SEO Agencies and evaluating your website:
Most agencies are secretive and a little elusive about how they will “optimise” your internet marketing/selling campaign. They don’t like to give too much away, which on one hand is understandable due to the competitive nature of the SEO industry and also due to how long knowledge and experience can take to accumulate but on the other hand is a nightmare scenario for anyone who has a business, knows they want to improve on their websites performance but would like to have a good grasp of what their money will be spent on.
Basically, all the main tips for SEO and SEM are out there for all to read and to learn about so we at IC247 believe that we should be as open as possible about our techniques. This not only helps to get a deeper relationship with a client so that their services/products that need marketing better online are clearer to us but also assists with striking up the kind of open partnership that we like to have with any relations, be them business, networking or social.
OK then, so what makes you want to use our SEO and SEM services rather than a competitor, if all of these tips are already out there? You ask:
Well, opinions differ as to what steps one should take to get a website ranked or to get traffic levels higher and a lot of results have come about from our own learning curves (good and bad) over a long period of time. Some of the tools freely available, like the Google tools for example, need fine tuning and take time to learn properly. We know about all these tools; the good ones, the bad ones, the ones that work well and quickly and the ones that don’t work at all.
From the outset of a client finding us via our site or through another of our online activities we tell it straight. We go through your site with a fine toothed comb and tell you what you’ve got that is cool, what you need to get, what needs tweaking and then on top of this we give you recommendations, that are easy to understand, with links so you can see actual results from similar campaigns and information about neutral tools you can look at to see what we mean.
The internet evolves constantly, business is getting more and more competitive and time is money – it stands to reason that you, as a running business need to market your products and services in a manner that gets results fast and also is structured so that potential issues, future plans and competition activity can be monitored and dealt with efficiently.
Here is an example website evaluation we did recently with a few pointers so that you can see as an example how our client relationships start:
Internet marketing “example website”
There are key elements code-wise that need to be integrated into the website so that it is optimised correctly for better search engine performance. Clean HTML should be used. Divs need to be incorporated (also good for mobile internet) and Header tags (page per page).
Meta tags are needed and need to be adjusted page per page. Please check this completely neutral tool and input each individual page URL, following the instructions, to get a detailed Meta tag breakdown and page analysis. Then use www.responsiva.biz (a site from our portfolio)as a comparison.
The site itself has a good keyword rich text content base and has a page rank of 3/10, which isn’t too bad at all. Search engines need information (as text content) in order to rank and place your site according to its relevance to the given search result listings. Look to add a news section or articles and also look to try to provide a regular stream of new content for the search engines to index every time they revisit your site. This can be changed via Webmaster tools.
I also recommend a contact page with Google maps integration, different calls to action (see below), videos, Podcasts/recordings of example talks and a helpful links page for reciprocal linking/back link campaigns.
Here is a good tool to analyse your competitions sites according to the pages that show up from them for searches you want to be found for. Use this tool to get ideas about keyword rich text copy-write for your site and your Blogs. Add the URL of the example website you found on Google to the website content tool and check out what they are being found for.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Links coming in from other highly ranked websites are of great importance to how a search engine will rank your site and this is lacking somewhat to pages within your website (not just to the home page – by this I mean ‘deep links’). SEM (Web 2.0) practises, including the use and integration of Google tools, exterior Blogs and other SEM would enhance traffic rates, achieve better ranking for your site and increase exposure in general for your branding.
There are currently only 2 registered back links to the homepage from video sharing sites and 9 in total overall. This needs to be improved dramatically. Below, in the other sections to your evaluation, are recommendations for getting back links.
You can look at your competitions sites and see which sites they have linking to theirs by simply typing the following into Google:
Link: www.thesitesnamedotcom (including the link: and also trying with a space after the colon and without a space).
You’ll be able to see then which sites they are registered with and have links from and add your website to the same places. Alternatively, you can utilise this tool for a bit of a breakdown of different aspects of your and your competitor’s sites performance:
http://diagnostics.googlerankings.com/website-diagnostics-panel.php
Calls to action/content:
· More keyword rich text content
· More pages overall, covering different aspects of your industry/training methods
· News section (perhaps use newsletters emailed monthly to your client database as content)
· Sitemap added (then submitted to Google Webmaster tools)
· Helpful links page with links to all your other SEM
· Social bookmarks as calls to action on each page
· Sign up for newsletter as call to action on each page
· A questionnaire of some description as a call to action
· Email this page to as a call to action
Google tools:
· Standard tools including; Analytics (traffic analysis) and Webmaster tools (Google’s indexing stats)
· Local Business Listing; Your business (including website) listed for Google Maps demographics search tool with links, in depth contact and business information
· Google Base; upload whole product or service portfolios from your site to Google’s specialised search engine. Add references, testimonials and other individual information
· Picasa; Google’s image sharing tool. Upload images with descriptions and links to main website. Create slideshows and improve indexing from Google Image Search
· Blogger; Google’s weblog tool. Personalises internet presence as well as providing back links to the main website
· Google Pages; Hosted free by Google – your own Google web space with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor
· Adwords; initiate PPC (pay per click) campaigns and/or manage said campaign with daily CPC (cost per click) budgets, landing page optimisation, keyword analysis (including competition websites) and calls to action
Back link campaigns:
An intrinsic part of website SEO is the importance (Page Rank) of other websites that link to yours. Individual campaigns can be initiated as well as strategic standard link campaigns. This creates a net within the net and also obtains shares of other highly ranked websites traffic.
Directory listings:
· Listing of company details with website links, logos and contact information on highly ranked business directories
· Highlighted listing discounts possible
· Obtains client larger overall internet presence
· Obtains back links to main website
· Share directory website traffic
Classified advert campaigns:
- Blanket internet advert campaign
- Target geographical areas
- Place strategic adverts per product/service group and client area
- Gain back links from highly ranked classified advert sites
Web 2.0 SEO:
- Social bookmarking
- Video/Podcast sharing accounts
- Blog/news sharing
- Wiki/E-zine entries/posts
- Press releases
- Review sites for testimonials
- Forum participation/creation
- Group participation/creation
- Social/B2B networking accounts set up
- Shopping/service comparison site submission
So now you see an average breakdown of how we evaluate a website SEO and internet marketing enquiry to us. Of course there is a downside to giving out all this information straight away and we and also individuals close to us have had experiences of providing this and more in depth information for a client or another SEO agency they were working with freelance at the time, only for them to use the information provided themselves and cut out the information provider completely.
What do we think about this?
Half of the time people who do these things make a mess of stuff like packing header tags with spammy keywords or not coding the site correctly or not using the search engine tools available properly. Great results, over a longer and more sustained period can only be achieved with experience and good, solid SEO knowhow!
Contact us for an in depth chat about your internet marketing needs - we’d love to hear from you!
