ECOMMERCE SEO Services

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website so that it performs well in organic search. Ranking highly for search terms which are known as keywords increases the visibility of a website and leads to a higher number of visitors to the actual website.

Put more simply, SEO will allow you to connect with those searching for your product or service and help turn them into customers.

As a business owner, you need to have a plan in place to promote your business and obtain new clients. SEO should be a part of that plan and here are just a few of the reasons why:

• Leads generated from SEO close at an average of 15% which is 12% higher than the conversion rate for outbound leads.

• In a recent survey by Hubspot only 9% of businesses using inbound marketing with SEO failed to see an ROI. If it works for 91% or businesses, it is very likely to work for you too.

• Blogging is a leading source of leads and traffic for businesses when they are properly optimized for search. SEO will make sure you blog posts get found and drive traffic.

SEO is unarguably one of the best ways to connect with targeted consumers and share your offer. Implementing an effective SEO strategy is not straightforward or easy though, especially with all of the recent updates to Google’s SEO ranking algorithm. For those of you willing to take a risk and tackle SEO on your own, here are some tips to get you started.

Figuring Out How Your Customers Search
Before you can optimize your website, you have to know what you are optimizing it for. The terms people use to search for what you offer are known as keywords. There are numerous methods for finding keywords 

Implementing Keywords into Your Website
Once you have identified keywords that people are using to find products or services similar to yours you need to implement them into your website. If you have done this in the past you may have been told to include the exact keyword a certain number of times on each page.  

This used to be the best method but Google has improved its ability to understand the theme of a page. For this reason, you should include your primary keyword and other related terms to establish a clear page topic.

Reviewing and Improving On-Page SEO Factors
Content is a very important part of your website but it is far from the only on-page factor that will affect how well your website performs. When you design a site or have one designed for you, it is imperative that you make the site easy to navigate for users. You should have a clear hierarchy to your site and if you have multiple topics, it is important to maintain a proper silo structure.

Spreading the Word about Your Content
You may have heard or been told “just write great content”. Great content is certainly a crucial element to building a website that converts but it is far from the only thing you need to do. Once you have built a great website and filled it with great resources, you need to tell people about it!

With over 6 websites online for every person on earth, you need to be ready to work if you want your site to standout.

With SEO, you want to tell people about your content that are likely to share or link to it. Building a list of people who have linked out to content similar to yours and asking them to link to your content is known as outreach link building. This is one of the easiest and more effective methods in use today. There are numerous methods you can use to build links some are better for local SEO while other methods are geared towards higher organic rankings. Check out our Complete Guide to Link Building to find the best methods currently in use.

Measuring Results
The best part of SEO and inbound marketing as a whole is the ability to track and refine the entire process. Numerous tools are available that allow you to keep tabs on your website, traffic sources, and user engagement. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are both free programs offered by Google that will allow you to keep track of your visitors and website. If you are not currently tracking your website, you should implement those two programs right away.

Moving Forward
If you still think you want to tackle SEO for your website, remember to take the time to find out how people are searching. Use that information to write exceptional content and do not be afraid to let the world know about what you have to offer. In addition to SEO, you should also look into the other methods of inbound marketing such as content marketing and it may benefit your business.

SEO is essentially just a series of steps taken to help your site show up higher and for more terms related to your business. The three main components of SEO are technical SEO, content, and link building. Technical SEO allows your site to be crawled, indexed, and understood by search engines. The content on your site helps your site visitors understand what you do and how you do it while helping Google understand the types of searches your business should be showing up when people search. Link building is the fuel on the fire. It helps to build trust, authority, and ultimately to drive you ahead of competitors who may also have good technical SEO and website content. Together, this is one of the highest converting and most effective marketing tactics available.

The manner in which every company operates is going to be a little different. However, for an SEO campaign to be successful, there are some elements that should be present in any worthwhile campaign. The company you work with must have some method of discovering your goals, a framework for comparing your website to those of your competition, and a skilled team able to solve technical, content, and link building issues/deficiencies that are found during the comparison phase. Last, you should expect communication about realistic timelines for seeing results and collectively, should have some measurement (s) in place to determine the effectiveness of your SEO campaign.

