To get to the first page of Google you need to hire a professional SEO agency such as Strategic Marketing Consultants. Search Engine Optimization’s (SEO) primary goal is to get your site to appear on the first page of Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). However, in almost all niches, the competition is fierce! If you’re not on the first page of SERPs, chances are no one will ever find your site. To make it to the top, you need help from our team of SEO specialists who know the ins and outs of how Google works. We are experts with SEO and we have been optimizing client websites since 1997. So, we know what we’re doing. We know what it takes to get your website on the first page of SERPs for Google and other search engines.
If you want to know what you’re paying for when you hire us, read on.
Search Engine Optimization: What in the World am I Paying For
Hi, my name is Shea Ellison and I have been in the SEO industry since 1997 and probably know more about SEO than 99% of the people out there. Don’t believe me? In 2008 I put together a 191-page e-book entitled “SEO Secrets 2.0”. It was for a tele-seminar series I conducted. I have presented numerous seminars to organizations and the general public on search engine optimization and what it takes to get on the first page of all the major search engines including Google, YouTube, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Bing. If you would like a copy of that e-book, simply contact me through one of our contact forms and I’ll be happy to send it to you.
What you will learn from that e-book is that although SEO is complicated, it is also a lot of work. It is a very task-intensive process. There are a number of things you have learn how to do, but then you simply do them over, and over, and over, and over… If you are truly committed to getting your site on the first page of Google and staying there, keep in mind that SEO is an ongoing process. You can never stop. If you do, all that you have gained over the months and years will begin to deteriorate. Remember, many of your competitors are also vying for those few precious spots on the first page of SERPs. Getting the pages of your website to the top of the search engines is difficult if not impossible without the help of an expert SEO agency such as us.
Straight to the Top: Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
The only “nearly sure” way of appearing on the first page of search results is to pay for it via paid advertising with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) such as what we offer at my company site Strategic Marketing Consultants. However, even that has changed over the years. There used to be a time when whoever was willing to pay the most, was put at the top of page one of the ‘Search Engine Results Pages’ (SERPs). However, search engines now look at a number of different factors such as relevance between ad copy and the landing page to which a user is directed, Click-Through-Rate (CTR), and many other factors to determine which ads even show up on any given SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Additionally, search engine algorithms also continuously evolve to keep up with the ever-changing environment online when it comes to organic and paid search.
Here’s essentially what you are paying for when you hire a search engine optimization company such as us. The first thing we are going to do is ask you who is your target market? Describe them in detail. The next thing we’ll want to know is what are you selling? What are your products or services? What is the benefit they get from your product or service? What search terms do you think people use to search for what you have to sell? What we will do with this information is begin our keyword research using a variety of free and paid tools. What we want to do is figure out what search terms your target market uses when searching for what you sell. This is a critical first step. If keyword research is wrong or ineffectively done, everything else will be like spinning your wheels. Additionally, you need to review your keywords from time to time as the terms people use to search for what you sell may change over time.
Keywords are the cornerstone of SEO
We’ll provide you with a list of what we think are the most profitable keywords – the ones for which we plan to target or optimize the pages of your website. We’ll balance the average number of monthly searches with number of competing sites. Remember, SERPs point at pages, not your website per se. Therefore by optimizing different pages of your website for different keywords, different pages can show up in SERPs for various searches conducted by users.
You can and should provide feedback to us about your keywords. If you think people use different keywords, tell us. We will either tell you we’ve already searched on those terms, or we will research those terms to see if in fact people actually do use those terms. What we want to do though is find the BEST keywords. The BEST keywords strike a balance between ones for which there are a lot of searches combined with those that have the least competition. Those are the keywords you should target.
Okay, so now you have your list of keywords, now what? To get to the first page of Google, here’s a very basic concept in SEO that is a foundational principle – meaning it doesn’t change over time.
Keywords tell the search engines what your page is about. One way inbound links from relevant and important sites tell the search engines your page is important.
There are two aspects of search engine optimization; on-page optimization and off-page optimization. One of the first things we will do is tweak your existing content or add new optimized content to your website ensuring when search engine spiders find your pages, they are clear as to what the page is about so that they index your pages properly. Therefore, if you have an important and profitable keyword, we’ll want to make sure you have a page that is strategically optimized for that keyword.
However, search engine algorithms are very smart and they can tell when wording is normal and natural versus odd and unnatural. Therefore it is both an art and science to writing page content that uses just the right amount of keyword density to ‘strike a chord’ with the search engine’s algorithm. So you don’t want too few keywords used, and you don’t want too many uses of the keyword, otherwise search engines will think you’re trying to ‘tip the scale’ too much and they can then penalize your page – which is not a good thing.
One-way Inbound Links
Once your pages are optimized, we will begin an extensive campaign of building one-way inbound links to your pages from important and relevant sites with high Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) all over the web. We will do this via articles submitted to article directories, registering your site with important web directories such as ‘Google / Yahoo / Bing’ directories etc. We’ll send out press releases, post to blogs, classified ad sites, create and distribute PDF files and much more. We will get your content out all over the web as much as possible with links pointing back to the pages on your website.
In today’s hyper-competitive marketplace, you MUST have videos to market your business particularly since YouTube is the second largest search engine. Today more than ever, people search YouTube for “How to” information more than anything else. We will build your YouTube channel and promote it through the many free and paid video hosting sites. (You have to provide us with the videos.)
If you really want to supercharge your SEO, we will also build your social media channels when you work with us and subscribe to one of our SMO packages on our main website Strategic Marketing Consultants, we’ll create your content for you and post to your blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr and any other sites that are a good fit for your business. Additionally, if you have the financial resources we will design, manage and monitor your Search Engine Marketing campaigns (SEM or PPC). Subscribe to one of our SEM packages on our main website.
In summary, we will continue to monitor the keywords that people use when searching for what you sell, we’ll make sure you have optimized content on your website for your most profitable keywords, and we will tirelessly build high-quality inbound links to your web pages. And as I said, this is a never-ending process. Getting to page one of search results is challenging and staying there requires never-ending persistence. So, that’s what you are paying for when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.