Or "You get what you pay for".
Yet hundreds of business owners are being duped by offers of cheap Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
I hesitate to use the word 'lazy' but it has to be because they don't want to, or don't know how to, ask some simple questions and do some digging before handing over the keys to their business reputation.
Please, run a mile if you're offered:
At best it will relieve you of some hard earned revenue. At worst it could mean completely rebuilding your website, your traffic numbers and your reputation from scratch. Sounds like I'm getting a bit hysterical, but I have heard of businesses that end up in exactly this pickle.
I can sympathise with a business that wants to save money, but why take the cheap option and hand over responsibility for something so vital to someone who could do so much damage, without being very sure they could be trusted? Do you hire full time employees the same way? Sorry to sound so grumpy, but it's just not good business.
Professional SEO's are NOT cheap. If you can't stump up the budget, you'd be better off with a modest PPC campaign like Adwords – at least you will get results. Or learn how to do it yourself (Here's a DIY Checklist)
What you get with cheap or shoddy SEO is:
No matter what they tell you. If you want to be on the front page of Google you have to EARN it. And the word 'earn' doesn't exist in the same sentence as 'shortcut'.
Good SEO professionals should talk to you about :
They should also properly manage your expectations and warn you it will take from three to six months to START seeing results.
Anyone willing to share any horror stories or hard earned lessons? Or even challenge the premise?!
]]>It's also because there are so many factors at play that people can get obsessed about one or other tactic hoping it will be the "secret ingredient". SEO can get very complex at the technical end, but people forget to take into account the competitive environment they are in. Sometimes obsessing over duplicate content issues and "page sculpting" simply isn't worth the benefit you get out of it.
And, some people are just regurgitating what they have read or heard – not what they have found out through experience.
Lots of people will say SEO is a waste of time, money and effort. It's true that your could be throwing money away on 'snake oil salesmen' who use dodgy, short-term practices.
It is most likely to be wasted if you don't have your keyword strategy in place. But healthy organic rankings are (once you get them) more effective and sustainable than paid promotional methods.
No - they can't. Not unless they are talking about paid listings such as Adwords. Results vary depending on the competitiveness (which they can only guess at before starting), your budget, how good your products and services are, the size of your market and many other factors some of which are outside any one companies control.
And if your website is new, it will typically take 3-6 months of consistent, focused effort. And it is hard work.
Unlikely – especially following from Google's updates in the first few months of 2012. These specifically targeted practices that built links between sites in a 'group' of sites linking to each other. Links from directories containing thousands of links to other, unrelated businesses not even in the same country are also essentially worthless.
While a site may rank highly purely on the strength of it's back links, it's quite hard to do this if you aren't offering something on your website worth linking back to.
On site SEO is still an important foundation. And we see site's ranking well with almost no back-links, because their on-site SEO is good and their competitors aren't.
Every site works in it's own competitive niche.
It has it's own marketing and content strategy that will affect SEO strategy. The secret is that people looking for a silver bullet can still be fooled into paying thousands of dollars instead of doing the work that everyone knows is necessary.
Google can only determine bounce rate if a website has Google analytics loaded on it – and there are thousands of sites that use other reporting packages. You don't see those sites being penalised do you?.
Also, a single blog article that has amazing insight and thousands of links back to it may well have a 100% bounce rate. But that page will still rank highly.
Find out more about bounce rates and to reduce them
If your site has been built without SEO in mind, it's too late. The structure may not be oriented around search terms, and the technical elements disregarded.
A lot of confused business owners will say their site was optimised by their web developer. And maybe it was, but SEO takes consistent ongoing effort, particularly to build links and target long tail keywords with targeted pages. SEO is as much (if not more) about building roads to your business than about building the destination in the first place.
This one has been around a long time. You don't need to pay to submit your site to any of the search engines. If your site has been built properly they will find it. You can submit a site map to Google which can speed the process up and help make sure it is being indexed properly.
Nope. This one was so well and truly abused that the search engines have been ignoring the keyword tag for a long time.
All it does it make it easier for your competitors to know what keywords you are targeting.
Don't just ask your web designer/developer. A lot of them say yes without understanding anything about SEO.
So, how can you tell?
]]>One reason why you shouldn't employ them - it's hard to become un-blacklisted or climb back from the ranking wastelands.
First, the distinction between Black Hat SEO vs White Hat SEO is a bit contentious. The reality is that in many markets, getting a high ranking will necessitate tactics that you wouldn't bother with if search ranking wasn't important. Such as article and directory submissions.
