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Organic SEO Consulting

What is an organic SEO consultant?

An SEO consultant’s job is to analyze your website and come up with recommendations and strategies for how to increase rank to the perfect customer audience. An SEO consultant has a track record of improving organic traffic for client websites directly.

An organic SEO consultant works with you to help you with the perfect next moves for improving your organic rank and traffic. They don’t do the work for you, but they are there every step of the way helping you when you’re stuck. A good SEO consultant can get you results within 6 months in most cases and get more customers to your site inexpensively.

Hiring an SEO agency is a crap shoot, especially if you don’t know how to tell if it’s working. An SEO consultant can train you and your team on basics of how to measure SEO attribution and results so you know if visibility is improving and if you’re getting sales from organic traffic.

Remember, SEO traffic is free and the daily traffic gains from fixing SEO issues with your website will be realized for years after your SEO consultant has moved on and the SEO optimizations are completed.

How do you know what will make a website rank higher on google?

What do search engines want? Also, what do your target customers want to see? What questions do they have? These answers are not always simple but, these elements will always be key with Google regardless of algorithm changes.

There are two main parts to ranking a website, content and compliance. The compliance part is the boring technical SEO part which includes structured data, sitemap, robots file, site speed, breadcrumbs, Meta Description, and general site structure. A decent ecommerce web developer can do a lot of the SEO setup basics for you.

On the content side… it’s more complex. Your site’s content needs to be attractive, well organized, and actually inform the visitor. It also needs to perfectly match the intent of the customer so they get the information they want. Those facets of organic search engine optimization will never change as they all seek the same result, matching the visitor with the content they want.

They are evergreen rules to follow and are the basis for long term strategy when working with an organic SEO consultant. Google wants to match customer questions/requests with the best content that solves their problem, or answers their question.

Offisite and Onsite SEO marketing

When you hire an organic SEO expert of any kind they’ll be doing offsite link building or Offsite SEO marketing. How do they do this? They will contact other webmasters and work with copywriters to get high-quality content created with backlinks to your ecommerce website. For example, if you have an online tropical fish store you might create a really informative article on how to care for salt water coral and live rock. This article would be submitted for publication on one of the high-ranking salt water fish blogs with backlinks to your ecommerce store for supplies, fish references and more general fish tank care information.

The onsite SEO marketing is just what is says; information on your site that ranks and brings in traffic. If you have a lot of unique and truly valuable content that your customers are looking for on your ecommerce website blog, it will rank eventually. To help it rank faster you can optimize it for keywords, headings, subheadings and interlinks. Organic SEO Consultants have the experience and tools to help teach you general strategy for creating a search engine optimization strategy for your business that can bring in sales for years to come.

Does Google Analytics bounce rate matter with SEO ranking?

Yes. If a customer hits your landing page and bails, that’s a bounce. If the visitor doesn’t see an element on your page that matches their search intent…they are gone. This is what bounce rate is all about.

You’ll find pages that have a high bounce rate having trouble ranking. The almighty Google knows all and does consider bounce rate as an SEO ranking factor. More importantly, if you have a page with a heavy bounce rate something isn’t right. Either the traffic that’s seeing the content isn’t a match or the content sucks. The function of optimizing pages for SEO isn’t to trick google; it’s the tell google what your amazing page is all about so it can send you the right traffic.

Also, the content you create needs to be complimentary material. If you create a page created for knitting instruction and include a technical section about yarn types, it won’t match the intent. If you don’t clearly match the intent, your bounce rate goes up; rank goes down. That’s a fact that won’t change with the google algorithms.

Why is my e-commerce store not getting any traffic?

I hear this often from e-commerce store owners. How do I get noticed by google and have strong continuous rankings on keyword phrases that generate sales? That takes quite a range of e-commerce knowledge, planning, and execution and it’s hard to know where to start if you haven’t done it before. Having a high quality blog is a super important part of ranking your website. This is an area you can provide helpful articles, tips, new product features and more good content that your target customers are looking for. If it’s something your customers are looking for, chances are Google will push it to the top of the search results.

I hear some clients talk about natural SEO. Sure, sounds great in theory but you have to realize your competitors and affiliate sites are constantly gaming the algorithm. This is also why Google updates their algorithm every few months to defeat these grifters. If you stick to creating really valuable content and information your customers want that’s a start. But you also have to know what keywords people are searching for.

For example; one of my clients sells ceramic supplies and we found that customers were search for “pottery table” and we were calling it a “ceramic table”.  We updated the keywords, headings and meta description as well as the anchor text for the interlinks and boom, ranking and selling more pottery tables.

Make sure your website is fast!

