Who isn’t happy to hear a client’s positive feedback? It’s even better when it’s detailed and has suggestions about improving your service. Our post today is about exactly that: an interview with one of our long-time clients. They shared their SEO experience and expertise with us, and now we’ll share it with you, our readers.

Meet Robert Holzler, Director of Web Development at Grapevine Communications, a full-service SEO agency in Sarasota, Florida. We sat with Robert to discuss his company’s trials and successes, and here’s what he told us.

Q: How long have you been working as an SEO agency and how long have you been in the SEO niche?

A: Grapevine started offering SEO in 2014, so 6 years. Our web developer has been doing SEO since the mid 90’s. We started offering SEO as a service shortly after he came onboard in 2014.

Q: And what is your global mission?

A: Grapevine’s mission is to put the interest of our customers in the forefront and to seek business relationships that are mutually fulfilling, while providing growth and profit for both parties.

Q: Do you remember your first steps? Did you start with a few tools for different purposes or with an all-in-one SEO platform?

A: Our Director of Web Development started working on SEO before there were any all-in-one SEO platforms. We have seen the industry develop from basic word counters, to keyword density analyzers, to placement trackers, to full-fledge SEO platforms.

Q: What SEO tools are a must for you or any SEO specialist?

A: WebCEO is a vital tool in our SEO toolbox. We also use a host of browser-based tools like Web Developer, BuiltWith, and Keywords Everywhere.

Q: Have you tried other SEO platforms? What was the decisive factor that made you choose WebCEO?

A: Yes, many. WebCEO’s full featured, holistic approach to SEO was the key deciding factor. Instead of using two to five different tools, we get everything we need in on platform.

Q: When was the first time you started using WebCEO? What SEO tasks have you solved with this platform?

A: We migrated from WebPosition Gold to WebCEO in late 2016. While the initial move was due to the termination of WebPosition’s platform, I am very glad we made the switch. WebCEO is a much better product in every measurable way. The branded reports and portal immediately impacted our bottom line by reducing the labor hours needed to produce client reports. It also increased sales by providing us with an effective pre-sales evaluation tool set, allowing our sales team to target and speak knowledgably about a potential clients’ current optimization and placement status.

Q: How does WebCEO help you with your work?

A: It is an essential tool for analyzing client websites and tracking placement over time.

Q: Which SEO tasks eat up most of your team’s time?

A: Content optimization takes up most of the labor hours for SEO. Blending effective SEO content seamlessly with a client’s existing content takes time and skill.

Q: What are your top 3 most used WebCEO tools?

A: Site Health is my favorite tool. We use the Site Health report, landing page scanner and automatic report emailing most.

Q: Are there any features you would like to see added to WebCEO? Do you have any recommendations from your SEO team on how we could improve WebCEO to help manage your SEO workflow?

A: We recently suggested a tool that would scan pages on sites and compare them to the cached/indexed content at Google to let us know if/when recently optimized pages had been found and indexed. That way we are not re-optimizing content before the impact of the work has yet been seen.

It would also be good to have Bing analytics and Bing My Business integration. While Bing is significantly lower priority than Google, we still consider them important to a well-rounded SEO program.

Q: Are there some SEO hacks for gaining high rankings and driving traffic to a website that you can share?

A: We don’t believe in using hacks of any kind for our clients because we see them as both short-term solutions and potentially dangerous to the client’s long-term placement goals.

A proven SEO technique that we recommend is the creation of micro-sites and doorway pages. If a client needs placement for a set of keywords that are difficult to integrate with existing content, these methods are a great way to build periphery content and focus the attention of searchers on that content.

Q: How exactly did WebCEO help your SEO team save time and costs?

A: Having all the tools in one place and the ability to create detailed, branded reports for our clients with the click of a button saves us a huge amount of time each month. By saving time on reporting, we can spend more time on optimization, which means we get better results and clients are much happier with the results. The branded portal access we provide clients help educate our clients and provides a level of accountability that our clients really like. This also saves us time and money because we can refer clients to the portal when they have questions about placement and optimization progress.

Q: I bet you also send SEO reports to your customers. Could you tell us more about it?

A: In conjunction with access to the branded online portal we create a summary cover page for the branded report that WebCEO generates. That provides clients with both the high-level information owners need and the in-depth information their in-house web team needs.

