SEO Oakville Burlington – We provide white-glove (and white-hat) expert search engine optimization (SEO) services to $2-50 million B2B firms in the GTA, from Toronto through to Oakville, Burlington and Hamilton.

Our key differentiator is that you won’t be handed off to a junior.  You will work directly with Jonathan Burns, our principal and SEO expert and, as such, we can only take on a select number of projects each year.

We recently grew Explorer Research’s search visibility 15X

Watch the video to find out more.

Does SEO Still Matter? Can’t I Just Buy Ads?

Businesses need targeted traffic to get good leads and Pay Per Click (PPC) ad costs have gone way up as running Google Ads has become a mainstream marketing activity for most businesses. For many companies the Cost Per Lead from PPC is prohibitive.

Upfront investments in the great content that leads to ranked pages and traffic can yield traffic and leads for months or sometimes years, depending on how digital your competitors are.

For many entrepreneurs, the only way to build a really profitable online business is to build one in a niche where you know you can rank on the first page of Google.

However, SEO is a lengthy and time-consuming process with a fair bit of complexity.

SEO is Not a Stand-Alone Service Anymore

SEO only produces results when it’s part of a well thought out Content Marketing Strategy. When you approach an agency for SEO services, what you really require is Content Marketing Strategy and Execution.

You used to be able to build a page and apply on-page SEO techniques like putting the right words in the title, URL, meta description and H1 tags, and get ranked.

Today, without backlinks, you won’t rank for any competitive terms. You won’t get backlinks unless your content is so impressive that experts in your industry point people to it as an excellent source of information and expertise.

SEO Best Practices for B2B Lead Generation

One of the critical trends in SEO for B2B Lead Generation in the past few years has been a shift away from topical blogging to the building of expert learning centers containing curated articles.

Many companies blog when they have time, and it’s often on whatever topic they feel like writing on. Their posts are generally 500-1000 words based on research from several years ago that advocated for shorter, snackable content.  That tends to produce lots of somewhat random, shorter blog posts. We have found that those type of shorter, random posts have almost no SEO value for our clients.

According to a study by Backlinko, here are the most important ranking factors that correlate with first page Google results:

Brian Dean

Backlinko.com

  • Backlinks remain an extremely important Google ranking factor. We found the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor.
  • Our data also shows that a site’s overall link authority (as measured by Ahrefs Domain Rating) strongly correlates with higher rankings.
  • We discovered that content rated as “topically relevant” (via MarketMuse), significantly outperformed content that didn’t cover a topic in-depth. Therefore, publishing “complete content” that covers a single topic in depth with all relevent sub-topics may help with rankings.
  • Based on SERP data from SEMRush, we found that longer content tends to rank higher in Google’s search results. The average Google first page result contains 1,890 words.
  • HTTPS had a reasonably strong correlation with first page Google rankings. This wasn’t surprising as Google has confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal.
  • Content with at least one image significantly outperformed content without any images. However, we didn’t find that adding additional images influenced rankings.
  • Site speed matters. Based on data from Alexapages on fast-loading sites rank significantly higher than pages on slow-loading sites.

The Shift From Blogs To Learning Centres

Based on that data and the example of SEO thought leaders like Moz, we have been helping health supplement, professional services and software clients implement Learning Centres to replace their blogs.