SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing a website or webpage to increase the quantity and quality of its traffic from a search engine’s organic results. SEO is a combination of properly formatting your website with keywords, integrating backlinks, creating blog posts, and more.
How SEO Works
In simple terms, SEO works by demonstrating to search engines that your content is the best result for the topic at hand.
This is because all search engines have the same goal: To show the best, most relevant results to their users.
Precisely how you do this depends on the search engine you’re optimizing for.
If you want more organic traffic to your web pages, then you need to understand and cater to Google’s algorithm. If you want more video views, then it’s all about YouTube’s algorithm.
What is an Algorithm?
Search engines are like libraries for the digital age.
Instead of storing copies of books, they store copies of web pages.
When you type a query into a search engine, it looks through all the pages in its index and tries to return the most relevant results.
To do this, it uses a computer program called an algorithm.
Fun Fact:
Google has a market share of ~92%. That’s why it pays to optimize your website for Google instead of Bing, DuckDuckGo, or any other web search engine.
To give you the most useful information, Search algorithms look at many factors, including the words of your query, relevance and usability of pages, expertise of sources and your location and settings.
The weight applied to each factor varies depending on the nature of your query – for example, the freshness of the content plays a bigger role in answering queries about current news topics than it does about dictionary definitions.
How to optimize for Google
Google famously uses more than 200 ranking factors.
There was even talk way back in 2010 that there could be up to 10,000.
Nobody knows what all of these ranking factors are, but we do know some of them.
How? Because Google told us, and many people
—including us—
have studied the correlations between various factors and Google rankings.
Google ranks web pages, not web sites.
Just because your business makes stained glass windows doesn’t mean that every page on your site should rank for the query, “stained glass windows.”
You can rank for different keywords and topics with different pages.
How to pick an SEO specialist
When on your search for an SEO specialist, it's important to know what to look out for.
There are a lot of people online who claim to use a "magical technique" to rank your business #1 on a search result within 30 days. SEO unfortunately doesn't always work like that, especially if you're in a saturated market.
SEO is a long term investment where you typically don't see results until 4-7 months of consistent management.
How long the process takes is entirely based on your market. For example, if your business ranks on page #10 of the search "car dealerships in Charlotte, NC", it will take more time to move through the pages than being #3.
When you find someone claiming instant results, they are either trying to scam you, or are new to SEO - therefore it's important to find a specialist who knows the risk, and talks to you about it.
Hiring an SEO specialist is like hiring a valuable employee - except that "employee" invests what you pay them back into your business. It's a win-win.
Quality SEO agencies in North America charge anywhere from
$2,500-$10,000 per month.
How we can help:
All of this can be overwhelming - let us take care of it all for you, so you can focus on what business owners do best.
We are doers, not talkers - we like to get things done, and make things happen, which is why we strive for excellence.
When you contract us, we walk you through every step of the process, and avoid making unrealistic promises.
Our team has the know-how, and required training to optimize as much as possible out of your search engine results.
Feel free to reach out for a free quote, and further information on SEO.