SEO & Local Search

Green checkmarks in Yoast or RankMath don’t mean your SEO is done. Those plugins help with on-page upkeep like title tags, meta descriptions and alt text, but they can’t tell you which keywords to target or how strong your competitors are. Here’s what real keyword analysis looks at, from search intent to difficulty versus volume.

Can customers tell that you serve their town? This 2024 Tuesday Tip covers local search basics: listing your service areas where people and Google can see them, keeping your name, address and phone number consistent, and claiming your Google Business Profile. One new floral shop started getting local calls within hours of linking theirs.

One client was sure she knew the keywords that brought people to her business, rewrote her website around them, and watched her search traffic drop. A keyword analysis found people were really searching phrases like “business bookkeeping.” This 2022 post uses a playground teeter-totter to explain the fix and why rankings need ongoing care.

In May 2022, many brands (Apple included) found most of their Facebook posts missing, and the common thread seemed to be posts scheduled through tools like SEMRush. Written as it was happening, this short post shares what was known at the time and our best guess that a filtering problem, not mass deletion, was to blame.

A client forwarded us a glowing “testimonial” email for a service where strangers share your links across social media on autopilot. This 2020 post reprints it and explains why link-sharing schemes don’t bring in clients, and why handing your brand to strangers can hurt your reputation more than it helps.

In October 2019, Wild Iris gave a quick overview of digital marketing at the Conifer Area Chamber of Commerce breakfast meeting. This short post shares the slideshow from that talk and thanks the chamber for the invitation. It also announced a follow-up class that November on applying the material to your own business.

Offering discounts for reviews, or paying a service to post them, breaks the rules at Google, Facebook and Yelp and can make even your honest reviews look suspicious. This 2019 post explains why reviews have to happen organically and shares simple ways to remind happy clients, from a note on the receipt to a link on your website.

Website analytics have come a long way since the hit counter at the bottom of a 1990s web page. This 2019 post explains what analytics can tell you, like where visitors come from and which pages hold their attention, and how that helps you decide which keywords and ads are worth your money.