A question we are asked a lot in the agency world is, “Can SEO help me?” The answer is always yes, no matter what type of website you have. At Vital, there are 4 basic types of websites that we encounter when we’re retained for SEO:

The Brand New Site

This site never existed. It’s either a new business, or an offshoot of a brand, and the SEO strategy is executed before the site even hits the Internet. This is done by doing boatloads of competitive research to find out what to target, what pages to build, what call-to-actions (CTAs) to use, and how to best convert users. Out of the gate, this site will show up for some long tail keywords, but leads will be few and far between for several months until Google determines that the site is worthy of earning better rankings.

Based on your market, the brand new site’s performance can vary drastically. An example would be a new market segment, such as tablets. A year ago, there were very few tablet manufacturers, so if you started selling tablets, your chance of showing up on the first page of a search engine for just about anything tablet related was extremely high. However, even if the overall market does happen to be dense, the immediate local market may not be as cluttered and can still lead to good traffic in certain cases.

The graph above represents the analytics for a brand new site we launched for a lobster company in an extremely niche market. In one month, our SEO strategies garnered them to over 1,000 visits per month (33 visits per day). As you can see, their traffic improved each month and this was the result of  an increase in domain trust. We achieve these successes – and more – because we make sure that your pages have low bounce rates and that strategic CTAs encourage users to “click through” to deeper interior pages on the site. This is the natural outcome (and progression) of a site that was SEO’d from day 1.

The 1990 Special

This site was awesome back in its day, with animated .gif files, tons of weird pages, and all kinds of buttons. It has a seasoned domain, and might even have a decent amount of traffic. This type of site is a rarity, but it does come up. When it does, you generally see good results quickly. Here’s why:

• The domain is aged. This tells Google you mean business and you’re not just throwing a site up for the sake of SEO.
• Generally speaking, sites that have been up for many years have a strong and completely diversified link profile. This is great news for any SEO strategy.
• People already know the site exists, so when the new site is put up, it encourages click through, lower bounce rates, and increases the domain trust even further. This boosts PageRank and as a result this new site is ranking as soon as it is launched.

The above graph shows an older site that we re-launched in May of 2013 – the traffic immediately doubled. This happened here, and happens with other re-launches, because as we continued to add new, targeted content, the PageRank of this domain carried into the new pages. What this typically means is that these site re-launches almost always rank immediately – and this drives the traffic numbers even higher. This is our “easiest” client because ROI is realized within the first few weeks.