There’s an overview on our website.

Monitor Ad Competiton in Other Cities with SearchMuffin

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Business owners: if you geo-target your search ads, or if you’ve ever wondered about your paid search competition in a particular city, then you need to check out SearchMuffin.

SearchMuffin is a very cool and simple-to-use search engine that I’m betting you’ve never used before. To use it, all you need to do is enter a keyword and select a city in the US from a dropdown (there are more than 250 cities to choose from). In return you get a view of Google’s search results for the city you selected. In other words, you can see the ads exactly as they appear as if you were a user in that city.

This is extremely valuable for a couple of reasons. First, you can find out who your competition is in any city. It’s very possible you’ll find competitors you never knew existed. To me, that’s always a positive thing because, good or bad, we can always learn something from our competitors.

Second, you can piece together your competition’s strategy. Are their ads the same in every city, or do they change? Do they bid more aggressively in one city over another? Do they even bid in the same cities as you do?

One more tip: compare what you see in SearchMuffin with the stats in your analytics. Now that you know who is bidding against you in a city, keep an eye on how your conversion rate in that city compares to other cities in your campaign.

So, go try SearchMuffin and let me know what you think.

Need Links? Here’s a Way To Get Started.

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Check out our latest article in out free SEO Resources – “A Simplified Look at Acquiring Links”.

Like many of the articles we make available for business owners, this one is born out of a very common issue we see with business owners looking to get started with search engine optimization. Most of the business owners we talk to know they need to increase the number of quality inbound links. Many have been confused by some long-winded proposal from another SEO company about how exactly to get that done.

Bottom line: business owners want to at least know the basics before they make an investment (no matter the size) in improving their search engine positioning. Here’s hoping this article makes it a little easier to understand where to begin.

Regulated search? I don’t think so.

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Just wanted to chime in quickly on today’s buzz-producing post on TechCrunch about the need to regulate search.

Admittedly, it is pretty amazing to think about the control that Google has over search. Without a transparent algorithm, they can seemingly do what they want and keep SEOs guessing. But does that mean we need regulation? I’d have to vote no for one big reason:

Regulation = getting the government involved as an overseer.

That definitely doesn’t sound good. While I’m sympathetic to the argument that Google wields too much power, there’s no way the government will be able to keep current with technology. If the IRS is still trying to figure out how to get all of their forms to go paperless, how can we expect such a massive organization to stay ahead of the curve in something like search? I just can’t see it working.