SEO Basics from a Creative Marketing Agency

I am an SEO neophyte. Fortunately, I have friends like Jason Sirotin at Brain Bytes Creative who is an SEO expert. So I don’t need to know the intricacies, I just have to know Jason. Contact him for SEO and Jason, how about a comment on this (that’s helps with SEO) and maybe a backlink? That really helps, too.

Creative Marketing Agency as a keyword

That term “Creative Marketing Agency” up there? That’s what I’m shooting for. I own a creative marketing agency. I’m not an SEO expert. We do other things very well. And we’re not the type of creative marketing agency that says we’re expert when we are not. If you need messaging, creative, media or a creative marketing agency expert in behavior change or healthcare, we’re the best. Check out our site. For SEO, we get help. However, I like a challenge. So I’m taking what I’ve learned and using this page to illustrate how I make the term, “creative marketing agency” one that will move me up in the search ranks. I get to work on my SEO, you get a basic primer. Win/win.

How I selected “Creative Marketing Agency”

We looked at several terms that people use to search for what we do (e.g. creative marketing agency). We used the Google Keyword tool (which is free). It tells you the number of searches for a phrase and how competitive the term is. We looked at the Monthly Average Searches (MAS) for “creative marketing agency” and determined the competitiveness of the term based on how much people were willing to bid for it when it comes up in a search. Creative Marketing Agency gets about 1000 searches a month. That’s not a lot, but people will pay close to $10 per click, so it’s a valuable key phrase.

Step 1: Creative Marketing Agency as a Slug

A slug is your url and you want it to have the search term in it. The url for this has creative marketing agency in it, for example. We haven’t done that for all of our marketing content yet, but fortunately there are great tools like Yoast that allows you to create new names for links, then forward to your existing ones. This is key, because you don’t want a lot of broken links on your site.

Step 2: Titles and Meta Descriptions

Your page title is the most important element for SEO because it’s what users will see in search results. Put your key phrase in there. Also, your title shouldn’t be longer than 65 characters (SEO Basics from a Creative Marketing Agency is only 43).

Meta Descriptions come up when you do a search. Here’s a shocker… make sure your key phrase is there (you’re starting to see a pattern, huh?). Your meta description should be at least 135 characters long. Ours “Simple ways for anyone to optimize the SEO on a webpage, even if you’re a beginner, from a Creative Marketing Agency that’s been where you are.” Is 142 characters.

Step 3: Creative Marketing Agency and the 2% Rule

The SmartCrawl SEO plugin that we have on our WordPress site says the phrase, “creative marketing agency” has to encompass at least 2% of the words I use. There are 1144 words in this article, so I have to mention marketing agency at least 23 times. How am I doing so far?

Let me be honest, it makes your writing redundant as hell. As someone with a background in journalism and script writing, typing “creative marketing agency” over and over is making me twitch. But this isn’t Pulitzer prize time, it’s find my page time. Which brings me to one area I’m not into at all.

Step 4: Readability

Somewhere, in some dark little room, a piece of AI software or a brilliant computer nerd determines what’s “readable” and what isn’t. The Flesch-Kincaid scale gives you a score based the types of words you use and the length of your sentences. They say you should shoot for something a 12-15-year-old can understand. We don’t do that, and I know SEO experts will disagree. However, while I can manage to repeat creative marketing agency a zillion times, I can’t bring myself to say, change the word “neophyte” at the beginning of this piece. Use their standards to make your site more “readable.” I can’t because it hurts my soul.

Step…somewhere between 1 and 4

We set up an account with slickplan.com which helps plan out your site and we laid ours out based on keywords and phrases (like, you guessed it, Creative Marketing Agency). It’s a work in progress so don’t hate on our site’s SEO. Give us some time.

Links

You’ll notice I have links on this page. Those help. And as I mentioned at the top, if you can get backlinks from trusted sites, your SEO will skyrocket. If you get a link to your site from a news outlet that’s an SEO jackpot. I also mentioned getting comments. Every time you get a comment, your site moves up the search ladder a bit. So accept those and respond to legitimate comments. Warning: do not respond or accept comments that are obvious spam. Google does not like those and will lower your trustability.

Things your SEO advisor will know

There is plenty more that we consider when improving the search for our creative marketing agency. For example, using the same content on several pages is a no-no because Google won’t know which page to send people. You’ll need a canonical page (it directs Google to the page you want). How do we do that? We don’t. We ask someone else to. That along with the hundreds of other do’s and don’ts that, when an SEO expert explains them to me, I nod my head and think about chocolate cake or drinking wine or drinking wine while eating chocolate cake. Mmmm. Oh, yes, SEO.

As a Creative Marketing Agency, we never stop learning

Our business is ever-fluid so the learning never stops. On our podcast we talk to marketing experts all the time and it helps us keep up. Then we transcribe those episodes because, you guessed it, SEO! In fact, we were recently on a live show with Polymash.com about our podcasts’ SEO and Polymash is giving us a backlink. (Always ask for those.)

Wrapping This Up

Could you have looked all this stuff up? Absolutely. Can you just call a true SEO expert and he/she will tell you how to do it for real? You bet. But our goal in writing this wasn’t to break new ground in SEO. Our goal was get Creative Marketing Agency to appear on searches and to demonstrate to uber newbies like us how to make a page super findable using the most rudimentary knowledge. Oh, and one more thing: creative marketing agency. That’s 2%.