Announcing B12 SEO, our human-assisted AI approach to SEO

Most people find your website by using search engines like Google, and effective SEO means potential visitors will be more likely to find you wherever they look for you.

SEO is our customers’ number-one request. It’s the single most effective way to improve your website’s search ranking, help your audience land on your website, and build online awareness of your business.

Our human-assisted AI approach has allowed us to turn a many-month, thousands-of-dollars-a-month service into a zero-touch $99-a-month experience.

The B12 SEO service is $99/month (plus a one-time setup fee to build your website) and includes:

• On-page optimizations. We’ll make sure your website follows SEO best practices so Google can easily evaluate its content

• Business directory listings. Your website will be listed on search engines like Google and directories like Yelp and Facebook to expand awareness of your business and grow its online reputation

• Metrics tracking. We’ll collect data on your current search ranking, traffic to your website, and the keywords we think your business can rank for on search engines

• Monthly updates and recommendations. You’ll receive email updates on your website’s progress each month, including highlights and opportunities to improve your ranking

This is how we do it 🎶

When you sign up for B12 SEO, we first evaluate your current search ranking and traffic to get some baseline metrics so we can track the plan’s impact.

Next, we explore which search keywords could drive the most clicks to your site so we can focus your content and improve your SEO. Our algorithms and search competition data help our SEO experts select keywords that are both valuable (many people search for the keyword, and it’s relevant to your business) and feasible (the keyword isn’t so popular that it will be nearly impossible to improve ranking for this keyword). For example, while “cosmetic dentistry” might be valuable but infeasible, “cosmetic dentistry portland” might be in the value/feasibility sweet spot.

While we track your performance across a number of keywords, we pick a few of the most promising keywords and perform on-page optimization. We update your website’s content (headers, descriptions, image alt text, HTML meta descriptions, etc.) so the keyword appears prominently throughout the text on the various pages.

This customized, keyword-rich content makes it easy for search engines to understand what your website is about, then show it in relevant searches. How good is our on-page optimization? When we give each page a grade using industry-standard tools, they usually receive an initial grade of 40–50 out of 100. By the time we’ve optimized the website for relevant keywords, the customer’s score rises to the low 90s on average.

Then we get started with directory listings! Once your website’s content is optimized, we submit your business information to local directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages, Facebook, Google Maps, and more to make sure your business information (phone number, address, hours of operation) is consistent across the web. This helps improve your online reputation and helps potential customers find you wherever they’re looking.

From there, we monitor traffic to your website and track how well it performs over time.

Each month, our B12 SEO customers receive email updates on how well their website is performing and where there’s room for improvement. We repeatedly re-calculate our metrics — new keywords, traffic, ranking — and inform customers of their progress, so it’s clear that we’re actually helping them. We’ll explain what we’ve been working on and how your metrics have changed over the past month.

Streamlining our approach — 8x faster, 8x more affordable

While we’re officially announcing the B12 SEO service today, we unofficially launched it back in February, when a few of our customers piloted our human assisted-AI approach.

When we first kicked off B12 SEO, it took us significantly longer to choose keywords and optimize your website than it does now. Since then, we’ve automated more and more of the setup process and built user interfaces to improve our SEO experts’ efficiency.

We use automation to identify keywords relevant to your business that we think it could win on various search engines. With a few small examples from our SEO experts, our algorithms recommend similar terms that prospective customers search for on Google. Our algorithms then rank the high value/high feasibility keywords that are relevant to your business.

Next, an SEO expert looks through the machine-generated list and decides which keywords make the most sense for our customer depending on their industry and competition. The expert then makes subtle changes to your website to optimize for those keywords.

When we first started offering this service in February and depended on only humans to brainstorm and evaluate keywords, this was a 3–4 hour process. Now that we’ve streamlined our approach to be led by machines and refined by humans, we’ve cut that setup time down to 25–30 minutes.

It got about eight times faster because we leveraged a humans + machines model, which means it also costs eight times less than an agency would charge you for similar SEO services. Seriously — agencies charge $500-$1000/month for a product we’re able to provide affordably at $99/month.

Recommended for small businesses

Investing in SEO is hard to do on your own, especially for small businesses with limited resources. You not only need to understand technical components of your website like metadata, page speed, and sitemaps, but you also need to think creatively about creating unique content. Moreover, search engines and directories frequently update their ranking algorithms, so you need to constantly monitor how your ranking changes across keywords.

That’s why we’re excited to launch B12 SEO. It combines SEO experts with AI to offer you affordable, custom SEO services done for you, getting your website more traffic and more transactions.

To optimize your website, get started here. And make sure you stay tuned as we continue to evolve and automate our SEO strategies.