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

SEO Tips for Beginners

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The world of search engine optimisation (SEO) is both complex and ever-changing. Due to this, a lot of the information for in Google’s search results (SERPS) is out-of-date or irrelevant to the needs of a beginner trying to get some basic, easy wins.

In this article, we are going to give an overview of the SEO basics needed for beginners. If you combine the following information with some practice, your visibility in organic search should improve and therefore your website should rank higher in search engines such as Google.

Research and Relevant Keywords

There are many tools, both free and paid versions which are available to help you collect a selection of keywords together for your businesses SEO. Initially, you need to think of what potential customers may type in to find you. For small businesses, targeting local rather than national, this will be a combination of both what you do and where you do it.

seo tips for beginners

As well as using your own initiative and keyword research tools it may also be worth searching for your selected keywords. This is because when you search for keywords, suggested keywords will also appear in the search bar as you type. Also, there will be a range of suggested keywords at the bottom of the page, if there are any relevant ones, add them to your list.

Optimise your META Titles and Descriptions

After you have collected a list of keywords, the next thing you will want to do is optimise your META titles and descriptions. This is an SEO element which is not displayed on page but available to edit in your websites control panel or SEO plugin.

NOTE: Page titles are what are shown within Google’s search results so we are aiming to portray what the page is about as well as tempt a user to click on our listing rather than others.

Optimise your META Titles and Descriptions

Our advice would be to include what the page is about, where your services or products are available and who the audience is, if possible. In an ideal world, you would like the keyword at the beginning of the title to aid click-through and also, for possible ranking improvements.

Also, consider META descriptions. This element is edited in the same place at your META title.

Optimise Page Content

As well as optimising your META content, we also want to optimise our page content. Using the keywords we collected as part of your keyword research, we would look to add these into your copy throughout a number of methods. These include:

  • Headings – H1, H2, H3 etc.
  • Copy
  • Images

optimise page content

Primarily, optimise your headings and subheadings to increase your keywords – where it is natural to do so. The next step would be to create copy that not only promotes, but accurately describes your business. Within this copy, try and aim to include all keywords which relate to the subject matter you are writing about. Further optimisation can take place on images via the image name, alt text and image description.

Implement these basic SEO tips and follow our advice on how to do so and you will see an improvement in your rankings and traffic.  For those looking for more information, here at Chameleon Web Services we do offer SEO training courses as well as SEO packages.

SEO Company

The Value Of SEO

The power of the Internet in 2019 must be taken seriously and if your business is not achieving visitors to a website then you need to think about how you find services and products yourself?

If you need help or a FREE SEO Audit then get in touch.

 

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.

HOS – House Of Sparkles Website

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It ihos home logos great to read about the HOS Home – House Of Sparkles success and this is what inspires others to go for it and set up their own business.

Mandy Hale’s quote is great here “There is nothing more beautiful than someone who goes out of their way to make life beautiful for others.”

The website HOS – House Of Sparkles setup by Layla Chapman back in 2016 with according to the Sun News Paper for just £40 is now a booming success with a turnover of £10.7 million. This is great to read and we really hope that people feel inspired by this but also understand that it takes a huge amount of hours and personal sacrifice with added luck to succeed. Previous failures often come before achieving success and the road to success is often difficult and we always admire success stories.

Successful people have a ridiculous level of persistence in making their dreams comes true and we see people here at Chameleon on a daily basis that want to make it online and we create a plan to achieve success for everyone from what we do, but often people never realise how much work is involved once you make it. We think it is easy to read articles like this forget this fact and it is important to have this in the back of your mind so not have false hope.

If you look at the likes of Sir Alan Sugar, he worked so hard to achieve the success he has today and he often refers back to his routes, even today in a tweet as he is attacked for being successful:-

Sir Alan Sugar Tweet

The road to success is a journey and you will never stop learning. Successful people learn new things every day improving a little and the snowball rolling effect makes them become great. This website success has been helped along due to celebrities such as Amanda Holden and Peter Andre and this is fantastic. We are sure that with the positive publicity the business it will grow even faster now as a result.

HOS Home Sun Article

We thought it would good to look to into this website further from an online marketing perspective because often success comes and businesses miss the basics. The growth of this company could come from hardwork, luck, organic growth, paid online advertising or something else and identify and help HOS achieve more growth from what we find.

When a business comes to us and asks us to audit a company we look into everything to understand and identify how success has been achieved.

We take a look at everything to understand what is good and what can be better, there is always something that can be better and we have been in the industry since 2001 and helped grow some of the most successful websites online today.

HOSHome.com – House Of Sparkles Website

The website HOS is currently looking lovely:-

HOS House Of Sparkles website hoshome.com

Back in December 2018 which is not very long ago at all the website didn’t look as nice and it very important to look at how a website develops and move forwards. Often changes are made a result of research to improve conversions or simply to improve the visual look. The HOS Home website looked like this:-

hoshome website 2018

The website in 2019 looks in-line with the competition and when we look behind the scenes at search engine optimisation aspects of the website it is missing vital information for Google to help it rank organically and this is something that HOS Home online development need to look at. Normally we would run and audit using our in-house software and then make positive changes after looking over the results.

The website is built using Shopify a hosted shopping website platform with multiple themes which requires very little programming experience. The website is using MailChimp for Shopify, Automatic Discounts, Searchanise, Covet Pics, Product Reviews Addon and MageWorx usage statistics as an example of plugins/extensions installed.

The website is hosted in Canada and on a server that is hosting websites we would not recommend to have in the same neighbourhood. We look at hosting as this is part of the search engines algorithm.

