Search Engine Optimization

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO is an extensive set of proven, longstanding and ever-evolving practices aimed at improving a website’s visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). The primary goal of SEO is to increase organic (non-paid) traffic to a website from search engines like Google and Bing.

SEO involves various techniques to optimize a website for search engines and enhance its chances of appearing higher in relevant search results. These techniques can be broadly categorized into on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO involves optimizing elements of the website itself. Off-page SEO involves activities outside the website meta tags that influence its search engine ranking.

SEO is an ongoing process that evolves as search engines frequently update their algorithms. Website owners and digital marketers must continually stay current with SEO best practices to maintain or improve their rankings over time. Effective SEO leads to increased organic traffic, better visibility, and ultimately, higher conversion rates for websites. It is our specialty.

Keyword Research

Our keyword research involves finding realistically attainable relevant keywords words and phrases that your audience uses to search for information related to your business and integrate them into your content on your website. We use special tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush and Google Search Console to identify these relevant keywords.

Competitor Analysis

Our competitor research and analysis consists of uncovering what your competition is doing SEO-wise, and do it better. This involves identifying hidden or missed opportunities and gaps in your own strategy. The tools we use to uncover all of this are the best tools in the industry specifically designed to look at that data.

Local SEO

Local SEO is now a must for pretty much all small to medium sized businesses. The optimization tasks differ from traditional SEO but see a positive impact much quicker. The reasons for this are because traditional SEO is competing nationally and continual adjustment and tweaking is required to keep up with the constant changes to the algorithm. We feel that Google prefers that businesses use the Business Panel. There are reasons why this would make sense. Business profile information is verified and authenticated, reviews provide accurate feedback, Google can standardize how information is displayed to customers, and it’s easier for Google to organize this data and link it to MAPs and NAPs. The benefit or incentive is that local SEO optimization sees tangible results within the first few weeks and can be tracked illustrated with a built-in performance panel.

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On-Page SEO

Optimizing the web pages on your website to improve your search engine ranking is what all of our hard work is based on. This includes using keywords in titles, headings, and content, and ensuring proper meta tags are in place and properly completed following best practice.

Other Tasks

Other SEO tasks will include some of the following but certainly have more that isn’t here. XML Sitemap: The XML sitemap is the structured file that lists the important pages and content on a website to help Google crawl and index the site more efficiently. Robots.txt File: The robots.txt file is the text file on your website that provides instructions to web crawlers or search engine bots on which parts of the site should be crawled and indexed and which parts should be excluded. Canonical URLs: Canonical URLs address duplicate content issues on a website which can confuse search engines and affect rankings. A canonical URL is a preferred or authoritative version of a web page that is specified to search engines. User Experience (UX): Not necessarily an on-page task, yet still important. UX is the overall experience that a person has on your website, encompassing ease of use, accessibility, efficiency, and overall satisfaction.

Quality Content

Creating high-quality, informative, and engaging content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience is what this is all for. A large part of SEO is the development of this unique content. This helps attract and retain your visitors. (see our SEO guide)

Pillars Pages and Topic Clusters

We focus on creating related topic clusters to demonstrate your expertise in a particular subject area and point them to pillar pages which ultimately improve your site’s authority on the topic and increase visitor volume and leads.

Ensuring that your content is well-structured, easy to read (see readability), and includes relevant keywords inserted in a natural way is a skill that we continually work hard to perfect. A skilled writer is needed to accomplish that well.

In addition, we use subheadings, bullet points, and images to enhance that readability.

Mobile-Friendly Design

Making sure your website is mobile responsive and looks and functions well on mobile devices is extremely important. Google considers mobile-friendliness when ranking websites and stats indicates you could lose 3 – 50% of your leads as a result of missing just this one step.

Page Speed Optimization

It’s important for us to improve the loading speed of your web pages. Faster-loading pages will provide a better user experience reducing bounce rate, thereby increasing engagement and resulting in a higher rank in the search engine results pages.

Internal Linking

We will connect related pages with keywords within your website by including hyperlinks. This helps both users and search engines navigate your site and discover more content. It will also help search engines find and index the pages on your website. They can send page rank to important pages and is key to ranking higher in Google.

Link Building

Acquiring high-quality, relevant backlinks is seen as a vote of confidence in your site’s authority and greatly improves your rankings. It is one of the most time consuming and difficult processes we do.

Image Optimization

We’ll compress and properly label images with descriptive alt text to help improve page load times, and make images more accessible putting context to what’s in the image so it is more searchable.

Schema Markup

Adding structured data to your website’s HTML to help search engines understand your content better so that pages don’t get buried too deep or get orphaned and unsearchable is another task. This can also lead to rich snippets in search results.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Featured Snippets Optimization

Structuring content to answer common questions concisely, increasing the chances of your content appearing as a featured snippet in search results gives you an advantage over your competitors. We try to structure your answers to get that spot.

4 common SEO myths: you need new content to rank higher, local SEO isn’t worth it, SEO is dead, it's only for big companies.