Sometimes it’s as simple as the website speed being slow and google flagging Core Web Vitals. If that’s the case your organic SEO consultant will have specialized developers to bring in that only work on site speed and Core Web Vitals.

How do you measure if your ecommerce website is slow? Shopify actually has a really helpful tool built into the dashboard, don’t ignore it. If you load up Shopify with a ton of plugins and apps you’ll slow it down considerably. There are lazy load type code that you can implement to help offset a lot of that.

Some other common issues that prevent sites from ranking on google:

  • Lack of keyword-rich content: Google uses the content on a website to determine its relevance and authority for specific search terms. Websites that lack sufficient content or have content that is not optimized for relevant keywords will struggle to rank well.
  • Technical SEO issues: Technical SEO issues such as broken links, slow page load times, and poor mobile optimization can all negatively impact a website’s search engine rankings.
  • Lack of backlinks: Backlinks, or links from other websites to a site, are a major factor in determining a website’s authority and search engine rankings. Websites with few or low-quality backlinks will struggle to rank well.
  • Duplicate content: Google will penalize websites that have significant amounts of duplicate content, which can negatively impact search engine rankings.
  • Poor user experience: Google takes into account the website’s user experience and will not rank a website that has a poor user experience.
  • Not mobile-friendly: With more and more people using mobile devices to access the internet, it is important for websites to be mobile-friendly.

Pitfalls of not getting qualified help with SEO

  1. You and your team waste time creating articles randomly hoping they will rank…and they never do.

  2. You can easily get ripped off by an SEO agency if you don’t have a way to audit their work. (It’s scary how many times I see this happen)

  3. Your competitors will get all that sweet organic traffic while you spin your wheels.

How to find a good SEO agency?

When you deal with a typical SEO agency you have multiple levels of expensive overhead and fluffy sales guys that will tell you anything to get you to sign. But they are a necessary evil to some extent. Someone has to do the work and if your team isn’t up for the task it’s a good idea to have one.

However; Digital Marketing and SEO agencies will happily take your money and won’t deliver, my clients tell me horror stories all the time. And yes it takes time to get results with SEO so you’ll spend a lot before you figure it out.

You’ll get some reports every month but your sales really don’t go up. One trick that SEO agencies will do is tell you you’re ranking for new keywords (false KPI’s) that nobody is actually searching for. Unless you’re knowledgeable with SEO measuring tools to measure which keywords are popular with your industry and products, you won’t be able to sift the bullshit. The bigger the SEO agency gets, the less attention your account will get regardless of what you pay, that’s just how it works.

To ensure your SEO agency isn’t ripping you off… you’ll want to gain some knowledge of at least the basics of what is moving the needle with Google.

Hiring an organic search consultant can do just that. They can train you and your staff and provide the tools to measure the sales impact of SEO on your business. After working with an experienced SEO master for a while you’ll start to know which SEO keywords are valuable, how to target them. Most importantly you’ll know what moves are going to positively impact your rank on google.

There are two ways to improve your organic traffic:

  • Scour the “interwebs” looking for a magic bullet, read a ton of blog articles, watch youtube tutorials, rinse and repeat. Then close your eyes and hope for the best.
  • Hire an SEO agency or SEO Consultant that does SEO every day and has the SEO knowledge and game plan.

How to get more organic traffic for your website consistently

  • What if your SEO agency taught you what to look for and how to measure impact? Most won’t. This is because SEO gains are hard to get and the internet has become a pretty damn crowded place. This would also hold your SEO team accountable for gains. We’re not scared of that and I’m also sick of seeing these loser SEO agencies sell snake oil. We developed an efficient way to teach e-commerce sellers the important parts of SEO marketing that make a difference. We actually train our clients about solely the parts of SEO that they need to know. There is a lot to learn about SEO so we boiled down our SEO consulting program to focus on just e-commerce SEO specifically and only teach our clients exactly what makes an impact. There are a lot of benefits to actually understanding your SEO situation instead of blindly paying a company to improve rank. Here’s a brief rundown of what we teach our e-commerce merchant clients:
  • Know why your pages are ranking and why some aren’t
  • Know the basics of SEO code compliance
  • Know SEO KPIs that are meaningful to your business
  • Know how to use popular SEO tools to make money for your business
  • Know impactful SEO optimization standards
  • Have practical knowledge of all intent match scenarios
  • Know how to create and promote content that attracts links and sales for your business

Looking for the best SEO company in Spokane? We do offer done-for-you white hat natural SEO services if desired, but would rather be your Spokane SEO Consultant so you’ll be in control of your business. The choice is yours. We’re here to help you learn about SEO and how to optimize your business on Google for the long haul.

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