Q: Which WebCEO functionality really helped your agency grow the most?

A: The automatic, branded email reports have been great for Grapevine. We use them as pre-sales tool, and for billing support and customer retention.

Q: Is there anything you find unique about WebCEO?

A: It is, hands down, the most full-featured SEO platform we have used. It is the perfect combination of developer tools with a well-designed UI, which provides our team with a fantastic user experience.

Q: Let’s talk about your SEO agency some more. Could you tell us about your most recent success?

A: Last month we had a client go from 12 #1 placements to 140. The same client saw an increase of 198 top 5 placements leading to a month-over-month increase of 39% in organic search traffic.

Q: That’s really impressive. Having so much work, did you ever miss a deadline?

A: It is an extremely rare event that we miss a deadline. Our production manager meets with the team regularly to get the status of projects and keep our team on track for meeting deadlines. Our production team regularly cross trains so projects can be migrated to the colleague with the capacity to complete it on time and budget.

Q: What advice can you give to SEO Agencies to avoid the pain of missed deadlines?

1. Set achievable goals and timelines.
2. Set client expectations before the project is started.
3. Don’t over-sell your capacity.
4. Plan for failure so you are prepared when it happens.

Q: With so many clients, how do you keep an eye on their profiles?

A: The WebCEO All Project Dashboard is a great way to get a bird’s eye view of all our SEO clients.

Q: Let’s hear your professional opinion. How often do you recommend SEO & technical audits? How often do you usually schedule reports?

A: Depending on the size of the site and how long the client has been using our SEO services, we may perform technical audits anywhere from 8 times a month to once a month. We find that multi-hundred page sites with lots of external links need the most attention.

Q: Could you tell us about the most remarkable challenge that your SEO Agency faced?

A: Our biggest challenge for providing SEO services was finding a software vendor that was as dedicated and reliable as we were. Finding and partnering with WebCEO was one of the best choices we ever made for growing our SEO business.

Q: What is your agency like now compared to how it was when you started?

A: We are growing in every sense of the word. In the past six years, we have grown from a primarily traditional media marketing, advertising and public relations agency into a full spectrum agency with over half our production team engaged with digital marketing and advertising. In a time when other agencies are laying off and downsizing, we are adding production capacity and taking on new clients.

The post SEO Agency Success Story: 198 Top 5 Google Positions in 1 Month appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Can you remember the precise year when SEO started? It was somewhere between 1995 and 2000, near when search engines appeared. 

The TechWyse Internet Marketing agency established their company in 2001. They were standing at the gates of high-quality white-hat SEO because keyword stuffing, link exchange, spamdexing and other black-hat SEO techniques were quite common then. So, TechWyse had a lot of issues to deal with!

We decided to ask DJ Kennedy, CEO of TechWyse, about his experience growing from a small team to one of the largest Internet marketing agencies in Canada!

Sophia Campbell: First of all, I am happy to know that WebCEO helps your business. How long have you been working as an SEO agency?

DJ Kennedy: We established the company in 2001. Since then, we have evolved to be one of the largest Internet marketing agencies in Canada!

Sophia: Wow! Almost 18 years in the market. What is your global mission?

DJ: Our mission is to maintain our legacy as an industry leader and deliver exceptional digital marketing solutions that exceed client expectations. We do this by hiring and developing the most inspired, passionate marketing individuals as part of a creative and collaborative environment.

Sophia: Do you remember your first steps. Did you start with a few tools for different purposes or with an all-in-one SEO platform? 

DJ: We tried a lot of different approaches; now it’s hard to say if it was really worth that. We spent a lot of time on switching between numerous Google Analytics accounts (can you imagine how much time it takes when you have 50 clients’ accounts and more?) and reporting to our clients. Now these tasks are automated so we are focused on creative work, communication with clients, and enlarging our community. 

Sophia: What SEO tools are a must for you? 

DJ: We have a few that we use regularly.  Right now we really like Ahrefs and SpyFu for getting in depth knowledge of a domains back link attribution and also keyword research.

We also love WebCEO and have been using it for many years to gain greater intelligence on our client base.

Sophia: Which SEO tasks eat up most of your team’s time? 

