Here is something most agencies will not tell you: the Grand Strand is not one market. It is a collection of distinct communities strung along 60 miles of coastline — and treating them as one homogeneous target is one of the most common and costly mistakes local businesses make with their SEO. The Geography Problem […]
Let me be straight with you. I have been doing internet marketing since 1998. I launched Top of Google in 2009. I was getting businesses to the first page of Google using press releases back in 2005, before most agencies in this market had even built their first website. So when someone asks me what […]
Most local businesses are wasting a significant portion of their advertising budget reaching people who will never buy from them. Not because the ads are bad. Because the targeting is wrong. Zip code geo-targeting is one of the most powerful and underused tools in local advertising — and it is something I have been implementing […]
I started in internet marketing in 1998. That is not a typo. In 1998, most businesses did not have websites. Google had just launched. Online advertising barely existed. And I was already figuring out how to get businesses found online. By 2005, I had developed a method for consistently achieving first page placement in Google […]
There is a conversation I have regularly with new clients. I look at their site, their rankings are underperforming relative to their content and optimization, and when I dig into their hosting situation I find they are on an eight-dollar-a-month shared plan with a commodity host. That is usually a significant part of the problem. […]
This is the question I get most often from business owners who are new to digital marketing: should I do Google Ads or SEO? My answer is almost always the same: it depends on your timeline and your budget — and ideally, you do both. But let me break down what each actually does and […]
Television and radio advertising used to be out of reach for most local businesses. Production costs were high, minimum buys were steep, and the targeting was blunt — you reached everyone in a broad market whether they were your customer or not. That has changed significantly, and the businesses taking advantage of it are pulling […]
Political campaigns are the most unforgiving advertising environment in existence. The budget is fixed. The deadline is immovable. And every dollar spent reaching a voter outside your district, your precinct, or your target demographic is a dollar that cannot be recovered. I have run digital marketing for political campaigns, and the single biggest mistake campaigns […]
I have rebuilt a lot of websites over the years. One of the most common situations I encounter is a business that paid good money for a site that looks professional — and ranks nowhere. The problem is that most web designers are not SEO specialists. They know how to make things look good. But […]
I have been doing reputation management for clients since before most people knew what it was. In the early days of internet marketing, it meant pushing down bad press releases and managing what showed up on the first page of a Google search for your name. Today it is largely a Google reviews conversation — […]