Search engine optimization SEO in San Francisco.

Keywords seem like they should be the easiest thing to figure out for your business. You just put yourself in your customers’ shoes, imagine what they’re going to search for, and focus all of your efforts on ranking for those terms, right?

If only it were that simple.

Keyword research is a complicated game that involves figuring out a searcher’s intent and tweaking the phrases they target until you find that perfect balance between bringing in traffic and targeting keywords that lead to sales. And that’s a balance that a lot of companies get wrong, as these stats from PPC Hero demonstrate:

That pie chart shows us that 19 out of every 20 keywords (about 95% of them) don’t lead to conversions. In this case, a conversion could be anything from a sale to a prospect starting a conversation with your business. If you’re not tracking (and reporting on) the keywords you target, you’ll have no idea how many of them fall into the non-converting category.

NEWMEDIA’s marketing specialists ensure you’re not wasting money on pointless keywords.

Imagine that you’re searching for recommendations about the best pizza place in San Francisco.

The reputation of the individual recommending a place matters in these situations. You’re far more likely to trust the opinion of a good critic, especially one who loves pizza, over the word of somebody who’s never tasted a slice of pizza in their lives.

Google takes the same approach when it comes to the links you build for your website.

You could take the scattershot approach of putting a link on every directory or article blog that’ll have you. But those directories and blogs may not have anything to do with your industry, meaning Google sees that link as a “recommendation” from a site that has no actual idea whether your company offers customers what they need.

Compare that to getting a link from one of your industry’s thought leaders, who are people or organizations that know what your industry is about, and you can guess which link is going to mean more to search engines.

Throw the risk of penalties into the mix (Google will unleash the dreaded Penguin to kick you out of search results if you have a ton of bad links), and you’ll see why you need an SEO company that knows linking inside and out in your corner.

First impressions matter in every aspect of life. If you’re going on a date, your first impression of the person you meet sets the tone for the entire date. When you’re buying a house, its curb appeal affects your opinion long before you set foot into the property. And when somebody visits your website, its design has a huge impact on what they think about your business:

Webiqquity says it takes a fraction of a second for a visitor to get their first impression of your website, and that impression influences what they think about your company’s professionalism. And with 94% of a customer’s first impression stemming from web design, it’s clear that your site has to look the part.

But it also has to work, which is where web development comes in.

Coming back to the brief data analogy we started with, your website’s design is the clothes and accessories that make your data stand out from the crowd. The development side is all about the substance. Everything has to click for a first date to go well, and everything on your website has to work to maintain a good first impression.

A shocking 16.98% of businesses haven’t configured their website’s domains correctly, making it much harder for search engines to crawl and rank those sites. And over a third of websites (33.29%) have broken links, which either lead to 404 pages or send customers in circles as they try and find what they’re looking for.

These little technical errors matter, especially when you recall that 94% of people form their first impression of your business based on web design factors. If a link doesn’t go where it’s supposed to go, your website has a navigational issue that’s going to make customers more likely to bounce away. Combine that with incorrectly configured domains, and you have the recipe for an SEO crisis, even if you get everything else right.

NEWMEDIA makes sure you avoid that crisis by optimizing websites for technical, as well as traditional, SEO.