I own an online business and it didn’t take me long to realize that I’d need to grow organically if I wanted to establish myself in the industry.
Social media management and advertising and pay-per-click marketing are great and I dabble in those areas, but I knew that the costs would become unsustainable if not supported by organic methods.
So I did what any reasonable entrepreneur would do and I started looking for SEO services in Chicago – where my online business is technically located.
The first thing I learned is that, since I serve the online market, local SEO isn’t really applicable to me. I have clients all over the country – so SEO services in Chicago quickly started to seem untenable.
I learned that local SEO services are best tuned for businesses that have brick-and-mortar locations or, if they have a website, they only serve a specific market.
But I also hired an SEO company that’s not based in Chicago and I couldn’t be happier with the results. That’s the other half of the picture that convinced me that “local” as a prerequisite should take a backseat to “quality.”
Allow an explanation. I hired 1DigitalⓇ Agency (1DigitalAgency.com), a full-service eCommerce agency, to handle my SEO services. Given my niche, they didn’t take a local SEO approach – they took an industry-based approach.
What I learned was that I didn’t need “Chicago SEO experts.” What I needed was a digital marketing solution that put my industry in focus.
So what 1DigitalⓇ Agency explained to me is that the SEO strategy they wanted to implement would hinge on keyword research to develop my authority for the most relevant search terms related to what I sold.
This approach to digital marketing services, they said, would build topical authority. Then Google would recognize my business as a leader in the industry and push my listings higher on the organic search engine results pages.
What they did worked. They worked with me to uncover the most practical search terms and keywords that were relevant to my niche and then started implementing their SEO services which included link-building, on-page optimizations, content publication, and technical optimizations.
First, they swept my website looking for duplicate content, broken links, and other technical optimizations that were harming my website’s speed and security.
Then they started updating my product pages with new, keyword-optimized copy, and they also created a blog post schedule which their writers took care of – and let me tell you, the writing is good.
Don’t take my word for it, you can check out their blog via the previous link. That’s the quality of writing you’ll be getting.
Their writers and technical team also worked together to improve my backlink profile, which, as they explained to me, has a lot of benefits for a long-term SEO campaign.
According to them, having a healthy backlink profile improves domain authority, increases referral traffic, and most importantly, can help you skirt an SEO disaster in the wake of a Google core update.
I’m not a web development expert or an SEO specialist, but that made enough sense to me, and my traffic has grown.
Also, they made a ton of piecemeal optimizations to key category and product pages, changing titles and content, and other ranking signals.
I’ll be honest – I can’t pinpoint the single aspect of their services that had the greatest effect. But I can say that traffic and sales have all improved significantly, and it’s definitely summatively attributable to their SEO services.
The other thing I can say is that, unless you have a physical location or only serve a specific market, you don’t need a “Chicago SEO” agency (or any other local one).
What you need is an agency that has the experience and can substantiate it with results. 1DigitalⓇ Agency did that for me, and according to their client portfolio, they’ve done it for countless clients in the past.
