Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

At 9Niner consulting in Baltimore, MD we offer search engine optimization (SEO) services to increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your website.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to your website. The goal is to boost your ranking on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when a keyword search is performed.

So, What is a Keyword?

A keyword is a single or combination of words that are placed in the search bar. This could be one word, to a complete phrase.

Paid Search (PPC)

While not technically “SEO”, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a “fast-pass” to being positioned at the top of the SERP. As you might guess, it costs money and time to be successful with PPC, which will be covered in more detail later. But suffice it to say that you are bidding for the rights to page position on your chosen keywords, and you pay every time your ad is clicked.

Local Search

Local SEO is all about increasing search visibility for businesses that serve their communities face-to-face. Search results are prioritized by physical proximity to you. Google gives priority to results that have a brick-and-mortar location near you and sorts them by SEO efforts.

Organic Search

Google has a “crawler” or spider that crawls the internet, gathering all the information it can about webpages and then feeds its findings to a program that matches websites to keyword searches based on a number of ranking factors such as:

• Links to your site and their quality
• Keywords/quality of content/relevance (are the search terms present on the page)
• Readability/Content-Length
• Page load speed (the faster the better)
• Mobile-friendliness (how it looks on mobile devices)
• Site traffic (the more traffic a site has, the more “relevant” it is considered)
• On-page optimization (page titles, meta tags, etc.)

Google thinks of you as a customer. The goal is to present to you what it thinks you are looking for. In Google’s eyes, if it fails, it will lose you to Bing or Yahoo. So in an attempt to not lose you, Google works hard to figure out exactly what the websites it crawls (or analyzes) are about to make sure they are relevant to what you want.

Factors that affect Local SEO:

Negative Impact:

– Page errors
– Keyword stuffing
– Poor site speed
– Poorly written meta tags
– Duplicate listings
– Fake reviews
– No SSL
– Broken links & images
– Insufficient content