Suggestions while working with SEO Company

Thing to consider while working with SEO firm

Based on my experience in executing SEO projects for over half a decade, I am posting a blog entry which deals with the suggestions for a client working with any SEO professional or SEO firm for optimizing his website.

• Have complete faith in SEO professional: Once you finalize SEO professional or SEO Company, trust their skills. Also you need to trust their knowledge and experience. Do give them freehand to work on their methodology and indulge yourself in learning basics about their methodology and approach. You can discuss the blueprints they prepare for your website, in detail with them. This will help your SEO professional in gaining your confidence and also will help you in reaching a comfort level with your SEO professional.

• Have reasonable / realistic expectations about your SEO project: SEO can’t work miracles irrespective of their experience and past track record. Especially if the site is new, it may take months to really see traffic building up because of SEO work. So its quite unfair on your part to expect your website appearing in top 10 search results within a month of SEO work done. This is the reason why a good SEO professional DO NOT guarantees any results for the SEO job.

• Be patient with the results and be realistic: SEO is not a fuse wire which can trigger a chain reaction and your site will be bombarded with huge traffic in a matter of time. You need to be patient with SEO. It takes time to implement SEO as it’s a scientific approach and can be implemented after taking a series of steps, each requiring thorough analysis. The approach implemented by a SEO professional may take time to get indexed properly and it may take a little while to get appreciation by search engines in terms of rankings.

• Work in detail with SEO and treat him as a partner: You need to detail SEO about every minute thing related to functionality of your business so that he can come up with a decent research on keywords. Talk to him about the nature of business, customer behavior, product range, your competitors, target group / area. Based on the information provided by you, SEO can pick right sets of keywords and can boost your website rankings and get the right traffic.

• Be ready to pay for quality work: Chose a SEO professional / SEO company based on the track record. Once zero in on any professional based on the capabilities, then be ready to pay for the quality work which you expect from him. “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. There are plenty of people who are ready to do SEO in a couple of hundred dollars. Their job is just to stuff keywords and create metas and they are done. So my advise is be cautious while picking SEO and be ready to pay for quality work as it is something which is going to bring in more MOOLAH to your business and your growth depends on this.

• Do not hesitate taking an elementary class from SEO professional about SEO approaches and methodologies: Learn the basics of SEO from SEO professional working on your project. It takes little efforts but the reward is quite satisfying. You will not be in dark about the SEO progress and you will attain a comfort level with your SEO professional.

• SEO is not a one time effort: SEO is not doing a one time job and then sit and wait for the results. You can equate it with the regular marketing and sales efforts. You need to keep refining the approach based on the results which you get crawl after crawl. You need to measure finite parameters and make changes in your website / content / visuals accordingly so that you get better and better visibility. After the work is done, its about putting in time & efforts to sustain rankings and continue taking actions for improve rankings.

• The success of your business does not depend entirely on SEO: This is one of the most important points. Do not rely on SEO for generating more revenues and increasing your business reach among the potential buyers. A SEO can drive targeted traffic to your website, however he can not force visitors to buy from you whether its service or any product. The actual SALE entirely depends on your product line, service levels you offer, after sales service, product / service pricing and many other factors. So its unfair to hold SEO professional responsible if you are not getting desired jump in sales even after increase in traffic to your website.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Organic SEO Vs PPC

PPC and SEO

Pay Per click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are two of the main techniques to generate visits on your website.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is the approach where you bid for the position in search results which are sponsored.

1. higher the bid, higher the position
2. higher the competition, higher the bid

In principal, it is very straight forward. You pay for the position you wish to be and you have a greater control in terms of spending etc.

Organic SEO: Here you try to optimize your web pages around a set of keywords which you feel are suitable to your category. Once search engine crawlers indexes your website and all the pages then your ranking / listing starts appearing in the organic search results for the keywords you have targeted.

So which one of the two is better?

Organic SEO

• ROI from organic SEO is substantially better than PPC
• Organic SEO pays good in long run
• The top positions of search engine results are not for sale. You can get there through organic SEO only
• The CTR of organic listings are higher usually
• The conversion of organic listing is also higher (lead / sales)
• Organic SEO does not require regular maintenance once SEO is done perfectly and is refined for few iterations
• There is no recurring cost associated with SEO
• There is nothing like “click fraud” as you are not paying per click in organic SEO
  

PPC

• PPC gives you instant traffic
• PPC gives you targeted traffic as you can define a set of keywords for which you need traffic
• Results can be measured in PPC programs
• Marketing strategies can be formulated based on PPC as a tangible forecast of clicks is
  available over a period of time
• PPC requires professional management once you attain a certain level of spend as maintaining
• ROI is very important. An inefficiently managed PPC program can make you loose hundreds of dollars in one night !!
• PPC usually is second most cost effective form of web marketing (After organic SEO)
• PPC campaigns requires recurring / ongoing management
• There are chances of loosing money due to click fraud but most of the major search engines have placed mechanisms to check this.

Final Take: For any website an optimum balance and mix of PPC campaigns and organic SEO is must as they can generate quality traffic if managed properly. PPC gives instant traffic and can be a good source to generate traffic in long run too.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp