5 Reasons People Prefer Hiring Experts For Their SEO Audits

by Marketing Strategy TipsOnline Marketing TipsSEO Tips

Let me ask you something. If you’re Usain Bolt, would you buy a pair of running shoes at a $10 store? Probably not. You’ve heard the admonition, don’t be penny wise and pound foolish. This lesson could not be more true than when it comes to doing SEO audits. The last thing you want is to be that guy who constantly goes to the plastic surgeon to fix his nose. If you need something done right, let the experts do it–in this case, the SEO experts.

And millions of people around the world hire experts like AJ Frey for their SEO audits. Still not convinced? Let me ask you? Do you think it is a coincidence that you are here? No, it’s not! You are here because our SEO experts have spent hours auditing our website to ensure that we make it on Google’s page one–which is where you found us. 

And that’s just one reason people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. We’re the good guys. We believe in sharing information so we’re going to share some more reasons with you. Are you ready? Here then are 5 reasons people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. But for the newbie who is just starting out in SEO and has no idea what we are talking about, let’s first define an SEO audit.

What Is an SEO Site Audit?

Well, we are going to presume that you already know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. According to Yakkety Yak (a Chicago-based marketing agency) “an SEO site audit is an analysis of the factors that impact your website ranking in organic search. 

This often includes technical back-end factors as well as on-page, content-focused elements that make a website both easier for search engine robots to crawl and easier for people to navigate”. The objective being to understand the ranking of your site and to discover how to increase traffic to your site.

Why is this Important? 

A 2020 study (Search Engine Journal) found that the clickthrough rate for websites in the first position on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is 25%. For websites in the second position, this number drops drastically to 15%, and 2.5% for websites in the 10th position. And this is all on the first page!!! 

Can you imagine what happens when you get to Google’s page 2? This means if your website is not on page 1, the odds are pretty slim for consumers to find you. Why spend money to build a website if not to generate revenue. However, if no one is visiting your site, then it means no leads and ultimately no revenue. 

So now you see the purpose of SEO, you can also understand why it’s important to do an SEO audit of your website to ensure it is properly optimized for the search engines. 

 

Why can’t I do it for free?

Good question. Let’s look at free: 

We all know that time is money, therefore it is unreasonable to expect an SEO Expert to spend the time to do an audit for free, right? So what’s left? DIY or have a team member who’s not an expert do it. Anyone else who promises free has an ulterior motive, whereby you are going to end up being penny wise and pound foolish. 

Note that a free SEO audit will generate incomplete and misleading information, which if acted upon could harm the quality, visibility and profitability of your website. If using a third-party, he/she could provide sales-oriented recommendations to steer you towards engaging with the third-party providing the audit. I.e. “Hire us” and we will fix the problem for you. This we call the foot-in-the-door tactic.   

What you will not get for free is valuable insights, historical contexts (past and present performance) and meaningful recommendations for what to do next. The danger of missing these three necessary ingredients is that you can end up making harmful decisions due to a lack of information, the wrong information, or information designed to lead you in a predetermined direction. 

Not only will you now have to deal with the financial fallout of an uninformed decision, but you will also have to bear the additional cost of fixing it–penny wise and pound foolish.

 

Why it is Worth Paying for an SEO Audit

A free SEO audit, as a giveaway, only provides limited useful information in its purpose, scope and strategic value. A paid SEO audit delves deep into your marketing data to analyse the meaning and implications of the site’s SEO performance.

Not only that, but it also presents a “comprehensive picture of how SEO affects overall marketing and business goals, so the audit delivers many times the value of your investment in revenue-driving conclusions”.

Having established that you are now left with a paid SEO audit, let’s now look at the 5 reasons people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. Also, let’s give a look how SEO Expert AJ Frey, the best SEO in Canada, can audit your site and ensure your audiences discover you on Google’s first page. 

You’re hiring a team of experts

Usually, SEO experts do not work in a vacuum. So what most people don’t know is that when you hire an SEO expert, you are actually getting a team of experts working together to do a comprehensive audit on your website. 

You’re getting value for your money

When you hire an SEO expert, you’re actually getting value for your money because he/she is going to evaluate your website based on your unique needs, foci and desired conversions. There is no one-size fits all in SEO, therefore, you cannot use a template to do an SEo audit. Even if you start with a template, it must be customized to meet the needs of that particular website. 

You’re getting thoughtful, Informed Insights

You could decide to purchase the SEO tool–which is good, and even the SEO experts use them sometimes. The only problem is, you may not be able to read and understand the outcome. What does “manual actions” and “tracking/analytics” really mean, for example? An SEO expert will give you thoughtful, informed insights based on the outcome after he/she has audited your website. 

You can expect to receive quantitative and qualitative information because well-trained experts like AJ Frey are looking through every single anomaly revealed through their SEO audit of your website. 

Issues like duplicate contents, excessive redirects, low word count, unlinked pages, etc. are recorded and categorized into subheadings. The SEO audit report will not read like a fill-in-the-blank generic report used by everybody. No, every section of the report will contain thoughtful insights about your website–information that has been obtained from the data collected.  

You’re Getting Honest and Forthright Recommendations

After a thorough evaluation, you can expect an SEO expert to provide a prescriptive list of categorize recommendations fit to your budget. And one that is easily implemented by you and your team. 

Many third-party auditors will give you a description of what’s “wrong” with your website–Usually in the form of a pdf file, and that’s where they stop. However, they will not prescribe the “medicine” needed for your “broken” site. 

With an SEO expert, an SEO audit report is not just a pdf file (though you will get that too), but also includes meaningful recommendations that go beyond “check your sitemap” and “improve content”. 

The SEO expert will have a conference call or face-to-face meeting with you to discuss the findings of the SEO audit. After giving you honest and forthright recommendations, he/she will answer all the  questions you may have concerning the audit and your website. You can expect to get honest feedback.

By the time you finish, there will be no doubt as to what your next move will be. This is another reason people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. If you do not have an SEO team, we will gladly assist. We have the best SEO packages in Canada, so you don’t have to worry about your bottomline. 

You will avoid Issues with Google

And the fifth reason people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits is to avoid any issue with Google. If you know anything about SEO you know that Google has a Best Practice manual of the things one can and cannot do in order to rank on their pages. 

You’re an upstanding citizen, but unknown to you, when you decided to place your favourite keyword 20 times in your underperforming page Google sees that as a “black-hat” technique and penalises you. 

Google no longer accepts keyword stuffing (that’s what they call using a keyword too many times in one article) and so Google’s crawlers notice this on your web pages. What will happen is, you will see your page rank go down instead of rising, which means fewer people will find your page, and subsequently fewer leads and conversions.

As you can see, it’s bad enough If you make a mistake with your SEO campaign–if that’s all you had to worry about: wasted resources. However, your real problem starts when you get entangled with Google. If you’re not experienced with SEO-and most DIY web owners aren’t–you could accidentally conduct black-hat SEO techniques without fully understanding the consequences of your actions.

SEO Experts know all the rules. That’s why they are experts. A part of their job is to understand the ins and outs of the industry, to ensure they never run into legal issues. If they were to conduct “black hat” SEO, they could find themselves in trouble with Google, and you could take legal actions against them. 

Final thoughts

When It comes to SEO Audit, you could download a free SEO tool and DIY. However, if you did, and if you’re not an SEO expert, you coud not only hurt your bottomline: you could get into trouble with Google and your website could get penalised for inadvertently practicing black hat techniques.

Or, you could hire an SEO expert who will not only conduct a thorough audit of your site, but will also present the results in a timely, well-thought out manner, whether face-to-face or virtually. He/She will go through the results with you in a thoughtful way. 

Once through, you will receive a honest and forthright recommendations. So you can make informed decisions. The value you get from hiring experts for your SEO audit will be proportionally more than what it costs, if managed correctly and nurture your business to scale.

If you do not have an SEO team, we can provide SEO services to you, at a fraction of the cost seen on the Internet. Or, if you want to learn more about how search engine optimization can help your business grow, give us a call, or send us an email. AJ Frey is ready to help you!  

So there you have it. The 5 Reasons People Prefer Hiring Experts for Their SEO Audits. What are your thoughts? Let us know in the Comments box below.

Why WordPress Is Still The Best

by Ecommerce TipsMarketing Strategy TipsOnline Marketing TipsSEO TipsWordPress Tips

WordPress is by far the most popular open source CMS (content management system) – around 60% of all websites use WordPress and for good reason. In fact, over 10 million websites use WordPress, with 500 new ones added each day, according to the latest statistics.
In this blog article, we’ll go through the reasons why you should choose Wordpress over other CMS systems such as Shopify, Wix, Joomla or Drupal.

How Long Does SEO Take to Work?

by Marketing Strategy TipsOnline Marketing TipsSEO Tips

The single most important question for a business or brand which is about to spend money on search engine optimization (SEO) is how long does SEO take to work before results start coming in. We’ve been asked that question countless times over, and frankly, there’s no direct answer. 

The leading issue in trying to answer that question is that there are plenty of things that factor in – including but not limited to, the type of business, industry, marketing strategies, and web design. Simply put, figuring out how long it takes for SEO to work is relative to how it is done in the first place. 

We’ve dealt with several businesses in the past who already had impractical expectations before coming in; they ask head-on if we can help them produce results in a couple of months because that is the ideal time frame they hear from their peers.

How Long Does SEO Take to Work?

The Truth About SEO

Sadly, for them and any future client, we tell them that SEO doesn’t walk on a straight line. In other words, there’s no uniform system or set of rules that govern how strategies should work and what methods should be avoided. 

Key in the term “SEO tips” in Google, and you are bombarded with thousands of opinions from everyone claiming to be experts. While there is nothing wrong with the overabundance of information, we take issue on those who cash in on misinformation, particularly about SEO campaigns that produce results in no time. 

You’re here because you want to know the truth. Don’t get me wrong – We’re not dissuading you from investing in SEO. You’re here for a reality check, and that is what we’re giving you.

Don’t worry if you are confused or scared. Everyone feels the same way when they ponder how long it’ll take for SEO to work. But before we delve on to the factors that affect the timeline and results, let’s make sure you know the basics of SEO. 

What is SEO?

SEO deals with the optimization of the pages of a website in a way that achieves favorable rank in the search engine results pages (SERPS). It stands out from all other strategies with the same objective because it involves the use of free or “organic” methods. 

