SEO Service

We provide SEO services focused on applying only the very best SEO practices to your website, and across all channels. Good SEO goes far beyond your website. It must be performed across multiple networks starting with Google and then spread across most major social channels. Then, to boost local SEO we add profiles in local directories and help you develop a plan to make a real impact across your local market.

It all starts with researching data and creating a plan based on what is discovered from data. What are the personas of your typical customer? How will your potential customers find and purchase your products or services? Only after the data is throughly evaluated can we structure your website and apply the necessary optimization. Good SEO service is all about research, planning, structure, action and consistency.

Instead of boring you with all the specific details of our SEO service, we'll share some of the basic foundational principles, a few specifics and even a couple of true stories.

WordPress and SEO

We use WordPress for almost every site we create and it's a good start for solid SEO. In truth, just using WordPress isn't nearly enough. To obtain high organic search rankings, every company needs an effective SEO service, even if self performed. If following the DIY method, we highly suggest finding some up to date training and having a look at Google's SEO Starter Guide.

Out of the box, all WordPress sites come with a certain amount of search engine optimization! In fact, going back in time, using WordPress alone was almost enough. We could add our site titles, insert tag lines, publish blog posts and WordPress took care of the rest. WordPress still does all this, but it's no longer enough!

Out With the Old and In With the New

Great content is still king, but some of the SEO procedures we practiced in the past are now dated. Going back even a couple short years, it's likely your knowledge of SEO is outdated. There was a time when we never worried about the device our visitors were using. Today, if your website is not mobile friendly, you're toast!

Not only must your website design be responsive to all devices, it needs to be well structured and simple for visitors to navigate, no matter the device. That sounds simple, but it's not! It takes and good amount of experience, research, planning and implementation.

Keep Your Visitors Happy By Giving Them What They Want!

Good SEO Is About Your Visitors

Google changes their algorithms continuously and you never know how those changes might impact your business. The absolute best approach to safe and effective search engine optimization is to always put the needs of your visitors first. Simply focus on giving them exactly what they want and need! Our SEO service is quite extensive, but below is a list of the general practices we follow when providing our service.

We focus on providing your search visitors the results they expect, based on their search term.
Provide visitors with a website that is responsive and mobile friendly.
Give visitors a page that loads FAST. Page load speeds are crucial!
Design websites using clean code, so each site looks good and feels amazing!
Add custom functionality so your site is simple to navigate.
Verify all content is well written and easy to read.

The above list sounds easy enough to accomplish, but it's not. It's especially difficult if your site is a bit dated. Regardless, it's all achievable! If you are serious about improving traffic and earning more revenue, your organic SEO needs to be at it's best.

SEO Tip: Avoid those persons or organizations trying to sell their top secret SEO services. There are NO unknown secrets! All the information needed to be successful at SEO is readily available, mostly for free.

Is Your Website Truly Optimized?

Does your website pass the Google Mobile Friendly Test?
If using WordPress and your site failed the test, contact us immediately for a quick emergency fix! It's a short term, cheap easy fix and may not work on your theme. If your site is not mobile friendly, you have nothing to lose so it might be worth giving it a try.

If you passed the test the next step is to perform an audit your site's content. Look at all your URL's, pages, posts, custom posts, images, tags & keywords. There's more, so be sure to look at everything! Your website should only contain one piece of content per each keyword or key phrase. Your URL's should also include your keyword.

How many tags do you have on your site? If you have 40 blog posts and 80 tags, it's likely you have duplicate content and this is hurting your SEO! See what SEO Plugin developer Yoast advises about duplicate content. Also, are your tags or category titles similar each other, or to any of your page or post titles? If so, it's negatively affecting your SEO.

You should be searching out any duplicate content, crawler errors, broken links, and your overall site structure. Check your Google Search Console (Previously known as Google Webmaster) for crawler errors. Put yourself in your visitors shoes and take a hard look! Is your site easy to navigate and your content easy to read?

Always remember, Google's primary mission is to provide the absolute best user experience to their search visitors. They want to deliver the highest quality search result possible. If we can help them do that we will be rewarded. If we are displaying duplicate contents for a similar keyword, Google may not feel either piece of content is worthy to display.

Fix Your Website SEO

Regardless of your current SEO status, don't get too discouraged. It's all fixable! More than ever, Google continues to work very hard to provide it's users with search results matching what they are looking for. If you can improve your website and help Google with this, you will be successful with organic SEO!

Google wants us to rank well in their search results! In fact, they give us perfect instructions on exactly how to achieve this. It's not easy, but it's doable and well worth the time and money spent to achieve our goals.

Once you've discovered your website's SEO shortcomings it's time to get to work correcting the problems. We have more information on this included below, but you'll need to do your homework before giving this a go on your own. If you just start deleting pieces of content, you will be doing more harm than good. We recommend reading this free SEO guide available from the professionals over at MOZ.

