If you’re not familiar with SEO, here’s what you need to know: SEO stands for search engine optimization and it’s the process of getting more traffic from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Now that you’re up to speed on what SEO is, let’s talk about some fun facts about it!

Fun Fact

SEO was invented by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were trying to make sense of their own website data! They figured out that if they could just get more people to find their site when they typed in certain words in Google (like “the”), then they could sell more ads on their site! Today there are billions of websites competing for those same keywords so it’s not as easy as it used to be – but we still love Larry and Sergey!

What impact does SEO have on your sales? It can increase your website traffic by up to 300%! That means if 10 people visit your site per day without optimization (or 200 people total), then 30-300 people could visit per day using SEO.

Again, the impact of SEO on your sales is huge. If people don’t find you online, they won’t buy from you online. That means no more sales leads and no more new customers—and that means less revenue for your business overall. If people don’t find your website when they’re searching for products or services just like yours, then their business and money is going somewhere else!

The Cost of SEO Can Vary Widely Based on the Services You Need

SEO can cost anywhere from $450 to $2,000 per month and some companies may charge more depending on which services you need. Typically, SEO includes things like link building or content creation for social media platforms and blog posts that get published on your website—but there are many other factors that will affect the price tag as well! For example, if you already have an established presence online but just want some additional help with content creation or optimizing existing pages on your site, then those services might not come at an additional cost. However, if you don’t have any content yet but want to start from scratch with new blogs and articles written by professionals who know exactly what they’re doing when it comes to SEO best practices, then the cost will be higher.

It’s important to note that while this price range may seem high, it’s actually quite affordable when you consider everything that goes into ensuring your site ranks well. For example:

–              You’ll need someone who can examine your site’s code and make sure it’s optimized for search engines. This usually involves hiring a developer who knows how Google works, and then paying them for their time and expertise.

–              You’ll also need someone who can manage all of your backlinks—the links on other sites that point back to yours—and make sure they’re from high-quality domains with good reputation scores.

–              Also, keyword research is important because it tells you what people are searching for when they go online—that way, when someone searches for something related to your business, there’s a good chance they’ll find your website. Having someone that understands keyword strategy is important.

5 SEO Mistakes to Avoid

If you’re wondering where to start, or want to avoid common mistakes that can damage your SEO, check out these mistakes:

1. Not having a clear idea of your target audience.
2. Not considering how search engine bots view your site, and what they’re looking for when they visit it.
3. Not optimizing every page on your site for the keywords that matter most to your business’s success.
4. Not having a strategy for dealing with duplicate content issues (which are a big deal for SEO).
5. Not writing quality content that meets the needs of both humans and bots alike—and isn’t just filled with keywords!

Now that you know what not to do, we’ll show you how to do it right!

SEO mistakes can be costly and optimizing your website for search engines can be time consuming, but with MiAgency.ca’s expertise and resources, you don’t have to worry about making mistakes, or the time commitment to learn it.  View our SEO services here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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In a recent article by Forbes, author Steve Olenski proclaims “organic search engine optimization is far from dead!” He states that “many companies are making a renewed commitment to investing into developing solid, SEO optimized web infrastructure that is search engine friendly, given the engines’ continued commitment to improving their algorithms over time.” Search Optimization isn’t just about rankings, it’s about digitally being there. Google says “Local searches lead 50% of mobile visitors to visit stores within one day.” This makes it vital to be found in search engines.

Search Engine Optimization is vital to your businesses success for a variety of reasons.

First and foremost, they work! Joshua Guerra, CEO of marketing firm BIZCOR says “As long as you are focusing on optimal user experience while performing methodic SEO strategies, you will be rewarded with higher positioning and organic traffic.” Moreover, it is predicted that it will continue to be effective for the foreseeable future.

Steve Olenski suggests that “Based on the way search engines appear to be developing, it is not likely that Optimizing for search engines will cease to be effective any time in the foreseeable future.” SEO’s are also cost effective and “somewhere between 80-90% of customers now check online reviews prior to making a purchase, and this number is only expected to increase”.

Thus, it is safe to conclude that without an SEO, a significant amount of sales are at risk of being lost as potential clients will likely experience difficulty locating your business. Finally, we ask you to remember that “SEO is a never-ending process,” as Jason Bayless, Owner of BestSeoCompanies.com, a website which tracks and ranks the efficacy and service of many of the nation’s leading SEO providers exclaims.

