SEOctober Returns for the Sixth Year!

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Strottner Designs

What is SEOctober?

SEOctober is our annual awareness effort, where we spread the word on the importance of Search Engine Optimization for your business, and we do it by offering you a discount. The first step almost every person takes online these days is to search Google for a product, service, how-to guide, or answer to a question. Google is currently the owner of 90.1% of total search engine market share when one includes Google Images, and they are followed by YouTube (which is ALSO owned by Google)…and that is why when we discuss SEO, we talk about what Google wants.

In 2013, the year before we began SEOctober, Google issued 890 “improvements” to its algorithm, and last year there were 3,234. (Source can be found here) Were all of them critical? Not at all! But the rate of change has accelerated, and the knowledge necessary to keep up with what is and what isn’t important takes away from the other critical functions that go into running a business. Therefore, every October, we come to our clients and remind them of the importance of SEO, why they need it, and why they should consider outsourcing it.

You’re Going to bother us With Statistics Now, Aren’t You?

Oh, how I know me…I’m ABSOLUTELY about to bother everyone with statistics! I love stats, especially real ones, with sources and everything. Ready? Here we go!

  • According to this piece from Hubspot:
    • 70-80% of search engine users are only focusing on the organic results.
    • Including a video in a post increases organic traffic from search results by 157%.
    • 72% of consumers that did a local search visited a store within 5 miles.
    • Google drives 96% of mobile search traffic.
    • The average click through rate for first place on desktop is higher than mobile, at 31.52% and 24.05% respectively.
  • 53% of users will abandon a page if it takes more than three seconds to load. We’ve told you this before.
  • 87% of smartphone users use a search engine at least once a day.
  • After making a local business search on a mobile device, 88% of consumers will either call or visit the business within 24 hours.
  • 97% of people learn more about a local company via the internet.
  • 56% of local retailers have not claimed their listing for Google my business.

What’s Your Point?

SEO is incredibly competitive, with many businesses vying for placement not just on the first page, but on the top spot of the first page. When we began our SEOctober campaigns, we offered one service for On-Page SEO. Simply put, On-Page SEO is where we work directly on the individual pages of your site, ensuring that everything about the website is in line with Google best practices and the current algorithm. This also means that the site’s internal factors are developed in a way that makes the site useful for a visitor. With our Standard SEO Package, we still offer On-Page support to our clients, and it is a popular service. But times, they are a changin…

On-Page is, and will always be, critical.

In fact, they’ve already changed. What we have seen in the past year is a preference for our Premium SEO and our Enterprise SEO packages. So, this SEOctober’s focus is the Premium SEO Package. It includes everything in our Standard Package, but it goes deeper. With the Premium SEO we also get into Off-Page SEO. Off-Page involves actions taken outside of your site that have an impact within search engine results pages (known as SERPs to the hip and cool). We improve search engine and user perception of your website’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness and it’s authority by making sure that it is viewed positively by other credible sources online.

Off-Page SEO creates a separation between your site and the site that is only performing On-Page

We also include our StrottLOCK security package in our Premium SEO service. This makes sure that all of your plugins are up to date, that you have the most current version of WordPress, and we maintain 30-days of backups for the site. In addition, we help with content creation, writing a blog post that is optimized for your keywords, posted to the site each month (never without your approval), and we’ll share that on social media if we’re managing that for you!

I’m Intrigued, What is the SEOctober Special This Year?

I assume that you skipped the link in the first paragraph (I was sneaky, there were a bunch!), and that’s why you are asking. It’s simple:

  • Option 1: $100 off of Premium SEO, per month, with a 12-month agreement.
  • Option 2: $300/month for Standard Social Media Management (Normally $450), with a 6-Month Premium SEO Agreement. After 6-months you can cancel the Social Media program, or it will revert to its regular price.

Some of you will want to know more about our Enterprise SEO, and you should contact us. It’s a robust program that is built to put you into the Google 3-Pack, and we wrote about it last year. The thing about the Enterprise program is that we will only take one business of its type per market, so placement is very competitive.

You had to know there would be a call to action in here…go ahead, click the pic to contact us.

What Else Should We Know?

My position at Strottner Designs often involves serving as a translator. Sometimes I’m translating a client’s vision to the design team so that a brand identity can be created. Other times I’m going the other way, and trying to explain a concept that can be confusing to a client. Oftentimes that concept started out confusing to me, and I made the team explain it to me VERY carefully. But my background is closer to that of our clients. I’m not a techie, nor am I a designer. I began in finance, and spent time working with start-ups and turnarounds. And because of some of my experience, along with that of the rest of the team, at Strottner Designs we’re a little different with our approach, and we aren’t a typical marketing firm. We don’t sell services just because we can. They need to be a fit for our client or we won’t recommend it. We care about your ROI, and when we’re working on a project for you, we’re thinking about how it will help keep you busy and profitable. Will the design of the site help drive inquiries? Phone calls? Appointments? Sales? These are things we think and care about, and they are why we have programs like SEOctober.

If you would like to learn more about SEOctober VI, contact us today. It runs until the end of this month!