Wiideman Consulting Group

Great question True! A good SEO agency is one that is willing to give plenty of references, be open and transparent with what's going on behind the scenes, and built upon a foundation of client-agency collaboration, communication, and extremely clear expectations. Reporting and analytics are crucial. In our experience, many agencies claim their NDAs prevent them from sharing case studies or successes, but the reality is that screenshots don't have to include the business name when showing up or down in Organic or Paid search results. Data talks, inexperienced agencies walk. :) Be sure to ask for: 1. Timelines and project management platform access 2. Reporting tools used and weekly or monthly performance reports 3. A dedicated contact and service level agreement for faster response times 4. References of existing and past clients 5. Access to respective Google Drive or Dropbox folders where assets are stored Thanks for the awesome question!

Great question! Search for "online reputation management tutorial" and look for our video that walks you through the process, with links to a tracker and tutorial. Better yet, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbn2PJC4tJg

Excellent question, and one we hear often Jeremy. We used to offer a balance of fulfillment and consulting, which eventually spiraled into nearly a year and half of serving clients rather than being innovators and working on our brand. It's so easy to get into the trenches and watch time fly by without scaling. Therefore, unless it's a really fun performance-based deal, we tend to stay in the consultancy zone, as navigators rather than bushwhackers. Other than for a one-time one-off consult, we generally don't bill by the hour. Instead, we setup a Slack group, a Google Drive folder, a project management system (fully loaded with tasks, video training and templates), and search analytics via Conductor SearchLight or our clients' choice of rank monitoring tools. Our retainer programs come with a weekly, twice-monthly or monthly scheduled consultation, based on the program. The time in between is spent in the PM system and on Slack with channels for #tech-seo, #content, #lseo & #links.

Migrations are a specialty of ours Bill, they can be a nightmare if not well-planned out. Our migration checklist includes before and after performance testing, 1-to-1 URL redirects, verifying title/meta/heading transfers, robots.txt monitoring from staging to prod, submitting Change of Address requests in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and many other tasks to insure a safe move. The biggest challenge with moving that we've seen is when the business name also changes. Redirecting inbound links is easy, but when the entity changes, the value of the mentions of the entity can awhile to correlate to the new name, and unfortunately rankings are often affected. If the name stays the same, MOST of the time, there's little to no impact on rankings. Great question!

Super important question in today's SEO world Bill, thanks for asking! Most of the clients we work with are larger brands in retail or restaurant-type franchises that don't have negative SEO issues. However we do consult for a few injury attorneys where negative SEO is a big problem. Out the gate, we do our best to pull aggregate backlink data from multiple sources, organize them into projects (such as Anchor Cleanup and Remove Link) and upload them to a CRM such as Buzzstream or Pitchbox. We'll setup work queues and teach our clients how to perform outreach to fix the issues, while monitoring for new links monthly. Disavow files and Google Alerts are usually involved as well. Techniques like canonical tags, 302 redirects, and cloaking issues are also something we help identify and create an action plan for. We've been lucky for the most part and have avoided clients in industries where NSEO is an ongoing problem.

Hi David! Fascinating how many questions we get around the impact of social media on SEO, and definitely an important topic (thank you for reaching out). There is no direct correlation to social engagement as it applies to search engine rankings, at least not from our experience or from the data we live in. However, there could be causation between growing subscribers and the probability of a subscriber sharing content they viewed from your stream. The likelihood of a user linking to, curating or referencing your amazing content grows with each new relevant follower you earn. Example, an attorney we consult for earned 5m views of his viral commercial, which resulted in free PR across 13 news websites and 20+ online portals such as the Daily Dot. Those links resulted in eventual keyword ranking improvements, especially when the phrase "injury lawyer" was mentioned in context. Great question!

Do we ever, thanks for asking Al! All of our consultants are trained in local and multi-location SEO, with a profound understanding of the process involved at the data level, local landing page level, and reputation level. We have two dedicated Local SEO Experts on the team who work with a combined 5,000 locations between the various accounts we support. One of our clients actually won prestigious recognition a few years back for the local marketing efforts our team spearheaded. We also work closely with location dashboard and store locator service providers to try to get the best cost and best platform for our franchises to manage data syndication, local landing pages, and and ratings/reviews. Thanks for the question!

