Search Engine Optimization in Lancaster & Beyond

Expanding Your Search Presence Online

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, operates as a beacon for users. Once a website is built it’s a fantastic start to gathering an online presence, but it can only go so far on its own. At Schweb Design, we refer to these websites as lonely islands.

A lonely island website is new, isolated, and uncharted so is typically hard to find by users. By setting up a lighthouse built from SEO services, users – and Google – can locate and visit the site much more often. With more users going to the site, it picks up momentum and begins to generate sales.

In order to flag users down and chart a website, the goal is to get the site to rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) of Google. The higher the ranking, the closer you are to the prime real estate on page 1, and the higher your website traffic will be. Users tend to stop searching once they reach page 2 of Google, so the exposure on those first results pages is critical for online presence and visibility.

SEO gets this done in a number of ways.

Onsite SEO

Onsite SEO takes a look at the website itself to determine if there are opportunities for growth; like building the foundation of the lighthouse for the island. By examining site performance, user behavior once they reach a site, and traffic trends before they reach a site, along with researching keywords and phrases, Search Engine Optimization professionals can generate and implement a number of recommendations.

This includes a variety of different techniques:

  • Site copy addition and revision
  • Meta tag optimization
  • Technical asset integration
  • Load speed improvements
  • Structured data implementation
  • Crosslinking
  • Navigation improvements
  • Content generation

After identifying the target market, altering the site to suit that market and trends over time keeps the site fresh, and its users engaged. Because Google is always shuffling results, and the sand erodes over time, websites need to continue evolving to keep up – and Onsite SEO does just that.

Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO focuses on measures outside the site to increase visibility and traffic, like the lighthouse’s beacon. It draws attention to the site to increase exposure, and gain traffic and domain authority. Off-site SEO can be a lengthy process, but when strategies are consistent and long-term, they can be quite effective.

These strategies include:

As a general rule of thumb, solid external links to a website are a very strong indicator of authority. The more high quality backlinks from trustworthy sources a site has, the higher its authority – and ranking – becomes. Google determines relevance from queries and authority, so Off-site SEO is an important tool in the SEO professional’s toolbox.

Local SEO in Your Target Market

In performing Local SEO, the beacon is refocused for users nearby. For businesses that deal in purely local markets, it’s not always relevant to have traffic coming from other countries, or even other states. So when typical SEO campaigns are too broad, this can result in businesses actually turning away potential clients for being too distant geographically from their location.

To build up local online presence, these methods are often used:

  • Regionally significant keyword content
  • Google My Business management
  • Local citation submissions
  • Local competitor analysis

Boosting a site’s online presence in a laser focused way reaches more relevant traffic, and increases customers in the site’s service area. When sites reach a certain level of local growth, and have the opportunity to expand, they can always shift gear and refocus on state-wide campaigns or even national and international campaigns as time goes on.

National SEO and Beyond

National and International SEO widens the lens on the beacon to reach users both near and far. Sites that can provide widespread services and products welcome the additional traffic, and can deliver at a larger scale. SEO professionals will focus on user behavior based on product relevance and user personas as opposed to locality, and will generate content to match.

There is a wide breadth of strategies at this level of SEO, including:

  • Generating evergreen service content
  • Focusing on high quality guest blogs from national sources
  • Finding niche long-tail keywords for carving out a national market share
  • Broad competitor analysis on comparability and user share
  • Improving traffic quality for the increase in quantity

Businesses of all sizes can benefit from SEO, and every year the market shifts more and more towards online sales and lead generation. Search engines are the primary way users find businesses online, and SEO is how search engines find businesses.

The Schweb Difference

At Schweb Design, we’re a Lancaster-based web development and digital marketing company created as a one-stop shop for all of your online needs. We know that there are no shortcuts when it comes to an effective SEO strategy, which is why we only utilize ethical, data-driven techniques to help your website be seen. Take a look at some of the comprehensive digital marketing services that we offer.

Don’t let your site become a lonely island. Get started today.

Get Started