Why Would You Need SEO Services?

12 November 2019

SEO should be a fundamental part of your overall marketing strategy. In the following article, we explore what SEO is and why SEO services could be the perfect fit for your business to help it grow.

What is SEO?

You may have heard about SEO which stands for “Search Engine Optimization” before, but what is it? SEO allows you to generate traffic for your website for free, also known as organic search results on search engines.

SEO aims to structure your content in a certain way that allows it to perform better in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. The higher your content ranks organically the better it will perform and more traffic will generate for your website.

Does your business need SEO Services?

SEO is a great strategy for any business, small, medium or large. It allows you to optimize the content you create in a cost-efficient way. There is a huge opportunity for business growth by including it in your marketing strategy, it’s also likely your competitors are investing in SEO too. Relying on only one source of traffic for your website/marketing can be detrimental to your business success, diversifying your reach is a solid and proven strategy to keep your business competitive as the marketing landscape changes.

7 reasons your SEO Services will help your business

The internet continues to grow

The internet continues to grow, which means your consumer base can be growing too. In January 2019 more than 4.39 billion people were online, an increase of 366 million from the previous year.

With organic search being one of the largest channels for business website traffic, you’d be leaving your business at a disadvantage if you aren’t investing in a solid SEO strategy.

Your competition is using SEO

It is likely that your competitors are already using SEO to help grow their businesses by generating organic traffic to their sites. Stay ahead of the competition with SEO and start ranking for key terms that will generate relevant website traffic for your business. It also means you are preventing customers from going directly to your competitors.

Investing in high-quality SEO services will also allow you to perform better than your competitors if they are executing their SEO poorly. Take advantage of the opportunity that SEO provides and start building an SEO strategy today.

SEO delivers a high ROI

SEO can bring some of the best ROI of any marketing channel as it’s long term, meaning that it outperforms paid search in the long run. Why? Once your content is starting to rank well, it will continue to drive traffic to your business, unlike paid advertising which stops once you stop spending. This means that in the long run, you get better lasting results for your money.

As your SEO strengthens the effects can increase your website traffic and ultimately your leads. Just note that SEO is a longer-term strategy and it will take 6-12 months before you really get traction. If you’re investing in an SEO strategy we recommend taking at least 6 months to start seeing the results.

It boosts your creditability as a business

Using a solid content marketing strategy, a fundamental part of a good SEO strategy, you can begin to build trust in your marketplace by offering quality, informative and valuable content for your potential customers.

The more valuable content that you have the more trust you can gain. The added benefit of this is that as your content begins to rank well and it can generate more traffic to your site. SEO gives you another means to reach your customers and build touchpoints with them before they purchase.

For sales, the average number of touchpoints is between 6 and 8 times, which means potential customers generally will interact with your business up to 8 times before they make their decision if they want to buy. Creating quality content will allow you to strengthen those touchpoints with your potential customers.

It improves user experience

Google’s ultimate goal is to provide the best possible results and experience for its users.

As a result, many of their recent algorithm updates focus on making sure that they are sending users to sites that not only provide relevant content but also great user experience.

When considering SEO whilst creating content, the user should be at the front of your mind, again this creates better content and sends signals to Google that you’re serious about adding value.

That’s why SEO is a fundamental tool to use as it takes into consideration technical factors like mobile-friendliness, usability, and site speed, which plays a big role in search engine results page rankings than ever before.

While this means that optimizing your site might require a bit more professional help, it also means that you’ll be continuously improving the user experience your site provides.

With better user experience you can expect better conversions, this can have a significant impact on your sales and revenue in the long run.

SEO results can be measured

Measuring results is a huge win when it comes to any business activity, and SEO is no different. You can track every aspect of your SEO results, and most of the tools like Google Analytics and Google search console come free. Track everything from your website traffic, where your traffic comes from (referral sources), conversions (based on goals you set) and any other important metrics for your business.

Using this data allows you to fine-tune your marketing and SEO efforts to further improve your website and your ranking with search engines. With any good SEO management company, they should be able to provide you with detailed reports of your SEO growth and how that performance is affecting your business.

You can reach a local audience

Do you have a brick and mortar business, or are you fighting for clients in a specific area? Using SEO can help bring visibility to your business. Using local SEO you can improve your business’s credibility and find customers that are looking for your services in your local area.

