At college, before sending your essay to your professor, you’d edit it, proof read it, and check its coherence. Think of Google and co. as your professors and your site as your essay. The search engines will judge the quality of your site before deciding where to rank it. Therefore, your site needs to be as optimized as possible before sending it out to meet the world.

Making a site optimized means upgrading its code and adding more valuable content to it. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, this is the time to change that. If your site is difficult to navigate, now is the time to put that right.

Search engines expect websites to be the full package. Sites are expected to be easy to access, unobtrusive, and valuable. As this is a prerequisite to SEO success, holistic site healing is the first step in any good SEO campaign.

Before taking on the big, bad world, you’ll need to make sure you’re a hit locally. That’s why stage two of any well-run SEO campaign is to optimize your business for local searches.

Ruling your turf means creating a highly functional Google Plus page and making a reputation for yourself in your local community. Think reviews and social media domination.

Of course, mastering local SEO can get highly technical. You or your campaign manager will need to index your site and take care of data aggregation if you haven’t done that already.

Local SEO isn’t as exciting as ranking for a highly competitive keyword, but that shouldn’t stop you from taking it seriously. Local SEO helps your company look authentic and helps provide you with a steady stream of converting traffic. Not bad considering there’s still one more stage to go!

Once local SEO is taken care of and Google is willing to accept your business as credible, it’s time to expand your reach in order to conquer national and even global markets.

At this point, all of the holistic healing that was carried out on your site will be paying dividends. You’ll be in possession of a site Google is happy to promote to its users. Now it’s time to boost your appeal further.

One of the most efficient ways to rank higher on Google for an array of search terms is to embrace link building. Having reputable sites link to yours will show the search engines that you too are a reputable authority in a number of areas.

When all three stages of a successful SEO campaign are carried out by somebody knowledgeable about SEO, the results are easy to predict.

All sites that rank highly on Google have had to go through the following stages in one way or another.

If you’ve previously been confused by SEO or have been frustrated at the results of your recent efforts, hopefully this post has given you food for thought.

If you’d like to receive more information on the next step you need to take to achieve SEO success, contact our team who will be happy to give you personalized advice.