How Search Engine Optimization works at HeyTony
We do Search Engine Optimization a bit differently. Over the last 12 years, and fifty million website visitors, we have crafted a unique approach that search engines love. Not only do our strategies work, they have made it through every major algorithm update. Here’s a look into our process.
SEO Research & Competitive Analysis
Understanding your business, competitors, and objectives is the first thing we do. Our goal is to make sure we’re on the same page from day 1.
At this point we’ll need the following access: Website, Google Search Console, Google Analytics. If you don’t have these, it’s not a problem.
We start by creating a baseline report to measure against our SEO efforts. This includes keyword rankings, website clicks, traffic, bounce rate, etc.
We then analyze your current optimization efforts, identify missed opportunities, and create a list of low hanging fruit(optimizations) to kick off your SEO campaign.
The next step is deep diving into your competitor’s websites, keyword strategy, and optimization efforts. We identify what they’re doing well, and where the holes are in their strategy.
Using these two pieces of research, we then move onto more in depth keyword research. We look for terms & keyword variations relevant to your industry that have a lower keyword difficulty.
Our research and findings allow us to craft an SEO roadmap specific to your business.
SEO Roadmap
Think of your roadmap as a step by step process to attracting more website visitors. Typically an SEO roadmap consists of 9 – 12 months of optimization tasks, but it may be longer depending on your goals.
This SEO roadmap is unique to your business. There are no templates or copy/pasting here. Using our research and findings from Step 1, we carefully consider every element we include in your roadmap to success.
Your roadmap may include the following: website redesign/layout adjustment, writing new content, rewriting or adding to existing content, building domain trust & authority, technical SEO improvements, and internal linking.
The next step is reviewing your roadmap to make sure we’re aligned on the strategy and goals.
Client Review & Approval
One of the biggest complaints we hear from new clients is that they had no idea what their previous agency was doing when it came to SEO. This is one of the biggest advantages of having a roadmap and alignment on strategy and implementation.
Before we start any implementation, it’s important that we both sign off on the strategy & roadmap. At the end of every month, we can pull up the roadmap and literally check off work that was completed.
With your approved roadmap, we can then move onto step 4, SEO Implementation.
SEO Implementation
At this point you can sit back and relax! Your job is done! We’re on it.
We take your roadmap back to our implementation team and get to work.
Want to know more about what exactly goes into implementing your SEO roadmap? Take a look at some of the tasks below.
- Increasing page speed
- Optimizing images using next generation formats
- Adding ALT text to images
- Internal linking
- Optimizing your title and meta descriptions
- Adjusting heading tags
- Adding Schema Markup
- Writing additional content for existing pages
- Creating blog content
- Building trust and authority
Reporting & Optimization
If you’re reading this, congratulations! You made it to the end of month one! I know, we move fast!
At the end of every month, we send you a detailed email, following our scheduled call, that includes a list of all work that has been completed (according to your roadmap) as well as a performance report.
When it comes to SEO, monthly reporting is the most accurate way to look at the data. Although we’re constantly looking at the results, they fluctuate due to the algorithm trying to find the right place for your content in the search rankings. We have found that looking at the data month over month is the most accurate way to show real results.
This monthly report is not only useful for our clients, it also helps us adjust our optimization strategy in real time.
Our SEO Results
FAQs
Learn more about Search Engine Optimization below!
“What is Search Engine Optimization?” is a question that we’re frequently asked by clients. SEO is the process of optimizing your website content to increase the chances of ranking higher in the organic search results on search engines like Google.
What goes into SEO?
Without getting into every possible optimization strategy, here are some of the optimizations that you can make on your site to increase your rankings:
- Increasing page speed
- Optimizing images using next generation formats
- Adding ALT text to images
- Internal linking
- Optimizing your title and meta descriptions
- Adjusting heading tags
- Adding Schema Markup
- Writing additional content for existing pages
- Creating blog content
- Improving domain authority
The purpose of SEO is to attract more website visitors and convert some of them into customers. Alternatively, your monetization strategy may include selling display advertising, which would require an increase of website traffic.
Everyone needs SEO. It doesn’t matter if you’re a local business or a national chain. Why? Well, there are over 8.5 billion daily searches on Google alone. These are all users searching for something specific and that may be your product or service. You’re telling me you don’t want to get in on some of that sweet sweet action?
Even if you’ve never done any SEO, chances are that you’re ranking for something, unless you’ve specifically told search engines not to index your site.
Let’s say you’re getting most of your traffic/customers from doing Facebook ads, should you be doing SEO? YES! I’m not suggesting you stop doing something that is clearly a success, but with social advertising it’s a pay to play game. If you stop paying, you’ll stop getting new customers.
This is why SEO is so important. It’s free traffic. No more paying to play.
Want to keep up with everything SEO? Here are 10 more SEO Blogs To Follow
Yes.
Over half of users are accessing the internet via mobile devices. In fact, Google will reward you for having a mobile optimized website by increasing your organic search rankings.
Have you ever gone to a website while on your phone only to have a terrible experience trying to access the information you’re looking for? You probably left that site and found one with similar information that was optimized for mobile. You’re not alone. This is the typical user journey. Are you starting to see how important it is to have a mobile friendly website?
When it comes to SEO and keywords, you’ll be using a mix of long-tail and short-tail keywords. If you have no idea what we’re talking about, keep reading!
