Search Engine Optimization
“If you’re not first, you’re last.” – Ricky Bobby
SEO has one overriding purpose – to place a company’s website at the top of the first page of search engine results for a phrase lots of people use to find that company’s products.
Over 90% of all organic website hits occur from links on that first page. If your company is on it, it will get a portion of that 90%. If not, in a practical sense, it will not exist for the particular phrased used. There is no 2nd place, only first.
SEO has two primary advantages over traditional outbound marketing techniques like print advertising and telemarketing. Its cost per lead is about 60% less. And unlike outbound techniques, SEO produces residual leads. In other words, while an outbound campaign’s lead production vanishes at campaign end, SEO continues to attract leads after changes are finished.
This is all well and good, but the real trick to SEO is choosing the right phrases to target. A good phrase is a maximized combination of three factors:
- Number of searches per month
- Competition to appear on the first page
- Average profit from a prospect to hit your site when using the phrase
For every type of company and product, there exist phrases with relatively low competition that produce MORE monthly searches than slightly different phrases with much higher competition. The practice of analyzing multiple phrases to find the best combination of factors is the essence of good SEO, and we are very good at it. Once the right phrases are determined, the act of including them in website copy, page titles and descriptions (meta tags), blog topics, press releases, photo tags, anchor text and various other inputs is a fairly straightforward task.
Keyword optimization isn’t the only technique within our SEO tool belt. To be fully effective, we commonly employ other methods such as:
- Link building
- Competitor analysis
- Local search optimization
- Content development
- Online public relations and press releases
- Video SEO
- Marketing analytics
