“Everyone has an opinion on SEO”, I was told the other day. This is because the market is still in its early stages of development. There are still ‘first generation’ clients out there who do not understand SEO and there are no de facto standards to measure the standard of service against.
A trawl of the myriad of offerings on the Internet from Search Engine Optimisation companies range from £75 to place some keywords on the page footer of the home page to £4,000 for a full service which in reality turns out to be simple link building.
Clients often ask if they should continue with AdWords while the SEO process works its way through to achieve Page 1 rankings.
In the Nineties in the early stages of advances in IT and the rise of the Internet, companies were keen to appear as if they were major global players with a local presence, this often involved producing local language versions for products and having regional offices and sales forces. Now an organisation can electronically roll out products across the Internet on a global basis the advent of the Internet and the advances in technology that make micro-marketing possible, this old adage has been turned on its head. Now it’s important to be seen as “Your local specialist”. Big brands such as Nat West are keen to demonstrate through their advertising that they offer a personal service and are interested in you as a person, your family and your lifestyle and are not just some anonymous impersonal global brand; for HSBC this translated into “The world’s local bank” showing both the twin strengths of global coverage, but with local personality, culture and flavour.
SO Direct’s Search Engine Optimisation techniques enable any organisation whether B2C or B2B to achieve a local and national dominant position. Our unique software enables us to “twist” content and listings with a selection of local town keywords and national coverage, to ensure that you come up on page one in the area of your choice.
Our ‘Grey Hat’ techniques allow for semi-automation so that Google sees a humanized element to the process,enabling us to load accounts to multiple directories and twist unique content to recreate the same article in multiple formats so that Google sees unique content each time, on each page, across each town or City across the UK.
You can see the power of this.
Initially, it’s not just a question of the website designers sitting with the PR or marketing managers within organisation to discuss preferred keywords. Again, we’ve automated this process using Google Keyword Tool and other techniques which give us an in-depth analysis of preferred keywords from “doable” to “Difficult!”. This list is then compared to the Top 20 most successful competitor websites together with their Pay Per Click campaigns so that we can see the amount of money competitors are spending on certain keywords. We use software to run this analysis and this gives us a refined targeted list of keywords ranging from “easy” to “difficult”. We take a mixture of the two and work our way through a list of up to a hundred keywords writing articles which we ‘twist’ load and push out on a multiple basis to maximise coverage across the topic area and preferred geographical location. This helps to push even the biggest competitors off the front page.
We agree the right search terms or ‘meta tags’. These are a selection of keywords and phrases that many website owners think customers are most likely to type in a random search in order to find them, and their products and services.
Keywords need to be used 2 or 3 times every 100 words. A copywriter can be purchased for as little as 2c per word. We have copywriters based around the world who can write on any topic, provide research around the area and produce copy quickly that reads very well.
Loading original content to up to 3,000 relevant directories is semi-automated.
Creating a ‘hub and spoke’ effect with blogs and new websites highlighting specific product areas of your business, all with back links to the main site help to exponentially speed up the process of helping your business to dominate page one of Google for your preferred keywords. Once there, the visitor needs to be encouraged to stay through the use of video case studies, an enquire now form, a free ‘health check’ offer or an email autoresponder so that they can register their details and in return be able to download some valuable material – a free “White Paper” for example.
Employing full-time writers and link builders enables us to focus on the 360 degree strategy that is so important for sales and integrated marketing communications programmes designed to communicate and target prospects, customers and influencers across all touch points.
It is a virtuous circle of activity today, encompassing brand image and consultancy, Web Design, Search Engine Optimisation, PR, Direct Mail, Advertising, Events and Sponsorship. At the heart of it lies the messaging from Thought Leadership through to the translation of the messages into a piece of Direct Mail that will in turn drive the prospect to the Web Site to register their details in order to download material and so the circle of communication continues.
With such a joined up approach and using our powerful techniques companies can dominate their markets across the globe, looking like the favourite local supplier.
