Site Optimisation

There is a lot written about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and about the secret ways to being number 1 on Google! I am sure that you have received emails from companies promising you a first page Google rank and in some cases being guaranteed the number 1 position. The truth is no one can guarantee you that number 1 spot, so don’t fall for it and hand over your hard earned cash. In some cases the outdated methods these businesses use can actually damage your rankings. At the end of the day the search engines are not stupid, they will eventually see through the underhand techniques and you will pay the price. In fact Google have algorithms that specifically look for some of these techniques.

What makes us different? Well our approach to SEO is much more about how to make your site visible to the search engines and tell them what your site is about rather than trying to con them. Often a customer will tell us that their site doesn’t rank for search term “x” when you check out their site you find that the term “x” is not mentioned anywhere on the site. If you haven’t told the search engine that is what your site is about by mentioning your search term then the search engine wont know it!

Our approach to SEO is only based on “on page” SEO and not off page, this is a much lower risk approach and is likely to get the best results for a limited budget. On page SEO is looking at your content and the way it is laid out rather than trying to gain credibility and page rank through back links to the site. We will also look at performance (page load speed) as this is becoming a more important ranking signal. If you like we have extended on page SEO to cover everything on the domain rather than just the page.

There are limitations to what SEO will achieve which is primarily based on budget when small to medium sized businesses are trying to compete with the big boys. Bear in mind that some of the larger businesses have a full time team of people using highly advanced techniques and carry so much authority that you will never outrank them on major search terms. Take a search term such as “News”, you will be competing with sites such as the BBC and Sky that have such high page rank and authority that you will never out rank them in a fair fight. However as a small or medium sized business you are unlikely to need to rank for such a generic term so you need to take time to think what your potential customers are likely to realistically search for when looking for your products or services. This is called keyword research and is the cornerstone of improving your ranking for realistic search terms. If for instance you are an Italian Restaurant you are likely to find it difficult to rank for that search term, but will find it much easier and probably more profitable to rank as Italian Restaurant  in My Town. All our SEO clients rank well in local search, this is where the effort goes and this is where the return on investment is. Just focusing on this approach has taken many of our clients from 20 – 30 site visits per month from Google to in excess of 400, over 1000% rise in organic traffic.