- What is search-engine-optimisation-seo?
- How can search-engine-optimisation-seo help me?
- How do we do it?
What is SEO?
SEO - Search Engine Optimisation - is, quite simply, the improvement of a website's visibility in search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, for search terms that are commercially important for the website's business.
To achieve this, SEOs employ a wide range of techniques, including technical changes to the website's HTML and architecture, engagement with social profiles, content quality audits, linkbaiting, competitor backlink gap analysis and more.
The simplest way to think of all of these activities is to group them into three distinct categories: strategy, on-page (i.e. changes to the website itself) and off-page (improving the backlink profile).
We cover each of those areas in more detail in the 'How do we do it?' section above.
Oh, and as you've probably guessed, there's a lot of jargon in our industry, so check out our SEO glossary if you're stumped by any of the terms we use! To save you a click: backlinks are links from other websites to your own.
How important is SEO?
Very. Businesses which have invested in SEO over the last few years have consistantly outperformed their competition, and a strong rise in budgets is predicted through 2011, as the recession-busting trend of bringing in budget from other marketing channels continues.
This trend reflects the excellent Return On Investment (ROI) achievable by SEO, and also the fact that SEO boasts a strong reach as a marketing channel. Taking a quick look at the numbers:
- 92% of people in the UK use the internet, at broadband speeds*
- Of that group, c75% use search engines to navigate online.
* Source: BMRB Internet Monitor (May 2009)
That's a lot of potential customers online right now. Since we're looking at stats, you also might like to know that, of all those people making searches online in the UK, c89% of them are using Google.
That's a staggering reach for any advertising channel. But the best news is that all of those users can be better targeted than any offline channel could ever hope to achieve.
Online Advertising Spend Overtook TV Spend in 1st Half of 2009* while internet advertising grew by 4.6% to £1,752.1m, despite the entire advertising sector contracting by 16.6% during the same period.
*Source: UK IAB
It's also the reason why, despite the UK's recession hit economy forcing a slump in advertising spend, online marketing is still yet to see contraction. In fact, while in the teeth of the start of the recession 2009 saw advertising spend for online marketing overtake television spend for the first time.
That trend has continued into 2011 with strong sustained growth across all areas of online marketing.
Those advertisers who reinvested their advertising spend in online - and especially those who invested in SEO - have comprehensively outperformed in their marketplace, typically seeing higher ROI for SEO than any other advertising channel.
How Can SEO Help Me?
An ethically optimised website can dominate top three search rankings for relevant, high traffic terms, attracting increased visitors from organic (rather than paid) search results.
QueryClick's SEO also offers improved usability to website visitors, and ultimately drive more online sales and enquiries than an unoptimised website.
Our Top 7 Reasons For Becoming Search Engine Optimised
To increase the number of sales or leads your website is generating
To bring more free traffic to your website
To place your website higher up the search rankings for high traffic search terms that are relevant to your business
To improve and diversify your website's backlink profile e.g increase the scope and quality of websites linking to you
To give your website and in-turn your brand an increased online presence
To reduce marketing spend and get better return on investment than other channels such as traditional forms of print advertising
To employ a form of marketing that is measurable at all times
How Does QueryClick Do SEO?
Some SEO agencies like to make search engine optimisation appear to be a dark art. This isn't how we go about things here at QueryClick. Instead, we're on a mission to demystify SEO and show you clearly why - and how - what we do works.
All of our campaigns break down into three phases:
- Technical SEO Audit
- Marketplace Keyphrase Strategy
- Rolling Linkbuilding, Conversion Optimisation, & Reporting
These phases allow us to optimally target the three SEO activities required for a high ROI SEO campaign: Strategy, Onpage SEO, and Offsite SEO.
SEO Strategy Phase
The ultimate goal of a solid SEO campaign is to consolidate your website's value into pages set up to target the keyphrase terms identified - and prioritised - by your overall campaign strategy.
Developing a strong keyphrase strategy is therefore critical to outperforming your competition in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
At QueryClick we realise that no-one knows your business - or your clients & customers - as well as you do, so we spend a lot of time at the start of a campaign getting to know everything we can from you about your business goals, target market, competitors and marketplace opportunities.
We'll also run User Voice surveys to identify problems (and successes) you may not know people already have with your business.
We use this research to develop customer profiles which help us determine the likely search terms used by your target audience. Profiles are rated according to how valuable they are to your business, and in so doing start to develop our highest value keyphrase terms - which we group into sets.
We then look to develop and expand on these keyphrase sets by incorporating search volumes for the terms, as well as how competitive a term is and how well the site is currently ranking (we use some of our cool in-house tools for this BTW, get in touch for a free audit today to find out more).
