What’s On My Mind
What You Don’t Know About Link Schemes Can Hurt You
When I started Blue Corona in late 2007, practically no one knew what “SEO” stood for, much less what was actually involved in creating and executing an SEO campaign. Flash forward to 2014. A lot more people know what SEO is, although there’s still considerable mystery and confusion on the part of business owners when…
Google Penguin 2.1 Update, October 4, 2013
It’s Sunday afternoon. If you’re like most normal people, you’re grabbing a quick afternoon nap or shuttling the kids to and from games or birthday parties. The last thing that’s on your mind is Matt Cutts. Hell, you probably don’t even know who Matt Cutts is! And why should you? He’s only the head of…
Google Gives Itself a Birthday Gift
For those of you who actually spent this week working (not in an online marketing capacity), Google announced some big news. In celebration of its 15th birthday, Google gave itself a present. Drumroll, please! The gift? A shiny new search engine algorithm called Hummingbird (cute, Larry, real cute). If you’d like to learn more, you can…
A Different Way to Think About Search and Social
A lot of companies weight heavily metrics like lead quantity and cost per lead as measures of success for their search and social media campaigns. On the one hand, I agree that these are very important metrics. However, there’s another set of metrics relating to authority that a lot of companies are overlooking (to their…
Taking the Hard Road (the illusion of easy)
A couple weeks ago, I had a conversation with the owner of a local plumbing company. He had recently paid a fairly well-known inbound marketing guru and consultant to help him grow his business. But during the consulting process, something interesting happened. Instead of the consultant helping the plumber create an inbound marketing system to…
SearchLove Boston 2013: The SEO Identity Crisis
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending SearchLove Boston. It was a great event, and I think the team at Distilled did a fantastic job! If you work in the SEO industry and you’ve never attended one of Distilled’s events, I highly recommend you check out SearchLove San Diego. There were a number…
The Future of SEO (Do You Deserve to be There?)
Imagine a place where you can be anyone and anything you want to be; a world where you are whatever you claim you are—with little or no recourse. That place exists. It’s called the world wide web. Right now, it’s pretty plain to see that the web and reality are two very different places. Over…
The Devil is in the Details
Whenever I tell a business owner that they have to start accurately tracking their advertising and marketing, they tell me that they already do. They ask prospects the age-old question, “How’d you hear about us?” The problem with this approach is threefold: 1. It’s inaccurate The biggest problem with this question is that it’s inaccurate.…
Using Data to Hold the Course
In the world of traditional advertising and marketing, where companies are forced to “rent” the attention of an audience from someone else, large, well-heeled companies have a major advantage over the little guys. Think about what it costs to run an ad during the Super Bowl. Advertising initiatives like this are simply not a practical…
How “Guesstimating” Can Wreck Your Marketing ROI
The reason you’re unhappy with your marketing results is the same reason that more than 30 percent of Americans are obese—guesstimating. Think about the number of people who accurately count the calories they eat and/or weigh their food. It’s probably a fraction of a percent, wouldn’t you say? Sadly, I’ll bet that there are more…