SERPs contain links to pages, listings, videos, and other stuff that are relevant to a specific keyword phrase or search term. The results are ranked using an algorithm designed based on the search intent of the user. 

SEO has the most impact on a website’s ranking, but it is a broad concept that is better understood by two attributes – on-page SEO and off-page SEO. 

On-Page SEO

The only way to understand on-page SEO is by learning how a search engine like Google operates. It was mentioned earlier that search engines embrace an algorithm to examine content and rank pages through them. Google gathers content by using spiders or crawlers.

Search engines use a database (indexes) to save pertinent website info, including URLs. So, when someone searches “signs of a roof replacement,” Google displays results based on its indexes. 

On-page SEO deals with optimizing a page on a website. The search engines take multiple factors into account when ranking pages. These factors include keyword use and stemming, internal links and anchor texts, mobile responsiveness, and distribution of page authority, to name a few. 

Off-Page SEO

This is often called “link building,” for a good reason. Off-page SEO describes the process of creating a reputable inbound link profile for a website by using:

  • high-authority
  • relevant
  • trustworthy links from other websites.

The reason why it is called “off-page” is that the work done is outside of the website. An excellent example is when you ask an authority site in the roofing industry to link to your blog post about the signs that a roof needs replacement.

When Will You See Results from Your Campaign?

Irrespective of the chosen SEO strategy, it takes time to see the results after the implementation. If you’re desperate to know how long you should wait, then the most sensible projection is four to seven months.

This is the period when you begin to see results. In other words, we’re not saying you achieve utter success in less than a year. 

The reason why we’d always come up with this modest projection is that there is a bevy of factors that affect the development of your campaign. We discuss these factors below:

Age

Being a newbie is the biggest challenge for every website trying to climb up to the search engine results pages. It’s like when you’re vying a job straight out of college, and everyone looks at you as an inexperienced prospect with a lot of risks and a few upsides.

For the most part, it takes Google a couple of months to index a newly published site. In other words, age plays a crucial factor in figuring out how long you have to wait for your website to appear on the first page of SERPs.

There are ways to help speed up your progress, i.e., obtaining links from authority sites (off-page SEO). Doing so means convincing high-ranking and relevant sites to link to you. If you’re successful in getting these links to your pages, you’re telling Google to index your site quicker. 

History

Age and history are two different things SEO’s perspective. The former refers to the time that your site has been published on the web. While the latter talks about your site’s interaction history with the search engines.

Google hands out a score on every page of a website based on factors such as trustworthiness and reputability. This score or rating exemplifies your site’s propensity to climb in the search engine rankings. Hence, the higher score your page gets, the more likely faster the climb to the first page of Google will be.

Penalties

We said earlier that there is no set of strict guidelines or rules in SEO. But don’t think Google and other search engines won’t penalize black hat strategies.

Google hates websites that break its rules, although there’s no existing document that details these rules. Any decent individual with minimal background in SEO knows what it means to break the rules.

For example, procuring backlinks from shady and spammy sources, posting duplicate content, and keyword stuffing.

If you’ve engaged in any of those black hat techniques before, it means your site has a tainted reputation online. Google and other search engines won’t forget previous penalties when they rank pages. But like everything in life, there’s always a second chance to redeem yourself. 

Final Words

SEO is a lot more complicated than most people think, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of probing into how long does SEO take to work, the best approach is to set realistic goals. And then establish an effective plan based on them. Instead of focusing on the time frame, you should weigh on the factors that affect your campaign. 

How To Easily Do An SEO Audit

by Marketing Strategy TipsOnline Marketing TipsSEO Tips

In this blog post, we’re going to show you how to do an SEO audit.

If you’re like a lot of businesses out there, you’re probably not getting the traction to your website that you want. You have a great-looking website, you have a great product or service yet you aren’t getting enough sales. What went wrong?

Well the first thing you need to do perform an SEO audit to see where you stand and what improvements need to be made.

What Is An SEO Audit?

As a business owner, you should know what a SEO Audit is, and why it is crucial for your online presence. You need to identify issues that could and would prevent your website from being ranked on any search engines.

SEO Audits gives you a precise and detailed perception that gives you an overview of your site’s online presence. Ignoring these identifying issues, and your efforts will be in vain.

In other words,  your hard work will be paid off once you regularly audit your site. Also, this will make sure it’s properly crawled and indexed.

Pro tip: To make your content stand out, discerning content-related issues, indexing, proper use of backlink analysis, learning site architecture, and social media engagement are important factors to use in your internet marketing.

These components when understood and practiced will be important in helping you to identify strengths, weaknesses, and your website’s potential in gaining traction online.

Keep in mind that when you lose out all on the traffic, your possible sales will go down the drain. Quite the opposite when you regularly audit your website.

SEO Tool List

So how does SEO Audit procedure go? Here are tools you need to know:

  1. Moz Site Audit Tool
  2. Google Analytics
  3. Google Search Console
  4. Google Page Speed Insight

Starting The SEO Audit

The Crawl: This procedure is so important that you need to run it first before you do the other steps. Why is this important? Because this is where you identify your website’s problems, i.e., duplicate contents, low word count, unlinked pagination pages, excess redirects.

Moz Site Audit Tool

  1. Go to the tool and open application.
  2. On the top right of the screen, click new site audit.
  3. Create new project.
  4. Then enter your domain name followed by your project name.

With the exception of the limited checked pages, there is no need to edit any settings. However, if the need arises, remove URL parameters, bypass restrictions, or allow or disallow some URLs.

  1. On Page SEO Score.
  2. Organic Monthly Traffic.
  3. Organic Keywords.
  4. Backlinks.

As you scroll down the page, ‘Top SEO Issues’ will appear. Click on any of the URL for more information on your website’s issues. This way, you can review the pages; decide whether you need additional content. It’s crucial that you’ll have an insight on how Googlebot is crawling your site. You’ll know when your site is ranking well by manually searching your site.

Other Aspects To Check

When looking for relevant search results, how many of your pages pop up after? Do they come up first in the list when searching your site? Do you see your site in the list of end results when giving assessments?

Keep in mind though that despite your page’s not being at the top rank, it doesn’t mean that your page is uncrawlable, it only suggests that you need to realize the problem and what needs to be done.

You need to do this procedure in order to know if your page’s variation is in the right arrangement, in combination with duplicates. How do you do this? Go to Google and run a “site:domain.com.”

This will list indexed URLs for your domain. If you have mix site versions, then you potentially need to addressed to it. It’s important to run site search in order to have a preview of any used subdomains.

Checking your site’s indexed URLs is another procedure, it’s like running the same procedure as the above. You’ll be surprised to see a few pages Google has indexed after doing this.

Are these the results that you expect after a search? Then if not, there’s an issue that needs to be fixed. (The main culprit is usually the faceted navigation needs to be indexed). However, if it’s less than what you expected, your site then is being crawled or indexed.

How To Use Search Console

Seeing a drop in your site’s ranking or failing to rank high as it should be is anticipated once your site has violated Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines; this is where Manual Penalty comes in. If your brand does not rank then your site will be deindexed.

You can avoid this by checking in to see whether a manual action has been issued against your site by using the Search Console; look for:

  1. “Security and Manual Actions” tab down the left-hand side of the menu;
  2. Look for the manual actions link.
  3. Click, then you will be directed to your status.

You can relax if you see the result with a green check. On the other hand, if an issue appears in a list, then you need a Manual Actions Report.

It has been an important factor for Mobile Ranking for a long time. Remember that User Experience is prevalent in SEO success so site speed is important.

In fact, data shows that if there’s a significant bouncing from a user, this increases a slower page load. The faster the page loads, the better result from SEO and UX perspectives. Use SEMrush Site Audit report to see load time statistics and list of highlighted errors.

SEO Audits and SSL Certificates

Implementing an SSL certificate is important if your site runs on HTTP. Once you run https://www.domain.com in your browser and see that your site remains on the HTTP protocol you can relax and head on to the next step. On the other hand, you need to address this issue if you are redirected to an HTTP version.

Make sure to keep up with the trend of having a mobile-friendly site. UX is a must if you expect to reach the top. You can check this on Search Console, look for Enhancements tab in the Mobile Usability section for any issues.

SEO Audits and Indexation Issues

How to analyze and resolve indexation issues? You will see valid pages or ones that have warning, plus, excluded pages as well as coverage errors, if you go to the index tab of the Coverage page in Google Search Console.

Prevention of site from being crawled and indexed is expected if there are underlying issues. Address this ASAP! Underlying common errors include:

  1. Pages that have a noindex attribute and that are submitted in a sitemap.
  2. Pages blocked from being crawled in your robots.txt file but that are included in a sitemap.
  3. 404 pages submitted in a sitemap.

Excluded URLs are pages that are not currently in Google’s index. This includes:

  1. Pages excluded with a noindex attribute
  2. Pages that redirect
  3. Crawl anomalies
  4. Canonicalization issues
  5. Pages that are crawled but not indexed
  6. Not found (404) errors
  7. Pages blocked by your robots.txt file

Deeply analyze the report and only clean the areas of concern. Of course, these reports don’t need to always be cleaned up. Usually, there are specific reasons these exclusions happen, i.e., due to site migrations. Those are the best moment to clean those reports.

Page user experience is the main goal in Google’s future objectives. A combination of Core Web Vitals signals with Google’s for a better Search ranking which gives better metrics for page user experience is a feat.

Other Tips to Improve your SEO Audits

Be a social media butterfly. Use social media as your tool for your SEO efforts. Let the dynamics of this platform be a conduit for consistent backlinks and engagement. It has the power to increase the number of your backlinks.

Those who follow your content might be more likely to link to it. This increases your brand awareness through queries about your brand. Also, let us not forget the “mentions” and “tags” that social media can offer to your brand.

As we take everything into account, we have touched on some techniques on how to do SEO Audit. We have given tools and procedures on how to fix issues and deal with it to keep your site up to its rank.

Final Thoughts

Always bear in mind that search engine algorithms, best practices, market trends, and most especially your competitors are always keeping track. So make it a habit to keep your site up to date; address issues immediately after audit. Eliminate duplicates. Monitor your site analytics, and make sure you’re engaging in any social media platforms.

The more your presence you have in social media, the further you’ll push your relevant search terms. Be consistent, and your SEO ranking will soon reach the peak of success.

