Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is what you do to get to the top on Google's search results for your important keywords and search phrases, and to a lesser extent also on Yahoo Search, Microsoft Bing (previously called MSN and Live) and some local search engines.
Why should you care about SEO?
There are many reasons to why you should take SEO seriously, the most obvious one is that search engines represent a lot of online traffic, and most people only click on links if they appear on the first results page. How much traffic are we talking about? Well, half of the top 20 sites in the world are pure search engines, and another handfull include search as important functionality (e.g. Facebook). Internet users over the age of 15 conducted over 29 million searches per minute in 2009, or close to total 131 billion searches per year. Two thirds (67%) of all searches globally came from Google sites, 7% from Yahoo sites, and 3% from Microsoft sites [Source: comScore data for 2009]. In many countries, like UK and Sweden, Google is even more dominant. If looking at the English speaking core search engines it is almost only Google and Bing now we need to focus on. The latter is for instance providing the search results to Facebook and Yahoo will also be based on Bing soon.
How big is it for your market and its associated keywords? A proper keyword analysis will tell you pretty accurate aggregated figures, which means you can in a way use SEO to estimate potential market size, at least in relative terms.
The fact that people search for something specific, as opposed to general browsing on a news or entertainment site for instance, means they are much more likely to convert into leads or even buy from you. You could also bid for those keywords as PPC ads, such as Google AdWords, but people tend to click more on natural search results than sponsored links, and you cannot pay Google to be included in the natural search results listing, only SEO will help.
It even has implications for your brand. Research shows that most people actually believe that the companies being on the first and maybe also second page of the search results are also the leading brands within that niche.
How do you do SEO?
SEO is not easy, but it is also not rocket science like some SEO companies will tell you. Many years ago you could manipulate and do tricks (so called "black hat SEO") to climb in the search results, but now it is much more difficult and will not go undetected with penalties as a result. Therefore the only thing you can do today is to go by the book and recommendations ("white hat SEO"). You need some smarts and knowledge and the rest is hard work, and you can only do it for the keywords that your site is really about. Also remember that getting to the top of the search results is not the end goal - getting people to also click your links and convert into leads and ultimately become paying customers is.
Our approach to SEO is that we look at it as part of your overall marketing activities, often called inbound marketing since new leads come to you without having to contact them first. And we do it together with our clients to build up this knowledge, or at least understanding, in-house. We don't keep secrets, we tell you everything we plan to do and why, and we look at your whole potential aggregated potential market of tens if not hundreds of relevant search phrases.
Working with SEO means focusing on three main components:
- Keyword Analysis. Do you know what the most searched keywords are in your market? Do you know what also the lesser searched and more specific keywords are? A proper keyword analysis will tell you not only which keywords and search phrases to focus on and what terminology to use in your communication, it will give you a sense of the total potential market size and its aggregated search volumes.
- Onpage Optimization. Based on the keyword analysis, onpage optimization is how you make each page and subpage unique and focused on maximum a few keywwords each. There are many different factors to consider, the most important ones being Page Title, domain (if you can choose), URL and meta description, even some that you cannot control such as the age of the domain/site.
- Offpage Optimization. Good keyword analysis and offpage optimization can take you really far for many of your specific ("long tail") search phrases, but if there is competition you have to have lots of external links pointing to your site, preferably with the right keywords as anchor text and coming from popular sites that has content similar to yours. But if you optimize too much you may get a penalty so it is worth it having an expert oversee this activity.
Most of the work for keyword analysis and onpage optimization is done at the beginning and offpage optimization, and reporting should be ongoing, although new important keywords and search phrases discovered through our system for SEO monitoring will trigger updates and changes also to the onpage optimization every once in a while.
Unlike many other SEO companies that charge per keyword and give you links from sites they control themselves, Ztrive will do a complete keyword analysis, proper onpage optimization and any links we give you you get to keep forever. We will also transfer as much SEO knowledge to you as possible during the process.