Dive into Mystic Media’s commitment to excellence in SEO services in this dynamic discussion with Jim Moore, Founder of Mystic Media, and Hassan Ul Banna, SEO Specialist. Moore and Ul Banna offer valuable insights into navigating challenges and envisioning the industry's future from their roles within MMDC. 

Q1. Can you explain the main components of a successful SEO strategy?

Hassan Ul Banna: A successful SEO strategy covers all the aspects of SEO regarding website ranking. It is essential to create a customized solution that covers the technical part, the on-page SEO, the off-page SEO, and the content strategy. Your website has to be set up so that Google can easily crawl and index all your pages. Then, we have to create the sort of relatable and useful content for your target audience so that Google would like it and rank it on the first page of the search results. Once the basics are well set up and well-researched articles, user-friendly web design because the design is also a ranking factor. Recently, voice SEO has also become an important ranking factor. So there are many factors to focus on when it comes to SEO, and they all play an important role in optimizing your site for search engines. 

Q2. Can you provide an overview of the SEO services offered by MMDC?

Jim Moore: We offer full-service search engine optimization, which means both off-site and on-site, as well as local and what we refer to as non-local SEO, which I’m sure we’ll discuss more as we move forward here. So, our services include everything that's necessary to ensure that a website is technically prepared for good search engine ranking. And also, the off-site items, which are equally as important, that Hassan just described, include creating content that can be used on third-party websites that can link back to the target website and back link generation. So we offer full-scope SEO services. 

Q3. What makes MMDC’s approach to SEO different from other agencies and consultants?

Jim Moore: I think that the answer is the same thing that makes all of our services different: they're all customized. They're all based on customer service that our customers won't receive from anybody else. As we discussed in our last interview, our philosophy and commitment to providing our clients with value separate all of our services or make our services unique.

Q4. What are some common misconceptions about SEO, and how does MMDC address them?

Hassan Ul Banna: There are multiple kinds of myths that people come across when it comes to SEO. The first is that if a person has a good website that they designed themself, then they don’t need a well-researched keyword strategy. Another myth we’ve come across is people thinking that they don't need well-researched content. People who do this tend to produce themed content or replicated content from other resources and other sites, thinking that it will be ranked on search engines but the reality is that it doesn’t. Another myth that many people believe about SEO is that link-building is the only part of SEO, this causes people to put all their focus on that aspect of SEO and believe that that will increase their site’s domain authority and lead to a higher rank in search results. Unfortunately, Google actually considers this as spam practice and in the past year, they have penalized millions of domains that were previously ranking well. So when the site owner doesn’t have a successful keyword strategy, it will make it difficult to achieve any SEO success. 

Jim Moore: Just to add to what Hassan has discussed, There’s a lot of information and misinformation around the subject of artificial intelligence (AI) and it’s use in search engine optimization. It hasn’t been made completely clear what Google thinks of AI, but it’s reasonable to say that the misuse of AI, especially in terms of building content for your website, will not be a positive for your search engine optimization. To be specific about that, if you think search engine optimization means going off to ChatGPT and saying, please write search engine optimized content for my website, and you place that on your website, that’s definitely not going to be positive. AI has its uses in SEO; however, the general thought that you can just utilize AI-generated content and rank well is a myth that I see propagated and acted on often. 

Q5. What kind of results can clients expect from investing in MMDC’s SEO services, and how long does it typically take to see these results?

Hassan Ul Banna: As we mentioned earlier, clients can expect a customized solution when working with MMDC, we don’t just offer them keyword research of back-linking services we focus on offering comprehensive solutions. We perform an SEO audit on the client’s site and identify the areas where they might be lacking and the best strategy to fix those issues. When you research SEO, you’ll see that Google officially says that SEO specialists can only provide their best strategies and put their best efforts into the ongoing process, but they cannot commit to a time frame. That’s why the big names in the industry always have disclaimers that you can put your best efforts into your outreach campaigns and your content writing, but still, Google (and other search engines) make the final decision. Also, Google is now rolling out major code updates each month, especially the update in March. The time frame also depends on multiple factors and varies from industry to industry. When a client does come to us, we can then analyze their needs and compare them with competitors to determine the six-month or one year plan. They may be able to observe some progress after the first or second month, but reaching our final goal can take six months to a year at the very least. 

Q6. Can you share a success story or case study where MMDC significantly improved a client’s search engine rankings?

Jim Moore: It’s the best part of the day when you can share a success story, right? Without divulging client information, I’ll share that we have a client in Florida, a large restaurant group that has several local restaurants that all have different concepts meaning they all have different menus and different themes. They came to us about a year ago, and we determined that they were in very bad shape in terms of search engine optimization and they're in a very competitive market. It was an interesting case in that we had to design a customized approach for each restaurant because of the different menus that each restaurant served. We couldn't develop a strategy for one that would work well with another because they were so different in terms of the types of service they provided and the types of food they served. As I mentioned, they were in a very competitive market, but over the last year, we have made some incredible gains for specific keywords for each of the restaurants, even for one of the restaurants, and I think it's reasonable to share that it’s a Cuban based restaurant in Southern Florida. And it was one that the client thought we'd certainly make no gains on but we have made significant games for them. So that's one success. 

