If you're like many business owners, you probably rely heavily on your organic search rankings to gauge and measure your SEO performance. When you see your website listed on the first page for a relevant keyword, you're happy. If you see your website at or near the top of the first page, you're ecstatic! When you lose an organic ranking, you're upset and when you fall off the first page, you're downright pissed off. Sound about right?

Suppose you own a small contracting company with a couple trucks. Whether you operate out of Washington, DC, Philly, Chicago, Los Angeles, or any other metro area, you're competing against dozens of comparably sized contractors AND at least three or four companies that are considerably larger than you. The larger contracting companies most likely have bigger advertising budgets, fancier websites, more trucks on the road, hundreds of online testimonials and much, much more.

If you want your web site to rank on the first page of Google, you’re going to need a lot of links from other web sites, right? The answer might surprise you. Like many things in SEO land, link-building, the process of getting other web sites to link back to your web site, is not very well understood by many business owners (and probably some SEO companies alike!).

According to a study conducted by Fireclick, an industry leading provider of website analytics services, the average conversion rate for websites (worldwide) is just a hair over 2%. Depressing, isn't it? But, before you set out in search of a bridge to leap off of, consider this: Blue Corona has dozens of clients with website conversion rates that exceed 15%!

Given the potential value of a conversion and with such a large discrepancy between different sites, it's natural to wonder:

If you spend any time listening to the radio, you've probably heard the commercials about how you can get a FREE website when you sign-up for XYZ service for your business. If you've been thinking about building a website for your business, this might seem like a pretty sweet deal. You need XYZ for your office and, as the commercial mentions, "if you don't have a website your business is invisible" - it seems like a win-win offer!

Whether your company intends on investing in social media marketing or not (it should), there are 4 critically important reasons you should reserve your social media profiles today. While I could easily write an entire blog post about why your company MUST be on social media, I know there are a lot of companies out there who still just don’t buy into the movement (it's really more of a seismic shift).