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SEO
Marketing
Branding
Writing
SEO
Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing your website to appease the search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and more. We use best practices to make your website rank well and increase your visibility to actual humans. Too often, in this industry, SEO turns into a scammy, tricky business that will make your site rank well for a while, but inevitably leads to trouble.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO
Good or White Hat SEO means focusing on what customers or end users want. Unique, high quality, and consistent content. For example, your website should be easy for the potential customer to navigate and use, have informative blog posts to entice your customer, and unique photos to showcase your skills. The potential client should be able to follow a logical and intuitive path from entering the website to requesting a consultation or purchasing your products. Giving the website’s users what they want is the key to a great SEO foundation.
On the other hand, Black Hat SEO is the practice of deceiving search engines into ranking your website higher. Many people are looking for a fast way to rank their site on the web and fall into deceptive practices. While your website may initially gain ranking faster than by using good practices, it’s important to remember that the search engines are really smart. When they figure out what’s going on, you will have a very hard time ranking well again.
What it actually boils down to is taking the time to make the experience the best it can be to the users and that’s what makes the search engines happy. We spend a lot of time analyzing data and a lot of it is based around the customer experience. This data, given to us by the search engines, allows us to see how long a customer is on your website, what pages they are interested in, and ultimately, whether they decide to use your services or leave the site. This helps us narrow in on potential shortcomings, and also growth opportunities. The more technical data allows us to see and fix problems with the code of the website, understand what the search engines want, and tweak to appease them.
A well-rounded SEO campaign is always going to outperform trickery. It takes longer to do it right, but the results are worth the effort.
One Time vs On-going SEO
When first starting out, many businesses choose to hire a one-time SEO of their website, mostly due to budget constraints. While it’s not the most effective way to get your business rolling out faster, we understand budgeting in a new business. Optimizing your site for growth is important! We always build our websites with SEO best practices, but we offer a one-time full SEO as an add on to your web design build.
The problem with a once and done SEO effort is that Google alone changes their algorithm between 500- 600 times every year – and sometimes more! That’s more than daily. If you don’t have someone dedicated to maintaining and improving your web presence, things can go awry. This is why the technical data that we analyze from each of the major search engines is so invaluable. While they don’t tell us what each algorithm change consists of, there are clues in the data. We make changes to your website based on the data that they give us to keep your site ranking well.
Marketing
Online or digital marketing is an off website way to promote and attract users to your website or location via the internet. The most effective marketing strategies vary from business to business, which is why we don’t use a one sized approach to plans. Some businesses may do well with a well built ad campaign on social media, while others find their mailing lists and drip campaigns are better suited to their clientele and produce a higher ROI.
Marketing Campaigns may include:
- Social Media Management
- Targeted ads through search engines, social media
- Mailing list management
- Sales ads
- Industry directory listings
- Photo / Video creation and editing
- Creation of promotional material (Flyers, infographics, and more)
Branding
Often overlooked when starting a business, branding is arguably one of the most important things to get right. Think about McDonald’s without the Golden Arches, Home Depot without the orange coloring, or Frank’s Red Hot without their catchy slogan. Branding matters, from your logo, your color scheme, your slogan, and your voice (and yes, businesses have a voice – even in writing). Branding is what makes your business memorable. Repetition and brand recognition keep customers coming back.
While re-branding is possible, it comes with it’s own unique set of challenges on the web and it’s vitally important to get it right. We have successfully rebranded our own business twice. The iteration you are seeing now is #3. Yikes. We’ve also helped other businesses overcome the challenge of rebranding a business. This usually happens when the company starts growing and branding was previously just an afterthought, or when some major change happens. Events like the company changing hands, or stale branding are often the catalyst of change.
Whether you are just starting out or wanting a full rebranding of your existing business, we can help!
Writing
For years, we have offered writing and editing services for our web design and SEO clients. During the web design process, the clients tell us about their business and we work with them to convey their message – in their voice, to their audience. SEO writing takes on many forms, but the most common is ghost writing blog posts. The key is using the client’s voice to speak to their customers. Your business has stories that need to be told, and we can help you tell them.
In the SEO section of this page, I told you that the search engines and customers alike need unique, well written, and engaging content. This is a real struggle for business owners. Most business owners are so busy running their business that they don’t have time to focus on engaging their customers through their blog, even when they realize that it’s a necessity. Further, there is a very real fear of not being able to properly articulate the points that need to be made.
Don’t have the budget for a full SEO plan, but still want to work on attracting new customers to your website? Our writing services can now be obtained without web design or SEO plans.
