SEO Service
How ITH SEO Brings Your Website the Visitors You Need
Our team at Invite Them Home lives and breathes SEO, and we are excited each time our customers see the success of their unique SEO program. Here is a detailed look at the SEO techniques we use to bring you engaged website visitors and raise your SERP rankings.
Table of Contents
- ^What is SEO?
- ^Why is SEO important?
- ^How Does SEO Work?
- ^Why is SEO important for your business?
- ^4 Keys to an Effective SEO Strategy
- ^Measuring the Effectiveness of SEO
- ^Don’t forget the technicalities
- ^Using Google Search Console
- ^SEO with Other Search Engines
- ^Levels of SEO
- ^Useful SEO Vocabulary
- ^Why hire ITH as Your SEO agency?
- ^Get Started with SEO Today!
What is SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of improving your website’s visibility in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. By creating relevant, high-quality content and providing a great user experience, SEO helps fulfill users’ search needs quickly and accurately.
SEO activities can be done on your website (on-site) or outside (off-site). This is why SEO is often divided into “on-page” and “off-page” categories. SEO success comes after intensive keyword research, content creation and optimization, technical optimization, and link building.
Why is SEO important?
Billions of people use Google and other search engines daily to find information about products and services, in addition to “how to” and other search intents. Your website must appear in the top search results for your target keywords to see its share of search traffic. The higher your website ranks, the more visitors you’ll get. High SERP positions have become more important than ever with the popularity of voice search and the advent of AI-assisted chat-based search. The results of these searches are often delivered as a “ according to Invite Them Home SEO….”. These results will often only expose a single answer and source, so it is critical to understand every intent and question your target audience has about your product, service, and organization.
SEO is a powerful method to improve your web page’s appearance and SERP positioning in organic search results. Organic search is the primary way people find and access online content, making a solid SEO strategy crucial for driving quality and quantity traffic to your website.
Unlike paid ads, organic search results are determined by the search engine’s algorithms and are positioned based on relevance to the user’s query. You can’t buy your way to the top of organic search results, you have to earn that position with quality targeted content.
Attracting visitors is great, but ensuring they are genuinely interested in what your site offers is important. High-quality SEO focuses on matching user search intent with relevant pages in the search engine results page (SERP) to drive meaningful conversions.
To increase your chances of getting clicks and conversions, it’s vital to rank your relevant pages as high as possible in the SERP. The more high-quality visitors you attract, the higher the likelihood of boosting valuable conversions.
How Does SEO Work?
When a question or problem arises, you most likely use search engines to find the answers. Search engine algorithms analyze keywords and webpage content to give you the best results based on their understanding of your search intent and the page content they present. The process of how search engines work can be broken down into three steps: crawling, indexing, and ranking.
Crawling is the stage where search engines discover web pages. Indexing is the filing stage, where search engines organize and store these web pages. Finally, ranking is the stage where search engines determine the order in which web pages should appear in search results.
Once a search engine has crawled and indexed your website, it can be ranked and appear in search results.
To determine the ranking of web pages, search engines use over 200 signals, which can be grouped into three pillars of SEO: technical optimization, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization. These signals include things like the presence of keywords in the title, the loading speed of the web page, and the reputation of the website.
Google’s main search algorithm is responsible for ranking search engine results. It also has a sub-algorithm based on machine learning. If Google’s algorithm encounters an unfamiliar word or phrase, it uses artificial intelligence to better understand it by relating it to similar search queries. This helps Google and other search engines provide more relevant search results, even for unusual search queries. Instead of focusing on keyword optimization, Google rewards websites prioritizing user satisfaction and delivering the expected results.
A successful SEO strategy involves optimizing your website to enhance user experience and satisfaction. This includes optimizing for medium-tail keywords, optimizing page titles and descriptions to encourage clicks, and optimizing content to increase dwell time and reduce bounce rate.
Why is SEO important for your business?
