Lohre & Associates Industrial Marketing will offer free SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Scores and Reports through the month of August.

These search engine optimization reports outline all of the less-seen technical SEO issues as we focus heavily on the SEO benefits of good design, good server configuration, and good programming. If your site, server, or content is mis-configured there is a very good chance that all of your other investments in SEO will be wasted. We are happy to help put you on the right course with your SEO, because we believe that experiencing our level of service and dedication to excellence will encourage your company to use us for other marketing services.

How can a free SEO report be more useful than hiring an “SEO” agency?

A lot of other SEO agencies advertise that they do SEO, but typically they are not actually optimizing anything save for some minor content tweaks as recommended by Yoast or similar tools. Instead they focus on link building, a practice often looked down on by Google and other search engines. This practice, even when done properly can actually hurt your SEO score if it is noticed by search’s increasingly-strict algorithms. Link building is merely Search Engine Manipulation. Using “pay for play” websites for technical articles, spamming websites and comment sections, writing blog owners in hopes of getting a guest post with a link are some of the strategies that can come back to haunt a website in the long run.

Is link building a bad practice?

Link building is not entirely bad, and it can even be necessary, but it has to be done right. The best link building comes from creating great content that others want to reference and link to in their own articles. Writing great technical articles that are unique also helps to get some of the right search traffic.  If the content is decent, visitors stay to read. The resulting low bounce rates to prove to search engines that your content is the perfect fit for those keywords, and you’ll move upward in search. Great link building through good content is more  of a job for a marketing agency who specialized in great by-lined technical articles, even better if they, like us, have enough SEO know-how to optimize that content. Another great way to approach link building is by writing great technical articles good enough to be published in actual known and respected industry-related magazines. Links are harder to come by there because respectable magazines do not want to become the sort of “link farms” that search engines and reputation ranking websites might penalize.

How is a technical SEO report more important than link building?

We find that the most important part of SEO is actual Search Engine Optimization, a purely technical task, starting at the bottom, on the website and server side. Our reports are solid tried and true reports that tell you all of the places where your website might be failing your SEO efforts on a technical level. Even if you choose to go with a great link-building campaign done right, having a good technical footing on your website is essential.

With a solid technical report on your website’s SEO, you may find that there is a lot that can be fixed without hiring an agency. These may be things as simple as upgrading to a better web host, having your registrar improve some fine points on your domain’s registry, getting a secure certificate for your website, even improving some glaring issues with your website’s content such as changing heading tags or adding alt tags to images. If you are using a CMS (Content management system) these content fixes may be easy enough for any member of your staff to correct without having an agency professional on the payroll. That part of your web marketing budget could be saved to hire agencies like ours for the heavy hitting from purely technical work to great copy writing.

How does my company compare to other Industrial Manufacturers?

We have found that a GREAT site with very few and minor search problems will score above 72 in our system. It takes a *lot* of work to get a website above 85, and for some sites this is not possible due to the CRM, theme/template, or needed plugins/add-ons. For some pages it will be less than possible for needed content and for customer experience. Main pages to websites are typically expected to be a 72 or less to fit their purpose. If a website is very fine-tuned, subpages and posts could expect to score 75 on a well-designed website on a good server, 85 with a good SEO’s help. We’ve gotten pages and even websites as high as 100, as an experiment, but reduced them to 95 soon after because some things (analytics, crisp images, animations, etc.) can be more important than a perfect SEO score.

How does an industrial company get their free SEO assessment?

You can reach us by phone, though our contact form (below), or you can even create a support ticket.