Why Is AJ Frey So Sure About Your Website’s Success? 

by Ecommerce TipsMarketing Strategy TipsOnline Marketing TipsSEO TipsWordPress Tips

Why Is AJ Frey So Sure About Your Website’s Success? 

On his website he’s described as handsome, debonair, suave, charming and a technology-lover who also loves Ghostbusters, StarWars and cheesy 80’s TV. You may disagree with all of the above–after all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or the buyer, according to AJ Frey.

However, one truth that is undeniable is that AJ Frey is an incredibly brilliant Search Engine Optimization specialist aka SEO expert, who hates pay per click. Thought that would get your attention! It is no secret that AJ Frey has a sense of humour.

But when it comes to his clients and helping them to achieve website’s success, he will do whatever it takes to position your product or service on page one. AJ Frey is the owner of Best SEO in Canada.

He Offers a comprehensive range of SEO services, dedicated to driving traffic that meets your lead, acquisition, or sales objectives.

But why Is AJ Frey So Sure About Your Website’s Success? Because success leaves clues. What he has done for others he will do for you. Let’s look at some of what he’s done for others and for himself to make it to page one on Google’s search engine: 

1. Experience and Process for SEO Delivery

When it comes to SEO these days, anyone with a laptop, access to the Internet and a WordPress-installed blog can boast of being an SEO expert After all, YOAST plug-in is the #1 WordPress SEO plugin, and is available on all WordPress sites.  

What you won’t see behind those claims, however, is the experience and process they take to deliver results. This is fundamental, and something you should watch out for. When a so-called SEO expert is offering his or her service, the first thing you should do is visit his/her website.

Next, do a simple search in Google to see if they show up on the search engine’s organic positions. If they don’t, it means they have little to no experience, nor have they implemented whatever SEO strategy they are claiming to deliver. How can you give what you don’t have?

Therefore, a fundamental characteristic of great SEO experts is that they have experience implementing SEO for themselves first. In addition, they should have a process, showing you how they intend to make your website a success:

2. Thought Leadership 

SEO is always evolving, as you no doubt have seen with the genesis of BERT–Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), which is another attempt by Google to improve their natural language processing in order to better understand the search queries of their end users.

And if you’re just returning to the planet and have no idea what I’m talking about, check out this article (link to: What is the Best Word Count for SEO in Canada?). 

This is Google’s last major update. However, in one year alone, Google made upwards of 3,200 updates to its search engine algorithms. How can you be expected to keep tabs of all these updates while focusing on managing your business?

You need thought-leadership, and that’s another characteristic of great SEO experts. They must know what is happening in the industry and are able to adjust accordingly. Ensure they’re keeping up with these ever evolving SEO best practices and are sharing tips to help your business adjust for maximum impact.

3. An Outstanding Portfolio

Experts aren’t born, they’re created. Becoming an SEO expert overnight is impossible.

In order to be an SEO expert, you have to put in a lot of work and dedication. Experts study a lot and practice a lot. This gives them impressive portfolios which every SEO expert wants to show off.

Who wouldn’t toot his own horn? In the world of SEO the louder the horn the better. When an SEO expert works with a client to put his/her website on Google’s page one, this gives him/her a feeling of great pride and accomplishment.

And they should feel proud of their accomplishments. Getting on Google’s page one is hard work! Naturally, they are going to publicise this great feat by posting it on their websites. 

This is good for you. This is your opportunity to scroll through their portfolio to see the kind of work they have done and are doing. You will also get to see the calibre clients with whom they work to determine if you, too, would want to be in that “club”. 

As an SEO expert, AJ Frey is no exception in wanting to highlight his outstanding portfolio. Here you can peruse some of the work he has done for clients just like you. 

4. Real Life Testimonials

Naturally, if an SEO expert has a portfolio, it means he/she has clients. What do satisfied clients do? They give testimonials. So not only do SEO experts toot their own horns, but their clients toot louder.

Developing winning SEO strategies, managing their implementation, and guiding teams on their execution to generate results is not easy. When an SEO Expert does all this hard work and gets those fantastic results, their clients reward them with testimonials, having gotten value for their money. 

Thus, sharing real-life testimonials is a characteristic you’ll find with most great SEO experts like AJ Frey. 

5. We’re a Team of Creatives

When you hire AJ Frey you’re not just getting the most brilliant SEO expert on the planet, you’re getting his team — an eclectic group of creatives with various backgrounds, who manage to work together with our clients to plan out and implement an extensive strategy to boost your website in the Google rankings.

10 years ago a crack squad SEO unit was sent to prison by a Google court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped a maximum security stockade, changed their SEO strategy, and went underground.

Today still wanted by the search engines they survive as web designers and SEO specialists. By bringing together a team of the very best SEO experts in Canada with specialties in site optimization, mobile UX, link building, analytics and SEO content, AJ Frey is sure about your website’s success. 

AJ Frey doesn’t only talk the talk, but he walks the walk. He specialises in helping anyone (small businesses, large enterprise businesses and everything in between)boost their online presence and get found on not only Google, but all major search engines across the world – not only in Canada.That’s a recipe for success–your success!

6. Only SEO-optimised Content Marketing

And that’s not all!

AJ Frey, through his evolving proven whitehat secret recipe generates millions of organic SEO traffic to his clients’ blogs and websites–all done organically. I.e. no Instagram and Facebook Ads.

Only SEO-optimised content marketing. It is for this reason that many small and large businesses trust AJ Frey to deliver SEO strategies that put them on Google’s page one. 

7. 5-star Ratings 

Still don’t see why AJ Frey is so sure about your website’s success? How about this: Across several review sites, including this one, this SEO expert’s team of creatives’ expertise and penchant for perfection have seen them receive 5-star ratings from happy customers. 

8. King of Backlinks 

At the beginning of  the article we mentioned BERT–Google’s AI that interprets data on a page and delivers meaningful search results for your keyword search.

One of the algorithms BERT interprets is the number of backlinks pointing to web pages and websites on a whole.  The more backlinks, the more BERT sees your site as authoritative.

However, due to its “intelligence”, Google’s search engine cannot be fooled by many backlinks that are from dummy sites, or sites with irrelevant information–though many have tried.

When it comes to acquiring backlinks, AJ Frey comes highly recommended as the king of backlinks.

He will help you to generate high-value backlinks, ensuring search engines interpret your website as important and rank it above those of your competitors for keyword searches. This is another reason AJ Frey is so sure about your website’s success. 

When you sign up for one of AJ Frey’s SEO packages you receive expert consultations, market and keyword research, search engine webmaster tools setup, and a myriad of other tools that will aid in the success of your website. 

Whether or not you own an ecommerce website, or maybe you just have a simple landing page, but you want it to be on Google’s page one for your keyword search, you need a team of creatives who are passionate about organic traffic and SEO white hat best practices.

You need AJ Frey–who is sure about your website’s success. 

What to Expect from The Best SEO in Canada

1. Onboarding and Project Management

We value your business. We understand how important your website is to you. In order to assist you to reach your goal(s), we will assign a project manager to handle your account. He/She will need access to some of your assets. 

Depending on the scope of work, this could mean anything from access to your website/blog, your Google Analytics login info, your in-house staff, etc. This is why an onboarding process is important.

From this exercise, the project manager will be able to advise concerning the management of your project. I.e. how long the process will take, what is the full scope of the project, etc. 

2. Strategy session 

Of course, before your project manager proceeds with the onboarding process, a strategy session is organised. Your decision to work with AJ Frey, an SEO expert, came from the desire to rank high on Google’s search engine.

Or, it may be that you are seeking to generate more traffic to your site. Whatever the reason, you’re here for results. You have heard that AJ Frey can make your business successful, and trial and error is costly. 

We know that no two businesses are alike, therefore, the SEO strategies that work for one may not work for the other. Great SEO experts like AJ Frey, from experience working with different businesses, know this.

Thus, we do not simply take your information and send you proposals. Instead, and in order to help you, we allow you to share your unique needs and business case during our strategy session.

3. Research and Recommendations

After sharing your needs and business case with our SEO expert during our strategy session, your information is then used to conduct in-depth research. This is done in order to gain insights into your industry and your target audience. 

Once done, our SEO expert will share the results of the research, and offer recommendations based on the findings, in order for your website to be successful.

We use all the available digital channels available to you, including telephone, email and video conferencing. 

4. A Contract Detailing the Deliverables

So far, you’ve had several “meetings” with our SEO expert, and no mention yet of a contract. We believe in value for money and putting our money where our mouth is.

So, we will only offer a contract for your acceptance, after our strategy sessions, which includes a digital project kickoff meeting with your team (onboarding) and platform specific optmsation consultations (See numbers 2 & 3 above).

If our strategy session and follow-up discussions with our SEO expert looks like a good fit for the exchange of mutual value, then and only then you’ll receive our contract for your business.

Not only that, but our brilliant SEO expert won’t just send you a contract, but you’ll receive the contract detailing our deliverables–what we’ll deliver, how we’ll deliver and when you should start expecting results.

AJ and SEO  

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not a one-size fits all, fly-by-night strategy implemented by black hat SEO “experts”. SEO takes time before its results become apparent.

Any SEO “expert” who tells you he/she can produce overnight success is clueless about SEO strategies, or is practising black hat techniques–which will find your website being penalised by Google for illegal practices.

The minimum time on average for any signs of improvement is approximately 3 months. It could be sooner, but we do not make wild promises. We prefer to be conservative, and work hard at fulfilling our obligations. 

AJ Frey is an incredibly brilliant Search Engine Optimisation specialist aka SEO expert, who hates pay per click. His strategy, which he calls his secret sauce, is a white hat, Google-friendly strategy that is guaranteed to get you positive search results, regardless of the search engine. 

He offers a comprehensive range of SEO services, dedicated to driving traffic that meets your lead, acquisition, or sales objectives. If you give it approximately 3 months, you’ll start seeing results—qualified traffic, leads and sales. 

AJ Frey can do all that was mentioned above and then some. As you have seen from the testimonials, many clients have testified to the success of their websites. If he is able to help make their websites successful, he is sure about your website’s success.

A few words From AJ to You

Hi! I’m AJ Frey, and I would love to hear from you.

If you enjoyed this article and are in need of digital marketing, a cool website, or improving your ranking on the search engines, contact me at 1 250 801 6588, or just leave me a comment in the box below by way of introduction. Your website’s success means business for me!

