“SEO” stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of getting traffic from the “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines.
All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Business owners know they need it and want it, but don’t realize the great effort that goes into getting your website to rank better on search engines.
To optimize a website there are a couple things you need to do:
1. On-Page Optimizations
On-page optimization that refers to factors that have an effect on your website or web page listing in natural search results. These factors are controlled by you or by coding on your page. Examples of on-page optimization include actual HTML code, meta data, keyword placement and keyword density. The search engines scan your website and finds everything it needs to associate your website with a certain topic.
For example, if your business is a San Diego based Marketing firm, you want to include key words such as: San Diego marketing, small business, etc. Also include the terms that summarize your business and the services you provide so when someone is looking for those, they find you.
2. Foundational and Ongoing Linkbuilding
Link building means essentially you want other websites talking about your website and referencing it. It’s important to include those key words in your content and meta data so that other sites will “link back to you.”
SEO is kind of like a popularity contest in that you tell Google who you are and they confirm that – you are who you say you are – because other websites are verifying that your website and its content is relevant and it matters. They have a very real number of what we call link-backs where they can measure the amount of links that are pointing back to your website and some of those carry more clout than others. For example being featured on CNN with a high standing, it will be recognized by Google therefore giving your business a higher ranking on the results page.
We can actually pull what people are searching for on a monthly basis and the amount of people searching. From there we come up with a real number of what kind of traffic you could be receiving in terms of monthly volume, if you’re ranking on the top half of the results page. We are able to figure out exactly within a very reasonable amount how many people will be finding your website because of the work we’ve done.
The things that can be challenging about SEO is that it’s very competitive and we can also pull up a number to see how difficult it can be to rank. The nice thing is once you do it right foundationally, no one is going to jump ahead of you in the rankings. SEO is a fantastic long-term investment. The process does take time and a little more time if your website is brand new. When the site is older and you have some legitimacy in that URL and the search engines are familiar with it, you will actually raise in rankings faster. If you already have a good position, you can make it better by making sure you take care of the foundational things like foundational link building and the on page optimizations.
We ask that our potential clients get in contact with us and explain what kind of business they are and what kind of clients they want to attract so that we can do some research to show where you could be growing and how you could be getting new business through ranking much higher in the search engines.
SEO is all about location, location, location. That’s one of the most foundational principals of business so if you have a great location for your website in terms of ranking higher in SEO, more people will be visiting your site and you are going to get more foot traffic. It all comes down to a numbers game. Let’s say you convert 2% of clients that visited your website and you get 100 visitors a month, that’s 2 clients. If your website becomes a higher ranker, that could turn into 10,000 visitors online and 200 clients a month. With this information is easy to see how it’s really important to get more leads through that door so your conversion rate goes up therefore bringing you more business.