Using the developed sets, we build a master keyphrase list, prioritised by value (i.e. traffic) and opportunity (i.e. how quickly we can reach top three positions).
Because we know that 49% of all organic traffic goes through the top three search terms, targeting early top three performance drives immediate, relevant traffic through to your website to deliver return on investment from day one.
Each month, we use our detailed reporting to identify new quick win strategies, and clearly show how our activities are improving your business's bottom line. As a strategy it's served us well, and allowed us to achieve 73:1 ROI in a recent case study.
Onpage / Technical SEO Phase
When QueryClick kick off an SEO campaign, the first thing we do is schedule our technical team to dig through your site, pull it apart & work out every issue & oppertunity we can take advantage of to give you an edge over the competition.
We compile these changes into a master Technical Change Request List, prioritised by SEO impact Vs time to implement. Our technical SEOs will run through each issue, and the various solutions highlighted, to develop an agreed change list with your technical team for your signoff.
Everything is written in plain English and we are fans of big images with nice, clear annotation to explain what the change is and why it will benefit your business.
We hope you will be able to follow each point, and we'll be happy to go into detail on any change, but equally if you'd rather we just get on with solving each issue directly with your developers then we can do that too: we know not everyone shares our love for the intricacies of technical SEO!
Regardless of the level of detail however, the technical SEO audit will be the first step in an SEO education programme, helping you & your co-workers to understand what we're doing, and how to think like an SEO expert.
Offsite SEO Phase
From the third month onwards our main concern is executing effective linkbuidling strategies to deliver better perfomance for the search terms highlighted in our campaign strategy.
As an ethical SEO agency, QueryClick's linkbuilding strategies are all 'white-hat' - which basically means we don't do anything outwith search engine guidelines. We don't do this out of the goodness of our hearts, but rather because we are able to:
- achieve better results from our innovative ethical linkbuilsing strategies than equivalent unethical (aka 'black-hat') strategies
- deliver sustainable, long term benefits, without risk to your brand name
This means, in effect, that you get the best of both worlds: the ability to outcompete your competition, regardless of their own SEO ethics as well as build a credible online value that will sustain your business for years to come.
So how do we achieve this? Simple: we advocate well thought out, custom linkbuilding solutions for each and every client.
There are lots of components in each client linkbuilding package, including responsible use of many of the below activities:
- Competitor Gap Analysis
- Niche Directory Scouting & Submissions
- Social Backlink Optimisation & Submission Strategy
- Expert Article Distribution & Promotion
- Online Press Release Optimisation & Submission
- Rolling Linkbait Strategies
- Online Community Engagement
- Development of News Article Performance to Provider
- Image / Data-Rich Resource Bait
- PR Pack & Community Promotions
If you'd like to know the blend we'd recommend for you, ask us to quote you and we'll be delighted to oblige.
Reporting Success & Finding Pain Points
So we've built a technical foundation, segmented our audience & refined our keyphrase map to bring in more & better quality traffic. We've set the wheels in motion to revamp site content & kicked off our linkbuilding strategy to attract more external links.
How do we know if it's working?
If you're asking most other SEO agencies, the answer will be: improved rankings.
But improved rankings for what? And what's the business value of one ranking over another? It's important to tie improvements in rankings back to bottom line impact. By doing this we make it easier for you to show the value of our work co-workers or managers with little to no SEO knowledge.
That's why at QueryClick we measure the success of our SEO campaign in terms of your business success. We'll look at:
- Number & Source of Sales Generated / Qualified Leads
- Improvements in traffic that engages with the site (i.e. relevant traffic)
- Impact of Social Media activity on bottom line sales
- Increases in Enquiries, Newsletter Signups & other 'soft' engagement metrics
- Major ranking improvements / losses, and 'Opportunity' keyphrase terms
We'll customise your report to highlight those metrics which mean the most to your business and allow you to transparently judge the progress of our SEO campaign - a simple exercise for qualified Google Analytics professionals like ourselves.
In our opinion, the only true metric that counts is your success as a business. So, we urge our clients to take the time to understand their audience and reap the benefit in your keyphrase strategy.
The SEO industry has matured over the last decade. At QueryClick, we have experts boasting 10 years experience at the very highest level, knowledge of what it takes to get things done, and confort working with clients from blue-chip to local, family-run businesses.
In short: we know what it takes to succeed in any market. And we understand that a consultant's job is to make your business succeed.
We're not afraid to spell out the truth if you can't target the very top terms, but we will get you better SEO results than any other agency in the UK. Why? Because we care about our clients and we're driven to make online the core of their business success.