With the internet continually broadening the horizons of our businesses, marketing trends have had to continuously keep shifting to push forward, and while that means there is a constant influx of new advertising opportunities available to improve your business’s impact, it also poses a new challenge in trying to keep up to the shifts and changes that those opportunities create and mandate. However, while so much is changing, SEO in The Woodlands continues to be one of the most important ways for your business to achieve success. Here’s why.

1) ROI

SEO in The Woodlands is important to your business because it is a cost-effective way to improve the discoverability of your business. That’s the foundation. Before you can start looking into ways to maximize profits from PPC advertising, Search Engine Optimization gives you an online presence. Without that, your business is limited to the point of non-existence.

2) Mobile Matters

Everyone has a phone, these days. More important than that, everyone uses his/her phone as though it is an extension of his/her body. That means they are far more likely to grab their phone to quick search companies that match their needs than they are to look in the yellow pages—or even to look up as the bus drives them right past your business’s door. If you want to grab people’s attention now, you need to do it through their mobile devices. That means using SEO in The Woodlands to create marketing and a web presence that is easily viewable on mobile devices. If it’s too big or glitchy, you’re going to lose interest, and that means losing sales.

3) Online Visibility

Have you ever laid in bed after a long day at work and browsed online stores on your phone? A lot of people do, and that’s exactly why you need SEO in The Woodlands. You need to up your web presence, so people can find your business and spend their money on your products and services when they’re too tired or up too early or late to go to your physical store. You don’t really want your potential clients to wait long enough to change their minds about whether or not they want to buy. SEO in The Woodlands can make you noticeable, can make your business profile easy to navigate, and can make purchasing simple enough that you don’t miss out on any potential impulse sales.

4) Don’t Let Your Competition Make an Impact Before You Do

Your competitors are already online. Don’t let them attract the attention of your potential clients before you can. Let SEO in The Woodlands help you attract those clients first.

Myth - You Need to Submit or Resubmit Your Website to Search Engines

For many years, some companies selling SEO in Sugar Land have specifically advertised services for submitting or re-submitting your website to search engines; but, in reality, you don’t need to submit your website to search engines for them to list your website, although you can submit them to speed up the process a small amount. Also, once your pages have been crawled, search engines will periodically re-crawl them on their own.

Fact - META Tags Don’t Affect Your Rankings

SEO in Sugar Land will tell you that META tags will not affect your website’s page rank on search engines because they specifically ignore them. However, it is still a good idea to include them for click-through rates because it is one of many things that helps searchers decide whether your page link is worth clicking on in a search result.

Myth - Duplicate Content is Penalized

SEO in Sugar Land will point out that there is no duplicate content penalty when it comes to page ranking; however, there is a filter. When google detects multiple version of the same pages, their algorithms will decide which version is the authoritative copy and ignore the rest.

Fact - Readable URLS are Better

Readable URLs help people remember your pages and understand what the content is on that page, and search engines favor them for the same reason; explaining what’s on your pages faster makes for more effective SEO in Sugar Land.
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Myth - You Must be Rank 1 in the Results

You may think having the number 1 result on a search engine will guarantee you a lot of traffic, but it’s not necessarily going to happen. As well, it could cost a lot if you are attempting to get a high rank with a fairly generic word. With SEO you should focus on getting a decent rank with keywords that are relevant to what your potential customers would be searching for.

Fact - Sitemaps Help Search Crawlers

Sitemaps are no longer just a nice-to-have extra for a website; mobile is much more prominent now, and sometimes it can be hard for a crawler to navigate an entire website organically. A sitemap helps a crawler find all the pages of your website to be able to index and rank them all. SEO in Sugar Land will help you with both XML and HTML sitemaps.

Myth - Backlinks are Better than Content

Backlinks do help with your sites page ranking, but they only really help when they have good content to go with them. When it comes to long-tail queries, they are so unique that there is no competition for them, so backlinks are going to have no active role in SEO in Sugar Land page ranking.

Fact - Don’t Overload Keywords

Long ago, you could help your page ranking by having a high density of keywords, but then the search engines got smarter and started to ignore word stuffing. Plus, SEO in Sugar Land will inform you that too many keywords lead to inorganic content that is just going to annoy your visitors.

Myth - Guaranteed Rankings

SEO in Sugar Land companies cannot guarantee a high page ranking for your site; any that claim they can are just trying to trick you into buying their services.

Fact - A Mobile Friendly Site is a Great Asset

As of 2014, mobile searches outrank desktop searches, so having a website that is mobile friendly is going to be a great asset. A 2015 Google blog post even details that they boost mobile-friendly pages on search results. SEO in Sugar Land will let you know you’ll save money by making a single scalable website rather than two separate ones for mobile and desktop.

