This is a difficult question because it all depends on what ‘well’ is. Most websites have some half-hearted attempt at on site optimisation, but often that’s just about as far as it goes.

So, before you speak to anyone, here are four suggestions from us which will help you understand if your website really has had a good start.

So, How can You Assess if Your Own Website is Optimised?

Here are our five best SEO tips that anyone can use to help them understand a site is well optimised:

1.Check Your Page Title – Homepage First, Then Other Pages

Go to your website homepage. Look up, above the content in the page to your tab bar (or top of the window in older browsers) and read what it says.

If your page title just says your brand name, or ‘Home’, or has text with nothing in particular to do with your business, then the chances are your site is not optimised.

As a second check, look at other pages on your website too. They should have different text, related to the content in the particular page, and relevant to your services or products.

2. Check Your Page Headings

The main heading in every page should be tagged as a ‘H1′. Again this is a technical term, but is important as Google sees this as the most important written content in the page, and therefore this heading should carry the most relevant keywords for your page.

To find it for your website, right click on the page and choose ‘View Source’. Once you see the source code, search for a word or words in your heading on the page to find where it is. Then look at the code ‘tags’ either side of the heading. Ideally they should say <h1>. If you can’t find them, the chances are they are images and will not be fully read by Google.

For example this page has this:

<h1>Check if Your Website is SEO Optimised</h1>

3. Make Sure Your Images Have Relevant ‘Alt Tags’

Google knows that every image placed in a site has some kind of relevance, but generally only looks at two things: where it links to (if it links at all) and the ‘Alt Text’ on the image.

So, for example, if you look at the above image in this page, then you can see that it’s ‘Alt Text’ is: ‘Is Your Website SEO Optimised’ which is relevant to the page it is on and not just ‘screenshot’ or ‘image’.

4. Make Sure There’s Keyword Consistency Across These Items

Once you’ve looked at all the above for a particular website page, then you should be able to answer a simple question.

Are these keywords consistent:in the title, in the headings, on the images and in the page content?

If not, then it may be that your site is part-optimised or the content writers have not liaised with the website developers.

5. Write a Decent Length and Write Good Copy

Finally there needs to be enough written content on the page for it to be fully indexed. If you want a page on your site to gain strong rankings, then it needs to have at least 250 words in the page. Less than this and the page will not carry enough weight.

However, write it properly. Don’t just stuff it full of phrases and keywords in the vain hope that it will perform for you. It has to be well researched and written. Pages are also checked for grammar and ease of reading and if your page is poorly written then it will suffer as a result.

Not only that, but if a page does get good ranking and traffic, then it needs to perform for you. If it’s poorly written then you won’t get the conversions you need.

You have been warned. In fact, you’ve had more than a year and a half since it was first announced that the EU ePrivacy law was coming into force. So, whilst it may be a daft Eurocrat edict, it’s here, and you’ll have to deal with it.

The new EU Cookie Law is coming into force on 26th May 2012 so, for your benefit, here is a sensible guide and next steps for businesses in the UK wanting to ensure that they understand this law and are taking proactive steps to tackle it for their website.

Not Heard About The ePrivacy Law?

This law forces all website owners to inform website users clearly on the ‘cookies’ (small files placed on the users computer to identify that they have visited the site), and give clear direction on how users can opt out of cookies placed on their computer.

However, not all cookies are equal. A cookie which is deemed essential to the operation of a website (for example a cookie used for a shopping basket on an ecommerce site) is an example of what is acceptable and necessary. A hidden third-party tracking cookie shared with advertisers is an example of what is being specifically targeted by this law.

Put simply, the more intrusive or unnecessary the use of the cookie – the more you need to seek overt consent from your website visitors.

Which Cookies to Watch Out For?

