What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Simply put, SEO is the process by which you can improve a site's ability to rank on a search engine like google. It's a process by which you increase visibility to a specific website or webpage to organic or non-paid traffic from a search engine. This process requires planning and targeted implementation of best practices to succeed.

Why is SEO important?

There are many ways to generate traffic for a website. Paid advertising, social media, and many other platforms allow you to generate quality and targeted traffic, but most site traffic is driven organically through search engines.

Your audience asks questions about the services and products you offer. With that in mind, you can provide highly detailed answers, and specific information about that share your expertise with your audience. In doing so, you are creating authoritative content that enables Google and other search engines to see you as an expert in your field. A solution to the questions asked.

This is a big portion of SEO, building trust with search engines and with your audience. Providing the highest quality answer to questions within your domain. The more you build this relationship, the more visibility, traffic, and revenue you will have.

Keeping this in mind, as I mentioned, you want organic traffic. This is the result of users finding your site listed on what is known as a SERP or Search Engine Results Page.

Meaning the user/customer searched on Google and saw your site as a result of that question. That user then clicked on your link and ended up on your webpage that ranked.

This is not the same as spending money with Bing Ads and paying for your traffic via the search engine. Although that traffic comes through search engines as well, that would be referred to as "paid traffic."

 

Quality of your Organic Traffic

Now that we understand that this traffic is coming through search engines and it's not being paid for, we need to go over quality. It's easy to think that just because you have a large amount of organic traffic, you have successfully optimized your site for search engines.

You also need to focus on alignment of your content to the search intent/ or the customer's need. Otherwise, you will end up misaligned, and users will land on your site and leave unsatisfied.

If someone is searching for brake pads for a car and all you sell are brake pads for motorcycles, you would not solve the user's need and, therefore, would not categorize that as quality traffic. It's all about alignment with those that are actually interested in buying, reading, signing up, or consuming what you are offering.

Full Speed Ahead: Quantity

As you now have the right fit, it's time to focus on getting similar people to visit you more often. As long as you've targeted the highest quality and you stay committed to that goal, you'll be maximizing the impact of this channel.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Most of us have been using search engines on a daily basis for over a decade now. These pieces of software are embedded in every other platform we use as well, mostly without us even realizing it. We know Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and some of us are familiar with Yandex and Baidu, but there are thousands of other search engines that have more specialized purposes. These search engines help us find products, groceries, the next movie to watch, and our favorite curry recipe. They return back driving directions to the closest movie theater in a fraction of a second. They help us in our everyday life and seldom do we stop and question how.

Simply put, search engines are a combination of software. One piece goes out and visits websites and follows every link it can find and then the next link and the next etc. until a comprehensive understanding of the website and its multiple web pages have been captured. Then, they consolidate that information; some of them parse the javascript and digest everything from architecture, response times, the number of times they saw a page linked internally, and the breadth and depth of the content on the pages they visited. These are just a few of the aspects that these search engine algorithms consider when indexing (i.e., ranking) each page as it relates to user queries and maps to their needs.

How Does SEO Work?

As mentioned before, SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a site on search engines so that we increase the amount of organic traffic to the site. This is a process of making sure our site is compatible with the search engines that your audience is using. The tricky part is that the algorithms are continuously changing on a daily basis. As of a few years ago, Google admitted that they improved their search product 4,500 times in 2020, which equates to ~12 per day. That's just one of the major search engines out there. Additionally, the majority of these changes are kept secret, meaning that it's imperative to keep a close eye on the changes, your rankings, and the industry movements as a whole to better understand what is being updated and how it will impact your site. This results in the need for the SEOs you work with to have a strong foundation and a broad grasp of the landscape.

Great SEOs will consider the historical context, documentation from the search engines themselves, first-party data sets, testing data sets, and input from the community as they build a perspective and make decisions. It's a continuous effort to stay up-to-date on all aspects to build the best picture and vantage point to operate from. This underpins the need to make SEO a long-term strategy rather than a one-time effort or something you start and stop. If you invest consistently, you will see significant benefits.

SEO, The Landmark Way:

Successful SEO demands a collaborative spirit and willingness to pivot and iterate on what works.

We are experts in increasing traffic, improving conversion rates, and driving revenue through organic. We'll work together to leverage your business expertise within your industry and create a plan that keeps your KPIs as our true north.