SEO is crucial in boosting brand visibility, driving search traffic to your website, establishing your brand as an industry authority, and facilitating sustainable business growth. If you’re looking into SEO basics for your business, you want to know what’s in it for you. Let’s dive into how each of these factors contributes to the importance of SEO for your brand.
Boost Visibility and Rankings
When users search for a product or service online, they tend to choose from the top results suggested by search engines. By implementing effective SEO strategies, you can increase your website’s ranking and visibility, making it more likely for potential customers to click on your site and convert. Even if they don’t convert immediately, being present in the search rankings helps users become familiar with your brand, increasing the chances of future engagement.
Drive Web Traffic
If your website remains hidden from potential customers or clients, you miss out on valuable opportunities. SEO helps increase organic search engine traffic, leading to a higher number of daily visitors on your website. With more relevant people visiting your site, your sales potential also increases. The more people who see your site, the higher the likelihood of making a sale.
Build Trust
Optimizing your website boosts its ranking on search engines like Google and Bing. While higher rankings increase visibility, it also builds trust with potential customers. Users often rely on search engine recommendations, and a higher position in search results solidifies your brand’s trustworthiness in their minds. When your website appears at the top for keywords users are searching for, it reinforces the credibility of your products or services
Fuel Business Growth
Without a doubt, SEO holds immense importance for brand growth. Higher rankings for high-volume keywords on search engines translate to more organic traffic for your site. A well-optimized website is more likely to attract customers, generate leads, and increase sales. Once users find your website through a search engine, they may also share your brand across popular social platforms like Facebook or Instagram. SEO is the key to unlocking your brand’s growth potential.
Improve User Experience
Aside from boosting visibility and rankings, SEO efforts also contribute to creating a better visitor experience on your site. By optimizing your content and ensuring a user-friendly design, you enhance usability for both mobile and desktop visitors. Improving page load speed also reduces bounce rates and increases visitor engagement.
A well-optimized website effectively communicates the product or service being offered, provides clear instructions on obtaining it, and addresses any user inquiries. User experience (UX) is a crucial factor for search engines like Google, and optimizing your site appeals to search engines and enhances user experience. By making it easy for both search engines and users to find the information they need, you create a seamless browsing experience. Conversely, if users struggle to navigate your site, search engines will face similar challenges.
4 Keys to an Effective SEO Strategy
SEO success depends on a well-thought-out strategy from beginning to end.
1. Start where you are
Any successful SEO strategy begins with SEO benchmarking. Benchmarking your SEO metrics against your competitors is crucial to measuring performance and productivity in your marketing efforts. It lets you track progress, set campaign goals, and identify effective strategies. By staying updated and regularly measuring results, you can ensure you’re focused on improving ROI and productivity instead of being distracted by superficial statistics.
Many SEO agencies rely on generic reports and easily manipulated statistics to show progress. For example, they may highlight an increase in the number of keywords you rank for, but fail to consider the quality of those keywords or whether they align with your target audience. This can result in misleading progress and lack of actual business growth.
Google constantly updates its algorithm, requiring adjustments to your SEO strategy. Without clear benchmarks, it becomes challenging to understand how well you’re performing and what changes are needed. However, by benchmarking your primary keywords and critical metrics, you have a solid foundation for improving the success of your SEO campaign.
2. Do your keyword research
Mastering keyword research is essential for effective SEO. By identifying the popular words and phrases, known as keywords, that people search for on platforms like Google, you can tailor your content to attract your target audience. Conducting keyword research allows us to gauge the demand for specific keywords and assess the level of competition for those terms in organic search results. This valuable insight provides direction for content optimization.
Keyword research has evolved, with the focus now on search intent - understanding what users are looking for when they enter a keyword in a search engine. Advanced keyword research involves using a professional keyword research tool like Spyfu or Serpstat that we use every day at ITH.