In my view, Black Hat SEO are techniques used to improve search engine results page (SERP) performance in a way that leads to a bad outcome for users and the internet in general. Ones that break search engine rules and create poor user experiences. Automatic website creation, article spinning and blog comment automation are some examples because the end result is rubbish sites with duplicate, poor quality content.
While not 'illegal' or even against anyones guidelines, these techniques are frowned on by search engines and many in the SEO community.
The problem is they may well work in the short term. But if you are contemplating paying someone to improve your SERP ranking and they employ any of these techniques you risk having your site disappear from the search results when Google catches up and changes it's algorithm.
Even if this doesn't happen, the results are not sustainable so you're likely wasting your money anyway.
These techniques include:
Post Penguin and Panda updates to Google's algorithm, site owners are now wondering how to get rid of back links to their site that are coming from 'bad neighbourhoods' or otherwise hurting their ranking. This is hard to do.
This article that explains in detail what can happen when Google decides to penalise tactics like link farming.
Good SEO takes time and effort to do and to get results.
]]>Search Engine ranking is a number that refers to the position your site appears in a list of search results, divided into pages of 10 listings (sometimes referred to as SERPs).
So when I type 'Italian Restaurant' into Google, the websites that have some relevance to this phrase will be listed in the order that Google think shows the most relevant listings first.
If Google thinks a page on your site is the 9th most relevant page, you will appear 9th – which would put you on the first page of results. If your page is the 66th most relevant result, you'll be on page 7.
First page is the ideal because people will only look at the first few pages of results. The higher up the list you are, the more visitors to your website you will get and as a result, more enquires, more sales etc.
One of the fundamental things people don't think about when they ask this question is that their search ranking will be different depending on the search phrase.
You might rank number 1 for 'Italian Restaurant' but number 77 for 'Good pasta restaurant'.
Your ranking will change over time, as you and other site owners add content and links to their sites.
If people can't find your site, you won't get any business from it. It is that simple.
So it stands to reason that if you don't know where your site ranks then you are missing out on a critical piece of information to improve revenue.
The short answer is that Google uses a formula (or algorithm) that decides where your website is ranked for a given search term. It's complicated and they won't tell anyone what the formula is.
But there are generally accepted and proven tactics that will improve your search ranking.
For this article, let's just say it can be a) hard work and b) take some time. You can't pay Google* or ask them nicely to be on the front page.
A lot of people will simply type in the name of their company and see what page they are on.
This approach is flawed for a number of reasons:
There are free search ranking tools out there, just search 'search ranking tool'.
The problem with these tools are that most only look at google.com, Bing and Yahoo.com.
Which is pretty pointless if you are a small local business in the UK, Australia or New Zealand (or any other country). Google.com is not going to be the engine that their prospective customers use.
SEOBook has a free down-loadable tool for Firefox that doesn't do too bad a job and you can find out your ranking in google.co.nz (but not pages from New Zealand).
If you are signed up for webmaster tools, you can look under 'Your site on the web' and 'Search Queries'.
However, this report can be a little unhelpful, particularly if your traffic levels are low and you can't specify the terms you are interested in if it's not in the list. If you are ranked lower than 30, it will just tell you "Page 3 +"
There are several software tools you can purchase to avoid having to check your results manually. Many have limited free or trail versions so you can try the software out. If you want to purchase one, most will set you back several hundred dollars with the possibility of ongoing fees to keep the databases up to date.
These tools allow you to check multiple keywords at once, and (importantly) the more sophisticated ones will allow you to specify which country you want results for (ie NZ)
However, some of these tools are violating Google's terms of use by scraping SERP results. Although this will not get your website banned, Google may block your IP address for a while, preventing you from accessing the engine.
Find one (such as SEO PowerSuite) that use API keys to avoid violating search engines policies.
The most popular of these tools include:
Each of these will include slightly different mix of tools and purpose but will include any of the following:
Here at Essentee we run search ranking reports that will save you time and a large cash outlay.
We'll add some recommendations in for you as well so you know where to start to improve your website's search ranking.
If you have the time and/or only want a general idea of where your site sits, then use one of the free tools or do it manually.
If search ranking information is important to the success of your business, you'll need to outlay some cash for a piece of software (or purchase a report).
But this is a small outlay for what is a very important piece of information.
*Unless you are paying for Adwords Ads
]]>You hear 'content is king' all the time, but businesses continue to live with 5 or 6 page websites and expect to compete in the crowded web world.