We prefer to work as an appendage of your team. Open and active communication. Together we'll build out strategy, supporting documentation, measure, and experiment, and as the data leads, we will iterate. With an agile approach to SEO, we can afford to pivot and respond to market, industry, or search landscape shifts as needed without throwing off kilter a long roadmap.

Landmark will keep you up-to-date on the data as it's coming in. If we need to shift and make a change, that is what we will do. There is no reason to follow a plan to fruition if we know it's missing the mark or the opportunity has passed. We aim to develop SEO strategies that provide you and your team with the highest ROI.

The Core SEO Pillars:

On-page SEO and Content:

Recently Google doubled down on authoritative, unique, and high-quality content again. Realistically, this has always been their goal: serve our customers with the best information and answers, and they certainly are not done. The days of exact-match domains, keyword stuffing, and a few links are long gone. SEO today deals with systems that are driving towards "understanding" the context of a query and the context of content as related to the industry, culture, etc. There are ~19 openly referred to systems that underpin the Google search algorithm today. As of November '22, we've seen decade-old systems such as penguin, hummingbird, and panda all deprecated while moving towards AI and machine learning heavy systems/ algorithms such as BERT, MUM, Neural Matching, and RankBrain. All of this to say, it is clear that Google is investing in further understanding meaning and context to the point that they can reliably rank a page that answers a question without having a single matching keyword or verbatim question on the page itself. With our on-site and content services, we focus on aligning with your brand voice and building content that speaks directly to your audience based on the goals of your business. If we are fishing, your site is the boat, but the content is your nets. We help you build out bigger nets and catch more fish.

Some popular on-page & content offerings:

• Content Calendars
• Competitive content and content gap analysis
• Keyword and Topic Clustering
• Content and funnel alignment
• Rich Snippet optimization

Technical SEO:

This is your foundation. The core of your SEO strategy starts with technical SEO. We put it second because the majority of people are looking for our content capabilities.

Technical SEO is how we improve your ability to be crawled, parsed, indexed, and ranked on Google. This work increases your visibility with customers, and if you're not solid here, the rest won't mean much.

In order to be successful, we'll look to understand the ins and outs of your site and work cross-functionally with your development and IT team to improve the opportunities we've uncovered. Scale is nothing to worry about; from 15,000 pages to 15M, we've seen it all (disclaimer: there is probably something we haven't seen... bring it on).

Some potential opportunities:

• Page Speed
• Site architecture
• Site security
• Accessibility
• Hierarchy
• Schema optimizations

Backlink Acquisition:

We work towards a unique and completely white-hat link acquisition and content promotional strategy that will result in high-quality links telling Google how important and useful your content is to your customers. This process enables us to increase the popularity of your site and prove to search engines that your site is driving your industry forward and keeping visitors engaged.

• Popular Landmark projects:
• Backlink audit and analysis
• Link acquisition
• Content Promotion and outreach
• Link penalty recovery

Local SEO:

Here at Landmark, local is where it all started. Hell, that's where the name came from. SEO so good you stick out like a landmark in the SERP, a brand everyone recognizes because of how well you rank.

We develop local search strategies for single brick-and-mortar to multi-location brands with thousands of locations. It's not a detriment to have a physical footprint; most of the time, we find it to be a benefit when trying to build out a digital footprint. As the physical and digital worlds have continued to meld, with Buy-online and Pick-up instore (BOPUS) programs, we've continued to see search engines make more space for local businesses to operate with success. We are well-versed in every mobile platform and application that supports the growth of local businesses.

At Landmark, we tend to think about local SEO as The Local Domination Square (working title):

Google Business Profile / GMB Optimization:

Fully built out products, services, hours, high quality + representative photos, along with leveraging Google Posts when relevant.

Review Acquisition / Reputation Management:

Not just on Google but other locally relevant profiles and platforms. It's imperative that you're focused on making the ask to your customers and getting a sense for how well you serve them and how they feel about the products and experience you provide... on any platform, they are most comfortable with.

Website & Content:

A well-optimized, well-structured site that fully informs users not only what you do but where you do it is a significant portion of the local landscape. You have to ensure that your site is built out and provides users with the details they need when deciding to visit or making a call for service.

Locally Relevant Backlinks:

The process of acquiring locally relevant / industry-specific backlinks is very different than the usual backlinking effort, but it's a differentiator for the businesses that take it seriously, and it's not as hard as you might think if you're active in the community you serve.

Some of our top Local SEO programs:

• Improved map rankings
• Improved Three-pack rankings
• Effective local marketing
• Attribution and conversion tracking