PLEASANT HILL SEO

Local SEO in Pleasant Hill, California

PHD is proud to call Pleasant Hill home, and we have been providing SEO Services for the last 10 years to companies in the San Francisco Bay area and also Globally.

So what is SEO and do you need it?

Search Engine Optimization is often times confusing, and there are many reasons that you would hire someone to provide SEO for your small or mid-size business. Some people may feel that it is a waste of time to do SEO if you are a small local company. Others may feel that SEO is voodoo science and is something that the industry made up.

Other confusion comes from the many names that people use to describe optimizing your website and online presence. Content marketing, digital marketing, article marketing, web marketing, search engine marketing, SEO, SEM, local marketing, Google marketing, and more; all can be described as SEO.

SEO is necessary if you want to be listed on Google or the other search engines, even for small businesses in Pleasant Hill and other small cities. Don’t be fooled by someone that says that you don’t need to optimize your website, these people often times do not understand what SEO is.

SEO is always changing, and this is why there are many terms.

It used to be acceptable in Google and other search engine guidelines to provide links in anchor text back to a website for ranking purposes. In fact, Matt Cutts (The head of Google’s Webspam Team) would provide guidance in the early days of SEO that included link building. Some companies used off-shore link building companies to keep costs low for their clientele. Other companies would build these links themselves, others, a combination of the two. Everything was good until the spammers started abusing the privilege, and as a result, Google and the other search engines changed their guidelines.

Now link building has changed, but it has not gone away. Instead of quantity, now the focus is on quality. Links from qualified directories, links from articles, links from press releases, links from forum comments; all of these are still allowed. But strong emphasis needs to be placed on quality. Articles that are useful, directories like Yellowpages.com, press releases that are relevant, and active communications with other people in forums or other online mediums are always going to help your topical authority.

Topical authority is the goal to achieving high rank these days, and any time you are providing useful information and guidance to others you will be rewarded.

Your website is also important for SEO, you need to be refreshing the information on your website and adding useful content on a regular basis. This content needs to be written for humans, not to try and game the Google Bots.

Google and the other search engines are essentially running a popularity contest, the popular websites get listed higher on the SERP (search engine results page) and reap the benefits of more traffic, and potentially more business.

We have not mentioned everything that helps with SEO, like page load speed and user experience, but we are pretty open about discussing anything related to helping you grow your business.

Transparency is one of our core values, as is education. We have provided thousands of free webinars, seminars, website analysis, and consultation to business owners and marketing teams over the past 10 years. We don’t believe in high pressure sales. We do believe in discovering what would help each person we talk to. Sometimes we can help a business save money by doing all or some of the SEO on their own. Other times we find a way to work together. Either way, we provide value.

If you would like to discuss your SEO needs for your small or mid-size business, or if you just want to see what your current authority is on the web, send us a note. We are happy to help.