Does your business use an SEO agency to drive traffic to your website? We hope you’re nodding yes, or maybe do air fist pumps and cheering at all the success your SEO agency has had at establishing your online brand recognition. If you have fog horns and confetti flowing in recognition of your SEO agency, you’ve gone too far. If you’re scratching your head and wondering, “What in tarnation is an SEO agency?” then you’ve got some work to do.
What in tarnation is an SEO agency?
SEO companies specialize in the science of search engine optimization. Search engine marketing focuses on promoting your website’s ranking. Why does that matter? Well. If you have the most incredible website in the world, it makes approximately zippity zap of a difference in your business unless you have visitors to it. Your target audience most likely isn’t going to accidentally type your www. address in by their own fruition. If they want your product or service, they’re most likely going to type it into a search engine. In fact, over 90% of online experiences begin with a search engine. The purpose of an SEO agency is to put your website the top of Google’s rolodex when putting together search suggestions.
Can’t Google find me with a search engine optimizer?
Yes and no. Sure, the search spiders that work on behave of Google are very efficient at pulling together any websites that correlate to the search terms that a use enters. However, your website isn’t going to get the kind of action that you want to see from it unless you get yourself to the top of Google’s search ranking.
Let’s let the numbers speak for themselves:
- When Google gives a user a list of suggested sites, somewhere around 80% of the time, they’re going to automatically mentally filter out the paid advertisements and go straight to the organic results.
- About one-third of users will choose the first organic link that Google suggests. This prime spot is where you want to be.
- The second suggested link will get 18% of the love. Each following link will get less and less.
- If you let the search engine spiders find you without the help of an SEO strategy, you’re most likely going to end up on the second page of search results (because, trust us, your competitors are creating SEO-friendly sites and elbowing their way past you to the top of the search engine ranking). When this happens, 70% of users will never even lay eyes on your link.
To sum it up, if you created a website that you want to get future customers to see, you want to incorporate search engine optimization into your marketing strategy.
How does one incorporate search engine optimization into their website?
Now we’re talking. The science of search engine optimization is a complicated and ever-changing topic. However, here are a few SEO approaches that are effective:
- Add quality content on the regular. Your site needs a blog where you add quality content. The more content that you have on your site, the more likely your site has the search terms that Google’s search spiders are looking for. Updating your content regularly tells Google, “Hey, we’re relevant and worth your attention!”
- Have a responsive design. As of 2014, online users are more likely to be hitting the web from a mobile device than a desktop. The last Google algorithm update actually tests if your website is mobile friendly (if you Google this, you’ll find a mobile tester where you can enter your web address and Google will tell you if you pass or fail the mobile test). By creating a responsive design, your page is desktop-friendly to visitors who are on a desktop, and mobile-friendly to viewers using a cellphone or tablet to visit your site.
- Utilize link building. When a link points to your site, it’s like a neon arrow that tells Google your site has something worth looking at. This works both with internal link building, where one of your indexed pages points to another, and external pages. The trick is you have to be on the up and up. If Google sees that you just dumped a bunch of links to yourself, they’ll penalize your ranking.
Do you have any comments on SEO strategies? We want to hear them in the comments! More like this blog.