The best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of Google

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What is Search Engine Optimization?

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Every day over 1 billion people use Google to find information, products, and services. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of increasing your website’s potential of showing up on Google when future customers search for a product or service you offer.

SEO improves your website’s position in search results, increases traffic and visitors to your website, and as a result, you’ll experience more leads, sales, and customers.

Google’s search engine uses a unique and precise algorithm to help users find what they are looking for. The algorithm works to show a user what it thinks is “relevant content”.

A single Google search may find thousands of potential websites with relevant content. Google prioritizes search results based on several key SEO factors. The top ten ranking websites will show up on Google’s first page.

The logic behind Google’s algorithm is constantly updated to try and provide the most relevant content for every search.Have you ever heard that the best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of Google? That’s because over 75% of Google search traffic goes to the first ten search results, and only 3% goes to the second page.

So how do you show up on the first page of Google?

Two Ways to The Top

There are two ways to show up on the first page of Google: Google Ads and SEO.

Google Ads

Google offers paid advertising for businesses who want to pay to show up first. Google ads use a bidding system for keywords or phrases that potential customers might search to find your products or services. The more competitive a keyword or phrase is, the more it will cost to show up for it.

There are a few ways to pay for Google Ads. The most common way is to pay every time someone clicks on your ad and lands on your website. This is known as pay-per-click.

The average cost-per-click across all industries in Google AdWords on the search network is $2.69. The highest cost-per-click is found in the legal industry, while the lowest cost-per-click is found in the dating and personals industry.

SEO

The other way to show up on the first page of Google is through SEO.

The costs associated with Google ads can escalate quickly, and once you stop paying you stop showing up. SEO is a more methodical and steady approach to showing up as relevant content and is a much more effective long-term strategy for generating a high volume of consistent high-quality leads.

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Our SEO Service & Process

At Key Marketing Strategies, we use a proven and systematic approach to improving your website’s ranking on Google. Here’s how it works:

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KEYWORD RESEARCH

Ranking for a keyword or phrase starts with research. Here, we use online tools to pinpoint and list keywords and search terms that potential customers are actually searching for on Google. We do this by analyzing your existing site, your competitor’s website, and searches related to your products or services. Our online tools also show us how easy or hard it will be to rank for any keyword or phrase we list. This is known as “keyword difficulty”. A keyword or phrase will be harder or easier to rank for based on the amount of competition and search traffic it gets. The secret is in finding search terms that are not super hard to rank for but that get a decent amount of traffic. By increasing your search position for related keywords and search terms, it will become easier to rank for the more difficult and popular keywords.

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Search Engine Optimization

In addition to creating content, there are some other technical details we take care of. While these technical aspects are critical to good SEO, they are not seen by visitors and exist in the code or back end of your website to tell Google what your website or a specific webpage or blog is about.

Because Google cannot “read” images on your website, our SEO services also includes labeling pictures so that Google knows what the pictures are. Again, all in the back end and not visible on the front end of a website.

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Link Building, Our Secret Sauce

Consider this next step like Grandma’s cooking. You know that dish you look forward to every time you visit, but she won’t reveal the recipe? After years of SEO work and consulting with some leading professionals, we found a single ingredient that can make all the difference in improving a website’s SEO, granted the prior steps are done. While we are bound by the “grandma’s secret recipe code”, we can tell you that here, we get other high-ranking websites to refer to or link to your website as a source of relevant content for whatever keyword or phrase we are targeting. This is called “backlinking.” A backlink is simply a hyperlink to your website from another website. The more backlinks you have for a specific keyword, phrase, or subject, the higher your ranking in Google.

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A Step by Step Approach to SEO

One of the most common errors in SEO is to target 10-20 keywords all at the same time and try to generate content and optimize a website for all of them or some of them at once. Through actual trial and error, we’ve found this approach to be costly and less effective. Instead, we use a step-by-step approach to focus on a single keyword or phrase and get the ranking before moving on to the next. Any good marketing requires testing, so we may adapt or change our approach to get better results. That’s just to say we’re not going to beat our heads against a brick wall if something isn’t working. But by focusing on targeted keywords and phrases, one at a time, we’ve found a snowball effect, the more keywords a website ranks for the easier it is to rank for more keywords.