Keyword research goes beyond just determining search volume for a specific keyword. It involves exploring the different ways people use language to research ideas and topics. This research is crucial not only for search engine optimization but also for content marketing as a whole. It helps generate blog post ideas, shapes future content strategies, illuminates your audience’s questions, problems, and needs, and keeps you up-to-date with the ever-changing search landscape. Ultimately, by researching the words people use in search engines and using this knowledge to create targeted content, you can drive highly relevant traffic to your website - traffic that is more likely to convert.
3. Choose the right keywords with a keyword analysis
Keyword analysis is the essential process of examining the search terms that bring visitors to your website. It forms the foundation of successful search marketing campaigns.
By understanding the queries used by your target audience when searching online, you can tailor your content and landing pages to attract more traffic and increase conversions. This makes keyword analysis a crucial skill for both SEO and PPC experts.
Not only does keyword analysis help boost conversions, discover new markets, and optimize spending, but it also requires time and decision-making to outperform your keyword competition. Our professional SEO tools allow us to analyze your keywords and provide suggestions for maximum results.
4. Write optimized content
Content SEO is essential for ranking your web pages high on search engines. It involves everything from writing to structuring the content on your website. To ensure that your website ranks well, you need to focus on three key elements: keyword strategy, site structure, and copywriting.
Search engines like Google rely on the words you use to determine your website’s ranking. While a well-designed website with a great user interface and technical optimization is important, quality content is crucial for success in search engines.
When creating articles, it’s important to make them engaging for your audience while also appealing to Google. The key is to optimize your text for search without sacrificing the originality and readability of your content.
For your copywriting to be of high quality, it’s essential to write original content that stands out from what’s already available on the internet. Your content should also be something that people want to read.
Doing keyword research will provide you with a list of terms you want to rank for. However, you should come up with an original idea for your blog post where the desired focus keyword plays a significant role.
Original SEO content doesn’t have to be completely new. Providing your professional opinion on a topic can also count as original content, as it adds a unique perspective to the discussion. To ensure your content is original, consider your audience and their needs. Ask yourself what message you want to convey, what the purpose of your article is, and what action you want your audience to take after reading it.
If you don’t have the time or skills for quality content creation, our team of copywriters have a proven history of writing outstanding optimized content that delivers measurable results.
Measuring the Effectiveness of SEO
Not all metrics are made equal when it comes to measuring your SEO results. To get a comprehensive overview of your SEO performance, focus on the key metrics that truly matter for your business. Measuring your success is critical for accountability and the visibility that you need to adjust strategies and tasks. For this reason, we meet one or more times per month with all of our SEO customers via Zoom, and each customer has a secure Digital Marketing Dashboard that they can check at any time and view trends and history related to their website, social media, Google Places for Business, Ad campaigns and more.
Some of the metrics and KPIs we track are:
Organic Traffic:
Gain insights into how well your webpages rank for relevant keywords and the quality of traffic you receive. Measure your organic traffic accurately with Google Search Console’s “Search Results” report under “Performance.” Compare your site’s performance against competitors to identify opportunities for improvement.
Keyword Rankings:
Your website’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific keywords or phrases is crucial for driving traffic. Keep track of your keyword rankings as they can fluctuate due to algorithm updates, loss of backlinks, or competition. Setting up a daily tracking campaign will automate this process and help you retain valuable traffic.
SERP Visibility:
Measure how often and prominently your website appears on SERPs for relevant keywords. Take into account keyword rankings as well as the presence of nontraditional organic results like snippets and panels. Your visibility percentage, ranging from 0% to 100%, indicates your site’s progress in the top 100 results. Higher visibility means more visitors to your site, so implement best practices like keyword research, structured data, and content optimization to increase it.
Click-Through Rate (CTR):
Evaluate the effectiveness of your title tags and meta descriptions in attracting searchers’ attention and interest. Calculate your CTR by dividing clicks by impressions and multiplying by 100. Monitor your Google CTR through Search Console and experiment with different strategies to maximize this rate.
