Tag Archives: on-page SEO

Impact Of Negative SEO On Your Website’s Rankings

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what negative SEO isAlthough your website’s chances of a negative SEO target are low, the consequences are enormous. You might wonder how easily a competitor can ruin your rankings or how you may protect your website? However, before answering them, you need to understand what negative SEO is.

It stands for a range of activities that aims to lower a competitor’s rank in search results. It is primarily an off-page strategy that might involve building unnatural links to a website or reposting and scrapping its content. Some cases also include hacking or modifying content on a website. But any sudden drop in ranking doesn’t always mean that it’s the case of Negative SEO. Hence, before concluding that a competitor has hurt your rankings, it’s important to factor out the common reasons for the drop. Below we have compiled a list of all such possibilities.

Negative Off-Page SEO

The strategy primarily targets a website without any internal interferences. Some common types of negative off-page SEO are discussed below.

Link farms
A few spammy links don’t hurt your site’s rankings. But negative SEO attacks mostly involved building links from multiple interconnected websites or link farms. Most links use the exact anchor text and are often unrelated to the website under attack. Some might include a niche keyword to make it appear as if the owner of the website is trying to manipulate.

You cannot prevent such attacks, but it’s easy to reverse the damage they might do if you regularly spot them. You have to constantly monitor the link profile growth by using tools like SpyGlass, which generates progress graphs with a list of links in your profile and referring domains. If you notice an unusual spike in any of the two, you should investigate immediately.

Scraping
Competitors may scrape content from your website and use it on other websites to ruin your rankings. If Google finds duplicated content across websites, it would only pick a single version amongst them all. Google is smart enough to identify the original piece unless it considers any stolen performance first. Scrapers are smart and often copy and post new content right after publishing it on your website.

Using Copyscape can help in determining all instances of content duplication. In case you find scraped copies, it is advised to contact the webmaster and ask them to remove the content. If this doesn’t help, you should report it by using Google’s copyright infringement Report option.

Forceful crawling
Another way where competitors try to crash a website by forcefully crawling it and leading to a heavy server load. If Googlebot fails to access your website on several attempts in a row, your content might get de-ranked. To be safe, you should observe if your website has become slow or shows unavailable. Contact the hosting company and ask them to investigate and help you solve the issue.

Negative on-page SEO

Implementing negative on-page SEO attacks is very difficult as it involves hacking and changing your website’s content, codes, or settings. Hackers may modify your content, redirect your pages to suspicious links or malicious websites, etc. Staying safe against such situations requires conducting regular audits using tools like WebSite Auditor.

Getting Your Website De-Indexed
Minor changes to the robots.txt file can drastically impact the SEO strategy that you have been implementing. For instance, a simple disallow rule is enough for Google to ignore a website completely.

To stay protected, you need to check your rankings regularly. It helps in knowing if your website got de-indexed. Rank Tracker is one such tool that allows you to perform scheduled automatic checks daily or weekly. Any sudden drops in your rankings are shown separately in Dropped note in the difference column.

Hacking A Website
If a website is hacked and the hacker doesn’t have any negative SEO in mind, such attacks can drastically hurt the SEO. Google intends to protect its users, and if they suspect a website has been hacked, they might de-rank it.

Besides the strategies mentioned above, beefing up the security of your website should always be on your list of priorities. If you think it’s hard for you to deal with Negative SEO, you should reach out to experts for assistance in protecting your website and remediating negative SEO. Local SEO Jacksonville company in Jacksonville, FL is an expert in such strategies and has been assisting clients in staying protected from the effects of negative SEO.

Significance Of Local SEO For Small Businesses

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Benefits of Local SEO for Small BusinessesMost small businesses, especially those that are multi-located come across a predicament while competing with the big national and international level brands. It is mainly related to a limited budget. Due to this reason, local SEO is a terrific marketing weapon. It allows small businesses to compete with bigger brands in a constant battle for survival in the competitive market. The local SEO gives the small business credibility in the market. It is also crucial for mobile searches. Here are some ways of bettering the local SEO.

1. Have accurate business info on Google: When you are looking to get your small business to appear in local searches or on Google Maps, you are needed to create a listing with GMB or Google My Business. You will have to provide up-to-date information about your organization here. Make sure that you are submitting all the required data, verification of business location, adding photographs, entering the current working hours, and managing the reviews properly.

2. Embed the website with Google Maps: For this purpose, you need to utilize the Google Maps Embed API. You can place a panorama that contains an interactive map or a street view on your website. The entire process is completed by using straightforward HTTP requests.