There was a time not even that long ago where a single platform was all you needed to be successful in business. A website was it, and many businesses boomed during this period of lessened expectations. Today, however, your business needs to succeed on multiple platforms, and your website has to be advanced, engaging, and effective. With these new expectations, many businesses are hiring the top SEO firm in Houston to help grow their audience and get better results.

Unlike traditional marketing methods, SEO relies on technical knowledge and digital analytics to help businesses succeed. It isn’t as simple as a killer banner ad or a video in front of a YouTube video. It’s about crafting a campaign and building a quality web presence that gets attention. Here are the three major ways in which the right SEO firm in Houston can help your business succeed.

1.  Raise Your Website’s Ranking

One of the most immediate benefits of using an SEO firm in Houston is your website’s ranking. With the right combination of design tweaks, keyword strategies and proven optimization strategies will help your site raise to the coveted first page of results—and thus become the site people click on when looking for businesses like yours.

2.  Multi-Pronged Approach

Your website is just one part of your search engine optimization journey, and the right SEO firm in Houston will help you with the many different facets of the latest SEO strategies. These can include anything from keywords, backlinks, citations, and Google My Business to name a few. Only by using every available tool will your business not only rise the ranks of search engine results, but your site will also become a destination for people who are already interested in your products and services.

This is perhaps the most important aspect of SEO, and why so many businesses turn to the top SEO firm in Houston: increasing your reach on the internet while honing your audience to the people that want to know about your business.

If you are looking to expand your presence and grow your business in Houston, be sure to call Brazos Valley Marketing. Our search engine optimization knowledge and skills have helped businesses reach new clients, expand their reach, and grow into successful companies. Today, it’s about more than a website, and Brazos Valley Marketing can help you strategize the perfect plan to help you grow.

In 2018, it is very rare that a business without an online presence will survive. The most effective marketing tools are social media and digital platforms because they allow businesses to reach a broader audience at a faster rate than traditional media. To ensure your online presence is driving traffic, you need to maximize your search engine optimization. Here are 7 cost conscious tips for small business that may be the key to your success using SEO in Sugar Land.

1.  Understand Your Online Audience

Before you can begin to build your online presence, you need to know who your online customers are and what they are looking for. What is the average age of your customer? The gender? The income? All of these things will determine where you need to focus your efforts. While Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are similar, they serve very different purposes. Maybe the majority of your customers are on Instagram, or maybe they prefer more tutorials and articles. Without thoroughly understanding your audience and what they need, your attempts at SEO in Sugar Land will fall flat.

2.  Analyze Your Analytics

Our first step is to determine where your customers are and what they want. The next step is to go into the back of your site and analyze your site data to find what terms you want to target. You can learn a lot from this data: what your customers are searching for, what language they use in their search, what the top landing pages are, what is bringing your customers to your site, and where exactly your customers are coming from. You will most likely find the keywords people use on your site are terms you aren’t currently targeting with your SEO in Sugar Land.

3.  Create a Google My Business Account

If your business has a brick and mortar location, you need to create a Google My Business profile! This SEO tool allows customers to see your business in Sugar land on the local “maps” result on Google. The process is simple, it takes minutes, and the payoff is big. Think of how often people search for nearby places to shop and eat. Simply setting up a Google My Business account can generate new customers simply by utilizing SEO in Sugar Land.

4.  Target Local Areas

With SEO in Sugar Land, there is a fine balance between being too broad and too specific. If you are an independent bakery specializing in custom cakes, you want to make sure your keywords include your location. If you use phrases like “custom cake bakery,” you are competing with every single English-speaking bakery that takes custom cake orders. Instead of being too general, target the areas you want to reach, like “Sugar Land custom cake bakery,” so you are competing with custom cake bakeries in Sugar Land who are also SEO (http://www.brazosvalleymarketing.com/blog/what-seo-can-do-for-your-business) optimizing their businesses.

5.  Start a Blog

Creating a blog is one of the best ways to ensure you have a steady stream of useful content. There’s so much you can write about, whether it’s a quick blurb about new products, a DIY project, a style guide, or an interview. Your blog posts can, and should, vary in length, so don’t feel pressured to write a 5,000-word article three times a week. Even posting bi-weekly is enough to get Google’s algorithm to notice your website. You just want to make sure that your content is unique and relevant to visitors. Why? Because the more unique and relevant, the more likely it is to be shared on social media. This is really helpful to your website’s SEO in Sugar Land as it provides backlinks.

