As a starting point, we would emphasize the importance of engaging with a quality digital marketing agency providing SEO services. Do not let your decision to take up SEO services be entirely about the cost per month for the SEO campaign, cheaper does not necessarily mean better. The key things to look for when selecting an SEO agency to carry out work for you are the following:
- Do they use White Hat SEO processes or Black Hat Tactics?
- Be wary of fast results – good quality SEO takes time to achieve
- Quality Blog writing services
- Understanding your market segment
- Capability for local, national, and international SEO targeting.
- Technical SEO capability
- Lastly affordable, good-quality SEO services do not necessarily cost the earth. A good quality digital marketing agency will have SEO packages to suit a range of budgets.
The reason for this is that search engines use special ranking factors, to organise search results. A good quality SEO service through a digital marketing agency can help you tick off a significant number of these factors. Helping your business improve its position in search results.
Another reason is to ensure black hat tactics are not being utilised by the SEO agency. The use of black hat tactics is not only outside of best practice, but it can also cause your site to be penalised in search results due to unethical SEO tactics, and even removed entirely from search directories.
SEO should not be taken lightly, for example, let’s say that your business is called ‘A COMPANY LTD’ and your business site has been around for several years, and you have invested a lot of time, money, and physical resource to get your brand recognition.
You decide to take up SEO services from an agency that is promising page 1 rankings in 1 month, for the FMCG industry – there is a good chance they will be using link farming (black hat SEO) to do this. Firstly, SEO can take anywhere between a few months to over a year to see significant results. Not only is FMCG very competitive, but there are a lot of big businesses out there with an outstanding online presence that has big budgets for ongoing SEO investment – it would take a fair bit of SEO momentum to compete with these businesses, let alone knocking them off the top spots.
In addition, usually black hat SEO tactic results are short-lived.
Having a site removed from search engine listings due to utilisation of black hat SEO tactics would be detrimental to a brand, imagine losing the domain name www.acompany.com in this example?!
What a knock. The number of years that this site has been recognised for “A Company Ltd.’s” brands products or services, now is suddenly no longer visible in results! Not only that to start with a new domain, and index from scratch will mean building up your trust and domain authority with search engines which can take considerable time to do.
- Content Optimisation Tips
Marketing should form a cornerstone of a business’s growth plans. Well-planned and executed marketing tactics can lead to new customers, existing customer engagement, and an increase in sales.
Content should be relevant to your business, product, or service offering. For example, we would not suggest writing about orange paint when you sell red apples. The relevancy of orange paint in this example, to you selling red apples is zero. Imagine a person that reads a blog written by your business about orange paint – they are more than likely expecting to see orange paint for sale somewhere on your site. They will probably be surprised to see red apples.
Writing content that is not relevant to your business is not only frustrating for the reader, but also for the business. It is a waste of resources – when it would be better to write about red apples.
The easiest way to think about what to write about is quite simply looking at the products or services that you offer, and then writing about ‘what it is, or ‘what it does, ‘why it is useful, ‘the quality of the product or service, or ‘why your business is the best place to buy this product or service.
Keeping things simple, will not only help you plan what steps you would like to take to promote your business, but it will also feel comfortable, and less stressful as you will be talking about something that you know about already, and hopefully are passionate about.
Okay, so what do we mean by existing customer engagement? When putting together content, a well-thought-out, and relevant piece of content can offer an interesting read or expert guidance. This not only has the potential to appeal to existing customers but can also potentially appeal to new customers and improve conversion.
But content alone will not do the trick – first your potential customer needs to find what you have written. This is where content optimization comes into the equation. Optimization is for the search directories and their algorithms. Usually well-placed keywords, image optimization, and titles can help with search bots ranking your content higher in search results.
Content optimisation is how you can enhance the content on your site, not only from a user point of view, but also from a search engine and SEO optimisation point of view. Here are our content optimization tips:
- Content should be clean, well structured, and easy to read and understand
- Use clear and relevant titles and headings
- Include keywords in your text
- Add meta tags and descriptions
- Add links to other pages on your site or calls to action.
In summary, content optimization is about speaking to search engines so that they can see the relevancy of your content in relation to search queries potential customers carry out in their search directories. If the search bots cannot read (via content optimization) your content for relevancy then the likelihood that the content will appear in listings for proactive searchers is decreased.
