Maybe you’ve heard a digital marketing expert say that search engine optimization – or SEO – is a marathon not a sprint. If that’s the case, what are SEO Sprints? And, what does it mean to be an SEO Sprint Agency?
We have a confession to make: We are an SEO Sprint Agency! We’re a lot of other things too, including experts in Digital Marketing, Digital PR, and Enterprise SEO. But, there’s something uniquely energizing about a super-focused, super-effective SEO project.
So, let’s answer the question “What are SEO Sprints” and examine what a SEO Sprint can do for you and your brand.
What Are SEO Sprints?
An SEO Sprint is an SEO project with a specific, short-term focus and a defined duration.
That doesn’t mean it’s all done in a day. More like 100 days!
A SEO Sprint focuses on short-term improvements in your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). This can include improving the ranking on keywords already within striking distance of the first page, ranking for new keywords with high opportunity, and identifying long-tail keywords that lead to revenue. It’s a highly-customized project that is unique to the needs of each brand and website.
To make sure an SEO Sprint delivers results, here are the steps we take with each engagement:
- Understand. We discuss your goals for the engagement and what terms you want to rank for and why. Are you trying to reinforce your rank for specific terms? Boost traffic to specific pages? Generate more leads for a certain product? Your goals inform our approach to this customizable project.
- Measure. We work with you to measure your current performance and ranking. Together, we’ll work to understand how your site currently performs and where there is room for measurable improvement.
- Research. Our digital specialists dig deeply into the keywords we are sprinting on and their current search landscape. This includes a close review of all of the related content on your site and competitive analysis on the sites currently ranking on the first SERP for those terms.
- Recommend. We come back to you with our recommendations on how to make a meaningful impact on your ranking by revitalizing copy, adjusting meta data, URL structure, inbound and outbound linkbuilding, creating new content, and more. These aren’t sitewide changes. They are surgical, finely-tuned adjustments we know will affect your page rank and keyword performance.
- Implement. We can make the SEO changes to your site or we can provide your team with easy-to-follow instructions on what to change.
- Re-Measure & Re-Implement. An SEO Sprint is an iterative process. We’ll meet with you regularly to review how your revised site is ranking, discuss what’s working, and propose additional changes and tweaks to keep things moving in the right direction.
SEO Sprints are a fantastic tool for improving your rank for specific terms, broadening your SERP footprint, or putting some SEO power behind the launch of a new product or service.
Why do SEO Sprint Services work?
SEO Sprint services work because they are attuned to how Google indexes pages and the signals that Google values most when determining page rank in search engine results.
Google delivers more traffic to sites than any other website on the internet, which is why SEO is so important for your business. But, search engine optimization as a practice has existed for more than 25 years – it was around even before the launch of Google in September 1998.
Search engines exist to help people find what they are looking for. That means they have to understand the relevance of every crawlable page. Many early search engines, including early iterations of Google, took weeks to update their indexing and ranking. SEO was a long game of making changes and then waiting for results.
Today, you can have Google recrawl a page on demand using Google Search Console, and newly-crawled pages can begin to rank in a matter of weeks instead of months.
That means short-term measurement and an iterative approach can make a big impact on launching a page for a new term or reinforcing your rank for an existing one. At the same time, you don’t want to tweak a page too much! You need to let every change have a chance to be indexed and see how it affects factors like page rank and page authority.
SEO Sprints don’t guarantee instant ranking. You’re not going to rank on the first page of search for a broadly-used term like “SEO” or “pharmaceuticals” as the result of a single sprint. But, a sprint-length focus on specific goals and niche keywords can make a huge difference in leveling the playing field against industry competitors who outrank you for key terms.
We recommend sprints because we use them ourselves. Our digital marketing team runs sprints on our own website to super-charge our ranking for specific terms, products, and services. We’ve repeatedly hit the #1 spot in search results for the terms that matter to folks like you, which is how we’ve met some of our favorite clients.
Why work with a SEO Sprint Agency?
There is no one gatekeeping SEO.
Anyone can work to improve their own website using publicly available tools and plugins. We encourage it! Even basic activities like reviewing your keyword density and site interlinking strategy can help you improve your SEO results!
Working with an SEO Agency experienced with SEO Sprints takes the guesswork out of improving your search performance. An SEO Sprint Agency knows what to focus on and has the tools to measure and achieve results. They also can provide you with realistic expectations of the range of possible outcomes of a sprint based on the time and tactics employed.
A lot of what makes an SEO Sprint succeed is knowing what NOT to do. This isn’t about throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. It’s about taking the best, most-efficient, highly-effective tools in the SEO Agency toolbox and applying them in the short term to specific pages and keywords. It’s about measuring the signals that matter most and filtering out the noise.
Only 1% of searchers look beyond the first page of results, so there’s a huge difference in organic search traffic between ranking #8 for an important term for your business versus ranking just a few spots lower at #12! If you want to bring efficiency and experience to your SEO Sprint, you should work with an SEO Sprint Agency with a track record of results – actual search engine results!
Start Your First SEO Sprint Today!
Are you ready for a dash towards better search engine results, based on focused strategy and tested tactics? It sounds like it’s time for an SEO Sprint. Percepture’s digital marketing team has been working on SEO before Google was a verb. Get in touch to start sprinting today.
