We Ensure Your SEO Integrates And Supports Your Larger Marketing Strategy

Search engine optimization is a well-known online marketing strategy that most businesses have adopted in one way or another. At the very least, most companies will optimize their content using a few choice keywords. However, for SEO to be as effective as it can be at improving page rankings and boosting visibility through organic search, a more well-thought-out approach is needed.

A good SEO strategy consists of various tactics to help increase page rankings, from creative SEO to technical SEO to off-page SEO. A great SEO strategy, however, is one that understands the importance of integrating your SEO efforts to support your overall marketing strategy, also known as contextual optimization. Contextual optimization requires a more holistic approach to SEO that is equal parts art and science.

SEO Is A Diverse And Complex Process

SEO is much more involved than just adding a few keywords to your website pages. The idea behind SEO is to address the ranking factors Google uses to index web pages based on context and quality. These ranking factors are not limited to keyword use; they include other ranking signals as well, such as user engagement, page speed, backlinks, security, and social signals. As a result, the success of your SEO efforts depends on the understanding, execution, and integration of your SEO strategy.

Many businesses make the mistake of trying to address every one of Google’s ranking factors individually. While you might have some short-term success doing this, your SEO tactics will be more effective if you have a more comprehensive SEO strategy in place. We have a strong understanding of overall SEO strategy, including technical SEO, creative SEO, off-page SEO, and content marketing (which, although not necessarily an SEO strategy, is vital to SEO as a whole). We also understand how these tactics should work together.

When developing an SEO strategy, we will perform an SEO audit to evaluate the existing SEO of your website. We will then optimize the existing pages of your site where needed. We will then implement your new SEO strategy when publishing new content and adding new pages to your site. Keep in mind that SEO does not end upon implementation. SEO is a long-term strategy, and your SEO efforts will need to be monitored and continually improved upon over time.

We will develop an SEO strategy that aligns with your content marketing strategy. They work hand in hand, SEO intends to support your content, but without content, SEO is meaningless. Additionally, aligning both SEO and content marketing with your social media marketing efforts can be beneficial. Social media marketing involves the promotion of content, which can help to generate more backlinks and social signals, both of which are major factors in Google’s page ranking system. All these reasons are why a successful SEO strategy depends on a holistic approach to inbound marketing.

We Treat Your Website As An Evolving Hub Of Information And Value

Your website is more than just an online presence. Many businesses have websites that remain static when they should instead be dynamic. We understand that for a website to be effective, it needs to provide your audience with value and should act as a hub for relevant information. To stay relevant, it must continuously evolve. Fresh, relevant content on your website will continue to nurture existing customers as well as new prospects and become an essential part of your SEO. Since Google takes the freshness of a page into account when ranking pages, we will make sure that your website is all it can be by using these strategies:

We will perform a site-wide audit to get an overall feel of how your website currently sits. By assessing existing website pages, we can determine the value of the content on that page as well as how effectively optimized each page is. We will also identify how each page is performing, which will provide us with more context about your existing SEO and content creation efforts.

Once we have assessed the entirety of your existing website, we will create a roadmap of pages to be added to your site. For example, if you do not have a dedicated contact page or are missing targeted sales pages that could be helpful to your audience, we will add these to your website architecture roadmap.

Pages that have become outdated or irrelevant to your organization can hurt your SEO. For example, if your company pivoted to offer different products or services, then older pages that contain content about products and services you no longer offer are now obsolete. These pages can confuse visitors who are looking for those old products and services, thereby hurting your brand identity. We will do a thorough inspection of your website to identify pages for removal.

Everything Begins With Understanding Your Industry And Services

A good SEO strategy is one that integrates with your content marketing strategy. Since a strong understanding of your industry and services is required to generate content that provides value to your target audience, that understanding will also be required to implement an effective SEO strategy. Without such knowledge, SEO efforts may not support your content efforts adequately and may not only result in a subpar SEO strategy but can drag your content marketing efforts down as well.

The following are some of the specific reasons why an understanding of your particular industry and services is critical for proper contextual optimization:

Although keyword research is undoubtedly a vital component of a good SEO strategy, those keywords should support the topics that you are exploring via your content. Many companies make the mistake of generating a keyword list based on assumptions of their audience or what their competition is doing before creating a topic list. A strong topic list that is relevant to your company and your audience will help you to identify better, more relevant keywords. Of course, to identify related topics, an understanding of your industry and services is required.

The content you create for your website needs to address every stage of the buyer’s journey. Remember, prospects at different stages of their customer journey will be searching for various details. Be sure you can attract prospects no matter what stage they are in by connecting topics to each stage of the journey.

The content you create should be relevant to your audience. Since the leads that you are engaging with can be at various stages of the buyer’s journey, your content will have to help address their individual needs at each stage. The challenge lies in the fact that there are thousands of potential entry points for prospects at any stage of the buyer’s journey. Creating content to address each of these entry points is inefficient. Instead of trying to create content for every single possible entry point, we will identify what the most critical trigger points are. Doing so allows us to focus on the most advantageous points of entry so that we can create high-quality content that will have a significant impact.

Competitive Analysis

Once we have identified the most advantageous points of entry, we will perform a competitive analysis of these trigger events. We will determine how other businesses are addressing the same trigger points that you have identified. Doing so will give us an idea of what kind of content they are creating for those trigger events, what keywords they are using for that content, and how successful that content is at engaging their audience. This information will be invaluable for crafting content to address your points of entry.

