Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine Optimisation Sheffield’

From a quick glance at various websites, it seems apparent that many companies are ignoring their SEO. When you overlook a content marketing strategy, you are restricting your business conversions, ignoring customers and ultimately forfeiting search engine rankings.

Consider you Strategy

When considering an SEO strategy, it is important to remember not to just focus on rankings. It’s true that rankings are important, but on their own they don’t allow a business to grow successfully or naturally. The best SEO is great content across the whole business.

A carefully crafted, well written product page can escalate a businesses customer conversion statistics greatly. It is also well advised that a good form of SEO content management is to allow the business to be social media friendly. An interesting blog post or the right tweet on Twitter can help attract new leads and incoming links from brand followers.

Where are Companies going wrong?

Larger companies have bigger marketing budgets and happily spend thousands on web design and pay per click management. This seems irrelevant therefore when they ignore the foundations of their SEO. As they concentrate on chasing the latest online marketing tactic, many businesses neglect the keyword rich content that helps build prospective links across the customer platforms. These customer personas are ignored as content becomes an afterthought.

How can I achieve good SEO?

A good SEO strategy will be one that encompasses many things. As mentioned earlier, social media is now playing a key part in SEO, as well as introducing key phrases and content.

Every piece of content is a way to engage, inform and sell; and a solid marketing strategy helps encourage communication with a designated audience. To allow this to span as many platforms as possible, you should consider product service pages, blog posts and articles.

Don’t neglect your SEO, embrace it and watch things grow.

Whilst wading through the search engine optimisation articles over the weekend I found some useful stuff on local SEO which will really help us deliver our SEO projects.

There were a few articles on good strong link building that can help get solid results in terms of rankings. Link building is not exactly straightforward as everyone seems to have a different opinion on what makes a good link and there is the added problem of the search engines continually changing their minds about what constitutes a quality link as well.

However, there are some universal similarities of opinion emerging that will really help our clients that are currently receiving the SEO service. The golden rule seems to be to get links from authority sites, with high page ranks that are also relevant to the site that we are linking to. Quality is definitely preferable over quantity.

Of course, adding fresh content is just as important as getting quality links. As long as it’s relevant. But good copy writers can be hard to find, particularly ones that also understand how to write from an SEO perspective. Fortunately we have a great team here with account managers, programmers and even directors that can turn their hand to penning a good article when they put their minds to it.

So we are adding articles to our SEO service as standard. We’ve got to keep the clients happy by getting them results!

We experienced another classic example yesterday of SEO encountering scepticism and being judged on results, whilst the same cannot be said for almost any alternative form of advertising. I never hear anyone placing an advert in a newspaper or directory on the condition that they write business as a direct result on threat of not paying for the advert. That’s just not how it works.

And yet clients insist on proof of return when embarking on an SEO project. It’s a good job we can deliver a return!

Whilst pressing on with our SEO Sheffield campaign we have yet again come up against ‘that’ directory (and others) as the main competitor in the eyes of the potential client. It’s understandable because these forms of advertising are almost an institution, so ingrained are they in our thought processes when it comes to advertising our business.

And yet we do not seem to be playing on a level playing field. I always ask whether or not they know how many people will look in that directory for the service offered by the client on a given day – nobody can ever tell me. I can tell them exactly how many people were looking for their services via the internet on a given day. I hear owners of businesses say things like, “well we need to be in this directory because everyone else is in there”, or “it’s a necessary evil”. I even hear people bemoaning the cost to appear in such a directory. I tend to enquire after how many leads the directory has generated for their company and hear the same answer, “I don’t know but I think it must be a lot.” And in the same breath they are complaining about the lack of new business. In short, they stick with what they know despite unknown results.

We can offer our clients a truly transparent, cost effective service that offers real return on investment. Once we get a foot in the door we are able to prove indisputably that our SEO service generates leads for our clients. Even the firms who were formerly adamant that a directory was the only way forward. We have happily run alongside their other advertising ventures and consistently outstripped them in terms of performance and cost efficiency. The result is that we prove our SEO service works.

So we are in fact changing the way our clients think about internet marketing and are enabling them to embrace the new methods of generating business. Most are reducing their spend with directories and local press and ploughing more into Search Engine Optimisation because of the excellent return that they receive. I think it is still important that a firm has presence in directories, but not at the expense of sound economic sense.

At the moment we are in the fortunate position of winning the vast majority of the Internet Marketing pitches we make to new clients. Usually we only dissect the pitches that we do NOT win to try and find out where we went wrong, how we could have been better etc. So it was quite refreshing yesterday to have a client congratulate us on winning their business and telling us that the reason they went with us is that we seemed to understand the most important thing to them – getting them more business.

Whilst the client was fairly sophisticated in terms of knowledge about SEO and PPC campaigns they bemoaned the fact that the other 2 rivals in the pitch completely bamboozled them with jargon. They kept telling them how good they were and what great clients they had, and how algorithms would affect them, amongst other, far more scary sounding beasts lurking in the dark corners of the internet ready to prey on the naïve company that strayed too near them. You get the picture.

Our pitch focussed on the client. We told them that traffic was important for both SEO and PPC and they should expect more of the right kind of traffic. Firstly they needed to rank highly, secondly we needed to examine how to improve the conversion of the traffic we drive to the site.

There’s nothing new there I hear you say. Well, ultimately we told the client that the only true way to measure our service, and for them to assess the value of our Internet Marketing, was in their ROI. That clinched it. We told them that once everything is stripped away; the jargon, the fancy terminology, the procrastinating on all things marketing, the lamentation of the economic climate – that we would get them more sales and they would make more money than they were spending with us every month.

So that was that. In the future we are going to start asking our new clients why they chose us because it’s now obvious to us that we need to know what we are doing right as well as what we are doing wrong if we are going to continue to compete.

I’ve been asked to explain a number of times this week by Sheffield businesses why they should consider implementing an SEO plan to improve the number of enquiries they receive through the internet.

I get asked this a lot. It’s normally from people who have heard about the internet as a sales tool and they’ve got a vague idea about SEO but are nervous about embarking on a project because they don’t understand it. There are lots of negative stories doing the rounds as well from people who have seen poor results from the service. They won’t have chosen the right partner to do it with, or might have tried to have a go themselves.

My answer to these questions is pretty much always the same. The proof of the service is in the pudding. Our SEO delivery achieves high rankings for your website when people are actively searching for your products or services. You can easily go onto Google or one of the other search engines and perform a search for your service to find out if you are up there. It’s a really transparent service.

It’s a very unique form of advertising. You could do a mail shot, but you don’t know how many people that receive it will be in the market and ready to buy from you at the time they open it. You could do a radio advert as well, but how do you know how many people listening at that time are in the market for your product? Even submitting to a directory such as Yellow Pages is a bit of a gamble because you don’t know how many people are looking for your service; all you get is distribution or readership figures. And if they are looking for what you do, your firm is in amongst all the rest of your competition.

SEO is a pull form of advertising. When people are sitting at home (or at work!) and searching for your service they are actively interested in it right here and now. It’s about as hot a sales lead as you can get. If your website is not put in front of them at that exact moment then you are not even competing for this extremely targeted enquiry.

Search Engine Optimisation is all about putting your firm in the shop window when people are actively searching for your products.

Keep checking back as I’ll be putting some case studies up next week so you can see how it works in practice.