SEO: The Basics

SEO is by far the best investment you can make in your business, with low costs and huge ROI.

What is SEO?

SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. SEO is by far the most important aspect of internet marketing because it can deliver huge amounts of traffic to your store and online business organically without fees.

SEO focuses on getting a business ranked as best as possible within the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Google has about 90% of the market so certified Google partners and analytics experts are the professionals that best know how to optimize your website safely and effectively.

Organic Rankings

When websites appear in search engine results on their own (not paying to appear) their rankings are referred to as organic. And Google is essentially ‘vouching’ for the top company they list at the top of the organic search results. They are saying that “in our opinion, this is the best company for this industry or category”, so they are continually refining their algorithm to filter out the companies that meet their stringent parameters. They do this so they have the best suited and deserving companies at the top of their results.

What are these strict conditions that SEO companies need to address? Well, Google doesn’t list their algorithm’s proprietary structure, although if a website is built with good code, good content and it develops a good online presence you can bet that you have just met much of what is needed.

Important Factors in Developing Organic Traffic

There are many important factors that need to be addressed in developing top search engine rankings. These factors can be grouped into three categories:

  1. On-Page SEO
  2. Off-Page SEO
  3. Technical SEO

Other types of SEO include:

  1. Local SEO
  2. Ecommerce SEO
  3. International SEO
  4. YouTube SEO
  5. Social SEO
  6. Content SEO which is covered in on-page SEO but is important enough for it’s own mentioning

There are a lot of variables for each of these aspects of SEO that need to be developed and managed.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO relates to the content of your website.

Informational content always needs to meet the needs and interests of visitors, but it must also be optimized to satisfy Google. Content is best when it provides a new, fresh, or unique perspective. Rich informational content using images, text, and other media such as video are valued by Google as they best communicate with the visitor and provide informational value.

Keywords used in the content need to target a specific search for a specific product, service, or information. To achieve this, a keyword analysis needs to be performed beforehand to identify which keywords are the most relevant to your page or article and are most searched.

Other on-page SEO variables include meta data (meta tags), html, internal linking and more.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO primarily relates to building your website’s domain authority.

Domain authority is a measure of how important your website is, or at least how it is perceived as such by Google. Domain authority is important in building a successful online business.

Off-page SEO tactics include getting citations, which are links in other websites that mention your business’s name, address, and information, as well as developing a presence in social media and securing backlinks, which are links to your website from other websites which preferably have a high domain authority.

There are other factors to consider as well.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO relates to the technical side of things that help the search engines crawl your website easier and more completely. An important factor relating to this are XML sitemaps which provide the search engines with a complete and detailed listing of your website’s page structure so that they index all your pages.

URL structure is also important because the search engines favor websites that have a logical URL structure that keeps things organized. URL’s also need to be optimized so that keywords are present in the link.

Other technical SEO factors include site speed which helps to deliver a better user experience and helps with Google, as well as structured data, content that is not duplicated elsewhere and more.

Expectations

Given everything that we’ve listed above, it is realistic to look at SEO as a marathon rather than a race. There might be some low hanging fruit that could be immediately capitalized on but establishing your online business as an important entity in the rankings takes good old-fashioned work – expert SEO work to be exact.

There are hundreds of variables that can be optimized but those same variables can lead to declining rankings and worse if they are not properly implemented and managed.

Organic Listings vs Paid Listings

SEO focuses on organic listings whereas Google Ads place your website in the search results, where you are charged a fee every time someone clicks your listing. Once your budget is exhausted your presence on the page is gone. Think of PPC or Google Ads as rented traffic and organic traffic as earned free traffic.

Organic listings are also more likely to convert over paid traffic. Websites that dominate their market are routinely sold for huge amounts of money. Because so much business is generated by the internet, it frequently exceeds walk-in sales and other marketing strategies.

The SEO Process

Discovery

Collaboration between you and an SEO expert to understand your business, your goals, your audience and whether you are looking for local results or national and international audiences.

Research & Strategy Development

Researching your targeted market and generating a plan that will enable your business to outperform your competition and increase visibility and sales. No stone should be unturned in strategy development.

Website Audit & Optimization

A thorough inspection of every aspect of your website to identify potential barriers to success such as poor code and content, internal linking issues and much more. The issues are then corrected and optimized.

Full Online Audit & Optimization

The many technical aspects of your online business that may negatively impact success, such as slow site speed, poor code, URL structure, file sizes, broken links and much more are analyzed and corrected.

Project Launch

Once you have determined which services you want to move forward with based on the previous steps, everything that has been identified and recommended for your business can be implemented.

Measuring & Reporting

Measuring and reporting ensures that you are making steady progress and that identified issues that crop up are resolved quickly and on an ongoing basis.

Search Engine Results

Enjoy the fruits of your labour such as top Google rankings, more visibility and increased sales!

Staying Ahead of Your Competition

SEO is an ongoing process that ensures your biggest asset, your website or ecommerce shop, continues to improve and doesn’t begin to slide. Ongoing SEO is the best investment you could possibly make.

Staying Ahead of Your Competition

Internet marketing is an ongoing process that ensures your biggest asset, your website or ecommerce shop, continues to improve and doesn’t begin to slide. Ongoing Internet marketing is the best investment you could possibly make.

Our core Internet marketing specialty is SEO, and our results have helped to develop many successful long-term relationships with our clients, many of whom have been with us for over a decade, and we hope to add you to our long list of satisfied customers.

Contact us now for a free consultation.

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