Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for increasing the visibility of your website. Depending on your industry, there may be dozens or even hundreds of other companies’ websites that appear ahead of yours when people search for businesses like yours. SEO is the most effective digital marketing technique for positioning your website higher in search results than your competitors. Your investment in SEO can be the deciding factor for a prospective customer who’s seeking the products or services you offer.

The simple answer is SEO costs whatever you’re willing to spend. But if there was ever a good example of “you get what you pay for,” this is it. You can buy a bare-bones, low-priced package that may get you some short-term gains, but search engines won’t reward you for long. SEO is clearly a marathon—lasting results are built day by day, month by month. An inexpensive SEO package probably won’t include the level of attention and maintenance that sustained results demand, so you may get little (or, in the long run, nothing) for your money.

High-quality SEO involves a range of strategies and tactics, most of which require repeated deep dives and continual hands-on work. In addition, the initial up-front work your SEO company will do may include a lot of time spent on eliminating negative SEO factors, correcting problems on your website that interfere with good rankings, and in-depth research on your target audience and your competitors.

The good news? With the right SEO company on your side, your investment in SEO can provide great returns in the form of more (and better qualified) leads for your business. You can learn more about DAGMAR Marketing’s pricing here.

A less-than-reputable SEO company or consultant will tell you that your site will rise to the top of rankings quickly, but nothing could be further from the truth. SEO is a mature marketing discipline, and through the years it’s come very clear that a few initial gains may take at least three months, while additional sustainable gains will take much longer. As more relevant content is created and added to your site and authoritative links back to your site are developed, your results will continue to improve.

For an existing website, the sooner, the better. Because it takes significant time to build a high-quality SEO campaign, a delay in getting started is a delay in getting results.

If, however, you are about to create or launch a brand-new or redesigned website, the best time to implement SEO is prior to launch. Building in features and structure that supports good SEO results is a great investment that can give your new site a head start.

There will always be a lot of moving parts that determine rankings. These include your own dynamic SEO campaigns, the SEO work your competitors are doing, and the nearly constant changes that search engines make to how they ultimately determine rankings. That said, it’s normal to see relatively minor fluctuations over time. If, however, you experience a sudden extreme change in your site’s rankings, there’s a definite reason behind it, which an experienced SEO company can uncover.

Playing off the old western movie tropes of good guys in white hats and bad guys in black hats, the meaning in the context of SEO is basically the same. White hat SEO is all about adhering to best practices and search engine rules to achieve legitimate rankings. Black hat SEO is focused on gaming the system and bending the rules. While both can get you results, it always goes back to the long journey of building quality content and relevant links to achieve sustainable results, which only white hat SEO can do.

Here’s another important distinction: Black hat SEO never works well for long, because it’s designed to take advantage of whatever backdoors or loopholes exist at the moment, and those always change. (It Because it’s built on solid marketing principles, white hat SEO is much less vulnerable to the frequent changes made by search engines, so you don’t have to worry about reacting to every little tweak Google makes.

Also known as onsite and offsite SEO, these two parts of SEO function separately but work together. On-page SEO is everything we do on or to your website, such as adding relevant content and optimizing your site’s structure and URL structure. Off-page SEO takes advantage of other authoritative or reputable web content to support your own site’s authority, which is done by identifying and developing links back to your site. It also includes optimizing your company’s listings in various business directories across the web.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is used to improve how high a website organically or naturally ranks on a search engine results page. Search engine marketing (SEM), which includes specific tactics such as pay-per-click advertising and social media marketing, is also referred to as paid search.

There are many factors that affect SEO results, but the important ones to focus on for ranking well on Google are content quantity and quality, mobile-friendliness, backlinks, relevance, domain authority, and page speed. As you might guess, each of these require its own particular expertise, so when you’re shopping for an SEO company, you’ll want to learn as much as you can about its capabilities in each of these areas.

Keyword research can make or break a content strategy. Since it is the first step to developing SEO-friendly content, it is also one of the most important elements to your company’s success in search engines.

Keyword research is the process of finding terms or queries that your target audience enters into search engines when seeking products or services like yours.

Crafting online content with these queries in mind enables your website to become easily discoverable by users and search engines. It can place your website higher in search engines, and/or feature it in Google’s People Also Ask section

When determining rankings, search engines rely in part on the number and quality of the links your site includes internally and those that it has linking back to it externally. There are several types of links, including natural links, which comes from other sites that choose to link to yours, and manual links, which are gained by actively pursuing links from reputable sites back to yours.

Link building is a bit of both art and science, and the best practitioners understand the value of link building to attracting targeted, qualified leads to your site.

When a prospective client tells us they’ve just experienced a severe drop in rankings, one of the first things we do is attempt to identify penalties or algorithm updates that may have been assessed due to having violated Google’s guidelines. Even if every other aspect of your SEO campaigns is in line, some low-quality links or keyword stuffing can trigger a rank-tanking penalty.

If you’ve been notified that your site is being penalized, or even suspect it, our penalty recovery services can help.

Digital marketing comprises several strategies, but SEO is its heart, so it’s important to do your legwork to determine which SEO companies are most likely to help you achieve your marketing and business goals. Google provides some guidance for this, which includes asking these and other questions:

• Can you share examples of your work and success stories?
• Do you adhere to Google’s guidelines?
• How do you measure success?
• What experience do you have in my particular industry or a comparable one?
• How long have you been in business?
• Will you provide detailed information about your recommendations and strategies?

Google also offers these warnings:

• Be wary of an SEO company that guarantees a first-spot ranking on Google (no one can guarantee it).
• Avoid an SEO company that seems deceptive or gives vague answers to your questions.
• Be sure you clearly understand how your budget will be used.

Learn more about what to ask before hiring a digital marketing agency, and five red flags to watch for in your agency search process.