These are the types of cookies which need proactive action on your site. You almost certainly will be using at least Analytics:

• Analytics – third party and non-essential to the workings of your website. First party (hosted) ones still need to be identified
• Advertising – first or third party advertising cookies will need to be overtly opted into
• Affiliate – similar to advertising, if you use affiliate cookies you are sharing cookie data with third parties
• User Identification – any cookies used to identify return visitors

Before May, at Least Demonstrate an Intent to Comply

It sounds like a disaster, and if implemented on 100% of websites, then the new ePrivacy law would not only be extremely expensive to comply with, but ultimately frustrate all website users to the extreme. Imagine if every site you visited had ‘tick this’ or ‘click that’ as banners or pop ups? Nerves would be frayed.

However, the important point is this: you need to do something. Here are four steps you can take straight away in order to show that you are taking this matter seriously:

1. Update your privacy policy – the chances are that your privacy policy is not up to date with the latest information on the cookies you set, and what their purposes are. You need to do this anyway so it should be done as a matter of course
2. Download a suitable document with guidelines – it is important that you can demonstrate that you are not just operating on your own instinct, our recommendation is to download the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) guidelines on the ePrivacy directive, print it off, and keep it for reference to demonstrate that you’re compliant
3. Conduct a cookie audit – discover every cookie your site sets when visited and document for what purposes they are used for
4. Remove unnecessary cookies - there are many cookies that are set by sites which are never used. For example your site may be using a content-management system, but you don’t actually NEED that cookie: so make it optional or don’t set it

However, for some using Third Party Cookies this may not be enough. It is important to perform the audit and then seek legal advice to ensure that your policies are compliant and you are taking enough action on your site to comply with the law.

Want Some Help With This?

You can do all these things yourself, but it may be that you want an independent audit from an agency familiar in all these things to not only tell you which cookies you set, but provide clear reporting and guidance on what to do about it.

Just contact us, mentioning ePrivacy in our contact form, or call 01962 605 000 and we’ll be able to help.

So, let’s do a very quick ‘deconstruct’ job on this:

Headline – Do Not Ask a ‘No’ Question

“Do You Need More Automotive Europe?” is a mouth-watering invitation, isn’t it? It’s almost asking you to question whether it’s worth being on this particular email list.

Sadly, this will only do one thing: increase the unsubscription rate, because, when it comes to email, no-one needs more, do they?

Body – Don’t Rely on Images

Don’t mistake us, images are really important for email marketing. A well placed image or highlight can increase click through and engagement substantially.

However, as you can see from this screen grab, for those (and there are many of us!) who have images by default switched off, if you only have images, then your message is lost.

User Experience – Think Logically

We expect the sender saw this email in a nice, bright 27″ iMac screen with the image in it’s full designed glory. Sadly, no one thought ‘what will the recipient see’. No one thought about the substantial proportion of recipients who’d see an empty box.

Worse still, because of this, you can now see the full problem:

• A headline raising the question of interest in receiving further emails
• An empty box
• A large unsubscribe link

The result will be that more people will unsubscribe than will actually see the promotional image.

Personalise – Think About the Receiver, Not Your Process

Finally, to cap it all off, because of the missing image, what you see is something impersonal (not even a salutation) an empty box and then the only content other than the privacy and unsubscribe links is an American address selling a European service.

Make Sure You Avoid an Email Fail

There are so many things you need to get right with your email marketing even before you design and send an emailshot. Every part needs to be meticulously planned. If you want us to help you, then please call 01962 605 000 or send us an email via our funky form.

And, even if you don’t need help, share this page with your contacts using your favoured social flavour!

As we look ahead, we’ve spotted six things that anyone involved in digital marketing should take note of… here goes:

1. Mobile Finally Delivers

It is common to get premature in excitement over new technologies. For example: the dot-com bubble was burst on the delay between the promise of the eCommerce revolution (2000/2001) to the actual fulfillment of that promise (from 2004 incrementally to today and beyond).

The same is true of mobile – yes, we’ve all replacing our old titchy ‘just call and text’ handsets with funky new smartphones for the last 3 years or so, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s an immediate payoff.