So there you have it 7 solid reasons why SEO is super important for your marketing strategy and long term business success. But why do you need an SEO management company and what services can they offer you?

Why an SEO management company?

Whilst SEO fundamentals are relatively simple, SEO itself is an ever-changing landscape that requires time, effort and technical knowledge to track and implement.

A good SEO management company can offer you proven strategies that work to help improve your SEO and to help you get the most from your marketing dollars. This should include a solid SEO strategy tailor-made for your business needs and goals. Ultimately this should improve your site traffic in both quality and quantity leading to business growth.

SEO management companies are also able to effectively track and report on your SEO growth, and can easily adjust our SEO strategy to provide better results. This way you’re able to see how your performance improves over time and the return on investment that you’re getting.

If you are serious about improving your website SEO to improve your overall marketing strategy, then investing in an SEO management company is the perfect fit for you.

What services can an SEO management company offer?

SEO management companies can offer a variety of services from SEO audits to monthly SEO services. Generally, they will help with improving your search engine rankings, help with site optimization, offer strategy development and assist with content creation as well as providing detailed reports on your SEO spend.

Enspire offers the following services as part of different packages to help your SEO grow.

SEO Audits

One-time SEO audits are a great solution for anyone with an existing website that wants to learn more about your current website performance and how you can improve your website’s SEO.

The One-time SEO Audit includes a detailed report identifying any website technical on-site errors and issues. This report also includes suggestions for improving the health of your website for SEO.

SEO Strategy and Goals

With our monthly SEO packages, we can assist you further by analyzing your current business, understanding your goals and then tailoring a strategy that will work for your business. This is fundamental to SEO success and should be part of any good SEO agency offering.

This will include looking at your current website, as well as your industry competitors to understand your strengths and weaknesses, your customers and target audience before developing a new SEO strategy.

Keyword research and strategy

Keyword research and strategy is another important part of any good SEO offering. We do this by understanding what words and phrases you associate with your product and services. We will also use our competitor analysis to understand what key terms your competition is ranking for and if those key terms make sense for your business goals.

Once we have that information we can propose a plan that utilizes the selected key phrases to help your pages rank with search engines. Some of your existing content may already be set up well to take advantage of this strategy with some optimization, and in other cases, we may need to assist with content strategy and creation to target these key phrases.

Content Strategy and Content Creation

A good content strategy can take your SEO to the next level. Your website content needs to contain the right keywords and phrases to allow it to rank well. Creating keyword-rich content is a huge part of your overall marketing strategy.

Any good SEO company will offer advice on the best kind of content and how that relates to your keyword strategy. Some companies will even create the content for you (normally for an additional fee). Content strategy should also involve looking at your existing content and optimizing it where necessary to allow it to rank better with search engines allowing you to drive more organic traffic to your site.

Website optimization

After an SEO audit, some initial website optimization should be carried out on your website. This could be improving site speed, optimizing images, and making sure existing content has the right keywords, meta descriptions, and titles.

It could be some small adjustments to your most important pages to make sure that relevant keywords are being used. It may also mean removing content that isn’t working and making sure that plugins such as Yoast are configured so that only your strongest content is being indexed.

For local SEO it could be something as simple as making sure that your office/locations are listed on the home page, signaling to Google that you are in a specific area.

Submission to search engines

If you have a new website or have recently made adjustments and changes to your site, then it’s vital that you submit your site to search engines. This will allow them to check your content again and include it in search results.

Once submitted then it’s a matter of reviewing that existing content again and then it’s time to work on improving your rankings.

Ongoing support and updates

SEO is an ongoing and ever-changing landscape. To get the most out of it you should be working to optimize your content as you grow. With our monthly packages, we assist you with ongoing support, education, and analysis of your site as well as adjusting your strategy as SEO and your business changes.

It’s important to keep a heartbeat on algorithm changes as it could affect your SEO rankings. We’ll be sure to keep you notified if any major updates are affecting the performance of your site and make any necessary adjustments.

Time to take action

Now that you have a better understanding of how SEO can enhance your business marketing strategy, what an SEO management company is and what services they can help you with, it’s time to consider if an SEO company is right for you, or if it’s something you’ll do in-house.

