SEO Services to Grow Your Business

The best SEO companies start by understanding what success means to your business. They work with you to identify your measurable goals and then translate those goals into a disciplined process that helps your company grow. They work with you to establish baseline metrics and articulate achievable goals that you not only understand, but can clearly see how they will translate into growing your business.

The best SEO companies don't overload you with buzzwords or technical jargon that doesn’t provide real meaning to you. Instead, they help translate SEO from confusing technical updates to real life business success. The truly best SEO company and partner out there that’s qualified to help you grow your business can provide you with measurable results that make sense—and reassure you that you’re getting a return on your investment in digital marketing.

At Sanctuary, we’re focused on generating measurable results that help grow your business. We partner with you to determine what metrics are most important to the success of your company, and how those are tied to specific SEO tactics. Improved site speed, increased organic traffic and higher conversion rates are all things we like to see for our clients involved in SEO services.

In addition, Sanctuary is rooted in strong values that make our team a pleasure to work with. Among many other things, we’re honest, hardworking, curious, and focused on moving the mark for your business. Learn more about our company values.

SEO best practices are things that all websites should have or be doing to contribute to positive organic search rankings—with the ultimate goal of getting found online by potential customers.

But before we go into specific SEO best practices, we have to start with two big ones that trump everything else: 1.) Engaging a professional SEO company and 2.) having a plan. There are thousands of possibilities when it comes to optimizing your website for search. An SEO company with experienced digital marketing strategists can work with you to establish business goals and then put together an SEO strategy that will help you achieve them within your budget.

Once you have a plan and you know what the end-game is, you can start rolling out specific tactics and updates following SEO best practices. These best practices are recommendations that have come straight from Google and from our team’s extensive research and experience. These are things that we do for all of our clients involved with SEO services and are things we’ve proven make a difference.

• Does Your Website Content Have Keyword-Rich Headings? - Those same keywords you should include in your meta titles and descriptions are the ones you should also be including in your headings and subheadings throughout your content.
• Is Your Content Long Enough? - Each page of content on your website should have at least 250 characters on it to be recognized as a “real” web page by search engines. Ensure each page on your website is providing value to potential customers.
• Is Your Content Easy to Digest? - Within those 250 characters (or more), content should be well organized and easy to read. Headings and subheadings help with the organization, while bulleted lists and short paragraphs help keep the content skimmable.
• Are You Accurately Describing Your Content to Search Engines? - Meta titles and descriptions are important to have for each page on your website because those help tell search engines what your content is about. It’s a great opportunity to include important keywords that you’re trying to rank for. But beware—meta titles and descriptions must be unique for every single page of content or else those duplications could actually count against you.
• Does Your Site Load Fast Enough? - Site speed is a big ranking factor for both desktop and mobile because no one wants to wait forever for a web page to load. There are steps you can take to improve speed, such as compressing images or using lazy-loading.
• Do You Add Alternative Text When Uploading Images? - Showing diversity in the type of content and media you have on your website helps indicate to search engines that your website is robust, so images are a must to have where appropriate. Every time an image is uploaded to your site, you should make sure it has a keyword-rich ALT text to indicate to search engines what the image is showing.
• Does Your Site Follow a Logical URL Structure? - Your website should follow an organized URL structure to make it more apparent to search engines how your site is organized. URLs should also be kept as brief as possible and include important keywords.
• Is Your Website Secure? - Improving your website’s security and making the switch from HTTP to HTTPs is a “one and done” update you can make that will give your ranking a boost. It has been a strong ranking factor for Google for years because of the protection it offers to your website users. HTTPs makes your website more secure for both your business and your potential customers.

The first—and most helpful—step to take is to run a site audit. This will give you great insight into the issues going on with your website behind the scenes. Once you know what some of those issues are, you can get started on tackling them. Here are a few quick fixes that we make sure to tackle first:

• Correct Behind-the-Scenes Meta Issues - Things like meta issues are usually quick fixes and just involve taking the time to write unique, keyword-rich meta titles and descriptions for pages that don’t have them or that have duplicates.
• Optimize Content for Keywords and Readability - Another quick fix you can make is to the actual content on your site. Make sure that each page has a top heading (H1) and subheadings throughout that contain important keywords. For example, if you have a web page about air conditioners, be sure to include air conditioners in the page title and subsequent headings throughout.
• Optimize Images for Search Engines - Make sure that images on your site aren’t too large, because that could be slowing down overall site speed. In addition, each image on your site should have ALT text to let search engines know what the images are about. This is another great opportunity to include keywords if applicable.

If you’re curious how your website ranks for a specific search term, you can enter that term into a search engine (like Google) and see where you come up. If you don’t see your company on the first page of results, there’s definitely work to be done to make your website more visible to potential customers searching for the products or services you provide.

The Sanctuary team has access to industry-leading tools used to pull a complete ranking report that will give you insight into what keywords you’re currently ranking for and how much competition is there.

The bottom line is: you can’t manage what you can’t measure. You’ve chosen the right SEO company if they are focused on providing you with measurable results for your business. Without discussing company goals and metrics that can help you reach them, there’s really no way to know for sure that you’re moving the mark with SEO.

You can feel confident you’re partnered with the right SEO company and that they’re doing a good job if:

• You are partnered with a strategist who has laid out a plan for your website to get results for your business.
• You understand the established measures for success.
• You’re clear on the expectations for what kind of results SEO can bring you.
• They help connect the technical stuff and the numbers will real life success for your business.
• You’re receiving monthly reports that are simple, clear and meaningful to you.

The goal of SEO is really to improve your organic search engine ranking and get discovered by the right people. The amount of people visiting your website will increase, leading to more leads, conversions and eventually sales.

There are other more technical things that should improve with SEO services. Things like site speed and meta issues contribute to your overall ranking, so we’d expect those areas to improve.

In addition, you can expect:

• Site speed to improve.
• Meta issues on the backend of your site to diminish.
• Organic search traffic to increase.
• Keyword ranking to improve for your targeted keywords.
• Overall conversions to increase with time.

It’s true that a website built using WordPress is much easier to optimize than one that is not. That’s because WordPress has special plugins (like Yoast SEO) that are specifically designed to make SEO easier. WordPress is also known to be much easier to navigate from a development standpoint, whereas other types of websites may be more difficult to update.

However, that doesn’t mean our development team can’t handle it! We have helped countless clients optimize their non-WordPress sites—and even make the transition to WordPress if that’s what they decide is best.

An SEO analysis starts with running an audit of your website. The audit gives us insight into site speed, meta or image issues, and other things going on “behind the scenes” of your website. Once the audit is complete, that can be used to put together an analysis that answers questions like:

• Is my website secure?
• What keywords does my site rank for?
• Does my site load fast enough?
• Does my content provide value?
• Does my content include keywords that people are searching for?
• Is my content easy to read?
• What kind of traffic am I getting to my website?

We also collect some information from Google Search Console that shows us impressions versus clicks for organic search traffic. This can be an indicator of search terms that your website shows up for often, but isn’t being clicked on—and in turn gives us insight into what updates need to be made.

We may also look at Search Console through the lens of figuring out which keywords you want your website to rank for versus what you rank for now. We’d then put together a strategy to optimize your content for those specific search terms.