Minneapolis SEO Services

SEO works by modifying elements on a website like the meta title and meta description of a page to ‘optimize’ it to get the most possible traffic. ‘Keyword targeting’ can determine which words you should be aiming for, and getting links from other high authority sites and creating relevant content on your web page and via articles on your site can shift your website up in search rankings over time. For more check out Moz's Beginner Guide to SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Any way of getting more customers to be aware of your company is important – particularly when they are looking for a product or service like yours. That is why search engine traffic is ideal. You can pay for ads at the top of search engine results and in various places on the web, but only 18% of clicks in search engines go to these ads because many customers are savvy enough to skip them. They trust in the algorithm of Google to serve the best results towards the top of the ‘organic’ results, or the other results besides the ads – your job (or a professional SEO experts’ job) is to make sure your website is seen as the best result. The top 3 results for any one term get the lion’s share of the clicks, and the first page is generally the cutoff point for any meaningful traffic for most terms besides high volume ones.

SEO helps businesses by allowing them to attract more customers to their website and if it's done right – attract them in a way that they also become customers. This is why I pair SEO with 'Conversion Rate Optimization' so that any site I'm doing SEO on also gets improvements in design and development that are intended to make it easy for people to become customers of your business. You don't want to just attract people to your site, you want them to take the next steps towards becoming a customer. Your website needs to be compelling and be set up for maximum conversions so that you can get the most out of SEO services.

It will take anywhere from 1 month to 3 months to start seeing some shift, and likely 6-8 months to start seeing significant ROI from Search Engine Optimization work. That being said, if you don’t start seeing some shift in traffic (either month over month or year over year for seasonal businesses) then in most cases you should be very forward with your SEO provider and seek a clear explanation.

SEO is not hard. It does, however take time – it involves technical tweaks on your website, competitive analysis/content strategy, and building links from around the web.

So most people don’t have the time to get up to speed on all of the shifting trends, the technical aspects, and make sure their website is running perfectly for SEO like a finely tuned machine.

If you have an agency or team doing SEO + something else

When I say 1 to 3 months for some initial returns, or 6-8 months for significant ROI – I mean that much time concerted SEO effort, not SEO effort watered down with a redesign or an SEO + PPC agency trying to do both. Not that they can’t do that, but the time/effort/money spent would have to be double.

So my suggestion is to have a team totally dedicated to your SEO efforts, and if you want PPC done make sure that budget is entirely separate from your Search Engine Optimization work.

Honestly, I wouldn’t suggest moving so quickly that you risk some type of penalty. Particularly with backlinking, if your ‘velocity’ or the time passing and frequency of links procured rises too fast – it will look fishy and unnatural.

Be smart about how quick you try to force this work.

Slow is smooth.

Smooth is fast.

So when you or your Minneapolis SEO Agency creates content – make it significant and targeted, not worrying about the speed that it comes out, because 100 posts on your blog won’t create significant traffic, but that one that was super-targeted and useful will.

When you or your SEO Company creates links – make them hefty and serious. They should actually be almost a pain to get, whether through outreach, guest posting, or by deliberating with someone in your network to include a link back to your site. These things, when worth something for real will either take… money, time, or effort. If they don’t, they aren’t worth it.

85% of people searching on Google are clicking on the organic search results, according to Search Engine Watch.

If savvy customers are skipping the paid ads – you may want to as well. It really depends on the industry. Paid ads have a little thing next to it that says ad, and are shown above and below the 'organic' search results.

Many businesses opt to do paid ads and search engine optimization.

1. You can de-index any types of content that have less than 100 words. This might be the #1 suggestion for most businesses that have not done any SEO. For WordPress websites you can use the Yoast SEO plugin for this.

2. You can find terms that are driving traffic to your competitors with a tool like Ahrefs, or SEMRush and create similar but more in-depth and quality content for the same terms. Consider the intent of the searcher and create epic content that will service that intent while at the same time selling them your products or services with a lead generation form or listing of products.

3. You can reach out to higher trafficked websites that people in your prime demographic are reading, and ask if you can write a blog post for them. Create a quality piece of valuable content and use your bio at the bottom of the post to create a compelling picture of the products or services you offer and link to your website. Earning links from high domain authority sites (determine this with a tool like Mozbar) is the #1 thing you can do to drive visibility of your site up.

Create serious value by developing really well targeted 'content hubs,' or pieces of content that are highly engaging and serve a serious need that customers like yours need help with.

