Our SEO Strategy for 2016

SEO is constantly changing and we have to adapt our strategy every year, but here are our recommendations for 2016! The biggest addition in the past year or two has been Local SEO.  We will get into that more though below.  Let’s dive in!

1. Keyword Research
Every good SEO strategy starts with keyword research.  You may be surprised by people’s searching habits.  We provide the cold hard facts according to Google so we can optimize your website accordingly.

2. Website Review
If you have an existing website, we will review it for the keywords that we chose from our keyword research to ensure that your website is on the right track and see where you stand currently in SEO rankings.

3. Sitemap Structure
Believe it or not, Google does look at how your pages are laid out.  What are they called? How are they structured? It all comes into play and in this step we review and make any changes needed.

4. Website Optimization
We will grade every page of your website to ensure it’s optimized for the keyword(s) that you would like.  If needed, we will make changes.

5. Analytics/Reporting
We can’t stress this step enough.  How can you measure your success if you aren’t tracking your results?  We get weekly reports emailed to us and also to our clients showing you what has happened in the past week.

6. Local SEO Campaigns
Google likes to see consistency of your business information across the web.  In the past, you would have to manually go to every business listing and make sure they matched.  Nowadays, it’s automated with companies such as Moz Local and Yext.  They basically blast out your company information to 100’s of local directories to ensure that your company name, address, phone, etc all match and are consistent.  This helps with SEO as well as visibility and exposure across the web.

7. Link Building
We still prefer to get links through content creation and never recommend buying links, ever.  It used to be popular to submit your link to various directories, but this has died down a lot over the years because of nofollow links as well as Google updates.   There are still some strategies that work here but we can’t stress content creation enough!

8. Content Creation
Content is still king in our opinion.  Companies struggle with this one the most because they don’t want to write the content or hire a copywriter but yet in our opinion it’s one of the more important steps to SEO.  Google likes to see value on your website.  The more value you provide in your content to your clients or visitors, the more links you will gain naturally and the happier your visitors will be.

9. PR
Good PR is great in a few different ways.  First and foremost, if you ask, normally they will put a link in the article to your website which is huge for link building.  Secondly, you are getting exposure on the web and perhaps in the paper.  It’s all around a win win.