SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization, often called SEO, is the practice of optimizing websites so that they rank higher in search engine results for relevant keywords. Higher search engine rankings ultimately lead to more website traffic and more customers.
Search engines, such as Google, often use more than 200 ranking signals to determine the value or authority of a website. The greater the value or authority a site is given will result in higher placement in search engine result pages.
There are several factors about websites that contribute to and impact these ranking signals. These factors can occur at domain-level, page-level, site-level and from user interaction, brand signals, social and review signals, and much, much more.
The goal of SEO is to "optimize" a site on as many factors as possible to boost a site's ranking.
Websites receive traffic from many different sources:
- Direct traffic comes from people typing your domain name directly into the browser or linking from offline sources. This usually happens when a person has your business card or finds your information on marketing material.
- Paid traffic comes from paid advertising sources such as Google, Bing, Facebook or other resources that offer online paid advertising.
- Organic traffic comes from search engine results or links from other sites or directories. Organic traffic is the primary focus of SEO efforts.
Why do you need Search Engine Optimization?
The internet is a crowded place. It's estimated there are 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide. (Datareportal, 2020). Websites not only face competition from competitor websites, there's also review, directory and aggregate sites such as Yelp, Home Advisor, Expertise, Yahoo etc that appear in search engine results. Search engine results pages also include paid advertising and map results. Breaking through the noise is not an easy task!
The best way to improve your chance of being found on the internet, at least in an organic sense, is by using proper search engine optimization techniques around popular search keywords or phrases for your industry. Our SEO specialists are highly trained in these techniques to improve your sites rankings and increase your website traffic.
Successful SEO techniques include:
- Keyword research
- Content Writing
- Responsive Web Design (Mobile first approach)
- Internal/External Linking
- High Authority Backlinking
- Analytic and Search Console Data Analysis
- Site Audit (Broken links, 404 errors)
- Competitor Link/Content Analysis
- And much, much more...
Tracking Your SEO Success
Measuring the success of SEO efforts is done in a variety of ways but data analysis and conversion tracking are the primary methods.
Parkadoo Digital uses a number of resources to track and measure data for a websites performance. We employ SEO software, Analytics (Google, Bing), and Search Console information to build an overall picture of how a website is performing. We provide monthly SEO Reports for our clients to track the success of our SEO efforts.
Conversion tracking is another valuable measurement of website performance. Tracking actions on a site such as phone calls, form submissions, button clicks, and other call to action items is a great way to determine just how effective your site design is.