6. Backlinks

Let’s elaborate on backlinks and how they can improve your SEO in Sugar Land and grow your business. Backlinks are hyperlinks to your website from other sites, and it’s important to build a network of these links because they result in a higher search ranking. You can do this through blogs and other shareable content, such as YouTube videos, but you can also do it by creating profiles of your business on a variety of different sites. LinkedIn and Yelp are international, but search for local sites, such as directories that promote small businesses, too.

7. Mobile Friendly Website

When you first launch your business, your website doesn’t have to be elaborately designed by a professional. But it does have to work on smartphones and tablets, or else your mobile search engine ranking is going to take a hit. If it isn’t mobile friendly, you will miss out on a lot of SEO potential and customers. Even if they are local to Sugar Land, that doesn’t mean they will learn about your business through word of mouth. Most online publishing tools, like Wordpress and Wix, offer free website templates, but not all of these templates convert to mobile, so be aware! Considering these aspects of SEO in Sugar Land will provide you with the best start to boosting your Sugar Land business.

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO or SEO marketing, is a booming industry. In fact, businesses in the US spent almost $70 billion on it in 2017, a number that is expected to grow to almost $80 billion by 2020. With so much money going into SEO, it makes sense that it has some serious benefits. Here are just a few of those benefits, and why SEO in Houston may be the key to your business’ future success.

1. Rank Higher

SEO marketing is about many things, but one of its most important aspects is ensuring that you hit that top search engine results page when people go looking for you. Doing so is a complicated system that requires time, creativity, and money to help drive your campaigns. It’s simple: SEO actually connects you with people who are already looking for you. They just didn’t know you existed yet. And with billions of searches happening every day, why not use SEO in Houston to make sure you are connecting with those people, especially in the immediate area?

2. Reach New Clients

The great thing about SEO in Houston is that it’s actually SEO for the entire world. Getting onto the coveted front page of Google and other major search engines means that you can discover more clients from the surrounding areas all the way to across the globe. If you are a local company looking to make it on the world stage, SEO marketing can help. And if you are a local company looking to connect with other locals, SEO marketing can drive up your search results for the surrounding areas, helping you to connect with more people while expanding at a responsible pace.

3. Make New Connections

SEO marketing and keyword analyses may seem like a lot of graphs, charts, and algorithms, but they are also about creativity and deploying unique strategies. The top SEO in Houston is all about making new, creative marketing plans that help you reach people who are looking for you, and people who didn’t know how much they needed you. With the use of the right adjacent keywords, you can start connecting with the people who are looking for your expertise before they even knew you were what they were looking for the entire time.

Take, for example, a sporting goods store. Now, most marketing around SEO in Houston would prioritize or focus exclusively on “sporting goods” as the driving keywords. But sporting goods stores are rarely looked for with those words. People are looking for baseball bats, for basketballs, for bicycles, and for football pads. With the right marketing strategy, a sporting goods store can start popping up in these types of searches, which means more people will find them when they are already looking for what they want specifically.

Many local businesses are already using SEO in Houston to connect with new business, to expand their operations, and to creatively find new ways to succeed. The trick is connecting with an experienced, dedicated SEO marketing firm that has an eye to the international while understanding the importance of local.

How’s business? You’re more than likely used to hearing that question by now, but chances are, the answer isn’t quite as simple as a two-worded question might suggest. This is due, in part, to the complexity of your market. Once upon a time, most businesses were locally owned, run, and marketed. Your business depended on the needs and wants of the people and businesses near you. Your market trends aren’t something that can be seen locally anymore because, locally owned and operated or not, your business isn’t just a local business anymore. The internet—and other technological innovations—has created a global market, and whether or not you actively participate in the global aspect of that market, it’s certainly affecting you. That’s why you need search engine marketing for your business.

What if you aren’t globally active as a business?

In the clearest terms: you should be. It doesn’t matter if your company is focussed on its local presence anymore because, chances are, your competition isn’t local. It’s national, if not global. You have to compete with the prices and services of other businesses that may be operating from across the world. How do you compete? By increasing your online presence so your competition doesn’t overtake your business opportunities. That’s where search engine marketing in Houston comes in to play. If you create a strong search engine presence for yourself, then you aren’t going to be overlooked by even the local clients who see your international competitor’s products and services first.

How does it work?

Search engine marketing steps beyond simple search engine optimization to create paid search activities that are designed to direct traffic to your business’s website. In other words, you pay for online advertising space that gets called up based on the search parameters of your potential clients. Your potential clients are targeted by your marketing tactics based on their own search parameters.

The benefit?