Crafting A Website Architecture To Match

Technical SEO is just as important as creative SEO and off-page SEO. You need to make sure that your website not only provides an exceptional user experience (essential to the ranking signals that Google searches for), but that it is easy for Google’s bots to crawl, index, and rank as well. Creating a website architecture to support your SEO strategy is undeniably essential, and we will take these steps to create and maintain a robust website architecture:

When building a new website, we use a growth-driven design approach, which involves launching a site that is not 100 percent complete, but that has all of the key pages which should exist in this initial launch phase. This process allows us to continue building your website in iterations and to use real data collected from visitors to make more useful improvements. This methodology enables us to monitor SEO efforts over time and make adjustments as we continue expanding your website.

A growth-driven design approach will also help prevent your entire website from being pigeon-holed into one specific area. You will be able to slowly expand to different areas of the website through each iteration based on how your existing launchpad site is performing. We will refrain from targeting the homepage to the keyword identified as the “best” at the time of launch. Home page targeting from the outset is a common mistake — if the keyword turns out to not be as effective in the future as you thought it would be, or you aren’t able to compete for that keyword successfully, it will hurt your homepage’s SEO in the long run.

Although a growth-driven design approach doesn’t require a completed website for the initial launch, we do plan in advance for the expansion of your website at regularly scheduled iterations called “sprints.” These are some of the elements that we will plan out in advance:

Additional Top-Level Menu Pages

Some top-level menu pages may require new content created over time or feedback from new customers that you will gain over time. For example, Resource pages or Customer Testimonial pages can be additions, later on, to expand your website further.

More Specific Sales Pages

As you find out what customers want and what they are looking for, you can begin addressing those needs. Adding more specific sales pages to your website will help educate potential buyers about more specific aspects of your products or services.

The Intertwining Of Informational Based Blogs And Sales Pages

Your website shouldn’t contain only self-promotional content. While you will want to have some sales pages that educate prospects about your services, include some blog content that is less promotional and more focused on identifying and addressing the needs of your audience. Not only will we make sure your launchpad site has the right mix of informational based blog content and sales pages, but also ensure they complement each other appropriately.

A semantic silo is a section of the website aligned by a common or related topic. Although many websites use their keywords appropriately, they do not always organize their websites effectively. One of the goals of contextual optimization is to not only target keyword phrases but also to match the topics or themes that those keywords identify. All too often, websites contain content pages that aren’t related to one another, nor are they connected by a central topic. Focusing on semantic silos for your website addresses this common pitfall. For example, an online clothing store might have a semantic silo based on the topic of shirts. It would be appropriate to organize pages focusing on t-shirts, long sleeve shirts, polo shirts, and button-down shirts within the same semantic silo.

The pages contained within each section (or silo) should be optimized using keywords that are related to that common theme. Optimizing your website in this manner can significantly improve your SEO results because Google will subsequently be able to more closely match the content organized within your semantic silo to relevant user queries. We will make sure that your website architecture is organized properly into semantic silos that are effective for SEO.

Topical Structures Built For Bots And Humans Alike

Although organizing your website into effective semantic silos can help make it much easier for Google bots to crawl your site and to understand the context of your website’s content, semantic silos aren’t just for the benefit of SEO. They also make your website more user friendly. Visitors will have an easier time navigating your site and exploring your content when you organize it appropriately using semantic silos, which will ultimately improve the user’s website experience.

We Target Each Page With Purpose

When we optimize your website for SEO, we target every single page on your website. Every page should have a purpose outside of just ranking high on Google’s SERP (search engine results page). We follow these guidelines to plan, publish, and optimize the individual pages of your website:

Each page on your website should focus on a single keyword or topic. When multiple pages contain the same keywords, this can result in cannibalization. Google won’t know which page is most relevant for a specific query since you’ll be optimizing multiple pages for the same keyword phrase. Optimizing various pages for the same keyword can hurt your ability to attract high-quality leads as well as harm your page rankings. We will make sure this doesn’t happen.

Based on the relevancy of a topic to your company and your audience, we will determine if specific concentrations deserve their own space. If this is the case, we will add new pages to your site that delve into these areas.

When building your launchpad site as well as when adding new pages, we will make sure that every page we add to your site makes sense. If it doesn’t make sense to add the page to your website, it could hurt your user experience. There are two ways in which we ensure that each page makes sense:

In Its Own Right

The new page must make sense in its own right, which means that the content on the page has to be relevant to your target audience. If it’s not, then it doesn’t make sense to have it.

As Part of Your Website’s Wider Narrative

Additionally, the new page needs to not only be relevant to your audience’s needs, but it also has to fit in with the architecture of the rest of your website. For example, a piece of content can’t very well address a particular aspect of the needs of your audience if the solution to that specific need isn’t something that your product or service can provide. Essentially, the page has to be relevant to not just your audience, but to your company.

SEO’s Can Get Carried Away Without Appropriate Context

One of the most common mistakes that businesses make when developing and executing an SEO strategy is launching without the appropriate context. Attempting to boost page rankings for the sake of increasing page rankings will result in low-value returns, no matter how effective it may seem to be on the surface.

An SEO strategy conceived with a holistic approach in mind and implemented in a manner that’s integrated with other facets of your online marketing strategy will deliver real value over the long term. Without the context of your other marketing efforts, your SEO strategy will not have the impact that you’re looking to achieve.

Speak to a Consultant About How Your SEO Can Match Your Business Needs Better Today
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