You hear it all the time from SEO companies, “You have to have SEO to succeed!” But do you?

What would SEO do for you? What does it even mean? (check out our SEO FAQ )

Let’s examine that.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and there are lots of great Austin SEO Companies that do great work. SEO is the process of aligning certain aspects of the way your website is set up so that it is clearer to search engines. It is important that they are able to tell exactly what you and your site are all about, so that they can see you as a relevant return for a search keyword (if that’s what you want).

Done Correctly, SEO gets the right prospect to the right page, and increases your sales!

So do you need SEO? Short answer: Maybe.

The better question that you should be asking is this:

“If someone comes to my site, can they tell what problem I will be solving for them?”

Here’s another:

“Can a website visitor readily access different parts of my service offerings?”

See, if these two parts of your site don’t work right, SEO will do you no good. Why? Because, all SEO does is bring more traffic to your site. If your site doesn’t work right, that effort and energy is wasted. Don’t put yourself in the position of wasting tons of money on SEO when your content marketing isn’t even ready for it. If you are thinking of SEO, first think about addressing your content.

Once your content IS done, SEO can be a very wise choice for you.

Because you have a relatively low fixed cost setting up your site, and almost no cost month-to-month, the more traffic you drive to your site the greater your scale economics are. If you think you might be ready for an SEO investment for your marketing efforts, click the button below and let’s talk.

I’ll tell you this, if we’re not a fit, I won’t sign you up for our service. I have lots of great relationships in the online marketing space, and I can make a great referral if we’re not a fit.

SEO is an acronym, and stands for “Search Engine Optimization”.

 It’s a combination of art and science resulting in increased search ranking for your website and its keywords.  The history of SEO is a checkered one, with many people engaging in what is called “Black Hat” SEO.  This is the act of cheating in one way or another to gain the rankings you seek.

We won’t go into all of the specifics of how this is or was achieved, but one example is bad links.  For several years, you could get any link at all to your website or page and get it ranked.  As search evolved (and especially when Google started taking over), the quality of inbound links had to be better, but still could be in any volume pretty much, and using any anchor text (these are very general statements, but true).

The rise of Google changed the world of SEO, and the search experience for users, forever.  By providing a more relevant search engine return page (SERP) experience, they became the dominant search engine.  As such, they make the rules in SEO, and if you want to be on the first page, you’d better obey their SEO rules!

More recently, Google has released the Panda and Penguin updates (along with Mobilegeddon), turning the world of agency-driven SEO on its ear for many companies.

If you have driven all of your traffic on one or two keywords, used the same anchor text too many times on a page, used spammy links or any of several other major factors, your page ranking has fallen.  This is the future of SEO, and while it has certainly made link building harder, it is providing a much more relevant and rich search experience.

So where does this leave your SEO efforts?  In short, be relevant, be engaging (this means using social media extensively with your SEO efforts), and only get quality links that matter to your content. Worry less about links, and more about getting good content in front of your core audience.

How do you know if you need SEO help?

That’s a good question. It’s not always easy to know just based on your website, and relative to your niche, SEO might not even do you any good.

A great example might be a truck company that sells to fleet buyers, meaning a company that buys 20 trucks at a time. That’s a relationship sale that has a long buying cycle. It’s not one that is driven by a Google search on “Fleet Sales in Austin, TX”.

Let’s look at Optimization vs. Marketing. What’s the difference?

Optimization VS. Marketing

What is the difference in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing? Once you know the difference, do you actually need SEM? In real terms, you could consider SEO to be a part of SEM, but SEM generally refers to Pay-Per-Click marketing.

There are significant advantages you get from using SEM, chief among them flexibility. You can tailor a message for a specific market, then dual test that against another message in the same market demo. You just can’t do that with SEO.

So if you are considering SEM as a part of your complete marketing breakfast, contact us today at Frontburner Marketing!