Do you know who your website’s best friend is? We’ll give you a hint– it is the three letter acronym that helps your site show up on search engines. That’s right, depending on your perspective, it’s either your reliable friend or your arch nemesis– SEO (search engine optimization)!
We like to think of SEO as a website's fraternal twin. Both of which are related and complementary but are still different enough. But when the two are working in synergy, good things happen. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and more often than not we get this question from our clients– “why isn’t my website showing up higher on Google search results?”
That’s a really good question, but unfortunately, the answer is not so simple. SEO rankings adhere to a series of complex algorithms developed by Google and other search engine crawlers. With that being said, there are certain best practices that SEO experts know of that will provide you with a lift in your SERP (search engine results page) ranking. Since we live in an age of continual technological progression, SEO follows the same progressional suit in regards to optimizing your strategy in order to increase your ROI. In other words, it’s important to stay on top of your SEO strategy on both the front and backend of your website.
If you are in need of help with your SEO project for your website, Oak Street has experience performing audits and front/backend implementations to help your site increase traffic organically. Our full service SEO projects typically focus on these four components:
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Competitor Analysis
Our SEO projects include a comprehensive analysis of your business or organizations competitors and your respective market. This is an important step because we need to figure out what is working for your industry as well as what we can do to create a differentiation between you and your competitors. This typically starts with us connecting with the decision makers at your organization and talking them through what elements of SEO we need to prioritize in order to get a better understanding of what it is exactly that your business does and who your target audience is. This approach allows us to get a unique perspective from a consumer's point of view, ultimately, allowing us to strategize a SEO game plan that is built from the ground up from your target audience's perspective.
When it comes time to perform an SEO audit or implement new SEO best practices, knowing what your competitors are doing and how well they are performing is beneficial without a doubt. At the end of the day, knowing your competitors as if they were the back of your hand will prove to be more valuable than anything else.
Keyword Strategy
The keyword strategy is essentially the bread and butter of SEO. Having the right keywords, whether they are short tail or long tail, will affect how crawlers will interact with your website. Before implementing any SEO work on a website, Oak Street performs a series of keyword research queries to identify which keywords work best for your business or organization in regards to search volume and the number of impressions your site will generate. This step typically goes hand in hand with our competitive analysis and allows us to accurately identify the keywords that increase the chance of your site acquiring clicks. Depending on the type of business your website is, the market competitiveness will vary, so it is important to understand the ins and outs of which keywords will help you out the most and how to utilize those keywords accordingly.
Content Strategy
Just like the backend SEO elements are extremely important, so is the content on the site. In fact, you’ll hear many SEO experts say that in regards to SEO, content is king. Meaning, nothing will rank your site higher than good, digestible content. However, it is not always this simple. There are a lot of backend elements that need to tie into your content strategy as well like keywords, font size & contrast, number of fonts, character length, HTML5 tags, alt text, metadata, structured data, and much much more. We recommend building out your SEO strategy prior to putting content on the site, but we also know that this is not always the case. In the event that SEO comes after, we do have experience turning around sites in an efficient manner and give them the lift they need for search engine optimization.
Analytics & Reporting
We are huge proponents of the Hawthorne Effect– What gets measured, gets managed. The good news is that although SEO sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo that you can’t see since its nature mostly lives in the backend of the site, you actually can measure how your site is performing and how you compare to competitors. This is a vital part of SEO because like we mentioned earlier about SEO being part of the continual progression of the technology era, there will always be room for improvement. In fact, SEO is considered a long term strategy that can take anywhere from 3-6 months in order to see its full effect. Therefore monitoring organic site performance is extremely important as well as releasing new and relevant content on your site to keep search engines crawling and ranking your site higher and higher over time. As part of our SEO execution agreements, we make sure that the site is configured to all the necessary reporting tools so that we can start collecting data and focusing on what’s working and stepping away from what’s not working.
Regardless of which CMS (content management system) your website is built on today, we have experience performing SEO across different platforms. We encourage you to reach out to one of our experts today so that we can put together a proposal for you and start getting your site to where you want it to be.