3. Use good on-page SEO: When you are looking to dominate the local searches for your small business, the on-page SEO must be precise. There are two factors involved in on-page SEO. These two factors are the products and services you are offering and the location of your business. It shows to Google the products and services you are providing and the place where you can find them. There are certain key elements involved in the on-page SEO that you need to focus on such as, title tags, meta tags, NAP info, header tags, page content, and photos.

4. Have reviews on the website: When you are looking to achieve local ranking, you will need reviews. The review count and the actual score are factored within the local search ranking for Google. A higher number of reviews showing positive ratings are more likely to raise the local ranking of your small business. Having positive reviews also helps in getting your business to stand out to the prospective clientele that is close to arriving at the final decision.

Keep in mind that you are going to have some negative reviews as well. Ensure that you are not leaving out any of them unaddressed. You must reply with honesty, courteousness, and as per the Google guidelines. The question now is how do you get the clients to give reviews about your services? Well, you may create links that lead to review websites. You can also develop a business card for providing all the review site info. Or, you can even ask satisfied clients to write reviews about the products and services you provide.

5. Have local citations: The local citations provide a mention of your small business’s website info and NAP info on the internet. Google considers the citations to be a way of establishing the relevancy and authority of your small business. In other words, these local citations help the organization in developing prominence and relevance in the eyes of Google. The best websites you can use for citation are Yahoo.com, GMB, Opentable.com, Apple Maps, Yelp.com, Facebook, bbb.org, and Here.com. These local citations are not only helpful for the local SEO but they can provide awareness about the organization via different sites. These sites are considered to be reliable by many people.

Remember, all the local search results are achieved through relevance, distance, and prominence of your business. All these factors work in tandem to help you in finding the best fit for the local search. For achieving this goal, you need to utilize the power of search engines. You can leverage a bigger customer base by using them as it is a common way of running a small business. Any local SEO company can be quite useful for these multi-location small businesses, especially for gathering more customers and developing their sales. When you are looking to develop sales in Jacksonville, FL area, you can get in touch with the professionals at Local SEO Jacksonville for reliable service.

What Is Local SEO And Why It’s Mandatory In 2019

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SEO Jacksonville - What Is Local SEO And Why It's Mandatory In 2019In a nutshell, local SEO is a branch of search engine optimization that focuses on optimizing a website in such a way that it’s easier to be found in local search results. You can also call it a process emphasizing the optimization efforts of local brick-and-mortar businesses, instead of just online businesses.

Unfortunately still ignored by many business owners, local SEO is essential nowadays, considering that most searches made on Google are now made using a mobile device. Besides this, stats confirm that half of the people who did a local search on their phone actually went to the physical store they needed information about within one day, while a staggering 97 percent of consumers searched online for a local business in 2017.

Looks like “x business near me” is one of the most powerful search queries of the moment.

Who needs local SEO?

There are several categories of clients who can make great use of local SEO, among them being lawyers and law firms, doctors and medical practices, as well as plumbers. Basically, the types of services you need in case of an emergency.

Then, there are restaurants. This type of business achieves a lot from local SEO, as a potential customer can immediately check reviews from other clients, see the opening hours and address, then leads them to the business in the least amount of time.

Ok, but is it for everybody?

No, not at all. The reality is that some types of businesses just don’t need local SEO. E-commerce shops, authors, or any other business that doesn’t share local information are definitely not good candidates for some local SEO services.

How is local SEO done?

At first, it might look difficult, but the truth is that local SEO is not that different from organic SEO, since it also implies keyword research, creating quality content, obtaining links and, obviously, taking care of on-page SEO. Basically, the main difference is that it just has a local focus.

All of the above-mentioned elements are essential for a local website, in order to outperform the competition in SERPs. And when it comes to optimizing for the so-called ‘near me search’, you need to do them with the local customer in mind.

We’re talking about using keyword variations that have a conversational tone and focus, able to achieve huge search volumes, creating content with a local focus, and, obviously, get some high-quality links, from – for example – NAP sites, local directory websites, industry-related local sites or even local newspaper sites.

Again, the core idea is the same to organic SEO, but this time, you’re optimizing just for users in a specific area. And your mission is to help them find the business they need, preferably one as close as possible to them.

Do I need local SEO?

If you have a local business and want to attract as many clients as possible, yes, you absolutely need it. Sure, you can also live without this as well, but why miss on such a great opportunity?

Gone are the days when people were searching for local businesses from desktop devices. Everybody as a smartphone with Internet access and whenever they need a local service, they’re a few screen taps away from finding it. And stats claim that they end up going to that location within the next hour. Let that sink in for a moment.

So, are you looking forward to starting using local SEO for your brick-and-mortar business? If the answer is positive, start with a competitive SEO package, able to satisfy any business owner and deliver results. SEO Jacksonville has exactly what you need, promising to deliver results-based work, so your business can be taken to the next level.

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