We found hoshome.com is hosted with over 1,000 other domains hosted on the same web server which uses IP address 23.227.38.32 and this web server is hosting web sites with explicit content. To show examples of the websites our system detected a simple ping command can be used to check the hosting to confirm this problem:-

HOS House Of Sparkles hosting

There is a possibility that all of the web sites on this web server may be affected as far as being blocked by web filtering software. Search engine rankings for all web sites using the same IP address may be affected as well. We always recommend looking at the IP address and ensuring a website is hosted correctly with a unique IP address and SSL certificate.

HOSHome.com – House Of Sparkles Website SEO Report

We have a complete SEO PDF report you can download here:

free seo report

When you carry out a Google search can see the company is paying for Google Adwords for its brand name to protect it presumably. However, this will result in people clicking on this and adding additional costs to the business when visitors are already heading to the website.

HOS House Of Sparkles Google

The home page www.hoshome.com meta title for example is <title>HOS Home | Luxury Furniture</title> and then the meta description is <meta name=”description” content=”Welcome to HOS Home. Affordable luxury furniture specialists. High end glamorous furniture at high street prices. A brand you can trust.“>

This could be improved but is in line with what Google is looking for in terms of the title and description.

If we then move to an internal page for example www.hoshome.com/collections/living-room we find the title is <title>Living Room Furniture | HOS Home</title> and the meta description is <meta name=”description” content=”The living room is where we spend the most time, create the best memories, and relax. For this, you need the perfect furniture for your living space. From sofas, coffee tables, media units & more. We have everything you need to design your living room interior.“>

This page could be improved to help tell search engines like Google what the content is about, but is a great starting point to achieve online success. It is clear that from only looking at a couple of internal pages they follow the same pattern. This shows that what we presume this is automatically generated meta titles and descriptions and the job is partially done right.

We scrapped the site to look to see what the Google spider would find and for example, we quickly found broken links on the website using our in-house developed scrapping software.

For example www.hoshome.com/pages/returns-policy we found a link created wrong:-

HOS House Of Sparkles broken link example

HOS House Of Sparkles broken link example code

You can see the coding is has been built as follows:-

<a href=”customerservice@hoshome.com”>customerservice@hoshome.com.</a>

In the screenshot, you can see also that another link has been built correctly, so this is a simple coding error when the page was created.

To fix this they need to add the “mailto:” which would create <a href=”mailto:customerservice@hoshome.com”>customerservice@hoshome.com.</a>

As we carry on looking into the site we spotted the site has been built with an error using two rel=”canonical” tags across the site.

If you look at the homepage for example:-

HOS House Of Sparkles canonical code

A website should only have one canonical tag.

A canonical tag is the method used to inform search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs.

This is probably because it is being generated by Shopify and also by a second extension adding SEO data.

A very important factor of ranking online is the power / trust a website has and this helps search engines determine whether or not to trust the website content and also it helps to identify the business links the website may have and the subject content to help place the website in a category.

Looking below we can see out of 100 the website scores 11 in trust and 18 in citation.

hos home power trust seo

 

To compare that against another website for a reference we have used WayFair.com and you can see below the trust is 54 out of 100 in terms of trust and 63 in terms of citation. The higher the trust the better:-

wayfair power trust seo

To increase the trust carefully selected backlinks need to be found and this is a subject in the SEO world that causes many issues. Here at Chameleon, we identify only the perfect links to try and find that will add value and we help clients create links organically by creating content that can be shared adding value to the users.

Looking at the link text known in the SEO industry as anchor text the links can be seen below and the geographical location of the links:-

HOS home anchor text

If we take a look at the traffic the website is achieving it is attracting a large volume of visitors already, but the traffic cost is low and this is due to the keywords ranking:-

hoshome.com semrush

HOSHome.com – House Of Sparkles Ranking Keywords

When we look at what keywords the website is ranking for it appears to be attracting its traffic via the brand name “house of sparkles”:-

HOS Home Ranking Keywords

 

So from what we can see the website strength isn’t its online rankings for keywords, it is something else which points us to Social Media as the main growth point of this business.

In the footer of the website there are links to the following social media accounts:-

https://www.instagram.com/hoshome_/

HOS Home Instagram

The Instagram account has 116K followers, but when we look at the sharing of posts this is relatively low which makes us think this is a lot of bot type accounts.

https://www.facebook.com/houseofsparkles/

HOS House Of Sparkles Facebook

From what we can see with the linked Facebook page being broken / hidden we think that actual FaceBook page https://www.facebook.com/HOS-Home-1525053811125655/ is in the process of being merged.

https://www.facebook.com/HOS-Home-1525053811125655/

HOS Home Facebook page real

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/HOSparkles/

HOS Home Pinterest

It appears that this business has grown as a result of Facebook and then recommendations from friends, family and celebrities which shows the power of social media.

So What Would Chameleon Do Next?

We would look at the website and hosting, ensure all the site is Google friendly and fix all broken links. Ensure that all touch points are working, for example the Facebook link going to a dead page is not good.

We would carry out on-page SEO across the entire website and make it fully search engine friendly and increase the trust of the website to help search engines like Google rank the content and grow the traffic to the website for keywords that are not brand related. The website could then take the power of Google and increase business turnover without spending on advertising.

We would look at the images and get these ranked in Google search results for window shoppers to find by mistake and this would result in higher conversions because if people are actively looking for the products that are being sold by image then the very fact they click on the image to view it means they more than likely like what they see.

Download a PDF report –

If you would like to understand more about this or wish us look into your website or a competitors, please get in touch.