Our Methodology

Our 3 Pillars To SEO

Our methodology comes from our deep, intensive understanding of how search ranking algorithms work, along with 15+ years of real-world experience in actually ranking websites. We know what works and what it takes to rank a website, and we can break down our methodology into 3 core pillars. An SEO campaign that lacks even 1 of these pillars will ultimately crumble and fail.

The 6 Steps To Our SEO Campaigns

Our SEO campaigns can be broken down into 6 main steps. Some of the tactics and order of the steps may differ slightly depending on the type of business and website, but we generally follow the same 6 step process. If you’re interested in the exact strategy we would use for your business, book a consultation!

Step 1. Website Design

The first thing we do when starting a campaign is to go through and analyze your website. We’ll run a technical audit that will give us an insight as to how well your website is technically optimized and if there are any major issues that we need to address. A large part of SEO is about user experience, and so it is important that your website is a good user experience. If a website is outdated, does not utilize a responsive design, and has long loading times, it could lead to search engines not favoring your website and we would highly recommend an overhaul and redesign to the website. Without this, your SEO campaign will suffer to reach its full potential and it would drive traffic to a website no one will want to use and will leave you missing out on conversions. Redesigning a website can have a huge impact on your rankings, so it’s best to do it at the very start of an SEO campaign. We’ll also integrate analytic tracking so we can measure the progress of the SEO campaign.

Step 2. Keyword Research

Keyword research is the next step that we implement in our SEO process. We take the services, products, and locations of your business and derive the best keywords that we should focus on for the campaign. This is one of the most important steps because if we don’t target the right keywords, we won’t generate any relevant traffic. We’ll also look for what we like to call “Easy Wins“. These are keywords that you are already ranking for that could be improved upon. Maybe you’re ranking on page 3-5 for the majority of your keywords. If those keywords have a lot of traffic and search volume, those are potential Easy Wins that could immediately help bring in more traffic to your website. One thing to keep in mind when researching keywords is to think like the customer. When we are in a specific industry, we understand the nomenclature and the proper technical terms for things, but a potential customer most likely does not. This means that we have to put ourselves in the customer’s shoes and think like them. “What would they type in to find X?” Luckily we have tools that allow us to see exactly what people are actually searching for, which makes “thinking like the customer” much easier.

Step 3. Competitor Research

Now that we have the keywords that we want to rank for, we need to check out the competition. When we do our keyword research we can get an idea of how difficult a keyword will be to rank for. This is known as competitiveness. The more competitive a keyword, the harder it will be to rank for it. What we’ll do is analyze the other websites that are ranking for these keywords and we’ll see what they’re doing. This will give us a good understanding of what we need to do in order to outrank the competition. One of the major things we’ll look at is the competitor’s authority. This will help us determine how aggressive we need to be when building authority.

Step 4. Content Optimization

Content optimization is where we start re-writing the content of the website to target specific keywords. We’ll make sure to use proper content structuring, utilizing the correct header tags to organize the content. This is important to ensure the search engines properly understand the content it is crawling. We make sure to only target 1 keyword per page and never target that keyword again to avoid rank cannibalization. Usually the homepage of a website is targeting your branded keyword, which is just your business name. The about page will target your industry keyword, and your service/product pages will focus on those service/product specific keywords. If you’re a local business we’ll ensure to target localized keywords.

Step 5. Authority Building

Authority is where we make the actual ranking happen and is arguably the king of any SEO campaign. Your website could be perfectly optimized with a ton of content targeting thousands of keywords, but if you don’t have any authority, you’ll never actually rank for those keywords. Before the internet, how did we know who to hire or who to go to? Well, we had to ask around and get referrals! You would then create a hierarchy of who the best choice was based on the number of referrals. This is exactly how search engines rank websites. The more website that refer their traffic to your website, the more trustworthy your content is in the eyes of a search engine. These referrals are called backlinks. Not all backlinks are equal though, and there are many factors that determine how powerful that backlink is, including the other website’s own authority.

Step 6. Content Creation

Not to be confused with Step 4, Content Creation is where we create new content targeting supplemental keywords to your primary keywords. Content creation is mostly done via blog posts that internally link back to the main keyword/service/product page. Our focus is to create and build authority for your core service keywords, but once we’ve got that handled we need to write content that supports those core keywords by expanding on more similar keywords. This allows us to cast a larger net in search engines and generate more and more organic traffic to your website.

Example SEO Campaign

Below you’ll find the basic structure of our SEO Campaigns. We like to split up the campaign into 2 different phases. These can vary slightly depending on your specific industry so if you’re interested in learning more about what an SEO campaign would look like for your business, book a consultation!

Phase 1. Setting The Foundation

Phase 1 of the SEO campaign is all about prepping your website for expansion and contains all of the keyword research, competitor research, website design (if needed), and technical and content optimizations. For the vast majority of our clients, Phase 1 only takes a month to complete, however depending on the size of the website the on-page optimizations can blend into multiple months. For local SEO campaigns, we’ll also optimize your Google Business Listing during this phase. For the most part, Phase 1 is all of the one-and-done aspects of an SEO campaign.

Phase 2. Expanding Your Reach

Phase 2 is where all the magic happens. We start building up the authority of your website and creating new content to help bolster your core keywords by targeting supplemental keywords. This is the ongoing portion of the campaign. We’ll use a plethora of link building strategies like the tried and true guest blog posts and link insertion methods. The keyword research portion will help us formulate what to target for our blog posts. Your budget will determine the amount of backlinks we can build out month over month as well as how many blog posts we can write each month. SEO is one of those services where the bigger the budget, the faster the results. But don’t get discouraged if you have a small budget because SLOW SEO IS BETTER THAN NO SEO!