As a website owner, having your site maximized for search engine optimization, or SEO, is critical to attracting — and keeping — the kind of traffic you need for success.
What Exactly is SEO?
SEO refers to the way search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others match search queries to relevant content from all over the internet.
Better SEO optimization can help bring more high-quality traffic to your site. But as business owner, you need to do more than just please the search ‘bots and algorithms with your website — you also need to persuade visitors to become customers.
So, a great SEO plan will not only help your site get noticed — and ranked higher — by search engines, it will also be appealing to your human visitors.
SEO keyword selection: The right words for the right searchers
As the owner of a business, you’ve no doubt already come to the conclusion that search engine optimization (SEO) is essential to getting your business found online. However, which keywords are right for your business?
70% of users click on organic results, 53% of the organic search clicks go to the first link, and most importantly, 75% of users never click past the first page.
Source: Search Engine Watch
There are many SEO ranking factors to consider in keyword research such as global popularity, competitiveness for those keywords in your industry, and how well those keywords match up to content on your website. The natural inclination might be to want your business to rank for the highest-volume searches, usually one or two-word terms, the so-called “head terms.” The process of getting to page one of the search results pages can often be a long and expensive undertaking. Furthermore, the high-volume search terms that are not well-targeted and represent an Internet searcher’s early phases of research, hence, the “research phase.” These searches generally have higher bounce rates and lower engagement on your website.
You are far better off to begin your SEO strategy focusing on so-called “long-tail” searches (3, 4, or 5-word) search queries that have less competition and represent users who are in the late-cycle research or buying phase. In other words, they have done the research and know what they want, and thus, you need to be positioned to capture them.
What keywords are you trying to target? Is it the name of your business or is it the name of an item on your menu if you’re a restaurant? What is it you are trying to search for, and more importantly are people actually searching for it? You can be the highest targeted, the most well optimized result for a phrase, but if no one is searching for it, you’re not going to get any traffic.
For example, a short-tail search for “birmingham lawyer” is a lot less targeted than “birmingham corporate tax attorney.If you are a Birmingham attorney specializing in corporate tax law, it would be a waste of time and money to go after the short-tail searches – you’d likely pull in too many irrelevant queries; people looking for personal injury, criminal defense, bankruptcy, etc. Far better to focus your efforts on users who are likeliest to convert or inquire within.
As part of our SEO consulting process, we help determine which keywords are likeliest to strike the right balance between driving traffic to your business’s website and converting that traffic to qualified leads. Any hack online marketing company can send you traffic to inflate its own results, but is it good traffic for you?
And at the end of the day, it’s quality traffic — not rankings — that matter most. In fact, there is such a thing as a rankings hoax (read more here). Even though search engine algorithm updates have vastly changed SEO techniques in the last three years, it doesn’t change the fact that the most effective way to drive visitors to your website at the lowest cost is to build your website’s organic search referrals.
The Flagstone SEO Difference
We have over 12 years of experience creating targeted SEO plans for clients that drive traffic and get results.
Flagstone has the specialized knowledge necessary to improve your brand’s exposure while also increasing the time visitors spend on your site — elements that contribute to better conversions and more revenue for you.
Here are just a few reasons why our results are tops in our industry.
- Ethical SEO That Drives Results
- Local SEO for Increased
- Return on Investment (ROI)
Why Choose Flagstone?
Your business is a great fit for Flagstone if:
- Your business targets high-value customers and leads — an average of $1000 per lead or more.
- You want a high-performing website.
- You take a long-term view on SEO processes and marketing.
- You understand that SEO results bring big benefit — in the long run.
- You realize that great search marketing is done through perpetual refinement.
- Your business has a high-performing website (or wants to).
- You want bonafide experts in SEO planning and implementation.
Sadly, many marketing companies claim to have “expert” SEO experience, while in reality they have only vague notions of how to implement a critical SEO plan.
These individuals with surface-level understanding often do severe, irreparable, damage to website owners who are fooled by their false credentials.
Flagstone has over 12 years of dedicated SEO planning — and we have an extensive portfolio of referrals and work to prove it.
Because of our cutting-edge knowledge, Flagstone clients enjoy an increase in both organic search referrals and conversions of leads to customers on their sites.
