With the many Internet marketing companies contacting your business daily offering SEO services or claiming to be Google, why wouldn’t you want to know what we do?
To put it simply, we make it possible for potential customers to find your website on search engines when searching for your business’s products or services. Given the usage of search engines in our everyday lives, being able to be found on Google is a must for businesses looking to grow and sustain.
Conducting an SEO campaign is a scientific process in which the scientist must understand each component of it to achieve maximum results. So what do we do? I’ll explain using the 5 steps of the scientific method. Let’s start with making an observation.
Make an Observation
SEO Audit: What’s preventing your website from search engine leads?
Every expert-level SEO campaign begins with an SEO audit. The purpose of the audit is to determine what’s needed for your website to perform better on search engines. As detailed further below, we’ll take a look at what changes need to be made on your website, what off-site measures need to be taken (backlink analysis, citations, etc), and how your website stacks up against search engine competitors.
Keyword Research
Keyword research and analysis is about identifying the most commonly-searched keywords or search queries, that will produce the best results for your website once good rankings are achieved. The ideal keyword is searched often, is relevant to your business, and would bring in new customers. Targeting the right keywords is pivotal to all SEO campaigns.
Onsite Optimization Analysis
The Onsite Optimization Analysis examines whether or not your website is functional for search engines along with how well is it optimized for service-related keywords that potential customers would input into Google when searching for your services.
For functionality, amongst other things, we check to see if your website is optimized for mobile, if are there any broken links or 404 pages, does it loads fast enough, and if your website’s sitemap is properly set up with Google.
The keyword implementation portion of the onsite optimization analysis checks to see if each service page or web page that you’d like to be found, on your website targets a specific keyword. Typically, these keywords are commonly searched and are likely to bring you sales-converting search traffic.
Competitor Analysis
Being that your website competes with other similar websites, a competitor analysis is probably the most critical part of the audit. Using key SEO metrics, such as domain authority, backlinks, trust flow, social shares, and various others, we’re able to determine what’s necessary for your website to compete with your rivals and ultimately beat them out for higher rankings.
- Backlinks: A backlink is a hyperlink from another website to your website. They pretty much serve as online recommendations for your services. The more backlinks, the more Google values your website above others. That’s if, the links are credible or trustworthy, which leads to trust flow.
- Trust Flow: Your website’s trust flow is a measure of how trustworthy your backlinks are. There was a time when you could purchase backlinks from any website and watch your website’s ranking shoot to the top of search results. Now, with Google and other search engines becoming much smarter, backlinks must come from websites with similar content as yours. For example, if you’re a mediator, a backlink from an attorney’s website will suffice.
- Domain Authority: On a scale from 0 – 100, domain authority measures the ranking strength of your website based on the quantity and quality (trustworthiness) of your backlinks. DA is by far the most important metric as it takes the most critical metrics into account when determining a score.
Along with various others, we pull data for each metric from your website and compare it to that of your competitors. After doing so, we’ll have a solid idea as to what it’ll take to rank your website above theirs on search engines.
Form a Question
What’s Needed to Compete on Search Engines?
Once we’ve conducted an SEO audit to get an understanding of what’s preventing your website from being found on search engines, the next step is to determine what it’ll take to resolve the issues in the audit and begin working towards gaining better SEO metrics than your competitors for higher search rankings.
As for resolving on-site optimization issues, it’ll take know-how and a set amount of hours of work. Of course, the hours would depend on how much work needs to be done. For most websites, onsite optimization is a one-time fix.
Next, we’ll determine what kind of backlinks would benefit your website. How strong? How relevant and trustworthy? How many per month? How many hours per month should be spent on building backlinks?
Being that SEO is a continuous process in which the time put toward it is based on how soon you’re looking to track down the competition, the cost of your SEO campaign will vary.
Form a Hypothesis
Set goals and prepare a kickass SEO Strategy
According to Merriam-Webster, a hypothesis is an idea or theory that is not proven but leads to further study or discussion. While this may be a bit of a stretch, the hypothesis of your SEO campaign lies in our guesstimate that we can achieve desired results in X amount of time. To fulfill our hypothesis, we’ll put together a solid SEO strategy, or plan of attack, and begin implementing it. Elements of a quality SEO strategy are below:
- Keyword-Focused Landing Pages: Once we’ve determined which keywords are more likely to generate sales-converting traffic, we’ll develop landing pages for each. Expect a dedicated page for the different products, offerings, and locations your business has. Trying to get one page to rank for a handful of keywords makes it hard for search engines to determine what keywords a web page should rank for.
- Link-Building Plan: With link-building being the primary objective of off-site SEO and a huge determinant of how well your website ranks on search engines, we’ll put together a detailed plan to attract inbound links to your website. Regardless of industry, there are plenty of websites that are relevant to what you do. On your behalf, we’ll reach out and connect with these websites to promote content and generate backlinks.
- Content Strategy: Great content is developed with a specific, clearly defined goal in mind. Whether you’re looking to boost brand awareness, generate leads, convert users, attract past customers, improve search ranking results, or something else altogether, we’ll create a plan to achieve just that.
Conduct an Experiment
Implementing the SEO Strategy
Now that expectations and strategy have been agreed upon and formulated, it’s time for campaign execution. This is where all of the issues listed in the audit are resolved. This is where content is developed and backlinks are built. This is where the magic happens.
Analyze Data
Tracking & Continuous SEO Optimization
Using web analytics tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, and many others, we’re able to track important information such as website visitors, demographics, keyword rankings, conversions, and most importantly ROI. We’ll use this data to further optimize your website for search engine leads and website conversions.
Often, you’re able to see SEO results after a month depending on the competitiveness of your targeted keywords and the strength of your domain. While these results most likely won’t show up as sales, you’ll be able to see an increase in impressions (views of your website on Google) and clicks (website visits) which indicate that your rankings are increasing. For most local SEO campaigns, you can expect to reach the first or second page of Google and begin receiving quality leads within 3-4 months.
Being that we can’t control when Google decides to update its search engine algorithms, we aren’t able to guarantee our results as many SEO professionals do. However, these updates rarely ever affect the work of SEO agencies or professionals who utilize white-hat SEO tactics for strategy execution.
Interested in SEO for your business? Contact our SEO agency and request a free SEO audit to get started. Chat with you soon!