DJ: SEO reporting can be a very tedious task. For every client, you are supposed to run a specific set of reports. For example, a keyword research report, a technical audit and an SEO analysis for a new client.  Also, a report on rankings, a backlink analysis, technical and SEO audits, web analytics and social engagement. 

So you begin with scanning and generating numerous reports. Then you check every report for blank spaces with no data. When all the reports for every client are scanned and checked, you can prepare a consolidated report for each client. And the final touch: select the language of the report. This is important for us because some of our clients speak English and some speak French.

Sophia: So you must enjoy WebCEO’s interface which is translated into 24 languages.

DJ: Yes, this feature is truly important! But the report generation still has many steps. When all reports are put together and designed for each client, you have to send them according to individual schedules. 

Some of our clients receive reports once a month. Other clients may need reporting every week. Some may require specific SEO services in their location like St. John’s, NL. Some might say that once a quarter is enough. So having flexibility is important. 

Sophia: Having such a lot of work, did you ever miss deadlines?

DJ: If you miss deadlines in this business then you are telling your client that you are not prepared.  This is not acceptable. This is why choosing dependable software to help with the repetitive tasks is so important. 

Sophia: What advice can you give to SEO Agencies to avoid the pain of missed deadlines?

DJ: Preparation and organization! This is not as hard as it seems. Split every process into tiny tasks. Assign tasks to every team member. Set deadlines. Track their performance regularly and fine-tune the process on the fly, instead of checking it all on the last day. A task manager is a must for an SEO team! If a task manager can be integrated into an SEO platform, it’s even better. We enjoy WebCEO’s Task Manager feature – so we never have to search for third-party solutions.

Sophia: What was the most remarkable challenge that your SEO Agency faced?

DJ: This question would need another full interview!  This happened a year ago. One of our clients suddenly lost his rankings for a number of keywords and his website’s traffic dropped. This happened because of a link bomb. We detected a lot of inbound poor-quality links pointing to the domain. WebCEO’s Backlink Checker tool made this easy to detect and, what is more important, neutralize this kind of black-hat SEO attack. 

I can tell you for sure that this was the first time when using the Google Disavow saved our skin! It took some waiting afterwards but, eventually, the client’s website got its rankings & traffic back. Now his backlink profile is clean and powerful. 

Sophia: Are there some SEO hacks for gaining high rankings and driving traffic to a website that you can share?

DJ: We do our best in optimizing client sites structure for better rankings, prioritizing the most important pages and bringing more link flow to them with the help of thoughtful on-site interlinking. WebCEO’s Internal Link Optimization is a must for this task.  Using Schema is good form as well!

Sophia: What WebCEO tool really helped your agency grow?

DJ: That’s definitely the Lead Generation button! The button looks simple and prospective customers visiting our website enjoy receiving their free SEO reports. After that, they understand that, with our help, their SEO routine will become much easier. Just in this way, the number of our customers increased 300% in 2015, the year of the Lead Generation button’s introduction, thanks to WebCEO. The lead generation button helped our agency grow financially too. 

Sophia: What tool is a must-have for any SEO specialist?

DJ: Say no more – it’s definitely rank tracker. This is the best way to see the progress of a website. The Rank Tracker report is one of the most important for the client as he can see in what way visitors reach his or her website. When it comes to WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool, both we and our clients are happy to know how many times their website was featured in snippets, shown in vertical results (Google Places, Images, Videos, Shopping, News) as well as in organic and paid search results. 

Sophia: With so many clients, how do you keep an eye on their profiles?

DJ: As I said before, our SEO team members have assigned tasks and these form their workflow. However, sometimes there are urgent tasks – we receive alerts from the Technical Audit tool, alerts on ranking fluctuations, and we act immediately. Critical SEO errors can result in decreased rankings. We receive consolidated reports regularly, but these alerts are really good when something urgent happens. You only have to check your mailbox regularly.

Sophia: Thank you very much for such a comprehensive interview! We will do our best to make our customers happier still.

DJ: Thank you for such a great service. WebCEO is a nice fit for us. Without the reports rendered by WebCEO, getting to the root of problems would have taken much longer.  We have been delighted to watch the growth of this tool moving at the same pace as the growth of our own agency!