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Monthly Reporting

At the end of each month, you’ll get a report with what keyword we are targeting, what backlinks we procured for your website, and any change in SEO ranking so you can see progress. Then, when you land on the first page of Google, we celebrate and move on to the next keyword and page and repeat the process. This process does take a bit of patience, especially for brand new websites since a website’s age plays a role in how Google prioritizes websites in search results. But our process is a proven process that works. And the good news is that once your website is on Google’s first page, you’ll be experiencing increased website traffic.

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Copy Writing

SEO is all about having content relevant to whatever someone is searching for on Google. For that reason, routinely adding relevant content to your website is a key factor in improving your website’s ranking on Google. Page “content” refers to all the information contained on a website or a page of a website. Page content can be text, links, images, or videos. But the most important content is text. Although we can tell Google what an image or video is about, Google will still scan all the text on a website or a webpage to determine whether it’s relevant to a search or not. This can be achieved by adding new pages, adding content to existing pages, or blogging. By generating new content that contains and talks about a keyword or phrase, your website’s potential to show up in search results increases. We can help you generate relevant content in two ways:

The first is by writing 1-2 blogs each month. Each blog will be anywhere from 500-1000 words and some months we may just write one larger blog with 1500-2000 words. Blogging helps boost SEO ranking by positioning your website as a relevant answer to a potential customer’s questions. Our blogging service can be done independently or in tandem with our SEO process.

The second option is part of our ongoing SEO process. Every now and then we may find a good opportunity for a keyword but don’t have a page or blog on your website for that subject. In this case, we will usually pause the SEO service for that month and use that time to add content to an existing page, create a new page and write content for it, or write a blog. The following month we resume our SEO process using that newly created content.

Some customers prefer to write and provide content for us to add to a site or create a blog. But no matter how it’s done, the combination of routinely adding relevant content to a website and our ongoing service is the most effective way to increase your website’s SEO rankings.

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Common SEO Questions & Answers

How long does it take to get to the first page of Google?

Although you will start to see progress in the first month or two, it can take anywhere from a month to six months or longer to rank on page 1 of Google. The time it takes for your website to rank on page 1 of the Google search engine results page will depend on a few factors:

1. Longevity of your website and existing domain authority (number of websites linking back to you.)
2. Difficulty (competitiveness) of the keyword being targeted.
3. How hard your competitors are working to rank for the same keyword.

Can I run Google ads and SEO at the same time?

Yes. The advantage of running ads is to drive immediate traffic and conversions in the short term. Running ads usually does not affect organic SEO ranking.

When are Google ads more appropriate than SEO?

If you want to get immediate traffic and business tomorrow or next week, you should be running paid ads, not an SEO campaign. However, that traffic only continues as long as you continue paying for it. As soon as the ad campaign stops, you are no longer showing up. The advantage to SEO is to show up for search terms organically, so you no longer have to pay for that traffic.

Does SEO only work with Google?

SEO works with all search engines, but we only focus on Google because other search engines follow Google’s lead. Many other web browsers and online search tools, such as Safari, also use Google’s search engine and core algorithm.

Does website speed affect SEO?

Website speed indirectly affects SEO because if the website is very very slow, it may affect the bounce rate, and the bounce rate does affect how well your website ultimately ranks on Google. However, it’s not our main focus unless there is a major issue with speed.

What is Domain Authority and is it important?

Domain authority is simply how many other websites are linking back to your website. The more other websites and pages that link back to you, the more authority your website has. Domain authority is typically calculated on a 100-point scale by SEO tools, with 100 being the best.

Does Google penalize a site if it’s not mobile-friendly?

For a while now Google has favored websites that are mobile-friendly, so we take this into consideration when building a new website.

Why are my competitors ranking higher than me in Google?

Your competitors may have more relevant content, the content may be better optimized, or they may have more domain authority that is, more other websites linking back to them. With our SEO strategy, we can help you rank above the competition for as many search terms as possible.

Does social media help with SEO?

Social media does not have a direct impact on SEO, however, if you want to post on social media it’s a good idea to link back to your website to drive more traffic to it which does help SEO. For example, if you promote a topic on social media, you should also have a blog post on your website and link back to that blog post.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a separate service related to getting your business to show up in Google and Apple Maps as opposed to ranking your website. Local SEO is the preferred strategy for local businesses such as salons, contractors, or any strictly local service. However, if you have a local business you can still benefit from ranking your website with SEO.

Should I do my own SEO?

Doing your own SEO is definitely doable if you do not have any marketing budget but you do have time to work on it yourself. There is plenty of information available on how to rank your website on Google. Focus on the most important factors: content creation, on-page optimization, and backlinks, which are the best place to start.