Do not underestimate the importance and value of an SEO strategy. SEO, otherwise known as search engine optimization, is an extremely important part of any business’ marketing strategy. The role that SEO plays is simple: it brings new prospects to your website. These prospects are people who would not have known about your business or would have not been interested in your business prior to performing an SEO search.
Why do you need an SEO strategy? If you are truly serious about growing your business, SEO is one of the best values and return on investment that you can make. SEO will allow your website to generate leads for you, turn prospects into paying customers and increase your sales revenue. Using an organic SEO strategy will not only increase rankings, but it will also add value to your brand and credibility to your website. How? By creating unique content that educates, informs and inspires your prospect to take action.
What to look for in an SEO company. When you are in the market looking for the best SEO company to work with for your business, it’s best to make sure that you are getting a company that knows how to tailor SEO strategies to your individual business. No strategy will work the same for a business in the same industry. A good SEO company will also research your industry landscape and create processes that are ever-changing to achieve top rankings for target keyword searches.
How does the SEO process work? Though many companies may have a different process, most of the common practices are quite similar. The very first step is a quick SEO audit of your company. Here are some typical things SEO companies will look at:
- what your business is trying to promote or sell
- what your target market is
- brand analysis
- how your current website structure is set up
- what the current content on your website is
- how you are currently ranking in search engines
- ease of updating content frequently
- resources for writing and updating content
- competitive landscape
- how you are currently utilizing social media
Once we get the basic SEO audit done, the next step is to determine what your goals and objectives are. Without measureable goals, your SEO strategy will not be useful.
Understanding keywords. After determining goals and objectives, the SEO strategy begins and custom processes are written to your business goals. More in-depth research is performed on your website so we can get a better understanding of how we can use keywords for your business. Here are a few examples of what we look at next:
- the value of your current website and what keywords your website already ranks with
- what the most valuable pages of your website are
- what pages are already indexed with Google
- who is currently linking to your website
- what keywords your competitors are using
Measuring your SEO performance. Once your SEO strategy is in place, measuring SEO performance begins almost immediately. Because we monitor your website’s performance daily, this helps us catch what is working, what is not working, what is getting hits, where we need improvements, what is excelling, etc… These daily monitors will allow us to change and tweak our ever-changing strategies as needed to get the most success for your website.
Search engines are continuously changing their algorithms and are striving to improve how they rank websites. With this in mind, it’s important to not only invest in an SEO strategy, but to also invest in the company that will perform the service for you. Just remember, there is no singular service that will enhance your SEO dramatically enough to make a valuable difference. If a company tells you there is and you can achieve results fast, run for the hills. The best SEO practitioners know that SEO is like a healthy diet in that no results are instantaneous, but if you stick with it long enough, your company will reap the valuable benefits and turn prospects into paying customers.