Search Engine Optimization

Increase online website traffic to drive leads and sales. If your website can’t be found (without searching by name) your business could have minimal online visibility. Search is a key component to driving business online and local.

What is it

Search Engine Optimization

Also commonly referred to as SEO, is a service that increases website rankings on search engine results pages (SERPS). The higher your website ranks on the page, the more visitors (traffic) your website will receive. Create relevant content and solutions to what consumers are searching for.

In detail

SEO includes a lot of sub-parts

Not all SEO is performed the same. There are three parts to SEO and some agencies only offer one or two of them. Understand what you’re getting and find out what your site is missing!

Technical SEO

Aspects include crawling, indexing, rendering and website architecture.

On-Page SEO

Optimizing web pages such as content, code, and structure in an effort to make the web page more appealing to searchers.

Off-Page SEO

These tasks involve getting the search engines to understand what consumers think about a website, its products and services. Furthermore to demonstrate the websites authority, trustworthiness and expertise.

Our Process

We help brands increase online visibility

Building a website without performing SEO is equivalent to having a billboard in a ghost town.

Step 1

Website audit

Get a baseline of website health. Analyze the competition and compare the gaps.

Step 2

Strategy

Establish content and back link strategy. Establish KPIs.

Step 3

Execute

Start optimizing, add pages, content, video. Monitor KPIs and adjust as needed.

15+ Years

of Marketing Experience

50+ industries served

B2B, B2C, Ecommerce

2500% growth

in 90 days in some cases

If I build it, will they come?

Building a website is the first step in creating an online presence, unfortunately your new website is competing with many other websites vying for the same eyes as your website. Standing out among the sea of competition is a tall order, especially if you have an ecommerce site. Instead of competing for local views in your market or service area, you're competing with the rest of the world.

So many businesses rely on big box companies like Townsquare, Thryv, Hibu, who will build a website for you on your URL (www.yourwebsitename.com). The only problem is that these sites are put up in a hurry with no real thought about the content on the pages or the keywords their client wants to be found for. The worst part is that these web site designs are being rented, as you pay a monthly fee for these companies to host your site. No actual work is being done on a monthly basis to get the website found on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and DuckDuck Go. Your essentially "renting" the website and once you decide you don't want to work with that big box company, that website goes away. The business is left starting from scratch again to build a new site and hopefully generate lots of traffic (visitors) to it.

Have you ever thought about why websites you see on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) appear there in that order? How'd they get there? We're not talking about the "sponsored" or "paid ads" on the search engines but the listings that come after the paid advertising. These sites garner these premium positions based on scores given to them by the search engines. These score are referred to as Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA). Building up these scores are a way of proving to the search engines that your website has authority and is a trusted source of information. The search engines want the user (YOU) to have a positive experience using their search engine. Otherwise, you won't come back.

There's no way to "trick" the search engines, all that can be done is best practices in website development. Website designers aren't website marketers and while they build some very beautiful websites, they rarely have the all the necessary inner workings to get that website found. Conversely, SEO professionals typically aren't website developers or great designers. This is why it's necessary to work with an SEO professional to get your website to rank on search engines. This service is more of a marathon than a race as building up authority takes time, typically 4-8 months.

There are three pillars of SEO and only doing some of them will hurt your chances of your website ranking. On-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO. Here is a list for reference.

On-page SEO tasks:

Metal title and meta description optimization.
Image optimization.
Website URL structuring.
Schema mark up optimization.
Header hierarchy.
Having a good content strategy and publishing monthly blogs.
Locality based landing page optimization.

Off-page SEO refers to tasks such as:

link building
Brand citations
Guest blogging outreach and brand citations.

Technical SEO refers to tasks such as:

Website crawl analysis.
Setting up Google Search Console
Sitemap and Robots.txt Optimization
Tech Audits and Site Health Checks (ongoing)
Website Speed Optimization
Implement Canonicalization
Indexability Check

Before this process can start you'll want to start with Strategy Planning which includes tasks such as:

Competitor Analysis (if you don't know what you're competition is doing how can you out rank them? You can't hit a bullseye if you can't find the target!
Conversion Rate Optimization is the process of creating calls to action, lead magnets, formatting as you want your visitors to take action.
Performance Tracking - Keeping track of lead-generating pages is important to see which of your pages and content are getting the most views.

