• 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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How To Use SEO Metrics: MOZ DA, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Alexa and More Explained

There are a number of SEO tools that can help you achieve better results in search engine queries. Each have their strengths and weaknesses as well as their own metrics. In this video, we will break down a few of the most common metrics created by SEO tools and explain what they mean.

Video Transcript:

Hey, thanks so much for checking out this video. If this is your first time watching, or maybe you’ve been watching this channel for awhile and have not yet hit subscribe, please do so now. We would love to have you join our community. And don’t forget to turn on alerts, that way you know each and every time we publish a new video.

When it comes to SEO or marketing online, there’s a lot of different tools and metrics that we can track and some of them are not fully understood the right way and when they’re not understood, they can lead to bad assumptions and tracking the wrong things. Let’s take a look at some of those different SEO metrics that we get and some that come from tools and then other ones that come from analytics platforms and how can we use those to make better decisions for our business.

So the first metric we want to look at is domain authority from MOZ. It’s usually abbreviated as DA . And what domain authority is really looking at is how many high quality or authoritative backlinks a website has. It’s guessing on how authoritative your site is and it’s out of a score of 100, now 100 being the best site on the web, something like Google, Facebook, and then zero meaning you have no authority whatsoever. Now this is often tracked as one of those end alls, be alls for how authoritative a site is. And really what DA is looking at, it’s trying to mimic what’s known as page rank. Page rank is part of Google’s search algorithm and it’s how they decide how authoritative a site is based on links and a number of other algorithmic features. Now DA is doing its best to mimic that. And it can, over time, give us an idea of if are we moving up in authority or moving down in authority, but it shouldn’t be the end all be all.

If we have a higher domain authority, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to rank. Why? Because MOZ has absolutely nothing to do with the ranking algorithm in Google. Google does not look at your domain authority. They look at their own page rank. MOZ is an indicator of trying to help us better understand how authoritative our site is. It can give us indications, but it’s not the end all be all. You place too much weight on it, you could be pushing yourself in the wrong direction.

The next one we want to look at is the Ahref rank. This is another kind of authoritative rank that’s being used. Ahref has a number of different tools that allow you to see backlinks and keywords and loss backlinks. It’s a really great SEO tool. Even though they’ve moved to a paid version. If you’ve got the time to invest in it, it can be a very, very good tool for you. Now Ahref rank is again, it’s an internal marker for Ahref’s to judge based on what they have in their index, how authoritative your site is. Again, just because one site has a higher Ahref rank than another site, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that site is going to get more links. It doesn’t mean that that site’s going to rank more. It doesn’t mean that that site’s going to get more traffic. It’s an indicator within that tool’s specific database to say how authoritative, how much estimated traffic we think this site is going to specifically have.

Another site we want to look at is SEMrush and SEMrush has something known as authority score. Now you’re noticing a theme here. Similar to DA and Ahref rank, what authority score is doing, is looking again at how authoritative a site is. It’s trying to mimic Google Page Rank. These are tools. This is a metric that’s going to be more of an indicator. like the other two, that’s going to tell us how authoritative a site is over time. An SEO wants to track that. Are we growing in authority? Are we being seen as a site that has more promise, that has more backing, that has more trust, that has better content, that has a strong link profile. And what these can do is they can indicate are we headed in the right direction or not.

Another one that I would look at is Alexa Rank. This is something that is in a lot of different tools and a lot of people assume that it has something to do with search engine optimization. What Alexa rank is is it’s looking at, based on their own tools, the estimated amount a search or the estimated amount of traffic a specific website has. So Alexa is going to rank them based on web traffic, but it’s not necessarily always looking at a ranking based on organic or paid or direct or social traffic. It’s just looking at the amount of website traffic that comes to a site. So you can push a lot of traffic to a site, get it’s Alexa ranking up and you make it look like it’s this authoritative site but the reality is it has no impact on search results. You can have a site that has no organic presence but has a ton of paid traffic and because of that it’s going to have a higher Alexa rating the site that actually is doing quite well in organic but might not have the amount of volume because they’re not paying for that traffic volume.

So this is a metric, honestly, I don’t track, I don’t really pay much attention to because it doesn’t have much of an impact on the things that we’re doing. We do track traffic, we just don’t base everything we’re doing off of what Alexa sees.

When choosing the right analytics & ranking SEO tool you need to have in mind that the tool needs to assist you in your work and with it help bring you more quality organic traffic and higher rankings. Such tool is Linkio which offers the right anchor text and percentage usage based on your competitors in order to move your rank higher in a pretty fast time.

All right, so we’ve talked a little bit about some tools. Now I’m a big believer, I use MOZ, I use Ahref. I use SEMrush. I use those tools every day to help us make better decisions in our search marketing. But the one thing I always want to focus on is my organic traffic and make sure that that’s grabbing and then knowing where that traffic is coming from. So Google allows us to do that, Google Analytics, you can filter out or just segment by organic traffic and see is your organic traffic moving up or is it going backwards? The other things that I’m also looking for are search console terms. What keywords are we ranking for and what keywords are driving traffic. There’s a ton of really powerful metrics inside of search console that can help you see in real time based on what Google is doing, is your site improving its rank, is it not improving its rank? And this is where you can use a tracking like impressions, clicks and then the click through rate to understand how well you’re doing on specific keywords.

Now I know that Google doesn’t give us all the data. They give us partial amounts of data, but what we can extrapolate from that data is trends over time. Then we can use our other tools, whether it be MOZ or SEMrush or Ahref to do rank tracking and make sure that we’re ranking for those terms and then we can match that up with the organic traffic coming in. These are the more actionable metrics that we really should be paying attention to. Yes, we want to see those indicators, make sure that we’re growing in authority, but at the end of the day, we want to be able to track and measure the things that are producing results for the business. Because if a business is going to continue to invest in search, if you as a business owner are going to continue to invest in search, you’ve got to see that it’s producing ROI for your business.

If you have any questions about something we talked about today or you want to learn more about another type of metric that maybe we didn’t mention here, please comment below. We would love to continue the conversation. Again, don’t forget to subscribe and until next time, Happy Marketing.

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