Expensive data plans, clunky interfaces, steep learning curves and lack of confidence in security has meant that many have not used these devices to their fuller potential. Now, that has changed. The devices are better, the pricing is much more competitive, the user-experience is tight (and not just the Apple iOS platform any more) and social media is driving increase in use.

Here are some stats for you to consider. By the end of 2011 these were the stand out numbers:

• Over 30% of emails are now opened on smartphones / tablets, over 50% at weekends (evenings)
• Over 40% of posts to Facebook are from mobile devices
• When incorporating tablets into ‘portable PCs’, Apple will become the world’s biggest portable PC supplier (volume and turnover)

If you have not planned for the mobile revolution then make sure you do this year. Ideally this quarter!

2. Bing Comes Second… A Good Second!

And that’s no bad thing when position one is secured by Google. You can be sure that Microsoft are going to be pressing hard to increase market share but their merger (read: takeover) of Yahoo! Search and Search Marketing, plus their ‘relationship’ with Facebook means that Bing has got a bright future and enough traction to take an increasing share of the advertisers’ buck.

3. The Social Backlash

There is no doubt that Social Media continues to gather steam – growth, use, time on site – whatever metric you want to use, it wins.

There is no doubt that IF you want to engage, speak with, understand better, relate to you customers and prospects, then Social Media is an excellent place.

However, where there IS doubt is how brands, products, services and companies can make this work to their advantage for two main reasons:

• Lack of imagination: we don’t know how many businesses do this, but many have the ‘Field of Dreams’ approach to their Pages (‘build it, and they will come’). Er – no they won’t… build it, put no creativity thought into it, and they won’t come. And for the few that do will leave. This is a social media, you need to think socially
• Narrow focus: you cannot treat social media like direct marketing and measure response and revenue out of it. If you do it this way you will fail for too many reason to mention in this article (TBC at a later date!)

At the same time, these principles need to be accepted: a ‘Like’ is worthless unless it becomes a ‘do’, impressions on your social pages are worth less than impressions on your own website, social media advertising is patchy at best (particularly LinkedIn) and the true cost of social media is the time spent managing it.

So the social backlash will mainly consist of businesses who thought (or were persuaded into) that either it would be self-fulfilling, or that it’s a straight marketing tool. Or, it may be that you have outsourced it to incompetents.

4. Companies Will Work Even Harder to Ringfence and Reward their Clients

It has always surprised us how little SMEs work to support their existing client base and reward them for their loyalty. Given that we can expect another challenging year, the competitive business will work as hard as possible on their existing contacts and make sure that they retain custom from as many as possible.

The smarter ones will also use techniques to use their existing customers to leverage further opportunity.

This will be the opportunity for true CRM – the management of actual customer relationships through a combination of media, not CRM as Salesforce describe it (sales channel – CRM with a silent ‘relationship’).

5. Limitations of Automation Will be Revealed

We get approached by many agencies purporting to have automated various things – from pay per click performance, to email response. All offering, for a monthly fee, to make our lives easier.

For the buyer this is serious compelling as the more automation, the cheaper and more scalable the services are. So, if it works then quickly, with little staff resource needed, then the benefits are clear.

However, the main question is: ‘is it better?’ And we believe that for marketing – the answer is a firm ‘no’. The main reason being that strong marketing needs two things: creativity and market knowledge. Give us a strong ad copywriter any day over an automaton: better copy, better click through, better quality score, lower spend, improved performance.

So, if you buy into automation, be very careful and test against a ‘human managed’ (ideally experienced) alternative. You may find that the only thing you’ll be scaling is your losses.

6. Performance of Apps Will Come Under Scrutiny

We’ve always maintained, when approached by clients wanting apps, that this is no gravy train… in fact, far from it, it’s more like a Ponzi / Pyramid / MLM scheme where the winners are deliberately PR’d to create the illusion of success. Yet, Apps are a thin layer of great success, covering a very deep ocean of failure.

Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon will court you, create a convention just for you, present bold plans to you, bring you into their carefully controlled circle and, if you’re very lucky, even get you a signed Zuckerburg t-shirt.

What you have to remember is that they’re taking about 40% of everything – and every app ties your users into them (as much as you, of course). So, the more apps they have, the better their reward and, actually, it doesn’t really matter which ones make it.

So, you can see why focusing on Rovio (developers of Angry Birds) and not the 100,000+ other games that die a death hides the true picture. Recent research suggests that the average Game in the Apple App Store takes £4,000 in total revenue to the developer, and games is supposed to be the most successful category.

So, we wish you all the best for 2012 and if you want any advice or help, then please call 01962 605 000 – we’re more than happy to have a chat.

1. If the adverts in the search results were less relevant to the search term, then the search engine itself would seem to be less accurate
2. If the advertising network gets paid on click-through, then to allow poor performing adverts to dominate because they’re willing to spend more means that lower revenue would be realised

So, Quality Score was Google’s smart balancing act. The premise was that if you worked hard making sure that your keyword, ad copy (in Google) and website landing page were more relevant and compelling to the reader, then you would be able to bid less for a keyword because your advert was better.

What Google SAY Quality Score Is

“The AdWords system calculates a Quality Score for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).”

You can read further details on the Google Adwords Help Pages. The factors include (again from the Google page):

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors

Now, whilst that all seems legitimate and helpful, there’s a lot that can happen behind the scenes… after all, who is to say which of these factors has much or little influence? And, just give further freedom to Google, ‘other’ is a very broad term!

What Quality Score REALLY Is

So there is a lot that can actually be changed ‘under the hood’ without any perceptible change, or even any need for Google to change it’s bullet list. What we can reveal is this: that Quality Score has changed substantially recently and these are the things you need to know

Of high importance are:

• Historical click through rate of the keyword
• Historical click through rate of the display URLs

Of low importance are:

• Account history
• Quality of landing page
• Relevance of keyword to the ads in the ad group
• Relevance of keyword to the search query
• Accounts performance in geographical region (a small enhancement of overall CTR performance)

Of unknown importance are:

• Other relevance factors

Because ‘other’ cannot really be defined.

How do we KNOW This?

Recently, we setup a test campaign for a specific service – ‘telemarketing‘. We used all the normal relevance factors: great optimised landing page on a very relevant well established site promoting telemarketing, relevant advert copy specifically promoting the telemarketing service, and a suite of well-filtered very relevant keywords promoting specifically telemarketing services. In fact, we called our Google Account Manager and they said ‘there’s nothing more you can do’.

It was pretty surprising, therefore, with all this attention to detail, when we saw that most keywords in the ad group had a Quality Score of 3. That’s right… 3 out of 10.

What it tells us really clearly, is that you can do all you can to make all the elements of the campaign and website relevant, but ultimately 70% of the score is about the Click Through Rate.

Why is this IMPORTANT for Advertisers?

The reason why this is critical is that there’s a problem here that few are aware of. The Quality Score Formula was supposed to balance spend based around click through rate.

It was not supposed to be driven by click through rate. But now, it is another name for click through rate. If you have a high click through rate, you have a good quality score, if you don’t, then they will hammer your quality score.

The problem with this is two-fold:

1. The encouragement is for adverts which drive clicks, however most successful PPC campaigns are about getting high quality traffic in – these two objectives can be, in many campaigns, incompatible
2. The message to advertisers from Google has changed from being about relevance, to being about SPEND – about revenue to Google

WHY Has it Changed?

We don’t know for sure the reason, but this is our best guess. Until recently Quality Score was to help competition for places – so that the small guys could compete with deeper pockets and if they were smart enough, then they would benefit from investing more energy and time into their campaigns and websites.

However, now that virtually any search has at least 2-3 adverts, most have many, and (we estimate) about 50% of searches are full of adverts, there is no longer the need to be generous. So, they’re starting to turn the screw – after all, shareholder value must be met.

