SEO, which is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization, helps your website show up in search engines when a potential customer searches for something related to your business. SEO targets what are known as intent-based customers, which are customers who already have the intention to purchase a product or service. These customers already know what they want, they’re just looking for the best provider to give it to them. By ranking highly in search engines through our SEO services, you become a go-to provider for these customers. This drastically increases not only the number of leads you get, but the quality of those leads.

The 3 pillars of our SEO campaigns.

Technical optimizations

optimizing the code of your website

A website’s core structure is all about making sure search engines can crawl and index all of your content and in the right way. This means having clean HTML code, properly structured URLs (with no parameters, if at all possible), the right HTTP status codes for the right kind of webpages (so a Not Found page results in a 404 code, not a 200 or 302, and a 301 to redirect those pages when necessary), proper XML sitemaps, etc.

Essentially, this is everything that goes on under the hood of your website. It’s what makes your website function. Optimizing the structure ensures search engines can find and easily see the data of your website. It also helps make your website load faster and results in a better user experience.

Proper technical optimizations can also result in your website showing as a “Featured Snippet” or with “Rich Snippets” in Google. A Featured Snippet is like a super upgraded organic listing that stands out against the rest, containing a text blurb, image, and link to the page. A Rich Snippet is inbetweena basic organic listing and a Featured Snippet, usually showing additional content like extra site links or reviews.

Columbus SEO company technical optimization

Columbus SEO Company on-page optimization

On-page optimizations

optimizing the content of your website

When search engines can crawl your site’s content, that doesn’t mean they know what your content is about. The content optimization aspect of SEO looks at the various elements of text, images, videos, and links to ensure it can be properly interpreted by search engines.

This means having optimized headlines and header structures, properly structured content, sufficient topical focus on a single page, including the right semantic signals, etc. Writing great SEO-friendly content is now more important than ever.

Authority building

increasing the trustworthiness of your website

Great content alone is not enough to rank well in search results. You need to be seen as a trusted source, which is where the authority aspect comes in. With sufficient links from other trusted websites, your site will be seen as trustworthy as well and search engines will rank your content higher in search results for relevant queries.

It’s not enough to be on the first page of Google. You need to rank #1. Your website authority can be the difference between ranking #3 vs #1. The difference between #3 and #1 is staggering. The #1 ranked website on average will get 400% more traffic than the #3 website, and 200% more traffic than the #2 website.

SEO case study

$500,000 in potential leads in 12 months

See how our SEO campaign drove nearly 900 potential clients to this men’s health clinic in 12 months, totaling in nearly half a million dollars worth of potential leads.

view case study

Our SEO campaigns implement a time-tested and proven 10 step SEO process

See exactly what we do during an SEO campaign that gets you to outrank your competitors in search engines. Our SEO process is industry leading and proven to work. Stop paying companies for leads and start generating them for yourself on your own website.

Step 0: Website design

laying down the foundation

Before we can start on an SEO campaign we need to look over your website design and make sure it has a modern, responsive design and is optimized for conversions. Without this, your SEO campaign will drive traffic to a website no one will want to use and will leave you missing out on conversions. Redesigning a website has a huge impact on your rankings, so it’s best to do it before we embark on an SEO campaign. If optimizations are done to a website prior to a redesign, we need to make sure we properly redirect the old pages to the new ones to retain any search engine performance and minimize any loss on performance.

Step 1: Onboarding

getting to know your business

We start the SEO campaign with a meeting, whether in person or over the phone, to learn as much as possible about you and your business. We have you run us through your business model, focusing mostly on your value propositions and customer segments as well as your goals for the digital marketing campaign. We’ll also have you inform us about who your direct competitors are. This gives us a strong understanding of the your business and target customers. It also allows us to create customer personas.

Step 2: Competitor research

investigating your competition

With the onboarding completed we set out to learn about your competition in the second step of our SEO process. This is going to be crucial if we are to get you to outrank them. If you are a local business, we’ll search for local competitors in your area, including the ones listed in the on-boarding meeting. We want to know how well they rank in search engines, what keywords they were ranking for, and roughly how much traffic their websites are generating every month. This is all made possible with our industry leading tools. After researching your direct competitors we’ll have a good understanding of what it’s going to take for us to generate results for you.

Step 3: Keyword research

what are people actually searching for

Keyword research is the next step that we implement in our SEO process. We take the services, products, and locations of your business and derive the best keywords that we should focus on for the campaign. For a local business that serves local customers, we’ll focus on localized keywords, also known as Local SEO. This will help generate localized traffic to your website.

