Search engine optimization (SEO)

What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization is the process of increasing both the quality and quantity of visitors to your website through organic search.

Why do I need search engine optimization (SEO)?

Organic traffic is free traffic. And what’s better than free traffic? More and better free traffic.

SEO will help your website rank higher and be more visible to people searching for solutions that you offer. Organic visitors come from searching online (via search engines such as Google, Bing, and Baidu). If your website appears and the visitor clicks it, they enter your website.

Sometimes there are some problems that SEO can help resolve:

  • your website isn’t showing up on Google/Bing/Baidu

  • competitors are outranking you and are eating away at your business

  • website visitors are not able to find the right information on your site

Should I do search engine optimization (SEO) or paid marketing (SEM)?

Ideally, both. But it depends on your business needs:

I have money to spend and we need traffic this afternoon.

In this case, you need paid marketing. As soon as we hit go, your website can begin receiving traffic via paid marketing.

I don’t have much money and I want long-term ROI on my marketing spend.

Successful SEO programs generally start showing results 30 days - 3 months after execution. It takes some time for search engines to recrawl your website and to compare it to your competitors, but once it’s done, you will begin receiving the long-term benefits without having to continue to pay for traffic.

We generally recommend that you do both SEO and SEM because you can immediately begin receiving traffic while you build up your organic presence. You may then wish to wean off the SEM spend, though it is best practice to keep some SEM spend in place to get new visitors to your website and help bolster brand equity (we can talk more about how this works).

How do we start an SEO program?

Generally, we start any SEO program with the following:

  1. Discuss goals and how to reach those goals

  2. Review your data collection (you need data to identify issues and replicate success)

  3. Create an SEO program plan

  4. Execute, analyze, learn, and repeat

Contact us today and we can start tomorrow (unless tomorrow is the weekend…in which place we will get in touch the next business day).