Most business owners outsource their SEO as opposed to performing it themselves. Good SEO work is a time consuming process and usually not a good way to spend your time. Whatever you do, don't just call the first SEO person that comes to mind. There are a ton of SEO people out there but some are more interested in your money than your business.

If outsourcing your SEO service we suggest seeking out a referral from a very trusted source. NEVER use anyone making unbelievable claims or promises. Avoid anyone trying too hard to sell you their SEO service. Generally, if they are legitimate and good at SEO service, new customers come to them, not the other way around.

Learn more about our SEO service and let's see if we're a good fit for each other.

SEO Tip: NEVER buy back links! Avoid link farms like the plague. See what experts at MOZ have to say about link building.

When providing our SEO service we do our very best to deliver the content the visitor expects. Done right, the visitor will land on exactly the content they need, based on the search term they entered! They will stay on the page, consume the content, and if they found it useful, they may stay for a look around. If not, they are much more likely to return for more later.

Interesting True Story

Even most web designers, claiming to provide search engine optimized websites, have little understanding of how to handle SEO.

I spoke to an experienced web designer yesterday regarding a website re-design he is creating for a mutual friend. I asked him how he was going to address the existing pages and posts for which the client is currently ranking well. The correct answer should have been, he was going to import those posts and pages to the new site and make sure all the titles and URL's matched. That is NOT what he said!

His answer was this. "Oh, don't worry about that. I include SEO service in my work because I use a great SEO plugin!" I thought, oh, no! I could only shake my head. The poor client is going to lose his current SEO ranking because one guy thinks he knows about SEO. The truth is, the web designer only knows enough to be dangerous. What a pity!

SEO Tip: Never arbitrarily delete anything from your website without a plan. This will result in a crawler error. This includes any page, post, image, tag or category. Anything! Don't change any titles to anything! The removal of ANY content types will result in crawler errors and hurt your SEO rankings. If you delete anything, you must immediately set up a URL redirect of some sort. Certainly, one or two errors isn't going to cause any huge problems, but too many of these are going to hurt.

How Misuse of Tags Contributed to a Website's Downfall

This recent story is a common occurrence, especially for WordPress users! I have a friend who asked for our SEO service but she was a little late! She said her website was previously ranking well, but in the last six months it dropped way off the mark. She has continued writing plenty of blog posts, so her site was not dormant. After performing a short website audit I discovered she had been adding multiple tags to every single post. Most of her tags had the same or similar titles as her blog posts. Little by little, this created a duplicate content problem and eventually it affected her SEO rankings.

Thankfully, we fixed the problems! We removed some of the tags and created redirects where needed. Other tags we added the some simple meta code to prevent search bots from indexing or following those tags in the future. After a few months Google saw the improvement and my friend's website was rewarded!

The overuse of tags and categories is often overlooked and this can destroy your website's SEO. When providing our SEO service we take a hard look at all duplicate content tags and make the appropriate changes.

Good SEO Approach

If your site is mobile friendly, well coded and easy to navigate, you can move forward with more specific SEO improvements. As part of our SEO service we sometimes suggest existing websites be re-structured and optimized. Here's an example of the the general steps to take us in the right direction.

Research Keywords - This can take one to two weeks, taking an hour or two per day. After an hour or two all the words start to blend together and it's better to take a break.
Look at your existing website and determine the keywords for which you are already ranking
Map out your content with each keyword. Assign only one keyword or phrase to each piece of content
Be sure to look at your existing URL's. Assign each url to each piece of content. You'll want the title to include your keyword phrase.
Check your tags and categories to make sure they don't match any of your content keywords. Tags and categories are the biggest source of duplicate content on the internet. We usually try to avoid using tags altogether.
If there are some pages or posts not ranking well, but have keywords worth keeping, rewrite the content, using good on page optimization.
If you discover lesser pages outranking a cornerstone page, you'll need to fix your internal linking. Say you have five pages outranking the one you want. Go to each of those pages and link to the primary page.
Create a site map with future keywords outlining a future plan of action. Yes, these keywords must be researched as well. Avoid duplicating any previous keywords or content.

There's way more information on this subject, but it would take a book to cover. If you want to dig in deeper there are outstanding resources available for free. Check out the MOZ Blog, Search Engine Land.

SEO Strategy for the Future

Included in our SEO service is an overall strategy for the future! We provide our clients predetermined and mapped content creation list. Remember, keep up the list and make sure not to duplicate. Continue internal linking to those main cornerstone pages.

There are mountains of search results available on almost any subject matter imaginable. It's interesting to note, Google still sees a large percentage of brand new keyword phrases everyday. I think I read this at the MOZ Blog, but this percentage is something like 30% or more. That's huge!

With organic SEO, even small business can compete with the larger enterprise corporations. You can win, but only if using the right approach and willing to devote some consistent resources.

Unlike PPC marketing, organic SEO reaps residual benefits. Using PPC, you get automatic first page rankings. The very second you stop paying, those results disappear and you have no lasting effects. With organic SEO the benefits continue, as long as you keep up with your content publishing strategy.