• FAQs

          Search engine optimization (SEO) helps businesses drive visits to their website through organic search traffic. Given that the top organic search results receive a third of the clicks, a decline in ranking could be detrimental for your business. Implementing SEO best practices on your website will help to ensure that your web content is seen by as many potential customers as possible. The more visitors you have, the better your chances are of converting those visits into sales!

          Local search engine optimization (SEO) helps local businesses gain visibility by optimizing their local business listings for local search. A business that leverages local SEO will include its address, phone number, local opening times, and exact location in the form of a local citation. The goal is to rank for local searches which are usually performed by people in a specific geographical region looking for a business near them.

          We typically see results within the first 30 to 60 days, but when it comes to SEO, there are many factors at play. It's important to remember that SEO is a long-term strategy and results may not come as fast at you wish.


        • FAQs

          Digital advertising uses the internet to send advertisements to customers who are online through different websites and social media platforms like Google, Bing, LinkedIn and Facebook.

          The price for Google Ads management depends on the monthly ad spend. For accounts with $1,000 in monthly ad spend, the price is $550/month. Between $1,000 and $5,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $950/month. For $5,000 to $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $2,000/month. For more than $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $4,500/month.

          The price for Social Media Ads management depends on the monthly ad spend. For accounts with $1,000 in monthly ad spend, the price is $550/month. Between $1,000 and $5,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $950/month. For $5,000 to $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $2,000/month. For more than $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $4,500/month.


        • FAQs

          This depends on the complexity and size of a redesign and if eCommerce is needed. On average, it takes around 14-18 weeks from the web design intensive stage to launch.

          If your website experiences the following issues: it’s not responsive on all devices, has a slow loading speed, the design appears old and tired, users don’t spend long on the site, sales are stagnant, or your business is going through a rebranding - your website needs a redesign to boost your brand awareness and sales.

          Sometimes there’s no need to rebuild a website. Minor edits, refreshing page content and images, or restructuring page layout for SEO best practices can boost traffic and sales.


        • FAQs

          Semantic search launched in 2013 with the release of Google's Hummingbird update. Since then, Google's search engine has become more complex. The integration of machine learning, with RankBrain, and NLP, with BERT, has enabled the search engine to better understand the context of a query and deliver more personalized and targeted results. Semantic SEO is the process of creating machine-readable content using structured data and linked open data to help search engines better understand your content.

          On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page SEO refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals. From meta tags to page content, website structure, and HTML, on-page optimization services are focused on making your website more visible to search engines.

          Structured data refers to any organized data that conforms to a certain format, such as information in a relational database. When information is highly structured and predictable, search engines can more easily organize and display it in creative ways. Structured data involves using a piece of code that is laid out in a specific format easily understood by search engines. The search engines read the code and use it to display search results in a more dynamic way.


        • FAQs

          An SEO agency has experts in different areas of search engine optimization that may be out of the realm of your marketing team's abilities. SEO can be very complex and time-consuming. Furthermore, as search engine algorithms change it can be difficult to stay current on the latest ranking factors and strategies for improving online visibility. You will likely see a greater return on investment and better results from using a professional SEO agency than you would from tackling this on your own.

          As a digital marketing agency, SMA Marketing provides products and services in four areas: SEO, Local SEO, Digital Advertising, and Web Design

          We focus on building authentic, long-lasting relationships with our clients. We’re goal oriented and results driven and believe in doing good and making a difference in the world.

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5 Attributes of a Quality Link

Links are a foundational part of SEO. When it comes to ranking for highly competitive terms, the quality of your links plays a huge role. But what determines a quality link? Can links deliver value other than ranking? In this video, I’ll share five attributes of a quality link. I think some of them might surprise you!

5 Attributes of a quality link

Video Transcript: 

As I said in the intro, we’re going to be discussing the attributes of a quality link. What we want to get at here is why should we do outreach, or why should we look to acquire a link from another website?

A lot of people know that links are a good ranking symbol, and when you have more quality links, your domain is stronger and you have a higher chance of ranking in Google search. Well, a lot of things have changed in search over the years, and links are still extremely important, but there’s a lot of people that will go to acquire links at all costs because they believe that if you have more links, you’re automatically going to get those rankings.

Well, that’s not true. And they also ignore another valuable part of links, which is the referral traffic and the community building that can happen when you are doing link building, link outreach, and working with other websites.

We’re going to be working through a hierarchy, and what we’re going to do is top the icing on the cake, and then, working our way down to what is the most critical foundational part of a quality link.

1. Tool Metrics

If we start at the top, tool metrics can be very helpful. We want to understand things like page rank. The reality is we don’t have access to page rank anymore like we used to. We have to use other tools like Moz’s Domain Authority, or Majestic’s Trust Flow or Citation Flow. SEMRush has an Authority Score. These are helpful indicators to help us understand a little more about the website and how authoritative it can be. It’s not a direct reflection of page rank, Google does not use any of those metrics in their ranking systems, but they are indicators to help us understand how qualified a website is. That is important, it’s something that we should know, but we shouldn’t stop there.

2. Inbound Links

We also need to look at other things. One thing that’s really helpful is to look at the number of inbound links that the site has as well, and who’s linking to that site. Does the site have a lot of good links, is it qualified links that are linking to them? Is it relevant links that are linking to them? Do they have a lot of spam links? These are things you want to know about those sites before you’re linking to them. Again, it’s not just about link authority and raising your own page rank, but it’s also about making sure that you have the right sites that are linking to you and the right community connecting with you.

3. Content Quality

The next thing you want to look at is to read that site’s content. Now this is a mixture between some tools and also some manual actions. Is the content strong? Is it good content? Is it relevant content to your industry and to your personas? Do they have a lot of grammar and spelling errors? Are they taking the time to make sure that their content is noteworthy?

4. Influence

The next thing you want to look at is how many followers they have. How much traffic do they have? What is their influence? Is this a site that’s going to send quality traffic to your site, or is this site not relevant to you at all? That’s important to understand, and you can use a number of tools to do this. Similar Web, it’s an expensive tool, but it’s a very helpful tool. SEMrush also has market research tools where you can get an idea of how many visitors are visiting this website and through which channel sources.

This is important when you’re looking at building a link, again, not just from a page rank standpoint, but from an authoritative standpoint, but more so from a referral traffic standpoint. Are these the type of people who want to connect with your business and possibly learn a little bit more? Referral traffic can be very powerful if it’s from the right sites.

The last thing, the most important thing you have to look at when building a link to your site is, is this link relevant? Is it relevant to my audience? Is it relevant to my site? Is it relevant to my market? Does it make sense for my site to have a connection with that site? And if the answer is no, you should stop there.

5. Relevance

When you’re starting, you need to look at these sites and say these sites are not relevant, I shouldn’t do outreach to them because it makes no sense. Link-building can be very lucrative, it can be very helpful, it can help build the authority of your site, but also builds the qualified traffic from third-party sites that are in your niche. It’s also about building community more than anything. It’s about building connectedness.

That’s what the web is about, and that’s what links were originally designed to do. Google uses links to show authoritativeness, but they’re looking at other things like we’ve talked about here: they’re looking at reaching followers, they’re looking at strong content, they’re looking at context. Today’s search is all about semantic search, and so they’re paying closer and closer attention to context, not just in your content, but in the link profile that you’ve built as well for your sites.

If you have any questions about attributes and what qualifies a link, please comment below. We’d love to continue the conversation with you. And until next time, Happy marketing.

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