SEO – Search Engine Optimization

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SEO is the Means to Winning the Visibility Race

Successful SEO is a game changing business strategy.

Don’t let anyone tell you differently. People who minimize the importance of SEO, are not winners – it’s that simple.

When you rank in the top positions in the search engines – it is a game-changer for your business.

It is akin to getting to and staying in the first position in a never-ending marathon.

When you are in one or more of the first ten positions of the search engine results pages (SERPS), you are in the game.

When you are in the first organic positions for your market’s key phrases you are usually getting a multiple of the amount of business everyone else is getting.

The phone is ringing, the orders are flowing in – your biggest challenge is keeping up with it!

But what is SEO? Simply put, Search Engine Optimization is a catch-all phrase describing the process of optimizing a web property so that it stands a better chance of ranking in the top positions in the search engines. SEO is not just going into the back-end of a website and adding or removing a few key phrases in strategic locations. SEO is a lot of work. See our 2017 SEO Check List to get a sense of the SEO process.

Here’s what we mean, it’s a bit like asking, “what is fitness training”? Or, “what is dieting”? There will be many recipes, books, training courses, methods, tips, guru’s and sure-fire solutions that offer ways to get fit or lose weight.

For example, there are many things you can do to get fit. You could watch less television, eat better food, exercise regularly, run, walk, go to the gym, focus on aerobic exercise, and so on.

What does it mean to be fit? Fit relative to whom?

For example, what does it mean to be fit? How do you draw a line and say, “this person is now fit”? If we were to apply the same rules as in the SEO world we would say, this person is fit only when they win every race, every triathlon, every marathon.

In SEO our goal is not just to optimize for the search engines, it is to do it better than everyone else so that our web property outranks (wins the never-ending race) all the others.

In the same way, optimizing a web property to try to get it to rank, (win the ranking race) will generate many different suggested methods and solutions.  The proof though is only in the results, if a process, company, or course, produces top-ranking web properties then that’s the best one.

A better question therefore is, what are the best methods I can apply to my web property to outrank my competitors?

“Do you do SEO?”

“Do you do SEO?”, “I need a good SEO company.”, “Can you do SEO for my website?”, “How much does SEO cost?”, “I just want a company to go into my website and do SEO.”

We get questions like this all the time. Small business owners often have the impression that an SEO specialist can spend a week or so and optimize their website! Well, any SEO’er can go in and do some SEO on a site but so what?

That’s like asking, “can you do a bit of fitness training”? So what? Who cares? Will a bit of fitness training enable a person to win a race? Will it enable them to constantly win every race they enter all the time?  Well, it might, but only if all the other contestants are total couch potatoes and never do any fitness training!

In today’s digital world, ranking for specific market niches (key-phrases) is a highly competitive desire. Successfully ranking in the top positions usually translates into a lot of business. The companies that rank will often generate huge amounts of business.

Successful SEO Usually Requires All of the Following Forms of Digital Marketing

Just ‘doing’ them is not enough – they need be done better than your competitors in order to outrank your competitors.

We know because this is what we do – digital marketing services.

• Site Conversion Optimization
  • Creating a better site, ‘better’ meaning it converts new visitors into phone calls and or eCommerce sales
  • If your website converts less well than your competitors, you will pay a significant ranking penalty
• Content Marketing
  • Improving your visibility for your key phrases through new, fresh, or improved content
  • This needs to be done for all part’s of your sales funnel, think – content answering questions potential customers may have even when they are just in the research phase
  • This includes video marketing, social media marketing, and optimizing the content itself – think meta tags, images, titles, headings, inter-page linking
• Engineering Level Site Optimization
  • This means things like site load speed, eliminating 404 errors, broken links, duplicate content pages, shallow content, and poor HTML to content ratio pages
• Mobile Optimization
  • This is now done at two levels
  • Making sure the site works reasonably well overall on mobile devices passing the Google test
  • More advanced is page-level mobile user experience optimization
• Link Outreach
  • This means getting links from other relevant properties on the web
• Business Listings
  • This means listing the business in lots of business listing sites on the web – the most obvious being Google my Business, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Better Business Bureau, Bing Places for Business, Manta, Mapquest, YP.com, and many more…
  • There is a whole world of optimizing that can be done here, including multimedia, key-phrase optimization, and online reviews
• Site Interaction Boosters
  • The more people go to and interact with a website, the more that is a signal to Google the site is important – for example, adding forms to a site can boost sticky interaction