Which is why they are also looking at limiting the amount of adverts on a page by removing the right hand column of adverts. We call it ‘search engine optimisation‘ not of positions, but of revenues.

What’s the REAL Message

So, that’s why Quality Score is no more – it is there, in name. But it is no longer what it was and certainly we would challenge their assertion in the final line of their description of quality score:

“In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).”

It is not a measure of quality of keyword, advert, or landing page (or website). It is now merely a stick to beat you with to make you cough up more.

Spread the Word / Find Out More

If this post has helped you, then please spread the word on Twitter / LinkedIn / Facebook / Google+ below. If you’d like to find out more about how you can combat this unwelcome development, now that we’ve identified the problem, just get in touch – contact us, or send us a mention to discuss @johnnymb.

Worse, you may never discover that a little attention could double your performance. So here are our five ways…

1. Make it obvious what is wanted

Too many forms suffer from not making it clear which information is mandatory – the common symbol for a mandatory fields is an asterisk (*). However you can now apply ticks (or crosses), field colour highlights or even tooltips (friendly text prompts) to assist with a form fill, like this one:

Can you see how, with this simple prompt, you avoid user frustration and increase conversion?

Also, make sure your descriptions are easy to understand. You may know what you want with a phrase like ‘Confidential Address’ – but is that business, home, email?

2. Make it inviting

Many forms also suffer from being bland or, in extreme cases, seemingly disinterested.

If you would genuinely like someone to contact you, then say it! There’s no reason just to put a stack of fields and nothing else.

Moreover, we recommend you actually make sure that the person knows what they will get out of it. You need to answer the ‘what’s in it for me?’ if you want someone to share their personal details with you.

Finally, make sure they know what they’re opting into, or not.

If you don’t rent or sell your list, then make it clear that you don’t. If you plan to send emails out, then give them the option to untick the ‘further contact’ box. Again, be polite about it.

3. Trim the fields

If a field is non-essential, remove it. The fewer fields there are the more likely a form will be completed.

For example, if you’re following up leads anyway, then don’t ask for the full details in the form – just enough to contact that person and then complete their details over the phone.

4. Never trust your developer to get it right

Most developers and designers only care about making sure a form functions. They won’t consider the user-experience, they won’t care about conversion rates. You need to make sure that you specify the form fields needed, the field descriptions, and then test it.

Here’s an example of how it goes wrong. It’s a search field, but the ‘save as’ and ‘save search’ are in the wrong place meaning that the search button (which is the main action button) is not triggered properly when the ‘Enter’ key is pressed:

Not only that, but what is the ‘View All’? And why is it next to the Search button? This form is from a large email marketing business who should know better!

5. Use Your Forms

Go on, try your own form or, if you’re too familiar with it, get someone you trust to take a look at it.

Ask them these questions:

• Was it easy to use?
• Did you understand what information was requested?
• Did you understand what you would get out of filling out the form?
• If you made a mistake on the form, did it guide you to what you needed to change?

Bonus Point…

We always like to offer a ‘bonus’ – here’s a tip: measure your forms! Find out what proportion of visitors to a specific page then go on to complete your form. Make some changes (based on the above) and see how it affects your conversions – you’ll find that you will get more opportunities and be more successful as a result.

If you’d like this kind of thinking applied not just to your forms, but to all of your site, then please take a look at our form – we believe it stands up to scrutiny – fill it out and we’ll be in touch with you.

If you liked this article, please share the love… Just choose your favourite social network below….

We’ve already covered some of the pitfalls in our first two articles: never commit to a monthly SEO contract and 5 critical keys to managing your SEO supplier. These give you the groundwork to understanding SEO better.

In this article we now give you the ammunition to manage your SEO supplier (rather than them running rings around you).

Before we start… important note… to make this work you need analytics. We’re working on the assumption that you’d choose Google Analytics, but any analytics package which can measure visits and search terms for those visits will do.

