Many businesses will have a website, whether it was made by a family friend or a professional company, an online presence is essential in the current economy.
Online retail is expected to handle over £37bn worth of sales by the year 2014 and many retailers have seen the potential of their web presence. This online growth combined with many business schemes has seen a massive increase in small businesses getting their website online and ready for retail.
An increasingly popular and widespread method of promoting a website online is through the use of SEO.
SEO is commonly simplified as the process of making changes to a website to increase its search engine ranking. SEO would be able to raise your website in the rankings for relevant terms, so if you sold Bathrooms in Bristol your site would appear when users search for ‘Bristol Bathrooms’ in Google. There are many different SEO agencies and professionals who can assist in your website marketing, so we have compiled some tips to make sure you pick the most suitable.
Going Local
Search Engine Optimisation does not necessarily need to be carried out in-house, or even in the country, which is why many overseas companies have been set up to offer a similar service. Typically these will be Indian or Philippine companies who will carry out the work proposed, commonly it is of a very low quality and often using automated solutions which will get flagged as spam. Many customers we have spoken to have encountered some level of foreign SEO, with many giving unsatisfying reviews and one had even been penalised for work they had carried out on his behalf. The first place to search for an SEO consultant is your local area, this also benefits you as they are likely to know techniques which can help you in local search optimisation.
First Page Promise!
Guaranteed results should always make you a little cautious as SEO is a very dynamic sector which is constantly changing. Knowledgable SEO Consultants will know that promising results should not be done with the amount of search engine changes that occur on a daily basis. Do not mistake this for a poor service, or a lack of confidence in their service, but more a proper understanding of search engines and an honesty to make promises which cannot be upheld. Because of the ever changing nature of search engines there is never a finite date to the optimisation, it is very much a constant work in progress. Because of this there is no way to guarantee an organic result, but there is sneaky ways to still offer that guarantee. Some companies that do offer a first page listing will employ measures to ensure this is deliverable, such as the option to achieve this through a temporary paid listing which has very little benefit for the website owner. Obviously this is not what you require and is only a temporary solution to the problem. We recommend staying away from those who guarantee results as it is a sign that they do not fully understand search engines and their development.
Link Exchange Campaign
Another red flag should be waving on this one as a link exchange has many detrimental factors for your website. Link exchanging is where you link to one site in return for a link from them, this often has little benefit to both websites and can when misused can damage your search engine rankings. A measure often used in this exchange is to install a Links page, however Google will penalise a website with too many outbound links on a certain page. Installing a Links page used to be a common practice in SEO, however with recent updates many firms will search for one-way links rather than reciprocal links. Google realises that no one can completely control all the websites that link to you, however you can control who your website links to. This means that if your website was linking to a malicious or spam website, then Google would also penalise you through the indirect relationship. These links also act as an exit point on your website, and will often turn away many potential customers. Either way there are no real benefits from a link exchange partnership anymore and will only serve to harm your SEO.
SEO Pricing
Working with many SEO Consultants, Agencies and Firms in the UK and the US has taught us one important thing, you do not always get what you pay for. This methodology has often been used as a rule of thumb for SEO companies in that you get what you pay for. There seems to be a trick with many of the services though as they are managed by salesmen, but the work is carried out by someone else. This is misleading as you are signing up based on what the salesman says, which is why you should always speak to the person actually carrying out the work for your website. Rather than speaking to the salesman, try and speak to the techy who will be carrying out the work, this will give you a better understanding of the service. Often questions pitched to a salesman would be returned with confusing and vague answers which showed they did not know the full details of what they were selling. A good question we came up with was to get them to explain the ‘canonical’ tag and how it is used in optimisation. Many answers we received were vague and confusing. You would be suprised at how many of the most expensive and supposedly reputable companies would not be able to answer this correctly.
Using this guide you can be sure to find someone suitable for your website optimisation, whether it be Bristol SEO Services or nationwide. There are lots of high quality and affordable SEO Consultants available so try not to be put off by a bad experience. Just make sure you ask lots of questions, get testimonials and proof of past work that has been completed by them. This can often work well if you are searching for industry specific SEO Consultants as some will specialise in certain sectors such as eCommerce or seo for small businesses.
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