Why Research Your SEO Plan?
It might be tempting to dive in, start writing content, setting up pages and blogs to get your website up and running as quickly as possible, but if you skip the research phase of your site and SEO efforts, you are likely missing the mark. 
When you’re looking at your business or website form your perspective you will by default pigeonhole yourself. You know your business inside and out, but do your potential customers? Are they searching for the technical terms you would search for? how are your competitors doing and how are they achieving good rankings in the search engines? Every market is different. Every customer is different. Every website is different. As such you can only get so far with a cookie cutter approach. Of course there are dozens of best practices that apply across the board – local citations, schema markup, regular blogging, etc etc – but your business and your website will benefit from specific research and advice based on industry trends, customer behavior and understanding of your competitors.
Keyword Research
Understanding what keywords people are searching to find your and similar products is “key” to your site’s content. We have the keyword research tools to find out exactly who is searching for what and the trends your local market follows. There are many influences on how people search. Buzzwords, terms they hear in commercials or other media, their personal interpretation of your business. The point is you can’t just “set it and forget it”. To get to the top of the search engines you need to stay on top of search trends and keyword research is the best way to get there.
Competitor Research
Any good business model will include keeping an eye on the competition: What are they doing that works? What are they doing that’s failing? Learn form your competitors successes and mistakes. do you know who all your competitors are? We can analyze your competitors website and overall brand marketing to determine the best way for you to one up them in the search results.
Performance Monitoring
Once we establish a plan of action it’s crucial to see how your site is doing. Is it working? Did the page we updated help for a particular keyword? 
Did rankings drop and we need to figure out why? There are dozens of metrics that affect your site’s rankings and it’s important to understand each and what can be done to inch your way up in the rankings. If you’re not monitoring your site’s performance then you could be drowning and not even know it.
Usability Testing
It’s also important to make sure your customers stay on your site once they get find it. Navigation, logical flow, aesthetics all play a rile in keeping a customer or sending them to the next competitor in the search engine results. Using analytics to research your site, we can track your website visitors’ behavior form where they entered your site, how long they stayed, what pages they looked at, where they came form and hundreds of other metrics that give us clues to their use of your site and what can be improved.
Where to Start?
There are tons of research articles online and most are from reputable sources. However, even the most respected publisher likely has articles from years ago that were relevant at the time but may actually be bad advice nowadays. You can always reach out to our SEO consultant for a free website audit and recommendations.