In fact, even more importantly, do you like driving with a blindfold on? No? Then get some analytics and then look at it regularly, or just give up on your web marketing!

So, onto the job in hand… Steps 1-4 can be done before the SEO visits, steps 5-6 in negotiation to reach agreement.

Step 1: Measure Your Brand Visitors

Firstly, importantly, identify searchers for your brand or sub-brands, or people working for your business. for these two reasons:

1. You will come top for this without ANY help from a SEO, and
2. They are not ‘new’ business as they have heard about you before

Step 2: Measure Your Current Organic Traffic

Secondly, identify your latent organic web traffic – the number of searchers who are already visiting your website (this will be your total organic traffic minus brand searches from above).

Step 3: Value a Visitor

This is very easy if you’ve done any Pay Per Click (Adwords) marketing. If you spend on clicks you will, almost certainly know what the cost is of your average visitor, if not, then  estimate what a visitor is worth to you.

Step 4: Target Relevant Keywords

Using your analytics and through your own business knowledge, you will know what keywords and phrases are relevant to your business. You will also see from your current analytics that you do get a number of visits on rather spurious keywords. So concentrate on keywords which are relevant and are likely to bring in relevant visitors.

Step 5: Meet (Suitably Prepared) With Your SEO

So, when you go to meet your SEO, then you can have a proper discussion with them. Set the ground-rules:

• All brand searches, past or future, are not a part of the SEO’s service, so when it comes to performance, these will not be included within the SEO’s measurements
• Your current organic traffic is where you are today. Again, the SEO has not contributed so they need to improve on this and should be measured on the improvement over your current visits and not be given credit for your current ones
• Any non-relevant keyword visits will be ignored as these are ancillary to the job in hand and a good SEO should be able to get you ranking for relevant phrases

Listen carefully to their reaction to these items. These are all fair, they won’t like it, but they are fair! And hear from them how they are going to go about gaining you extra traffic.

Step 6: Agree Targets with your SEO

You will then be able to give your SEO a target: tell them that your ‘break even’ SEO performance for you is their fee (almost certainly monthly) divided by your average cost per click.

For example, if they want to charge you £300 a month, and your cost per click estimate is £0.50 then they will need to give you 600 additional visits a month to break even in terms of performance.

If they cannot commit to this, then it speaks for itself: they are not able to deliver you enough traffic volume to cover their fees. Therefore they should not be appointed.

Step 7: Measure, Measure, Measure

We would support any SEO in two respects: firstly that improvements don’t happen immediately, and secondly that there’s no value in a ‘free lunch’ – you have to pay as you’re expecting them to work hard for this, probably harder than they do on most of their clients!

Tell your SEO that you will give them a three month trial to get to this target figure of monthly visitors from their work, and that you will pay them during this trial. If they achieve your target then you will continue working with them, if not then the trial is over.

Furthermore, tell them that once they’ve achieved this target you will be expecting further incremental improvements until they at least double this figure per month – because one of the myths of SEO is that your need to continue spending to maintain your rankings. This is barely true and only in a select few competitive business areas. If you cancel the contract, unless they have been using ‘black hat’ techniques, your ranking should be maintained.

As you measure your visits in analytics, you should start seeing improvements in SEO within a month and, even if your SEO doesn’t hit the full target, if they’re close then you should give them the benefit of the doubt… if they’re a long way short, either renegotiate until they hit the target or cancel.

In this way, you can manage your SEO rather than letting them run rings around you.

DID YOU LIKE THIS ARTICLE?

Then SHARE away (and even Like / Share / +) using the links below… or, if you want to discuss anything like this with us in more detail, then please get in touch using our ‘award winning form‘ or just calling 01962 605 000 to speak to the team.

Here are five ways to make sure that you can manage your SEO and ensure they’re going to deliver for you.