In every industry, there are going to be low cost competitors and SEO is no exception. The difference is if you buy a cheap shirt and it doesn’t fit right, you are not out of much. If you hire a cheap SEO service, you can destroy your business and lose way more than you saved. We have a pricing guide for SEO services and link building on our blog that is a great place to start. However, the short answer is about $1500 per month is the lowest cost you should ever expect to pay a good SEO company and somewhere between $2000-$8000 per month is a more typical investment range

Also, the type of seo services, such as restoration SEO, vs. law firm SEO will cause the price to vary.

SEO is a competitive sport, meaning your competition has a lot to do with how quickly and how well you see the payoff of your efforts. In order to benefit from SEO it is critical that your goals, budget, and strategy are aligned. If your goal is ranking for the prized term of your industry and your budget doesn’t fit, your likelihood of success is going to be pretty low. If you have a new website, the first 4-6 months are all about building a solid foundation and months 7-12 is when you start to see more growth. If you are established, the current rankings, content quality, and authority of your site will all impact the timeline. Those variables along with many others are why getting an SEO audit completed and a roadmap developed is so important. Spending on a quality audit can save you big in the long run and help you establish clear goals and milestones to share with your team.

As mentioned above, modern SEO has three main pillars: technical SEO, content, and link building. Content marketing and link building are portions of an overall SEO strategy, but content and links can have benefits besides organic visibility as well. For example, YT videos, Instagram, and Twitter posts are all types of content marketing, even though in those cases they are used for referral traffic instead of SEO benefit. Link building is one of the most important ranking factors, but good links can build brand recognition and send referral traffic to your site as well, giving your benefits outside of SEO. If you are new to the topic, you should check out our link building guide to get a deeper look at how they work and work together.

Concerning SEO, choosing the quick route is termed black hat SEO. An SEO agency or search engine optimization expert may decide to use black hat SEO by utilizing sneaky tactics such as link scraping and keyword stuffing to rank your website extremely fast. An SEO service that uses such tactics would most likely promise you impossible results in an unreasonable time frame. And it may work for a bit to send some traffic your way but after some time search engines will penalize your website and even blacklist it ensuring that your website never ranks.

So while it may look appealing in the short term, black hat SEO services will ultimately ruin your business in the long haul.

Here are a couple of tactics used by shoddy SEO services:

Bad Linking Strategies

Some SEO agencies offer Fiverr- like packages that promise their clients things like “10,000” links within 12 hours. Or promise to get their clients ranking number 1 on search engines within an exact number of days using backlinks. This is a terrible way to build links.

Google and other search engines will quickly figure out what’s going on as they expect websites to build links from relevant content and pages within their niche that have individual traffic. Most of such links are from spam websites built solely to sell links to unsuspecting clients.

Copied Content

While trying to rank your website for a particular keyword, an SEO agency utilizing black hat strategies would duplicate content on your website to ensure that the particular term is reflected again and again. Google will penalize your website for this. This can happen by the SEO service spinning content to get more articles on your website because they’ve made an impossible promise they can’t keep up with.

Redirecting and Cloaking

There is an acceptable way to do redirects. However, some black hat agencies choose the dark option which is purchasing a bunch of keyword-rich domains and sending all the traffic to 1 website.

Keyword Stuff and Hidden Text

Way back, certain SEO companies utilized a blackhat tactic that involved stuffing a bunch of keywords at the end of an article by making them the same color as the page background. An SEO service that does this to your web page will get your website blacklisted in an instant. This also is true for keyword stuffing terms where they shouldn’t be.

The easiest way to spot such SEO companies is that they make claims they are unable to prove.

White Hat SEO companies, on the other hand, are the option to choose if you intend to build a long-lasting business. An SEO firm that does site optimization like this will focus its strategies on your human audience and business goals. An SEO agency using white hat SEO techniques will also provide a clear pathway to achieve the results they promise.