If you’d like to find out more about how Enspire can help you with your SEO strategy and the type of services we offer, contact us today for a free consultation.

5 Key Things to Know About SEO

06 September 2019

SEO
Websites

“I have heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but what does it actually mean?”

“What are you actually going to do?”

“Why do I need SEO?”

These are questions that we receive from many clients when they explore our SEO and Marketing services. They try to understand what it is they are paying for and why it is important for them.

Unfortunately in the SEO market, there are many people who claim that they can put companies at #1 on Google. The reality is: it is NOT that simple. No guarantees can be made. A track record backed up by data and research is the only real way to know if someone can help you with SEO. Still, it will take time.

When we look at the reasons why companies don’t involve themselves in SEO, three main reasons stand out:

It seems too expensive;
They have been disappointed before by someone promising everything and never seeing results;
They just don’t understand why SEO is needed or important to them.

These are all legitimate concerns.

At Enspire we keep SEO in mind from the beginning, as it impacts everything we do from design to development and the optimization of the site. SEO is something that no one can ignore any longer.

Which is exactly why we want to clear things up about SEO. We will share simple yet important points to keep in mind when approaching this topic.

1. What is the difference between On-site SEO vs Off-site SEO?

We first need to understand the different pieces of SEO before we can look at the next steps.

On-site SEO

As you might have figured out from the title, this is everything you control ON your website, it is also known as “on-page SEO”. This includes the content and functionality on your site and how it is optimized. To put it simply: this is how you optimize your website for focus keywords and appearing in the top results within search engines.

What it involves:

setting up an SEO plugin (we recommend Yoast)
reviewing the page loading speed
making sure that the content on the website is focused and clear
setting up a sitemap with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools (Plus Yandex if you have a more global audience)

This is what we would call a basic setup for your website, to ensure the Search Engines can find, read, and understand your website. The focus keywords will be “indexed” along with all the pages/posts you may have on your site so that your website is sharing the most relevant information also known as the information you want Search Engines to know.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Off-site SEO

Things get a bit more complicated with off-site SEO, it is not nearly as straightforward as on-site SEO. With on-site SEO once you set it up you will have to maintain it but for the most part, you don’t have to change things very often. Off-site SEO is always changing and is something you have to constantly keep up-to-date with.

Off-site SEO is really referring to backlinks to your website. This is the core of how Google measures your domain authority and trustworthiness. The more trustworthy and high authority domains link to your site, the better Google will view your site. While it might sound easy it is very hard to maintain consistent high-quality backlinks to your site. The best way to do this is by creating high-value content that people will share and repost.

Also included in off-site SEO is social media, guest blogging, influencer marketing, and brand mentions.

To simplify and sum it up…

On-site SEO requires research, setup, and basic maintenance but once it is set up you have a nice foundation. Off-site SEO requires a full strategy for daily monitoring, creation of high-quality content, social media sharing and finding opportunities to guest blog or submit a press release to news sites about something you are doing.

Phew… now let’s move on to the next point.

2. How do we know what our focus keywords are?

This is another question that is very important and asked often by clients. The trick here is that most clients already know their focus keywords as they say them daily to clients and their colleagues. The process is collecting all the focus keywords, doing research on what your competitors are doing and then narrowing down the focus keywords to the most effective, relative to the industry or service you want to target.

There are some great resources and tools out there to help with this process such as Moz, ahrefs and Raven. Though many of these are for agencies (like ourselves) not for small businesses as the pricing is a bit steep (some offer free trials for a limited time). There are also the free options of using Google Analytics and Google Keyword Planner.

Say you have all the information collected and in front of you. What does it all mean? How do you know which is the best one for your company?

This is a process that takes time and having all the research and information is only the first step towards great keywords.

Put yourself into your customers’ shoes and think about what they would search for in Google. How would they look for your service or product? Start to make a list of whatever comes to mind as it is important to balance what you know about your company within your industry and what your clients might know as well as understand.

Now it is time to analyze the data, competitor research, internal research and perspective of the client to find the best focus keyword(s), these are the keywords that should not only be easy to search and find your website but are also naturally used in the content you have on your website.

3. Is SEO expensive?

SEO can become expensive but it really depends on resources and how big of a reach you would like to have.

