SEO is one of the most misunderstood concepts of recent times. We receive a lot of email from people trying to sell us SEO services which we do find funny, as a London SEO agency!
SEO is one of the most misunderstood concepts of recent times.
We receive a lot of email from people trying to sell us SEO services which we do find funny, as a SEO agency!
Let’s just take a minute to absorb why they might think it is a good idea to sell SEO to an SEO agency. Aside from the fact they need lessons on target marketing, we are also left to conclude that they are simply using a buzzword to make money. We’ve seen everything from £50 a month to £5,000 a month publicly touted about (and even higher in London).
At £50 a month, you are not going to get effective SEO, which takes years of knowledge, time and skill. It is also much harder or near to impossible to implement on some websites. So a blanket quote from anyone who hasn’t actually reviewed your website is going to be from someone either trying to con you or who truly doesn’t know what they are doing.
Please, don’t let them near your website. You can’t always undo bad work and it can take many months to work out why your site has been demoted or delisted.
Wheareas £1.000 a month may be more realistic, depending on how much or what percentage of that is actually put to good use.
If an expert is working on your site a one day per week, doing analysis, generating reports and making improvements to the code, this would be extremely good value for money.
However, are they actually an 'expert' and are they even spending one hour per week doing anything at all? Or are you just funding a big firm with huge overheads, a board of directors and a fleet of sales people? Unfortunately, this is also all too common.
So what is SEO? Search Engine Optimisation is the art of consistently doing the right things.
The more correct things you do, the more often, the more it makes your website interesting to search engines. This means your website gradually moves higher, until it appears on the first page of those search engines when someone searches for businesses like yours (known as organic search).
Ideally, SEO starts when your website is built (in such a way that it meets certain web standards and technical criteria) and you can then choose to continue to improve your score over time. If you don’t have a professionally built website to start, then making progress after that point is more difficult, but not always impossible.
There are over 100 items that need to be done to improve a website's SEO score. It is possible to do yourself, given a few years of study and investment of money in SEO tools, but if you can’t do that, then you should consider hiring a expert.
An SEO expert should be able to do four main things:
- Demonstrate simply how they have improved their clients' websites and the impact that’s had on their business
- Help you with which phrases people use to search your business and what locations you are looking to market your business in
- Charge you a reasonable amount for improving your website SEO (depending on whether your website has been built professionally).
- Show you monthly update reports detailing where you are for organic search terms so you can see whether what they are doing is working or not. You should also have access to independent reports yourself, so you can check their veracity.
Stay away from anyone who wants to tie you into a contract. The effects of proper SEO are noticeable and trackable and anyone worth their salt will be able to show you what they are doing, why and it’s value.
