Almost 85% of all traffic to websites comes from search engines (source: Georgia Institute of Technology GVU User Study). Good search result placement is extremely important for your website — the vast majority of searchers don't explore beyond the third page of search results, so if your listing is deep within the results pages, you're not connecting with the people actively searching for your products or services. If your website doesn't rate higher than your competitors, you're losing out on potential clients.
Search Engine Marketing is the art of increasing a website's visibility in the search engines. There are two primary ways of ranking well in the major search engines: You can pay for sponsored listings which appear on the top and side bars of most search engine pages or achieve high organic (natural) rankings through Search Engine Optimisation.
Proportion of clicks on organic search results (via search engine optimisation) versus paid.
Sponsored / Payed Listings
While sponsored listings offer you a quick way to the top of search engine results pages, they have a number of disadvantages.
- They're expensive — you pay for each and every visitor who visits your site through a sponsored listing, whether they're of use to you or not.
- They're complicated — the formulas that determine the position of payed listings are complex and likely to favor bigger brands.
- They're less trusted — 66% of searchers distrust sponsored results because they are a form of paid advertising (source: eMarketer survey).
- They're ignored — 85% of searchers ignore sponsored listings completely (source: Penn State University 2009 research).
Sponsored listings can be effective, particularly for short term campaigns that need instant exposure, but the most effective and sustainable way of attracting customers through search is to refine your site for high organic rankings using search engine optimisation.
Organic Listings — Search Engine Optimisation
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the process of optimising your website to increase the volume and quality of traffic from organic search engine results, resulting in a greater web presence for your site. Searchers click on organic results 85% of the time — high rankings in organic results will dramatically increase targeted traffic to your site, establish a sense of authority and trust and most importantly, generate more sales and leads.
How we do it
We work creatively within the ethical guidelines to get the best results for each website. Our Search engine Optimisation process consists of two main components: on-site Search Engine Optimisation and off-site Search Engine Optimisation.
On-site Search Engine Optimisation addresses your websites content and structure.
- We'll help you choose the most effective keywords for each page of your site and strategically deploy these keywords to optimise your content and meta tags, the information on your website that is read by search engines. If any of your existing pages are cluttered with information, we'll create new landing pages for specific keywords and rewrite and restructure your website so that your keywords flow through the visible and non-visible elements of each page such as the title tags, meta tags, content, links, urls and navigation elements.
- We'll optimise your on-site links and advise you on how best to write quality, information-rich content that's search engine friendly.
- We'll ensure that any non-text content is properly marked up so that your information can appear in the image, video and map sections of search engine results.
- A technical review of your website will identify any technical aspects of your site that should be changed (such as hosting, domain names, excessive use of javascript, flash, redirects, images etc.).
With off-site Search Engine Optimisation, the focus is on your inbound links, the links that point to your site from other websites.
- We'll help you maximise the number and quality of inbound links, rewrite your link anchor text and advise you on which methods of link building to employ and which to avoid.
- We'll submit your site to the most suitable link directories and search engines, including speciality search engines (vertical search engines) that are specific to your niche, and create relevant landing pages specific to your inbound links.
The best way to stay at the top of search engines is by providing unique and useful content and a rich user experience. If your existing website isn't as effective as it could be, we can advise you how best to create content that not only attracts targeted visitors but converts them into clients and customers.
How we don't do it
Some SEO providers use 'black hat' techniques to increase a website's rankings that may work in the short term, but because the methods are non-ethical, can result in penalties or your website being removed from search engine indices completely. Such techniques include submitting the website to link farms, sending mass link exchange requests, hiding words in page content and stuffing keywords into certain page elements. All of the techniques we use are approved by the major search engines guidelines and don't violate any terms of service. We'll report on the exact work we'll do, on-site and off-site. If your Search Engine Optimisation providers won't explain exactly how they operate or can't show you results from previous campaigns, they're likely to be unqualified or untrustworthy. Be careful out there, we've heard horror stories about so-called SEOs in the North West providing very poor services.
Tangible Results
The results of your search engine optimisation will be evident and measurable. We install analytics software prior to commencing any work so that you can monitor your websites performance and see what people are doing, where they came from, what keywords they were searching for and which visitors arrived at which outcomes. You'll be able to compare the performance of your website before and after search engine optimisation is put in place. The graph below gives an indication of some of the statistics recorded and the traffic increase experienced after we performed some basic Search Engine Optimisation on one of our websites, Beautifuljobs.ie.
Monthly visits to Beautifuljobs.ie before and after Search Engine Optimisation was performed.
Click the image for a larger version.
While nobody can guarantee a number one position on any major search engine, we will be able to maximise your ranking, increase your brand awareness and generate new sales and leads. Contact us now to have your website appraised and receive a non-conditional SEO quotation.