“If you’re not moving forward and improving your position, you’re losing ground to a competitor who is. That’s a simple fact of how the process works.” Investing in organic SEO is more important now than ever before, Steve Olenski suggests that “despite the current difficulty everyone finds themselves facing regarding the lack of organic keyword data and traffic”.Thus, we at Metro Interactive Agency urge you, invest in SEO’s and grow your business!!!!

Metro Interactive Agency has a focus on the most effective SEO strategies to drive traffic to your website, and the most compelling content strategies to engage and convert when landing on your site.

Our philosophy is that effective SEO and an effective content strategy equals an effective conversion strategy. Because of this, we have long standing optimization relationships with our existing clients and can’t wait to build our new SEO relationship with you. Contact us today and get started building your business!

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For the most part, marketers are able to rely on Google accepting meta information and using at least the first 165 characters of it in the snippet. It was only when you didn’t specifically set a snippet that they would do something funky to pick one from your page. A lot of tools would actually have a 165 character limit on their meta description field just to prevent you from truncating yourself.

Google has now doubled the character limit for the snippet in their search results pretty much across the board. At 320 characters, it’s slightly longer than the new Tweet format. Interestingly, 165 characters was also slightly longer than the previous Tweet format. I wonder, actually, whether or not the Twitter character limit had any influence on this decision. Don’t count this as a quote or anything, I don’t think Google actually made their decision based on Twitter’s actions. That gives Twitter far too much importance in the grand scheme of things.

Essentially doubling the character limit for search result snippets is actually pretty important.That’s a lot of extra room to work in keywords and make human-readable descriptions. Some content will be pretty hard to describe while taking advantage of the space, but a lot of content could easily have used at least 250, so a bump up to 320 is very welcome.

How does this new longer character limit affect your marketing?

Longer Limits Allow More Information

Perhaps the most immediately impactful consequence of the change is that longer snippets allow for more information in the snippet. This is both good and bad. On the one hand, it allows users to answer informational queries without ever visiting the site in question. For example, if you were to Google “What is Net Neutrality”, you’ll see the top result from SaveTheInternet.com with a solid description of Net Neutrality in the snippet. This is distinct from the usual Google informational boxes, like their Wikipedia snippet off to the site in the same query.

On the one hand, this is likely to reduce traffic to your site from very basic informational queries. Anything that can be answered in a single sentence or short paragraph is likely to be answered without visiting your page. On the other hand, this is beneficial to your bounce rates. All of those satisfied users who bounce because their questions are answered never actually arrive, so they aren’t counted as bounces. Whether that’s beneficial or not is up to you, though I would say it’s probably a small detriment. After all, if they don’t show up, they don’t have the opportunity to click to other pages at all. There are also event-based ways to minimize those non-bounces as well.

I would anticipate this to have a negative effect on click-through rates from the search results pages, but at the same time, a positive effect on conversion rates. After all, the people with a conversion intent aren’t going to be satisfied with a snippet; they’ll be clicking on your page regardless. Those who would be fine reading a page and bouncing aren’t going to click through quite as often, so your conversion rates will increase implicitly.

In a way, this also competes against Google’s own information boxes. If your snippet description is better than the basic Wikipedia description Google would choose, your site will get more attention than the basic wiki link. Conversely, if your description doesn’t appropriately use the new space, you’ll be out-done by the search results alone, not even your competitors.

Longer Limits Make the Search Results Longer, Hurting Lower Sites

Another interesting side effect of having longer snippets is just the physical – well, digital – space they take up. Longer snippets mean taller search results pages. It might not seem like much difference, but when each search result is an additional 1-2 lines, it pushes the bottom couple of results even lower on the page.

Now, it’s not really a problem to scroll down a page and look at all the results on the first page, but what if you’re on mobile? You have a more limited amount of screen real estate, and you have to swipe-scroll even lower to get to lower search results. For most people, that won’t be a big deal, but for some percent of the population, it’s just tedious and they won’t do it.

Overall, this will likely result in slightly lower traffic to the people ranking #9 or #10 on the first page, which are already pretty thin pickings for the first page of Google. I don’t imagine it’s going to be a hugely noticeable difference, but you never know; if you’re positioned low on the first page for some queries, it might be worth keeping an eye out to see how it does.

View rest of the article here.

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