in search of the holy grail

These days, you would have to be living in a cave to have not heard someone talking about SEO. For people who have a website, SEO, or what SEO implies – a high ranking page in google – is often touted as the holy grail for thousands of visitors, instant profits and overnight success, and this is often re-enforced by specialist SEO companies who prey on people’s lack of understanding. If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance this sounds familiar, I’m pretty sure at some point you will have had an un-solicited email or phone call from one of these companies promising you overnight success? We get them all the time, and we sell SEO services, this shows just how thorough these companies are at checking your website.

At Image+ we get a lot of customers come back to us a few months after their website has been built with a list of changes they’d like. Quite often they’ve paid many hundreds or thousands of pounds to one of these specialist SEO companies to go through their website with a fine toothed comb and produce a specialised report just for their site to tell them the changes they need to make to achieve SEO success. We’ve seen hundreds of these reports from many companies, and each one follows a similar format, and gives the same poor generically available advice you could find at many of the free government sponsored SEO courses available.

We already know all of the stuff in these reports, we take it into account when we build a website and include most of it for free. We call this SEO Level 1 or “Search Engine Accessible” (included free) and SEO Level 2 “Search Engine Optimised” (a small extra free offered with every proposal). If these clients had just picked up the phone to us they could have saved many hundreds of pounds.

Whenever a client does ask us for SEO services, we break it down into 3 simple “levels” to make everything easier to understand.

SEO Level 1 (Search Engine Accessible)

Search Engine Accessibility is all to do with how the website is built. It means taking into account semantics before appearance, semantics is describing what the content is, and not how it should appear. This gives the search engines an easier time when they’re trying to understand the content of your page. It involves a few other details, such as proper file naming and some settings on the server, it’s all a little technical, but it’s basic due-diligence, which is why it’s included free with every website we build and host.

SEO Level 2 (Search Engine Optimised)

Search Engine Optimisation at Image+ is only a minor job. We usually price it based on the number of pages in your site. It involves things like selecting the keywords that are going to be most effective for your website, and that doesn’t always mean the keywords you think it does, or the keywords with the highest number of searches. We will help you through this process, and usually discuss the options at our first meeting so we can come up with a strategy for you (quite often the best thing to do is just ask your customers what they’d type into google to find you).

Once the best possible keywords have been selected, we then go through your site and modify the content of each page to make sure these keywords are included in the right places without “keyword stuffing” and making the content read like it was written for a robot, after-all, your website does still have to sell when people get there.

When we get to this point, there is still no guarantee of a good ranking. SEO Level 1 & 2 only accounts for around 15% of Google’s ranking algorithm. You can get SEO Level 1 & 2 absolutely perfect and still not achieve a good ranking. That said, we have a few clients who do achieve success with just this level of SEO. For example, 2 clients are ranking 3 & 4 for the competitive term “pr coventry” and another ranking #2 for the very highly competitive term “house clearance london” only using our SEO level 1 & 2 service.

SEO Level 3 (Search Engine Marketing)

Search Engine Marketing encompasses a whole host of online marketing techniques. This can include link-building, social media, pay-per-click marketing etc. and is usually tailored specifically to your needs (there is no point taking out facebook ads if you sell widgets b2b, for example).

The best thing to do here is give us a call, arrange a meeting, and come in to discuss exactly what we can offer you to best promote your website online.