Breaking Down SEO

What is search engine optimization (SEO), and why do you need it to promote online? As its name suggests, it refers to the process of improving a website using strategic keywords so that its pages appear on the search results. 

Nobody visits a search engine such as Google for no reason. There’s always a motive, such as:

• Searching for information
• Shopping for products and services
• Looking for online reviews or recommendations
• Engaging with online business owners or other Internet users

Regardless of the objective, online searches are carried out using keywords. For example, let’s say you’re looking for an apartment for rent on the Sunshine Coast. You may go to Google and type “Sunshine Coast apartments for rent.” When you press Enter, it will generate a list of websites that best match your search query. 

The purpose of SEO is to make your site appear in the search results and reach the top. If you work with an excellent agency, you may get to accomplish this. 

Why is this important? The first page captures more than 70% of search engine traffic. Only a few people take time to click to the second page, more so the next pages. 

SEO, though, is a complex process and can be confusing to people with limited technical knowledge, and is still vital to make a brand successful. You can choose the right agency more effectively when you know their area of expertise and the type of services they offer. 

Some of the most common types of SEO services are:

• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO
• Technical SEO
• Paid SEO
• Organic SEO

On-page SEO refers to the optimization you can do on the individual pages of your website, so it ranks high and generates traffic. Strategies include adding high-quality content, including original media such as videos and images, etc. 

Off-page SEO, Off-page SEO, meanwhile, includes activities you do outside of your web pages to help boost your ranking. Some of the popular techniques are:

• Link building
• Social media
• Forum engagement
• Content marketing

Of these strategies, one of the most vital is link building. While nobody knows how the algorithm works, search engines take note of where you’re linking to and who’s linking back. It’s because when websites link back to you, it’s a vote towards your credibility and authority. It gives an indication to search engines that you provide trustworthy content. Also, when you link to credible pages, it helps search engines find relevance to your targeted keywords. 

Technical SEO refers to optimizing the structure of the site for search engine crawlers. These are the ones that visit your site, browse through your pages, and then index them. This is how your updated content appears on the web. This way, when someone uses your targeted keywords, you appear on the list of search results as well. 

Good technical SEO means that:

• Your site is fast.
• Crawlers can visit your website often so that they can index more pages.
• Your site is searchable and functional on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets.
• It’s secure.
• The webpage doesn’t contain a dead or broken link, and you don’t have thin and duplicate content, which can confuse the crawlers. 

Paid SEO Paid SEO describes the process of optimizing your website by buying links. A good agency won’t do this since it increases the risk of a penalty from Google. 

Organic SEO is ranking pages naturally. This process takes time. You may see results only when you hit the sixth month. 

Take Note

Some people may also use the terms “SEO marketing,” “digital marketing,” and “search engine marketing” interchangeably. However, these do not have the same meanings. 

Digital marketing involves promotions or advertising through different digital means, not only through online. Search engine marketing, on the other hand, involves three methods:

• SEO
• Social media marketing
• Paid promotions, such as pay-per-click

How a Reliable SEO Service Helps Business to Grow

While you can try to do SEO by yourself, you may encounter the following problems:

• It will take you a long time to learn and apply the techniques correctly.
• Wrong strategies can jeopardize your website and ranking. 
• It may turn out to be costlier when you commit many mistakes. 
• You end up missing significant opportunities to boost sales and traffic because you need to do things through trial and error. 

If you want to give your business the higher chances of succeeding, consider investing in a Brisbane SEO service. 

The right team can help you in the following ways:

• They know what a search engine wants by keeping tabs on algorithm updates and industry trends.  
• They follow best practices to ensure that search engines don’t penalize you. 
• They help protect your brand and reputation, both online and offline. In a world where many of your potential customers can’t see you, credibility is everything. 
• They can implement more specific SEO techniques, such as local page optimization. According to HubSpot, 88% of the people who browse a local business online are more likely to visit the business within the day. 
• They have the tools that can help them improve your site in many aspects, from ranking to speed. They can also send you analytics reports to let you know the performance of their campaigns. 
• They assist in building a strong and unique brand online from scratch. 

Steps to Choose Right SEO Agency

By now, you already know the importance of doing SEO and how an agency can help you with it so you can grow your business and realize its full potential. You’ll come across many SEO agencies online who will claim to give you the first position on search engines and you may feel overwhelmed.

