Whiteboard Friday

8 Old School SEO Practices That Are No Longer Effective

Are you guilty of living in the past? Using methods that were once tried-and-true can be alluring, but it can also prove dangerous to your search strategy. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand spells out eight old school SEO practices that you should ditch in favor of more effective and modern alternatives.

How to Influence Branded Searches and Search Volumes to Earn Big Rewards

What have you been doing with branded searches? If the answer is "not much," it may be time to shift your focus a bit. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores the huge benefits of turning some of your unbranded searches into branded and offers some key tactical advice.

Linking Internally and Externally from Your Site - Dangers, Opportunities, Risk and Reward

Navigating linking practices can be a treacherous process. Sometimes it feels like a penalty is lurking around every corner. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about the ins and outs of linking internally and externally, identifying pitfalls and opportunities both.

How to Make the SEO Case to Small Businesses

Belief in the process can be the make-or-break factor when it comes to convincing small businesses they need SEO. Overcoming skepticism can be daunting, but there are strategic ways to go about pitching your case to potential clients that will smooth the way for you. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers a 5-step process to making the SEO case to those small and medium businesses that need a little extra push to help you help them.

How Google May Analyze and Evaluate the Quality, Value, & Rank-Worthiness of Your Content

Your content has quality links and your keyword targeting is an SEO's dream. Yet for some mysterious reason, that content still isn't ranking. What's missing? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains some of the advanced tactics Google may be using to evaluate and analyze your content and what you should be looking out for to help resolve your ranking woes.

Why You Need to Find All Your NAP Variations Before Building Local Citations

Citation consistency got you down? It's one of the most important local search ranking factors, but it can be an overwhelming task to find inconsistencies, and it's often easy to create accidental duplicate listings. In today's guest Whiteboard Friday, Darren Shaw, founder of Whitespark and recent speaker at MozCon Local, outlines a foolproof way to discover all your NAP variations to prepare for proper citation building.

Using Related Topics and Semantically Connected Keywords in Your SEO

Back in February, we explored balancing keyword targeting with concept targeting. This time around we're looking at using your knowledge of related topics and semantic connections in your on-page SEO processes. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about applying those ideas in ways that will boost your ranking potential and inform your keyword research.

Discovering Which Sites Your Target Audience Visits

Identifying your target market is only one-fifth of the battle. If you want to win the proverbial war, you have to know your audience inside and out. Discovering the sites they visit and using that knowledge to your advantage is key, but the best practices to do so can feel unclear. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines a five-step process to more effectively reach and market to your target community.

Overcoming Objections on Your Landing Pages

How do you take your potential customers' problems and turn them into a conversion success? If you're having trouble with low conversion rates on high-traffic landing pages, don't worry — there's help. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares a process to turn your landing page objections into improved conversion rates.

Should SEOs Only Care About DIRECT Ranking Signals in Google?

Can a new friend you connect with at a conference be as strong of a ranking signal as a quality backlink? Can it be ​stronger​? The power of indirect ranking signals is something that can often be overlooked or brushed aside in favor of what we know as hard truth from Google, but doing so is a mistake. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about the importance of broadening your perspective and tactics when it comes to considering both direct and ​indirect​ ranking signals in your SEO.

How to Optimize for Competitors' Branded Keywords

It's probably crossed your mind before. ​Should​ you optimize for your competitors' branded keywords? How would you even go about it effectively? Well, in today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains some carefully strategic and smart ways to optimize for the keywords of a competitor, from determining their worthiness to properly targeting your funnel to using third-party hosted content for maximum amplification.

Can SEOs Stop Worrying About Keywords and Just Focus on Topics?

Should you ditch keyword targeting entirely? There's been a lot of discussion around the idea of focusing on broad topics and concepts to satisfy searcher intent, but it's a big step to take and could potentially hurt your rankings. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses old-school keyword targeting and new-school concept targeting, outlining a plan of action you can follow to get the best of both worlds.