• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, April 17, 2018

Many websites are being penalized for violating Google’s link scheme guidelines, according to Sean Hakes, CEO at Altitude Agency. So he has been talking with the folks at Alexa.com, an Amazon subsidiary focused on analytics mostly for the B2B market, about creating a search engine optimization tool that would allow marketers to identify bad links and create disavows in one dashboard.

“There’s a possibility we’ll see a tool like this sometime in the future,” Hakes said. His agency focuses mostly on B2B clients, but also supports between 15% and 20% of clients focused on B2C. Many are in the home services category.

Hakes, who seems to champion Amazon’s subsidiary, Alexa.com, rambled off a bunch of new tools that he is grateful that the company created, including backlink checker, keyword share of voice, and on-page SEO checker.

Previously Alexa.com focused on rank, but recently developed and launched a suite of SEO tools for small agencies.  

Alexa.com’s dashboard for agencies is simple and makes it easy to differentiate the data for small business clients, Hakes said. “We spend about $15,000 to use a variety of tools because not one tool offers all,” he said.

In addition to tools from Alexa.com, Hakes mentioned tools from SEMrush.

He also said the agency continues to focus more on voice search these days, even for B2B clients. The office has “a bunch of Google Homes set up and we’re always micro-formatting structured data to figure out what works best,” he said. “The nice thing about Google with their SEO process is voice search is right in line with the way they develop their algorithms.”

Structured data and conversational content are two major pieces to help ensue that when someone asks Google Home or Amazon Echo and says “Hey, Google, what’s the best plumber in Denver,” the voice assistant serves up Altitude Agency’s client.

Hakes also emphasized the importance of completing information on Google My Business and ensuring that all content about the business connects across the web.

The agency mainly focuses on using Google Yahoo, and Bing as well as YouTube, which functions similar to Google.com in terms of the core algorithms, he said.

Product reviews, call tracking, and geofencing ads are all important tools, he said, which enable the agency to track from online to in physical stores.