Here are the steps to help you narrow down choices and eventually pick the best Brisbane SEO service: 

1. Check Their Website 

Their website can reveal vital information about their capability and communication skills. You can assess its performance based on the following:

• Page speed (how fast the content appears)
• Design (Is It user-friendly?)
• Quality and quantity of content
• Portfolio, customer feedback, or testimonials
• Social media pages 

You may also visit their contact us page and shoot them an email or give them a call. You can use this tactic to determine how responsive they are to queries and concerns. 

2. Dig Deep Online

Impressed by their website? Then it’s time to delve deeper and learn more about the team outside their webpages. Check out the following:

• Online reviews and recommendations
• Feedback on their social media accounts 
• Forums 
• Comments from other digital marketers
• Reviews from business organizations and associations
• Information from the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC)

If you need information about their legitimacy, you can ask for credentials besides the portfolio. A legit agency isn’t afraid to show you more proof. 

3. Request for a Free Website Review

You can also test their knowledge, best practices, and expertise by asking for a free website review or an SEO audit. How does this work? 

An SEO specialist will visit your website and then assess your pages and keywords based on their checklist and tools. They will then send you an analytics report with recommendations to improve your traffic and ranking. 

4. Ask SEO-Related Questions

You can already find useful checklists online, or you can use the following:

• Do you specialize in a specific niche?
• What are your link-building strategies?
• How fast do you rank a page?
• How do you choose targeted keywords?
• Do you also analyze competitor websites?
• Do you manage competitor sites? 
• What tools do you use?
• How long have you been in the business?
• Based on my goal, what is your SEO plan? 

5. Know Your Budget 

Sometimes you get carried away by the need to do SEO that you forget about the cost. Online marketing comes with a price, and it may not be cheap. 

It’s especially true with SEO. To avoid losing your spot in the search results and continue to boost traffic and ranking, you need to do it consistently. Otherwise, changes in the algorithm can hurt you. 

These days, SEO agencies can give you packages or plans based on your budget. It can be unique for each client as per their needs and objectives. It is better to discuss your budget with the SEO agency before beginning to work together. 

In 2019, over a billion people were active Google users. The extensive search engine, meanwhile, receives more than 60,000 searches per second. You can imagine the number of people and the millions of queries out there that are going to rise in the coming years. 

All of these represent an opportunity to sell, inform, and persuade—only if you get SEO correctly with the right agency.

The post How to Choose a Reliable SEO Service for Your Business appeared first on SiteProNews.

Here are some of the thought-provoking and compelling reasons to outsource your SEO requirements. 

Provides a Cost-Effective Solution

Maintaining an in-house SEO team requires a high budget. Apart from paying them salaries and other perquisites, you need to regularly invest in their skill enhancement and buy the latest tools and software required to stay abreast with the changing algorithms and technologies. If you outsource it to some good SEO services in India, you can have the best minds to work on your case at economical rates. You don’t need to spend anything on acquiring the latest tools or on their training. It’s the responsibility of the SEO outsource India agency to which you have outsourced your SEO requirements. 

Huge Exposure Difference

Your in-house team only deals with your website and hence has limited exposure. Those working with an SEO agency deal with several projects simultaneously and thus have better exposure, which equips them to have better solutions to push up rankings. They also have access to the latest developments in SEO tools and techniques and stay updated on search industry latest happenings. This is something that is almost impossible to achieve in-house.

Enhances Your Productive Time

At times, business owners try to manage SEO needs through their regular staff. This hurts in two ways: first, regular staff is not equipped to handle it and thus do a shabby job, and secondly, it kills productive time. The employees, who were hired to work on improving your products and services or making an expansion model for the business, get busy in areas, which are not in their domain. Outsourcing SEO requirements to a professional in that field will free up your employees’ productive hours which can instead be utilized to do the work they were hired for.

You Get a Holistic and Comprehensive Solution

A competent SEO outsource India is equipped to provide you with a comprehensive and holistic solution. This covers all aspects of digital marketing, which helps in gaining visibility, leads and conversions. This includes building the right and organic backlinks, working on social media management, code optimization, white hat techniques, doing SEO audits to figure out any on-page issues and more. Even a tiny mistake is enough to hurt your rankings and reputation in the online world. The professionals know how to take proper care of all these major and minor issues. The detailing and complexity that a professional agency can provide are almost impossible to achieve in-house. 