The post SEO Team Grew to One of the Top Digital Marketing Agencies in Canada appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

As a company providing agency-level SEO tools, we can’t help but look at our customers’ feedback with starry eyes – especially when they write it into a story. Today, we have the privilege of interviewing the Agnew Group, fresh from their all-time record month in both visits and lead generation in January 2019. A leading motor group based in Northern Ireland and one of the top 25 franchise car dealerships in the UK, the Agnew Group continues to go from strength to strength.

Colm Sharkey, Digital Marketing Manager at Agnew Group spoke to WebCEO about his role, all things SEO and how WebCEO is helping them achieve their online goals.

When was the first time you started using WebCEO? What SEO tasks have you solved with this platform?

WebCEO and I were first introduced many years ago. I was looking for a cost-effective, all-round piece of software as I developed my knowledge of SEO. The free version was easy to use and provided great insight, making the decision to upgrade a no-brainer. I first used the software whilst I was Website Manager at a leading Utilities company and immediately was able to identify glaring technical errors and make immediate improvements to the visibility of the website. Identifying and fixing the likes of broken links and 404 errors, I imagine, are how a lot of people start off their SEO journey.

Moving on in my career, I setup my own digital marketing agency, Blue Shark Digital, and WebCEO was an essential piece of kit that I relied on. Mainly dealing with SME’s, being able to scan and audit client’s websites and implement immediate and impactful changes and improvements was and is an essential component of what Blue Shark Digital offered.

You now work for Agnew Group and manage 6 websites! That’s a challenging responsibility. How does WebCEO help you with that?

To call it a challenging responsibility would be an understatement, indeed! (laughs) Well, the opportunity was too tempting to turn down. The role at Agnew Group came up and I knew it was one that I had to pursue. Having previously worked in a digital role in the automotive industry, the appeal of Agnew Cars was strong, with the chance to work with brands like Mercedes, Audi, BMW and Porsche amongst others.

Within the Agnew Group we have 6 websites: Agnewcars, Autoexchange, Autostore, Repair Centre, Agnew Leasing and Agnew Motability. WebCEO allows the digital team to monitor each site, create automated reports and alerts and to develop, track and compare different solutions and SEO improvements on the sites. The software makes the somewhat daunting task of monitoring 6 sites manageable and allows more time to be spent on digital strategy.

The digital strategy is continually evolving based on data-driven decisions, of what WebCEO contributes significantly. Each site has their own objectives and users. We track cross-domain traffic within our sites and study the online behaviour of each. WebCEO assists with this process, alongside other software such as Universal Analytics and UX software.

Have you tried other SEO platforms? What was the decisive factor that made you choose WebCEO?

Yes, I have used SEMrush and SE Ranking previously. However, each time I find the variety and reliability of WebCEO, combined with the competitive pricing, the best solution. My current role is the 3rd role in a row that I have subscribed to WebCEO.

What I like about WebCEO is the layout and user experience of the software. Some competitor software packages may have, or claim to have, similar features. However, WebCEO stands apart in terms of the clarity of the reporting, the clarity of the layout and supporting information it provides for each tool.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, WebCEO plugs-in industry-recognised metrics from the likes of Alexa, Moz and others for certain aspects. Having the ability to measure Moz Domain Authority and Alexa URL rank within the software is a massive plus, for example.

What is your favourite tool on WebCEO?

That’s a difficult one, depends which day you ask me. We are doing quite a lot of link-building as a team, and Competitor Backlink Spy is an absolute godsend. In short, I challenge my team to pick a competitor and identify every good link they have and target 85%+ of them to create links to our sites (where relevant).

Yesterday we had a good team discussion about where we are on Bing and Yahoo and what specific things we could do to improve our visibility. With non-Google search engine traffic still at around 10% of total visits, rank tracking on these search engines has proved invaluable. Being able to view Bing/Yahoo rankings and also the traffic from these sites in the same place was handy.

Tomorrow, well… Who knows?

What features do you honestly miss in WebCEO?

Some of the Competitor Analysis tools. I don’t think any one in particular is the authority in this arena, so having several different tools to monitor trends is of appeal. By their very nature, these tools all use different algorithms to analyze and estimate traffic on competitor sites. By having several tools to monitor at once, it can give you a clearer picture. The more tools the better in this regard to keep an eye on those pesky competitors of Agnews!

