What is Search Engine Optimization and why should I care about it?

Understanding the answers to these questions with put your business on a firm footing helping you move forward in online and offline marketing. SEO is simple yet rigorous,it’s a set of steps that attempts to find out what your customers are thinking when they use search engines. SEO then uses that info to better feed your customers needs and desires. SEO also helps you stay ahead of your competitor locally and across the web.

There are many tactics of influence being dropped on the head of your customer. Your competition uses classic tactics such as billboards, classified ads, radio & television and direct mail to influence your customers thinking but, we have to ask are the customers listening or are there other avenues of influence that are taking up most of the air in your market.

 What’s Taking Up The Air In My Market?

For quite some time now every survey has told us that over 80% of people use the internet as their primary source of information gathering. Your customers research leans heavily in the direction of spending money and  in the local area. They want to know what’s available, the best deal, the best customer service and the most convenient.

A well thought out and executed SEO strategy will make it easier for your customers to find your business. When one of your customers clicks a link from a search result leading to your website you have an opportunity to hold their attention and influence their behavior. Once you get a potential customer to your website you have a golden opportunity to tell your story, showcase your products and present your services. Just think about it, your business information and story show up on a home computer, a business laptop or a mobile device because that person wants to know more. The two questions you must answer is Who you are and what do you offer.

SEO is not only the first step in developing your online marketing strategy of success it is also a tool tool kit to keep you in the lead once you get there.

What’s Involved In A Basic SEO Program?

If your business has never had a website ( currently over 40% of small businesses don’t) then you’ll want to take advantage of the power of SEO from the beginning. Having your website built upon an SEO framework from the beginning will save you lots of money and time down the road as well as send a message to the search engines that you are serious about what you do.

Steps included in a basic SEO plan

1. Keyword Research
2. Keyword Domain Research
3. Onsite Optimization
4. Offsite Optimization
5. Obtain Authority Backlinks
6. Press Releases
7. Build More Backlinks
8. Legal Ethical Considerations

   Under the hood

• HTML/XML Sitemap

• Robots.txt setup

• 404 Error Handling Page

• Canonicalization

• 301 Redirects

Of course every website marketing and is different as is the SEO architecture steps needed to be taken. One thing that stays the same is that most steps need to be repeated on each page you hope to rank and receive traffic for. The days of putting up boiler plate pages and hoping they will be successful have been over for a long time.

 

 Steps included in a advanced SEO plan

If your business already has a website with many pages for your products and services then it’s likely you will need a more advanced plan for your SEO strategy.

 

• Initial Ranking Report

• SEO Website Review & Audit

• Keyword Analysis

• Competitive Analysis

 

 

 

 

search engine results page