That's the easiest question we've received so far Ashley, and possibly the most important too (thanks for asking)! Wiideman Consulting Group is the culmination of over two decades of industry experience piled into a room packed full of energy, curiosity, and passion for all things search. We live, eat, breathe and sleep SEO and SEM, watching RSS and news feeds, toggling over to expert Twitter lists and community social groups so that we're always in the know when something new happens in our industry. We also may be the last consultancy who believes in rebuilding website taxonomy and information architecture based on how users surf the internet; it's our most expensive and most powerful strategy we provide. Our audits take less than 30 days (usually) and include technical, content optimization, off-page links/mentions and (when applicable) local SEO. Strategies are uploaded to Google Drive and to a project management system where we work collaboratively with our clients transparently.

I love this question Randy, thanks for asking! Playing by the rules is important. Our technical SEO strategies all reference Google documentation, Search Console or videos by Google staff. Link audits highlight potentially harmful links amd intersecting opps. Content strategy is driven by data AND competitor insights. Nothing in what we provide is a "hack" or anything that we wouldn't share directly with Google as a Premier Partner. What happens when there's a change? We evolve if required, but have never needed to revert our recommendations in 20 years. :)

Thanks for asking David, the statement that "organic ranking is dead" is something we hear from a lot of lazy SEO's not willing to put the time and energy required to increase search engine rankings. LSEO requires optimization that increases rankings and traffic from Maps and blended 3-Pack listings. It's highly data and location-driven, but there's a component of on-page and off-page SEO that could be tie breaker when two domains are equal in data, citations and reputation. For e-commerce and national brands, we've more than doubled organic traffic YoY and have data to prove it. So, no, organic ranking is definitely not dead, it's just evolved and requires a hustle that most shortcut-style SEO's just won't take the time to commit to.

Fantastic question Rucha, thanks so much for asking! We've seen significant increases in overall account performance when paid social works side-by-side with organic and paid search. Data that you capture from audience targeting and email opt-in can all be used to boost performance in paid advertising in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Snapchat, particularly demographic data. The problem many businesses suffer from is a lack of storytelling consistency across all channels, since the resources running those channels aren't in the same room together planning the holistic content marketing strategy. When all three are aligned, marketing automation workflows planned in advance, the attribution data you'll see after each campaign will tell an incredible story of how we touched our customer at every phase of the buyer's journey, build trust, and maintained our message throughout every touch point. Add keywords into the mix and even spiders can figure out what you should be ranking for. :)

That is likely one of the most important questions we've received Mohammad, thanks for asking! E-commerce businesses seem to benefit the most, since there are so many placements available in a search result, including Shopping Ads, Inventory Ads, 3-Pack Ads (if also brick and mortar), organic search and of course other CSE's like Amazon. It's also easy to track results since Google Analytics will attribute dollars to traffic mediums. Second to e-commerce would be local and multi-location SEO, where there's also the top ads, map ads, map listings and organic listings available within a search result.

KPIs are the cornerstone of a great campaign Doc, we're glad you asked! ROI seems to be the priority when we speak with our clients' CMO and leadership team. If a client earned an additional $2m from organic search vs last year, and invested $100k into SEO strategy and resources, the math works out to an exciting ROI (infinite if they maintain rankings). How we monitor the pulse of search starts with measuring category market share using tools such as Conductor SearchLight. One of our KPI's for a restaurant franchise is to increase search market share in "burgers" by 5%. We have a small cluster of keywords for burger, such as "burger restaurant", "burgers near me", etc measured against several hundred locations. Each week, we watch rankings for that category of keywords and hopefully see the market share percentage increase over time. For micro-successes, such as moving up a specific page for an array of keywords, monthly tests and annotations play a big role.

Very detailed and informative answer! Will definitly recommend your company Wiideman Consulting Group and your services to people I know looking for SEO Consultation and Search Engine Optimization

Thanks for the question Mike! Though social media does not have a direct impact on search engine rankings (SEO), there is a long-term benefit to building an audience who may one day share, curate and (hopefully) link to your content. That in mind, our team will typically thread in social media into our off-page visibility strategies, along with making recommendations related to the use of keywords in bylines and profile descriptions. In terms of "managing" social media, we are a consultancy not an agency, but we have several referrals for clients looking for an agency with a proven track record for day-to-day social media marketing. Thanks again for the question!