If your website is structured correctly, it can be easy to add new content about topics you know very well. The first place to go to as a source of this content is your own knowlege about your business.
This knowledge can be turned into content and published on your website. Over time your website will grow and become more attractive to both the search engines and people.
Not only that, fresh unique content is easier to share.
Keywords or search phrases are a representation of how your audience expresses their need, so your content should respond directly to that need.
Do some research to find out what terms people are using and in what volumes.
You can get the information from:
Don't rely on a couple of short general phrases - people search using a huge range of variations based around a 'seed' word. You may have heard this referred to as the longtail.
Your site must be structured in a way that it can grow.
This means having different sections for each of your target keywords groups is critical.
A keyword group is a collection of keywords that contain your seed word.
For example a keyword group around the seed phrase 'bead jewellery' might contain the search terms "bead jewellery for beginners", "diy bead jewellery", "glass bead jewellery tutorial", "create your own bead necklace" etc
Within each section, you then add a page for each individual keyword phrase.
For example:
(We are not experts in Ginea Pigs - this is just to illustrate the point!)
So imagine if your site had a page 'Our services' with a list of the services you offer all on one page.
This one page will be difficult to optimise. You can only target one or two keywords per page.
This is why web people who know anything about SEO will talk about the underlying structure being critical.
]]>So you do all those things already...What can you do that other people might not be doing?
Use:
And some extras:
Why are we recommending these?
Because this collection represents a bunch of things that many people don't worry or care about .
It's possibly because some are put in place or controlled by technology. Believe it or not, some big content management systems have constraints that make these things harder.
Or it could be that your IT team, developers or CMS vendor doesn't understand how important search results are, how competitive your market is and that these things can make a difference.
Many SEO'ers will tell you that you only need to worry about getting back links and social shares. This may - or may not - be true for your industry and competitive environment. We just think it's better to have all your bases covered.
Make sure your relationship with your IT guy/girl/team or web developer is great.
Then you can have a discussion about them putting these 'other' bits in place.
Make it clear that you need their expertise and how it contributes to the success of your business.
If you are using an outsourced/hosted technical solution, you may need to put the hard word on the provider!
]]>Organic search results.
Paid search results.
Organic search is free. It's organic because where your site lists changes depending on a range of factors, many of which are out of your control.
Paid search results means you pay a fee for the search engines to display a link to your website. These are also referred to as pay-per-click or PPC advertising because you (the advertiser) only pays when someone clicks on your ad. Because many businesses rely on organic search, there is less competition for a paid listing, so it is more likely that you will be listed higher.
Which is better?
Organic search is free, and provides better value in the long term if your site is well optimised and performs well in terms of search list ranking. But it does take time (i.e. months) and quite a bit of effort if you are in a competitive market.
Paid advertising is more immediate and easier to track so you can get a better feel for the success and return of a campaign. In an ideal world, you would choose to do both, but it depends on your budget.
]]>Most (but not all) online directories such as Finda, NZS.com and the Yellow pages do not provide SEO benefit because they add something called a 'no-follow' tag to links back to your website. But some do.
More importantly, these directories are bigger, have more contentand better search 'rank' than most small business could ever hope for. Souse it.
Your listing in Finda, NZS.com or Yellow.co.nz could come up on the first page if you create focused listings (using your keywords of course) in those directories. And does it matter that it's their listing or your website if the searcher clicks on it?
One of our clients gets 36% of their website visitors from online directories such as the yellow pages (17%) and Search NZ (11%).
]]>Small business in NZ don't often have access to the same kind of resources or budgets, so must focus on the fundamentals that are going to get maximum return for the level of investment they can afford.
So what is the biggest mistake we see?
"I type my company name into Google and I come out on top!"
Well - yeah. If it worked that way, we wouldn't need the yellow pages - the white pages lists company's alphabetically and is easy to use.
Of course your business is going to be the first result if your company name is even somewhat unique.
But it relies on people having already made the decision to deal with you.
The sale is half way made already!.
Your businesses may be missing out on all the potential customers that don't know you . NZ small business rely a lot on networks and referrals. This is fine but why wouldn't you want business from those people who you haven't met yet?
To be fair, with their limited resources, SEO can be daunting for the one or two-man band.
Other common mistakes include:
A good SEO consultant should be able to provide a level of assistance to suit any budget, although if your funds are modest, you will have to do a lot of the work yourself. And you'll see the return.
]]>