Examples:

• A unique calculator that helps that understand the possible R.O.I. for your services.
• A In-depth 'How to do it yourself' guide for people that want to try it themselves.
• The giant guide to making the right decision, or comparison shopping with other companies.
• List of 100 top choices for the services you provide.
• A map with companies on it that are similar or in an adjacent industry – or that sell your products.

The list goes on and on – but really determining which terms and subjects are going to be 'worthy' of you creating a giant resource depends on their being a DEMAND. Make sure there is insatiable demand for the content you're going to create and then make an epic guide or resource.

On page SEO refers to those elements on a site that make your page more likely to be served up when people are looking for products or services like yours.

Examples include using the keyword in your heading tags and starting the page with interesting media to catch viewers attention and get them reading. This infographic from Backlinko is a great place to start understanding everything that goes into on-page SEO:

Yoast SEO is the most well-known and well-supported SEO plugin on the market. Most of the basic functionality is all you need to get started – but there are also pro-versions that do more analysis.

When I start work with a new SEO client I configure the SEO plugin to:

• De-index thin content, tags and other low-value and duplicate content so the other content gets more emphasis.
• Use Yoast SEO to make sure the meta-titles and meta-descriptions are written in a way that targets terms people are using to search for these topics and services.
• Use Yoast SEO to set up the sitemap and Robots.txt file for better crawlability.
• Use Yoast SEO to set up any site-wide meta data, like social cards to that when links are shared on places like Twitter and Facebook the previews of the content show up correctly.

As mentioned in an earlier question – Moz's Beginner Guide to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a great place to start learning SEO, but what are other guides that people have put out that you might learn more about it?

• Kissmetric's Beginner's Guide to SEO
• Kissmetric's Beginner's Guide to SEO
• Search Engine Journal's SEO Guide
• WordStream's Complete Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization
• Buffer's Beginner's Guide to SEO

SEO will never die! As long as the web is around, people will need to search to find what they want, and some algorithm will control what gets served up first.

If you know how that algorithm works and can serve it what it wants, you're doing search engine optimization. (Or just hire a us as your Minneapolis SEO Company).

Will the methods of SEO change over time?

Most certainly.

But the principles that guide SEO today will guide it for the foreseeable future.

• Create resources that people want
• Answer relevant questions to your expertise
• Make your website easy to access and well organized.
• Create indications elsewhere back to your website.

As long as this general idea guides your effort, you're efforts will help you in the future as well. This is the way we do SEO (the overarching strategy), and will continue to learn and evolve the specific methods of implementation (the strategy.)

Local SEO refers to making a company's website more visible on maps and in local-oriented searches, often for people seeking a brick and mortar store or a services based business that serves their area.

If you want to get found on Google maps, check out the punch-list I created for General Contractors and blue collar businesses. It applies to other industries as well, but the idea is simple verify your Google listing, create 100+ local listings on other websites, and supply the same name address and phone number on your site. Some more advanced tips are included in the guide as well.

Beyond that, creating landing pages for specific cities can be helpful, and we do a combination of this and other more advanced techniques to rank our clients going after specific geographic areas.

Content marketing is the process of developing unique content that is useful for your target market – often without selling whatsoever.

Content marketing is really a component of SEO, and SEO is a component of content marketing – it's really a chicken and the egg situation.

Good SEO involves creating valuable content, but they are not synonyms. Many companies that have an amazing content strategy don't have always have the technical and linking aspects of SEO taken care of as well.

So content marketing is one of the 3 main pieces to SEO, but has been around for longer than SEO because of things like Michelin Stars and Guiness Book of World Records, which were essentially ingenious examples of content marketing for the tire company and the beer company respectively.

If you need help from Minneapolis SEO Consultants, we encourage you to chat with us – and we'd love to help you implement effective content marketing at scale as part of an SEO engagement.

We know that people need some clear communication in the process of creating an effective website from an SEO perspective. Working with Minneapolis SEO experts means that you'll be able to have that line of communication wide open.

SEO is not a set it and forget process, but it's also not something that someone can do without getting all the facts about your business – so be wary of anyone who says they can increase your SEO sight unseen.

Minneapolis SEO experts should be able to clearly show you how your visibility is increasing as well – we believe your better served when you can chat with your SEO consultant regularly, that's why we are so adamant about systematic and regular monthly meetings.