My team and I will help you build a RAD website that will attract customers through good design, cool integrations and SEO. 

So why is AJ Frey so sure about your website’s success? Because you found him on page one.  If he can do that for himself, imagine, just for a moment, what he can do for you! 

He hates PPC! That’s someone you want in your corner. 

Tips on How to Create an SEO Friendly FAQ Page

by Marketing Strategy TipsOnline Marketing TipsSEO Tips

The FAQ page offers more than just information. For the consumer’s perspective, it answers common questions related to the brand, product, or service. When a FAQ Page is optimized, this page becomes a useful sales tool and a source of SEO content. That’s what we know as SEO friendly FAQ.

Although this page isn’t designed as an aggressive marketing ploy, it helps in motivating a prospective consumer to buy a product or avail of service by answering his/her query. So, if the FAQ page is about delivering information in a “question and answer” format, why is there a need to customize it?

For starters, an SEO-friendly-FAQ page cuts the workload of your customer service/support team. They don’t have to answer as many questions as they should since the page provides everything. It saves your people some valuable time.

A well thought out Q&A page builds trust since it addresses the consumers’ need for information. A visitor to your website sees you as an authority when he/she is impressed, or at least satisfied with the information that your SEO-Friendly FAQ page provided.

You may not notice it, but an SEO-friendly FAQ page significantly improves user experience.

Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer who needs his/her questions answered. You want your questions to be answered in the FAQ page instead of having to call or chat with customer support and wait for hours to get a response.

Creating an SEO-friendly-FAQ Page

Your FAQ page plays a critical role in drawing traffic to your site. There’s no way to get a higher ranking in Google when you’re not driving enough traffic to your pages.

More notably, the page provides visitors with a comprehensive understanding of your brand, product, or service that no other section of the website can. Simply put, it improves your conversion rates.

Below are the ways to come up with an SEO-friendly-FAQ page:

1 – Come up with a list of RELEVANT frequently asked questions

You just don’t make up all sorts of questions for the sake of having an FAQ page. The key is figuring out the right questions that will enlighten a potential customer about your brand.

You know those questions are effective when they generate demand. Creating this list takes a lot of effort, patience, and common sense.

If your company employs customer service representatives, then that’s a great place to get suggestions. Those guys are the recipients of hundreds of questions from customers, which means they are a valuable source of information once you start creating the SEO-friendly-FAQ page.

Do some digging on your competitor’s FAQ page. This helps you understand if they’re doing things right. You don’t necessarily have to copy their Q&As, but you at least an insight on how you can improve your own.

2 – Add structured data to the page

Incorporating structured data to the FAQs will improve your page’s reputation with regards to the search engine results pages. Structured data is a staple in obtaining a better click-through-rate.

If your competitors aren’t using structured data in their FAQs, you have your best chance of getting ahead of them. Just so you acknowledge the value of this strategy, Google now has integrated support for FAQ structured data both in Google Assistant and Search.

If you implement the structured data system, it transforms your content into an SEO-friendly material since the questions and answers appear on Google Assistant and Search.

3 – Don’t settle for text alone

We know that an FAQ page is about posting the right questions and their corresponding answers. But one issue that you need to face is its bland aesthetics.

You don’t want the page to contain anything but text. Preferably, use images, illustrations, graphics, or even videos to your answers to improve the aesthetic value of the page.

The information delivered through the combination of text and graphics is conveyed more effectively compared to text alone.

4 – Mind the navigation

An ideally written SEO-friendly FAQ page is useless when visitors to your website can’t even find it.

Apart from the information and inclusion of images and graphics, you should build a straightforward navigational structure. Since you expect a ton of text, breaking it down to categories and subcategories makes sense.

The structure avoids confusion and customers find the right questions in seconds instead of minutes. You want the experience of reading through the page to be instantaneous.

5 – Don’t forget about analytics

The purpose of checking analytics is to see if the pages on your website are getting traffic, and if they are ranking for the relevant keywords. Without it, you can’t know for sure if visitors are taking their time to read your FAQ page or if they are merely skimming through it.

Furthermore, analytics tells you the path that the visitors to your website are taking. Web analytics essentially give you the data and numbers that you can use to determine if what you’re doing actually works.

There is a handful of advanced web analytics out there, so it shouldn’t be challenging to get things started. Remember that analytics provide actionable insights, so you must embrace it.

Conclusion

Some say that FAQ pages are nothing but a waste of time. Why optimize it when you already have a well laid-out website with a superb navigational structure to guide your visitors to the information they need? The truth is an FAQ page plays an indispensable role and is never an afterthought.

The content inside it provides direct answers to highly specific questions. You don’t leave it at the corner and forget about it. If that is what you are doing right now, then you might as well delete the page.

The SEO value of an FAQ page is underrated, but it brings traffic and improves conversions. It’s just a matter of you acknowledging its worth.

What is the Best Word Count for SEO in Canada?

by Marketing Strategy TipsOnline Marketing TipsSEO TipsWordPress Tips

“Don’t worry about your word count; Worry about making your words count.”

You’ve more than likely heard the term SEO, and, like most people, can recite “search engine optimization”, but that’s where your knowledge ends, right? You’re still confused as to how to optimize the search engine, and which search engine are you optimising for that matter? Let’s find out below about Best Word Count for SEO.

These questions will naturally answer themselves during the course of this article as we try to fathom what is the best word count for SEO in Canada. But first, you need an actual definition for SEO. 

SEO and Word Count

According to New York Times bestselling author Neil Patel in his article SEO Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide For 2021, “SEO stands for search engine optimization. Which is the art of ranking high on a search engine in the unpaid section, also known as the organic listings”.

In other words, SEO is the process of getting your web page/ article / blog, etc, at the top of the search results of a search engine like Google, without purchasing Advertisements.

So for example, you entered your long tail keyword ‘What is the Best Word Count for SEO in Canada’ in the Google search engine and the results show THIS article on page one of the search results.

You would therefore conclude that this page has been successfully optimized for Google. Btw, a long-tail keyword is a keyphrase such as the title of this article, which is more specific than a short tail keyword, which is one or two words such as “SEO word count”. More on this later. 

SEO experts, and there are many, including Patel, will tell you that in order to rank on Google’s first page in the search results, you have to follow an SEO strategy involving backlinking, providing relevant content and writing long texts where you made sure to include the most important keywords at the right places. 

Where did this idea come from? 

Actually, indirectly  from Google–10 years ago! If you’re surprised that SEO has been around for so long and you are only now learning about it, be prepared to be shocked: SEO is actually over 20 years old.

To be more specific, the actual term ‘Search Engine Optimization’ was first used in 1997, though the practice of optimising web pages started from as early as the mid 90s. Back then, Yahoo was the Google of today. Interestingly, Google started in 1998 and has since become the go-to search engine not the least due to its simplicity and ease of use.

As such, website owners now optimize their sites to rank on Google’s search engine. 

While Google never discloses the algorithms used to rank pages, they have from time to time given clues and suggestions to enable website developers to produce high quality content to the end user.

The Evolution of Word Count for SEO

So ten years ago, in order for Google to retrieve the end users’ keywords, they relied on what is believed to be TF-IDF or term frequency inverse document frequency, along with the title tags and words in the heading.

It is believed that in order for Google to retrieve these keywords, they would somehow use this technique to find and extract the most relevant words in a series for the web page to rank them high.

Consequently, in order for Google to understand what your webpage was about, you would have to write long texts making sure to include the most important keywords, strategically place these keywords in the text, and have the right number of keywords in the texts.

Remember, Google never reveals their algorithms, so this was the outset for the emergence of SEO experts–men and women who would study Google to figure out their algorithms based on what they said, and mostly what was not said, and also experimenting on the websites’ optimization to see how they ranked. 

Due to the inevitable manipulation of the system by web developers to rank high on the search engine (keyword stuffing and cloaking are two common violations of Google’s algorithms), Google has had to over the years change its algorithms as these “experts” discovered their secrets.

Today, it employs related keyword techniques that are themed to interpret the intent of the content on a webpage. Enter BERT. 

What is BERT? 

According to Google Search, “BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), which is another attempt by Google to improve their natural language processing in order to better understand the search queries of their end users”.

Introduced in 2018, the BERT models can “consider the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it—particularly useful for understanding the intent behind search queries”.

In other words, BERT is basically a machine-learning algorithm that, based on large amounts of text, is trained to read text in order to find the best matching answer. Can you say almost human? Indeed, BERT is Artificial Intelligence (AI). And this is the direction that Google has taken in the past few years. 

However, Google did not get here overnight. According to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichal in a 2017 keynote speech at its annual I/O event “the company was shifting from a “mobile-first world to an AI-first world.

BERT, SEO and Word Count

Then a series of announcements followed involving AI in various ways: from the development of specialised chips for optimising machine learning, to the use of deep learning in new applications including cancer research, to putting Google’s AI-driven assistant on as many devices as possible.

Pichai claimed the company was transitioning from “searching and organizing the world’s information to AI and machine learning.” The end result: BERT.

The idea of BERT is best explained by their research director, Peter Norvig, “With information retrieval, anything over 80% recall and precision is pretty good—not every suggestion has to be perfect, since the user can ignore the bad suggestions. With assistance, there is a much higher barrier.

You wouldn’t use a service that booked the wrong reservation 20% of the time, or even 2% of the time. So an assistant needs to be much more accurate, and thus more intelligent, more aware of the situation. That’s what we call ‘AI-first.’”

But what does this have to do with the best word count for SEO in Canada? 

A lot, actually. In fact, SEO experts are at the best position one could be in terms of optimising web pages for search engines now more than ever–due to AI-first technology.

While it will be more difficult to manipulate the search engine with keyword stuffing, exaggerated length of texts and word counts, it will be easier to rank higher in the search engine when SEO experts help their clients to produce content that is relevant to the search of the end user. 

Which brings us to the age-old question, “What is the best word count for SEO in Canada” when producing relevant content? After all, clients want to know how many words to write to have the best chance of appearing on Google’s first page.

Surely there has got to be some guideline somewhere? And, indeed, there are. But before we delve into this, let’s hear from Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller, on the subject of word count in 2021. 

This topic came up on Twitter in response to a user who asked whether or not it would be beneficial to de-index shorter articles. This is what John Mueller had to say, “I agree with you & Mihai :).

