Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a core competency of addtwelve Digital Marketing Agency. We consider it the foundation that needs to be developed and maintained for successful digital marketing strategies. Search Engine Optimization is not about helping search engines understand and present content, it is about making websites better. Our team follows the major search engine guidelines, we implement the best practices and keep abreast of modern SEO trends.

Our SEO services are designed to help a business succeed in search opportunities engagement by generating organic (free) traffic to a website with the aim to increase the ROMI.

As an efficient agency, addtwelve provides a variety of services for website and business owners, such as:
- Site content and structure review;
- Website development and technical consultancy;
- Content development and optimization;
- Keyword and search opportunities research;
- Online business development campaigns management;
- SEO training.

On top of that, we believe that Relevance, Authority, Quality, and Accessibility boost a website ranking in the search results, so our team is focused on these.

This page can  help you understand...
  • The meaning of SEO
  • Some benefits of Search Engine Optimization
  • What are white hat and black hat SEO
  • SEO standards addtwelve follows
  • How to choose the right SEO expert: SEO agency vs. in-house team
  • Popular SEO tools available on the web

SEO meaning or what is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a multiple steps tactic of increasing the visibility of a website or a web page in organic search results.

According to Google:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of making small modifications to parts of your website. Individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, however, combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on a site's user experience and performance in organic search results. 

Hence, Search Engine Optimization is a practice of helping search engines understand and present content.

The important benefit of SEO

Search engine optimization targets quality traffic, it's an inbound marketing strategy. SEO gets more clicks than PPC, it also supports your PR, and helps your business move ahead of the competition.

The important thing to keep in mind: any SEO activity takes time to see results. According to Google, it typically takes from four months to a year from the time of making changes on a website until getting the benefits. In case when a business needs to get the traffic fast and fulfill that gap, addtwelve's team recommends leveraging paid search as well as the entire search engine marketing.

SEO agency vs in-house team

Starting an SEO is a serious decision for any business. It can potentially improve the site and save a lot of time, but bad practice can also bring a lot of damages to the site as well as the reputation of the business itself.

If you run a small local business, your team probably do much of the work itself. Google offers tones of useful information on SEO.

An in-house team might be the perfect choice for medium businesses. It works on your SEO strategy exclusively and exposed to more of the goings-on in your company. 

On the other hand, the business has to hire a full team of talent. It takes time to train them as well. SEO team is not always capable of handling the content, advertising, and social workload at the same time. Beyond any doubts, building a full-time in-house team is generally more expensive than hiring an agency.

Nonetheless, if your business feels a lack of resources (time and people) - the agency is your best choice. There are several pros for hiring SEO agency instead of building own SEO team. 

First of all, with the agency, you get an instant team of experts ready to make things happen. Second, professionals should always be up-to-date with the latest SEO industry developments, techniques and technologies. Third, for some businesses, modern SEO requires a comprehensive approach based on solid content marketing, paid advertising, social promotion and other marketing strategies to make an impact. Another big thing is agencies bring powerful tools, and your business does not need to pay for the expensive subscription. Finally, you don't have to worry about an office to fit SEO professionals in or anything else.

Notwithstanding the above, we have to mention the cons of hiring an agency. The issue with hiring an SEO agency is making sure you get a good one. Any digital marketing agency claiming to offer SEO, thusly identifying the good ones can be a challenge.

A professional SEO agency like addtwelve is aimed to improve your site. When you consider SEO agency Google recommends to check examples of the agency's previous work and success stories, review its SEO's business references, and finally begin the cooperation with technical and search SEO audit.

addtwelve proud that when we come up with a set of recommendations for a site, we always corroborate these with a trusted source, such as a Search Console help page, Webmasters blog entry, or Google-sanctioned response in the webmasters' forum.

White hat, grey hat and black hat SEO

There are several SEO practices called white, black and grey hat. White Hat SEO mostly refers to any practice that improves search performance of a website on a search engine results page (SERP) while adhering to that search engine’s policies. It is mostly focused on content relevancy, organic ranking, and audience engagement. On the other hand, Black Hat SEO tactics exist to increase page rankings on a SERP faster by going against the search engine’s SEO guidelines. To rank the website higher such an approach uses keyword stuffing, unrelated keywords in page content, invisible text to doorway pages, page swapping, redirects and content automation. Black Hat practices are effective, but are risky and can cause your site to be penalized. It can be removed from search results suddenly and decisively. Beyond any doubt, Grey Hat SEO is a practice that remains ill-advised by search engine published guidelines, it has some risks of being disagreeable. Clickbait is a good example of that.

As an SEO expert addtwelve prefers to adhere search engine guidelines and appreciate the online safety of our client the most.