Bounce Rate:
Determine the percentage of visitors who leave your site without further interaction. A lower bounce rate indicates engaging and relevant content. Use bounce rate monitoring to identify weaknesses in your SEO approach or website, such as slow loading speed or poor mobile optimization. Address search intent, enhance readability and navigation, and incorporate internal links to reduce bounce rate.
Backlinks:
Backlinks from other reputable sites are crucial for demonstrating your site’s trustworthiness and value to Google. Continuously track and monitor your backlinks while actively working on building high-quality ones. Implement effective link building strategies such as content marketing, email outreach, broken link building, and unlinked brand mentions.
Conversion Rate:
Measure the percentage of visitors who take a desired action on your site, such as subscribing or making a purchase. This rate showcases the effectiveness of your pages in converting visitors into leads or customers. Set up goals in Google Analytics to track your conversion rates accurately.
By focusing on these key metrics, you’ll gain valuable insights into your SEO performance and be able to fine-tune your strategies for optimal results.
Bounce Rate:
Determine the percentage of visitors who leave your site without further interaction. A lower bounce rate indicates engaging and relevant content. Use bounce rate monitoring to identify weaknesses in your SEO approach or website, such as slow loading speed or poor mobile optimization. Address search intent, enhance readability and navigation, and incorporate internal links to reduce bounce rate.
Backlinks:
Backlinks from other reputable sites are crucial for demonstrating your site’s trustworthiness and value to Google. Continuously track and monitor your backlinks while actively working on building high-quality ones. Implement effective link building strategies such as content marketing, email outreach, broken link building, and unlinked brand mentions.
Conversion Rate:
Measure the percentage of visitors who take a desired action on your site, such as subscribing or making a purchase. This rate showcases the effectiveness of your pages in converting visitors into leads or customers. Set up goals in Google Analytics to track your conversion rates accurately.
By focusing on these key metrics, you’ll gain valuable insights into your SEO performance and be able to fine-tune your strategies for optimal results.
Don’t forget the technicalities
When it comes to improving your website’s search engine rankings, technical SEO is a crucial starting point. By optimizing your site to be easily crawled and indexed by search engines, you can boost your chances of appearing at the top of search results.
Don’t underestimate the importance of technical SEO. While it may be a bit more complex to grasp, it plays a crucial role in driving organic traffic to your site. Even if you have amazing content, it won’t get noticed if search engines can’t find and understand it.
Without a solid foundation of technical SEO, your content will risk being ignored by search engines. Website errors like broken links, missing images, navigation errors, etc. can cause a search engine to downgrade your SERP rankings. But fear not, it’s a beast that can be tamed and broken down into manageable chunks. If you approach it with a checklist and tackle it step by step, you’ll be well on your way to improving your site’s visibility and driving more traffic.
Ready to optimize your site? Come to ITH for a free technical SEO audit.
Using Google Search Console
Improve your website’s performance on Google Search with Google Search Console, a free and invaluable tool offered by Google. It allows you to gain insights into how your site is viewed by Google, troubleshoot any issues, and enhance its presence in search results.
- ZEnsure Google can easily find and crawl your site.
- ZResolve indexing problems and request re-indexing for new or updated content.
- ZGain access to valuable data on your site’s performance in Google Search, including appearance frequency, search queries, click-through rates, and more.
- ZStay informed with alerts regarding indexing, spam, and other potential issues on your site.
- ZDiscover the websites that link to yours, enhancing your online presence.
SEO with Other Search Engines
Want stable, scalable, and free search traffic? Build authority with search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. While Google dominates the market, Bing’s market share is on the rise. Plus, Bing and Yahoo have higher conversion rates and can potentially make you more money than Google.
While everyone else is focused on Google rankings, you can easily attract traffic and new customers from other search engines. Don’t forget about Bing and Yahoo, especially if your target audience uses them more frequently.