If you're unsure where to start...... drop us an email!

What is User Experience (UX)?

Search engines take into consideration the User Experience that an end user (consumer) has with a website. Providing a poor User Experience can hurt Domain Authority and Page Authority scores and lose valuable rankings for a website. It will also increase other ranking factors such as Bounce Rate which refers to the amount of time a User is on a website. If a User visits a website and then leaves within 10 seconds of arriving, this will create a higher Bounce Rate thus hurting the ranking factors.

User Experience takes into consideration things like;

Relevance, how relevant the content is to what the consumer is searching for.
Ease of use and how easy the User can navigate throughout the website from page to page. Drop down menus, appearance on a mobile device and more.
Design and how well the website design can support the User's tasks.
Security refers to how well the User feels with the safety and security of using the website. Clicking on links can potentially download malicious software onto a User's device and steal their information or install malware.
Page Speed is another important factor as everyone has experienced slow to load sites or sites that won't load at all. This creates frustration and turns users away.
Workflow is one of the final facets of a strong User Experience. How well does the site fit into the User's workflow or their needs of using the website to accomplish what they're searching for? If the site provides tools to a User, how well does it help or hurt their workflow?

The next time you visit a website, think about the UX for yourself and the experience it provided for you. Are you likely to come back?

Can SEO help my business save on advertising expenses?

There are a handful of ways to drive traffic (visitors) to a website, some of them are free and some of them come at a cost. Here are a few examples of free ways to drive website traffic:

Creating posts on social media and adding a link to a page on your website so that anyone reading your social posts can quickly click the link and visit your website.
Having your business featured in a news article with a link to your website. This is assuming your business has newsworthy information or events. This is also considered a form of digital PR.
Having your website address printed on your business cards or printed collateral that is handed out in person at networking events or conferences.
Creating newsletters that are sent out to your subscribers via email.
Search Engine Optimization (done by you)

Paid advertising is the most effective way to drive website traffic but of course it comes at a cost. This strategy can become expensive if these "paid" visitors aren't converting into leads or revenue for the business. Here are a few examples of paid advertising:

Paid ads on Google, Yahoo or other search engines.
Paid ads on social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram.
TV and radio commercials.
Billboards and digital billboards or vehicle wraps.

Of course free strategies are the most effective, even if you have to work with an SEO professional. In time paying an SEO professional is far less expensive than paying for advertising all the time. In a perfect world your business will have a mix of SEO, paid ads, social media and direct to consumer (email marketing, direct mail). As this is ideal not all businesses have the resources or the staff to accomplish all this.

If you work consistently at it and publish good content and have good technical SEO, your website will increase in rankings naturally bringing more traffic to your website. This in turn will increase the chances of getting a phone call, email, or form fill and reduce the amount your business will spend on paid ads. Furthermore if your website isn't in shape to convert visitors into revenue, you're flushing ad revenue down the toilet. Poor UX and not performing Conversion Rate Optimizations in causing visitors to leave without taking action.

Think about this the next time your business purchases advertising!

How do I monitor my site performance?

There are many tools on the market to monitor website performance, some are paid subscriptions while free tools exist as well. We will focus on the free ones here as everyone likes free!

The two most popular are Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Don't get confused as these 2 tools accomplish to different tasks!

Google Search Console allows Users to see how Google crawls and indexes websites. It will also report on metrics like Click Through Ratios (CTR), keyword rankings and impressions (the number of times a website appears on a SERP). This data can be helpful to determine how a website is performing across the web and keep a website owner abreast of issues to address as they arise.

Google Analytics is essential for providing information about your customers. Key Performance Indicators include data points such as bounce rate, website traffic, traffic sources, engagement rates, user demographics, attributes and more.

Understanding how to utilize these tools takes some experience and practice but can provide valuable data for future optimization. Working with a professional to implement these tools and analyze them is often much easier and less time consuming than trying to do it yourself.

If your business is unsure about its website performance or it's never been measured, send us an email and we're happy to help!