SEO – first of all, what is it?
secondly, do you need it?
and thirdly, how much does it cost?
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You need it if you would like ‘organic’ (free) web traffic to get clients to your business, by ranking for a particular term. It has been proven that SEO traffic (organic search for a particular keyword) converts at about 600% higher than paid traffic for the same keyword. That means, in ROI terms, that although SEO has a cost (to pay us to rank your site) – the value is 6 x the cost of a paid click, PER CLICK that you get from search engine traffic.
to explain; let’s say the price per click (if you did Google Adwords) is about $2.30 per click; and you bought 100 clicks (costing you $230) and you made one sale or new customer from those 100 visitors, you could expect to make 6 sales from 100 ‘organic’ searches from that same keyword. Why is this? Because people ‘respect’ Google’s selection of the top sites more than they ‘respect’ the top advertiser. It’s like – the perception is that you are ‘the best’, if you rank at the top of search results for that keyword.
Let’s take an example – you are a software company who has invented a new ‘time management software’ – so that would be a good keyword for you to rank for (and there would be others that we would discover when we researched the keywords in depth, such as ‘productiveness software’ (etc).
In the first example, ranking you for ‘time management software’ would mean that after our work, people searching for ‘time management software’ would be able to find you by ‘googling’ that term – and your site would appear on the first page of search results for that search result.
Our SEO work gets results in all search engines usually not just Google; even though Google is the most important as most searchers use that search engine, by a vast majority.
as for ‘what is SEO?’,
SEO is the art of us getting your website to turn up in search engines (we always aim for page 1, and high up the page) – for a particular search term. It is not just about getting ‘your brand name’ to #1, because firstly you’re probably already #1 for it, and secondly only people that ‘already know about you’ will search for your brand name. Nothing wrong with that, but SEO is usually used to get people who DON’T already know to search for your brand name to discover your business. The art of SEO has a few different parts to it, which have to be done in order:
1) finding the right keyword or keywords
First we have to find keywords that will suit your business. We use software to do this. We try and find keywords that are not too competitive (so you have a chance of ranking in a doable time-frame without spending a fortune) – . The reason we say we ‘try’ to find keywords that are not too competitive, is the fact is in some markets – or most markets these days – there are fewer and fewer low competition keywords, with good volume, that are ‘easy’ to rank for. This doesn’t mean that we can’t rank you; it just means that we will have to create more backlinks to get you on to page one (usually that’s an oversimplified way of describing how we do it).
SEO is an exact science in a way, in that we can take a snapshot in time and evaluate the top ten ranking sites, compare them to yours, and figure out what we have to do to beat the top ten competitors. It’s NOT an exact science because a snapshot of the internet today is going to change tomorrow, as your competitors are also building links and changing their websites in order to try and rank. So although we can give you an accurate idea of ‘how hard it’s gonna be, how long it will take and how much it will cost’, the job is going to be harder in 6 months because there will be even MORE links and more competitors to beat then. So the point is, start now; and you’ll not only create a competitive advantage, but you’ll keep it.
SEO is the BEST way to spend money to get web traffic, in our opinion, not only because it converts better, as we’ve mentioned, but because it tends to ‘stick’ – you won’t have to stay on a package forever, you’ll be able to do a light top up now and then to maintain your position, in most cases – whereas paid advertising (such as pay per click) – is a relentless drain; if you stop spending, your traffic dries up overnight.
Sure, paid traffic is a great ‘right now need it tomorrow’ solution for traffic, whereas SEO can take months; but did you know we can help with both!? – set up your paid campaigns for your ‘right now traffic’, and then tail it out as your SEO traffic takes over, over time; or, leave both going, so you’re all over the page – in the ads, AND in the organic search; your customers then can’t miss you!
– okay, back to our task; we also look for keywords for you that have a good volume of searches per month (otherwise why bother! – there’s no point being #1 for a term nobody searches for!)
– have a ‘commercial intent’ – i.e. you could argue that ‘renovations builder’ would be more ‘commercial’ in that a searcher would be probably looking for an actual builder – rather than ‘renovations building’ – which could be just an information seeker; so we try and also make sure our keywords we try and rank you for have a ‘commercial intention’ behind the searcher’s query. makes sense so far, right?
