Investing in SEO – how it works
Posted by Neil Palmer in 
If you are considering SEO, or at least sure that you need to get more traffic from somewhere, you are most likely in one of a few positions. You either spend heavily on PPC and are fed up with the ongoing cost, or you are not really marketing your site and get little or no traffic.
The truth is, there are only 3 ways to get traffic to your website. One is an ongoing PPC campaign, which offers an instant stream of traffic but is expensive, and offers a poor return on investment. Another is total branding via the Television, print and online. This is the type used by companies such as CompareTheMarket.com and MoneySuperMarket.com. It is only suitable for large organisations with a big budget / funding in place.
The only other option is SEO- Search Engine Optimisation. This gets you up the natural lisings on the search engines and can provide high levels of targeted visitors. After an SEO campaign a small amount of work is required to stay in the top positions, but the cost in minimal. SEO offers a better return on investment than all other forms of Internet marketing, but has higher set up costs than Pay Per Click.
Here is a simple example of why SEO works better than PPC:
PPC: 30 keyphrases in a PPC campaign with Google Adwords, daily budget of £30 equals a spend of £900 per month. A typical company breaks even in 3 years after start-up. This means the cost to a business over that period is £32,400, and this needs to be made back in profit for a business to work.
SEO: 12 month campaign targeting 30 keyphrases at £900 per month. With top 3 positions for all phrases after the 12 month period, a £100 monthly fee is charged to maintain the rankings. The visitor levels would be higher than the PPC campaign as there is no traffic cap in place like with Adwords. The cost to the business over 3 years would be £13,200.
As there would be no immediate traffic with SEO, we often recommend a PPC campaign to run alongside the SEO, to keep sales coming through during the SEO project. At £900 per month for 9 months, this would add £8,100, meaning a total cost of £21,300 for an SEO campaign even including some PPC at the start.
Long term, SEO is much better value than advertising with Google. The more time that passes by in the future, the better the investment looks. Contact us today for a quote on your website SEO. Our campaigns start at just £200 per month.
Call To Click Improves Mobile Experience
One obvious problem with browsing the Internet on a mobile device is the display size, and ability to find what you what on a web page. This is especially true of most e-commerce websites and search results pages on search engines.
Whilst most people don’t tend to look for retail items while travelling around, things we do actively seek are places of interest, restaurants and cafe’s and service providers like car garages. To help browsers get to the contact details of a page Google, through their Adwords programme, have introduced ‘Call To Click’. This is a feature designed to bring the contact details for a company to the top of the page in a mobile web browsing device, commonly known as Android phones.
By introducing this handy element into the handheld search results, Google have really made life much easier for the public to use the Internet quickly on their phones. While we wait for technology to improve, or even a different kind of application for web pages on smaller screens, this has resolved an issue many consumers had.
Google in turn will be hoping that local businesses will see the benefit in the service and sign up (if haven’t already done so) for Adwords. This means they will need to have a PPC campaign in place to use the service, something which undoubtedly inspired Google to invest in this new feature. The company will also have to opt in to the mobile content network.
In the past many firms have opted out of the mobile content network in favour of the desktop results (with Adwords). SEO firms target those paying for adverts in mobile network results as having a poor return on investment, and being harder to track for potential pay per click fraud. This is due to many millions of blogs around the World displaying ads through Adsense, and there are always reports of click abuse.
Google Local Advertising To Be PPC?
We, like many other website search engine optimisation firms, will have been a little concerned to see that, in North America, the Google local listings have been changed to have a more prominent status. It looks like the inevitable will soon happen, and these will be added to the Adwords program and become a paid for service.
This could be the start of Google protecting their income, in the face of increased competition from the Microsoft / Yahoo situation. As with any large corporation, the end result the shareholders look for is the profits. This will surely diminish with the potential rise of Bing and Yahoo, and as we know Microsoft are now committing an awful lot of cash to the cause, including powering the results on Yahoo. The aim of this being to create a genuine rival to Google and work on the 65% market share they still maintain.
So how do Google protect their revenue streams? Well for years the local listings have offered companies the chance to have a free advert pretty much bang in front of your face when searching for a local product or service. We didn’t really think that this would last, did we? SEO Clock believe it was just a matter of many firms getting to the position where they relied on these listings, which would put them over a pretty little barrel if Google decided that these would become pay per click listings.
So why are we concerned? Well having worked in the optimization industry, like many people reading this article, we rely on the best sites getting recognised by way of organic traffic. So much of the traffic is generated by number one and two positions; the thought of these being pushed out of site on anything up to a 19 inch monitor is pretty scary. With a large rise in paid for traffic, and SEO becoming less important in the marketing mix, we can see this industry becoming very difficult to operate in. Also the reduction in quality of site content is inevitable, when the need to pay per click has more importance than good original website content.