At the end of the day in the SEO space, it is all about the steps you take to get needed results. If your SEO firm is purchasing guest posts for your website on platforms that are not related to your industry and stuffing your web pages with keywords in the wrong places your website will get penalized by Google. But if you create unique content that offers value to your target audience, analyze your website technically, and build links to relevant and authoritative websites your site will rank properly and safely.

Search engine optimization requires a ton of hard work and time. It isn’t a practice that you should expect to see instant results from. It demands consistent day-to-day actions for success.

There are a couple of underlying factors that display what content-driven SEO is, let’s look at them.

Content-centric

SEO is content-centric. This means that every optimization task done in the process involves some form of content.

This is because search engine users are pleased when they discover result pages that satisfy their search to the fullest.

When a user searches for “the best search engine optimization services”, for example, Google does all it can to deliver to the user what it believes to be the best search engine optimization company on the whole web.

It aims to give users exactly what they search for and it does this by directing them to the “best SEO companies” content it can locate.

This means that to succeed in SEO the first job to accomplish is producing quality content.

Search engine optimization is just like anything else – long-term results come from quality efforts. No matter how great an SEO strategy is if it does not include quality content. It’s worthless.

So what is quality content?

Quality content seeks to solve the user’s query for a particular keyword phrase or search term in the best way possible.

If your content does not satisfy the user’s query they’ll move elsewhere and this informs Google that your content isn’t solving the users’ question.

User Intent

Google and other search engines highlight user intent. They want to know what the user is looking for as they put a search term into the address bar. Google tries to figure out if the user is trying to purchase something, looking for information, or comparing brands.

When creating content optimized for search engines, a good SEO company knows this and won’t create the wrong type of content.

If a user searches for link-building services on search engines and ends up in a marketing platform, it could be a website that offers paid social media marketing services or even billboard adverts and those aren’t SEO practices. For this reason, the search engine would most likely rank the website that seems more attuned to what the user is searching for which is “link building services”.

The idea is that you want to provide the correct answer to the user’s query. In response, the search engine platform is more likely to rank your web page since your content is relevant to the users searching for the keyword. 

Updating Content

It has been said over time that posting new content consistently helps with Google rankings. There are tons of studies on this. But new content isn’t the single way to satisfy Google’s freshness search engine optimization requirements.

There is so much a good search engine optimization company can do with your existing content to update it and make it more relevant to the current user.

Stellar SEO, for example, will go through and update your content by fixing all broken links, checking your content for accuracy, and refreshing your articles to show Google that your content must remain on the first page or keep ranking.

This is extremely important because the search engine intends to not just provide relevant information to the user but also valuable content. So your webpage must offer information that is both factual and currently valuable to the user. And to achieve this you need to update old content.

This is why you should hire SEO specialists who are knowledgable in your industry.

At Stellar SEO, our SEO experts create content that satisfies the user, draws organic search traffic, and matches the kinds of pages that Google rewards. We achieve this by satisfying the following:

We Understand the Searcher’s Intent

To create relevant content for a particular target audience, as a digital agency, you must know what the searcher aims to accomplish as they land on a webpage. So regardless of if you create content for a product website or simply for an informational basis we ensure that every piece of content created is in line with the user’s intent.

Build the Target Audience Based on Your Business Goals

We provide custom services, this means that we just don’t offer a bunch of strategies to you but take the time to understand your business, goals, and your target audience. After this, we can build customer avatars that allow us to create content targeting the right people. This results in pulling relevant organic traffic.

Actionable Content

Every piece of content that users will find satisfactory must be actionable. This means that it isn’t a bunch of written text but that it thoroughly covers all there is to know and discover about the topic. We ensure that the reader has everything they need after reading your article. This keeps them on your site longer and increases the likelihood of them converting.

Link-worthy Content

Backlinking is a huge part of search engine optimization. But without valuable content to link to, how can you build links? This is where an SEO company like Stellar SEO comes in. We understand and know the link opportunities available, as well as, have the required relationships and tools needed to build such links. Also, most websites may not have existing content that authority websites would want to link to. So we create content that is valuable to your industry at large and that is link-worthy.