The question you will need to ask yourself: how much are you willing to invest? Keeping in mind that there is an initial investment upfront to get some things setup.

What it includes:

the setup fee for optimizing your site for SEO
installing plugins
setting up or refreshing Google Search Console
Schema markup
etc.

These are things that don’t need to be done all the time but it is important to set them up correctly and maintain them to ensure there are no errors or problems impacting performance. This is, of course, referring to on-site SEO. In terms of how much you spend on research of key focus words and off-site SEO that can really add up quickly.

If you don’t have the time or resources, then the most important part of the process is the research / finding the current focus keywords. If you don’t start with the right keywords then everything else you do won’t be as effective.

Off-site SEO would be the area that you would want to invest in last because the other two need to be set up correctly before your off-site SEO can be effective.

This is also the part where you can “leave it” (but still maintain it) to grow organically over time, or invest in a blog, videos, infographics, white-papers and other high-quality content along with a strategy to develop some serious backlinks. Which in return would give you stronger rankings, trustworthiness and domain authority. Either way, it is going to take some time but it is the best practice and the correct (no black-hat techniques) way to improve your SEO.

Think of it this way. You need to make sure you know where you are going (focus keywords) and have a good base (on-site SEO) before making a large leap (off-site SEO) as without the previous two the last would land quite badly.

4. Can I do this myself? Or should I hire someone?

Yes, you can! Though it would take time for you to learn what needs to be done and it also would require technical skills to make tweaks to your site.

Many of the clients that we work with at Enspire are interested in learning more about SEO and what it means and how they can do it better, which is important!

We love it when clients are researching, learning and asking great questions during our conversations. We believe the best combination for a company (especially smaller companies) is to gain an awareness of what SEO is and how you can use it at your company. It will enhance your SEO strategy and will bring up the question “How will this help our SEO?” more often, which is always good!

Do note that it would be more effective if you have an agency that specializes in SEO work with you. Especially when it comes to doing focus keyword research, setting up the on-site SEO and creating an off-site SEO strategy. The more you know about SEO the better because it will help facilitate conversations and develop a better overall impact.

Look at the trade-off of hiring someone or doing it yourself. You are going to spend a lot of time learning and setting things up yourself. How much is your time worth? Compared to hiring someone to do it for you?

The combination of the company working with an SEO expert is a winning combination. You are balancing the technical skills and understanding with the knowledge of the industry/company. Great things will happen with this combo!

5. What are some other factors that impact SEO?

There are a ton of factors that impact your SEO and we are not going to cover all of them in this article but we would like to highlight a few that are very important to know and understand the implications.

Website Page Load Speed

This is becoming more and more important in SEO rankings. While not the MOST important, it is a factor that will gain significantly. As SEO is not just about the quality of information and authority, it also takes into consideration the user experience and the site that offers the better experience is going to win. This means that if your page takes longer than 3 seconds to load you are offering a poor user experience.

At Enspire our goal is to have all of the websites we create load in less than 3 seconds, with the ultimate goal to have them load in 1 second.

Check out Pingdom and Gtmetrix to test your website and see how long it takes for your website to load.

Encryption

If you don’t have an SSL certificate it will start to impact your rankings, as your website will be viewed as not as safe compared to a website that has one. Not a huge factor at the moment but it does have an impact.

Also, this impacts how people perceive your website, how professional it looks.

Pop-ups

Incredibly popular but Google is starting to penalize websites that have them. Especially if they are full-page and hard to close (aka impacting the user experience). Honestly, almost everyone we know hates these and will sometimes even leave the website if they get a pop-up message to subscribe.

Final Notes

These are just a few other factors to think about with your website and note them as you talk about SEO with an agency or your own company.

It is important to stay up-to-date with the latest trends of SEO and the factors involved. Things are changing fast, but at the end of the day if you offer great value and user experience on your website you are on the right track.

Then the question is: “How can you harness that to get your website working for you?”

Let us know if this article was helpful and please reach out and contact us if you have any questions or would like to talk more about our SEO services.

Interested in SEO services?

Enspire development offers SEO services for small and large businesses. If you’re interested in growing your organic traffic, your site reach and your revenue, then check out our SEO services.