Search Engine Optimization
Imagine being able to answer the question of a potential customer that you’ve never met — at the very moment that they’re looking for an answer. That’s exactly what you’re doing when you optimize your website for search engines. That being said, SEO is a competitive sport, and many small and medium-sized businesses aren’t even in the game.
According to a 2019 survey from Moz.com (an authority on SEO), 93% of people who search using Google don’t go past the first page of search results. What are you doing to make sure your content is on that first page?
SEO Services - Let’s Cut Through the Technical Jargon
At Hotfire Creative, we’re big fans of search engine optimization (SEO). But as an organization that values clear communication, we’re not too fond of all the technical jargon that comes along with SEO.
Even the name “search engine optimization” is just a fancy way of saying that we help your website show up on Google, Bing, and other search engines. So, we decided to cut through these technical terms by offering a quick and simple explanation for each of our SEO services (almost as if a human being were describing them):
SEO Audits
Before we can develop an effective SEO strategy, we typically need to do an SEO audit of your website. This audit will tell us whether there are issues that are affecting your website’s visibility in search engines. This includes issues with your website structure, issues with your website content, technical issues that are preventing search engines from accessing your content, and other offsite issues that are impacting your website’s visibility in search engines. An SEO audit is the perfect way to determine which of our other SEO services you may need.
Keyword Research
Potential customers are constantly searching for information and asking questions on Google, Bing, and other search engines. And there are an assortment of SEO tools that capture and aggregate the data from those searches, allowing SEO specialists like ourselves to perform keyword research. When doing keyword research, we find the most popular and least competitive search queries related to your product, service, or brand. Then we improve your website SEO by integrating those same keyword phrases into your content – but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
On-Page SEO
After using keyword research to identify the most popular keyword phrases related to your product, service, or brand; we’re ready for on-page SEO. With on-page SEO, the goal is to weave those popular keyword phrases seamlessly into your on-page content. And by “on-page content,” we’re referring to the copy/text that’s visible to front end users of your website, as well as other information that’s “hidden” in the code of webpages (title tag, meta description, alt text. etc.) in order to help search engines and screen readers make sense of website content.
Keyword Rank Tracking
Keyword rank tracking involves monitoring how well your website ranks for your most important keywords over time. Think of it as a way to measure the effectiveness of your on-page SEO efforts. If you sell “fancy shoes,” and you rank third on Google for the search query “fancy shoes” in September, then we want you to rank first or second in October. And we’ll continue making adjustments to your on-page SEO to ensure your website content ranks well in search engines over time. This means more qualified customers for you and more profit for your bottom line.
Technical SEO
Okay, okay. You can call our bluff on this “quick and simple” explanation of technical SEO. It’s hard to avoid using technical jargon when we’re talking about technical SEO. It involves tasks like creating robots.txt files and XML sitemaps; fixing issues with duplicate content and 301-redirects; incorporating structured data markup; and registering your website with Google Search Console. But when you boil it all down to its simplest form, technical SEO is all about making it easier for Google and other search engines to organize and display your content.
Link Building
One of the ways that the Google search engine evaluates the importance and trustworthiness of your website content is by looking at the volume and quality of links to your website, also known as backlinks. Link building is all about analyzing your website’s backlinks; attempting to gain new links from high-quality websites related to your product, service, or brand; and occasionally removing or “disavowing” any troublesome links from less reputable websites (these links are often the result of an unethical technique known as negative or “black hat” SEO).
Local SEO
Local SEO involves taking steps to improve the online and mobile visibility of businesses that serve customers in a specific geographic area. This includes business with public-facing storefronts, such as laundromats, convenience stores, and dentist offices. This also includes service-oriented businesses like plumbers, landscapers, and real estate agents. Local SEO uses techniques like submitting local citations to Google My Business and other local listing sites, as well as monitoring and responding to reviews on websites like TripAdvisor, Angi, or Yelp.
