For local SEO, you can usually see results within 3-5 months, but that can take longer if you are starting with a new website or with no rankings, or if you are in a competitive industry or market. If you have some history or some rankings then that can speed up the results. Remember, we can influence Google, but we can’t control Google. They will reward a website with improved rankings once they process new quality signals, which in some cases, can take many months. For more competitive keywords, it can take 6-12 months or longer. The important thing to note here is that when you stack wins and continue to build quality, you’ll keep improving.

Yes, we will make changes to your website, but those changes go through an approval process with you first. We’ll create outlines for content with your input, then we create content, get your revisions and approvals, and then publish. We may also offer recommendations on layout, speed and performance, conversion optimizations, and other website items based on our findings. You’ll be able to approve changes we make ahead of time.

For some businesses, a new website makes a lot of sense. The average lifespan of a website is 2.5 to 3 years, so if it’s that old or older, it may make sense to start fresh. Why is the lifespan around 3 years? Technology in the website space changes a lot, and so do user expectations, so it’s best to keep up with technology from a security, performance, and usability standpoint.

We get asked this a lot, and as with most answers in SEO, it depends. Some keywords require a lot of trust and authority (links and citations), while some keywords require in-depth content to answer a query. Some require both. We did a correlation study that found that the most important ranking factor was in fact being comprehensive in your approach. So the website that had strong signals in the most factors tended to win. So, we concluded that the most important SEO ranking factor is how many factors you can positively influence. Here is a look at that study: https://www.seoteric.com/what-is-the-most-important-seo-ranking-factor/

We use a variety of SEO tools and utilities with thousands of dollars in services. We have a mix of internal and external tools, including rank tracking tools, analytics tools, competitive intelligence tools, research tools, project management tools, link outreach tools, crawling and audit tools, and several others. The tools themselves may change from time to time, but the important takeaway is that we invest heavily in tooling to allow us to execute effective strategies, test, report, and track performance over time. Tooling is often one of the overlooked aspects of budgeting for SEO services, as lower retainers typically mean less inputs (talent, time, and utilities).

SEO services can range from $500 to $5000 or more based on the amount of input required, the competitive landscape, your starting position, and the value of the terms we are targeting. Local SEO retainers for small to mid sized markets range from $500-$800 monthly. Mid to larger size markets can range from $900-$1250 per month, and major metro areas and competitive terms can range from $1500-$2000 per month. E-commerce and National SEO tends to start at $2500 and can vary depending on the number of products/categories, and competition. For Enterprise level accounts that require higher levels of expertise, resources, and time, those can range between $3500 and $7500 per month.

We provide a real-time analytics dashboard that compiles all of your marketing analytics data. You’ll be able to see rankings changes (daily), as well as traffic and conversion/sales data. SEO is working when Google is responding to changes by increasing your rankings for keywords. This climb can be over a 2-4 month period for small local campaigns, 3-7 months for mid-level competition, and 7-12 months for higher competitive terms. Smaller competition terms may see faster results as they move up the rankings quickly. More difficult terms will move slower because the competing websites will have more relevance and authority to catch up with.

We often hear (surprisingly) that some agencies don’t share what terms they are targeting, at least not in an easy to discover way. From the very start, we work with you to identify the right mix of keyword and topics to target, and you can see those right in your analytics dashboard. We can even pin important terms to the top so you can see what is important to you.

Our crawlers will update SEO rankings every 24 hours. This data is stored so you can see progress over time and compare periods. This timeline helps us to see what improvements have higher impact, and if Google changes require action. We recommend our clients check periodically (weekly, or bi-weekly). You’ll likely see movement like the stock market – some days up, some days down – but the overall trend we are looking for is steady improvement.

Rankings are tracked daily using the location you wish to target. We utilize tools that perform daily checks in organic and map results in Google and Bing search engines. As other search engines grow in popularity, we may add additional tracing to the mix in the future.

We will set up tracking points on your desired actions, like a form submission, phone calls, or online sales. These actions will trigger events and conversions in Google Analytics, allowing us to see how well each marketing channel and landing page performs. This gives us great insight into how to further optimize and improve campaigns. These conversions can be viewed in your SEO dashboard along with other marketing metrics.

On average, SEO is one of the highest ROI marketing channels, as it helps reduce your overall costs per customer acquisition. The actual ROI will depend on many factors including your site’s actual conversion rate, your lead to customer conversion rate, the profitability of your products or services, and your cost to attract visitors based on your industry’s and your market’s competition.

Although Google makes several thousand changes per year, we have an evergreen process to help us identify what Google wants based on each targeted query. We run competitive intelligence on the top 10 results to understand the type of results, type of content, and the signals affecting rankings. These signals may change over time as the results change, and by analyzing the changes and the new results, we can understand what direction Google is moving in and how the strategy needs to update. If these changes affect our clients, they become actionable, and we’ll respond accordingly.

Yes, as a form of competitive intelligence. We’ll analyze the top ranking sites to understand 1) what does Google want from the search terms, and 2) what are competitors doing in the space. We want to help position our clients to meet both the requirements for search, but also have a strong sales message that differentiates them from the competition. Much like how we monitor Google for changes, we’ll keep an eye on the competition as we progress. Google is quite dynamic, and so is the competition in the digital space.

Each search term/keyword/topic may have its own requirements for how in-depth the results need to be. That’s another value of competitive intelligence. As we analyze the results in Google, we understand the content depth needed to compete, as well as the supplemental content required (subpages and related content) to rank. The goal is to help become a good resource for the search terms, and that often means completely covering a topic as in-depth as possible.

With SEOteric, yes. In our agreements, we clearly state that all work done for our clients remains their work. This isn’t the case for some SEO agencies though. It is an important question to ask. We’ve recently helped several small businesses recover from agencies that “lease” their website and content to them. Some agencies in several niches even duplicate content across hundreds of other sites, so you have to be careful that your agency provides unique content that you own the right to. At SEOteric, we always provide work that the client will own and retain.

Much like the work or the content, you’ll have the rights to your website, meaning, you can take it and host it wherever you like (if it’s a site we built in WordPress or a custom build). The only exception to this is if you have your website built on a platform like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, or Shopify. These types of websites are more like “website as a service” companies, and you can’t take those where you want to. But, the work we do on those platforms would also remain yours as long as you pay for the use of those platforms. If you have questions about ownership, platforms, etc, we can help give some guidance here, as it can vary from provider to provider. We always land on the side of the client retaining ownership whenever possible.

No, you own all business listings we create for you. If you don’t have a Google Business Profile, we will create one for you and grant you primary ownership of that listing, and allow access to our team to manage it and optimize it. The same goes for other listings as well.

Guarantees are tricky with SEO, because we don’t control Google, but we can influence rankings by meeting the requirements for a top result. Google also doesn’t reward rankings immediately when work is done, and they have repeatedly said that new quality signals can take months to process. So we “stack wins” over time in order to prove to Google algorithms that we are a good result. Our guarantee is that you’ll be a better resource for the query, and we’ll work to improve that, but the timeline of getting results and the actual ranking positions are not something we can “control”, and we can only guarantee items we can control. There also isn’t a “special relationship with Google”, or an SEO boost from using Google Ads, or a secret process that does this faster – those are false claims you’ll often hear in a sale pitch. SEO is a long-term strategy, and when executed well, produces the best long-term results.