When people want to find a product, service, place to eat or pretty much anything at all they go to a search engine. It is a simple fact of the modern business that being on the first page of the search results means getting traffic, enquires and customers. It is also a fact of modern business that getting there is hard and there are a never ending queue of freelancers, agencies and marketing people saying they can get everyone to the top. 427 offer a clear and honest approach to SEO; we help businesses to understand the processes and how it all works as well putting a plan in place to start seeing some results.
Search Engines and How they Work
When people in SEO talk about results they are really only referring to Google. There are other search engines but the usage is so small it is to make any effort to rank on them a bit of a waste of time. Bing and yahoo combined only account for around 30%of all searches and many would quote less.
Search engines simply use mathematical algorithms to calculate how relevant any given page is in relation to the search someone is typing in. It really is that simple so to rank well a page needs to be more relevant than every other page. This relevancy could be related to content, site speed, page layout and user experience, how many times people have landed and left a page and also geographic location. It is also down to how many other sites have links pointing to the chosen site. There are a lot of factors involved but they are all logical and easy to understand, the hard part is knowing how and what to do to increase the quality of each factor.
The other side of this logical coin in that Google and other search engines are also looking for sites that are trying to beat their system. So they have guidelines and levels of activity that they consider too artificial or “Spammy”. Spam techniques include building huge amounts of links in a short time, getting links from poor quality sites, mentioning key terms too many times, creating small pages to rank for each term with no real value…the list goes on.
427 can help you navigate the confusion that surrounds SEO by first making sure you understand it. After that a plan can be created and implemented. There are situations where SEO may not be the right path initially and other marketing channels would be a better choice and we can advise accordingly.
SEO – Smoke and Mirrors?
Search engine optimisation is certainly one of the digital marketing options that seems to be the most mysterious to many businesses. Often it is the people that provide this as a service that seem to perpetuate this myth. It is all too common to not disclose the type of work they do for clients each month so they are able to charge large amounts of money to businesses hoping to reach the top of the rankings. What they often deliver is not quite what the client hoped for. Some low quality providers simply get the client ranking well for terms that are not very popular and so do not drive any traffic or new business in. This is a common tactic and one that many a fee paying business has fallen fowl too. Other tactics employed are over complex reporting so the data is so hard to understand that the client simply tends to nod and keep paying. The agency will make it all seem so complicated and hard to understand that whatever they say is accepted whether the results are good or bad.
427 believe SEO should not be over complicated and offer a clear and no-nonsense approach to this highly important marketing channel.
SEO – The Reality
SEO is a complex process but the aims and major factors in it are not. What makes it something most businesses are not able to do is the time it takes to work and making sure all SEO work is done within Google’s guidelines. There is a huge amount of SEO information available online, much of it is out of date and by implementing this advice a business could see themselves losing ground in the rankings and not gaining it.
SEO takes time…a lot of time; this is the reality of the process. There are no guarantees either, with so many factors effecting rankings including what Google themselves do and what the multitude of competitors do the results will be constantly changing and getting to the top can be a long slog.
SEO does really work! After all the time and investment there is absolutely no doubt at all that SEO can be the most high performing marketing channel available to a business. When a company ranks for the terms people are actually typing in, they have engaging and useful pages for people to visit and the right offering then often SEO is the only type of marketing needed.
Get In Touch
If you feel your business might benefit from better rankings, or you have attempted to implement an SEO strategy with less than positive results than get in touch today. 427 can help you understand how it all works, we can even help review reports from your existing agency if you have concerns about the quality of their work.