Working in SEO we have to answer questions like ‘why is SEO important?’ every time we get onto the topic of job roles.
We usually brush over the topic, making dramatic, over the top claims such as ‘without SEO no one would be found on Google’, but the truth is SEO is essential for all companies. From the local plumber with a five-page website to the biggest management consultancy firm with over a thousand URLs, every business, big or small, can benefit.
When most people search for something on the internet, they tend to head straight to Google. According to Statista, as of June 2019, Google held 87.64% market share in search engines in the UK. Bing, the next most used search engine, only had 8.2% market share.
If you’re targeting new customers, growing your rankings organically is crucial. Although establishing a loyal client base is very important, SEO will bring in new clients. Your website will be easier for new customers to find if you are ranking for keywords instead of just your brand name. As potential shoppers will search for keywords rather than specific companies. SEO is vital if you’re looking to grow your business and expand your clientele.
Whilst targeting Google might be obvious, using a professional agency might be less so. Although there are many blogs and tutorials on SEO online, the tips and tricks can only go so far and how up-to-date or accurate is the information. Not only do digital marketing experts have the training and specialised knowledge, but they also have access to specific software that will allow them to research the keywords most relevant to your business. An SEO specialist will then target the keywords most relevant to your products or services and bring in the right traffic.
One of the most frustrating things about working in SEO is the constant shift in the Google algorithm. Every day, Google changes the way it ranks websites and crawls them for relevant content. For instance, once upon a time, mentioning the keyword as many times as possible on a page, was standard practice for SEO consultants. Recently, however, Google has changed its algorithm to limit ‘keyword stuffing’ – referencing the keyword as much as you could.
Doing SEO for a website is a full-time job. If the Google algorithm changes without your knowledge, your rankings will start to drop. An SEO consultant will know the latest changes to the algorithm and edit your website accordingly, keeping your website on page one of Google.
Finally, SEO is particularly important because if you are not on page one of Google or in the top ten, you will not get the required organic traffic at all to grow your business. As most people are lazy and want instant information, they are unlikely to scroll further than page one. As there are so many companies competing for page one, if you don’t focus on maximising your SEO, your website will not receive much organic traffic.
There are many benefits of paying for SEO services, as you’ve read above. Being on page one of Google for your chosen keywords is one of the most effective ways of broadening a client base and bringing in more traffic to your site, something relevant for all businesses, big or small.
This is a great example of what Chameleon can achieve and to provide some time frames around results.
The website was purchased NEW on the June 6th 2019 and this means it has no past, zero power or trust and Google has never come across the domain before. This is positive because it has a clean bill of health.
The website was built in WordPress our favoured platform with a holding page containing the core keywords and setup for Google to find. Behind the scenes the website was being built, new fresh handwritten content and images were loaded to the site and then we forced Google to come and get all the new page content.
The first thing needed is to rank for the brand name which should be easy:-
Some SEO Companies often do not understand the very basics and the early stages are vital to achieving a quick growth for a new website. We setup the website perfectly for Google to understand and the result is instant and the graph above shows this clearly what can be achieved.
The next thing is to achieve other keywords and interestingly the company name being a word used all of the Internet related to cars, the word Concours and top of Google for “concours vehicle” is the Wikipedia page related to this subject. Concours d’Elegance is a term of French origin that means a “competition of elegance” and refers to an event where prestigious vehicles are displayed and judged. There are many websites talking about Concours Vehicles and cars based all over the world which means this is competitive.
This Google search shows that there are 89,700,000 website results in Google’s database and the SEO consultant has to make Google like this website more than all the others.
The content at this early stage is vital providing Google with the details it needs to understand what the website is about will result in success:-
The graphs above show the quickly achieved results, note that position 200 is page 20 of Google and position 1 is top of Google.
Then the service related keywords need to follow and as an example “supercar storage”:-
You can see from the graphs the quick growth onto page one shows that a Chameleon SEO Consultant can quickly achieve growth for a brand new domain name without doing anything outside Google’s guidelines, simply doing what Google wants to find. This is natural organic SERP growth as the result of understanding the Google Algorithm.
SEO Service providers are used to provide an expert assessment of a website and identify changes required to help the website grow within organic search results and this role is known as search engine optimization. After carrying out SEO on page changes the website should have increased visitors to the website as a result of obtaining the high-ranking positions in organic search results of search engines (SERP).
SEO services will be provided in a variety of packages which will include keyword and keyphrase research, competitor audit and research, technical website SEO audit of on-page content and external backlinks, robots.txt and sitemap.xml to be created or checked, identification of required and missing content and then because no website is the same, identification of additional tasks to achieve success within the specific industry sector.
How much should SEO services cost is a question that leads to many issues in the Industry. SEO services carried out correctly will have a huge impact on visitors to a website and this should provide new leads or product sales. With every website being different and having a completely different history it is never a simple question to answer. SEO service costs should be relevant to the required hours to achieve success. With this in mind, if you consider the standard hourly rate in the UK for an SEO Consultant is £55 to £125 per hour then an company offering services for £30 per month, you should question! what are they going to actually do and achieve?
To then take this further an SEO Company should install Google tracking in Search Console (Webmaster Tools) and Google Analytics to identify the current situation and also monitor the improvements. This analysis work alone can take a number of hours alone and for larger projects nearly an entire day.
Then carrying out an SEO on-page audit and backlink health check will require many hours of labour. And on top of this, there is the research into the competitors and the industry to identify the correct keywords for the business to achieve.
Every SEO agency will be using various software platforms which are all paid subscriptions like:-
The SEO service provider should also provide keyword rank tracking in the form of a report or client portal to monitor keyword positions with search volumes and compare growth to give transparency of the SEO service results.
If you then consider that organic SEO search results allow a website to be available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week with no budget constraints when comparing this to Google Adwords, the investment into professional SEO services should be a no brainer.
If as a result of carrying out SEO a website achieves 10,000 new visitors in a week or month and then 10% to 30% of the visitors purchase a product or service then the financial return on investment will be high and if you compare this a publication in a magazine, booking an exhibition stand or using digital outdoor media which have little to no tangible ways of tracking a return on investment, SEO should not be looked at as a cost you do not want to pay, it should be a cost you need to look at how much can afford to spend and then can I spend more, obviously with the correct SEO agency.
Selecting an SEO Company or Agency to carry out services can be difficult and if you do not understand what it is that is being done and why then you need to educate yourself. You will find the more you understand the better questions that you can ask and identify the sharks. Do not trust organisations that do not rank organically themselves, the SEO industry should be the hardest to achieve success and if a company can achieve results for their own website then can achieve results for your business.
