Short answer is traffic, targeted traffic or enquiries coming to your website, or sales leads, great!How do we do it? Well, we won’t bore you with the technical jargon and cloak and dagger information, but try our best to explain it in layman’s terms for you.
Quite simply SEO (search engine optimisation) is a complex process that when carried out ethically and organically can not only bring more visitors to your site, but also more targeted visitors, to our customers we describe them as sales leads.
But what is more exciting about this type of lead? More importantly what differentiates this type of lead gathering from other forms of advertising is that it’s inbound. Quite simply if a potential customer has used the Google search engine and typed in “SEO company Scotland”, or SEO company UK, they were looking for you instead of you looking for customers!
It must not be overlooked that this was an inbound enquiry, i.e. they were looking for you, what I call a hot lead, as opposed to you sticking an advert in the local paper, TV or radio station and essentially spending thousands of pounds casting out a big net trying to reel in a few small fish.
SEO is the best money you will ever spend. Remember we will be sending leads/sales opportunities to you and what other form of advertising can actually prove a return on investment to you? When was the last time you worked out how many customers your newspaper/radio ad gained you?
SEO not only shows you where your leads are coming from but what search terms they are finding you for, even what time of the day, week or month they came to see you, and even where they come from geographically.
Now that you have them on your site, in your shop browsing your goods and offerings, you have a hot lead, an opportunity to get a sale!
So, what do we do get the leads into your site, how do we use SEO, to drive targeted leads, and traffic into your site?
Well, firstly and most importantly I would like to say that we use the right people, our SEO people are quite simply the best. This is not a 9-5 job for them, they live this industry, they breath it, they dream it. Sounds unbelievable? Come into our offices and meet them, and see for yourself.
SEO is an ever changing practice that is not to be underestimated, it’s enormous. I would go as far to say it’s a science that is constantly evolving, constantly growing and changing. If you listen to me long enough you would probably begin to think it was alive(maybe it is?).
SEO needs the right people behind it and the practices our people carry out are ethical, which makes a huge difference. There are many what we would call unlawful practices that could gain enormous short term results on the first page of Google, but we don’t employ them. Like anything in life when you cut corners and try to cheat, you get caught, and when you get caught by Google, the consequences are not good.
Imagine you are selling designer shoes and clothes in the biggest shopping mall in the world (Google) and you are thrown out and banished by your landlord (Google), almost in an instant, you have no business, no income or leads, and could face going bust.
Unfortunately there are a lot of rogue practices and companies/individuals willing to make a fast buck from you, and put you under by employing those practices.
I’m sure you have heard of BMW, with its head office and operations all based in Germany bu I bet you were not aware that Google banned them from www.google.de
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-02-04-n60.html
So, enough of the bad stuff, and onto the science and ethical practices of SEO:
ANALYSIS
Firstly when a customer comes to us with a view to have SEO work carried out on their site we initially have to analyse the site to see what keywords they already target (if any) and to see what onsite work needs to be done on the website (we call this on page optimisation). It’s a bit like having a health and safety assessment on your premises, we go through the nuts and bolts of your site, the text, images and layout to make sure that its been built to a standard that Google and the other search engines look for when they come to analyse your site.
There are at least 200 individual areas we examine and check when we do this and it is a very important first stage that gets you started. Thankfully there are a lot of customers out there who have employed good designers who make sure that the initial work is done and that the first stages as described above can be kept to a minimum.
CURRENT RANKINGS
Are you already showing on the search engines somewhere? Perhaps not page one, but page 20 or 35? We look at how you got there, and we also look at where you are on the other engines such as msn and yahoo, to see what we can do to get you on the all important first page.
KEYWORD RESEARCH
Keyword research is a very important step used in identifying what people actually type in the search engines to find your product, information or shop.
For example, most of our customers find us using “SEO Company Glasgow”, or “SEO company UK”, or just “SEO”, but we also get traffic from “Search Engine Optimisation Company Scotland” or “internet marketing company”.
We carry out an in depth analysis of what keywords your customers are using to find you or your competitors on the search engines, and for any given keyword or phrase we can tell you how many particular searches were carried out on the search engines in the pervious month, Example “SEO COMPANY” had 31,794 searches carried out last month!
That means that 31,794 individuals were interested in a process that our company carries out professionally and who probably only looked at the first two pages of results.
Just as well we show on page one and page two, and I can tell you that some of the 31,794 people that searched for SEO COMPANY talked to the people on our team.
THE COMPETION
Who is on page one, position one for a keyword/key phrase that your customers are using to find you, but are actually finding your competition?
We look at their site, not just once, but every day, we monitor changes, we log them, we work out why they are achieving such good results and we implement a strategy better them.
KEYWORD DEFINITION
After extensive research into the keywords and phrases used in your industry we agree with you the amount of keywords that you wish us to focus on.
This will vary from customer to customer, some customers will only want us to focus on a small amount of keywords for their SEO campaign and some will want us to focus on 1000 keywords, this is also how we define how much time we spend on your site initially and on a ongoing basis and according how much it will cost.
Article Submissions
We produce articles and online press releases related to your business on monthly basis linked to the keywords we use in your campaign, with links to your site within the content. We then release/publish these documents within trusted online sites that Google and the other search engines like to visit and read on a regular basis, this in turn links back to your site and gives you favourable search engine listing results, as the search engines see you updating your content on a regular basis.
Do you think your customers would like to come back to your site week after week and see that the content had not changed? Do you think they would stop visiting you?
LINK BUILDING
We will seek to link your site to as many other trusted sites available that are in your industry, for example if you are a retailer, we would link your site to National Retail Federation, or if you were a restaurant, we would link your site to a trusted restaurant review sites,
Google sees that you are linking to other trusted sources and in turn will actually trust your site more, and will results in you gaining better results, this is not something we do just at the start of your campaign, but a continual process of your campaign.
TIME SCALES
The time taken achieve good page one results differs according to how competitive your industry is, and anyone or company that guarantees you top ten results is not worth their salt and I would be extremely cautious about employing them to carry out SEO work for you.
If you have an un competitive keyword or phrase, then we can normally see results is 6-12 weeks, if on the other hand you are in a fiercely competitive industry then it can be anywhere between 4-12 months.
ONGOING WORK
Everything I have spoken about here is not something that we do on one occasion, but is completely and utterly ongoing. It’s like having your own full time SEO person working on your site, which in turn is why it’s so much value for money.
Please don’t forget that this is not all we do for you, the process is much more detailed, but I wanted to give you an insight into what SEO actually is, and what huge benefits it can reap for you.
If you have any questions, or would like to talk to me, please email me:
paul@360innovate.co.uk
Many Thanks
Paul Kerr
Director www.360innovate.co.uk
Tags: search engine optimisation, seo