With search engine marketing, you are increasing your marketing reach by hundreds, if not thousands, of people—and often for the same cost of the advertising you do locally. SEO (search engine optimization) works in a similar way, but search engines show paid ads first, so SEM gets your paid advertising to the top of their search results pages.

Why hire a search engine marketing consultant?

Because search engine marketing isn’t as easy as it seems. You need to interpret the right ads and keywords to target not just the most people, but also the most people who are looking for exactly what you are offering. A search engine marketing consultant will help ensure that your targeting strategies are in line to offer you the best return possible. Don’t fall behind on the opportunities the latest marketing strategies can offer you. Contact us today to get started on boosting your business’s online profile—and success.

Are you trying to run a successful business? Well, in this day and age, you don’t just need to have business savvy to make your business a success; you also need to have internet savvy. That may not necessarily mean you have to get on Instagram, Twitter, and Snap Chat to connect with your potential consumers, but it does mean you need to have a strong web presence. You may already have a website—but did you know that probably isn’t enough anymore? The internet is vastly filled with content that bombards your potential clients every day. Having a website today is like standing still in the middle of a crowded room. You can’t get noticed very easily by just being there, so you need to do something to grab people’s attention. You can’t exactly make your website start doing the worm (or some other cool dance move), but you can get it to start communicating directly to the targeted group of people who are most likely to become future clients. That’s why you need an SEO firm in Houston.

How does SEO work?

SEO is search engine optimization, and it involves changing your online presence in such a way that it corresponds to the search terms and phrases people are searching for when they are looking for products and services that are related to what you offer. Essentially, an SEO firm in Houston can help you turn targeted visitors into paying clients by showing them that you are offering exactly what they are looking for—in some cases before they even know they are looking for it. It’s all about maximizing the efficiency of your advertising and your online presence. Simply maintaining that presence and trying to spread your brand as far as you can isn’t enough anymore. You need to stand out from the content that is endlessly bombarding your future clients by telling them exactly what they need to see to seal the deal. If they have to look too hard for their search terms on your website, you may lose their business even after they find you.

The things to look for when searching for the best SEO firm in Houston:

* Make sure the advice the SEO firm in Houston offers you is realistic. You don’t just want to be sold by the company that offers you the best, but probably not likely to happen, results. You want an SEO firm that is willing to offer you realistic and honest internet marketing advice, so you can achieve tangible results.

* Find an SEO firm in Houston that knows that SEO is about more than manipulating search algorithms for first-page rankings. Back in the early days of SEO, this was enough; however, today’s search engines are advancing to become more complex and intricate. It isn’t just about how many times a keyword is used in the page content or how common that keyword phrase is anymore. Those things still matter, but now search engines are also looking for useful content. They aren’t just ranking websites based on number of hits; they are also ranking them on user experience, which means the usefulness, ability to educate, and the entertainment value of the website are equally as pertinent to its ranking.

You need an SEO firm in Houston that can compile the necessary data needed to help you develop a keyword code optimization strategy for your whole website.

Not that long ago, all you needed for your business online was a functional web page and some social media profiles that were regularly updated. Today, you need much more than that. You need to get as high up on Google’s search results as possible, and you need to do it in a savvy way that gets noticed without seeming to “advertise-y.” To accomplish this with your Houston business, you need search engine optimization in Houston.

Many businesses have made search engine results one of their major marketing focuses and have seen incredible results. Not only are they reaching people who are already interested in what their businesses do, but they are also reaching people who would have never known they existed otherwise. In fact, search engine optimization in Houston has led to some incredible success stories, and your business could be next.

Not that long ago, Google’s search algorithms, and the algorithms of major search engine sites, were focused on keywords and back links. The assumption was that sites that had lots of links and contained relevant words would be what people were looking for. It worked, mostly, until search engine optimization specialists found the cracks and started getting irrelevant content to the top of Google. Today, Google’s search engine algorithm can’t be easily manipulated. 

People are looking for information when searching, and search engine optimization in Houston helps connect people who are looking for information with businesses that have what they are looking for. Unfortunately, a beautiful website is only part of the battle when it comes to rising your status on those search engine results pages. You need to have a site that looks information-rich to Google, Bing, and other popular search engine sites. That's where search engine optimization in Houston comes into play. The right company, armed with the most recent data and information on how these sites prioritize search engine results, can help your company rise to that treasured first page.