Word count is not indicative of quality. Some pages have a lot of words that say nothing. Some pages have very few words that are very important & relevant to queries. You know your content best (hopefully) and can decide whether it needs the details.” 

Key takeaway:

1) “Word count is not indicative of quality”

2) Quality is what Google is looking for

3) By the same token, pages with few words may be highly relevant to a user’s query

4) Ultimately it’s up to the site owner to use their best judgement.

In other words, Google will not necessarily rank pages based on word count alone. When it sees the quality content, it will rank shorter content just as well as longer content.

And in case you’re wondering why Google; aren’t there other search engines? Yes, there are. But as of 2021, Google is still the number one search engine and the go-to site for all things Internet. 

What do the SEO experts have to say about this? 

Notwithstanding what Mueller has said, four major players in the SEO industry have found clear correlations between word count and Google rankings:

1. Hubspot: 

In a recent study the marketing automation platform, Hubspot, gathered data from the 50 most read blog posts in 2019. They found that the articles were, on average, 2,300 words long.

2. Yoast: 

Yoast is a search engine optimization plugin in WordPress–but it is so much more than that, and personally one of my favourites. If your website is hosted by WordPress, chances are you are using Yoast. According to Yoast, the ideal blog post length is 300 to 1,000 words.

That is a huge gap. However, Yoast takes into account the fact that some topics do not require any research, but may just be an answer to a question. Yoast concluded that 1000 word count is the ideal number for higher rankings.

3. Semrush: 

According to a 2018 SEMrush study, the ideal length for better ranking is 1137 words.

4. Backlinko: 

According to backlinko in the 11.8 million Google search results they analysed, overall, the average word count of a Google first page result is 1,447 words. 

From the above one can infer that a webpage with an average word count of 1,471 (the avg of the four numbers) ranks higher than other pages.

So, is 1471 the best word count for SEO in Canada? Not necessarily.

Correlation & Causation

One of the challenges SEO experts usually have is understanding the difference between correlation and causation.

If you looked at the top 4 or 5 ranking pages for your keyword search and saw that they all had approximately 1471 words, it is understandable that you would think that is what is required to rank well for that keyword. However, this could be a correlation, not a causation. 

Another study (2015) by HubSpot suggested that longer posts may be “link-worthy” and more shareable. In turn, it could be the link profile of the page that causes it to rank well. It could also be that longer posts allow for more thorough answers required for some search queries, which then triggers Google’s AI technique to rank it higher. 

What is important to note is, correlation does not equal causation.

Google’s own SEO starter guide states, “Content should be factually accurate, clearly written, and comprehensive.”

Comprehensive is not a synonym for long. Comprehensive means “complete and including everything that is necessary.”

If you’ve been following this article you should have concluded by now that there is no definitive answer to the question, what is the best word count for SEO in Canada.

However it is not our desire to leave our readers more confused than when they started, so let’s see if we can help you to actually arrive at a “magic number as to the best word count for SEO in Canada by looking at some other factors. 

The first factor we will look at is Relevance:

Arguably the most important factor to rank content is its relevance. We cannot over emphasise the point that content should be relevant to the search of the users.

Ahrefs advice on content length: “Don’t shoot for a particular word count- just make sure you cover a topic in full. Whether that takes 500 words or 10,000, the key is that you are creating the best resource available for your target keyword.” (Search Engine Journal)

Ultimately you are writing for the users’ keywords. When a topic asks for more information then you should write as Google suggests–comprehensively.  

The second factor is the length of the keyword:

According to some SEO experts, your word count should be dependent on your keyword length. So for short-tail keywords (one or two words), you should shoot for approximately 4,500 words or more; mid-tail keywords between 2,000 and 4,500 words and long-tail keywords such as the title of this article, between 1,000-2,000 words. 

Long-tail keywords are considered to be the best in Digital Marketing SEO. They are a great opportunity for small blogs to rank higher and do well. The ideal blog length for long-tail keywords is 1,000-3,000 words. Although the market is competitive, it is less competitive due to its specificity. This article is 2490 words long. You be the judge as to who’s right. 

A word of caution concerning keywords:

Short-tail keywords are very competitive. You will notice in the search results, millions of answers–that’s due to the non-specificity of the query. This makes it hard for Google to show specific results and you will be “punished” for this.

The results: a low ranking of your webpage –especially if you’re a small site with low domain authority. So, this is a very important factor. You should select your keywords properly.

Another factor we’ll look at is: User Intent

The most important aspect when deciding on how long content should be is user intent. I.e. What does a user want when he/she lands on your page. If you understand what a user is looking for on your page, it will help you to write comprehensively enough to meet that need.

Having said that,

Content should be as long as it is needed to help convey the message of the page and allow users to complete their desired actions on that page.

Conclusion

You’ve seen that many studies by SEO experts have shown varying lengths for the best word count for SEO.

With machine learning, such as Google’s BERT, search engines can now better understand your content without you having to type thousands of words. Notwithstanding the length, web owners are encouraged to provide good content for the end users, which may mean a short article, or a long epistle. 

Can more words allow you to expand on a topic and offer your reader a view of the bigger picture? Absolutely. Could a shorter read be just what they’re looking for during coffee break? Quite likely.

The real takeaway from here is that your web content should give contextual meaning and value to your user, which is a shared conclusion among all SEO experts. 

Because in the end, only Google knows the answer to how they process texts and whether the word count is something to strive for.

I advise people not to focus too heavily on SEO recommendations when crafting content. Focus first on what your content is meant to do and go from there.

Notwithstanding all of the above, 

The final answer to the question of what is the best word count for SEO in Canada is 2000 to 3000 words. 

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Good SEO Practices Vs. Bad SEO Practices: A Simple Guide

by Ecommerce TipsSEO Tips

Twenty-first century websites are usually built and maintained following the standard set by the search engine giant, Google. These standards include Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices. As such, webmasters such as the Best SEO in Canada strive to follow good SEO practices that are ethical and up to date with the latest developments of ranking algorithms.

In the past, webmasters employed bad SEO practices such as keyword and banner stuffing, link building and cloaking in order to rank on Google’s first page.

However, Google’s latest algorithms make those practices almost impossible. Nevertheless, there are always unscrupulous webmasters who try to get around Google’s best practices.

Whether you are new to website development or a seasoned veteran at building websites, here is a simple guide to Good SEO Practices vs. Bad SEO Practices, so you can beware when making SEO decisions while building or maintaining your websites.

 

Good SEO Practices

Good SEO practices consist of what is called “white hat” techniques. These include:

● Security Certificate:

Up to recently, most people did not know what the ‘https’ at the beginning  of a domain stood for. However, they understood that if a site had this “lock”, it meant the site could be trusted.

Today, Google has added security certificates as a requirement in their list of best practices for SEO. So websites with the https automatically rank higher in their search results.

HTTPS stands for hypertext transfer Protocol Secure, and enables websites to be more secure by encrypting the information sent between the visitor to the site and the server. It has been a Google ranking factor since 2014.

You can tell if your site is already using HTTPS by checking the loading bar in your browser. If there’s a lock icon before the URL, then it means your site is secure. If there is no lock, then you need to ‘buy’ one by installing an SSL certificate.

Due to Google’s standards, most web hosts offer these in their packages. If yours does not, you can depend on AJ Frey, owner of Best SEO in Canada, to pickup one for you.

This is a one-time installment, and once done, you can expect security on all your pages, including those you may add in the future.

● Placement of your target keyword / phrase:

Google’s best practices suggest that your target keyword / phrase should be in at least these three places. These are your title tag, heading and URL. Let’s take a closer look at each:

a) Title tag

According to Google, title tags should be written that accurately describe the page’s content. If you’re targeting a specific keyword or phrase, then this should do precisely that. However, search engine optimization isn’t just about improving rankings, but also enticing clicks. This is why your title tags must also be compelling.

N/B: Readability always comes first. Your title tag must make sense to the searcher. For example, if your target keyword/phrase is “saskatoon berry pie cheap,” then that doesn’t make sense as a title tag. Rearrange the words so it makes sense, even if you have to add stop words—Google is smart enough to understand what you mean. At Best SEO in Canada, AJ Frey knows just how to do this for you.

Finally, keep your title tags under 60 characters and use only “title case” for titles.

b) Heading (H1)

In addition to your title tag, your target keyword / phrase should also be in your heading. N/B: Every page should have a visible H1 heading on the page, and it should include your target keyword/phrase where it makes sense.

c) URL

The third place according to Google, where you target keyword / phrase should be is in your URL. According to Mozilla, “URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator.

A URL is nothing more than the address of a given unique resource on the Web. In theory, each valid URL points to a unique resource. Such resources can be an HTML page, a CSS document, an image, etc.”

Your URL should be short and descriptive, according to Google, as long URLs may intimidate web searchers. As such, it is not always best SEO practice to use the exact target query as your URL.

N/B: Earlier we noted that it was okay to add stop words to your title tags. However, it is good SEO practice to remove stop words from your URL. What are stop words? Words such as The, Is/Are, At and On. There are others, and different search engines have different criteria for stop words.

Finally, your keywords/phrases in URLs should be relevant to your page’s content.

● Match search intent:

Another good SEO practice is to match search intent. This means to align your title and the description of your page with search intent. Nobody wants to see product pages in the search results for “how to make blueberry grunt.” Clearly, these people are in learning mode, not buying mode.

Google understands this, which is why all of the top results will be blog posts—not pages selling blueberries, lemon and sugar.

The opposite is true for a query like “where can I buy blueberries.”

People aren’t looking for a blueberry grunt recipe; they’re looking to buy some blueberries. This is why most of the top 10 results are going to get ecommerce category pages, not blog posts.

Matching search intent goes beyond creating a certain type of content. It’s also about creating the content from a particular angle and in a specific format. Which brings us to the next good SEO practice.

● Write thorough and relevant content on a regular basis:

How do you rank for more queries? By making your content more thorough and relevant. But how do you do that? Here are a few tips:

  1. Complete sentences with good spelling and grammar. There are a few reputable software programmes that offer spelling and grammar corrections, so there is no excuse for poor grammar and typographical errors on your website. This would not be a good SEO practice.
  2. Make sure that your content is unique and original. There is nothing wrong with publishing content that is written by others, however, it must be unique and original.
  3. Well-labelled images: If you use images in your content, ensure that each is properly labelled. If in case the images cannot load, at least the searcher can know what the image is about by reading the label.
  4. Make sure that your content is relevant. Quality over quantity. While the length of your content may be important in certain contexts, at the end of the day, it must be relevant to your searchers’ queries. Btw, this not only applies to blog posts, but also to other types of content on your website.

