There are tried and true tactics for ranking on page 1 of Google, along with numerous studies that show how businesses are making it happen.
I’ve been helping companies improve their SEO rankings for years. Contact me today for a free review and to discuss strategy.
The Difference Between a Sacramento SEO Expert and Agency
Working with a local SEO expert over a Sacramento SEO company provides numerous benefits, chief among them being price. Agencies have a ton of overhead and lack the flexibility to take on specialized tasks. Because of these factors, you’re always going to pay more when you go with a SEO company, and you might not always be paying for what you need.
I’ve worked at multiple marketing agencies and I can tell you the truth about their SEO proposals – they’re cookie cutter, lack creativity that leads to quick growth, and contain too much nonsense.
What do I mean by lacking creativity? Agencies don’t get to know each client’s past marketing intimately enough. I always take stock of old content that can be revamped as new SEO web pages. If you have old YouTube videos, you can search optimize those as well. PDFs, ebooks, and even your email lists can assist big time with your search rankings.
But using hacks like that mean agencies don’t get paid, so they’re rarely looking for ways to speed up the SEO campaign.
The nonsense that you see in their proposals are things like:
Basic reports on SEO rankings – these can be automated and take 5 seconds
Indexing all your URLs – the Google crawlers do 98% of this automatically
Verifying you on Google Search Console and subsequent Google Search Console reports – again, this takes no time at all
If you see something like, “we’ll make X number of updates to your web pages each month” run for the hills – these minor updates won’t improve your rankings and they take almost no time at all so why would you pay so much?
Lastly, a Sacramento SEO expert like myself communicates with you daily and even trains you. I will explain why we’re doing certain tasks, why we’re making certain content, why we’re adding certain links and I will put these tasks in the context of Google’s algorithm. After a few months, you might not even need me because my process is so transparent you can duplicate it.
The following are aspects of your website that we can improve to make those page 1 rankings happen. Good SEO means great content – specifically long-form web pages and articles that are 1000-2000 words, rich with multimedia and incredibly user friendly. Contact me to review my past case studies, SEO training slides and more.
Keyword Research
SEO starts with accurate keyword research and targeting. There are some phrases that are more likely to induce a conversion from a searcher than others, and those should be targeted first. For example, if someone Google’d Sacramento SEO consultant, that’s a phrase that is right at the bottom of my conversion funnel – it’s somebody who’s looking for exactly my services. Below are a few tactics I use to develop keyword targeting strategies.
Create a keyword based conversion chart (top of the funnel phrases are phrases that are somewhat related to your services, but don’t indicate a searcher is ready to buy. The bottom of the funnel keywords represent phrases we know a potential customer is using.)
Moz’s keyword difficulty score tool (I provide my own Moz SEO pro account to do this research)
Google’s auto complete and suggested or related results. Beccause you can’t just rely on their keyword planner tool
The keyword planner tool to get monthly search volume statistics
On-Page SEO Factors
Every web page should target a different keyword phrase. How you implement that targeting is based on a set of SEO variables Google’s looks at when reading text. These variables include:
Keywords in the title tags
Keywords in the web page’s headers
Keywords in the image alt text or file names
Synonyms and natural variants of the keyword phrase
Keywords in the URLs
Keywords in the body of the web page (particularly the intro and concluding paragraphs)
Off-Page SEO Factors
A large chunk of Google’s algorithm is still PageRank – the quantity and quality of external websites that link to you. If you’re curious to see how your website is performing in this area, visit opensiteexplorer.org and see your Page and Domain Authority scores. Link metrics to work on include:
Total number of backlinks
Increasing the amount of websites that link to you – not just getting a ton of links from the same site
Making sure these backlinks are from legitimate websites with low spam scores, something we can verify via Moz
The anchor text of these backlinks – hopefully they’re sprinkled with a few keywords
The total number of backlinks to a specific page that you want to rank
Technical SEO Issues to Review
There are a lot of best SEO practices in terms of website architecture an URL structure that your design team should work on to get the best SEO results. The top level navigation of your site should contain the pages you’re using to target high value keyword phrases, because they’ll likely receive the most PageRank. Other technical SEO issues to review include:
The use of subdomains (not helpful, especially if you have one for a blog)
404 errors and 301 redirects
Unblocking CSS and JavaScript files so Google crawlers can read them
