Marketing Your Business

Fix all thin content. Check. Use disavow tool to remove bad links. Check. What's next on the SEO checklist? Learn about RankBrain and why it has become the third-most important Google ranking signal.

You just launched a new site for your small business. Congrats! You may be a bakery, a dog salon or an ice cream shop. Now the trick is getting the word out. Focusing on SEO is a great way (and in most cases entirely free) to promote your website and more importantly your business. After all, over 90% of consumers use the internet to find local businesses.

At Hosting.com, we're all about making sure you get the fastest page load speeds possible. That way your audience can have an excellent user experience when they visit your site. Your audience's experience is a big part of the puzzle for you to be successful, but you need an audience in the first place.

Do you ever look at your referral traffic in Analytics and notice sites that aren't even linking to you sending hundreds and maybe thousands of visits? At first glance you may be tempted to pat yourself on your back because these referrals gives your traffic stats a boost. At second glance however you realize these aren't real referrals; they're spam referrals.

Still stuck in the mindset that tons of backlinks and tons of content is the most effective way to skyrocket up Google's rankings? Sure these both have an impact on your rankings, but always make sure to provide a positive user experience for your users.

Once in awhile I'll be looking at our traffic report in Analytics and notice a blast of traffic to us from a site that I haven't seen before. Unless that traffic is coming from the referring site's homepage, there really isn't a great way to see where it's coming from. This is especially discouraging if the traffic isn't converting at a high conversion rate.