Your website should be more than just a checkbox on your to-do list for running your business. Yes, you need one; however, if no one ever sees the site, it is a complete waste of time. You likely have heard about the options for driving traffic to your site, including PPC marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization, or SEO.
In fact, SEO can see a return of 5000% over the long-term. This is because it is additive as long as you do not try taking shortcuts. If you do, and Google catches you, you may end up having your site penalized. This is why who you choose as your search engine optimization consultant is so important.
When you look at search results, you typically find two types of results. The first you’ll see are paid ads, which are typically the first two or three on the page, and may also be along the right column on a computer. Once you get past the first couple of ads, you see the organic search results or non-paid search results.
This is actually a bit misleading, as the sites ranking for competitive keywords have invested substantially in organic search engine optimization. This form of search marketing starts with keyword research. A talented organic SEO consultant will look for keywords relevant to your product or service and that people actually use while searching.
Without quality keywords, you will either experience little organic traffic, a poor conversion rate, or both. In any of these situations, that means your site will fail to drive your business forward.
Once you have a quality set of keywords, the next step is developing the quality signals the search engines consider when ranking sites. While there are over 200 individual signals, your SEO marketing consultant should develop a strategy including:
It is important to find an organic SEO consultant with proven results in terms of both ranking sites and gaining conversions. This demonstrates the ability to properly balance the tactics to actually drive your business forward. Without this, you increase your risk of wasting your SEO consulting services budget.
The vast majority of companies depend on local business to improve their profit margin. Fortunately, most people who search for a business or product on a mobile device are actually searching for local businesses. What’s even better is that 50% of people who do a search on mobile will visit a business within 24 hours.
The search engines know that the intent between users is different, and so it ranks sites differently for local versus national or global search. In fact, the coveted first three results on a local search are affectionately called the Local 3-Pack, and are often easier to rank than standard search results.
This is why working with a local SEO consultant who is an expert in these differences is important. The strategy must be modified to help the search engines recognize your site for local searches.
One of the most important steps is claiming and optimizing your business listings. These are going to be what show first for people doing searches on a mobile device, or if the search engine considers the search locally oriented.
However, Local SEO services do not stop with simply claiming your listings. Rather, you still need the other organic SEO services to ensure your site will continue to rank over time. Your local SEO consultant will know the proper balance of tactics to achieve the best results.
Many business owners opt for a WordPress website because of their ease of management and adding content over time. And while you can install SEO plugins, these are not enough to push you up the search results. An experienced WordPress SEO consultant has gone beyond the normal skills needed for SEO services. Rather, many of the technical and on-page optimization tactics change because of how the WordPress system works. WordPress SEO services include optimizing how the code is executed to increase loading speeds. Your WordPress SEO Consultant should also be an expert in setting up the right plugins and the website theme so future updates to the website can easily be optimized. Not all themes are coded for efficient execution, though they may be beautiful on the front end. Likewise, not all plugins handle inserting code efficiently and drag down your site’s technical performance. A WordPress SEO expert knows how to modify the theme coding and knows which plugins will achieve the best results.
In a market that thrives on freelance work, you may be tempted to hire a freelance SEO consultant. However, when you work with an individual freelance SEO consultant, you are often left lacking a comprehensive SEO strategy.
An expert search engine optimization consultant leads NewStar SEO’s team of professionals, which means we are not constrained by a single person’s knowledge or opinion. Rather, our team has the range of skills to help you achieve high visibility, whether your market is local or national or whether you have a standard website or a WordPress site.
No two strategies will work equally well for two different sites. The markets may be different, you may have already had some SEO work completed, and you may have more competitive keywords. This means that a cookie-cutter strategy will only take you so far.
As an SEO marketing consultant, our firm’s first goal is to evaluate how your site is currently performing and then make a plan for how to move forward. That means you have a custom strategy to help lift your site and your business from where you actually are right now.
It’s easy to get started and see how your site is currently performing. Start with a free website SEO analysis provided by our SEO experts.
As you can probably tell, we are very proud of our SEO achievements. Let us know if you are interested in more details on how NewStar SEO can achieve great results for your company too.