Your customers are online, so it’s more important than ever to make it easy for them to find your company online. The challenge is that very few people browse past Google's first page of search results. If you’re not on page one of Google’s search results, your company basically does not exist to your potential customers!
Building an SEO campaign is a great way to gain more customers. An effective campaign will spread awareness of your brand, build your company’s credibility, bring more organic traffic to your web pages, improve your user experience, and ultimately convert more of your website traffic into potential leads.
Search engine algorithms frequently change, and your potential customers search the web in different ways as technology evolves. Consider the increasing popularity of voice search: People who use Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home for voice search will often use different search phrases than what they type in a Google search on their phone or laptop.
SEO is a continually evolving practice that requires diligent research and adaptation to new technology and processes. For most businesses, the best way to approach SEO is to hire an experienced SEO company.
Below are four reasons why most businesses benefit from working with an SEO agency rather than trying to do their SEO optimizations in-house.
- SEO and Website Design Improvements
Getting visitors to your site is only one piece of the SEO puzzle. Once they arrive, you need to provide a great experience so they stick around, browse your site, learn about your product or service, and eventually make a purchase. Here are some ways an SEO agency can improve your website design.
Improve Site Structure
If your website structure isn’t logical, people won’t be able to navigate your site and find the information they need, so they’ll leave. If humans can’t navigate your site, Google won’t be able to either, which means it isn’t likely to recommend your site to searchers.
An SEO agency can assist you with creating a logical hierarchy for your pages with clear pathways to the information that your visitors want to find.
Make Your Site Easy For Google To Index
You can do several things to make your site easier for Google to understand, making it more likely that Google will recommend your site to searchers. An SEO agency can assist with adding:
- Alt text — Describes the images on your site and is a great way to include keywords
- Transcripts for video or audio files — Helpful for people with disabilities and makes it possible for Google to understand
- Meta descriptions — Short blurbs of text that tell Google what each page is about and is another great place to add keywords
Make It Mobile Friendly
For many industries, mobile devices now make up the majority of web traffic. Many sites are not optimized for mobile users, so they’re slow to load and difficult to view on a small cellphone screen.
SEO agencies can help you optimize your web pages for all devices by creating responsive, stripped-down pages that load quickly.
Improve Your Load Time
Did you know that 53% of users will leave your site if it takes more than three seconds to load? You may be losing half of your traffic before they ever get to see what you have to offer!
Partnering with an SEO agency can solve this issue so you never lose customers to a slow-loading page again.
you’re curious about Nettra’s results with website design, check out the case study about our work with Kuykendall Solar, a California solar subcontractor. We were able to optimize their web design and make their site more appealing to their target audience. This produced a 24% conversion rate, which led to a 408% ROI with Google Ads and a 550% ROI with Facebook Ads.
- High Ranking Backlinks Using Strategic Link Building
Link building has always been an essential element of an effective SEO strategy. A backlink is simply a link from one website to another. For example, if the CEO of a credit union writes a blog about mortgage interest rates and it appears on Forbes and links back to the credit union’s website, that would be a very high-quality backlink.
Google’s algorithm utilizes over 300 different ranking factors to determine how every website ranks for its specific keywords. Backlinks are a crucial factor because they help Google determine the most relevant results for every search. They also give your site credibility because they position you as an expert in your field.
If someone is searching for a credit union in San Diego, the site with more high-quality backlinks is going to rank higher than a site without quality backlinks.
How To Build Good Backlinks
Knowing that you need backlinks and actually getting them are two separate things. For many businesses doing their SEO in-house, this is one of the biggest challenges. How do you convince a website to link to yours? That’s where an SEO agency can come in handy.
Agencies have a portfolio of sources to tap for backlinks that fit your business. These may include:
- Being a source for reporters or bloggers through Help A Reporter Out (HARO)
- Publishing high-quality blog content on your own site that others WANT to link to!
- Publishing in popular formats, like “ultimate guides,” “why” and “what” posts, and infographics
- Reaching out to high-quality sites and asking them to feature you
Backlinking Mistakes To Avoid
When it comes to backlinks, quality matters more than quantity. The following backlink mistakes can actually hurt your search ranking:
- Links from low-quality, spammy sites
- Buying links — Google only likes natural links, so buying fake links can get you banned from the search results
- Getting links from irrelevant sites — Having a cooking blog link to your credit union site isn’t likely to help you
- Building links to just one page on your site, such as your homepage
If you’d like help building a successful backlink strategy, an SEO agency can help you avoid these pitfalls and identify which strategies will be successful for you.
- Digital Marketing Services That Include Your Businesses Ideal Marketing Channels
While SEO can be a standalone service, it’s usually a component of a more comprehensive digital marketing campaign that includes social media marketing and content marketing. This is often where great SEO agencies separate themselves from everyone else because it takes a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience to manage and optimize a cross-platform marketing campaign successfully.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing isn’t just about posting to Facebook or Instagram. Instead, it uses those platforms to target potential customers and then push them to your website through ads.
A post on Facebook or Instagram only reaches a small percentage of your audience. However, ads reach your fans AND people who haven’t heard of you yet. They spread your message much more effectively and at scale.
An SEO agency can help you develop a social media ad campaign that targets the right customers with the right message, which will amplify your reach tremendously.
Content Marketing
When was the last time you clicked on an ad and immediately bought something? It’s probably been a long time!
Most people do at least a little research before they make a purchase. They’ll start by browsing for solutions to their problem, then reading reviews on a few options, and then making a purchase.
The majority of prospects who visit your website are looking for great information to base their buying decisions on, and that’s where content marketing comes in. Having helpful articles and videos on your website can guide them to making a purchase from you.
If your website does nothing but ask for a sale, people will leave. But if you provide education and insightful information, you’ll help visitors understand what you really have to offer, which makes them more likely to trust you and buy from you.
On our own website, we have several blog posts and videos designed to inform and educate instead of asking for a sale. Some companies will implement the strategies and tactics we teach and have success. Others are looking for an agency to help them with these tactics and view our content primarily to see if we know our craft. By offering many insights into our internal processes, how we manage campaigns, best practice, and more, it slowly positions us as an expert in our reader’s eyes.
The goal of content marketing is to get your potential customers to perform their research on YOUR website, trust you, and then buy from you.
How Social Media & Content Work Together
Having high-quality content is a great start, but you also need to get visitors to your site to view the content. An SEO agency will create ads on the social media channels where your customers spend time, as well as Google, to push targeted traffic to various blog posts and videos to answer questions related to your product or service.
A good website design means visitors will see similar blogs or videos they may be interested in, which increases their time on your site and builds your reputation. Over time, this leads to higher conversions.
- A Tailored Approach to Reach Your Target Audience
Your business is unique, so the approach for optimizing your SEO and growing your customer base needs to be unique as well.
Not all businesses need a website design overhaul, and not all businesses will find their target audience through Instagram ads. An agency that treats your business exactly the same as their other clients is probably not the right fit.
Our tailored approach starts with understanding your company’s customers and current web presence. Once we do this, we can identify your strengths and areas for growth, as well as which channels your target customers are most likely to find you. Then, we’ll check out your competition to find opportunities to outrank them.
Our strategic plan will take all of these factors and more into consideration as we launch your SEO campaign. We also meticulously track our campaign to identify what’s working and where we need to realign our efforts. This approach has helped us be successful with companies like Kuykendall Solar and can help your business find success as well. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can assist you, get in touch with our team.
