By Jackie Hunter, TEQ Intern
The shelves of any Whole Foods store are proof enough that organic products are the latest trend. Grocery stores now carry a wide array of organic produce, drinks and snacks that promote healthier lifestyles. But the fresh fruit section isn’t the only place that the organic touch is improving health.
Eyeflow Internet Marketing, a Pittsburgh-based Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media company, promotes living green with their method of SEO. The result is organic SEO, a technique that has improved the health of Eyeflow’s client businesses across the nation.
There are several methods of SEO, but the strategy of choice at Eyeflow remains organic SEO. The word organic refers to the links that come up during Google searches: organic search results. Eyeflow’s goal is to help clients’ Web sites rank as high as possible in these natural results without having to pay the search engine for the traffic.
“We study the Google algorithm and tweak the various factors,” said Eyeflow Founder and Owner Phil Laboon, “so that Google feels that your Web site is the best fit for a particular search.”
The other organic aspect of Eyeflow’s SEO method is in the way that it improves clients’ ranking in search results. Rather than using costly methods such as pay-per-click, through which advertisers pay their host for each ad clicked, Eyeflow sticks to the basics.
“Everything that we do is all-natural; clients are only paying us for our time,” said Laboon. “We don’t purchase listings or placement; we just expedite what happens naturally to the site.”
Organic SEO makes it possible for even small organizations to outrank larger companies in Google. The secret is link-building, a tactic that Eyeflow recently demonstrated in a campaign to prove that Pittsburgh really is “the best city in the world.”
The campaign began as a demonstration of the importance of back-links to a Web site. The Eyeflow team spread the word, asking anyone who agreed with the campaign slogan to create a link to the city of Pittsburgh’s Web site using the text “the best city in the world.”
By the campaign’s end, the city’s Web site landed on the first page of Google’s search results without any changes to the actual Web site. In fact, the text “the best city in the world” cannot be found anywhere on the city’s site.
“If someone wants their site to rank for a key term, so many people think that just using the keyword in their metatags is all that’s necessary,” said Laboon. “That is actually just a fraction of what needs to be done to rank for competitive key terms.”
Eyeflow has proven that they can take care of the rest, whether working with local clients like Giant Eagle and the Education Management Corporation (EDMC), or vocational schools and universities nationwide.
In a constantly changing business, a small company like Eyeflow has the advantage of adaptability. Currently, Google is beginning to use feedback from social media sites to impact search rankings. Eyeflow’s exclusive focus on SEO has allowed them to quickly account for such changes.
“Because we’re so focused on SEO,” said Laboon, “we can adapt to trends very quickly. We can have something new within two weeks of it becoming available.”
Larger marketing companies, by contrast, often have to wait to build a package until someone else handles the details. For Laboon, focusing on SEO is more than enough to be successful and stay sharp.
“There is a mystique to SEO,” he said. “It’s much more interesting than bidding on keywords and buying advertising.”
More importantly, it delivers long-term results. The sustainability of organic SEO has left Eyeflow with a contented client base; their client retention rate is in the 90th percentile, and Eyeflow is one of the highest ranked SEO companies in Pittsburgh on Google. And since the optimization that they do is permanent, clients continue to see results for months and even years after Eyeflow’s work is done.
For more information on Eyeflow Internet Marketing, click here.
