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Many companies come to us from either a Google search or a word of mouth referral and they want to know the cost to engage in Search Engine Optimization work.

Organic search engine optimization itself can cost anywhere from $1,000 - $5,000 a month based on competition. However, while we’d love to engage in SEO services for your brand, it’s important that you know that there are many things that you, the client, can do yourself to ensure that you are getting better rankings.

Let’s discuss a few of the practices you should put into play to ensure that before/without engaging in Search Engine Optimization services, that you have your site ready to go for peak performance in the search engines.

Content is King

Google’s ultimate goal when showing websites in search results in relevancy. They want to show visitors who are searching for a term the absolute most relevant websites possible. To do this, Google uses many algorithms that take a ton of factors into consideration to help rank your site.

One of those factors is content. For Google and others, content is king. Nothing is more important. The more content you have, the better. The more pages of content you have, the more searchable text Google has to scan your website for what the visitor is looking for, thus greatly improving your relevancy rating. Google would definitely rather show a website that has 50 pages of content vs one that has 5.

Quality Content

Having an infinite amount of pages is no longer sufficient. Recent updates to Google’s algorithms have put an end to being able to focus on quantity rather than quality. You now have to focus on quality over quantity.

There are a couple important factors relating to this:

• The important pages you have, such as your services pages, product descriptions, informational pages, etc. should be much longer. Instead of about 400 words, they should now be about 1500 words. That is a lot of content. It might be worth hiring a copywriter to ensure that you have quality content on your website. Even if you do it yourself, the ROI on your time for writing the content will be incredible. I guarantee it.
• This makes a blog ever more important. A blog is easy excuse to add content. The good thing about a blog is there are no specific guidelines on what you have to write about. A blog lets you post about anything industry related. For example, if you are a roofing company, feel free to post about signs you could use a new roof or roof maintenance. Not only will these pages be super important to Google, but these pages also give users many more entry ways into your website, and many more links in Google to your site.
• If you don’t already have a content management system, it might be time to consider building one in to your website. A content management system gives you full and complete access over all of the content over your website. This makes it super easy for you to not only modify all of the current content on your website but also will allow you to add new content as often as you’d like.

META Tags

Google and other search engine rankings use meta tags to help rank your website. The three main meta tags are title, keyword, and description. It’s super important that every page has it’s own, unique meta tags.

For more on META tags, read our blog post about how to optimize your META Tags.

Social media

Social media profiles are now being factored into Google search results. The number of (quality) fans and followers you have will factor into the legitimacy of your website, according to Google. The more legitimacy of your brand’s social media profiles, the more Google will like you.

In addition to that, the posts on your social media profiles, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ will also play a factor. Linking to your quality content is a great way to impress Google. Those pages/posts are now going to have more quality back-links in Google and will help getting those pages indexed higher.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as a whole should definitely be left to the professionals. However, as stated above, that does not mean you should sit back and do nothing yourself. You might be surprised as the positive effects you can see from these efforts. We have clients that are on the top of page 1 from simply doing the above techniques.

Basch Solutions. LLC, a Rochester NY website design and website development company also specializing in social media strategy and search engine optimization, has been optimizing websites for a number of years and has had great results. If you’re looking for help, give us a call. Or, give us a call and let us know if the tactics above helped you. We’d love to hear from you.