We like to describe our SEO efforts as public relations campaigns for the digital age, and that is what makes our results so successful.
Joel, our Los Angeles and Seattle company founder, began his foray into the world of online marketing at VT. Visible is one of the leading reputation management and evaluation companies on earth and heavily relies on an intricate understanding of search to generate results for their clients. In his time at Visible, Joel quickly moved up the rankings himself, until he headed up their SEO department. That valuable experience gave him an understanding about the web that most developers and designers don’t acknowledge.
All websites need to be found, and need to convert. This statement drives each and every aspect of our business and our services and is of ultimate importance to how we run our SEO campaigns.
SEO for us begins in the web development phase. First, we have to have a clear understanding of our client’s goals, their industry, and their business model. Because of that knowledge, we’re better able to target profitable keywords, client conversions, and find ways to generate revenue that their competitors and other internet marketing firms might be missing. Than we carry that knowledge and SEO into the HTML/CSS/PHP/etc. Ensuring that the site is properly built and coded, and that the client understands the content needs, help us to make sure that the first version of the site is SEO responsive and will innately be more inclined to climb the rankings. Where most web designers leave their clients needing a site rebuild from an experienced SEO company, our clients are already ahead of their industry.
Because we’re an integrated firm, our development team and marketing team are able to communicate and discuss the project as it is built. Once its live, and the site needs to start moving up the SERPs, our marketing team is standing by. Because they’ve had ongoing discussions about client needs, industry, site technologies, and strategies, we’re ready to move forward with our SEO campaigns immediately.
Rather than simply pursue a two-fold strategy of buying high volumes of links and targeting as many keywords as possible, we look for high value targets. One great referral link can provide unmatchable results when compared to thousands of poor links.
Great referral links not only count for more with Google because they are highly relevant and high quality sites in their own right, they often have an existing audience of potential clients who are more likely to buy from our customer’s site. Going back to the JC Penney example, how many of those video gamers bought evening gowns? Not many. But if that link to Penney’s had been from a fashion advice blog, Google wouldn’t have punished the department store, would likely have improved their ranking, and the visitors to the blog might have actually purchased the products that were recommending in the referral linking.
We also look to create buzz in social media circles and networks with the belief that they can provide results in the same two ways that a good referral link might. Getting a friend to recommend one product to another friend with similar tastes and opinions is almost always a guarantee to get a purchasing customer.
Ongoing testing also helps us to test the effectiveness of specific methodologies, so we are always looking to improve upon our work for our clients. Rather than being content to sit on our laurels and accept a good effort as enough, we’re trying to seek out new ways to improve traffic, increase conversions and rankings, and to produce better results for our clients.
We also carry out our campaigns in a transparent manner. Our clients have equal access to Google Analytics, a powerful tracking tool provided by Google, that documents how our efforts measure up. It allows them to examine things like traffic sources, keywords, ecommerce results, and other vital statistics. Many SEO and SEM companies use Google Analytics, but never publish the results or discuss them with our clients. We’ve found that people are excited to see our results, excited to gain an increased understanding of what we’re doing on their behalf, and ultimately most excited by the results we’re able to generate.
These efforts often take longer to gather and create, but they provide unmatched values and results for our clients. Time and time again, this strategy has effectively pushed our clients high on the rankings for valuable keywords that generate revenue. They also keep our clients from ever being in jeopardy of manual action or loss of ranking. And strong SEO campaigns often produce increasing returns both in terms of traffic and profitability.
