There’s more to SEO than you might think
Make search engines fall in love with your site.
Don’t let search problems hamstring your success
Technical search engine optimization (SEO) lags about 4-5 years behind development best practices.
Why? You can blame the trickle-down effect (no, not that one). Web development leads SEO, so there’s often a delay between what’s new and effective on the development front, and discovering effective search engine optimization practices to support that development.
The good news is that as your crack team of SEO + development, we don’t fall prey to that lag.
SEO has multiple faces. Like diamonds. Or Joan Rivers.
Which face will you stare into today?
Technical SEO
It’s not sexy, but its impact sure is.
Technical SEO goes far beyond surface-level SEO (like updating meta tags or adding in image alt tags). Problems (or even just forgetting to update certain spots) in your website backend can actually affect your search rankings.
Just a few of the issues we commonly find in our SEO audits:
"We have used multiple SEO services in the past but most of them were cookie cutter and had the same path of thinking. We signed up with Polymath because we wanted a different approach to automotive SEO, we wanted someone who wasn’t doing the exact same thing and Polymath was able to do just that. Right off the bat we started with fixing issues in the code of the website, which no other SEO service we used even mentioned. That is when I knew we would be in good hands with Shelby and Polymath."
Local Search Optimization
If your business runs a physical location (or two, or eight), then local search optimization is probably a big priority for you. Put simply, local SEO makes it easier for searchers near you to actually FIND you. Good local SEO involves a lot of factors, some straightforward and others agonizingly detailed:
Mystery Traffic Loss from Penalties & Other Issues
From our very first time-out in Pre-K, to the NFL’s more recent spate of absolutely garbage blown calls, we’ve always hated penalties.
These days, we reserve our vitriol for search engine penalties: AKA when a human reviewer at Google decides to manually reduce your site’s visibility in the rankings. There’s a laundry list of site issues that can bring on manual penalties, from sneaky redirects and “unnatural” links to hidden text and keyword stuffing.
If you’ve started to lose traffic for penalties or other reasons and you’re not sure why, it’s time for an audit. Technical issues like poor site architecture, thin or duplicate content, and non-mobile-optimized pages can all cause a dip in your site traffic.
We’ll help you figure out what happened, and how to fix it.
"Working with Shelby at Polymath has been a great partnership. Shelby knows SEO very well and can easily communicate it to those that are not as familiar with it. They came to us with new strategies to grow our online presence and executed those strategies in a timely manner. We saw measurable results that generated true ROI"
SEO IS
- A crucial part of your branding and marketing. If your company were a piece of toast, SEO would be the avocado. Things just don’t work without it.
- Always striving to better match your offer to your users’ needs
- A combination of technical (hard) factors and content (soft) factors
SEO ISN'T
- Voodoo
- Sorcery
- A douchey exploitation of “weaknesses in the algorithm”
- Something your smart nephew can pick up in a week or two
Getting results from SEO takes expertise, attention to detail & consistency
Every discipline in the marketing industry has its experts and charlatans, its enduring wisdom and “quick hacks”.
Even if you don’t take us up on our offer of a free SEO audit, we’ll just cross our fingers and hope you don’t fall prey to people who promise results so good so quickly, they’re unbelievable… because they are.
True SEO is the constant practice of matching your website’s offer to searchers’ intent. While you’ll often see a quick boost from fixing tech issues and fleshing out listings, building solid rank can often take time, focus, and some seriously relevant content. Even Google recommends waiting four months to a year before you evaluate the result of your efforts.
The SEO metric to care about isn’t necessarily “higher search volume” (although that’s nice). It’s higher search intent — meaning more of your right people are looking for you.
Because at the end of the day, the real purpose of SEO is to provide the best possible experience to human users. That’s what the robots want. And that’s what we’ll help your website do.
Here’s how we stay on top
TL;DR: we read boring documentation so you don’t have to
Search algorithms change all the time, even when those changes aren’t big and dramatic enough to make the marketing news.
Because we’re proud SEO dweebs, we regularly get deep into the weeds of trustworthy search engine sources like Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Journal, and yes, even Google’s own documentation — so you don’t have to. We also follow leading SEO experts and Googlers, like John Mueller and Gary Illyes, to get holistic context on upcoming changes and what they’ll mean for our clients.
Also worth noting? We do this all the time, so we can read between the lines. We know what obscure tipoffs to look for to stay ahead of the curve.
Rather not think about it?
Hand over your SE-wOes
Polymath’s SEO and marketing retainer services are custom-built based on your requirements, and on any issues we find during the audit and discovery process.
Your monthly SEO retainer is always flat-fee and agreed upon in advance — because budget surprises are nobody’s favorite.
And while this is a somewhat squishier benefit, it’s important: we’re smart and honest and you’ll genuinely enjoy working with us. So much that you might even want to play video games with us (hey, other clients are doing it)…