One of the most important aspects of SEO, whether you are attempting to rank for local Birmingham, Alabama keywords or rank for nationally competitive keywords is choosing the right keywords to target. Different phrases can spur different attitudes in the user. Certain keywords like “Hire a Birmingham, AL SEO Agency” are going to be much more valuable to your overall business model than certain others that may get more traffic like, “What is SEO?”.

The longtail keyword (“Hire a Birmingham, AL SEO Agency”) is going to get far less searches, but the people who are searching for this term are legitimately interested in finding SEO services and have a high probability of converting into customers.

The short tail keyword (“What is SEO” or even just “Search Engine Optimization”) will be much more focused on people who are just interested in learning about it. These keywords will have a lot more traffic and will look more appealing, but the average person who searches this is most likely not in the market for SEO services.

Your best advantage from organic search ranking will come in the form of ranking for keywords and phrases that are most focused on generating conversions and turning visitors into clients or customers.

Wanting something bad enough can only get you so far. If your content is not optimized to show search engines that your SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page) is the most relevant answer to the user’s question, then your ability to get organic traffic for certain terms is significantly limited.

Furthermore, attempting to rank your homepage for every keyword you are targeting is not an ideal solution. Specialized pages where you go into further detail about specific products or services that you offer are much more advantageous to have rank, and often easier to rank organically for highly competitive keywords. This will ensure your website will rank for a larger variety of targeted keywords, as well as increasing the likelihood of you ranking above your competitors.

How People Interact with Your Content Matters

Having description content is important, but ensuring people actually read and interact with the content on your website is key. As search engines become more and more advanced, the way in which a user interacts with your content becomes more and more important. If a user goes to your page, and the content bores them and they don’t read it, search engines know that. They want to send users to content that is engaging, answers their questions, and ideally results in the user interacting further with your website.

If your content captures user attention quickly through an appropriate mix of visual and text, while getting your message across and encouraging interaction and follow through, search engines will want to rank your webpage higher than others. 

The best content from the perspective of a search engine will always be unique and engaging. Establishing your brands voice as genuine and knowledgeable and combining that with subliminal psychology tactics focused around specific word usage and color psychology will ensure that we maximize the leads to your website and also convert these leads into customers.

Once you are targeting the right keywords and have great content on your website, you’re still not finished. Your content also needs to be formatted in a way Google and other search engines can easily understand it. Search engines are algorithms, and following all of the rules to the highest extent possible plays a big factor in how much authority the algorithm decides to give your page.

Properly optimizing your webpage also leads to more attention in the search results page. Have you performed a Google search and noticed that certain results have images or reviews or additional pages tied into the first result? How about the pages that show up in the "People Also Ask" section above the main results? How do you get featured there? More real estate on the search results page will lead to more attention on your listing versus your competition. These are examples of rich results, which come when your website content is properly formatted.

The most basic form of metadata comes in the form of meta-titles and meta-description. A meta-title is what search engines see as the title of the page when it appears in a search engine, and the meta-description is the long description that shows up as the description for your webpage in a search engine. These two details are only noticeable from the perspective of a search engine and users who find your page through a search engine. Choosing the right wording plays a big factor in both the ability for your webpage to rank and whether or not a user decides to engage with your page once they see it.

On the more technical side of basic Onsite SEO is the implementation of more advanced micro-formatting based on Schema.org. Schema.org began as a collaborative effort between all of the major search engines: Google, Bing and Yahoo. Their goal was to create a standardized way of identifying types of content so that more information than just the Meta-title and meta-description appear on the search results page. Since it's creation, there have been some other methods of organizing your website information for search engines that are designed to accomplish the same goal. Formatting your content properly is just as important as having it there in the first place.

Link building is the most under appreciated aspect of SEO in today's world for good reason: it's not easy. A backlink is when a website somewhere on the internet links back to your website. The more authoritative the webpage and content linking to your webpage, the more valuable the backlink. Google and other search engines use backlinks as “votes of confidence” in a webpage, because if authoritative websites view your website as an authority, then you must be an authority within your industry.

