The biggest mistakes marketing agencies see their clients making
SEO can be a black box, and many business owners have minimal understanding of it. To that end, that’s why you hire a professional to help you out.
At the same time, there are many things that agencies wish their clients knew so that progress could be made faster.
Search is live on Credo!
Over the last couple of years I’ve learned a valuable lesson in building a product – the time is never right but eventually you’ll find the time to build what you should.
This has applied time and time again to Credo, and last evening I pushed live a change that I’ve been wanting to make for a long time – site search.
What’s the Best WordPress Hosting for Businesses?
If you are looking to find info and recommendations for the best WordPress hosting for businesses in 2017, you’ve come to the right place. In this post we compare five common hosts across reliability, cost, support, and ease of use. We’ll compare (in no particular order, and each link leads to its section within this post):
At Credo we’ve used the top three listed above, and feel it is necessary to also compare HostGator and SiteGround as they are two that are constantly recommended as well.
Announcing the Credo SEO Calculator
Today I want to show you a new tool that we published recently onsite: the SEO calculator.
I’m excited about this tool because it works towards answering a question that we get asked all the freaking time:
How much should I expect to pay for SEO?
This question is so hard to answer because there are so many different factors that go into it:
- Size of your site
- Experience with SEO in the past
- Growth goals
- How broken your site currently is
- Your revenue model
- Hourly/project rate of each agency/consultant
What does an SEO agency or consultant actually do?
This is a question I get asked a lot, both as a business owner and an SEO consultant in my own right.
The truth is, it’s a great question. If you’re hiring someone to do SEO for you, you need to know what you are paying for. This is why I coach agencies and consultants to help you understand specifically what they are including in a scope of work for your business.
It’s also a great question because different agencies and consultants offer different things. So this post will cover the potential services an agency or consultant may offer.
So what can an SEO agency or consultant do? Any of these five things:
- Provides SEO strategy and direction
- Provides services to their clients
- Provides one-time audits
- Helps their clients get buy-in to put more budget towards SEO, or to get changes implemented
- Keeps their clients abreast of changes in the search industry
F*ck Cost Per Lead
I am going to say something that many of you will disagree with:
You should not base your marketing investment decisions off of cost per lead in the B2B space.
In fact, I think cost per lead is the worst metric you can look at as you build a service-based business.
SaaS Startup SEO Advice
Most startups underinvest in SEO for a really long time. If that’s you, listen up.
On the one hand, I can’t blame you. You’re trying to get a new thing off the ground and just keep it alive, and maybe even grow it. You’re trying to figure out your customer segments, how you’ll make money, who you need to hire and when, and so much more.
Trust me, I’ve been through all of it over the last two years running Credo. It’s one of the hardest things you can do, yet incredibly rewarding when it works.
No Nonsense Content Marketing
Two weeks ago at the MN Summit I presented this deck entitled “No Nonsense Content Marketing”. I have removed one slide that I gave away an an attendees-only gift, but the presentation otherwise is below in its entirety.
Enjoy.
Quit asking me what tools you should use
It’s time for a truth bomb.
When you hear about someone having success with online marketing, you need to stop asking “what tools did you use for that?”
I hear this question time and time and time again.
“What’s your marketing stack?”
“Who do you use for email marketing?”
“What 3 tactics did you use to get those SEO results for your client?”
These questions are work light. They’re amateur.
A Lead Generation Growth Hack with Gravity Forms and Calendly
You work in lead generation, or run a business where you need to get more people contacting you about your business, listen up.
If you are not converting the “leads” that are coming to you, or the “leads” that are coming to you are not qualified and are way too far up the conversion funnel to be of value to you, you don’t need more leads. You need better ones.
This is a hack I came up with to convert more form submissions looking for services into phone calls. It’s pretty simple, but I haven’t seen others doing it.
All you need is Gravity Forms (or a similar form plugin that allows you to redirect users to a specific page) and Calendly.