Keywords, on-page factors, and technical SEO are crucial for Bing and Yahoo. While they don’t have as complex of a search algorithm as Google, you still need to put in extra effort to provide information about your website. Meta Keywords are important for Yahoo, Bing, and other smaller search engines, so make sure to use them wisely.
Google no longer considers meta keywords for rankings, but Bing uses them to check to see if your web content is “spammy”. Use relevant keywords, misspellings, and synonyms to improve the quality of your search results. But remember, don’t abuse meta keywords or it will hurt your rankings.
When it comes to on-page keywords, Google uses LSI ( Latent Semantic Indexing )keywords, while Bing prefers exact keyword matches. Target no more than two primary keywords per page to improve your position in Bing’s search results. We call this “narrow and deep”; each of your pages ideally covers a single topic in depth.
Levels of SEO
The art of drawing search traffic depends on if you’re looking to a local, national, or international audience. At Invite Them Home, we have the tools and expertise to home your SEO strategy whether you’re operating a local business or a worldwide corporation
Local SEO
Elevate your small business’s visibility and attract relevant customers with local SEO. You can rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for local searches by emphasizing your specific geographic area and competing with local competitors. Our tools analyze mobile and desktop searches by city, county, or state to provide the data needed for the best results. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to generate more business from mobile and desktop searches near your business. Invest in local SEO and watch your small business thrive.
National SEO
National SEO is the practice of improving a website’s visibility on Google search results. It involves optimizing the site to rank higher for keywords and phrases that are relevant to a business’s products or services. This type of SEO is especially beneficial for companies that operate on a national scale and cater to a wide audience. For instance, national SEO can greatly benefit e-commerce sites that target consumers across the country. These businesses typically have websites that are designed to attract a broad range of customers and target multiple keywords and phrases.
International SEO
If a significant portion of your website traffic comes from different countries or speaks different languages, it’s time to optimize your website for a better international user experience. While international SEO might seem unfamiliar, it’s actually similar to geotargeting. Instead of targeting local traffic, you’ll optimize your site for different countries and languages.
To create a fully internationalized website that caters to a specific country and language, focus on three key tasks:
- Use an international-friendly URL structure to target your desired country or region.
- Implement language tags to indicate the language your pages are targeting.
- Develop and maintain content in your target audience’s language(s) to improve your rankings.
In some cases, you may only need to target a specific language or country, allowing you to focus on one or two of these goals.
Why hire ITH as Your SEO agency?
SEO is a time-consuming process that requires extensive research and upkeep. By outsourcing your SEO to a professional agency, you can free up your time to focus on other important tasks.
Our SEO agency will handle all the necessary tasks for optimizing your website, including keyword research, content optimization, and strategic internal linking. We will also analyze campaign data, monitor for any issues, and make necessary adjustments to improve your SEO performance.
But hiring an SEO agency doesn’t just save you time – it saves you money too. Maintaining an in-house team of SEO professionals can be costly, but outsourcing the job to an agency can provide the expertise you need at a lower cost.
In addition to cost savings, partnering with an SEO agency brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table. Our team is constantly staying updated on industry news and algorithm changes, ensuring that your website stays ahead of the curve.
We have paid subscriptions to essential SEO tools that help us ensure each of your site’s pages gives you maximum results. If you want to top off your SEO strategy, we can also guide you through a Google Ads campaign. With a dedicated team of SEO specialists, web developers, and content writers, Invite Them Home can seamlessly implement changes to your website and respond to any urgent needs.
Get Started with SEO Today!
These are just SEO basics. If you want to see true SEO success, you need more than the fundamentals.
If you want to grow your online presence and rise in search engine rankings, let ITH handle the job. We have the expertise, resources, and industry insights to make your business soar. Contact us today for a free consultation, including a full SEO audit and Zoom meeting to go over your results. It doesn’t get more optimal than that!