search engine optimization

If someone can’t find your company, chances are they aren’t calling to book an appointment. Let’s say you own a plumbing company in D.C. Go to Google.com and type in a generic search like “plumber DC.” Start scrolling down the page. Do you see yourself on the first page? Do you see yourself at all? Chances are, you rank for some common keywords related to your field but not all of them. The goal of an SEO campaign is to establish your website as the authority and ensure you rank for as many relatable keywords as possible.

When a user types a search query in the search bar, Google does an inventory of all of the webpages it has on file. It looks for the websites that have the most relevant information and presents those to the user. In order for a page on your website to rank for a search term, it needs to be easily readable by Google, have relevant content and a good reputation. In order for SEO to work, you must optimize your website based on these key factors.

According to Google’s guidelines, the average time for websites to rank on Google through optimization (SEO) techniques is about six months i.e. 180 days. It can be achieved sooner depending on the competitiveness of your industry and popularity of your keywords.

Great question! Keyword research helps you determine the keywords for which you should optimize the current and future pages of your site. For example: if your new small business sells employee scheduling software, but you discover that “employee scheduling tool” has higher search volume and lower competition than “employee scheduling software,” you might want to change the copy on your website to reflect that. Keyword research is a way of determining which queries people are entering into search engines so you can publish pages that will show up as results for those queries.

On-page SEO refers to tactics utilized on or within a page to assist it in ranking higher in the search engine. On-page SEO includes both content and the HTML source code of a page (image optimization, keyword optimization, Schema markup, and more), but not external links and other external signals.

Think about it this way: the internet is made up of two things—content, and links between content. When search engines first started indexing web pages, they needed a way to determine which pages were most relevant to certain queries—a system of ranking. The quality and number of backlinks pointing to a page immediately became a factor in determining that page’s rank. Backlinks represent a vote of confidence from one site to another. The more quality backlinks your page earns, the more valuable it is in the eyes of the search engine, and the more likely it is to achieve a high ranking.