What is search engine optimization?
1. The short read: SEO is the craft of elevating websites or individual website pages to higher rankings on search engines through programming, marketing, or content acumen.
2. The whole encyclopedia article: Search Engine Optimization and User Behavior by Nicholas Carroll.
Do you guarantee results?
No. SEO is not pizza, and no one competent in SEO guarantees results. I measure website traffic, classify it by value, analyze the pages’ SEO appeal and the overall website structure, and prescribe improvements to SEO and content strategy. Whether the bottom line improves depends on variables that include what you are offering, what it costs (in either money – or belief), the wording of your pitch or proposal – and the search engines.
Do you work by long-term contracts?
Usually not. I’ll do a one-off site audit and analysis if that’s all you want. If you like the results and want me to keep working, then there is regular billing, but still no lock-in with a written contract.
What is a “site audit,” and what does it tell me?
A site audit always includes “crawling” a website – essentially, to find out what search engine spiders like Googlebot are seeing – and also scanning the internet for inbound links.
The raw reports don’t tell much of anything until I look through them and make sense out of thousands of records of pages, server logs, and graphs. Once I’ve done that I write it up in plain English. Then it makes sense, and tells you a lot you’d never see from website logs alone.
Who does the work?
I do all the analytics work, hands-on.
Data aggregation through Google Analytics or similar tools is assigned to my team, since they they are more efficient than me in tool use. (You also have a choice of doing the work in-house, if you have the people.)
What tools do you use?
ScreamingFrog to crawl your website, and Majestic and SEMRush to see how your website is positioned on the WWW (plus googling to see your positions in the SERPS) – then Excel spreadsheets to look at the whole picture. Tweaking tracking tools like Google Analytics (now GA4) comes last.
Where are you located?
Physically, in Northern California, USA, so US Pacific time.
(GMT -8 in winter, and GMT -7 during the summer and daylight savings time.)
Please contact me by:
1. Phone: 415–810–1966 Pacific Time
2. Email: Nicholas Carroll
Please call or send your website address and I will have a look at the possibilities.
© 2023 Nicholas Carroll. All rights reserved.