We often get concerned companies and clients contacting us as they are either contacted by a rogue SEO company that gives them a SEO report showing them in a bad light or perhaps they have taken advantage of a free trial with a SRO tool that tells them they need to improve on some aspect of their site. In general these type contacts are interesting to us but never result in us making any ‘knee-jerk’ changes to the site as the person has either been contacted by a ‘SEO Salesman’ or they have focussed on a tool / report that is either irrelivant or not giving them the full information needed to make an educated assesment of the SEO needs of their websites. The following two conversations from 2 sample website owners demonstrate the fact that although concern about your website’s ranking / positioning is healthy you shouldn’t be mis-directed by sales orientated SEO companies.
1 [Concerned Website Owner] Got this email which raises some valued points why is my site not listed with these search engines if a search with key words I dont come up only through Yell and Checkatrade do I get listed? [link to seo company claiming that you need to be ‘first found’ when searched for.
[Website Designers] Thanks for forwarding this to me, I get a lot of these type things and always find them interesting, firstly these type of companies do not have your best interests at heart, they are the cowboys of the website promotion world see the thread below to see: Read this thread [link to a forum site where there are many website owners that are unhappy at the service received by this SEO company], the thread was started by someone I know through business. The way they ‘frighten you’ is by picking on a phrase for a new website that isn’t ranking well and telling you that your competitors rank higher than you, you have a fairly new website that is growing its visitor numbers that already has search terms starting to rank higher. Just for reference here are some search terms you are listed for in Google.co.uk that prove you are ranking highly for ‘relevant searches’.
The majority of our ‘off site’ SEO work happens once the site has been paid for and working with you we can help you build your visitor numbers (last 30 days you had many visitors to your site that represents a 20% increase from the month before). We will spend more and more time on your site over the next month to promote (polish) it and give you a list of things I recommend that you and Emma complete to help the site rank better.
2 [Concerned Manager] Please look at the lists below, these keywords are organic keywords built into the websites of two of our competitors. You will see that our site falls short by along way in comparison to the number of keywords on the site as we only have 2 meta tag keywords. It may be worth instructing a good SEO company to look at optimizing the site and adding at least another 18 relevant organic keywords to the site.
[Delicious Webdesign] This is a worthless comparison from a worthless keyword tool that is probably out of date (think its using the old site’s data as its referencing old pages and obviously the old site only had a small bit of text). If you are looking at your websites ‘SEO’ I am impressed and here to help and advise you obviously but you are barking up the wrong tree here looking at a keyword tool that is out of date. Its like myself if I was to be getting windows for my new house and focusing on the ‘mastic you are going to use on my windows’ instead of the ‘big picture’ of what the window will look and work like, in other words you need to look at the overall picture when thinking about evaluating your website in terms of SEO.
If you have the resources and idea to update / promote your site as I think you do then I recommend these things
1 Get us to create an integrated news section / blog for your website and use it regularly (build expert content)
2 Create more content and update existing content on all pages (add new products and services)
3 Create a Twitter account and start sharing your news / updates
4 Use your facebook page and get people to ‘like it’
5 Would be great for you to have videos of your products and to have a youtube channel to display them, have this linked from your website.
6 You could also have a page on your website about your products (video) or you could have embedded video within your website pages that are relevant to the product / service.
7 Get us to integrate social icons on your website
Have a look at this full ‘generic’ list of SEO ideas / recommendations for you to browse and possibly complete yourself.
[Website Owner] Can you set up a blog on our site, let us know the cost. We will endeavour to implement your other suggestion, Thanks again,
[Delicious Webdesign] A New customised Blog will be installed and setup for you, all menu navigation will be updated to include the new ‘News’ section and will give you admin access details once installed (prior to customisation work and inclusion within the website’s navigation) to allow you to learn how to use it (add posts / photos / categories etc.). More details here about blogs on websites.
