Did you know that the typical American averages nearly 5 hours a day online? That number goes even higher if you start thinking of phone games and internet TV as online time. Add all those minutes and seconds up and you’re talking about hundreds of thousands [if not millions] of impressions all fighting to get the attention of customers you want, followers you’d like to add, or business partners you hope to attract. So how do you really break through?

As designers and artists, there are numerous techniques we can use to draw people in from a visual standpoint, but before we ever usually get a chance to do that, people and prospects do something else first. They hit up search engines. It’s not always the flashiest part of a web development effort, but SEO and SEM can generate big-time results. When done right, some business see dramatic increases in web traffic, lead generation, and lead conversion. The trick is, it’s not an exact science, and it is definitely a discipline that requires ongoing maintenance. 

When helium does SEO, we tend to focus on what we call the big 3 – original content, earned links, and relevant research. Trying to skip steps on any of these three pillars often ends with less-than-ideal results. When balanced appropriately, however, we dive deep into the keywords, phrases, and questions a given audience has.

We look carefully at the little nuances between the brands who purchase listings versus those who earned an authentic first-page or top-ten ranking – who stayed there longest? What did it likely cost them? Did it really reach people ready to make a transaction or deal? Then, we take a look at the digital neighborhood a website is going to live in. How do the neighbors act? What do we want to say differently? What can we say better? Who can we connect with that shares our perspective and gives us the kind of legitimacy search engine algorithms prefer? After that, we start putting words to page… and we do it in ways that make people and robots both interested in reading them.  Our ultimate goal is that you shouldn’t even notice SEO is happening on your site… until you actually do a search and see yourself ahead of your competitors.