Access to Latest Data, Tools and Techniques

SEO is a developed yet evolving science. The tools, techniques and data used in it keep changing at a rapid rate. It will be a costly for you to keep getting all the latest tools and software in-house. On the other hand, it is a business requirement for SEO agencies to keep updating their arsenal as per the latest developments and the cost of this investment gets justified since they use these for multiple clients.

Gain Edge over Your Competitors

It is a competitive world and most of the time you don’t always have a unique concept. Even if you have started on some unique concept, it will soon be copied and you will have competitors in the market. When working in the same industry vertical, you need to prove yourself better than your competitors to get more business. When working with an in-house team, it becomes difficult because you have no idea of how to get an edge over your rivals. SEO professionals know how to crack the code by analysing your competitors’ strategies and by making use of the right tools and techniques. Thus, they can help you gain an edge over your rivals.

SEO is not an easy task. It is a full-time job where one needs to deal with varying situations and challenges. Trying to do it in-house will suck your time, energy and resources and since the results will nowhere be close to what professionals can get you, it will be a frustrating exercise too. Thus, it makes complete sense to outsource your SEO requirements to a professional and you can concentrate on your core strength.

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Some people want to manage their own website. I get that. Maybe you have had some negative experiences with outside “expertise” in this department in the past and you don’t trust anyone else to do the job now. Again, I sympathize.

So if you are going to go it alone and do your own SEO then let me lend a hand with some helpful advice. If there is one mistake that I see website owners make that pains me more than any other it is this: Buying Links

This is my advice on how to buy links. Don’t….not ever. Never, nada, no damn way. And here is why. Because this is one sure way to get your website a penalty. Unless you have been schooled in SEO and link building it is almost a guarantee that you are going to buy something harmful. It’s just the nature of what you are buying.

Guaranteed to get a Penguin Penalty

There are many places that you can buy links online, and they are going to have 5-star ratings and 300 positive reviews which appears encouraging to those who do not understand a good link from a bad one. And honestly, I could not give someone enough instruction in 100 articles like this one that would give you the knowledge to make correct choices in this regard.

So you must be wondering how these vendors get so many positive reviews for their link building service when I am warning you not to ever go there? How can people just keep buying this service and not eventually either get bad reviews and/or run out of potential customers after enough get stung by their bad links?

The answer is somewhat complex but I will simplify it by saying that SEO has a dark side. Some call it “black hat” SEO after Matt Cutts called it that in an interview once. I guess it’s a cool name.

The fact is, there are some types of web properties that you can point these kinds of “bad” links to and it is actually an effective tactic to get them to rank higher. You can point them at properties that you do not own such as your Facebook page or a Youtube video. Often this will help those pages rank higher just like a quality link can help your main website rank higher.

However, there are so many other factors besides just having a link pointing to your website than just the link itself. And these factors do not each contribute to the cause in isolation. Each factor about the link is interconnected to every other factor. For example, the anchor text of the link is a very critical element of the link. Anchor text is the words the clickable link is embedded in, meaning the word or series of words that you actually click on to move to the other website.

But again, the anchor text of the link you just acquired has to be weighed in combination with all other anchors of every other link that is pointing at your website currently. Yes…..Google looks at the entirety of all anchors pointing at your site, not just the individual one you just built. So, as you might imagine, not having access to SEO tools that can measure and scan this information is alone a serious setback to the person “ just wanting to get some links” because some SEO dude on Youtube said it would help and, after all, the guy selling them on Fiverr has 300 positive reviews and those SEO guys are so freaking expensive….I mean really…..how hard can this SEO thing be anyway????

Ah……….it’s hard enough let me tell you.

All links and all the anchor combinations of all the links pointing to your site are just one factor in this equation. The entirety of all SEO factors, as they pertain to the position that your site ranks is so far beyond the scope of this article it is laughable to think that someone from John or Jane Q Public could just spend $20 on Fiverr and replace all the time I have spent ( literally 1000’s of hours) and get the same results as any competent SEO practitioner would get with this amount of training.

It is actually not laughable since the damage I have seen it do on several occasions is quite severe and ultimately avoidable if people would, at the very least, consult with someone in my field before proceeding down the road to link building disaster.

But people like to save money. If only it were this simple!

But I sympathize. It is hard to trust something that is little understood. Not to mention there are no central authorities that train or license those in the SEO field that you can call and no diplomas on the wall to create some trust for those who pay for our services either. That’s a tough situation.