Imagine: someone in Houston types in what your business does and finds you right near the top. They click on your site, find that you do what they need, and in a matter of minutes, they have what they need and either bought it right there or are headed to your store for a conversion. This is what search engine optimization in Houston can accomplish: conversions that are traceable and recordable. This isn’t about engagement. This isn’t about “being part of the conversation.” This is about making your site what people find when they go looking for you so they will become paying customers because of what they saw. Search engine optimization in Houston is focused on this using the latest information and the latest tactics to ensure you are seen by people who are already looking for your products and services. So instead of people who love baking happening upon your Instagram profile, why not grab the people who are looking for a bakery?

If you are looking for cost-effective ways to increase conversions for your Houston business, search engine optimization in Houston may be the answer you are looking for.

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps businesses get seen online. The right SEO campaign can help you connect with new customers and drive people to your website hence business. Here are just a few ways in which your company can benefit from SEO services in Houston by an experienced SEO marketing company.

1. Rank Higher than Your Competitors

The digital landscape is much like real estate: those with higher rankings are the ones in those coveted, traffic-heavy shops. Those lower are on the next street over, or in a strip mall accessible only by car. Some are essentially in the middle of nowhere.
SEO ensures that your company gets higher rankings in search engine results pages, taking you one step closer to that first result of a Google search. And since that first result has a 34% chance of getting the click, that is where you, and your competitors, want to be.

2. Get Exposure to New Customers

Online marketing comes in many forms, from paid search results to ads running on YouTube videos, but one of its most popular iterations is called “organic SEO”.
Organic SEO uses specific content and design strategies to naturally elevate your page rankings, helping your company reach the first page of search engine sites like Google and Bing. By using organic SEO techniques, your company has a greater chance of being elevated to positions where people will see your site, even if it is a little off-topic. And when this happens, you have a chance to turn the curious into a customer.

3. Connect with People Already Interested in You

One of the greatest aspects of search engine optimization is that it connects businesses to people who are already interested in the products and services being offered by you. It is essentially the opposite of a cold call; it’s a person coming to you, wanting to know more.

4. Drive More Traffic to Your Site

At the end of the day, you want more people to discover your business and ultimately buy your products and services. This is the primary goal of search engine optimization, and it can be measured down to the individual click. Unlike other forms of marketing, which can sometimes deliver amorphous results, SEO services can come with reports on how it is driving more traffic to you, thus giving you more opportunities to create new customers.

An effective SEO campaign starts with SEO services by a professional, dedicated, and experienced marketing company. With the right tools and strategy, SEO services can help your business get a strong online presence. If you are in the need of a new way to utilize search engine results for your business, contact us at Brazos Valley Marketing and start strategizing today!

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key aspect of operating a business in the modern, digital landscape; yet many people do not understand why it is important. SEO can help your company succeed in many different instances. If you are a business in Houston, here are four such situations in which the right SEO company in Houston can help your business succeed.

1. When There’s Competition

We’ll admit it: there’s always competition; but that just means there’s always a need for SEO. The modern business isn’t just competing for actual real estate these days; they are competing for online real estate as well. Enter SEO, which turns your online presence into the equivalent of a prime location with plenty of walking traffic.

The right SEO campaign can help your company appear above your competition when people search for your products and services. The result: your company appears first and has a much greater chance of getting the clicks.

2. When You Launch Something New

When you launch something new, there is one question that you need to ask yourself: If my new product doesn’t appear on the first page of Google, did it really launch?

With billions of unique searches conducted every day, Google remains the place where people go to discover things like your new product. But without a comprehensive and effective SEO strategy, your product may not make that first page, and that means it may largely go unnoticed.

3. When Your Current Marketing Isn’t Working

Not all marketing works all the time, but search engine optimization isn’t just marketing. It’s about raising your profile through search engine results. Unlike a marketing campaign, where creative ads are strategically placed to drive people to your website, search engine optimization uses tried and tested methods that raise your pages in Google searches, so when someone searches for something related to your business, like your services or products, you are more likely to show up on that coveted first page. If your current marketing strategy isn’t getting the visibility you need, try SEO, which will elevate your online presence.

4. When You Undergo a Rebranding

When they say nothing is truly deleted off the internet, they aren’t just referring to embarrassing photos. They mean almost everything on the internet is difficult to truly delete, including your old business. Many companies that undergo a rebranding of any significance often end up competing with their past selves online. Old reviews, marketing campaigns, links and content, having spent more time online: these can actually arise in the search engine results pages during a rebranding, leading to confusion for your customers.

An SEO company can help organically raise your company’s new profile to help push down content that is related to your previous business branding. This can help avoid the confusion that can come from rebranding and can help push your new identity.

The right search engine optimization company can help elevate your profile online and get you seen by the right people. Contact us today to learn more about our SEO campaign strategies and how we can help your company succeed.