N/B: Publishing new content on a regular basis is a good SEO practice, but it is also important to keep a balance between content produced by the website and content offered to the website by an author, in exchange for a link in the author bio. In this case, it is better not to publish, than to break this rule.

●  Relevant internal links:

Internal links are those from one page on your website to another. Adding internal links from other relevant pages is a very good SEO practice. This is one of the foundations of Google’s ranking algorithm and remains important even today.

Internal links also help Google understand what a page is about. Look for suitable places to add internal links on pages that fit the bill.

Unfortunately, Google discontinued public PageRank scores in 2016, so there’s no way to check them anymore. But in general, the more links a page has—from both external and internal sources—the higher its PageRank.

Which brings us to last, but not least:

● Get more backlinks:

Backlinks are another foundation of Google’s algorithm and remain one of the most important page ranking factors.

Google confirms this on their “how search works” page, where they state: “If other prominent websites on the subject link to the page, that’s a good sign that the information is of high quality”.

Finally, you should aim to build backlinks from authoritative and relevant pages and websites.

Bad SEO Practices

On the other hand, persons who wish to take the shortcut to ranking high on Google’s pages employ bad SEO practices referred to as “Black Hat” techniques. These include:

● Duplicate content:

Duplicate content is a very common practice, as some webmasters will publish content that has already been published elsewhere. In and of itself, that is not a bad thing; there are many sites with information you may think is useful for your visitors.

If your intent is not to try to rank for a certain keyword or “stealing” someone else’s work, then you should “no index and no follow” those pages so that you are not penalised by Google for bad SEO practice. Non-unique content is not good for SEO. Think about it: If search engines already have the same content in their index, why would they index your web page since it has nothing new to offer?

● Invisible text and keyword stuffing:

It is not as common today, but there was a time when “black hat” strategists used to include many keywords at the bottom of a webpage, but make them the same colour as the background so they weren’t very noticeable to the human eye.

Google has been known to penalise such practices. The same goes for “stuffing” keywords where they are irrelevant. Have you landed on a page with a keyword search and that page was filled with the keyword, and barely anything else?

That is an extreme example of what we’re stating. This is a very bad SEO practice. Not only will it discourage visitors to your site who are looking to read relevant information on their search term, but it is also a red flag for search engines such as Google that you are trying to manipulate their algorithms.

N/B: It is enough to mention your keywords in the title, description, opening paragraph and a few other places in the body of the text.

● Cloaking and redirecting:

“Cloaking”, a very common practice of old, is when webmasters hide the real destination of a link, while “redirecting” is sending multiple “keyword-rich” domains to a single website.

Now, there may be times when redirecting is necessary for your business. However, there is a thin line between redirecting to a subdomain or domain and buying several domains just for the purpose of redirecting their traffic to a single website.

Showing different versions of a page to web crawlers and visitors to a website was a common practice in the past, but due to Google’s best practices thankfully this has been discontinued.

However, in case you just arrived on the planet and do not know Google’s best practices, please be advised that using such “black hat” techniques now is considered a very bad SEO practice.

● Poor linking practices:

Going out and purchasing a Fiverr package promising you 5,000 links in 24 hours is not the right way to build links. You need to get links from relevant content and sites in your niche that have their own traffic.

There are many other bad SEO practices one can employ including guest posting for links and accepting low quality guest posts. However, we will continue that discussion in a later article.

Conclusion

Google’s best practices reward good SEO practices such as Security Certificates, applying keywords to title tags, headings and URLs, having unique and relevant content, using appropriate internal and backlinks, while penalise bad SEO practices, which we call “black hat” techniques such as keyword stuffing, excessive link building and cloaking.

If you wish to have a successful website that ranks high on Google’s pages, then it behooves you to master good SEO practices.

AJ Frey can help you to develop and maintain a successful website that sees you ranking on Google’s first page with no fear of penalty due to bad SEO practices.

He offers a comprehensive range of SEO services dedicated to driving traffic that meets your lead, acquisition, or sales objectives.  You should start seeing results–qualified leads, sales and traffic–in approximately 3 months.

That’s it. A list of Good SEO practices vs. Bad SEO practices, which we hope will help you to stay in Google’s good books, and any other search engine you wish to rank on. We know there are others. Why not share them in the comments section below? Ready to let an SEO expert help you maintain good SEO practices on your website? Give us a call or send us an email.

How Do I Build Domain Authority with a New Site?

by Marketing Strategy TipsOnline Marketing TipsSEO Tips

Working on a new site for it to rank on the first page of Google is no easy feat even for experienced developers who’ve done it countless times before. The scenario is the same, but newly-built business websites have unique needs and challenges to address. Then, the question remains for everybody: How Do I Build Domain Authority with a New Site?

Superb design, fail-proof content strategy, and a handful of marketing campaign ideas – you think you’ve got it all. But no, you haven’t touched the surface just yet. 

The objective of every new site is to rank high on search engine results pages for high-volume and high competition keywords. If you watch some videos that explain how this works, you probably think it’s doable. Yes, it is, but it will take some time. Don’t expect to achieve something overnight. It simply doesn’t work that way. 

A relatively new site comes with inherent disadvantages, including the lack of content history and backlink profile. Having a low domain authority is expected, and every other site out there has gone through this process, too.

The lack of domain authority makes it quite a challenge to keep up with the more established websites in the same niche or industry. But don’t lose hope. The reason why you’re here is that you intend to learn about building domain authority for your new site, and that’s what we’ll talk about for the rest of this blog. 

The Value of Domain Authority

Google does its job by deciding which pages to show first when someone types a search term, say for instance, “how to replace a roofing shingle.” This search returns hundreds of thousands of relevant pages that contain or target the keyword phrase.

Since Google and other search engines genuinely care about convenient user experience, they will rank websites based on content relevance and a cluster of other parameters. This is where the concept of domain authority creeps in. 

You won’t see your new site about roofing products/services on the first page of Google because there are older and more established competitors that rank for the same keywords. But since you are on the bottom, there’s no other way but up. 

Domain authority is never about the metrics. It is not something that the search engines use to rank websites for their SERP. Instead, it is more of a barometer that determines how well your new website is expected to perform against everyone else.

Increasing your site’s domain authority doesn’t affect whatever your competing sites are doing, but it increases your chances of ranking high in the SERPs. 

Ways to Build Domain Authority 

Building domain authority with a new site is an indirect route of increasing its potential of finding its way on the first page of Google. Before you commit to doing the things that we’re about to discuss, you must acknowledge that this will only work with time. In others, there’s a waiting game in place. Be patient, and your website get rewarded eventually. 

1 – Link Building

Google loves link building, and so you must embrace it, too. The rule is simple – have high quality and authority sites link to your website. If you’re successful at that, it creates an impression that those authority sites trust your brand or company.

It may sound cliché, but that is because it works since the search engines notice it right away. If you already did some link building before, be sure to perform a backlink audit. It gives you a clear picture of your backlink profile, including the existence of harmful backlinks. 

Don’t get too excited about link building; we’ve seen a lot of people overdo it. The last thing you want is to damage your website’s reputation by linking to shady sites.

Back in the day, private blogging networks were considered an authority, but that’s no longer the case. Google is quite strict when it comes to the practice of spamming your links. Adding harmful backlinks to your website will do more harm than good on your domain authority score. 

Focus on high authority sites and publications instead. You want to fill up your link building profile with wholesome and relevant links. 

2 – Content Remains King

Content marketing is and will always be the foundation of a website. It’s an indispensable component of building your domain authority. The role of content is to keep the landing page in order while you simultaneously inject new stuff.

Google loves it when you regularly incorporate fresh content that is not only relevant to your niche but something that attracts prospective customers. Furthermore, adding new content provides new opportunities for backlinks and added keywords. 

Don’t fall for automated or spun content to fill some pages of your new site. Everything must be new, original, and unique. Come up with something that Google sees as something that bears no resemblance of published content on the web. 

3 – Social Media Boost

We’re not just talking about creating social media profiles and linking them to your new site.

To successfully build domain authority with a new website, you must up the ante by keeping those social platforms active. Google is on the lookout for social signals, i.e. shares, likes, and retweets of your content. These are invaluable things that Google uses in evaluating both page and domain authorities of new sites. 

Come up with a strategy that will increase social proof of your content. It drives traffic to your pages and will eventually boost your authority score. We don’t have to tell you how crucial social media presence is in terms of driving online traffic. 

Wrapping It Up

The pain of seeing your new website make slow progress must serve as a motivation. Don’t feel bad if your site isn’t on top of Google at the moment; we’ve all been there. As mentioned earlier, it takes time for results to come in, but don’t remain idle. Some people don’t see progress because they lack consistency. Put in the effort and time in building domain authority because it gives you proven results. 

2021 SEO Changes

by Marketing Strategy TipsOnline Marketing TipsSEO Tips

In this comprehensive Local SEO guide, we’re going to show you how you can win at search ranking in 2021.

Small and medium-sized businesses rely on local search more than ever. Seven out of 10 consumers search Google to obtain local information. So, if your business website isn’t optimized for local search, you’re likely missing out on more than half of your prospective clients.

With so many changes every year, you feel a ton of pressure to update your SEO strategy. But it won’t matter if you’re not into local SEO.

You lost some ground last year, but this year is your chance for redemption. Build upon local SEO to keep your brand relevant, and this article serves as your comprehensive SEO guide.

Good Local SEO Practices

Start with Google My Business listing – If you haven’t done so, set up a Google My Business listing. It’s the digital equivalent of the Yellow Pages. If you intend to rank in the local search, a GMB listing makes perfect sense.

There’s no reason to skip this step – it carries weight in local SEO, plus setting it up takes minutes. See to it that you put all the details about your business.

This must include your products/services, the main business category, and the secondary business category. Filling out the subcategory is critical in your Google Maps rank.

List your business in online directories – GMB isn’t the only listing out there. List your business in other relevant online directories, but don’t overdo it.

The key term is “relevant” since all the others are trash and won’t do your business any good concerning local SEO. Focus your effort and time on these directories:

  1. Angie’s List
  2. Yelp
  3. Bing Places
  4. Foursquare
  5. Super Pages
  6. Yellow Pages

Review your NAP information – Be consistent with the business information you put on your listings, especially the name and place. Google wants the information to be accurate for it to trust your business.

