Of course, you want drive as much traffic to your site as possible from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo (yes, it's still around). That’s why many businesses turn to digital marketing agencies that specialize in search engine optimization and provide SEO services.
It can be confusing and even a bit mysterious as to what “SEO services” means, what’s included, and how it can be measured. To put it simply, the goal of SEO is to maximize the number of quality visitors to your site by ensuring that your site appears as high as possible in search engine result pages (SERPs) for a particular set of relevant keywords.
As you may expect, you don’t reach that goal without some work. There are different SEO services that can help you bolster your online success. Here are five key SEO services that can make a difference for your business.
Technical SEO
When building a website, it's important to consider not just content and design, but also the technical "behind the scenes" details that can greatly impact your site in search. Technical SEO involves several elements that search engines consider when ranking a website, including:
This list just barely scratches the surface for issues that arise with regular check-in's on the performance of your site. If users wait too long for your site to load or frequently run into 404 errors when browsing through your content, Google notices and will factor that into how you rank.
When it comes down to it, you need a firm that understands how to optimize a website behind the scenes and explain how each factor can impact a site’s ability to drive search traffic.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is focused on user experience and optimizing page content for relevant keywords. Writing excellent website content means marrying compelling and relevant content for the user with rich keywords that are going to be found by search engines.
The process of optimizing on-page SEO involves:
- Researching relevant keywords for your product, service, vertical, or blog topic that have strong search volume.
- Ensuring the on-page content satisfies the user’s search query and intent.
- Building internal links from page to page to create strong connections between content.
- Balancing internal links with relevant and reputable outbound links. We're no longer in school, but it's still important to cite your sources.
- Ensuring content on a page is organized well for users to read and structured correctly for search engines to understand.
Off-Page Optimization
Off-page optimization is primarily focused on building links from authoritative and relevant sites. Link building has two primary benefits: driving traffic back to your website and more importantly, showing search engines that your website is reputable. Links from other authoritative sites (especially .edu, .org, or .gov sites) are like a stamp of approval from those sites that your content is valuable.
Link building can include several different tactics, including attaining listings in directories, publishing content on other sites, answering questions on social or Q&A forums, and more.
The link building process includes:
- Researching valuable opportunities for link building outreach.
- Prioritizing opportunities based on time, effort, and expected return value.
- Strategizing outreach (such as email, submissions, forum discussion, etc.).
- Tracking new inbound links generated.
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Local SEO
Local SEO ties into many of the above SEO tactics and is especially important for local or regional businesses as well as for businesses with brick-and-mortar locations.
Improving local SEO aims at getting search exposure for your business in the locations you serve. For example, a local dentist may want to show up in search results in the geographic area that they serve. This stretches beyond simple search results, as it has become more important to rank well in maps results.
Tactics for local SEO include:
- Ensuring your organization has listings in most of the prominent locations (especially Google).
- Ensuring that your listings are consistent across all channels and sites.
- Optimizing your site and content using specific local keywords, like city or state names, where applicable.
- Link building with relevant local directories, business organizations, and groups.
SEO Monitoring
How long does it take to see results from SEO? Unfortunately, there is no perfect answer to that question. Some SEO strategies turn results within a few months, if not a few weeks. For others, especially in competitive industries, results can take several months, if not longer. There aren’t any quick hacks for long-term success and trust from users and Google. If you aren’t seeing the results you expect, be patient and keep building up your authority through content reflecting your expertise.
As your SEO firm works on boosting your search engine visibility, it’s important to keep an eye on the right SEO performance metrics. At Aztek, we provide monthly reporting to show the progress being made and how it’s impacting your business. Remember, ranking higher is great, but if it’s not driving additional business success, there may be other issues at hand.
Need SEO Services?
There are more than 200 factors that affect search engine rankings. Not to mention, Google updates its algorithm almost nine times a day. When you work with Aztek, our SEO services include developing a strategy to help you gain search engine exposure and generate business results. Our goal is to keep our clients up-to-date on all tactics we’re using to improve search engine results. We’ll educate you on the best ways to improve SEO and how we’re using these techniques to improve traffic and convert more visitors through your website.
Want to improve SEO? Contact us today to see how we can provide SEO services for your organization.
