Search Engine Optimization

Improving website traffic with organic search results

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process of marketing a website to consumers, B2C or B2B, by making your website highly visible on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). SEO focuses on increasing natural or organic ranking, which accounts for 75% of clicks vs. 25% for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) (Source: Comscore.com and SEOMOZ.org.) A website that targets different kinds of searches, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines and is well optimized for commonly used search engines, like Google, Yahoo, MSN, can reap huge benefits for your website and your business.

What is Durkan Consulting Group's SEO Process?

Durkan Consulting Group provides wide range expertise with Search Engine Optimization; we tailor every SEO engagement to meet your needs. A typical SEO engagement is broken out into three phases. Phase 1 includes discovery, research, and documentation. Phase 2 includes the delivery of a work plan to address results of Phase 1, ongoing SEO tactics to be executed monthly to gain results, and plans to implement site revisions as needed to support the SEO campaign. Phase 3 addresses the ongoing month in and month out execution of an SEO campaign, applying practical knowledge to the work plan. Each phase represents a very large volume of work and has its own unique activities and tangible deliverables.

Phase 1 Discovery & Site Audit
During this two part phase we immerse ourselves into your business. Our discovery process sets the foundation for search marketing efforts that maintains the focus of the entire SEO engagement. The audit identifies current items on your site that may either be working well or others that may be prohibiting strong SERP results. At a high level, the deliverables include the following:

• A summery of discovery notes from kick-off meeting and stakeholder interview
• Keyword research results including; Long tail suggestions, keyword variations, and a short list of potential negative keywords
• Competitive research results including Page Ranking, Inbound link count, and Site SEO best practices used for achieving that ranking
• URL analysis, keyword usage, site coding best practices, meta tag strategy suggestions, and linking best practices
• Updated XML Sitemap & Robots.txt file

Phase 2 Work Plan and Site Revisions
The using the results of Phase 1 the Work Plan and Site Revision portion of the SEO Engagement provides a concrete work plan prioritized for budget and personnel considerations and addresses on-going activities.

• Sample work plan typically includes:
• Activity
• Reason for activity
• Delineation of task
• Start date
• End date (Projected)
• Priority Level
• Site Revisions Deliverables include:
• Site Audit Revisions - We recommend revisions stemming from the Site Audit and task the correction of those items to personnel on your or our team
• Content Revision
• SEO Writing Guide (90% standardized) that includes:
• Writing Style guidelines
• Linking best practices
• Readability guides
• Checklist for writing great content
• Benchmarking/KPI Creation outlining common benchmarks and Key Performance Indicators as known as KPIs for reporting purposes

Phase 3 Ongoing Monthly Execution
Now armed with the knowledge of your site and your competitors, a work plan, and fully prepared to launch a SEO campaign, how do you do it? In Phase 3 we execute the plan for you, maintain site integrity and work to maximize SERP results.

• Ongoing Campaign Management - We work the work plan, submit new work plans monthly and maintain site integrity.
• Link Acquisition - One of the most impor tant aspects of achieving great SERP ranking is to have a number of quality backlinks. once your content is created, you still need to actively pursue links.
• Reporting - We will work with you to measure campaigns as identified in the planning process. The measurement phase focuses centrally on documenting performance against benchmarks and KPIs. Without measuring campaigns, it is impossible to effectively adjust and enhance ongoing campaigns. Our reports are typically delivered in excel, and target KPIs such as:
• Total Links to your site up/down
• Listing of new links to your site and anchor text
• Site ranking in engines for targeted keywords up/down
• Directory or other link placement locations and count
• Google news mentions or technorati mentions as defined in Planning

Durkan Consulting Group has proven SEO expertise; we base our counsel on years of tested results based experience, not theory. We know how to get websites ranked and how to convert the traffic from the high rankings into significant revenue, and our results continue to work. Durkan Consulting Group continues to focus on the future of search, no tricks, no unethical games.