Even an honest mistake on inputting the wrong phone number could become a red flag for Google, giving it a reason to stop displaying your listing. Even the smallest details must be consistent, like how you write abbreviations and company suffixes. If you prefer “inc.” instead of “incorporated,” do it in all your listings.

Focus on local keywords – Shift your attention to local keywords this year, but don’t ignore the value of long-tail keywords for your business, too. If you didn’t climb up to the SERPs last year, you might have undermined keyword research value.

This time see to it that you compare search volumes for a couple of almost similar search terms. You may feel like there’s no point in it, but there’s a significant difference in impact for “roof repair, Vancouver” versus “roof repair, VBC.”

Rethink your SEO strategy by using local keywords – Once you’ve figured out a new set of local keywords, the next step is to optimize your business website with them.

This isn’t a newfound strategy, yet it’s still as useful and indispensable this year as it was a decade ago. Optimizing your site is no cakewalk as it involves several components that are worthy of a separate discussion.

Anyhow, the fundamental rule is for your homepage and the product/service pages to showcase the local keywords, specifically in the following:

    1. Heading
    2. Meta description
    3. Title tags
    4. Body
    5. Footer

Gone were the days when you can insert keywords while ignoring the natural flow of content. Google hates keyword stuffing and unnatural placements, so see that you’re putting value to your content by flawlessly incorporating the local keywords.

Create local content – It only makes sense to fill your pages with local content since you’re shifting to local SEO this year. Unfortunately, your current content marketing strategy is all but local.

You’ve learned a while back that non-local content reaches a broader audience (and supposedly more web traffic), but you can’t take full advantage of it since you’re a local business. Maximizing your efforts in content marketing for an improved lead generation means creating local content.

Create a mobile-friendly website – You may skip this part if you’ve done this already, and we’d be surprised if you haven’t. You know how impactful a mobile-friendly website is for SEO in general, and it’s essential for local SEO, too.

Almost 40% of mobile searches are location focused. It means that almost half of consumers who stumble upon your site via a local search are using their mobile devices. Imagine the number of opportunities you’re missing out if your site isn’t mobile responsive. That’s scary.

Place value on inbound links – Inbound links boost local SEO when you know how to do it right. Put some effort in building those links this year but focus on the proven strategies.

Come up with a list of acquaintances who are in some way related to your business, i.e., wholesalers, contractors, business partners, and suppliers. Search for relevant pages on their respective websites where you’re allowed to place contextual links.

You’ll use this link to contact those businesses and then recommend the link placements. Aside from this strategy, you can also generate inbound links via guest posting. Offer to write content for related businesses with the condition that you place a link to your site.

Create location pages – If you happen to have branches of your business, then you must rank in local searches in those areas, too. The most convenient way to do this is by creating location pages.

Come up with a service page for each city instead of having just one service page for all your branches. You may optimize these pages for local search terms. But be sure that you use unique content for each page. The last thing you want is for Google to see it as duplicate content.

Final Thoughts

Though you’re setting your sights on local SEO for 2021, don’t turn your back on traditional SEO. Remember that Google factors in your website’s ranking in organic SERPs in local SEO.

The lack of implementation of some of the components of traditional SEO may even adversely affect local SEO.

Take this SEO guide and make the best of simple practices to make a profit of your website… but if you don´t have time, experience or any other related, then call us. Best SEO in Canada is here to help you out.

 

SEO Practices That Make Google Penalize You

by Ecommerce TipsSEO Tips

Updated: Dec 15, 2022 10:00am SEO Practices That Make Google Penalize You
Originally Published: Dec 15, 2021 8:43am Top 10 of the Worst SEO Practices That Make Google Penalize You

SEO Practices That Make Google Penalize You

One of the worst things that could ever happen to an eCommerce website is a fall in ranks. Usually, bad SEO practices  are the usual suspect behind. And that is mild if you compare it to what can happen when you’re penalized by Google. But what could ever cause Google to penalize you?

A lot, actually. You’d be surprised by the number of black hat tricks or bad SEO practices employed by webmasters in order to appear on Google’s page one. However, for the purpose of this article, we are only going to list the top 10 of the worst SEO practices that make Google penalize you. 

1. Keyword Stuffing

There was a time when site owners actually got away with this bad SEO practice. But I am getting ahead of myself. You’re not sure what I’m talking about because this is such an old practice–perhaps before your time. What is keyword stuffing? Let me let Google tell you:

“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context (not as natural prose). Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

In other words, Keyword stuffing is when you place your keywords too many times in your web content. You’ve probably seen it, because unfortunately, it is still being used today, but didn’t know what it was. Have you ever been to a website after your search term produced some favourable looking results, but when you try to read the article it doesn’t really make sense? I like WebFX’s example (The keyword, in this case, is “yellow rubber duckie.”):

“Get a yellow rubber duckie for your children”. A yellow rubber duckie is a charming toy, so buy a yellow rubber duckie today. With a yellow rubber duckie, you can have tons of yellow rubber duckie fun. It’s easy to make bath time great with a yellow rubber duckie, and a yellow rubber duckie from our company guarantees yellow rubber duckie enjoyment.

According to Google, don’t do that. Not only will it damage your brand, but you will lose credibility with your clients. Your website falling in Google rankings is also a negative outcome.

2. Duplicate Content (Whether Yours Or Others)

What is duplicate content? Let’s hear from Google: Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar.”

In other words, either you or someone working for you decided that the content on another website matches info you would like to share with your audience. However, instead of using the content as reference, you instead chose to copy word for word that content on your website.

If that is you, stop it! It’s not worth it. We know content is king. That’s why the Best SEO in Canada offers evergreen content at affordable prices. We guarantee that every article written will pass plagiarisma.

We know that by and large, people are honest, so sometimes mistakes happen. You didn’t deliberately set out to duplicate content, however you recently updated content on your website, accounting for the duplication. If this is you, don’t panic. All you have to do is use 301 redirectswhen you create new pages so that the old pages are no longer accessible.

You can also use the tag: rel=canonical for pages with similar content, in order that Google, or any other search engine for that matter, will know which content is the original; while the “no index” tagshould be used for those pages you do not want Google to search.

Let’s take this article  for example: You’re reading this article, Top 10 of the Worst SEO practices That make Google Penalize You, and we noticed that it was getting traction and moving up the ranks, we could not use this content on any other page or website that we own (even though we are the original owners of the content). We would be penalized by Google if we were to “duplicate” this content.

 

3. Scraped Content

Further to #2 is scraped content. What’s the difference, you ask? It’s like apples and oranges. They are both fruits, but not all fruits are apples or oranges. So scraping does result in duplicate content, however, the act of scraping is deliberately copying and pasting content and publishing it as your own.

While Google will overlook duplicate content if they recognise that identical content which (often unintentionally) appears in more than one place on your site, they will penalize websites with scraped content–and you can bet they know the difference.

 

4. You’re linking to low-quality sites

According to Google, “Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.”

So, if you have links pointing to low quality websites, Google will penalize you.

 

5. You’re buying links

Further to #3 above, is the practice by link builders and some webmasters of purchasing links. Whether you choose to pay for a slot on a blog post so you can add links, or you are directly purchasing links in a directory, buying links is one of the fastest ways for you to get penalized by Google.

According to Google, exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links is considered a violation of their guidelines.

 

6. Coaking

“Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected”. (Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

It is a very bad SEO practice to show one content to the web crawlers in order to rank higher, while showing a different content to your site visitors. If you do this, you will be penalized by Google.

BTW, Google is aware that hackers use cloaking to hide their activities, so the only instance you will not be penalized by Google is if your website gets hacked.

7. Auto-generated content

Interestingly, this makes the top 10 list because Google does take action against websites where content is automatically generated (also called “auto-generated”—content). Believe it or not, filling pages with auto-generated contents  is a sign of  bad SEO practices.

If your content is “translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publishing”, “generated from scraping Atom/RSS feeds or search results” and “generated through automated processes”, among others, they are all considered auto-generated content and will be penalized by Google.

This is sometimes done to save time and money, but you could end up being penny wise and pound foolish. If you must have these types of content on your site, Google has some best practices you can implement to prevent them from showing up in Search.

 

8. Doorway Pages

This is an interesting one, because there was a time when doorway pages were considered good SEO practice. To use BrightEdge’s example, “…a nail salon with two branches that wants to bring in traffic for two cities may have pages targeted for each city that have the same or similar content and describe the same nail salon”.

Six years ago, this would have been an okay SEO practice. However, the good must now suffer for the bad, as search engines realize unscrupulous black hat technicians have manipulated the system to create doorway pages that lead searchers to intermediate pages (as final pages) that are not useful.

So have you guessed what are doorway pages? Indeed, it’s having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page. But in the case of Bad SEO practice they are sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries.

According to Google, “They are bad for users because they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination”.

 

9. Hidden Text

While hiding text in and of itself is no longer considered them as bad SEO practices, Google may consider it a violation of their webmaster guidelines and penalize you.

There is a saying, it’s not what you do, but how you do it. This would be one such time. For example, if your website includes technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript. Or if there is sensitive information you do not want everyone to have access to.

What Google penalizes is the deliberate attempt to manipulate the system in order to trick search crawlers.

For example, making your keyword text the same colour as the background of your website or locating text being an image. Because search crawlers are robots, or bots, they don’t see the Internet the same way we do. They can see your “invisible” keywords.  And they are smart enough to know the difference, especially in cases where keyword stuffing is present.

10. Sneaky Redirects

According to Google,

“Redirecting is the act of sending a visitor to a different URL than the one they initially requested. There are many good reasons to redirect one URL to another, such as when moving your site to a new address, or consolidating several pages into one.

However, some redirects deceive search engines or display content to human users that is different than that made available to crawlers. It’s a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines to redirect a user to a different page with the intent to display content other than what was made available to the search engine crawler”

So there you have it: Straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth. Need we say more?

 

Final Thoughts

We at Best SEO in Canada know you would never wittingly use any of these top 10 worst SEO practises that make Google penalize you. But just in case you unwittingly did and now your website has lost its ranking. Don’t panic. It’s reversible. Let us help you.

AJ Frey and his team “have a constantly evolving proven whitehat secret recipe that can help you get on the first page of Google and start converting potential leads into actual, paying customers”.

