Baltimore SEO Firm
What is SEO?
SEO (search engine optimization) is essentially how you rank organically on google or other search engines. Google hold most if this traffic, so that is where most put their efforts, though it can be beneficial to rank well on Bing and Yahoo as well. On google when you type in a search, you will usually see about 3 ads at the top, and then below these ads you will see the organic SEO traffic. The value of SEO is that you don’t directly pay to be here. Once you get to the top, you are likely to stay there as long as you maintain your site and reputation well. It can be one of the most profitable forms of marketing if done correctly.
Local organic ranking vs Local Pack ranking
Local organic ranking is what we talked about before. This is simply, where you would rank in the listing below the ads of a google search result. The local pack ranking is essentially where you rank on google maps for the keyword you typed in. You might think that these two ranking would be the same, but they aren’t. The way that google ranks these are a similar but different in many way. Moz does a great job at sorting out these differences each year in this article.
How has SEO changed recently?
SEO has changed dramatically in the past few years. There was a time where, if you wanted to show up for “Web Design in Baltimore”, you would just stuff each page with this keyword anywhere you could, and eventually you would be showing up. As you can probably guess, this isn’t a great long term plan for Google or the internet in general. It makes things uncomfortable for the reader, and a poor user experience. Google’s bots can now tell when pages are keyword stuffed, and you actually get a negative citation for this, and your rankings will most likely drop. A big reason google has taken this stance is because of all the spammy companies and illegitimate companies that were taking over these top spots fairly quickly. This pushed all of the well branded hard working companies down the list, which is a bad look for google and terrible for the users.
What is SEO like in 2019?
SEO has shifted towards branding. There are lots of fundamentals you need to have in place, but if the core of your SEO isn’t based around your brand, then it won’t be successful in the long run. This means having an SEO friendly website that supports great content, and links out to other businesses that you support. You want your online presence to be part of a community. When google sees other good companies in the area linking back to your site, and you linking to their site, they know you have a good relationship, and in turn know you are a legitimate business with a good reputation. This also means managing your reviews and having a good process for getting review feedback from clients/customers. Social media is one of the least influential parts of SEO, but it is a great way to build trust in your community.
How we can help you
The number one factor for SEO is having your site SEO optimized. This can be really tough to do for someone that isn’t familiar with web design and keyword research. You might instinctually think that a certain keyword like “Elkridge Web Design" is what most of your customers are searching for, but if you don’t know how to do this research, then there is no way to verify it. As it turns out almost no one is searching the term “Elkridge web design”, so if I optimize my site for Elkridge Web Design than I am probably going to come up #1 for this keyword, but I’m not going to get any new customers, so it’s useless.
Beyond keyword research we also build you NAP citations (name, address phone number), by getting you listed in all of the necessary local and niche directories. This is also a big SEO factor, and if done incorrectly can lead to negative SEO. We build out your meta tags and meta descriptions to lead to a better click through rate on google organic search. There are many other factors than help SEO that we would be happy to go over with you. Feel free to give as a call anytime. Our main goal is to help other business succeed.
