Years ago, when I first began working in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I was told a joke that stuck with me:
- Q: Where’s the best place on the internet to hide a secret?
- A: Page two of Google.
It’s true that 75% of users never proceed past the first page of Google, meaning that 25% of users do visit the second page of their search results. While this data isn’t as extreme as the joke may suggest, it is highlighting solid evidence that companies who rank on the first page of search engines hold a significant advantage over companies who don’t.
Let’s explore some the top SEO professional services that will improve your company’s online traffic.
Quality Keywords
Keyword research is a great first step when it comes to building out webpages. Understanding your customer and being able to sum up each landing page in a short-tail or long-tail keyword is essential to reaching your target audience organically. Using online SEO tools (i.e. MOZ Pro, SEMrush, etc.) is an excellent way to perform data driven keyword research. Important metrics to look out for are:
- Keyword Difficulty: A scale of 1-100 on how difficult it is to rank for a certain keyword.
- Monthly Volume: How often that keyword is searched monthly by users.
- Organic CTR: Predicts the Click-Through Rate (CTR) at which that keyword will perform.
- Priority: Combines all of the above metrics to predict how important this keyword is to utilize.
To take it a step further, it’s recommended to include keywords in the meta of your images, rather than just your landing pages. This better assists search engines in their eternal pursuit to matching relevant content to search results.
Consistent Long-Form Content
Search engines, Google in particular, continue to dominate the internet when it comes to providing the best organic opportunities to grow your company. A positive aspect of SEO is that it’s an inexpensive way to expand your online traffic. Although, while you may not pay a hefty price with cash, you do have to pay with time and patience.
Organic traffic is a long game requiring a steady drip of quality content that’s highly relevant to your company. Consistently creating more blogs, articles, and landing pages around keywords that show opportunity is a great way to rank higher. It’s also been proven that long-form content (landing pages with 1,000 words or more) perform much higher in search rankings. SEO takes 6-months to a year to get right, particularly if you’re a new company or rebranding. Rather than week-by-week improvements, which will inevitably waver up and down in search traffic, we want to see incremental month-by-month improvements.
Optimized UX and Meta Copy
Google prioritizes page loading speed as an important factor when it comes to how they decide to rank websites. For example, websites with optimized UX (resulting in a snappier user interface) are much more likely to rank on the first page of search results. Making sure your website runs quickly on both desktop and mobile search engines is essential to rank higher than your competition. You can track your businesses webpage loading speed on Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Additionally, adding quality Meta-Titles and Meta-Descriptions to each of your landing pages is a vital step. This is the text that’s shown to each impressionable user, including a compelling Call-To-Action (CTA) within your meta-copy is a great simple way to increase website traffic and, eventually, conversions.
Link Building
Across my experience working with SEO professional services, I’ve seen link building as the absolute BEST way to improve your company’s SEO. Examples of link building include:
- Internal Links: An internal link is a hyperlink that allows the navigation of one landing page to another within the same website. This helps search engines better understand your website, resulting in improved rankings in relevant searches.
- External Links: An external link is a hyperlink which navigates to a separate website domain. Data suggests that external links provide the best information for Google to determine the popularity of a webpage.
- Backlinks: Also called “inbound links”, backlinks are hyperlinks from other website domains that link back to one of your landing pages. This is an excellent way for other audiences to navigate to your website, and for search engines to better understand the relevancy of your content.
Accumulating backlinks naturally takes time and patience, although this is the absolute best way to build confidence with Google and acquire mutually-beneficial relationships with other company’s. Creating relationships with other businesses or websites, particularly those who rank high in organic search already, and eventually asking them to link back to your website is a great way to improve search ranking.
Link building extends much farther than just search engines. Through social media, it’s important to influence the influencers to talk about your business. Forming a professional relationship with a blogger, then having that blogger link back to your website both encourages their fan base to check you out and it greatly improves your SEO. This could be an Instagram influencer tagging you in their Post or a Story. Creating some sort of plan for the influencer to want to talk about your service to their followers is a vital factor of SEO.
The Ever-Evolving Business of SEO Professional Services
As incredible as it may sound, all the provided steps barely scratch the surface when it comes to SEO professional services. You need to take into consideration other factors such as Google My Business, compressing website content, crawl accessibility, and much more. In today’s competitive market, SEO is more important than ever. At Destination Marketing, our experts are thoroughly trained in the latest SEO industry trends, always testing new tactics and optimizing for prime positions to boost your visibility across all major search engines.
Our agency’s omni-channel digital marketing approach and customized digital solutions will turn your leads into customers and your business into an industry leader. They will also increase your traffic, engage and re-engage your leads, and boost your e-commerce sales. With a fully integrated digital strategy and content that converts, our digital marketing agency helps you stand out from the crowd because everything we do is focused on generating prospects for your business.
