So Many Questions
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“What’s SEO?”
“What does your company even do??”
Ever heard these kinds of queries? Baffled that people don’t “get” what your business does? Forbes contributor Joshua Steimle talks about the most common question he gets on a daily basis when talking about his SEO firm: “What exactly do you do??”
Steimle has a whole process for describing what his SEO firm does and the basic steps of on-site SEO. He usually replies with, “We help companies get business from search engines,” but that leads to the next question, “How do you do that?” He then explains to people that SEO is made up of creating content, building high quality links and analyzing and adjusting results.
“It’s hard to know where to start without going into a two-hour long explanation that is sure to make your eyes glaze over,” Steimle says correctly and comically.
Basic Traditional SEO
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Image courtesy of Sean MacEntee
Analysis, Research and Audit: Steimle says every client is different, but SEO should always start with this.
- Keywords: As we have shared with you before, the first step is some good keyword research. The ideal keyword is something that will be searched for a lot, is relevant to the client’s business and is not being targeted heavily by competition, says Steimle.
- Analytics: Next, an SEO firm will review past performance through analysis tools like Google Analytics to see positive or negative trends and opportunities for improvement. Google Webmaster Tools can also be viewed to see potential issues with a client’s website, Steimle explains.
- Links: Then, a firm will clean up spammy links. In the past, a client might have paid for some crappy inbound links that were put together for a low price. Google now penalizes this practice, so it’s important to get rid of this in the beginning.
- Audit: Next to do in SEO is to perform a site audit. This includes looking at factors like “website and web page load speed, URL structure, internal linking, title tags, meta description tags and content,” says Steimle.
- Initial Optimization: This can include website redesign, website code overhaul, competitor research, brand monitoring, outreach and online public relations.
- Content Expansion: Your SEO firm can help you improve and expand upon the content you already have. This can also include blogs and FAQs.
- Ongoing Analysis and Reporting: Analysis needs to be continued to be truly effective. Reports also help you see your data all in one place.
Local SEO and What We Do
Image courtesy of Paloma Gómez
There are many other things that can be added to this list, and it’s not meant to be the be-all-end-all of SEO practice. All these steps might seem like a bit much, and don’t worry you don’t have to do this for your company alone.
We get that question often too of, “What does your company really do?” and want to help clarify and put into simple terms what your resident local SEO expert is doing for your business. Just a note, local SEO should be done in addition to traditional SEO. A local SEO professional is not just concerned with the traditional SEO work but adds the local SEO tasks onto their already-challenging set of tasks. SyCara Local helps SEOs with the off site, external, local SEO problems. Make sure you or your SEO professional have covered the basic SEO steps above as you’re working on local SEO. SyCara Local helps you with local, off-site SEO. Here’s how SyCara Local can help you with some basics.
- Update Contact Information: We specialize in local SEO which includes helping search engines find your business. We make sure your name, address and phone number or NAP can be found easily. SyCara Local checks the accuracy of your information across 16 of the top online directories and makes sure the listings are claimed or managed by you.
- Track Keyword Search Rank: We track organic search keyword rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo as well as Universal Local (Google Plus) keyword rankings. Knowing where your businesses show up in local searches allows you to better optimize your campaigns and helps you to find where you need to make improvements to your local presence.
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Citations: Citations happen anytime your business name or information is mentioned online. Citation sources are important in local SEO, because search engines consider them to be a very reliable indicator of trust, relevance and quality. - Competitive Citations: We also monitor the online local presence of your competitors and use that knowledge to improve your own local presence.
- Analysis and Reporting: One of our newest features is Custom Reports, an easy-to-use PDF reporting solution that does most of the work for you. The reports can be auto-generated and include multiple templates.
Contact us for a live demo to see how we can help you with your local SEO and help you answer those annoying questions of, “What does your company do anyway??” 