What Your SEO Company Might Be Doing To Hurt Your Rankings

seo company penalty website rankings vancouver wa portland or

Is your SEO company hurting your websites rankings?

I get it, as a business owner it’s really easy to let things like SEO and your website slide. Your phone is ringing, people are mentioning that they found you on the web, so life is good right? But if you have an SEO company, web advertising company, or anyone else that does any kind of promotion of your website with the goal of attaining better rankings online for you, it might be time to start paying attention.Continue reading

5 things you need to know before hiring someone to build you a website in WordPress

WordPress website development

Here at City Ranked Media we primarily work in WordPress and all of our new client websites are built using WordPress, so you might say we’re big fans of the website platform.  However in the years we’ve been using WordPress, we’ve seen some pretty big messes with some websites that people have brought us to fix.  Pretty big messes that took a lot of time and money to fix, so that being said we thought that we’d write an article on questions to ask, and things to know before deciding to hire someone to build you a website in WordPress.
Continue reading

Cheap website SEO, does it really exist? Learn the facts here

cheap-seo-services

Just about any business small or large will at some point be faced with the decision on how to properly SEO their website.  It’s this need from small business owners, combined with the real complexities of how to get properly ranked on the web that has sprung up a whole industry of poor quality SEO agencies across the U.S. and the world.  After doing some quick searches on the web, I came across an interesting story of a Pest Control business in Arizona that took the time to share his experiences with some these low cost SEO companies, and the results they provided.Continue reading

How much should SEO cost?

How much should SEO cost your business?seo cost portland oregon vancouver washington

The answers to this question are as plentiful as websites returned on any given search on Google. As a business owner , you should be looking at SEO as a long term  investment into your business. So my answer is: “It costs you nothing.”

SEO – done correctly – should yield measurable return on  investment, therefore, the costs of quality SEO are far less than the return you should see  in positive sales and growth for your business. However, I understand that most business owners still want to know the bottom line when it comes to the cost of SEO and what they should be budgeting for this service.Continue reading

Are you really dealing with an SEO expert?

The 10 warning signs that the person you’re talking to is not an SEO expert.

In this day and age it’s pretty easy to come across someone who claims they are an SEO Expert.  As a small business owner you are no doubt contacted by several people every week via phone or email claiming they can rocket your business to the front of the pack for mere dollars per month.  So the question here is: with all these people claiming they can do the same thing, who is telling the truth, and who is selling SEO snake oil?Continue reading

Measuring The Effectiveness of Your SEO and PPC Campaigns

The Basics of measuring your marketing efforts

How to measure the effectiveness of your SEO and PPC efforts

seo and ppc measure effectivness with analytics portland oregon vancouver washington

When it comes to measuring your own SEO and PPC efforts, or perhaps you’re trying to measure your outsourced efforts, understanding what metrics to measure can be a difficult task.  The sheer amount of data that can be presented through programs such as Google AdWords or Google Analytics can make just about anyone’s eyes glaze over.  For business owners, reports like these often take a back seat to more important business functions.  So a question that we often get is how to effectively benchmark an SEO and/or PPC campaign for effectiveness, and when do you know its time to make a change?Continue reading

Three questions to ask anyone trying to sell you search engine optimization

Hiring a reputable Internet Advertising company for your small business may seem like an easy task. There are many choices out there when it comes to website marketing, search optimization and search marketing companies. Unfortunately the decision to hire a reputable company to handle your online advertising is not as easy as it may seem. In many cases, small business owners choose internet advertising based upon convenience, rather than diligent research, which can have unintended consequences down the road. Don’t become a victim of a company that doesn’t have your best interests at heart.

Continue reading

Website Ranking Factors For Small Business (Part 3 of 3)

In this final article of Website Ranking Factors For Small Business, I will cover factors that can get your website penalized by the search engines, hurting your chances of appearing for the keywords you want.  The below information is by no means all inclusive, but covers some of the more common black hat SEO activities that will eventually hurt your rankings.Continue reading