Why is choosing the right SEO partner so crucial for SMEs?

Imagine that you had a virtual sales assistant, someone who consistently brought you leads and/or orders through a portal that could completely manage the customer and provide a significant return on your investment in it?

In truth you already have one – your website. But does it achieve this week in week out year after year? Does it achieve it at all? Is it truly delivering its full potential, gaining maximum visibility in search engines to provide you with the best chance of being exposed to and completely engaging with your target audience.

Elan’s Director, Karen Fiddes gives advice on choosing the right partner to boost sales and ROI through your online marketing...

SEO Services for the 21st Century

Page One Position One…. It can be yours – providing you are careful about who you choose to advise you on what’s needed to achieve an optimum site for these purposes.

There are many different options regards the level of service you can expect from a professional SEO company – a good benchmark is to ensure that they offer at least the following in their portfolio of services for SEO:-

• Directory Submission
• Article Submission
• Links & Listings Service
• Social Media and Link Building

In addition to this and in truly competitive online environments it may also be necessary for you to also review and restructure architecture with your professional SEO partner who should be able to provide to offer 100% Google compliancy in order to improve page rank.

SEO Partners - Reporting and Accountability

It is important to remember that any SEO partner should provide regular reporting and updates on SEO activity, this medium is just about the most measurable you can get so if they are not offering regular analytics reports as part of their service – take care. Accountability in this respect is of course an added benefit for the client.

Don’t let them blind you with science – there are no secrets, they just have the skills that you don’t, trust in them and their knowledge and monitor carefully your return on investment in activity both in the direct and indirect marketing of the site on and offline. Sit down with them at least once a quarter and review this activity to discuss any changes in your business or improvements that can be made.

SEO is not an overnight process

Good SEO takes time, a number of factors will affect how quickly you rise to the top of the search engines but a well designed, built and marketed site should start seeing results in 6 – 12 months where terms are less competitive, maybe longer for much broader terms.

There are also regular updates by Google that often mean developers need to “tweak” the architecture to achieve prime performance.

Remember that your website is organic and should grow month on month to provide more content for SEO purposes. News and Blog sections on site are an excellent way of refreshing content quickly and easily, particularly if your product or services are relatively “static” on the site. Web maintenance and subsequent housekeeping is just as important as the initial build process and again any professional SEO partner should provide such a service as part of their fee.

What will good SEO cost me?

Expect, in the majority, to pay an upfront cost with any partner to provide services to change the initial structure of your site for compliance. In some instances, there may be a recommendation to redesign and rebuild the site specifically for SEO purposes. If your site is more than 2 – 3 years old then it is nearly always recommended that a new solution is built as technology has moved forward at such apace in this time.

Generally SEO companies work on a retained basis as the long term nature of the process and therefore relationship can demand this – dependant on location of the agency, skills, services, requirement, size of site, competitiveness etc – charges can be anything from £400 - £1200 per month for SMEs, rising in the corporate world.

For more information on Elan’s services for SEO both in house and through their carefully chosen partner. Please contact us or read more here

Karen Fiddes
Director
Elan CM Ltd

25 November 2009

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