Another that I can share is a former client of ours. They were a regional provider in the Northeast United States (and this was different because they weren't a local provider), and they were in a very interesting vertical in commercial financing. That project was also a year-long project, and we made great gains in the regional sense for them. Although it was a less competitive vertical, some of their competition was very well positioned and had done a great job in their own search engine optimization, and we were able to surpass them, which was a significant success for our clients in that instance. 

Q7. How does MMDC stay current with the ever-changing SEO and search engine algorithms landscape?

Hassan Ul Banna: It is really very important and crucial to stay updated because, in the past, there might have been one or two updates in the whole year, and it was easier to adapt to those changes. But in today’s world, there are more updates to keep track of. As we discussed earlier, there was a major update in March of this year, and then again a few weeks ago (in May), there was another update rollout from Google. So what we do to properly align our SEO strategy with Google’s guidelines is when Google announces and rolls out a new update, we check our sites to see how the update will affect the site’s overall health. So for a content-related update, we check how much traffic we lose or gain due to the update, and if there are improvements we have to make, we would then apply them. Or if there is an update that now makes the links on a client’s side no longer search engine friendly then we would remove or update those links. We also do A/B testing, constantly improving our knowledge and updating our strategies. 

Jim Moore: I would also suggest that anyone who's interested in the kinds of things that we look at daily to keep our knowledge up to date to the most recent changes in technical specifications - visit our blog we post stuff there all the time that refers back to information that we're reading and our social media accounts. We post articles from outside sources, from the experts that we look at daily. I personally have a checklist of reading each day two of those checklist items are finding two separate articles on search engine optimization that are from people who are smarter than I am, like Hassan or other experts and try to keep up to date with that. So, I'd refer people back to our blog or take a look at our social media posts and you’ll get good insight into what we’re reading daily.

Q8. What are the main benefits of hiring a professional SEO consultant like MMDC, compared to attempting SEO in-house?

Hassan Ul Banna: Many small business owners want to cover all the things, like the operational parts of their business, and also the digital side of things. What that usually does is cause business owners to lose potential leads and customers because their main strengths lie in the services they offer to their clients and not SEO. So, in my opinion, it is the best option to outsource things like SEO to agencies like MMDC so that industry experts can give them the best results and ROI. There are also many resources, subscriptions and tools required for SEO, making it very costly to do on your own. SEO is also an ongoing endeavour, there are tasks like content research, backlinking outreach, and Google Business Profile updating that have to be done daily. Lastly, with industry experts like us who have been practicing our skills and trying new SEO strategies, partnering with us gives business owners that advantage as well. 

Q9. For businesses considering MMDC’s SEO services, what initial steps do you recommend for starting a partnership?

Jim Moore: I think that what may be most important is to gain some familiarity with the landscape of search engine optimization. You don't have to become an expert, but there is a lot of technical jargon associated with search engine optimization. And if you just have some familiarity with that, you'll find that conversation that's necessary to get us position to help a client is going to be much smoother and much easier. The second thing I would recommend someone think about is - Who is their audience? It's our experience that often a business owner doesn't know, they know they want search engine optimization, but they don't know who they want to be speaking to. They don't know who they want to be found by so having some idea of who's your best customer, if you were to define a customer persona that was your best customer, the person that you're most likely to want to sell to or provide your services to. Developing that is a good strategy starting point. 



And bringing it back to what Hassan just shared. Keep in mind that search engine optimization is a long-term strategy. You cannot get it done in a month and then just let it roll. As Hassan pointed out, achieving measurable success within a month, even two months, is difficult. And secondly, search engines, especially Google, are changing constantly. They're finding new ways to outsmart spam and new ways to deliver better information. So when you're talking to an SEO agency, be prepared to be in a long-term relationship. And make sure the folks that you plan to work with are people that you want to be in a long-term relationship with. It's somebody that you will have to rely on for a period of time a year, six months to a year. So it better be someone that you have an appreciation for their approach to things and someone that you can talk to and feel comfortable with. So I think those are the three main points I'd suggest for anyone who's preparing to work with an SEO agency. To add on, go over and visit our blog, we post articles there all the time about the questions you should be asking an SEO agency and what the red flags are if an SEO agency tells you that they're going to achieve fantastic success within the first six weeks. That may be a red flag. That's not an agency that you want to work with, but there are lots of articles in our blog that help folks understand how to build the right relationship, what to look for in an agency, and what may be reasons not to work with an agency.