Why is SEO important?

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how important is seo

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.

Google Organic Search is the most important source of traffic

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.

SEO agencies have the software to boost your rankings

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.

The Google algorithm is always changing

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.

Page one is the only place you’ll be clicked

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.

How long does SEO take?

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SEO How Long Does It Take

How long does SEO take?

One of the most frequently asked questions we get asked as a business is ‘how long does SEO take?’

Usually, this is a question proposed by potential new clients wanting to know how long it will be until they see results. Looking into the answer to this question, Google suggests approximately 4-6 months. However, this is a generalised answer and does not take into consideration your current situation. For some companies, it may take between the advised times but for others, it could take longer.

There are many factors which need to be considered and therefore it is a much more complicated process than people make it out to be. It isn’t a ‘do once kind of thing’ and it’s done. It requires you to be able to continually work on the optimisation of your website because like everything in the technological world we live in, things are changing daily.

The Google search engine is constantly working to make improvements to the way the information is gathered and the SERP results delivered back to users. This means as an SEO company we are constantly following the guidelines being set out by search engines like Google and ensuring our client’s websites are following these requirements and more.

The result from working consistently on a websites search engine is optimisation in continued growth.

Does seo work

Defining organic results

An improvement in organic results can look different between an agency such as Chameleon and a business. To an SEO agency, an increase in rankings could be an indicator of success. On the other hand, to a business, results might mean receiving conversations from their organic traffic. Due to this, it is imperative to understand that SEO is a process and therefore until your website appears within the top half of page one within the Google’s search results, it’s not likely to drive the results business owners require. However, every step taken to achieve these results is positive progress.

chameleon web services seo agency

How long will SEO take for your website?

There are many elements you need to consider in order to get your website ranking in search engine results and therefore to determine how long it will take for SEO to take effect, you will need to know where you are currently. Some general questions which you may ask yourself are, what keywords do you rank for and what position do you rank currently? As well as knowing where you are now, you may also want to consider where you want to be and the budget you are willing to put into search engine optimisation to achieve online success.

To further complicate things, it is a moving target. By this we mean, there are frequent SERP algorithm changes which have an effect on your rankings, competitors SEO campaigns and other variables which all contribute towards your end goal. All of these have to be taken into consideration when estimating how long SEO will take for your website.

To summarise, in selected cases we have found SEO to start working virtually instantly. However, for the majority, it can be months, even years to reach your goal depending on the keywords you are targeting.

Our SEO consultants are happy to have a chat regarding your current organic ranking positions, where you want to be and the required budget involved to achieve success.

SEO Company

SEO Company

Concours Vehicles

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Classic car storage and Supercar storage is a big business in the UK. The company Concours Vehicles was set up online at the beginning of June to open up a service to others.

concours vehicles domain name

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:-

Concours Vehicle Solutions

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.

 

google concours

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:-

Concours Vehicle

concours vehicles keyword 2

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”:-

supercar storage

supercar storage 2

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

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SEO Service

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).

Does seo work

SEO Service Packages

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.

SEO Service Costs

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.

Choosing an SEO Company 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.

What are some myths about SEO?

What are some myths about SEO?

What are the top 3-5 SEO areas where webmasters make the most mistakes?

What are the top 3-5 SEO areas where webmasters make the most mistakes?

seo service

SEO HERO

How Much Does SEO Cost?

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With the SEO industry being difficult to understand for business owners we thought we would help by writing this blog post about “How Much Does SEO Cost?“.

How Much Is SEO Per Month?

SEO ConsultantWith every SEO campaign, we work on we will face different obstacles and different competitors. This is important to understand at the start of the SEO journey. If we are working on local SEO for a relatively uncompetitive industry sector it should be easy to achieve rankings with a decent website built on a good platform providing the content is unique and well written. So in this instance, SEO per month may be relatively low cost covering basic hours of labour and resources.

When you then look at national or a global SEO campaign in a highly competitive sector, this will require a huge amount of work to achieve success and as a result this SEO campaign will require much more labour to achieve the SEO goal.

Due to this we would recommend steering clear of SEO companies who can price an SEO campaign for you instantly as this suggests they do not understand the tasks ahead of them. Also it is important to note that every website has a different past and if a website has been worked on by a less than decent SEO company you may find when you carry out a health check that the website backlink profile is a mess and require a lot of work to fix things before you can start moving a website forwards in the search engines.

It might be the case that the website domain name is also brand new with no historical past, so why would Google trust this website. New domains need more external work than historical domains so as a result of this we would question any SEO company able to price a campaign without researching into the domain historical past.

The cost of SEO will vary as a result of the research and also the country in which the work is being carried out. In the UK you need to spend on average for a decent SEO Consultant £35.00 to £110.00 per hour, so if you work on this factor you can see that a company quoting £50 per month simply isn’t going to be doing the job.

It is also important to note that the cost of the software used by SEO consultants is often paid for a monthly basis and the more the tools are used the more they cost. Without the core SEO tools it is difficult to carry out SEO services and this means the majority of SEO companies will be using the core software available and spending over £1,000 per month as a minimum.

Semrush SEO Costs

Ahrefs SEO Costs

Majestic SEO Costs

MOZ SEO Costs

If we then look at SEO products offered by companies like GoDaddy we wonder what exactly is being purchased here. This might be great and achieving results and we wish clients using the service success.

GoDaddy SEO services

So officially you need to look at the spend on SEO per month and think does this give an SEO consultant enough time to achieve your success which leads us to the question…

How Much Should I Spend On SEO Per Month?

The question of how much you should spend on SEO per month should be looked at in terms of the value it can add to your business. For example, if you sell products or services that cost £10,000 with a £2,000 markup then being number one in Google could bring sales that if you sold only five products or services in one month you will have £10,000 profit per month and this could be as a result of this spending £1,000 per month on SEO to achieve this, which would be a great ROI.

Another example, if you are a CCTV company paying £1,000 per month for SEO and you get 10 to 30 leads per month from commercial clients looking at spending £5,000 to £80,000 on CCTV and security with on-going maintenance and support then the £1,000 per month SEO would be a good investment and grow the business each month with new clients.

CCTV SEO Keywords

If you then factor in that you could be using Google Adwords and using just one keyword “CCTV systems” which Google suggests achieves 18,100 searches per month in the UK, you would need to spend a minimum of $1.14 per click, if you do the maths you need a huge budget per day to achieve 24 hour a day adverts to be shown.

Organic SEO would be showing 24 hours a day 7 days a week with no budget constraints and also there is a large majority of Internet users who simply do not click on Google Adwords and will bypass the ads looking for Google Maps listing to find local companies or the top organic search results to find what it is they are looking for.

It is clear that the value of SEO is huge to any business, so the question should be “Are we spending enough on SEO” not “how much should I spend on SEO per month”…