WE imagine work in the SEO industry will still exist, namely the optimization of the Google listings, and PPC management services. The need to make a site friendlier for navigation and user experience will be required. But the ‘top spot’ on Google will mean less than before and make it harder to sell SEO to prospective clients. We envisage a scenario where SEO changes to SEM (search engine marketing) which will emcompass all forms of marketing online.
SEO Agency
Some of the articles we have written explore the ways in which SEO can help your business, but what exactly is a SEO agency? They are quite new to the UK and it’s hard to know what to expect in terms of deliverables and costs.
As a leading SEO Agency we have had to learn like others in this market how to handle short term, medium term and long term contract work. The nature of SEO means very rarely are the clients you work with going to be around for a long time. Indeed when we perform well and the rankings are working, quite often just a small top up of work is required on a bi-monthly basis.
When we first evaluate a website, we need to consider the amount of work involved, the competition and how difficult the industry is to work around. By this we mean is there a lot of potential for articles and white papers to be executed, or is it a pretty thin arena where it is tough to post relevant comments and posts with a view to getting back links.
Every SEO agency will need to put in a proposal for a project, and timescales are always just an estimate. In certain cases we have finished work early due to a quick rise up the rankings, but with the awareness of SEO changing all the time, it is usually difficult to predict exactly how long implementation will take.
The structure of a SEO Agency will vary; some are smaller firms being just one or two individuals working together. We for example have 3 management staff, then internal and external bloggers, article writers and designers. Usually one manager will be assigned to each client and then they continue the process throughout, managing the reports and meetings at agreed timescales.
Costs again will vary between the different SEO Agencies, and the focus for determining the price will be dependent on man hours for management, content writers and the difficulty of the market. Tougher competition means more work from the management, especially on areas such as keyword density, blog, code to text ratio and the html structure.
It must be hard to choose a SEO Agency, especially when there are so many more around. The mix of past performance, price and what’s on the table in terms of targets are all part of the mix. The other thing that helps the icing on the cake is the relationship, just like with any business, and this is something we take great pride with our clients.
Professional SEO
One of the most important things to consider when marketing your sites is to make sure you only have professional SEO work carried out. The thing that many people do not realise is that poorly maintained optimisation can not only lead to not gaining rankings, but you could also lose positions you already have.
Professional SEO consists mainly of the way in which the work is approached in terms of work ethic. Because search engines like websites that are full of rich content and are very clear and transparent, any attempt to get around this is usually viewed as a non professional effort. There is no getting away from the fact that SEO is time consuming and laborious sometimes, as well as intricate and difficult. Professional SEO companies will tackle this head on, with a well thought out campaign that includes set targets, milestones, work schedules and timescales.
Because there are so many sites being optimised now, professional SEO is even more important as the bad sites will stick out like a sore thumb. Competition is fierce and SEO will only ever become costlier and more difficult. This is why choosing the right company with the right principles from day one is essential. Best practice methods include the following:
• Being consistent with meta details all the way through the site navigation
• Creating new, fresh and relevant content and making 100% sure nothing is duplicated
• Link building with carefully selected 3rd party websites, with genuine content themselves and a positively similar theme to the link target page
• Make sure that social networking profiles have plenty of content and don’t copy the text across hundreds of other profiles
• Structure the URLs so they have a definite path and a good directory navigation
• The directories in the URLs need to follow a theme to create a cluster of information
• Professional SEO should always mean updating content on a regular basis
• Internal link structure must be limited but is vital to building a quality site that aids the customer experience but also helps the page interlinking
• Articles and press releases must be posted to reputable sites which have accreditations, and only those with a clear history of good performance
• No ‘spam’ techniques should ever be applied even in a minor format, especially when it comes to keywords, meta stuffing and bulk posting on the internet of links
Speak to SEO’Clock today
"I would not hesitate to recommend SEO Clock. They have transformed our site from a small part of our business to a major source of income. Excellent value for money..." Andrew Peckett, Managing Director KatiePeckett.com
We are delighted with the results we have for our web business projects. SEOClock are a pleasure to work with and have an excellent attitude. We are benefitting from a large increase in sales. Jon Palmer, General Manager Linear Recruitment
We are experiencing great results across all our websites because of SEOClock. They are attentive and want to understand our business and markets. Thoroughly recommended. James Corry, Project Manager, Wilbourn Associates