What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
You want your website to rise in the rankings so you’re searching for a Washington D.C. SEO company. Before entering into a relationship with one, here is a short tutorial on how SEO works to get your website on Google search results, as well as what to look for in your SEO agency services.
Search engine optimization is the process of getting visitor traffic from the “free,” “organic,” or “natural” search results on search engines. In other words, you want more than the people who are actively looking for your website by name; you want someone intently surfing the web looking for services, products, or content you provide to find your website.
Search engine optimization is important because 95% of all visitors find websites via search engines and if they are looking for “Alexandria nonprofit,” or “D.C. SEO company,” you want them to find you instead of your competition.
Your first priority should be to make sure that your website shows up on the first page of results for your most important keywords like, “business services,” “solar company,” “nonprofit fundraising.” This is where many fall short. They don’t bother optimizing their website at all because it’s a long game, not a short one.
If you want to capture any amount of the D.C. market share in your domains, you need professional SEO marketing assistance. Of course, once your business gets to the top of the rankings, it’s just as important to maintain too.
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Move Beyond SEO's Common Tropes
SEO marketing is more than just optimizing content via keywords or key phrases; SEO marketing also entails creating original content that users will be interested in, the kind of meaningful content that builds relationships. While search engine optimization takes time, once you get your site ranked higher on search engine results pages (SERPs), then the benefits outweigh the costs exponentially.
Here are five things that a D.C. SEO company should do for you based on best SEO practices.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the foundation of any SEO effort. It’s crucial for all search engine optimization initiatives because it provides an understanding of what searchers are looking for in the particular market niche. It’s worth it to spend as much time as necessary to find those high-quality keywords that have a decent search volume and low competition from other websites. After all, higher rankings generally translate to more website traffic and more website traffic means more visitors to your site who might be interested in making a purchase.
SEO Content
SEO content helps your website rank higher in search results. SEO content should be original and unique to your business because this means Google will see it differently than content that was copied from another site because of plagiarism concerns.
It is also helpful if your business has a blog where you can post articles to show Google that you are an expert in your field. Google is all about proof, they want to send their searchers to those websites that best fit with their search.
Link Building
It’s good to have your website link out to other reputable websites that are relevant to your business.
Linking out to relevant content helps strengthen the topical signals of your web pages and helps to add context for Google to understand your site better.
“Outbound” links can help demonstrate the depth of the topic that you are writing about and can point readers to further resources that they can use to learn more about certain concepts. This is especially important when writing about complex topics that may take more explaining to understand what is being referenced fully.
“Inbound” or “backlinks” are another way to let Google know that your content is worth reading. This can be developed naturally as other websites choose to link to yours, and you can also take a proactive approach and ask for backlinks from websites that you send traffic to or that have broken backlinks on their site that you can replace.
Ideally, you should build links from different types of sites (blogs, news, forums), as opposed to just one or two sources. Duplicate listings will hurt you because Google sees them as attempts at gaming its system. if you build links for the sake of having them (or worse, to manipulate Google’s results) , your site will be penalized or even de-indexed, and all your hard work will be wasted.
Social Engagement
SEO marketing uses social media websites like Facebook and Twitter to engage with your customers online. When they “like” your posts or retweet your content, your posts can reach even more people who might be interested in your services too. Traffic gets driven from all of these outlying posts and back to your main website, thus giving it more credibility.
Make sure you include social media buttons on your website so customers can follow you if they like what they see and want to talk to you about your products or services.
Technical SEO
Your Washington D.C. SEO company needs to make sure they have technical SEO in place for each page of your website because this is an easy way for Google to crawl, index, and rank your site higher than other sites with a poor technical SEO set up.
This means you should make sure your website is user friendly and easy to navigate. SEO marketers should have tools set up on your website so Google can understand what each page is about.
For example, if keywords aren’t used properly or if titles aren’t formatted correctly, or descriptions have grammatical errors, then this will hurt how Google ranks your site compared to other sites that use proper SEO best practices.
SEO marketing is more than just about finding the right SEO company; it’s also about making sure you invest in long-term SEO campaigns. While short-term SEO campaigns can help bring immediate traffic spikes to your website, long-term campaigns are better at ensuring that your rankings remain high over time. The best Washington D.C. SEO company will determine which method is best for their clients’ needs rather than pushing one over the other.
Do you need professional SEO help? It’s true that search engine optimization is something anyone can learn. However, it requires a serious time commitment; this isn’t some magic “get rich quick” scheme. The best SEO campaigns take months to develop and implement, so it’s important to have someone dedicated to the task full-time.
In addition, without years of experience with different types of SEO strategies, you’re going to have a hard time knowing what works and what doesn’t. All of your competitors already know which techniques give them the biggest boost in their rankings!
That’s where we come in. We’ve been helping companies increase their website traffic for 20 years. We know how effective different strategies are, meaning that you get the absolute best ROI for your investment.
Case Study
The Institute of World Politics
Innovative national marketing campaign for the nation’s top graduate school of national security affairs, diplomacy, and statecraft.