SEO tutorial and best practice

When addtwelve starts an SEO project for your business, we perform a complete analysis of your website as well as your business values. Our SEO experts believe that it is crucial to understand what your business offers, what pros and cons stay behind that, and why other people buy that. 

addtwelve digital marketing team follows the best practice and recommendations provided by Google as well as other search engines. Some of them are listed below. 

We make sure that any search engine can find your content. The first step to getting a site listed on Google is to be sure that Google can find it. We usually submit a sitemap - a file on a site that tells search engines about new or changed pages on the website.

addtwelve also identifies pages and tells search engines which pages shouldn't be crawled. Later on, our team assures that Google and Bing see your page the same way a user does. We double-check if Googlebot has access to all crucial elements of your website.

The digital marketing agency works with your content to create unique, accurate page titles and its description on the entire website to create good titles and snippets in search results. The page content is accurately summarized in the description to increase the CTR in the search result. We help your website to emphasize important text using heading tags. Structured data markup could be also added when needed. Some search engines can use this to display your content in eye-catching ways in search results.

Our SEO experts manage your website appearance in search results by structuring the data on your pages correctly. It can make your website eligible for many special features in search results, including review stars, fancy decorated results, as well as Featured snippets.

Your site hierarchy needs to be organized too. Search engines use URLs to refer users to it. If URL is meaningful, it can be more useful and easily understandable in different contexts. It is usually displayed in a search result in Google below the document title. The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors (as well as search engines) quickly find the content they want.

The major piece of our work is belong to improving your content by optimizing it based on the keywords. The agency and the client need to make sure that the site is interesting and useful. Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence the website more than any of the other factors listed here. 

At addtwelve we believe that any website has to provide values to its visitors. The content should answer the question "why do my visitors go to the website" and the answer should not be "to read about my business and its products". 

When writing content and doing keyword research Google recommends thinking about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. Our marketing experts suggest creating a new, useful service that no other site offers. You could also write an original piece of research, break an exciting news story, or leverage your unique user base. Other sites may lack the resources or expertise to do these things.

addtwelve knows that users enjoy the content that is well written and easy to follow, so we follow that guideline all the time. We try to provide an appropriate amount of content for your business subject.

Our experts prefer to use links wisely by writing good concise link text, format links to make them more clickable on your website.

We ensure that all of your images are optimized to improve the accessibility of your website and leverage the advantages of image search.

addtwelve helps your business in making your site mobile-friendly and secure. Most people now are using a mobile device to search for what they need. Thusly, having a mobile-ready site is critical to your online presence. We leverage Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology to ensures the site stays fast and user-friendly and can be further accelerated by various platforms, including Google Search.

Last but not least, addtwelve promotes your website. Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject. We search and reach out to those websites in your business-related community. Our external link-building practice is based on a natural content sharing and website values exchange. We try to build resource links from trusted sites by distributing the values of your website, leverage the Broken Links Strategy, stay active on Social Media, and keep an eye on competitor's backlinks as well with the aim to replicate it.

Lastly, our experts analyze your search performance on daily bases to identify new threats and opportunities for performing better in search results.

SEO tools we use in our practice

To perform the best in SEO our team relies on the following tools and can educate your business on how to use them all.
1. Google Analytics - the number one tool for digital analytics, quantitative and qualitative data processing. It also tracks and reports website traffic.
2. Search Console and Webmaster Tools that let professionals monitor and report the website’s presence in search engine results page.
3. Keyword Planner and Google Trends can give a piece of information regarding a keyword, plus they offer great insight into trends around the topic which can be invaluable at any stage of a business’s growth.
4. SEOWorkers Analysis Tool that helps analyze and measure the ranking potential of web pages.
5. Screaming Frog - SEO Spider which crawls websites' links, images, CSS, script, and apps from an SEO perspective.
6. Alexa Ranking - web service by Amazon that offers competitive benchmarking, and analytics on how a site's traffic from search, keywords, and backlinks compare to that of its biggest online competitors.
7. Ahrefs - one of the most recommended professional SEO tools online, it also considers the best SEO analysis tool.
8. Moz, which is one of the best SEO tools and it always up to date despite Google’s regular algorithm changes.
9. SpyFu - online service and tool that shows the keywords that websites buy on Google Ads as well as the keywords that websites are showing up for within search results.
10. SimilarWeb - competitive analytics tool. It offers information on competitors' website traffic volumes; referral sources, including keyword analysis; and website "stickiness".

There is a long list of other tools addtwelve's SEO professionals use less often, but our team would be happy to introduce you to all of them. 

Let's talk about your SEO

Would you like to know more about our SEO services or Search Engine Optimization in general? SEO is a very wide topic to write about it. Our experts studied SEO best practices for up to 20 years and read over 100 books about it. 

Feel free to address your questions and concerns on SEO to our team by contraction us via the web form or at inquiry@addtwelve.com.