Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the method of improving the volume of traffic to a website from search engines by optimizing a site's content. The goal of SEO is to achieve higher rankings in organic search results.

The first thing you should understand is that good SEO is a process. There are no guarantees in getting to #1, despite what any SEO company tells you. In many cases it can take months to see any real results. But if properly executed, SEO can drastically increase your sites exposure on the web.

Understanding Search Results

The first thing we need to do is take a look at a search engine in action. In this particular example, you can see that the search term "scottsdale arizona" (1) returned over 1.5 million possible matches (2) in Google (search engines don't actually return that many results to the user). Clearly, no one is going to click on every link. Most people only focus on the first page, or first 10 results.

You can see that the page is divided up into two areas: the sponsored links (3) and the organic results (4). Sponsored links, or Pay-Per-Click links, are there because companies pay to have them listed. Organic results are returned based on content relevancy, links, time on the web, and other factors.

Google Search Results

Organic vs. PPC Links

Organic results tend to return the most relevant information per the search words and have a much higher chance of user click through. However, many SEO professionals will agree that the best strategy involves a balance of both organic and PPC links. We personally want to focus on getting organic results, since they're generally more trusted than sponsored links.

Step 1: Keyword Analysis

Keywords are the specific words that people type into a search engine when looking for something online. They're also the backbone of search engine optimization. We do extensive research to come up with the most effective list of keywords and keyword phrases for your website.

Step 2: Identify and Evaluate the Competition

Who is your online competition? Who has the highest rankings and what keywords are they using on their sites?

Step 3: On-Page Factors

With the selected keywords and keyword phrases in hand, we optimize website content and tags. To effectively use the keywords and attract search engines, we need to establish the appropriate keyword density within each page.

Step 4: Off-Page Factors

Inbound links are important to SEO, but we don't want to saturate the web with too many links to your site. Instead, we focus on building inbound links from relevant sites using optimized anchor text.

Step 5: Monitor and Report

We evaluate how traffic is getting to your site, and where that traffic is coming from. We can then use that data to adjust our keywords or change our strategy if necessary. We periodically provide you with detailed reports on website analytics and rankings.