Search Engine Optimization & Marketing Services

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization, which is the process through which more traffic can be attained from search engines. Along with PPC (pay per click marketing), SEO is a part of SEM or search engine marketing.

Ranking is determined by a series of algorithms that are often viewed by SEO companies as two main algorithms:

a main organic algorithm
a map pack, or local pack algorithm that ranks local businesses in the map pack

Google SEO

Google is the largest search engine in the world. Ranking your website on Google will bring you more traffic than ranking it on another search engine. However, you can rank on multiple search engines at the same time.

If you have an US business, you are probably interested in your website ranking on:

Google
Bing
Yahoo

Note *** Even though Google leads the US mobile search market with a whooping 93%, Microsoft's Bing leads when it comes to longtail search queries.

So, you should not ignore Bing and Yahoo, even though their traffic is a lot smaller. Even a small percentage of a very big number can mean a lot of additional visitors to your website. Moreover, Bing visitors have been shown to convert better in certain industries than visitors from other search engines.

SEO Capabilities

SEO Copywriting

We can supply your website with content that matches searcher intent and helps them convert into loyal customers.

SEO Audits

Technical SEO is very hard. We use website crawlers and data from Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to fix errors and increase rankings.

Linkbuilding

We employ whitehat link building and link earning strategies to increase your referral traffic and your organic rankings.

Website Ranking Factors

Proximity

One very important ranking factor (and worth mentioning here), even more crucial to local SMBs, is proximity. Simply put, Google will not show a Chicago restaurant to a person searching for ethnic restaurants in New York City. That person is probably interested in choosing a dining place in NYC and showing them restaurants that are too far away from their location will result in a poor experience for them.

Note *** There is a way how a person in NYC can find Chicago restaurants - by searching explicitly for them and mentioning the location - Chicago - in their search. That person is probably planning a trip or researching something.

Content

The content has to be relevant not only to the general search topic, but to the search intent as well.

The intent can be:

informational (how to represent yourself in a traffic case)
locational (best traffic lawyer near me)
transactional (hire a traffic lawyer for an accident)

Reviews

We tell our clients to treat reviews the same way they treat money:

reviews will increase your organic traffic, directly and indirectly
reviews will convince visitors to buy
in a business's journey to get better reviews, that business invariably ends up improving their services as well

Backlinks

Links from trusted websites (especially editorial links) are seen as a vote for your website.

Backlinks have been shown repeatedly to be a major ranking factor.

Note *** Getting the wrong backlinks can hurt your website as easily as relevant, earned links can help it. A thourough SEO analysis can show if that has happened in the past.

Local SEO vs National SEO

There are a differences and similarities between local SEO and national SEO:

there is a difference in the keywords targeted (a lot of the local keywords will have a location modifier, such as Chicago SEO)
there is a difference in the way how local results are displayed by Google
there is a difference in how optimization is approached for local SEO

If you want to learn more about search engine optimization for local businesses, visit our local SEO Chicago page.