SEO Expert San Diego Jen Ruhman

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO uses a variety of strategies to improve a website’s rankings. These strategies include: Building quality content, On-page optimization, and Quality link building. The benefits of SEO is gaining quality and quantity or traffic to your website organically.

There are many benefits of SEO!

• Increased rankings,
• Increased organic traffic
• Increased calls/web forms
• Increased Sales

While PPC can bring immediate results, it’s the most expensive. Keywords can range severely in cost per click and many clicks are wasted on bots. Many business owners are frustrated in “pay to play” because once they turn off the ads, the traffic is gone. That’s why I recommend SEO. Organic traffic (shown below the ads) brings more clicks than PPC, 70% of clicks go to organic search results! SEO makes a smart investment!

Organic traffic has a “halo effect” in the sense that it is seen as earned rather than paid for. Anyone can create a website and pay top dollar to rank #1 but may not have the best user experience nor have the quality of information that’s being searched for. To be successful in SEO, you need to invest in a lot of time and resources. Google’s algorithms are constantly changing to provide the user with the best possible user experience. Google wants to stay the #1 search engine, thus having the best content and user experience on your site is a must. An SEO expert will provide the right keywords and optimize and create the best content to improve your visibility and user experience. And no, SEO is not just about typing keywords into a page. Over time, the SEO expert will analyze your website data and constantly make edits and improve the value of your website. There’s On-page SEO, Technical SEO, and Off-page SEO. Make sure the SEO guru you hire does all three! Be very picky when hiring an SEO guru, especially if they promise you a huge amount of website traffic overnight!

Because Google has over 200 different ranking signals, it is difficult to predict how long it will take a website to rank. In my experience, clients typically see significant improvement on long tail keywords in the first 90 days and more competitive search terms around 150 days. SEO is a long-term strategy but has consistently proven to provide the best ROI.

There’s no “SEO secret.” To be specific, I follow Google’s document on Search Engine Optimization. The document is called “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.” It covers everything you need to know about creating websites that give a great user experience along with over 200 ranking factors. It’s a free public document. BTW, if an SEO company tells you they have a “proprietary” SEO secret and can’t talk about how they rank sites… RUN!

Short answer, No. Major core algorithm updates can primarily affect low-quality websites. Especially websites that have an abundance of pop-ups, ads, notifications, bad mobile usability, thin content, and are not seen as giving credible, trustworthy content. If you’re not willing to remove the spammy elements listed above, I may not be able to recover your website’s traffic. Once you remove these elements,  I can work on adding quality to thin content pages and provide my SEO services. I may need to remove spammy pages and add 301 redirects, cache your site, make it https, and strive for a mobile-friendly user experience.

No. We don’t “lock-in” customers.

If a natural disaster or hardship falls onto your business, you’re free to walk away or take a break! We’re not all about dollars and cents. We’re about happy customers. 

SEO is NOT a “get rich quick” service. As an SEO expert, I don’t know when people will purchase your goods or services. My job is to optimize your website to rank in Google for specific keywords. With more “influencers” on youtube standing next to a Lambo than ever before – urging you to get “rich” like them from a website by setting up an online store and turning on ads. While they sell you an expensive online course. SEO is a slow but steady process. Yes, I can help you create ads in Google AdWords but I won’t promise you a quick buck in ROI. Testing ads and refining ads take time. Please be sure you have a high-quality website/landing page with a decent product before spending money on ads.

A few months is not enough time to start seeing results long term. Think of SEO as building muscles. You can work out for a few months and start to get stronger, but if you don’t continue to train, and stop – your muscles weaken. 

New websites have zero domain authority, therefore it will take time to gain trust with Google. You also need to escape the “Google Sandbox” The best way to gain trust and get out of the sandbox, is by building quality original content with service pages, blog posts, business/brand citations, links, social media presence, and time. It also helps to have a mobile-friendly website, fast loading pages, a clean online reputation, internal links, a well-thought website silo, that’s up to par with your competition.  

Yes, I have several years of experience working on ranking Shopify stores in Google. No matter what your product or service is, I know how to rank individual products, services, and collection pages. I also provide Shopify consultation so your SEO efforts can go above and beyond.

What Does it take to be a San Diego SEO Expert?

I get asked this frequently! With so many SEO companies in San Diego, it’s rare to find someone such as myself that works alone and directly with the client! It takes discipline, skills, and consistency. It’s not easy to be a true SEO specialist in San Diego. It takes thousands of hours testing ideas, learning up-to date information and implementing both client projects as well as your own! I started learning SEO in college. However, truly learning SEO involves learning what Google values, learning how to give the user a good experience with your website, testing, implementing, patience, consistency, and testing again. Before I took on clients, I made sure my own sites were ranking, and yes, I have my own successful websites. To be a successful SEO expert, you need to become successful from SEO for yourself first. Meaning, you need to create a website(s) that bring you recurring revenue. If you can do this, you can do it for someone else. On top of all that it’s necessary knowledge to navigate the area which is one of the most competitive around the world… But I have been working in the industry for 20+ years. My track record and determination to constantly learn is what makes a true SEO expert such as myself stand out.