My advice…..use some common sense first. If you are thinking about either doing your own SEO vs not doing it at all….. don’t do it at all. Seriously. It was one of the hardest things I ever learned and it is still ever evolving and I am having to learn new aspects of it every week. A business owner is far better off to concentrate on their craft and earn the money to hire a pro than create an even bigger mess for that pro to have to inevitably clean up after the damage is done.

In fact, I know people in my field that won’t even take on someone who has messed up their site with bad links because it is so much of a setback to future progress and you can only guess who gets blamed when things don’t go perfectly in the cleanup phase when the White Night SEO Squad comes in with all their link detox tools to the rescue.

It’s just a whole lot easier to go get a client without that kind of baggage. This is why the people who specialize in fixing these kinds of link building disasters are so damned expensive. Trust me…some of them are $2000 just to do the analysis before they even agree to do the job. Personally, I hire the job out to people who specialize in fixing these kinds of problems. They are more qualified to do the job. This should be a clue to website owners who want to DIY their way to the top. I am wise enough to hire my betters even though I could probably do a link cleanup gig just fine. I know when not to!

So what does a website owner do to assure they are hiring someone who is competent in the SEO field?

1) Ask them for a few references. It’s common in many fields and if an SEO person doesn’t have a few people that you can talk to regarding their success then they are not very smart business people. It’s kind of standard practice in any field where trust is hard to come by via traditional standards like credentials and licenses. Not that diplomas and pieces of stamped government paper are any kind of guarantee mind you. They are illusory comfort elements at best.

2) Ask them to do some small tasks for small money and see how they treat you during this time. Get them to build out a few social profiles or a Google My Business page for $30 and see what kind of job they do. Get them to do a small on-screen video showing the steps they took while they explain each step to you. You will get a feel for their attitude and skill level through this.

Really, you are going to have to narrow down the choice of who to hire for this job and eventually make a leap of faith over the void of uncertainty which will inevitably be awaiting you near the decision point. You can never remove all risk from a decision like this. You just have to remove as many risk variables as humanly possible.

3) So now that I have seemingly told you not to do your own SEO let me tell you some things that you can do as a website owner.

Do your on-page SEO. Make sure your site title is filled out fully and don’t repeat your business name in the title. This is a waste of an opportunity to place a keyword or phrase in the title. This is a strong cue to Google as to what you want to rank for. If your business is plumbing in Chicago then you may want to make your site title ” Plumbers Chicago | Chicago Plumbing Contractors ” so as to take advantage of that search. So often I do an analysis of a potential client and find that their website name is joesplumbing.ca and their site title is Joe’s Plumbing. Such a waste of an opportunity.

I have started with clients that are stuck on page 2 for all their keywords, changed their site title to a keyword phrase and within a week they pop up to the bottom of page 1. Amazing what a simple change can make sometimes.

Build your citations. Citations are free directories that you can use to put your name, address, and phone number plus a naked URL link to your website. They are critical for ranking in the Google Map Pack. They are a small pain in the ass to fill out and a bit time consuming but they are worth your time. Make sure your name, address and phone # are identical to your Google My Business page info. How do you find your citations? Simply place your competition’s web address in a search query like this “competitor.com” and look at the search results for their citations. The top ranking competitors will most assuredly have filled out citations.

Build out your social profiles. Obviously, you should already have a youtube channel, Facebook Page, Pinterest, Linkedin, and Twitter but there are many other lesser known social profiles that you can fill out that also lend authority to your web domain. You can go to “knowem.com” and find a list of available sites there. There are literally hundreds of these available to you. This is a standard part of the service we provide for our clients.

Build up some videos of some aspect of your business and put them on Youtube. I know, I know….. you are camera shy. Tough…. If you want to be successful then suck it up and get the camera rolling. If, for example, you are an HVAC pro, do a few videos of yourself on the job and talk about what problem you are solving as you work at the task. You will probably be thinking through the steps as you work anyway so just speak them out as if you are teaching an apprentice and record that. You could probably do 20 of these little 2-5 minute videos in a week and put them on Youtube. You would be amazed how many people I know in various industries that have pulled in business with Youtube. And it’s FREE!!!!!

Facebook….don’t waste your time. Facebook has become the domain of advertising and that’s the final word on that. Spend your time elsewhere.

These tasks will keep you busy for a while and in many cases, will bring you some results. If you are in a competitive niche, then don’t expect massive success. You will need a pro for that.

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