1. Don’t Focus on Position

Do not, we repeat, NOT, fall into the ‘Page 1 of Google’ trap. This is usually the domain of the lazy SEO. They will guarantee a first page position and, as soon as they get it for you, they’ll down tools and just bill you monthly.

Getting a page 1 position is easy. What’s hard is getting it for a high traffic keyword. Most SEO’s who play the ‘Page 1 trick’ won’t like questions such as:
“How many people search for that a month?” (you can find this in the Google Keyword Tool), or
“How much traffic will that get me a month?” (the answer can be found in your analytics software)

So, don’t focus on position, focus on traffic.

2. Relevance is Everything

One of our clients had a blog post which was all to do with mouse pointers, but which was nothing to do with their core services business. They got to page 1 and had about 10 visits a month from people interested in mouse pointers.

One of our more popular posts about Tree Surgery and Leylandii (there is a connection – it’s about valuing your clients) and we’re position 8 on Google UK for ‘Leylandii Tree Surgeon‘ – do you think that’s relevant to a digital marketing agency? Will that position win us business?

Here’s another ‘classic’ illustration:
We pitched a business who targets central London clients with a top tier professional service. We explained why SEO would not work for them – the local ‘expert’ (ahem!) wanted to rank them for ‘[Professional Service] in Hampshire’.

OK – so that’s a ‘triple fail‘. Why?

1. Because their target market in London won’t search for Hampshire
2. Should potential clients visit the site, they would be put off with Hampshire being plastered everywhere when they want services delivered to them in London
3. This particular keyword phrase has fewer than 100 searches a month (across the UK!!)

So, make sure the keywords you rank for are relevant! Make sure that your SEO supplier knows your business well.

3. SEO is NOT Free

You pay for SEO. It is not ‘free’. It has to be measured in exactly the same way as other forms of marketing.

4. You Can Stop Your SEO and it Won’t Damage Your Rankings

If you use a SEO supplier and they ‘threaten’ you that everything will crash and burn if you stop using them, they’re wrong. Very little if anything will happen (positively or negatively) over the course of time.

If, on the other hand, you do see your rankings being badly affected, then it’s almost certainly because they were engaging in underhand methods to boost your results; trust us, you’re best clear of them anyway as you were probably a blacklisting candidate (where Google pushes all your positions down, say, 30 places for as long as they feel like it!).

5. Be Reasonably Patient

Your SEO will tell you that it takes time for Search Engine rankings to materialise. That is true – give it 1-2 months, possibly three. No longer than that… if your SEO is playing the ‘time’ card after 6 months: give them a red one!

We hope this is all useful stuff, please share this post with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ … we’ve made it really easy for you: nice chunky buttons below! And if you want us to help you evaluate your SEO, then talk to us today.

You May be Told that Your Site is Only the Start

For many businesses this is not true – you may get a high or page one ranking just by doing ‘on site’ optimisation and never need to do anything further.

If you are a niche service, or already have a popular website with a good number of inbound links, then further link building may not make a huge amount of difference.

You May be Told that You Need to Spend to Retain Rank

For most online rankings, again this is not the case – once rankings have been achieved they are relatively self-sustaining and by focusing on improving content, your site should retain it’s position.

If it does require further work then this should be done – but on a more ad-hoc basis rather than every month. And you need to set clear parameters for your SEO supplier to meet (number of links, increase in traffic etc.).

To give you an idea, here’s a popular site where we have done no SEO for the last 18 months… does that look like a downward trend to you?

You Will be Told That Link Building is Crucial

This was the case when the only off-site measure was inbound links. But now it is less so.

Google and others take a great number of metrics into account when they evaluate the SEO of a website and it is likely that as their measures get more advanced, then they will be less interested in inbound links.

In any case, the number of link-builders who can’t even get the basic ‘on site’ optimisation right is eye-opening [and if your SEO doesn't even talk about your site, then you can be certain they don't know what they're doing].

