SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

There is no clear cut answer to this question, it all depends on your corporate goals, time frames and existing campaigns. That said, PPC typically produces faster results and provides more early adaption. However, SEO is considered an investment over a longer duration which appeals to many clients. Ideally PPC and SEO should run alongside one another as part of a holistic robust marketing strategy. Normally we recommend clients start with PPC and move swiftly into SEO, unless their budgets facilitate both from the outset. For clients new to digital marketing, the PPC campaigns allow for keywords to be discovered and campaigns to be tested rapidly, to which this knowledge can subsequently be applied to the SEO campaigns providing a stronger return on the SEO expenditure. For clients with a small budget that wouldn’t facilitate PPC, may still benefit from some monthly blogger outreach to boast their ranking positions. Talk to our SEO team, to allow for the best advice on which service is right for you.

You’ll hear most SEO specialists mention 3-12 months, but that tends to be for their SEO strategy to be fully applied. Many SEO activities can be effective within 1-4 weeks, with Google picking up the changes and increasing rankings. Therefore you’ll start to see movements quickly (depending on the competition and starting positions), but normally 3-12 months is required to achieve the corporate goals. Naturally if you are on page 6, it might take longer to get to a high rank, so staged SEO Milestones are established, like Page 1 within 6-12 months and higher positions in year 2. On the other hand, if you are already P8 on page 1 and are within a highly competitive market with FTSE 100 competitors, then we may seek ranking movement of 1 0r 2 over 6 months as SEO Milestones and targets. There are no guarantees with SEO as your competitors are often also making changes and our challenge is to get your desired rankings and then fend off the competitions keeping you ahead consistently. We’ve also seen clients rocket from page 3 to page 1 in relatively little time and even go on to dominate the top rankings within a surprising time frame. Ultimately the time frames are directly proportional to the SEO investment and competition.

SEO budgets vary from £200 per month to £10,000+ per month. It all depends on the competition and corporate objectives. For example a local Printing Company, could commit £300 per month to their SEO (maybe Blogger Outreach) and swiftly see improvements within a few months increasing rankings to a desired level. Alternatively, a healthcare group competing with established large organisations may commit £3k pcm to a range of SEO services, such as Technical SEO, Onsite Content, Local Citations, Outreach and high level Digital PR, against a carefully constructed and considered SEO plan and work programme to achieve movements over 12months and then hold those gains.

Absolutely. Link building is not a terminology typically used because users associate link building with the old fashioned practice of obtaining low quality cheap links on huge scales. However, all that has occurred within the industry over the last 5-8 years is a consistent and progressive movement to lower volume of carefully selected links with highly relevant websites and good quality articles. For example, if you are an estate agency in Birmingham and our team co-ordinate an articles to be written and placed on www.countryliving.com (a highly relevant and site with impressive site authority), then this Link is highly sought after and powerful in improving your SEO Backlink Profile. We tend to refer to this service as Outreach and Digital PR, which reflects the advanced considerations applied to link acquisition and building. Outreach and Digital PR are significant and highly effective SEO activities and a must to rank well.

That’s your decision, we handle many SEO accounts per month across a range of Website Platforms, from Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress, that our teams are happy to make changes to the content and meta content directly. It can speed up the process and avoid the developer costs for simple changes. Alternatively we are happy to work with your web administrator or web developers, to make SEO changes.

We report monthly on activities and performance, so you’ll always know what we are doing. Our teams will email or call to confirm instructions and are always have to discuss your SEO ideas or innovations, or simply explain various items.

SEO contracts typically start at 6 or 12months, because no SEO campaign should be engaged in within at least 6-months investment. The only time this is not required is with some short term Blogger Outreach activities. In addition, our teams often put a lot of extra work into the front end of contracts off their own backs, so the longer the SEO contract term the more time they can justify squeezing in as they develop the relations and chase SEO Performance Milestones.

On page SEO is a form of SEO optimsation that occurs on the pages of your website. It can take multiple forms such as ensuring that meta titles are optimised for keywords, that the correct pages on the site are being indexed by Search Engines or that the content of the page matches up what users would expect to find when searching for a specific key term that you want to rank for. On page SEO can also involve looking at how your site renders across different device types such as mobiles. This is something that is increasingly going to be important as Google moves towards Mobile First indexing of content and websites.

Off- site SEO covers all the elements of SEO that are not hosted directly on your website. The most prominent and well known of these is your backlink profile ( the number of links that are pointed to your website online), but other elements such as your reviews on platforms such as Google My Business and the consistency of your contact information across the internet can also have an impact. A good off-site SEO strategy will look at all of these and identify the areas that can be improved.