Short-Tail Keywords
Short-tail keywords typically are one or two words long. They are more general and have higher search volumes than long-tail keywords. For example, searching “SEO” on its own would be a short tail keyword, while “SEO agency In Hamilton, Ontario” would be a longtail keyword.
Long-Tail Keywords
Longtail keywords make up 80% of all Google searches. They are more specific than short-tail keywords, so ranking for them is typically easier.
Long-tail keywords are search terms or phrases that are typically three or more words long and add details to a search query.
For example, “Online advertising” is a short-tail keyword, while “Online advertising agency in Hamilton, Ontario” is a long-tail keyword. The short-tail keywords will have a much higher search volume, but the long-tail keyword will be much more relevant to the user. Long-tail keywords are often what we’re optimizing for.
Search engines love new content. They also like knowing that website owners are keeping their websites up to date. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
So how often should you be updating your site? This really depends on the type of business you’re running and how much you have to say.
We have an entire post about how often you should update your website.
Absolutely.
If your website doesn’t load instantly for a user, they may leave and head over to a competitor who has a lightning fast website.
There’s nothing more frustrating than clicking on a search result and the page not loading. And not only is it frustrating, but Google will actually lower your rankings if your link has a high bounce rate.
Page speed is a crucial part of your SEO strategy.
Want to increase your page speed? Here are 5 Free WordPress Plugins To Speed Up Your Website.
Yes and no!
The principals are the same, but with Local SEO, you’re competing on a much smaller scale than you would be if you were trying to rank nationally. Additionally, there are tactics, like building citations, that do not apply when it comes to regular SEO.
If you want to learn more about Local SEO, check out our Local SEO Checklist!
Even in a smaller city like Hamilton, SEO is incredibly important when it comes to potential customers & clients finding YOUR business. Ranking #1 on Google will bring in an influx of customers, regardless of your industry.
As of December 2020, there were over 15,000 businesses in Hamilton! Now, obviously you’re not trying to outrank ALL of those businesses, but even if there are 15 – 20 businesses in the same category as you, the top 3 will likely be getting approx. 90% of the business that comes from organic search.
Some of you will say “Sure, that’s great, but I get most of my business from Instagram, Facebook, or from paid advertising, why should I care about SEO?
- What has worked in the past, won’t necessarily work in the future. Especially with algorithm changes, outages, and when audiences shift to a new platform.
- It’s extremely dangerous to put all of your eggs in one basket. A healthy business will have a mix of marketing tactics.
- People are actively searching for your service or product on Google, they’re not doing that on social media. On social media, they’re “discovering” content, rather than seeking it out.
- You competitors who outrank you on Google could potentially be making lifetime customers, which directly takes away from your growth potential.
- Lastly, if you’re paying to play, you’ll always have to “pay to play.” the minute you stop paying for ads, you’ll stop getting new customers.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s a part of SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Both of these tactics involve increasing traffic to your website, however SEM includes paid advertising.
SEO
SEO is the process of optimizing your website and content so that you rank organically on search engines. One of the biggest differences between SEO & SEM is that SEO takes time. It can sometimes take up to 2 years to rank on page 1 for a brand new website. Now, that doesn’t mean it can’t take less time to rank. If you’re an established website with a good reputation, ranking changes can happen in as little as a month!
SEM
SEM is the process of getting traffic to your website via search engines. It includes both organic and paid rankings. The main difference with SEM is that you can rank #1 in the paid section of search engines immediately. So while we wait for your SEO to kick in, we can start driving traffic to your website! The downside of doing paid advertising is that you’ll always have to pay to generate business.
Think of on page SEO as anything that you can control when it comes to SEO. On Page SEO happens on your website. This includes any and all content appearing on your website. Examples of on page SEO includes website content, headlines, title tags, images, ALT text, meta descriptions, structured data, page speed, user experience, and more.
Off page SEO is anything that happens off of your website, and is typically out of your control. These are things like domain authority, trustworthiness, backlinks, and social metrics.
When it comes to off page SEO, the biggest factor is backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites back to yours. Backlinks have an impact on your domain authority, trustworthiness, and rankings. There are three main types of backlinks:
Natural Links: These are links given without the website owner doing anything. For example, a dog walker adding a link to a post on your website that points towards an article about healthy dog treats is a natural link.
Manually Built Links: These are links acquired through working with other websites or asking clients to link back to your website. For example, if you contribute a blog post to another website, they may allow a link back to your website.
One way to manually build links is to identify websites talking about your topic of expertise, contacting them, and letting them know you have an extensive post about a topic they’re referencing, but not linking to.
Self-created links: These are links that you create yourself. For example, if you sign up for a local directory which allows a link back to your website.
These types of links are great to build, however if you start a few websites with the intention of back linking to your main website, this is considered black hat seo, which is frowned upon by search engines – and may even get you banned. So be careful!
We have a ton of resources on our site! Here are some pages you might find helpful:
What our clients are saying
Matt at HeyTony has been my main point of contact for the last year and a half and working with him has always been such a pleasure! He’s been working with our creative agency on product landing pages for large national campaigns and he’s incredibly efficient, responsive and attentive to the agency’s every request. I’d recommend HeyTony to anyone looking to grow their business online - you’ll be in good hands!
Anna Kondratyuk
