For over 14 years, PalmettoSoft has been helping websites score and maintain top rankings on the search results pages. As a full-service digital marketing company in South Carolina, we offer expertise in national, local, and e-commerce SEO, each of which has its unique challenges.
To be effective, SEO strategies need to be customized to meet the specific needs within the client’s industry. We have achieved success in the following widely varied fields, among others:
Search engine optimization has become the single most critical marketing activity for organizations looking to reach online audiences. With huge percentages of Internet users conducting their shopping and information-gathering activities on the search engines, it is essential for your website to have a prominent organic presence there.
of search engine users don’t
click past the first page of results
of users only consider
the first four search results
of users click on
the first search result
As these statistics show, a website whose pages don’t appear on the first page of search results for its primary keywords will never be visible to more than 10% of search engine users. You need the help of an expert team to move your pages into those top four results.
Organic SEO (in contrast with paid strategies like pay-per-click) is a collection of various efforts that all contribute to the same goal: improving the ranking of a website’s pages in keyword searches. Many of these efforts involve the text content on the website and the page descriptions and titles that appear on search results pages. However, generating backlinks to the website and creating a network of high-value links to other reputable websites are also important elements of a successful SEO strategy. Additional off-page efforts, like guest posting to industry blogs and posting regularly to various social media platforms, also help a website’s pages organically increase their search results rankings.
Search engines have become incredibly sophisticated since their introduction. The earliest, most basic versions of search engines scoured web pages across the Internet, looking for pages that included the keyword or keyword phrase that the user had entered. Since then, the complex algorithms that a search engine like Google uses to rank these search results have developed to take into account factors like related keywords, overall quality of a web page, page loading time, and elements like graphics and video. The algorithm even looks at visitor metrics, such as the average time spent on a page, to determine which pages should rank higher in the results.
The Internet search engine has become the most important tool that many people use to find the products and services that they need, not to mention information on practically any topic. If your organization or company is looking to connect with its audience, it is essential that your website be optimized to achieve high rankings on the search results pages. Without these efforts, your pages will be pushed down to the later pages of the search results, where very few people click through. The vast majority of search engine users only interact with the websites that they find on the first page of search results, and most of those don’t look any further than the first three listed results.
An expert SEO provider can optimize any website, conducting a thorough inspection of the content, coding, link network, and any external and social media connections. The SEO manager then rewrites content, builds links, launches social media efforts, and follows other strategies to move the web pages up in the search results rankings as quickly as possible. The ideal time, however, to launch an SEO strategy is in conjunction with the initial design of the website. In this way, the website can be designed with the search engines in mind “from the ground up,” eliminating the need for an SEO audit and redesign later on.
In recent years, the focus of the search engines has been squarely on mobile technology. This focus is driven by the rapidly increasing percentage of search engine users that use a smartphone or tablet computer rather than a desktop or laptop. Websites that are built for navigation and use on a small screen, or that offer a mobile-optimized version and a desktop-optimized version of the same site, now enjoy a huge boost in the search engine rankings over websites that do not cater to mobile device users. Neglecting to make your website mobile-friendly will lead to disappointing search results rankings for your pages.
While most marketing options either online or offline involve payment for advertising, organic SEO does not, at least in a direct sense. Any website owner can optimize their site for performance on the search results pages, then enjoy the resulting increase in website traffic, without paying a fee to Google, Bing, or any of the other search engines. More importantly, websites that rank well on search results pages organically—that is, not the paid ads that appear at the very top of the results pages—inspire much more trust on the part of searchers. There is a sense that your web page is strong enough on its own to gain great rankings without having to pay for the position.