If you are a business in the Bellevue, WA area and you are interested in learning more about SEO and search marketing, then you are in the right place. We are an experienced local marketing company with a history of satisfying customers in Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland, and Seattle. On this page, we will first explain search marketing and its importance, talk about how it works and the different forms it can take, and then describe how we can help your business improve its bottom-line performance by using our services.
Search Marketing and SEO
Search engines, especially Google and Bing, have become one of the most important means by which people learn about businesses, products, and services. More than ever, potential customers come across products and services in every field with a quick search. As a result of that search, the search engine displays a list of results in a ranked order. This might seem like trivial information, but the order in which the search engine displays its results is actually highly important. Marketing research shows that the top results on the page get the vast majority of all visits from searchers. That means if your site is near the top of the search results page for keywords related to your company, then you stand to bring in more site visitors, meaning more potential customers. On top of that, it is possible to use web design and other tools to make your site appear higher on the page, garnering more clicks. This is the focus of SEO.
Companies Jenn has worked for
How It Works
Google is the largest search engine in the Western world, followed by Bing. Baidu dominates in China. Regardless of who runs the engine, they all work on the same principle: whenever someone makes a search, there is an algorithm that scans websites and decides where to rank them. Search engines want to put the most relevant and useful websites on the top, so that users click on those and are happy with the results of their search. The better the search engine is at providing good links, the more people will use it. Google’s well-crafted algorithm is the reason for their popularity.
SEO and search marketing operate on several levels, but one of the most important ones is using web design to make websites more attractive to search algorithms. The better your site can score with these algorithms, the higher it will rank and the more visitors you will get. Furthermore, while the full details of how these algorithms work are not public knowledge, good SEO experts have a strong understanding of exactly what attributes the algos value through careful research and testing. The changes can vary from seemingly trivial tweaks, like adding meta tags to content, to major additions, like creating a blog. In addition, there are specific steps you must take in order to integrate search marketing into new concepts like social media, mobile browsing, and local search.
Who Benefits?
You might be reading this article and thinking to yourself that it cannot possibly apply to you. All of this sounds like it is best suited for companies that have a lot of web presence and might even deal exclusively online. That is true, but companies that are primarily offline can also benefit. This is because websites can hold critical information. This is everything from basic name and contact information to detailed menus, a history page, mission and vision statements, and so on. No matter how little business you actually do online, having a great website can only help you attract more customers. Plus, the more complete your site is, the more search algorithms prioritize it.
That means even if you are a business that operates entirely in the offline world, a good website with online information is key to maximizing your potential revenue. Giving customers easy access to key information is the best and most transparent way to do that, because if site visitors can’t find the info they are looking for quickly, they will leave and move on to the next site on the list. The better your site design and the higher you appear on search results pages, the more potential customers you have.
Local and Mobile
Local search and mobile search are special topics in SEO because the main search engines, especially Google, have changed the way they work recently. Let’s start with mobile search. Now, more than half of all Internet traffic comes from a smartphone or tablet, and that amount is going up every year as more people get access to mobile devices. But using the Internet on a mobile device has a unique set of challenges. The screen size is much smaller and you use tapping instead of clicking to navigate pages. Many mobile devices have significantly lower power than laptops and desktops, and users may want to conserve their monthly data allocation. As a result, to make the browsing experience good for mobile users, your site needs to be efficient and fast to load. The fonts cannot become distorted on small screens, the images need to display properly, and the links cannot be too close together, or they will be hard to tap with a finger or stylus. The better your site is at working with mobile browsing, the higher it will rank when mobile users search your keywords. It’s important to make the investment in mobile search now, because it is an increasingly important part of the market.
Local search is somewhat different. When someone adds the phrase “near me” or the name of a city to their search, they are in local mode. The local search algorithm rewards local businesses over chains and big-box stores. That can put you ahead of many large rivals, especially if you are a business that does a lot of offline transactions. However, ranking high in local search is a difficult art that requires intimate knowledge of local search patterns and directories. It takes an experienced Bellevue SEO consultant to understand how to apply that knowledge for clients in the area.
Generating value through SEO takes a lot, because it calls on knowledge from several different domains: computer science, marketing, and local insider information. Our company has been in the business for years, so we know exactly what it takes to succeed around here. Our long list of satisfied clients can attest to that. Please get in touch with us today if you have any questions about search marketing services and how we can be of assistance to you.