LinkNow Media Blog Tag: LinkNow

What Is and Isn’t a Useful Metric for Improving Your Website

Everyone working in SEO knows that the golden rule for content is that it should be useful and relevant to searchers. Google has been saying this for years. And it’s a rule that we at LinkNow Media take advantage of. So it seems like a terrible irony that it’s so hard to find useful and relevant information about ranking metrics themselves. You’ll find one group of bloggers claiming that X metric is complete garbage. Then you’ll find another group who say it’s the most important. This is especially true when it comes metrics like bounce rate, pages per visit, and time-on-site. You have your for and against—and each side seems to suggest the other is behind the times. But maybe the problem isn’t so much that these are either good or bad. Maybe it’s that these metrics can be good in some contexts and not in others? Join us as […]

Trust Issues: What Was Behind the September 27th and October 2018 Algorithm Updates?

Whether you’re managing your own website or someone else’s, the last thing you want is to see your SERP ranking suddenly drop. As SEOs, we work hard for our Google rankings! We expect that with great content, great backlinks, and careful keyword research, we’ll get the rankings we deserve. And normally it’s true. But if one there’s one thing that every SEO knows, it’s that, aside from Google’s own engineers, no one knows how their search algorithm works. Which is why, every time Google updates their algorithm, the internet goes a bit nuts for a while. Some people’s rankings suddenly soar. Others plummet. And everyone’s asking themselves: what the heck happened?! The September 27th and October follow-up updates were no different. People panicked. Tweets were retweeted. Replies were written. Articles were posted. Comment threads exploded. Here at the LinkNow Media office though, everything was calm. Why you ask? We understand […]

Making Sense of Google’s Mobile-First Indexing

Back in March, Google announced it was launching its

Has Your Site Traffic Dropped? Check These 5 Issues First!

The fact is, SEO is all about trial and error. No matter how much time you put into optimizing your web design and content, there’s always a chance that suddenly, out of the blue, your traffic could drop. And it sucks. It really sucks. But it’s not the end of the world. Once you’ve gotten over the initial shock of it all, it’s time to get down to business and figure out what went wrong. The first thing you should do is check your Google Anaylitcs: do you notice any patterns in your web traffic that might explain it? For example, if it’s winter and you’re a landscaper, it could be that your content is optimized for lawn care at the expense of snow removal. Or maybe it’s a holiday and no one’s currently looking to have their well water tanks replaced? Second, double check that your code is updated […]

For the 3rd Year in a Row, LinkNow Media Ranked Among Canada’s Fastest Growing Companies

Every year, GROWTH 500 (formerly known as PROFIT 500) ranks Canada’s fastest growing companies. Published online in CanadaBusiness.com and in print in Maclean’s magazine, GROWTH 500 celebrates the best of the best in Canadian business. We are thrilled to announce that GROWTH 500 has featured LinkNow Media once again—for the 3rd year in a row! With a 307% revenue growth, between 2012 and 2017, we ranked a solid 230 on the Canada-wide list. Making things a little sweeter is the fact that we were also featured as Montreal’s 26th fastest growing company. With our sights set on new projects and new hires—not to mention our upcoming 10,000 client milestone—we’re very excited about everything we have planned for 2019! So, what is it that makes LinkNow Media so special? Why is it that, year after year, we stand out from the competition? Is there a secret formula for our growth? A […]

How to Take Advantage of User Intent for SEO

For a lot of small business owners, the world of SEO can seem overwhelming. If understanding the mysterious ranking systems that Google uses is hard enough, keeping up with the constant changes can feel downright impossible. Over the years, SEO experts have developed a few metrics that can help businesses to understand how searchable their pages are. These metrics give us hard facts about what works and what doesn’t. For SEO professionals like us, these numbers help explain to clients how well their pages are doing. The most important ones are: keyword and search engine rankings organic web traffic backlinks volume of searches conversion rates The problem is, Google often changes the things they prioritize. Which explains why user intent has become something of a game changer. User intent allows marketers and small business owners to determine a constant element in SEO. An element that Google puts before everything else. […]

10 Online Marketing Tricks to Take Your Landscaping Business to the Next Level

Remember the days when you’d open your mailbox in the morning and find a bunch of postcards and flyers advertising local services? You’d collect them all, put them on the kitchen table, and two days later throw them in the recycle. And two days after that you’d be looking at your lawn, wondering why it had all these yellow patches and think, ‘Didn’t I just see a flyer for lawn care services?’ Then you’d spend ten minutes digging around in the trash trying to find that flyer. It was a routine. A ritual. Something no one enjoyed, but everyone misses. And the fact is, it used to work really well. In those pre-Internet days, most landscaping companies were able to generate leads by forcing potential clients to rummage through the trash! But those days are long gone. For better or worse, the internet has fundamentally changed the way consumers spend […]

Google Maps Fraud: How False Business Listings Hurt Your Business

This article by CNBC is a good primer on an increasing phenomenon: businesses using Google Maps in a fraudulent fashion to increase calls to their business. The article details the example of a telemedicine business that posed as an urgent care walk-in clinic to improve the SEO for their website. We’re sure you know how important a tool Google My Business is when it comes to improving your website ranking in local searches. But it’s easy to see how this can lead to abuses that can have serious consequences. In this case, a parent took a sick child to the fake clinic believing it to be a late-night alternative to a local emergency room. That’s not only bad for business but in cases like this, it’s negligent and dangerous! Google Maps Fake Listings: How Widespread Is the Problem? The CNBC article goes into detail about volunteers who track down fake […]

Google My Business Finally Welcomes Video

The turn of the new year saw Google introduce a lot of changes to the operating systems of a variety of its platforms. This included increasing multiple new languages to its Maps platform as well as moving one step closer to infinite scrolling on their main search engine through the adoption of a ‘more results’ page. However, it is clear that the developments and changes did not stop there. Google My Business has now got in on the act and it appears that the option to upload videos to a listing on this site has finally arrived. The ability to add a video to a local listing via Google Maps has been in place since August 2017 but January 2018 is the first time that this option is showing up inside of the GMB dashboard. An official announcement from a Google My Business representative confirmed the development and the ability […]

Twitter: An Incredible Tool to Rehabilitate Your Business’s Image

Twitter is a social media that was launched in 2006 and quickly became one of the most important and popular sites on the web. With 330 million active monthly users worldwide, you probably already know that Twitter is a good way to reach out to potential customers and build an engaging brand presence. But did you know that Twitter is also one of the best ways to manipulate your search results and maintain better control over the content that clients see when they search for your business? SearchEngineLand reports that obtaining a Twitter search carousel takes up a massive amount of vertical space. If you have negative reviews or contributor’s pages jockeying for space on your search result, you know the value of gaining control over what displays on search pages for your brand or business. But are there other ways to use Twitter to increase the reach of your […]