Your SEO Questions Answered
What is SEO?
Search engine optimisation is the name given to making changes to a web site to move it up the search engine results pages.
For example, if you are a plumber in Great Yarmouth and you want to be found when a customer types 'trusted local plumber in Great Yarmouth' into Google, you will need some SEO work done to your web site.
Obviously, the higher up the search results page your web site comes the better because more customers will be able to find you so it's a cost effective way of marketing your business.
Why are your packages so cheap / so expensive?
Like most things, the cost of SEO packages with different providers can vary considerably. We price our packages at what we think is a fair price because they are affordable for all sizes of business but not so cheap that it's not sustainable for us.
What do your SEO packages include?
Quite simply, everything that you need. SEO is a hundred different minor tweaks to that add up to moving your site up in the search engines. You have to do the full range of checks and changes to make it work so whether you need some changes to your web coding, image tags adding, incoming links building, content adding or improving the speed of your web site, we do it all.
How will I know it's working?
Before we start working on a new project we like to get an idea of how well your site is performing at the moment. We do this by checking where your site is ranked for the various keywords that you have chosen so that we can monitor their progress as we go. We also install Google Analytics which will tell us how many people are visiting your web site every week.
Once the SEO work starts, we will see the site climb in the search engine results which will mean more people will visit your site and we will be able to track both of these. Ultimately though the test is whether you start getting more enquiries.
We will send you regular keyword ranking reports and Google Analytics reports so that you can see for yourself how well the work is going.
Should I go for SEO or Adwords?
There are a few differences between search engine optimisation and Google Adwords. Google Adwords are great and we do use them for some customers because it allows you to get to the top of the search engine results pages almost instantly. The downside is that with Adwords, every time someone clicks on your advert and goes to your web site, it costs you money - that's whether the customer buys anything from you or not.
SEO gives you a much cheaper, longer term strategy of getting to the top of the Google rankings and is much more cost effective than just using Adwords.
Why don't you do contracts?
Some companies do make you sign a 12 month contract for SEO work but quite honestly, it's not needed. We have worked on some sites where we have started the search engine optimisation work and then the site has done so well, the customer has cancelled after a month because they could not take on any more work. There would have been absolutely no point in him paying for another 11 months' of work.
There are so many X factors, it is impossible to predict how well the site will perform once we start the work. Sometimes things 'pop' after just a month, other times it takes a few months to get going. Locking you into a contract is pointless and it only benefits the SEO company, not you the customer.
All we say to people before we start is commit to a budget of three months because that is usually how long it takes to see a significant improvement in the rankings. You can cancel after a month if you want to but we like to be honest and realistic.