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Search engine optimisation is a long-term digital marketing strategy designed to push your website and its corresponding content to the top of the organic search engine results in order to drive large quantities of free traffic to your website.
It is a complex activity that requires a blend of technical knowledge, efficient user experience, content writing, and online networking. While it can take months to turn a profit, once your website ranks well organically, you’ll kick yourself for not starting sooner.
We use search engines such as Google, DuckDuckGo, & Bing every day, but have you ever wondered why you see certain websites at the top of page one, while other websites that appear to offer the same information can appear on pages two onwards?
It’s all controlled by those search engines’ respective algorithms. Drawing from a range of indicators such as content relevance, website speed, user experience, and site ‘trustworthiness’, those algorithms choose which websites appear where based on their likelihood to give their user base the quickest answer to questions.
So how does this help you understand how SEO works? Simple. You need to convince these algorithms that your website deserves to be at the top of page one instead of another site.
Search engine algorithms update and change regularly, and convincing them to replace tried-and-tested page 1 websites with yours takes time. You need to be prepared to invest in SEO for the long term, and by long-term, I mean at least 12 months. You will see monthly improvements such as an increase in traffic there, a better conversion rate here, slightly more conversions somewhere else, but it takes time.
Generally, from month nine onwards, SEO campaigns start to perform notably better. Your site has proven to be a hub of relevant and helpful content and now you can start competing in the big leagues. When SEO campaigns reach this stage, they become immensely profitable, and will outperform almost every other marketing channel.
While the fundamental strategy for SEO may be similar for most websites, the volume, quality, and KPIs are different for everyone. For this reason, SEO doesn’t have a fixed cost. I make sure to quote your campaigns based on what they actually need to get you where you’re going. This means there is no fixed answer to this question, and the best way to find out what you should be paying for SEO is to get in touch.
While they both involve search engine listings, they are very different. Google Ads is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing platform that rockets you to the top of page 1 straight away, and charges you for every click you get. Once you turn it off, you stop appearing immediately and won’t come back unless you start paying again. Everything has a cost, and the profit you make from Google Ads will be lower than SEO.
SEO takes a long longer, and while you don’t pay for the traffic, you’ll be paying an agency to do the work required to get you to the top of page 1. It takes months to get you anywhere of value, but once you are there, there are generally no further costs involved outside of maintaining your position.
You can, but it’s not advisable. Google Ads and other PPC tools are an integral part of the digital marketing arsenal, and they attract different audiences. However, when your website organically reaches the top of page 1 for your chosen keywords, you need to remember that you’re still appearing underneath four paid ads, and sometimes even Google Maps or YouTube snippets. Some people won’t scroll to the organic results, and so switching off Google Ads can save you money in media spend but lose you revenue & leads as a result. For best results, it’s best to leave them both running, but tailor your Google Ads strategy to go where it can be the most use.
No. Remember, we’ll be trying to influence a computer algorithm. We know what it likes, and we know what it doesn’t like, but like any computer program a search engine algorithm can access, interpret, and apply a huge volume of data in seconds that would take humans days.
We can’t control the decisions these algorithms make, nor can we force them to make a decision in our favour. We have to put our best foot forward and hope that search engines like what they see. In my experience, about 1 in 3 SEO campaigns go nowhere, so any agency that tells you SEO is a sure thing is lying to you. That said, you have to be in it to win it, and while the odds may not sound that enticing, not doing SEO forces you to be dependent on other channels such as PPC & social media, the costs of which will continue to go up for the rest of time.
A colleague of mine described it perfectly a few years ago. The best time to start SEO was ten years ago. The next best time is today. Spot on, Sami.
About five years ago, SEO agencies loved guaranteeing rankings. Page 1 or your money back. They would then choose low volume keywords with equally low competition, get you meaningless rankings to ‘fulfill’ their guarantees, then continue to underdeliver for the rest of your campaign. There are no guarantees in SEO for reasons outlined in the previous FAQ, so choosing an agency that offers you guarantees will likely leave you with a large hole in your bank account and not a lot else to show for it. When it comes to SEO, the lower the risk, the lower the reward, and guarantees are about as low risk as you can get.
Maybe. Maybe not. A lot of SEO revolves around technical knowledge of how websites & search engines work, with a healthy dose of content writing & data analysis. If you’re not very good at any of this, then no, you probably can’t do SEO yourself.
People make careers out of being SEO specialists, so unless you’re able to take on a full time job on top of your full time job, then it’s better to side with an agency.
A backlink is simply a hyperlink to your website that comes from another site. Let’s say you post a link to your website on your Facebook feed. The link to your website in your post is called a backlink.
Link Building is the process of generating those backlinks, but there’s an art to it that goes beyond posting on Facebook 100 times a day. The best backlinks come from reputable websites that are relevant to your business, but there’s a lot more that goes into it than this. It’s perhaps the most complex part of an SEO campaign, but it’s certainly the hardest to credit with any results.
Only search engine’s algorithms know how backlinks are applied to your website’s trustworthiness. If we build links and your site’s ranking grows, those links probably worked. If we build links and nothing happens, those links may not have worked, but they might work in three month’s time.
We’ll start with some context for this answer.
Consider search results from the perspective of the companies that run search engines. Everyone that uses their service is their customer. When those users click onto your site, they are still search engine customers. They want to make sure that your website is actually going to help those customers and give them answers quickly.
Why do they want to do that? It’s not from the goodness of their hearts – it’s because they can monetize their search results. The better a service they provide, the more people use their service. The more people use their service, the more they can charge to businesses like you to use their advertising services.
Search engines use your content to help their customers. The better, more relevant content you have, the more search engines will promote your website organically. Content is a major driver of how your website is perceived by search engines, but it’s also what helps your customers buy from you as well.
So how important is content for SEO? Very. If you do nothing else for SEO, make sure that you at least make a point of writing some content.
For people. Search engines want to experience your site in the same way a user would. Whereas you and I read websites with our eyes and navigate with our hands, a search engine crawls your site’s code and navigates through the links between pages automatically.
Ironically, the more you optimise your site for search engines, the less likely they are to credit your site with anything of value. The best way of optimising your site is to optimise it for people. Write your content properly, make it easy to find, and make it relevant.
Black Hat is just dodgy SEO. Generally, dirt cheap SEO campaigns use black hat SEO to cut every corner possible while trying to trick search engines into boosting your rankings. Agencies that use it will upload trash content to your site, overoptimise for keywords, and then build an ungodly amount of spammy backlinks.
Sadly, sometimes it works. More often than not, however, it tanks your website and permanently sours your website’s reputation with search engines to such a degree that you may never come back from it.
SEO for $150 a month might sound pretty tempting, but it comes with strings of the website-destroying type attached. It’s better not to risk it.
Domain Authority (a.k.a. Authority score, domain score, domain rating) is a made-up number from companies such as Moz, AhRefs, and SEMRush that tries to correlate a website’s organic performance into a numeric scale from 0 to 100.
As made-up as the metric is, it is generally a fairly good indicator of organic performance. Websites with higher domain authority tend to perform better organically, but search engines don’t recognise domain authority as a ranking signal. Your domain authority is a consequence of effectively optimising your website, and should be used as an indicative metric only.
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