Congratulations on a record-breaking January! Could you tell us about it?

In January 2019 agnewcars.com had our all-time record month in visits, users, calls and emails. This was led by a 21% and 11% year-on-year growth in organic and referral traffic. With “SEO traffic sources” (search engines and referral) accounting for 65% of hard leads (calls and emails), the priority since I started this role was to devise and implement an SEO and content strategy starting from the neck of the sales funnel upwards. There is plenty of work still to do and scope to significantly improve the performance.

Launching new landing pages, we are able to track over time in WebCEO how we rank for the keywords we target, and the impact of traffic to these pages in terms of lead generation. These landing pages have had bespoke designed based on the latest CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) principles and they have accounted for almost 10% of total leads since launch.

We aim to continue to use WebCEO to assist in the implementation and continuous improvement of the Agnew Group websites.

The post How a Company Got a 65% Lead Boost with Agency SEO Tools appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Running an SEO business is definitely a big challenge. First off, SEO agencies have to swim in an ever-changing ocean of Google algorithms, adapt their SEO activities to these changes and shape an individual marketing strategy for each client site. Second, managing hundreds of clients’ websites is a great responsibility and a big pain. This is where marketing automation tools become a great help. These tools, when designed properly, help to automate routine marketing tasks, provide big data for deeper research and analysis, and help SEO teams to collaborate more effectively.

If you run a digital agency or plan to provide SEO services, you will definitely love this insider information. We recently sat down with Mike Tortorice from Infront Webworks, a US-based digital agency, to discuss their experience in the niche of SEO services, challenges and drawbacks, hacks and workarounds. Here’s what he had to say…

How long have you been in the SEO niche and what challenges did your Digital Agency face?

Infront Webworks has been in Website Design and digital marketing for over 20 years but a little over 6 years ago we started aggressively recruiting SEO experts and building a team to compete with the best in the SEO agency space. In that time, we have won a number of National SEO awards, were the 11^th company in the U.S. to become LSA certified, have built a team that has 130 years collective SEO experience and created a reputable brand in the SEO arena.

Our biggest challenge is keeping up with demand as we grow. Most recently we were runner up for the 2017 US Search Awards “Small SEO Agency of the Year” which proved to be a great way to attract more high profile clients. With this, having WebCEO as a partner really showed that scalability was manageable.

Having the right white-label SEO software at the right time in a company’s growth curve is very important. WebCEO keeps up quite nicely.

What is your favorite feature in WebCEO?

As the SEO and Digital Marketing Manager at Infront Webworks, I have grown to appreciate the easy to understand and intuitive layout of WebCEO that has helped grow departmental gross revenue by 934% in the past 5 years, while consistently maintaining a 95 plus percent client retention rate. Many similar white-label SEO tools miss the mark when it comes to management overview. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a tool that offers a specialist breakdown of proper website metrics and KPI’s at a glance.

How is WebCEO different from similar SEO tools on the market?

With the multi-user functionality, being able to quickly glance at the SEO team’s metrics that are broken down by specialist makes it one of our go-to tools as we go about our work days. Spotting good and bad website metrics at a glance is vital to a specialist and a manager in this role. I don’t believe there is another platform that can dissect between team members at a glance and is equally valuable to the team manager and the specialists who strategize the client accounts.

How exactly did WebCEO help your SEO team save time and costs?

Time is money as they say. With WebCEO, the ability to quickly assess stats fast is tantamount along with finding KPI’s quickly. The platform does all this easily. From a digital marketing and SEO agency perspective, and as a manager on the team, I need a way to keep up on how specialists are performing which can be a huge challenge in this industry. With so many competing priorities having a quick glance of every client’s overview is huge.

The WebCEO Task Manager gives us the ability to segment specialists based on any category of our choosing. For instance, from the initial starting dashboard you can set up custom names for each specialist on your team, as well as assign projects based on department, or maybe a section for competitor rankings. The sky is the limit as you can alter each row to represent any category of your choice. For example, the below image represents the average of metrics of each specialist’s clients.

