Every SEO company is different, but all worthwhile companies share a similar bottom-line goal: Help you increase your company’s online presence and market to your target audience. At the end of the day, your SEO company’s job is simply to partner with you to guide organic traffic, generate sales, phone calls, visits, and more via search engine optimization. The methods may vary, but they all come down to one thing: Bring in targeted traffic. How do you accomplish that? Let’s discuss some of the most effective methods.

Perhaps the best-known strategy for increasing search engine visibility for your company is pay per click advertising. The concept is simple: When someone searches for a given keyphrase, such as “SEO consultants” or “digital marketing,” the ad sponsored by your SEO company will appear toward the top of the list. This tactic is effective for several reasons. First, it’s fairly low cost – often less expensive than running an ad on Google or Yahoo!

To make the most out of pay per click, however, you need to use your SEO services effectively. Unfortunately, many companies do not. They have adopted the lazy “sink or swim” mentality. Instead of investing time and money into their own marketing plan, they hire someone to do the work for them. There are two problems with this approach:

First, the new company forgets to optimize or update their websites. Even if they do invest in web page optimizing, most people do not see it. Second, because they have no control over social media, the volume of traffic that ends up at their websites is deceptively low – even though many of those visitors came from their competitor’s websites. Quality SEO services will include both an online presence and a social media presence in their budget.

The second problem with relying on just another service is that it makes the company invisible. In order for your business to rise above the competition, you must be seen as an authority in your field. Paying for organic search engine optimization and social media monitoring will only benefit your bottom line – but it won’t give you the opportunity to build brand recognition. By hiring a professional SEO company, you are giving yourself the chance to be seen as a leader in your industry.

While the strategy of buying organic search engine optimization can prove to be successful, it shouldn’t be the only thing you do to maximize your return on investment (ROI). Proper link building is just as important as the optimization. You need to build backlinks to your site in order to receive full benefit of your SEO campaign. There are plenty of tools available that will help you build backlinks organically, which will also help your search engine optimization. Just make sure you hire a professional SEO company that knows how to build backlinks organically.

It’s imperative that you have a clear understanding of what you want from your SEO campaigns. Are you looking for increased organic rankings, higher conversion rates, or both? If you are just looking for rankings, you may find the pay per click advertising to be successful. But if you want to see a significant improvement in conversion rates, you should use an expertly optimized landing page. An expertly optimized landing page will provide a great boost in both rankings and conversions, enabling you to achieve first page rankings on major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

A professional SEO company can provide all of these services at a reasonable price. The value of having a successful online reputation cannot be underestimated. A business owner that fails to have their website visible to their target market will not survive. SEO is a powerful marketing tool that can give you a dramatic advantage in your competitive market, but it requires effort from your business owner.