What is SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is about driving more visitors to your website through organic search results. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing send out search bots into the vastness of the internet, to scan the billions of pages of content therein.

The first and most important element of SEO is to ensure that your website is build to W3C standards and as such is inviting and accommodating to the search bots. All of our websites are built to these standards so that they are the perfect basis to begin an SEO campaign.

SEO is not a mystery; there are no secrets and dark arts involved. SEO is all about getting good relevant content onto the internet and securing quality back links. This said, it is a time-consuming task and the more competitive the search terms related to your product, the more man-hours of SEO will be required to bring about results.

As effective as SEO is, it is not the quickest way to boost your visitor count. It takes 3 to 6 months of effort for an SEO campaign to start to show results and you would expect your campaign to pay for itself after one year. The good thing about SEO is that once your website has risen in the search listings, it takes a concerted effort by a competitor to remove it.

SEO is an investment in marketing your brand just as much as print or AV advertising and is most successful as part of a concerted campaign. The most attractive element of online marketing however is that fact that all visits are trackable through Google analytics so you can easily monitor the effectiveness of the campaign asses the quality of the new hits your campaign brings.

Some companies are offering SEO services at very low rates and they can indeed increase the number of visits your website gets. The difference is however the quality of those links. When one of our experienced SEO personnel takes on a project, we ensure that we deliver quality results by ensuring that all our blogging, back links and social media work is contextual and relevant. This means that the people who do visit your website are more likely to be interested in what is on your website than someone who was lead there by a low cost SEO company.

Beware too of companies that offer quick results through SEO. Using legitimate White Hat SEO techniques, there is just no way that you can move a new website rapidly up the search rankings. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell you SEO using Black Hat tactics that are dangerous, unethical and can get your website penalized and even ignored by the major search engines.

We strongly suggest to most of our clients that they engage in an SEO campaign. Even though it can seem expensive, it really is the best way to grow an online business. Think of it like this; a website sitting on its own on the internet is like a warehouse languishing in an industrial estate with no customers. There are two ways to increase traffic to the warehouse.

1. Advertise.

There is always a case to be made for advertising. If you have a product that people want to buy and you can give them a good reason to buy it from you then advertising will bring you some results. Similarly online advertising can drive people to your site.

However, much like that warehouse, you are likely going to have to use price as a compelling reason to get people to visit. Budget pricing is a tried and tested method of increasing sales. It is however better, especially for an SME to sell your service/products for the maximum the market will bear. Slashing your prices to catch people’s attention can also mean slashing your profit margins.

Advertising too is expensive and is difficult to measure. What if there was a way to use a very similar budget to increase footfall but also enable you to keep your pricing and your margins intact?

2. Optimise

If you wanted to get thousands of people to view your store or your products, you wouldn’t ask them all to come and visit you (advertising) you would go to them. This is the equivalent of opening a high street store as the outlet for your warehouse. It costs you a regular rent on your store but you get thousands upon thousands of visitors every day seeing your brand and visiting your store. Optimising your website is just like moving your website from an industrial estate onto the high street, where all the people are and want to be.

With years of experience in optimising websites for a host of industries, Reckless New Media should be your first port of call for online marketing. As part of a comprehensive marketing strategy, SEO is an invaluable tool and its value should not be underestimated.