Digital Envy

07/03/2020

SEO Myth: Query Must Have Freshness

QDF, or Query Deserves Freshness, most certainly applies to queries that need fresh results. For instance, from a news site or say the most recent Powerball numbers.

That does not mean you have to change every element on your homepage every day, or even very often.

While there are sites that absolutely must have fresh content on their main site pages on a daily or weekly basis, most do not.

Evergreen pages are evergreen for a reason. If you write an article on mobile-first indexing and that information has not changed, you do not need to change that page to give it “freshness”.

You do, however, need to have some fresh content on your site. So a good content strategy is how you address having fresh content without trying to meet some unnatural goal for daily content changes.

Bonus Tip: For smaller sites that have small teams or little money and do not need to have fresh content daily, you can just invest in adding pages to the site when needed but keeping an active blog presence. Adding 2-3 blog posts a week will keep the site relevant without adding the demands and costs of continually updating pages.

06/29/2020

SEO Myth: You Don’t Need a Sitemap

Sitemaps are not a nice to have add-on for sites today. This gets even more important as we move to the mobile-first algorithms in 2018.

Why? When Google cannot easily crawl a portion of your site, the sitemap allows the crawler to better find these pages.

Bonus Tip: Google is going to have a harder time finding pages due to the reduced size of navigational elements in mobile-first indexing. Sitemaps – both XML and HTML – will be the best way for them to find all the pages on the site you want indexed and ranked.

06/26/2020

SEO Myth: You Must Submit Your Site

At least twice a week I get an email from an SEO site submission company telling me I need to pay them to submit my site to the search engines.

Seriously? No, you do not.

Now, are there times when it is good to submit your site URLs? Sure when you need the search engines to come back to the site to do things like pick up a new piece of content or re-evaluate a page, however, you never need to submit your site.

Google is advanced enough now – and especially with its status as registrar – that it can find you minutes after not only that site is live, but also when the domain is registered.

Now if you’ve been live for a few weeks and have an inbound link to the site and Google has not come by as evident by your logs it can’t hurt to submit it via Google Search Console Fetch and Render, but never ever pay someone to submit your site.

Bonus Tip: When in doubt just use Google’s URL submit form or “fetch and render/submit” in Google Search Console.

06/24/2020

Are you using "hope marketing" in your business? Lots of businesses are.

But what is hope marketing? And why doesn't it work? Find out in my latest blog post.

https://digitalenvy.ca/stop-using-hope-marketing/

06/22/2020

SEO Myth: Keyword Density

There was a time keyword density have some validity.

Really, if it did not work why do you think all those people were stuffing white text on white backgrounds for ranking purposes? Then Google got smarter and it did away with keyword stuffing as a viable practice and even people who got good results from applying density testing to much smaller keyword placements no longer could count on knowing what keyword density would help.

In both cases, this no longer exists.

While you can still put any word on the page too many times, there is no set range of what makes a page rank. In fact, you can find results now where the keyword does not exist in the visible portion of the page. It might be in the links or in the image tagging or somewhere else that is not part of the content it might even be a similar not exact match. This is not typical, but it does exist.

Bottom line: placing a keyword X times per page is no longer something worth spending your time on. There are far better fish to fry.

06/22/2020

What a great Fathers Day. Really grateful for everything and knowing what is the most important things in life.

06/20/2020

A lot has changed in 2020. Did these social media marketing trends work in 2020 or not? Find out in this blog post.

https://digitalenvy.ca/social-media-marketing-2020/

What will the future bring for small businesses looking to capitalize on their social media campaigns? Check out our top 3 social media marketing trends in 2020.

06/19/2020

SEO Myth: Links Are Dead

I once had a call from a potential client that asked me if I could remove all his links.

“Remove all your links? May I ask why you would want to do that,” I asked.

“Because I heard links were bad and I need to remove them,” he told me.

“Did you buy the links or get them from some nefarious method?”

“No, they are all legit.”

“Then, sir, whatever you do, use me or don’t for other reasons, do not get rid of your links!”

True story.

Links aren’t dead.

Links aren’t close to dead.

If you have the best content in the world and no links, your site won’t get much visibility. Links and content are correlated with rankings. Great content still needs great links (or a lot of mediocre ones).

If you’re buying links for $99 and expecting to get to the top spots in Google, you’re barking up a very dead tree.

Remember, good links require topical relevancy and legitimacy. If it isn’t natural and it comes from an unrelated page or site, it probably won’t help much.

Bonus tip: Reciprocal linking died circa 2007, maybe earlier. Linking to your buddy and them linking to you won’t do you much good.

06/17/2020

Are these local SEO trends still working in 2020? Read this blog post to find out!

https://digitalenvy.ca/local-seo-trends-2020/

Significant opportunities exist for businesses to increase ROI in 2020. Start with these 3 local SEO trends in 2020 and see an increase in targeted leas.

06/15/2020

SEO Myth: Website Speed Isn’t That Important

Google said a while back that page speed is only a tie-breaker when all other factors are equal. This is one of those cases where I can say that this is not borne out in real-world testing.

Personally, I had a client increase their traffic by 150% when they cut their page speed by 50 percent. So while it is true that it acts as a tie-breaker when all things are equal it can also dramatically improve rankings when your site has a severe page speed issue.

Now when I say a page speed issue, I don’t mean you cut your 5-second site load time down to 2 seconds. I mean when you dramatically cut your page load, say a 22-second site load time down to 8 seconds, which is what happened in this case.

This means that if you can cut your website load from 22 seconds to 8 seconds as in the example, Google will likely reward you for the dramatic decrease in page load because you are now dramatically faster. This is an additional benefit of improving page speed unrelated to breaking a tie on a specific query result.