Seo
Search Engine OptimizationThe Silent Seller
SEO – a phrase that has surely been discussed multiple times during your marketing strategy sessions. SEO simply put is the finessing of a website and/or webpage and it’s content thereby allowing it to show up in search inquiries on various search engines. This process has many different paths and no singular journey.
Every website is unique and there are multiple factors that can affect your search engine ranking. The old standard that people tend to focus on is keywords. This is still relevant, but no longer the number one key factor. Just think – there are over 1 billion websites active today. Can you realistically compete in that sea of websites with just keywords alone? Of course not!
Speaking to Google, as this is the most commonly used search engine, there are many things beyond keywords that affect your ranking. Some wider areas are:
- Hosting – website speed, load time, etc.
- Content – do you have rich content? Keywords fall into play here. Do you also have dynamic images and/or videos?
- Website structure – do you have an effective sitemap? Do your page URLs make sense? Do they match your content? Do you have content that users can engage with (forms, links to click, downloadable content, etc.)
- Page elements – do you have H1 tags, as well as H2, H3, and sometimes H4? Do you have readable content? (no run-on sentences, short enough paragraphs). Do you have elements such as bullet points? Numbered lists? Google loves these!
- HTML – is you coding correct? You and your users may not see the code, but this is all Google sees.
These are just a few categories that Google watches and just a few elements under each. As you can see, this list is potentially neverending and always changing.
Answers to Your Questions
What exactly do you do?
We are certified in all Google applications and have experience building websites since before Google even existed, so we have changed and adapted right along with them. We have an army of tools, plugins, and software that we have gathered over the years to help us analyze your results on a weekly basis.
We look at your SEO score in your website dashboard, we analyze Google analytics, we analyze your Google Ads (if applicable), and then come up with a game plan based on the data we find. This process can entail rewriting content, writing new content, editing code, adjusting ads, and even fully removing pages and adding new ones.
How do I know you will increase my ranking?
We’ll see! You can review our case studies to see our proven efforts that have increased traffic and search results for our clients. When people ask exactly how we do it, we say…best practices! It’s hard to say which, if any singular thing, works for any individual website. It’s often a combination of multiple different tasks that increase your SEO score.
What we do is focus on the handful of things that we know work and have always been on the SEO “best practices” lists and we do it continually, consistently, and as flawlessly as we can. We do look at data over large periods of time – remember, marketing is a marathon,
Can you increase my traffic without spending money on ads?
If you have an ad budget, your chances of gaining traffic increase obviously. You can still increase traffic organically, just maybe not as much as you want. This depends on a multitude of other factors as well. If you have a very common business with very common keywords (for example, a plumber or some other necessary service that is available virtually everywhere and has competition), it can be harder to show up in organic search if your competition is bidding on all of your prized keywords.
Reversely, if you have a very unique market or a unique business name ( like Bolt Goodly!) you may show up #1 on page 1, but the trick is, people have to already know you and be searching for you by name, not keyword.
How long will it take to see an increase in the ranking?
There is no one right answer to this question, but not overnight is for sure the truth. Be wary of any agency that guarantees any specific results as it relates to rankings because this is inherently uncontrollable. There are various factors, as mentioned previously that affect your ranking including when Google is indexing, keyword competition in your industry, personalized search results, and more. The best thing to do is follow best practices day in and day out, add new content, and stay in the know on changes in the search engine industry and look at results over a large period of time for results (usually 6+ months).