SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is the process of gaining more visitors to your website through ranking up on all major search engines. In turn, you “optimize” (enhance) factors on your site to get the highest ranking possible. Now, you may be sitting there, looking at your own site and saying “Why aren’t you ranking?! Do something!” But it doesn’t exactly work that way. You see, Google and all other search engines place the user experience above all else. So if you’re site is slow, spammy, a mess to navigate, or just completely inaccurate, chances are it will have trouble ranking. If you have any of these issues, make sure to visit our web design section to revamp your site.
Misconception About SEO
One of the biggest misconceptions about SEO is that you can get on the front page in a matter of a couple of months. If any SEO company or freelancer claims this, they are either doing shady tricks (i.e. Black Hat SEO) or selling you snake oil (i.e. lying). A good SEO campaign will show progress 3 months in and takes at least 6 months to see a valuable return. So if you’re looking to get traffic and leads fast, it’s better to go the PPC route.
Step 1 – Find us. Good. Now onto Step 2, let’s get you found.
How Our SEO Expertise Can Help You
SEO can broadly be divided into 4 major categories–technical, keyword research, content, and backlinking. Here’s a bit of what we can exactly do for you in each:
Technical
How your website performs and if search engines can read it. Think site speed, security, mobile responsiveness, and crawlability/indexability.
Meta Tags
Meta Descriptions
Alt Tags
Speed Optimization
Image Optimization
XML Sitemaps
Dead Link Checker
…and more
Content
Is your content relevant to your industry? Engaging? Sufficient? Are you finding different ways to provide content? Are they SEO-friendly?
Content Ideation
Blog Posts
Photo Galleries
Video
Infographics
Surveys
…and more
Keyword Research
Are you focusing on the right keywords? Are the keywords you’re focusing on generating search volume? Are they money keywords?
Target Demographic Research
Competitive Keyword Research
Search Volume and CPC Research
Long-Tail Keyword Research
Local SEO Research
…and more
Backlinking
Is your content being found? Are you getting linked back to reputable websites within your industry? Do they have high authority? And are you on all relevant directories?
Directory Submissions
Link Building
Link Replacement
Link Outreach
…and more
SEO – The Rundown
Looking under the hood of your website
A crucial factor of SEO success is whether or not your website is built for the user experience.
If you mislead, you’ll miss leads
Once people get to your site, will they find what they’re looking for? If you label your blog as a sports blog but only talk about football, are you really a “sports blog” or an NFL blog? You have to make sure that your content appeals to your consumer. This line of thought mainly applies to PPC but also stretches to SEO.
Backlinks – Let’s take it back to High School
The best time of your lives…right? Once you have the technical portion taken care of, and your content is fresh and appealing, you now have to look at your reputation. Are other sites linking back to your website? This is usually a key ranking component, as it signals to search engines that your content is valuable and can be vouched for. But not all backlinks are created equal. And in order to explain further, we’ll use the High School analogy to demonstrate. For the sake of argument, let’s say that being popular in high school is the most important thing ever (of course, you wouldn’t say that).
If all the popular kids say “hi” to you once, does that make you popular? You’ll certainly get a sharp boost in popularity but will it last?
What about if all the popular kids say “hi” to once a week? Then that’s great! It’s showing that you are cool, and that you didn’t just have a cool moment.
Let’s say you’re a band kid and don’t really care about overall popularity but still want to be well-liked within the band circle. So long as you appeal to the band kids, you’ll boost up. And if the popular kids outside of band like you too, even better.
On the other end, if you start to associate with unpopular kids, you won’t be as popular. And if you associate with troublesome kids, then it could serve as a red flag that you’re a troublesome kid yourself.
Granted, this is a very simplistic view on popularity but it serves to highlight the way Google sees your reputation. If you link to websites that are prominent and reputable in your industry (‘business and Forbes‘, ‘health and Web MD‘, ‘technology and TechCrunch), search engines will know that your content is worthy. And if you continuously get linked back to them, they wil see you as an emerging force. On the flip side, links from sites that aren’t as influential won’t deliver results as fast. And if you’re linking to websites that are deceptive and full of malware/viruses, you could be at risk of dropping in the rankings or disappearing off the search indices entirely!