Step 4: Website sitemap

creating a content silo

After we have created a list of keywords to rank for, our fourth SEO step is to create a website sitemap to organize the pages and match them to the proper keywords. We call this a “content silo”. A content silo is organizing the content in a way that makes sense to a search engine and to a user. This increases user experience and results in higher rankings. We create these sitemaps in a spreadsheet and list out the URL, Title tag, and keyword for each page we intend on creating.

Step 5: Technical website audit

finding and fixing technical errors

The fifth SEO step is where the research ends and the action begins. Now that we know everything we can about your business, your competitors, the keywords we want to rank for, and the new website structure, it’s time to dive into your website.

We run a full technical audit on your website to find any technical issues that may have been hindering your search engine performance. Our technical audit checks your website for more than 100 different items, including title tags, meta descriptions, and broken internal links to name a few.

Once we run the technical audit and understand the technical issues of your website we begin correcting those issues. This can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks or more depending on the size of your website.

Step 6: On-page optimization

optimizing the content of your website

Once your website’s technical issues have been resolved we can move on to step six in our SEO process: on-page optimization. Depending on the size of the website we may begin the on-page optimizations while still working on the technical fixes and optimization.

We’ll begin optimizing the pages of your website, including restructuring the text, adding appropriate heading tags, ensuring images have alt attributes, and much more. The length of this process again depends on the size of your website and the number of keywords we are targeting.

Then we implement our new content silo. We focus on a single keyword per page to maximize the performance of that keyword. We then create content around those single keywords that is optimized for search engines. This includes structured text and some multimedia like images and videos.

Step 7: Analytics integration

gathering the data

Now that the website is clear of all technical issues and we’ve completed the first set of optimizations, we then integrate the analytics channels in our seventh SEO step. These channels include tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. This allows us to begin tracking everything that happens on the website and in search engines. The analytics we track include user interaction, user acquisition, keywords, and search engine ranks to name a few.

The reason we wait to integrate these channels until this point is to help with the SEO. When you integrate Google Search Console, Google will begin crawling and indexing your website. We don’t want Google to crawl and index a broken and poorly-optimized website, so we wait until we’ve fixed everything and optimized the website before integrating. This allows the website to be crawled and indexed correctly the first time.

We also create and optimize a Google My Business listing if you don’t already have one. It’s free to set up and helps tremendously when it comes to generating local traffic.

Step 8: Month 1 report

just getting started

At this point in the SEO process we are nearing the end of the first month. We create an initial report that summarizes everything we did for the first month. This includes the competitor research, keyword research, list of technical issues that were fixed on the website, links to the pages that we created, as well as the starting point for our search engine data. The search engine data includes the amount of impressions the website had for the month, the number of clicks, and overall average rank.

Step 9: Authority building

building a backlink portfolio

Step 9 of the SEO campaign is where we begin building the authority of your website. We do this by gaining backlinks from relevant, high authority sites. For a local business, we begin our authority building by creating local citations. While most, if not all, of these local citation backlinks are no-follow links, they help secure your business as a trusted local business with a healthy portfolio of listing backlinks.

Once we’ve generated local citations we then switch our focus on guest blog posts. We reach out to high-authority relevant blogs to post guest posts on. From these websites we are able to secure many powerful backlinks that help increase the authority of your website.

Step 10: Repeat

ongoing optimization and authority building

The last step in our SEO process is continuous maintenance, management, and optimization of the SEO campaign. At this point in the campaign we continue to reach out to blogs to create more guest posts with backlinks. We also continue to monitor and further optimize the pages on the website. Every month we send a results report that shows the changes in search engines, how many clicks the website received, how many impressions the website made, and where each keyword and page is ranking in the search engines.

SEO FAQ

Below are answers to the most commonly asked questions about our SEO campaigns.

How much do your SEO campaigns cost?

We have a very simple pricing structure when it comes to SEO. We charge $100/targeted keyword/mo with a $500/mo minimum.

How long does it take to implement the SEO campaign?

An SEO campaign is an ongoing process. The search engine algorithms are always changing and your website optimizations need to be up to date with the latest Google updates. We recommend a minimum of at least 6 months for the campaign to start seeing results. According to google it can take anywhere between 8-12 months. Our SEO experts work on continuously optimizing your website based on new search engine features and current search engine performance.

What process do use?

The process that our Columbus SEO company uses is outlined in great detail above. We’ve been using our 10-step SEO process for over a decade and it is proven to produce great search engine performance.

How doyou measure the success of an SEO campaign?

We measure search engine optimization campaign success by the improved performance in search engines. Using Google Search Console we can monitor how many impressions your website made, how many clicks through to the website, which keywords your website is ranking for, and how well you are ranking for those keywords. The goal is more keywords, better rankings, and more clicks.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

Generate more organic traffic to your website.