When your potential customers search the web are they finding you, or are they finding your competition?

If there’s one mistake that I’ve seen site owners make time and time again, it’s assuming that just because they have a website people will be able to find it. Sadly, for most, it just doesn’t work like that. Spending a huge amount of money on coming up with a great design is one thing, but it’s just as (if not more) important to produce amazing content and, of course, to market yourself.

Google, Bing, and the other search engines use a massive amount of factors when deciding where to rank a site. To be honest, in most niches great SEO is relatively straightforward: do your research, consistently create great content, get links from other high quality sites, and keep driving traffic by having a good presence on Social Media.

Northampton SEO – My Services

In short, Search Engine Optimisation is about making the most of your site and help you rank better on the search engines. There are some key principles that you need to make sure you’re doing properly in order to get your site to rank and, to start with, I’ll go through a very similar setup process for pretty much every client that I work with (this is the same for my local Northampton SEO services and national or international businesses that I work with):

1. Research what keywords their potential clients are searching for;
2. Look at competitors and see what they do well (and what they do badly);
3. Carry out a technical audit on the site to identify what needs to be fixed;
4. Complete a content audit to make sure that your site is set up to target your best keywords;
5. Create a content strategy, targeted at potential customers;
6. Identify sites that are potential link targets and come up with ways of going out and getting those links.

Although that sounds quite lengthy, for most it doesn’t take very long at all. The next step is to move on and implement the strategies that have been created which, usually, is done on an ongoing basis. This doesn’t need to cost the earth and the services we offer can be scaled to fit your budget… and, if I don’t think we can make a difference, I’ll tell you up front – after all, there’s no point wasting your money and risking my reputation!

Modern SEO – Not Getting Burnt

I find that a lot of my clients (no matter what size) have had some issues in the past with their rankings – whether this be a less than scrupulous agency doing things badly, genuine mistakes being made, or attempts to manipulate the search engines. When choosing someone to help with your SEO it’s important to know that they’re going to do things properly… after all, the last thing you want is to spend a fortune and have no effect (or – even worse – end up with a penalty or ban).

Things you shouldn’t be doing:

• Creating spammy doorway pages or technical trickery;
• Old fashioned article marketing;
• Generic directory submissions;
• Just thinking about rankings, not traffic;
• Buying links;
• Basically, anything that could potentially get you penalised by Google, Bing, or any other search engine.

Things you should do:

• Creating great content that your users will love;
• Making your site is set up properly from a technical point of view;
• Combining paid and organic SEO campaigns;
• Thinking about traffic and conversions instead of just rankings;
• Coming up with ways to get you exposure on relevant sites and blogs;
• Getting genuine press coverage (press releases don’t really count!);
• Writing great content for other people, in return for some coverage on their site.

SEO Northampton: Get in Touch

So, if you’re looking for someone to work with you on your SEO strategy, please get in touch – I’d love to hear from you.