Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about optimizing your website to rank well on search engines. This requires keyword-rich and structured content, a fast-loading responsive website, proper technical requirements with images and videos, as well as having other website link to your content on a regular basis. These are just a few of the many factors that go into search engine optimization.
A website without SEO is essentially an online brochure about your business. For some businesses, word of mouth marketing drives their business and the website becomes simply a source of information. But for many small businesses, they will rely on customers finding their website through online search results (Google, Bing, Social Media, YouTube, etc).
SEO is especially important for small businesses who only operate in a small geographic region, such as local services or retail companies. These businesses can benefit greatly from having their website optimized to show in search results related to the specific towns or regions they operate in.
There is a lot that goes into a proper SEO campaign. It starts with keyword and competitor research and understanding how search engines find and index your website. From there you need to make sure those keywords are in the proper places throughout your website. Content marketing helps immensely with SEO because more content gives search engines more pages to index and more keywords to target. Then there are technical aspects of your website, such as page load speed, mobile load speed, broken links, etc. that need to be considered as well. Once all that is done, we’ve completed on-page SEO.
The second step of an SEO campaign is off-page SEO, which typically focuses on obtaining high quality backlinks. When a website links to your website, it’s a sign to the search engines that that piece of content is valuable. You want many high-quality websites linking to your website in some way. Sometimes this doesn’t make sense for a business, but backlinks always help.
Other off-page SEO techniques we can help implement are: Content marketing, guest posting, influencer marketing, social media marketing, forum and group marketing and search ads.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Some SEO techniques are considered “black hat”, meaning they are frowned up by Google and other search engines. If your website is found to be using black hat techniques, your website can be penalized. This will not only hurt your reputation, but set your SEO campaign back by months. It’s important you never hire any companies that use black hat techniques. Proper SEO usually takes at least three months before you’ll see results and can take years before you see positive ROI. Anyone promising otherwise is not being honest.