Your SEO May ‘Front-Load’ Their Effort

If you commit to a monthly fee, your supplier will front-load their effort. Possibly just do some on-site work and very little link-building and then reap the medium and long-term rewards of doing very little (if anything) for you.

Important Note: This is not true for ALL businesses.

There are some types of site where ongoing spend will work. If the category of business you are in contains really high traffic search terms and valuable keywords (like ‘Car Insurance’, for example) then it is worth spending to stay at or near the top.

However, for the vast majority of businesses, despite all the promise, SEO is not the key to unbridled success – it’s just something you should do well on your site and seek other, more profitable, revenue generators.

If you want us to show you more evidence, please contact us, or call 01962 605 000.

This is true when it comes to social media too. With Google+ just about a month old, we’ve seen the two common responses you’d expect from this kind of launch:

1. The Enthusiast: your typical ‘early adopter’… just sooo excited by this new entrant that they’re gushing about anything it does
2. The Critic: much keener to take a contrary position and to be perceived to be knowledgeable precisely because they aren’t excited about the launch, they prefer to criticise from a distance

And, in Google+’s launch these have been polarised. The enthusiast talks up adoption rate, invites friends, promotes through other channels; the critic avoids at all costs and, often, hasn’t even tried the service in the first place.

However, in the instance of Google+ these two positions are both supportable – because it’s not going to ‘beat’ Facebook or Twitter, it’s just trying to carve it’s own furrow. Some will use it, some won’t – but the effect it has on both Facebook and Twitter will be measurable and long-term.

So, who should be most nervous about Google+?

In our view it’s Twitter. Why? Well, for two main reasons:

ONE: Because it is struggling under an ocean of mainly junk and drivel content. We love Twitter, but it’s just ‘overdose’ and as it grows in popularity, things get worse. But Google+ can do what Twitter can do in a much more managed way. Following is just one small part of Circles and Circles is way better than Lists, and

TWO: Because there’s little else to it – it’s simplicity is also it’s weakness. Whereas Facebook is a hub of social, sharing, gaming, commerce, etc. etc. etc., Twitter is just bulk communications with a little one-to-one interaction. So, if Google+ does things better than Twitter, it has nothing else to fall back on.

Will it mean Twitter disappears? We think that’s unlikely, but I’m sure there will be some furrowed brows at Twitter HQ as Google+ develops. Our view is that 100m accounts will be the key tipping point to volume communications getting going in Google+ (estimated to happen Q4 2011).

Note to Web: Google+ Hasn’t Even Got Going Yet

Google+ is still in a managed roll out phase. You can’t sign up directly – you need to be invited. Recently our personal account was limited to 150 invites and no more.

Not only that, but the linking of search to social is much easier for Google to do given their dominance of the former.

Also, Google is holding back on various roll outs we can be certain are coming:

• Business pages: which we’re confident will be better connected with Search and Advertising than Facebook or LinkedIn’s clumsy efforts
• Realtime search v 2.0: why hook up with Twitter or Facebook when you have your own platform? It comes with a massive search volume that blogs, merchants, advertisers and people want to get in front of
• All the other Google services: they’re not quite tied up as yet, but things like Google Docs will add some very interesting spice to the mix
• Mobile: Hands up who’s got a mobile platform AND a social network? Precisely!

Wrap Up

Google has had two failed attempts at social – Wave and Buzz. Wave was let down by difficulty in access / promotion and also being before it’s time – it wasn’t easy enough to comprehend and use, yet we will see Wave functionality but in other forms (like Docs). Buzz was just a weak attempt at ‘doing Twitter’. However we believe Google has learned from these two mistakes by developing an accessible and user-friendly platform which improves on what’s out there.

It’s not really Twitter or Facebook. It’s email 4.0… the start of proper unified communications that non-users can plug into (thus the need for a Gmail account). The trend is clear – email’s popularity is on the wane and social, chat and messaging is taking over – and Google+ is right in this space. And, as first efforts go – it is very good!