When speaking with potential clients, we often hear the question ‘Do you guys do SEO?’ Every time I hear this question, I immediately start panicking. It becomes a battle figuring out how I can condense this topic into a short enough amount of time to keep someone’s attention and simultaneously trying to provide enough information to educate. With that said, we wanted to provide some foundation in this article by breaking down some of the high-level bullet points of SEO so you can build a plan of attack for growing your business.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a very popular buzzword you’ll hear often when trying to promote and grow your business on the Internet. While SEO itself can be very complex in nature, there are certain pillars of SEO that are pretty easy to understand. SEO can be broken down into four primary categories. The names can vary, but they typically represent the same thing. For our article, we will call them: on-page, local, technical, and off-page.
On-page SEO
On-page, or on-site, SEO is exactly what it sounds like. This is the process of optimizing the content on your website to help you reach your target audience. Search engines (i.e. Google) will frequently “crawl”, or move around, your website to learn more about and determine the purpose of your website, as well as the services or products you offer. They do this by looking at numerous things such as page titles, page descriptions, the verbiage on each page, the images on each page, and much more.
It is important when you are building the content for your website to research currently popular keywords or phrases being searched in your field. Once this information is known, you can then optimize all of the aforementioned details so that when customers search for services or products using these keywords, your company is more likely to be recommended and shown at the top of the search results. Research your keywords, optimize your content, and link to it consistently throughout your website in a manner that allows search engines to easily find it.
The benefit of choosing us to build your website is the amount of research and intention we put into building our websites in an effort to provide a high level of service in this area. Depending on the package level you choose with us, we will start with optimizing your homepage all the way up to every page on your website.
At this point, you may be asking “won’t this change over time?” Yes! But we will touch on that in a bit.
Local SEO
Local SEO is a little less straightforward, but still incredibly important in the eyes of the services your customers are using to find you. The goal of local SEO is to optimize for areas you serve instead of at a national level. This allows you to increase your presence within the communities you impact the most and to promote your products and/or services to local customers. This is incredibly valuable to companies that offer trade services or companies with brick-and-mortar locations.
How high you appear in search results on Google can be heavily influenced by the amount of information you provide in your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) and how often you interact with customers on Google’s platform. This includes items such as consistently providing up-to-date photos on your Business Profile, ensuring you continue receiving customer reviews, and how often you respond to these reviews. Be sure to always keep up-to-date location and service information in your Google Business Profile and ensure this information is consistent on other sources around the Internet (including your website). This is a free benefit that allows you to highly target customers most likely to use your services or purchase your products.
116 Solutions can help you setup and optimize your local SEO on many platforms, including Facebook, Google, and Yelp. These platforms feed data into numerous other outlets such as Apple and Google Maps to ensure you’re reaching the maximum number of customers in your area. Depending on your package, this may already be an included service for you. We also provide this service for a one-time fee regardless of whether you have a monthly website package with us.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to steps taken to help search engines more efficiently crawl your website. These steps include things like the speed at which your website loads, how accessible your website is on mobile devices, and ensuring your website is properly structured.
All of our websites include a responsive and mobile-friendly design as well as properly structured data. This includes improving the accessibility and proper placement of information on your website, such as appropriate internal linking to other pages on your website and external linking to relevant information on other websites.
There are numerous things we do to optimize website performance and speed based on the package you choose with us. These items include things like the latest caching techniques, efficiently sizing and storing images, enforcing proper priority of resources, and in some packages, offering a Content Delivery Network to ensure high performance and availability of resources.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO, often in the form of linkbacks, encompasses everything outside of your website that points back to your website. The primary purpose of off-page SEO is to build trust for your company or brand with an added benefit of providing you more exposure across the Internet. When search engines like Google see other reputable websites linking back to your website, it increases the trust Google places on your website as well as your rankings within search results.
This can come in the form of articles written either about your company or with help and knowledge from your company (lending your expertise). Because other websites are now linking back to yours, you are creating more references to your website throughout the Internet and reaching customers you may not have otherwise reached.
We do not currently offer a solution for off-page SEO, but a reputable digital marketing company can assist with this area tremendously. There are also services that exist that will allow you to lend your knowledge to assist with the writing of articles.
Conclusion
As we hinted earlier, SEO is an ever-changing and constantly evolving thing. This is why it is important to constantly research and evaluate what your customers are looking for and tweak the content on your website accordingly. With any website we create and host, you are always welcome to update your content on your own to stay up-to-date with the latest trends. Beginning with our Light package, we offer content updates that we will perform at your request that can assist with updating your content to ensure it remains relevant based on your latest research.
If you’re looking for further help in this space or performing this research, and prefer a hands-off approach due to time or lack of knowledge, we recommend enlisting the help of a reputable digital marketing agency. While we try to offer as many services as we can to our clients, we want to ensure we offer our existing services at a high level. It is because of this that we do not currently offer digital marketing services, but we do work with companies we can recommend to you.
Contact us today if you have any questions, and let us know how we can help you and your business succeed. It is intentional that our business model and success are built on the success of our clients.
