Search engine optimization is the art of optimizing your web pages to receive consistent, organic, high-quality traffic from the search engines.
You will notice I say high quality traffic instead of large amounts of traffic.
Traffic is worthless if it isn’t traffic you can convert, that means traffic that is interested in your product or services in some way. We’ve worked on websites that receive tens of thousands of visits from search engines each day that are generating less than $10,000 a month, while we’ve also worked on websites getting one-tenth of that traffic while making ten times as much.
Once you become experienced in SEO, you will quickly find out traffic is extremely easy to generate. Yet traffic that generates revenue is much, much more difficult.
At outstandingSEO we focus on using search engine optimization to increase revenue. Increasing traffic for the sake of vanity is useless and never part of our strategies.
SEO Return on Investment
You must ask yourself, “will this provide a positive ROI for my business” before investing in SEO. It is the ultimate question. If you know what you’re selling, and how you want to sell it, then an investment in SEO is one of the very best investments your online business could ever make.
Every business is different, yet SEO has provided a positive ROI for every SEO project we’ve ever worked on. And that’s no accident.
Although SEO is not free, it does have an exceedingly low cost compared to traditional forms of marketing, and can carry exponentially high returns. Combine this with the fact that everything can be tracked online using basic analytic software and it’s easy to understand why so many businesses are choosing SEO over old-school advertising.
SEO as a Process
Research – The first step is to research the company, industry and competition. To win online you must be the best. Without knowing your market that’s only a pipe dream.
The research stage also tells you all you need to know about whether there is a market for what you’re selling and how profitable that market might be.
Strategy – Before any work is done, a solid SEO strategy must be agreed on, with clear objective sand goals. This strategy is by no means static, if something is not working it will be dropped or modified.
Foundations – Once you know your market and have a strategy to dominate it, it’s time to make sure that you have all your foundations in place. This means making sure your software has the capabilities and is optimized for SEO.
Content Creation – Content, whether that means articles, videos, products or anything else you wish to deliver, is what search engines are always looking for. Without some kind of content they will not send traffic to your website.
Link Building – Links are the currency of the Internet. The more links you have pointing to your pages, and the higher quality they are, the better your site will do in the search engines.
Review – At the very least you should be monitoring your progress each month, and assessing what’s working and what isn’t. That is the only way you can tweak your strategy and take your SEO that much closer to optimized perfection.
