Raleigh SEO Company

SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, is a specialized set of techniques that improve your visibility in search engines so you get more traffic to your website, and thus more inbound leads.  SEO includes a variety of technical activities like longtail keyword analysis, page speed improvement, and image tagging, just to name a few, but what it really boils down to is demonstrating how your company’s services relate to what people are searching for.  SEO helps ensure that when you build a website or create content of some type, whether blog articles, videos, etc., that your content is built in such a way that Google will be able to both understand how it relates to people’s needs, interconnecting your business’ online digital assets in the right way that doesn’t create penalties, and ensuring that your website gets the proper credit for the work that you do through appropriate backlinking that isn’t just web spam.

SEO and PPC naturally go together, and they should both be part of any business’ long term strategy.  SEO helps you build your brand effectively, while PPC with Google AdWords can quite literally put you at the very top of the screen practically overnight.  In fact, you’ve probably notice that when you do a search for a local company, very often nowadays almost everything Google shows you is either (1) paid ads, or (2) their map.  So if you want to be on that first screen, traditional SEO itself is not going to get you there.

The way many companies package their services, it may not be affordable for a small business to have both SEO and PPC elsewhere.  I addressed this shortcoming in the market by creating a special small business blend of SEO and PPC that shifts the focus over time.  The PPC component can get you on that first page with paid ads, while implementing brand marketing to improve your organic results so you just show in the natural listings.  Again, it’s all about just being thoughtful and deliberate about how you grow your online brand.

In deciding what type of rank you warrant, Google wants to be sure that you are really going to continue to provide some type of value or have relevance to people searching online.  There have been too many fly-by-night or shady operations gaming the system to get top rankings, when they didn’t really deserve to be there.  As a result, Google takes a really close look at things now, including actual live person reviews of Page 1 rankings.  The two main things to keep in mind if you are trying to pursue SEO are:

1. Don’t try to outsmart Google.
2. As Google giveth, so does it taketh away.

There is a bit of a catch-22 with getting online attention, since you need some attention to get found, but you can’t get found without getting some attention from Google – but once you get found, it’s much easier to get attention.  It’s hard to get either one without the other, which is why social media marketing can, and should be, be an important component of your complete online marketing strategy.