Keywords Research and Audit

We do keyword research for various reasons but there are 2 major reasons for the practice: creating relevant content and ranking on search engines. Keywords open the door to inspiration by providing in-depth knowledge for you and your SEO company about what readers are interested in knowing about based on their volume of searches.

There’s so much involved to perform keyword selection. You must know the competitiveness and intent behind a keyword before attempting to create content around it. Some of the most vital aspects of keyword selection include the following:

Picking Keywords

Let us assume you sell advertising services. Your offering may cost customers $20,000 in a year. Now imagine you hire an SEO company that ranks your web page for “free advertising tips”, you already know the type of audience your ranking page will attract.

The users coming to your website will be searching for free advertising methods. This means they don’t want to pay you $2000 a month or even intend to subscribe to your service packages as they land on your website from the search engine results pages. Now granted, that particular keyword may send thousands to tens of thousands of web users to your website monthly but it will all go to waste. This is because they would be the wrong audience and ranking for it won’t give you a meaningful ROI. That is how important hiring the right SEO company to do proper keyword research is to your business and Google search engine results. You’d be better off ranking for a keyword that sends maybe 1000 people to your website monthly who intend to make a purchase.

This is why custom services like Stellar SEO remain the best SEO services as the approach used to conduct on-page SEO and off-page SEO for your website comes from an understanding of your business and target audience.

Keyword Competition Analysis

After picking the right keyword during keyword research that is relevant to your business and accurately aligns with the content to be created and what you’re trying to sell, there’s one more box we check – competition analysis.

Naturally, SEO newbies would simply gravitate to keywords that are relevant to the business and have a high search volume. But that’s not enough.

Every keyword has other websites fighting to rank for it and if those web pages have more backlinks and authority than yours you would probably lose the fight. This means you won’t rank because those other sites have gained the trust of Google and have myriads of backlink juice already, which you don’t. So there’s no point in spoiling for a fight. All we do is simply find a keyword that’s relevant to your business and target audience, as well as, has low competition (this means a lot of authority websites aren’t ranking for it yet) and a high search volume.

This way you’re able to rank for a keyword that has a ton of users searching for it but doesn’t have a lot of competition, which means your rank easily for it and still get the needed traffic.

User Search Intent

Search intent isn’t what the user types in the search bar but what they’re trying to find. Say for example a user is searching for marketing jobs, what kind of marketing job? digital marketing? physical marketing? Or what exactly.

So the keywords that a website ranks for must be relevant to the kind of search intent you want to rank for. If you have a position open for a digital marketing specialist, ranking for the phrase “marketing job” may attract all kinds of marketers and simply defeat the purpose.

SEO generates more revenue for B2B (business-to-business) companies than all other digital marketing channels combined. In fact, across all industries, SEO averages 44% of all revenue.

So yes, it is worth it to hire a good SEO company. The data speaks for itself.

Also, digital marketing experts (70%) state that SEO is the preferred option for driving sales over pay-per-click advertising.

Think of it this way. For your business to survive and thrive people must know about it. And the only way to achieve that online is through marketing. Now imagine you have a marketing option that allows you to be on the first page of Google without consistently paying for it. That is search engine optimization (SEO).

All you have to do is hire a custom SEO company and enjoy the long-term benefits. However, with the other advertising options, you would have to consistently pay for traffic and customers. This means a lower ROI in the long run than if you opt for SEO and attract customers organically.

The right SEO agency will understand your business needs, have the right SEO knowledge and create a custom SEO strategy that will pull in organic visitors for a long time.

Beyond the results, performing SEO yourself is an extremely draining task, especially if you run a business. You have to spend time making relationships for backlinks, performing keyword research, writing content, etc. And all these take time and resources. You also may not be in the know about the latest Google update and trends that will help you to come up with the right strategies to rank effectively and avoid Google penalties. For these reasons, it’s the better option to hire an SEO company to do all that for you perfectly.

