Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines like Google and Bing via the “organic” or un-paid search results. Simply put, SEO strategies increase website traffic. One of the primary advantages of SEO is that it gives companies the ability to market to customers who are proactively looking for their specific products or services.

A long-tail keyword is a precise multi-word keyword phrase, typically three words or more, that someone types into a search engine. From an organic ranking (the free listings in Google) perspective, long-tail keywords are not only easier to rank a website for (because they are less competitive), but are also more specific to a person’s intent when searching for a particular product, service, or information – for example: “custom home builders boston” or “best manufacturing erp software” or "cheap tourist attractions near me." For paid search advertising e.g. Google Ads, bidding on long-tail keywords is an important strategy since the cost-per-click (the amount an advertiser pays if someone clicks on their ad) to an ad is typically lower since there’s less competition. Bidding on long-tail keywords allows companies to show ads for the exact keywords that customers are typing into Google to find a specific product or service.

Core Web Vitals

Google has clarified how they want websites to be optimized for user experience: Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals are made up of three measurements of speed and interaction: largest contentful paint (LCP), first input delay (FID) and cumulative layout shift (CLS). LCP refers to the amount of time it takes for the largest content to load on a page, while FID measures how long it takes the site to respond to the user's first interaction with it. CLS focuses on how many layout changes the page has gone through in its life span.

Frequent Google Algorithm Updates

Google, now more than ever, is constantly tweaking their algorithm to improve organic search results. This has made it a necessity to always be testing your SEO elements to ensure you’re maximizing your positions on your target keywords. What works great today, might not work as well tomorrow. We constantly monitor your key data in order to shift strategies as the search engines change their algorithms.

Voice Search

Voice search is growing at an exponential rate. There are certain items (like the FAQ you're reading right now) that can improve your website's ability to answer your customers' voice search questions and ensure that they find your business. We've developed a step-by-step process to optimize websites and business SERP results specifically for voice search.

On-Site and Off-Site SEO

Effective SEO now requires both the on-site optimizing of a website’s tags, navigation, pages, and architecture, but also the utilization of off-site content, social media, and link acquisition to drive traffic. Content is more important than ever.  A core component of Ice Nine Online’s SEO strategy is to publish content that not only establishes you as an authority in your industry, but improves search engine visibility and increased awareness to your target markets. In tandem, we devise processes to repurpose content so that you're getting as much marketing mileage as possible out of every piece of content.

High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are useful because they are seen as a “vote of confidence” by search engines. In other words, when a site has a lot of backlinks pointing to its pages, search engines see that as a sign that many people find the site useful and authoritative. While backlinks are not the only factor in determining where your site will rank, they are important, and collecting as many quality backlinks as possible is very beneficial to SEO. However, gone are the days of building backlinks from low-quality websites and seeing upward movement in search engines - now, the quality of the backlink matters more than ever.

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

SEO and content marketing overlap, cohere, and blend. There is no such thing as SEO without content.