Marketing Consultant

The SEO industry has taken off in recent years, developing into one of the fastest moving, most exciting and most lucrative industries around. The main reason for this sudden growth is the dominance of the search market by Google, and with it the realisation by companies that appearing in prominent positions in Google for keywords and phrases relating to their business can generate huge volumes of leads, enquiries and sales.

This increased demand for Search Engine Optimisation has lead to the creation of literally thousands of specialist SEO companies with expertise in improving website rankings. As with any industry some of these SEO agencies are better than others, and prices vary greatly. Sadly, however, there are only a few SEO companies who provide affordable SEO for small and medium sized businesses, due to the fact that SEO campaigns for large orgainsations are much more lucrative.

SEO involves persuading Google that yours is the most relevant website for the search terms you are targeting. The reason we focus on Google is because it has around 87% of the entire search market.

Every SEO campaign starts with keyphrase research. This involves identifying what search terms your prospective customers are using to products and services of the type your company offers eg. SEO Harrogate. There are various tools available to help you do this but by far the best, and most commonly used, is Google’s own Adwords Keyword Tool.

When you have constructed a list of the best keywords to target you can then begin optimising your website.

There are 2 main areas of Search Engine Optimisation – On page Optimisation and Off Page Optimisation.
On page optimisation ivolves anything you do to the website itself in order to improve its ranking potential. When Google crawls your web pages there are ceratin elements it places particular weight on when determining what subject the page relates eg. page title, URL, body copy, header tags etc. The more of these elements you write your targeted keyphrases into, the better chance your web page will have of appearing high up in the search results.

Off Page Optimisation usually begins once the on page optimisation has been completed. Off Page Optimisation essentially means Link Building, which involves creating inbound links from other websites to your own. This increases your website’s credibility in Google’s eyes, as Google sees each inbound link as a recommendation for your site. Link building is not as easy as it sounds though because what Google wants to see in order to move your website up the search results is links from well established websites that are relevant to your business area. This is easier said than done.