Not all SEO services offer custom strategies. This means that the SEO company has a proposed set of tactics for every industry and business. So when you reach out to such SEO companies they’ll simply run a campaign for your website exactly like they would for any other. However, a custom SEO company like Stellar SEO will first have an intake or onboarding segment where they learn about your business goals, target audience, and overall desire for the campaign and then create a custom strategy that aligns with the information you provide.

This means that a custom SEO company will use strategies that are relevant to your industry and needs.

Why is this important?

Every industry, business, and website isn’t the same. So using the same SEO tactics for all websites isn’t the best option. The services provided must be tailored to the particular situation and need for it to be effective. This is what a custom SEO company seeks to achieve with its services.

As the saying goes, you get what you pay for. Cheap SEO services are exactly that – worthless. And beyond the worthless effect on your website, they are also damaging. Such SEO companies would use strategies such as PBN links, spun content, and keyword stuffing to try to rank your page. The outcome is that Google finds out and penalizes your website. So you’ll end up paying an SEO company just to have your website rank for just a few days, unranked, and probably blacklisted.

Why would a cheap SEO service do this? Because quality SEO takes a huge amount of time and resources, and to be able to offer their service that cheaply they have to decrease the effort put in. This means using shortcuts to perform various SEO tasks to boost your website’s search rankings which should be done properly.

So like everything cheap, avoid such companies as they’ll harm your website’s SEO.

The website audit is the analysis of your web page’s performance before conducting large-scale search engine optimization. Before an SEO company can carry out quality optimization they must first audit your website to know if it is properly optimized to satisfy your business and traffic goals. And if not how to fix it.

Here are a couple of things a website audit can help you identify:

Technical Performance

A website audit will not just analyze your website for content but also its technical performance.

It will provide the opportunity to inspect your website’s technical framework and infrastructure and also determine how friendly it is to search engines and users. Regardless of how great your content is, if users can now find a way around your site easily it will lead to bouncing.

Search Engine Optimization Issues

By performing a website audit your SEO company can identify optimization problems or missed SEO opportunities to remedy all badly executed SEO issues such as exact match hyperlinks, unoptimized title tags, incorrect meta descriptions, etc. Throughout your website content.

Competitive Analysis

Carrying out a website audit will enable you to compare your website to its competitors. You’ll be able to know how well you are doing in the search engine result pages (SERPs) compared to other websites competing for the same keywords you intend to rank for.

Identify Problems

Website audits allow you to discover issues that are hurting your SEO efforts and user conversions. These can be long page load times, broken links, hidden content, poor anchor text descriptions, etc. Finding out these problems will help you fix the issues that are affecting and diverging the traffic.

So the above points show that analyzing both your content and technical issues on your website will open up opportunities to boost your SEO effectiveness.

The first way to know that an SEO company is legit and won’t scam you with bad practices is how they offer their services and the promises they make.

If it is too good to be true it probably is. Granted, SEO is an extremely rewarding endeavor however an SEO company can’t promise you the exact results that you’re going to get. There are too many factors in play and an SEO company that promises this is going to use black hat practices or do nothing at all.

Also, if the SEO agency offers incredible outcomes like 5000 backlinks within 24 hours, it is most likely a scam. This is because practices like building links involve a ton of steps and resources and it’s just not possible to offer those kinds of results within 24 hours if the strategies to reach them are legit.

Thirdly, if your prospective SEO company guarantees you results within an extremely specific time frame they’re not worth your resources. Also, if they state that their SEO team members have insider knowledge they aren’t worth it. Nobody knows how the Google search engine or algorithm works exactly. It is extremely complex and continuously changing so an SEO service cannot promise this truthfully.

Quality SEO is based on industry experience, tested practices, and public information made available by Google.

Local SEO is any search engine optimization practice that helps local businesses rank for particular keywords that users within their geographical location are searching for with regards to the services they offer. Any business with a physical location can benefit from local SEO services.