If you have questions about avoiding bad SEO practices or can suggest a few more, send them to us in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you!

The Top Pricing For SEO Audit Services In Canada Ranked

by Ecommerce TipsMarketing Strategy TipsOnline Marketing TipsSEO Tips

Updated: Nov 28, 2022
Originally Published: Sept 30, 2021

The Top Pricing For SEO Audit Services In Canada Ranked

An SEO >audit refers to a full analysis of all the factors that affect a website’s visibility in search engines. It determines the strengths, as well as the weaknesses of your website when it comes to SEO. Let’s find out below about top rank pricing for SEO audit services in Canada.

An SEO audit can give you insight into the challenges you’re facing, why you may not be achieving your SEO goals and also realise the strategies your competitors are using to be successful. Based on the results from the SEO  audit, you receive a list of recommendations from an SEO expert like AJ Frey (Rad Websites – Best SEO in Canada), who further implements these recommendations on your behalf, if you do not have your own SEO team.

There are many articles on the Internet for DIY website owners on how to conduct an SEO audit. However, if you’re not tech savvy, or have the time to do a thorough audit, enlisting the services of an SEO expert is the best gift you could give yourself. But how much should you be doling out to an expert to audit your site?

In this article, we are going to list the top rank pricing for SEO audit services in Canada. Check No. 5.

SEO Audit Services In Canada

1. Arhefs

At the top of the list is Ahrefs –a well-known toolset for SEO analysis. Though based in Singapore, Ahrefs is worldwide, including in Canada. They make the top of the list because their prices range from US$99 – 999/month, with a wide array of services, including their SEO site audit tool for DIY web owners.

An SEO site audit tool automatically audits a page on your website — all you have to do is enter your Url. The tool then “crawl” your site before generating a report, which highlights the strengths and weaknesses of a webpage. Other SEO audit tools on the market include Moz,  Semrush, Alexa, Serpstat, to name a few.

Most SEO audits have two things in common: They’re too technical and they take DAYS (or even WEEKS) to complete! Ahrefs SEO audits take hours. They do have a caveat: If your website is HUGE, i.e. hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pages—it may take longer than a few hours. However, for most small to medium-sized sites, this should be doable in hours rather than days.

They also give you a breakdown of their SEO audit process:

  • Steps 1–4: check for BIG issues (that may be holding your site back)
  • Steps 5–9: uncover easy-to-fix on-site problems;
  • Steps 10–12 analyze organic search traffic (and find low-hanging opportunities);
  • Steps 13–14 backlink analysis (VERY important!);
  • Steps 15–16 content audit AND “content gap” analysis.

As well as the “tools” they use during the audit process:

Ahrefs reports usually include recommendations for optimizing your webpage’s SEO.

2.  Webfx

According to Webfx, whether you’re a small-to-midsize business (SMB) or established enterprise, you can expect to pay between $650 and $14,000 for an SEO audit. Granted, if you’re a larger company with a bigger website, you will have higher SEO audit costs than a startup with a small site.

Like the size of your website, several factors affect the price of your SEO audit. Their figures quoted are also one time prices–but again, depending on the size of the website and other factors. WebFX also provides SEO services to clients around the world! So whether you needSEO in Boston, orSEO in Charlotte, or Canada, they’ve got you covered.

3. Neil Patel

Well-known marketing expertNeil Patel comes in at #3 because his website generates millions of organic search traffic—about3.5 million 3.5 million. No ads, only through SEO-optimized content marketing. That qualifies him as an expert on SEO marketing. 

He states that at a minimum, a technically sound website should be secure, quick to load, easy to crawl, have clear and actionable navigation actionable navigation, and not contain any duplicate links or content. It should also have systems in place to engage users even if they do hit a dead end, such as content created for 404 errors and 301 redirect pages

Finally, a site should have structured data to help search engines understand the content. This can come in the form of
schema graphs and XML sitemaps
His SEO Analysis doesn’t just point out errors, he says, but gives you step by step instructions on how you can fix each of them. Each SEO report contains video tutorials to step by step instructions.

His prices come with two options: a 30-day money back guarantee on a one-time lifetime payment ranging from $120 – $400 or a $12 – $40/month with a 7-day free trial. 

4. Semrush

Semrush is a SaaS platform used for keyword research and online ranking data. It’s SEO audit tool can do a full website scan in minutes. If your website is under 100 pages you get your audit free. Their audit report includes Intuitive charts, instructions and directions for:

  • Loading speed
  • Crawlability
  • Content issues
  • Meta tags
  • HTTPS security protocols
  • Internal linking
  • JS and CSS errors
  • AMP implementation

With their SEO checker, you get a quick report card on how your site’s doing from an SEO perspective. That report can serve as a handy resource when discussing with decision makers why a professional SEO audit is necessary.

Their pricing ranges from $119.95/mo for marketing newbies, to $449.95/mo for large agencies and enterprises. Bear in mind, Semrush is a tool, not a person like No. 5. 

Which brings us to:

5. Rad Websites / Best SEO in Canada / AJ Frey

SEO expert AJ Frey starts his audit with a web crawl. This procedure is so important that you need to run it first before you do the other steps, he says. Why is this important? Because this is where you identify your website’s problems for example:

  • duplicate contents
  • low word count
  • unlinked pagination pages
  • excess redirects
  • Loading speed
  • Crawlability
  • Content issues
  • Meta tags
  • HTTPS security protocols
  • Internal linking
  • JS and CSS errors
  • AMP implementation

AJ Frey’s professional SEO audit focuses on in-depth, customized assessment of your entire website by his experienced team of digital marketers. And AJ 100% agrees with Neil Patel on the many aspects he considers when performing a technical SEO audit. These include:

  • mobile optimization
  • page load speed
  • link health
  • duplicate content
  • schemas
  • crawl errors
  • image issues
  • site security
  • URL structure
  • 404 pages
  • 301 redirects
  • canonical tags
  • XML sitemaps
  • site architecture

    •  

For Audits they use Moz and Spyfu as their primary tools. Other tools to produce a comprehensive audit report include:

  • Google Search Console
  • Google Page Speed Insight
  • Google Analytics
  • SpyFu
  • CrazyFrog

An SEO audit by the Best SEO in Canada delves deep into your marketing data to analyse the meaning and implications of the site’s SEO performance. What you will end up getting is valuable insights, historical contexts (past and present performance) and meaningful recommendations from AJ Frey for what to do next.

If you do not have your own SEO team, AJ Frey offers his at competitive packages to meet every budget. The Best SEO in Canada prices range from CA$699 (for those on a budget)  to CA$2499–their best value is the local Rad package at CA$1499. 

6. OuterBox

If you’re an online retailer, the team atOuterBox has extensive Ecommerce expertise and can deliver one of the most detailed and comprehensive Ecommerce SEO audits available. The audit will help you be more prepared and eliminate unknowns when heading into a full comprehensive SEO campaign. Outerbox also offer a free SEO audit quote.  

Their SEO audit process begins with their team analyzing your website content, code, structure and more to determine the strengths and weaknesses. They’ll also review your competitors to see what they are doing well and reverse engineer their strategies.

Their SEO audit final report will include all findings along with recommendations and how to find the problems. Their SEO audit process typically takes between 4-6 weeks. However, throughout the process you will work with various team members at OuterBox. 

7. SEO North

SEO North has been in the industry for close to a decade, which means they have the experience to create a unique service and withstand the new regulations set by major search engines that may hinder your site’s high ranking.

Also, they base their SEO audit on the developed algorithms, strategies, and links. The digital marketing services allow them to work remotely, and their clients have the option to contact them anytime.Their main tasks in the audit process involve:

We check and identify the highest performing content.
Check for any website errors and identify each comprehensively.
Develop solutions and seamlessly implement them on the site

Markedly, technical SEO Audits are designed to identify technical barriers in the way of your content ranking higher in search results is what their site states. However, what can one get for CA$100– their one-time fat rate? 

8. Optimized Webmedia Marketing

And finally, Optimized Webmedia Marketing is also based in Canada. They offer a “Free” SEO Audit, but by their own admission, nothing is truly free and there’s no such thing as “cheap SEO”–you get what you pay for. They’re on the list because they do offer good SEO Audits based on their testimonials–but it costs $150 per hour, which is more realistic than SEO North’s one-time fee of $100.

We can only surmise though that if they\re offering “free audit”, then they are using the foot-in-the-door technique. If so, you can expect to pay anywhere between $650 (low end), $2000 (average) to $5000+ (high end) on a monthly basis, or $100 to $300+ on an hourly basis.

Don’t expect to spend less than $650 if you choose the monthly plan, for according to OWM, they don’t do “Cheap SEO”. Cheap SEO is considered to be anything less than $650 per month and provides the level of “skill, time, and customization that is unique for every single website”.

What An SEO Audit Services Means

It was tough putting this list together because of each’s uniqueness and the wide range of prices offered by each. In most instances it was not a case of which was “cheaper”. But which is more aligned with your goals for your website.

The top rank pricing for SEO Audit services in Canada tried to find the best SEO audit service whether by a team or a SaaS platform.

Unlike many of our competitors, we did not rank ourselves first

–as we so easily could.
We believe AJ Frey at Rad Websites is the Best SEO in Canada because he provides top notch SEO service that places you on page one for your search term. Not many agencies can say that based on their own placement on the search engines.

Important to realize, Ahrefs and Neil Patel offer the best organic results. Semrush will get you on page one with paid SEO, and Semrush is an SEO tool.

Final Thoughts

Optimized Webmedia Marketing gives more flexibility by offering both hourly and monthly rates, but there’s a grey area, as they offer a “free page audit”, while stating on their blog that the “cost for a manually created audit varies from $1,500 to $10,000, with the average cost in Canada being $2,500”. You decide if this is a foot-in-the-door technique. You decide also if we were fair in our assessment by ranking ourselves No. 5. 

Notwithstanding, whether we’re Noi. 5 or No. 1, at Best SEO in Canada, we don’t depend on cheap sales tactics to lure our customers. Our work speaks for itself. The fact you are here means you found us on Google’s page one.

We have done the same for all of our clients. AJ Frey is the best SEO in Canada. If you want him to  carry on SEO audit services  and optimize it for the search engines, just drop us a line via email, or call us at 1 250 801 6588. You won’t regret it!

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