TAMPA SEO

Research and planning are key to any great SEO link building strategy. Although research should be an ongoing pillar of every successful SEO approach, the initial research is extremely important.

We like to start with our client’s own website to look at what backlinks they already have. From there the research extends into main competitors to see what links they have. This is achieved through extremely robust software such as Ahrefs or SEMrush. We drill down on these links to find out the DR, organic traffic, if they are a follow or nofollow. We also review their site from inception so we can monitor their link building strategy over the years.

Prospecting is the process of using the information we’ve gained through research to decide whether a link it worthwhile or not. After we’ve reviewed your competitors links we gauge whether or not we want to reach out to the same websites for a link of our own. Remember, not all links are good links.

Visual Realm generally will not do SEO for a website we did not build. There are multiple reasons for this but the main reason is website architecture. If you do not code your site with the correct website architecture your Tampa SEO ranking may be doomed before you even start.

Google considers multiple factors into site architecture including how pages are named, how pages are formatted, how fast a website loads, how the overall site map is formulated (which is known as siloing) and multiple other factors. High ranking websites will not have broken links, confusing navigation, lack title tags or header tags Google is looking for.

Building websites in house allow us to add keywords into the domain structure telling Google what we want to be ranked for. This also allows us to tell search engines which pages on your site are most important and which pages to give less emphasis to.

Internal linking is the act of adding links from one page of your site to another page on your site that contains relevant information. This not only keeps browsers engaged by encouraging click throughs, it also tells search engines which pages you consider the most important. Internal linking also helps increase user time on site and encourages ease of navigation as it’s a natural way for readers to browse around the site.

One of the largest updates to the 2019 Google algorithm was a shift to focus heavily on search intent. Search intent is defined as the “ultimate goal” of the person using a search engine. This essentially ends the era of keyword stuffing in hopes of helping browsers find real answers more quickly and effectively.

If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Google is a business and although they are the front runner, they compete against all other search engines of past, present and future. They update their algorithm to consistently provide the best, most favorable results to their users so people continue to use them.

Google uses “robots” or “spiders” to crawl websites, not humans. These robots are programmed to consider many factors when it comes to ranking a website for desired keywords and phrases. This is what us Tampa SEO companies call SERPS or Search Engine Results Pages.

For example, if someone searches “Tampa SEO Company” what exactly is that user looking for? Most likely they are looking for a company that specializes in SEO in the Tampa area. The new update makes it so pages with real content rank for keywords like this, rather than pages that use keyword stuffing or other “black hat” SEO techniques of the past. The main goal of search engines is to provide the results their users are looking for.

Due to the rise of the popularity of searching the internet on a mobile phone, Google has put an emphasis on websites loading fast. Quick load time also improves browser on page time and click through rate. These are all things Google takes into consideration in its ranking algorithm.

This is another reason we generally do not do search engine optimization campaigns for sites we didn’t build. Page speed is one of the main reasons. We increase the website speed by optimizing images, using compression code like gzip and minification, put your site on a CDN (content delivery network) like Cloudflare, defer loading of scripts that should not load that top of the site, avoid the use of inline code, minimize redirects, add expiring headers and caching the site.

Our goal is to make your website load in under 2 seconds.

Another part of Google’s ranking algorithm is paying attention to what happens when a visitor gets to your site. Did they stay and read the whole page? Did they leave before it loaded? Did they bounce to another page or even just leave the site completely?

These are all important factors the search engine robots look at. On page time means a user is finding what they are looking for. They are engaged. This goes back to “search intent” where Google and other search engines are trying to provide the best possible results to their browsers. Longer on page time to a search engine spider means the visitor is happy with what they’ve found on the page.

Directory submission has been a long time trick for helping people find your business on the internet. Directories like Yelp, Google My Business, Whitepages, Manta and LinkedIn are common places people search for local businesses. There are thousands more of directories just like these across the internet where you can claim or submit your business to help it get found.

What if you move? What if your business phone or even the name changes? Over time, especially with businesses that have experienced growth, changes in employees or marketing firms, etc these directories can become outdated with incorrect information. This is where Google’s NAP comes in.

The Google “Name, Address, Phone update” requires this information to be exactly the same across the internet. This means the directories you submitted to 10 years ago when you first started your business, before you moved 3x and lost the passwords need to be updated with the newest Name, Address, and Phone.

Not only does Google penalize you for incorrect listing across the internet, they will dock you for minor differences in the listing like the word drive on some and dr. on others. When they say “exactly the same” they mean it!

Part of a Tampa SEO campaign with Visual Realm is making sure your NAP checks out. We also look to build roughly 80-100 citations per location to help aid in local SEO.