The very first step in any SEO campaign is keyword research. You may have a good idea of what keyword terms people would use to find your business, but more often than not, you either have it wrong or you’re missing something. You know your business very well. And you know how you talk about your business. That’s not always how customers talk about the business. We utilize multiple tools to pull actual keyword data from Google to understand exactly which terms people are using, how often those terms are searched, related terms that we haven’t thought of, and how competitive each term is. With that data in hand, we know exactly how to spend our time on SEO to deliver the most impactful results to your business.

Once we have our keywords and a clear understanding of what we’re targeting, we need to start building out our content. Each keyword, with some exceptions when there is a very close relation between the keywords, should have its own page on the website. If you sell shoes and t-shirts, you’ll have far more SEO success with an optimized page for Shoes and an optimized page for T-Shirts, rather than trying to make a single page rank for both keywords. Your web page content should be thorough, as there is clear evidence that longer content ranks higher than shorter content. But it’s certainly not just quantity over quality. The content must be engaging, natural and provide as much or as little information as the user is hoping to consume.

The way in which you write and display your content is equally, if not even more important, than the content itself. Following a proper technical implementation includes, but is not limited to, site architecture, implementing proper keyword-rich URLs and organizing your on-page content with proper header tags, title tags, image alt tags. This will put you far ahead of your competitors. Each page should also have schema markup and display the content in web-friendly short paragraphs with supporting visuals to engage the user.

Almost everything on this page could be categorized under User Experience. But it’s so vitally important, let’s give it its own section. User experience covers everything that the user encounters when visiting your website. Is it mobile friendly? Can they find what they need quickly without too much thinking, clicking or friction? Are the forms easy to fill out? Does the website and each of its pages load very quickly? If any of these things fall short, you’re missing out on major SEO opportunity. Fortunately, we know how to fix it!

Improving conversions (% of people who visit vs. call/email/chat/text/buy) has obvious benefits. As you improve your conversion rate, you improve your leads/sales/etc. But it also has a strong SEO impact. Google (and other search engines) measure the rate of conversion on your website. If it’s low, they may interpret that as a poor website to include in the search results and drop your ranking. If it’s high, it’s the exact opposite. So when you improve conversions, not only do you get more leads/sales from your existing traffic, you also increase your traffic by way of increased rankings.

Last, but most definitely not least, a solid SEO strategy will include a smart backlinking strategy. Backlinks are the number of websites that link to your website. From Google’s perspective, the more people talking about you (linking to you), the more important and authoritative you must be. And they’ll reward you for it.

But be careful – this is easy to get wrong. In fact, a lot of SEO companies in Raleigh get this wrong too. Obtaining high quality backlinks takes time, effort, content, outreach, rejection… There are ways to shortcut it. And these ways sometimes have a short-term benefit. But ultimately it will catch up with you. If you are working on your backlinking strategy – or hire someone to do it for you – be very involved and ask questions about how the links are obtained, the quality and relevancy of the site linking to you, and make sure you check them out for yourself.