SEO is the practice of making your website discoverable to the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing). If your website is on the internet, but doesn’t have an official category to live in, the search engines ignore it.
This makes it very hard for web searchers to find it. SEO is to most businesses what the Yellow Pages were to most businesses 25 years or so ago. The main difference, other than it being on the internet and not in a book, is that the results are not alphabetical, but are sorted by relevance.
It is universally accepted that if you rank well in Google or other search engines, that your business is good or valid or relevant. Strong search results are more trusted and therefore get clicked on more often; significantly more often than ads or results on page 2 or beyond. This phenomenon is called “social proof.”
Social Proof and positive search results will drive traffic more consistently in the long run.
Here’s an analogy: If I were to ask you to find a specific document and then handed you 1000 pieces of paper, in different languages, on different topics and in no particular order, you’d likely not even bother trying to find it.
Search engines are tasked with a similar errand. When you create your website, you essentially put it into a digital filing cabinet with no labels or easy ways to find it. When you optimize your website, you are labeling it appropriately and earmarking it to be found easily.
So how do we do that?
We pick keywords that are the most searched for your company. The keywords function like letters or dates in a filing cabinet. All November 2019 transactions are in that filing cabinet.
All clients that start with letter “G” are in the appropriate cabinet. Keywords basically do the same thing. We engage in activities that help us put your website in the right category and then build links (and other things) so that it shows up at the top of the category. This will significantly increase traffic to your website directly.
The only drawback to SEO is how long it takes to see the results you want. Remember the 1000 documents? Every day, the internet adds documents to the pile that need to be categorized.
We continue to add information to your website and build links that make a case for your website to be at the top of the search rankings (or file cabinet in this analogy). This process takes several months because of the volume of information on the internet. There are strategies to make this process happen faster and we implement them regularly, but it still takes time.
Effective SEO can take several months to achieve first page results. Most businesses are unwilling to wait several months for consistent lead flow, but also recognize that SEO is a necessary part of their digital strategy. Stick with us though; we’re really good at it. 😉
For search engine marketing and search engine optimization from a well established company based in Charlotte, North Carolina, get in touch.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focuses on optimizing your website for search. Instead of focusing exclusively on your website, Local SEO focuses on your Google My Business profile page. On the local level, Google displays business pages and a map highlighting where the businesses are located.
Local SEO is a great tool for any business that interacts in-person with customers, clients, or patients. It’s also a great tool if your clients or customers want to work with someone locally.
Yes, you will need to make changes to your website. The search engines love content and the more relevant the content is, the better for your local SEO strategy. The greatest impact will be making changes to title tags, headers, metas, and ALT tags.
Search results are not guaranteed, but we have a solid track record. No agency or SEO expert can guarantee results because search engines are constantly gaining new info that will compete with your results.
Though it depends on the keyword and the industry, an average is between six months and one year. GoBeyond has historically been in the 4-8 month range, but that still can vary.
