How An SEO Consultant Can Drastically Help Your Business

SEO Overview: What is it?

The goal of this read is to help you determine if leveraging an SEO Consultant is right for your business. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization consists of increasing the visibility of your online presence through a series of practices including but not limited to, on-page SEO, backlinks, keyword focus, and most importantly, valuable content that users engage with. 

Most companies have heard of SEO but only 44% of organizations are investing time in optimizing search. Now, why is that? Search engine optimization can absolutely show value for your company in the short-term, but it’s a long game and hard to show your boss an immediate return on investment. Because organizations want to see immediate results, they’ll skip building out an SEO strategy and jump right into ad spend. 

Why Does it Matter?

As we discussed, SEO is a long-game, and organizations can reap the benefits if they implement an SEO strategy and stick to it; good things take time. As more companies throw money at paid advertisements, it should be noted that on average, less than 3% of users actually click or ‘engage’ with paid search. 

We searched for ‘SEO Company’ and the example below shows the little ‘ad’ box in the top left which often discourage users from engaging.

For this New Jersey based SEO company, they’re listed at the top of Google’s page when the term ‘SEO Company’ is searched. That’s great, but will be incredibly costly over time. Let’s look at the cost to be on the top page of google for that term:

$31.38 will beat out most competitors and ensure that your ad can be seen at the higher end of the page. The only problem is that if less than 3% of users actually click on these ads, you’re spending a great deal of money on a monthly basis just to ensure that a 3% click-rate will actually drive significant traffic to your site.

Now, let’s take the same term and see what comes up organically (not paid ads). 

Lyfe Marketing and Thrive Agency both are listed within the first 5 listings of organic ranking in google. Almost 68% of traffic to sites come from listings within the first 5 positions of page 1 on google, and only around 15% of traffic coming from paid. 

The takeaway? Organic reach drives the majority of traffic and is FREE to implement. Obviously, you do have to pay an seo consultant to help you implement a strategy but it is still significantly cheaper and pays dividends over the long-term; Even after you’re no longer working with an seo consultant. 

Implementation 

There are a number of tactics that play into optimizing search so that you drive traffic to your site. Here are our top 3:

On-page SEO

You need to ensure that your pages are structured in a way that:

1. Are easily read by search engines

Search engines have algorithms that are continuously updated when crawling pages and looking for content. 10 years ago, you were able to ‘stuff’ a bunch of keywords on a page and your site would rank well for them, but the algorithms are now much smarter and look for quality pages that are well structured and easy to read (both for bots and humans). 

2. Is user friendly and engaging for your customers

We hear the term ‘bounce rate’ frequently in the marketing world and marketers will argue with how effective of a gauge it really is. Bounce rates define how frequently users view a page of your site and immediately leave, but that doesn’t tell the full story. 

What if your pages are structured well enough that users immediately get an answer to what they need and reach out to you after only viewing one page? 

Having a structured on-page SEO strategy can propel your business for years to come. 

Technical SEO  

Here comes the boring aspect (although effective marketers love this aspect of SEO). There are many areas that fall under technical SEO, but let’s talk about these 3 to start:

1. Metadata & Keywords

Metadata helps algorithms find your pages and tells the algorithm what the page is all about. More specifically, a title and descriptive text about the page. Example below shows how effectively applying the metadata to each page can help users organically find you through search engines.

Here, we searched for the term/keywords ‘SEO Company in NJ’ and came to the example above. For clutch.co to be listed within the top 5 listings of page 1 tells us that:

1. They’re effectively using metadata and tags
2. Their page offers high quality content and user experience 
3. They’ve established authority for these keywords

2. Page speed

How frequently do you go to a page and leave after the page takes too long to load? It’s recommended that to ensure you’re not losing a users attention, your pages should load in under 3 seconds.
We won’t bore you with all of the details but GTmetrix is a great tool that will analyze and grade your site based on load time and speed. It will then give you recommendations to improve your site speed to ensure your pages are loading quickly and most importantly, not losing the attention of users. 

3. Cross-device functionality 

If you’re like most, you probably don’t use just one device to consume all of your information. On a train ride to work you may use your phone, at work you have a desktop and large monitors, and at home you probably use a laptop or tablet depending on your preference. 

An aspect that’s often overlooked is how user-friendly your site is on more than just your standard monitor. Enter the age of responsive web design; where you have to ensure that the user-experience doesn’t diminish from one device to the next. Check out the below example that breaks down what devices users used the most within the last 7 days:

A staggering 41% of users used mobile, and expect that number to continually increase over time. 

Fortunately, most sites now are built on a wordpress content management system (CMS) and developers are continually creating wordpress themes that are responsive across all devices. This keeps your users engaged with your site and coming back whether it’s on the train ride to work, at work, home, or on vacation.  

QUALITY CONTENT

Now, we’ve discussed the on-page aspect of SEO and technicalities that go along with it, but we haven’t yet touched on the single most important aspect to your SEO strategy; quality content…

Picture this, you’ve implemented everything we’ve talked about on this post so far, but yet your content isn’t informative and doesn’t provider user value. Will you rank well for your targeted keywords? Sure, for a very short period of time.

Search engines that crawl your site are smart, and can read when users find your pages invaluable based on a variety of factors. To sum this up, consider the example below that highlights two hypothetical companies and letter grades for their SEO strategy:

Company A	Grade
On-page SEO	A
Technical SEO	A
Quality Content	D

Company B	Grade
On-page SEO	C
Technical SEO	C
Quality Content	A

You can probably guess by now that in the long-term, quality content wins. Quality content that informs users will attract more users, enable back-links to your site, and ultimately gauge user interest in your product/service. 

Where to Go From Here

We’ve barely touched on all the aspects that go into an effective search engine optimization strategy, so where do you go from here? You’ll need to understand where your site currently ranks, and how you can improve. 

Tools such as ahrefs and moz offer great analysis tools to help you get a full understanding of your site. 

Chances are, some of the changes you’ll be able to make in-house, while others will require an SEO consultant to help you execute on your SEO strategy. Whichever route you choose, remember that this tactic produce long-term value for your business. 

Regardless of whether you’re using an SEO Consultant or executing a strategy in-house, it is a crucial tactic for the future of your business