At Integrity Marketing & Consulting, our goal isn’t selling our services—its helping you (our client) raise your online identity, and increase ROI (return on investment). Perhaps the most powerful weapon in our arsenal is via Organic SEO.
Search engine rankings—and how we improve them
As Owner of Integrity Marketing and Consulting, and an SEO Consultant myself, I will outline the process of how we improve search engine rankings. Although the technical jargon can be quite dense, I’ll do my best to make it as easy as possible. In the meantime, feel free to ask me any questions you may have: call (954) 534-0510 or contact us.
Search Engines: what they are—and why we care
Search engines are used to refer to a web search engine. This web search engine searches for critical information on the Internet, and generally presents these results in lists, often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). SERPs may contain web pages, images, information, and other file-types. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories—which are maintained only by human editors—search engines derive their power by maintaining real-time info via an algorithm run by an automated web-crawler.
Search engines give users the ability to research & access any topic online—effectively and easily. Search engines enable us to find answers, conduct research, meet people / companies, and do business.
How They Work
Search engines crawl the web with spiders and index everything they find, including web pages, images, videos and files. They use proprietary, highly-secretive algorithms to calculate the indexed items based on keyword density and relevance. These algorithms factor in popularity, authority, structure, navigation, and current content delivering the results based on the user’s search query. These results are based in order of most to least popular.
“75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.” SEJ
How We Use Organic SEO to Improve Search Engine Rankings
Keywords
A keyword is a word used by a search engine in its search for relevant web pages. We determine and indentify the targeted market the content is trying to reach. Next we conduct keyword research using software to find keywords / alternate keywords that are most-often searched for. We then conduct an on-page site audit based on the selected keywords—enabling us to optimize and monitor your online marketing efforts.
On-page Website Audit
Our audit will identify and grade the keyword density (the # of times the keyword appears within the page’s content) based on the targeted keywords per page. We only optimize one keyword phrase per page. Our audit also identifies any Meta tags (Meta elements are the HTML or XHTML <meta … > element used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Multiple elements are often used on the same page: the element is the same, but its attributes are different. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided conventional means.
Our audit will also identify any issues you may have with your site’s coding, duplications, navigation, website layout, existing analytics, marketability, conversion rate, efficiency or usability. We then create a report based on our findings, delivering an Executive Consultation Report aimed at improving any deficiencies.
How we can Help
Our consultation will provide all possible ways to optimize content based on our audit’s findings. You may choose to write & edit the content yourself—or have us do it professionally. See our website copywriting and content ctreation services. Also included in our services is optimization of Meta tags and images.
Off-page Optimization
We use several different sources to determine your site’s Link Metrics, Page Authority, Domain Authority and Social Metrics. We use Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO Site Explorer, Ahrefs Site Explorer and Page Rank Checker.
Link Metrics
These show us internal & external linking structure, anchor text, link coding behaviors and back-links.
Page Authority
This calculated metric shows how well a given webpage is likely to rank in the search engines’ search results.
Domain Authority
Another calculated metric, it shows how well a given domain is likely to rank in the search engines’ search results.
Social Metrics
These consist of Facebook Likes & Shares, Tweets, Google +1’s and other social media-related factors of your site.
Submission to Search Engines
We review whether or not your site indexed in the major search engines. If not, we will submit your site for you, to all major search engines.
Submission to Local Search Directories
We review you are indexed in any local search directories we partner with—if not, we submit and manage your listings and reviews. We work with Google Local, Yahoo Local, Bing Business Portal, Yelp and Angie’s List. Our work entails creating, submitting and managing all listings for you.
Sitemaps
We will create a sitemap for you, submit it and manage it. A sitemap is a list of your site’s web pages that is easily-accessible to search engine crawlers and users. It can take the form of a document used as a planning tool for web design or a web page listing pates on your site—typically organized in hierarchical fashion. In short, sitemaps help visitors and search engine robots find pages on your site.
Link Building / Link Baiting
Because link metrics are so critical to search engines—particularly Google—we spend a tremendous amount of time and effort on link building and link creation. We make sure that there are appropriate links on each page that link to relevant content, both internally and externally. We build links through direct outreach and through link-baiting.
Link Baiting
Link Baiting is a technique used to create unique content that will naturally attract others to link to it. Some of the techniques we use are unique page content, Blog Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Infographics, Video Marketing, Comment Marketing and Contests.
Blog Marketing
Blog marketing, which is content marketing, is a powerful tool in our tool belt and can be effective for on-page and off-page SEO. It helps to increase brand awareness, popularity, stickiness, web traffic and conversion opportunity. We have a team of writers that research topics based on our clients niche and geographically targeted market. Each blog article is written with unique content and receives keyword research, optimization, quality control and social signals.
“Content marketing rocks. Marketing Sherpa reports Distribution Inc. lead to a 2,000% increase in blog traffic and a 40% increase in revenue.” SEJ
Social Media Marketing
Social signals play a growing role in the search engines algorithms and will continue to as time passes. That is why we have incorporated social media management into our SEO / Internet Marketing packages. Social Media allows companies to engage their customers online and visa-versa. It helps increase brand recognition, trust and is a great way to build natural backlinks. Companies and brands that refuse to have active social media accounts will be surely left in the dust.
“GroupM states “when consumers were exposed to both search and social media influenced by a brand that overall search CTR (click-through-rate) went up by 94 percent.” SEJ
Google Analytics
We leverage Google Analytics to analyze your site’s productivity base on our optimization, link building and link baiting efforts. We use these reports to monitor the favorability of the on-page content, likability of landing pages and user interaction with your site. We also continually hunt for additional keywords, for ongoing keyword research and marketing strategies.
Search Engine Rankings
We monitor the SERP (search engine results page) based on specific, targeted keywords and deliver reports directly to you.
Just the beginning…
As SEO continues to evolve, so will our strategies. I hope that this has been a helpful primer, and that you now have a better understanding of how we help our clients improve their search engine rankings. Feel free to leave any comments you may have and share it with your social community. And as always, please contact us with any questions or issues you may have.