Search Engine Optimization
SEO is the key to improving your “findability”.
Content plans | search engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization – “The Watershed9 Way”
What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimization is the name given to any activity that attempts to improve the visibility of your website in search engines. The word ‘findability’ may describe it even better. When a prospect looking for your product or service types a search phrase into a search engine (Google, Bing etc.) wouldn’t it be great if they found your website on the first page of search results?
While getting you to page one for any specific keyword or search term is no easy task, our SEO programs have been designed to ensure consistent movement of your web pages from lower rankings (where you are today) towards the prime real estate higher up the page. It takes time and in-depth understanding of how search engines think for our Search Engine Optimization team to reach this goal on your behalf.
Content
There’s an old cliche “content is king”, and it is absolutely true. The surest way to keep your website on a fast-track to better organic search results is to add new content. Whether it’s new page content, blog pages, or video, Google loves content. The challenge for most businesses is finding a way to keep the new ideas flowing while you’re busy building your business. We have solutions that are low stress and high impact.
Engagement
How long do people stay on your website once they arrive? It sure matters to Google and they rank your site by how ‘useful’ the search result was to the person looking for your products and services. We study the web browsing habits of your users and work to increase their engagement (interaction) with your website. Longer visits to your site means more love from Google!
Links
How your website ranks in organic search is dependent on how many other websites know you exist. Our team works to build a network of external links back to your website that will become more valuable as time goes on. As with all our SEO strategies, we follow Google best practices to ensure your website increases in value to all search engines – and customers looking to do business with you.
Technical
Online search trends and the way humans interact with your website is in a constant state of flux. The extensive list of technical updates required to lift your website to a higher level will follow the same track regardless of your business, or product / service mix. We work on your website (on your budget) to meticulously optimize every aspect of your website. From alt tags to overall site structure, and a whole lot of other improvements (see below), our team is dedicated to making your website the best it can be.
Site Speed
One of the biggest factors to consider when ranking your website is the time it takes to load. People don’t like slow websites and neither do search engines. Our team will analyze your site and make adjustments to make sure that slow page loads become a thing of the past.
How Do Search Engines Decide Who Is On Page One?
Search Engines use mathematics (an algorithm) to determine which business listings should be seen first when a user is searching for a service or business. There are no actual people making these decisions. How exactly that algorithm works is never disclosed by Google and for obvious reasons. Accurate ranking of web pages is determined by how well the suggested pages answer the questions entered into the search engine user. For example, if a page contains helpful information and visitors to that website stay longer to read the content, Google considers that a succesful search and the algorithm will rank that page higher “for that question”.
Google’s accuracy in finding the best pages for any given search are the key to Google’s success. Any tricks or shady practices that cause pages to rank higher when they don’t help a human user will actually hurt page rankings.
However as Google does give general guidelines, SEO professionals like ourselves can follow best practices. We can:
- perform tests on sites we own and measure the results
- reverse engineer the sites that are positioned really well
Our “style” of SEO is referred to as “Technical or Scientific SEO”. We determine what to do for a client based on evidence that we have seen and proven to ourselves and what is commonly assumed to be best practices.
Certain fundamentals are always followed:
- content is crucial… you need to have an ongoing content plan of some kind
- inbound links… other websites that link to you (ie: Chamber Of Commerce) help your “reputation” with Google
- technical optimization of pages… no coding errors… correct use of various markup… etc.
- site load time… particularly on mobile
- site structure and internal linking… how your site is organized and how pages link to each other
Technical SEO – What do we actually do?
Getting better organic search results on Google is the primary goal of our work. There are a lot of things that can be done and in every case we will focus on those tasks which will bring the greatest chance of improved organic search results.
Our SEO tasks include the following:
- review your current analytics… how many people visit? what pages do they read? how long do they stay?
- research to discover the most important keywords for your website
- review the websites that are currently ranking well for those keywords
- review current page TITLES and DESCRIPTION tags
- review current keyword density in text body
- review your Social Media setup as these can provide quality inbound links and help with overall visibility
- content creation
- help acquire inbound links
- review new page TITLES and DESCRIPTION tags
- review new keyword density in text body
- distribute new content through your Social Media
- improve search results click through rate (CTR)
- improve web page engagement (how long people “dwell” on a page)
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