This gives management a quick glimpse of performance at a high level. If something is off the next step would be to examine deeper by simply clicking on the specialist’s name and opening up their dashboard deeper and taking a granular look.  This will open up a panel listing the particular SEO specialist’s clients in a well formatted list. This breaks down the statistics even further.

From here if we can drill down even further per website under a specialist’s projects for an overview of the site of your choosing. Once again at the project overview level, everything is well laid out and composed. You can also add special widgets to this dashboard. For example, if you wanted to track at a glance traffic over 12 months, there is a widget set you can add to the project level dashboard with a simple click of the mouse.

All the widgets display nicely as they are lumped together into the project overview. The look and feel is sleek and streamlined which is good because WebCEO offers branded access to the dashboard from your own sub-domain if you wish to let your clients see stats at will. This helps agencies remain transparent, which is a present day gripe among new clients who previously had bad experiences with non-transparent agencies.You can also set the permissions so your client will only see their dashboard.

Upon logging in as a customer or as an SEO team member, the project overview is the first thing you will see at the project level. A not-so granular overview of the metrics of your choosing. From site speed to average ranking position the widgets can be set to your liking or set as static for your clients, meaning they cannot be altered via a third party.

It would appear something like this…

By clicking on any of the widgets the tool sets get more and more intricate as far as stats and helpful information goes.

WebCEO from end to end has so much information packed within its programming I can’t think of anything that is not covered important to SEO. Stacked with the ability to provide everything from competitor reporting, backlink toxicity, social analytics to technical website audits, WebCEO is the Swiss Army Knife of SEO in that it pretty much does everything you need for technical level SEO.

Oftentimes in SEO, there is always an extreme amount of jumping around between different SEO tools, but with WebCEO the need becomes less frequent. Pulling information from tools like Google Analytics, Search Console and SEMrush, you can almost always stick with this one tool, finding the information you need at the press of a mouse.

In conclusion, one thing that really separates WebCEO from all the other SEO tool suites is its team management features. No other SEO tool suite offers “at a glance” KPI’s on SEO team member performance and per client stats from a single screen.

WebCEO has all the strength of all the most popular tool suites for the SEO professionals doing the day to day SEO but also offers dimensions for managers and directors that no other tool set does.

I bet you send SEO reports to your customers. Could you please tell us more about it?

We actually do send out monthly reporting. With WebCEO the practice is easy and offers customers a detailed view of how their performance stacks up.  The reports look exactly like they do when a customer logs in to view their account. The PDFs are full of color and insights. A professional looking bonus for clients.

Taking it a bit further you can not only set up reporting to utilize your agency’s branding but you can also incorporate branded reports to include your client’s logo as well.

Reporting is an essential part of what we do. Being able to expand on information and stay transparent lends to our company’s outstanding reputation.

What are the top 3 WebCEO tools which your team uses most often?

The top 3 tool sets our team uses quite regularly are:

1. The Keyword Detail tool – This tool allows us to view the progression of keywords along with the ranking pages. Combining this tool with the Internal Links Optimization tool allows us to capitalize on moving link juice around websites in order to push keywords higher by easily viewing what page ranks for what search terms.

2. The Link Toxicity tool – Gives us insights on bad link mojo. You can set custom parameters to find the types of links that should not be associated with your client’s website, easily create a disavow file and submit it to Google with a few clicks.

3. Competitor Backlink Spy – A phenomenal tool that allows you to view the backlinks of a competitor’s website. If you have ever done a bit of link building, you know the importance of trying to share backlinks that your competitors have through simple outreach and backlink techniques.

Finally, do you have any recommendations from your SEO team on how we could improve WebCEO to help manage your SEO workflow?

One of the nice things about the customer help desk at WebCEO is their responsiveness to our needs.

Recently, we asked the help desk if there was a possibility to add the last scan date to the specialist’s dashboard so we could be sure on the management side of things that client accounts are being scanned by our specialists in a timely manner and to ensure we have a fresh view of the client stats at all times. This way no one is neglected and it keeps the workflow alive.

The response was quick and at the moment they are looking into it with the programmers in order to implement. Again, this would be a great feature-set for our team.

I love that WebCEO does what it takes to make agencies successful.

The post How a Digital Agency Raised Its Client Retention Rate to 95% appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.