Every small business is different and every business owner is different. Outlined below is my basic process for working with clients whose site I am optimizing or marketing.
Step 1. First steps - When I do search engine optimization for you, the first thing I’ll do is meet with you in person to understand the goals of your business and what success for your Web site looks like. Are you trying to generate leads, sell a product or service online or just be an online resource? Before we meet, I’ll do some basic site and competitive analysis. If we decide we want to work together, we proceed to Step 2.
Step 2. Proposal - Based on our talk, I’ll do an initial audit of your site to estimate how it’s currently performing against your goals, including an analysis of your chief competitors, and develop a detailed proposal outlining the scope of work involved, how long it will take, what it will cost, what kind of results you can expect and when.
Step 3. Getting to work - This is mostly me, but I make of habit of being in regular communication with my clients to update them on what I’m doing either to their site or on their behalf. In this and most businesses, a good rule of thumb is, people don’t like surprises.
In many cases, there is much that a client can do to help further their search engine discoverability, such as writing for a blog in a way that adds relevance to their site. I can help you come up with a strategy to match the content you generate with the needs of your customers.
Step 4. Reaping the rewards/care and feeding - We did it. Your site now ranks better than it ever did and you’re clients or customers are now finding you much more easily than they ever did before. This is good news. The next most important step is yours. As part of my search engine optimization package you’ll be set up and personally trained on the tools you’ll need to monitor how your site is doing and whether you're keeping your place in the rankings.
Search engine optimization can take time (two to six months to see results in some cases). Search engine marketing allows you to draw traffic quickly while at the same time learning what your customers want most by creating search ad campaigns for specific products and then discovering which ads work best for which products. In many cases, search engine marketing is a great tool to help you identify ways that your site should be optimized for natural rankings.
My role in this is to help you organize your search ad campaign, monitor and tweak the results to make sure that the traffic you get is the kind that actually wants to engage with your site or buy your product.
Creating or rewriting headlines and basic body text is part of the general site optimization package so there's no extra fee for that. One of the keys to drawing more attention from the search engines, however, is to have great content on your site that goes beyond simple descriptions of your products or what you do. I can help you develop a strategy for developing that content. A regularly updated blog targeting the topics we've learned that your site visitors are most interested in is a great solution. I can help you create that content, teach you how to make sure it is best optimized for search and even install a blog on your site.
Many small businesses still rely on primitive traffic reports from their hosting company to tell them about visitors to their sites. But how critical is it to you to know what kind of Web browser your vistitors are using? In other cases, they have a robust free program, such as Google Analytics, but aren't using it to it's full capability.
I can help. Modern analytics can tell you more about where your most loyal customers are coming from and which inbound links or keywords are netting you the most actual business. It can help you understand if the specfic wording of calls-to-action on your site are working. Would you like to know if your "Sign Up" button works better than "Join the Team" and by how much?
This is the world of modern analytics, These can help answer those questions and more and are key tools for fine tuning the business performance of your site. For larger enterprises, I have experience with Adobe's Site Catalyst and Discover tools.
But for most small businesses, Google Analytics works and can help you learn and use this free tool to understand more about your Web site visitors.
I'm easy to reach. Feel free to email me at , call me at 206.755.7322 or go right ahead and schedule a meeting.