Before hiring an SEO company, it’s important to have a clear understanding of their role and how they will contribute to your business. While you may be curious about their specific tactics and processes, it’s essential to recognize that a reputable SEO firm is there to study, diagnose, strategize, and execute. Just as a skilled mechanic wouldn’t expect you to understand the intricacies of a car engine, an effective SEO firm is focused on delivering results and keeping you informed about its strategies and actions. It’s more important to gauge their ability to understand your business, provide transparent communication, and demonstrate a proven track record of success. Being able to recognize this will help you make the right choice in the long run. Getting stuck with an SEO company that provides “one-and-done” SEO only for search engine bots will land you in a troubling spot. It’s important to find an SEO company that values your goals and time – delivering you the proper results without hiding behind technical jargon to blind you from what is happening behind the scenes. 

A website being SEO-friendly means that it has been designed and developed in a way that makes it easy for search engine bots to crawl and understand its content and structure. An SEO-friendly website effectively communicates what it is about, what it offers, and how it is relevant to users’ search queries. This allows the website to be indexed properly by search engines and improves its chances of ranking well in search results for relevant keywords and phrases. An SEO-friendly site also provides a good user experience, with fast loading times, mobile responsiveness, clear navigation, and quality content, all of which are factors that search engines consider when determining rankings. A website built without SEO in mind is still entirely possible to get ranking well, but it makes the job much harder, therefore not being very SEO-friendly

Absolutely! Local SEO services are incredibly important for businesses that want to attract customers in their specific geographical area, such as a city or region. Implementing effective local SEO strategies can give you a competitive edge over businesses that are not optimizing for local searches. By appearing prominently in local search results, you can attract more attention and generate more qualified leads, ultimately increasing your chances of converting those leads into loyal customers. Local SEO techniques, such as optimizing your Google My Business profile, local directory listings, and creating location-specific landing pages, can significantly improve your visibility in local search results. This means that when potential customers search for businesses like yours in their area, you have a higher chance of appearing at the top of the search results. In addition, potential customers often trust businesses that have a strong online presence and positive reviews from other local customers. Local SEO helps you build that trust by showcasing your business as a relevant and reliable option in the local market.

Organic search results are the listings on a search engine results page (SERP) that appear because of their relevance to a search query. These are not the advertisements you see at the top of a search. Those are called paid search results displayed because of paid advertising campaigns like Google Ads. Organic search results are purely determined by the search engine’s algorithm. The goal of organic search is to provide users with the most relevant and authoritative results for their search query. These algorithms take into account various factors such as the website’s content quality, relevancy, user engagement, backlinks, and technical SEO to rank pages. Organic search is important because it is a significant source of traffic for websites. High rankings in organic search results can be achieved through effective SEO practices and can lead to increased visibility, credibility, and higher traffic without the cost of pay-per-click advertising.

Several key metrics are important to track for SEO because they provide insights into the performance of your website and help gauge the effectiveness of your SEO strategies. Here are some of the most important metrics:

1. Organic Traffic: This metric refers to the number of visitors that come to your site from search engine results pages. Tracking organic traffic helps you understand the overall reach of your SEO efforts and can indicate how well your site is ranking for keywords.
2. Keyword Rankings: Monitoring where your keywords rank in search engine results pages is crucial. This metric shows which keywords are driving traffic to your site and helps you understand how visible your site is for important search terms.
3. Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR measures the percentage of people who click on your site’s listing in the search results versus those who see it. A higher CTR can indicate more effective meta titles and descriptions, which entice users to click through to your site.
4. Bounce Rate: This metric shows the percentage of visitors who navigate away from your site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate might suggest that your content is not relevant to what users are searching for or that the user experience is lacking.

Of course, these are not all the statistics we track, but these are the ones we value the most at VGI. During an SEO audit or as one of our clients, we will provide reports including the top metrics used in the SEO industry.

Engagement measures how users interact with your website, reflecting their interest and involvement with your content. It’s an essential aspect of a successful online presence, indicating that visitors find your site valuable and are more likely to convert into customers or followers. An SEO company tracks engagement through various metrics such as time spent on the site, the number of pages visited, interaction rates, and user comments or shares. A website optimized for both search engines and a user-friendly experience is more valuable than one built solely for search engine bots because it prioritizes the needs and satisfaction of real users. Engaging, high-quality content encourages longer visits and repeat traffic, which search engines interpret as signals of a site’s credibility and relevance. In contrast, a spammy website may initially attract traffic through the manipulation of search engine algorithms, but it often leads to poor user engagement and high bounce rates.

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is a concept used by Google to assess the quality of web pages and their content. The idea is that high-quality content must be created by experts in a given field and that the website itself should be a recognized authority on the subject, with a reputation that makes it a trustworthy source of information. Expertise refers to the knowledge and skill of the content creator in their particular field. Authoritativeness is about the credibility of the website publishing the content, as well as the content author. Trustworthiness relates to the accuracy and reliability of the content and the overall website. Google uses E-A-T as part of its guidelines to help determine how well a webpage provides what users are looking for. Pages with high E-A-T are typically rewarded with better rankings in search results, while those with low E-A-T may rank poorly.

Above the fold content is the part of a webpage that is visible to users immediately upon landing, without scrolling. The term comes from the pre-internet era when newspapers were folded in half when you saw them in the stands. It was crucial to create an attractive face for newspapers, and this same concept still applies to websites today. In terms of SEO, this area is crucial because it can affect user engagement metrics like bounce rates and time on site, which are signals to search engines about the quality and relevance of your website. Engaging above-the-fold content can contribute to better rankings by encouraging users to stay longer and explore more of your site, indicating to search engines that your page is valuable to visitors.