When it comes to building backlinks to your website, quality is always more important than quantity. Our team has years of experience networking and working with high value websites to ensure our clients become the premier authority in their industry from the perspective of a search engine.

These backlinks can come in the form of industry related content on relevant, high authority blogs, or even direct mentions from large media outlets like Forbes.com, CNBC.com, FoxNews.com, BusinessWire.com, Nasdaq.com, or Bitcoin.com. These backlinks will not only provide your website with the desired transfer of authority from the perspective of a search engine, but our content will be put in front of the eyes of thousands of individuals who have an expressed interest in your industry.

Website speed is one of the most important and under-utilized aspects of SEO. Google has come out and vocally said that web speed is a prominent ranking factor in their algorithm.

From a user experience (UX) perspective, today’s users have very short attention spans and ensuring your website loads quickly will prevent them from getting frustrated and leaving the site before the page even loads. There are often lots of websites capable of answering a search engine user’s questions or solving their problem, and if your site doesn’t load quickly enough, they will be likely to leave and find answers elsewhere. Search engine’s also crawl your websites content, and having too much Javascript or clunky, unnecessary backend coding makes the process take longer.

Our team will examine your website’s code and come up with creative ways to ensure that your website loads as quickly as possible. This could come in the form of removing unnecessary plugins, moving Javascript to the bottom of the page instead of the top so it loads after the page has already loaded for the user, or transferring large images to a CDN (Content Distribution Network) so it can be pulled from a separate source instead of loaded locally. Taking these factors and more into consideration will ensure that your website is in the best position to outperform your competitors.

It's not good enough to have a great website for browsing on a desktop computer. More web searches are performed on tablets and smartphones than on a desktop, so your website has to be optimized for all possible devices if you want search engines to promote your content above your competition.

Every website design project we take on will end in a website that is functionally designed to be optimized on every browser possible. Not only will your website be beautiful on different screens, it will be optimized for each one. Even if we do not design your website, we can make back end changes that will show search engines that a good user experience is important to you.

Google and other search engines like to give authority to websites that are constantly changing. Search engines have learned that users prefer to see things change when they visit a website so there is something new for them to see.

There are many ways to get Google’s attention from a website changing. This can come from occasionally updating your main homepage images. It can come from having blog posts organized on the homepage so that when a new post is written, it creates a teaser on the homepage that can lead users to the blog post. It can come from something as simple as installing an Instagram or Tiktok feed on your website so that every time you post on social media, the website is updated with new content. It can come from having a store front where new products are added on a regular basis.

The change doesn’t have to be overly dramatic, but showing Google that you are making small adjustments to your website regularly shows the algorithm that you care about the end user experience. At the end of the day, search engine’s perceived authority comes from their ability to direct users to the best results, so they have an inherent priority to feature websites that appear to share this priority. Consistent small adjustments is how your showcase this.

The biggest link building factor to establish Local SEO authority within a specific region is maintaining your website’s citation links. We ensure that all of our clients have all of their information listed on all of the major citation websites. This includes: Google, Google Maps, Bing, Facebook, EZlocal, ShowMeLocal, CitySquares, MyLocalServices and dozens of others. Other directories that should be consistent include GPS directories, such as TomTom and Uber. Your content not only needs to be included on all of these websites, but the way your content is written needs to be identical across all of these pages. The business name needs to be written the same way, the address needs to be written the same way, everything must be 100% consistent to pass on the highest level of authority towards your website.

Other opportunities for local backlinks could include working with local bloggers who create content that is relevant to your niche, sponsoring charities or universities who are willing to link to your website as a sponsor, doing something innovative or interesting that will result in local media outlets picking it up as a story, or partnering up with other local companies who offer services that compliment, but don’t directly compete with your business.

It should be noted that if you pay a local media outlet to create “sponsored content” search engines know you paid for the content and the transfer of authority is essentially irrelevant.

Other relevant factors that help a website rank in local demographics are the amount of time users engage with the website, Google reviews and other trust signals, and crafting relevant content focused on your targeted area.