2) once the keywords are settled on, which we will work through with you after submitting a shortlist showing you which search terms have the most volume, which are the hardest, which are the easiest, and which will probably be the most specific to your business – and which may or may not have a location modifier in them, i.e. ‘builder gold coast’ –
– then, we optimize your website.
Optimizing your website
This means that before we start building links to your website, we make sure the keyword is on the page, in the title, URL, description and header; and of course in the content as well.
If we don’t do this step, building backlinks won’t work, because Google won’t deem your page ‘relevant’ to the search term, and it won’t fly. (it would be like trying to fly a brick, rather than a glider).
Building Links to your site
3) step 3 is where we build links to your site. Basically, we are promoting your site (using that keyword or keywords) all around the web. this is done by real people, writing unique content; and often involves publishing articles, creating web 2.0 properties that link to your site, press releases, blog and forum posts, and other ‘ninja’ techniques which we would probably tell you if you asked us, but we won’t publish in detail here, so that our competitors don’t learn our secrets and we retain our competitive advantage for our clients!
(even if we did tell you the nuts and bolts, it probably wouldn’t mean anything to you unless you were an SEO expert yourself, and most clients don’t really care about ‘how’, they just want results! but like we said, we will tell you how we do it if you ask, and once you see the results, you’ll be able to follow back the links we are sending you anyway and check it out!)
One thing I can tell you – and our competitors: –
– We have exclusive access to a privately owned blog network that we OWN, and which is ‘clean’ – i.e. it has only high page rank blogs in it, and only our clients have access to it, plus we are constantly buying up more sites and adding to it. Almost every other SEO firm just uses ‘publicly accessible’ blogs; we are one of the only SEO companies that uses a private blog network (as well).
The very few SEO firms that have their own blog network are usually very low quality in terms of page rank; because they are not discerning about who they publish links for. You don’t want links to your high quality law firm coming from the same site that also has links to porn, gambling and viagra sites, do you? But this is what you’ll get from most ‘typical’ SEO firms. Our high quality, high page rank PRIVATE blog network is the single thing that no other SEO firms can compete with; they pretend they can, and they ‘borrow’ other people’s blog networks, but over time those blog networks get ‘dirty’.
Ours won’t, because we own them. So; we’re superior, and we know it; we don’t expect you to believe us if you don’t know much about SEO, but perhaps our results can speak for themselves.
Getting SEO done: How much does it cost?
Our SEO packages are priced monthly, and the price depends on the number of keywords you want to rank for.
$399 per month +
For small location specific businesses, i.e. ‘plumber [suburb name]’ – $399 per month would probably suffice to rank you for 2-3 keywords. Allow 3-6 months to get on the first page, or longer, depending on the size of the suburb. if you want to rank for (example) ‘plumber sydney’, it’s going to be much more expensive/take longer (because it’s more competitive) than if you wanted to rank for, say, ‘plumber glenfield’.
$799 – $1500 per month +
Allow this budget if your keyword is more competitive; i.e. ‘plumber sydney’ (in the example above), or if your keywords are in one of the more competitive niches, i.e. medical, legal, financial, pest control, removalists, automotive, software, or any sort of e-commerce; or for more keywords.
$2300-$3500 per month +
Allow this budget if you are in a very competitive niche, want to rank nationwide, or have identified 10 or more keywords you want to rank for. We usually divide the budget up based on competitiveness X volume x best match for your business. This means that if we have identified a ‘hard’ keyword that gets massive volume, but we think we can rank you for it, we will ‘weight’ the links for that keyword accordingly within your package.
SUMMARY
We’re the best at SEO, and we don’t feel like being modest about it. Our clients are smashing it, and outranking some very heavy competitors! If you want info on our packages and how to get started, Since the Google Penguin update, we’ve updated all our SEO packages to include MORE social, MORE videos, and MORE keywords per month – at the same price!
As to the exact specifics, you’ll have to enter your email address below to be automatically emailed our latest SEO pricing and packages, as we don’t want our competitors to scrape our content by publishing it!
We don’t have any monthly contract (though we offer substantial discounts if paying for three months at once).
See you on the inside!
cheers
barbara griffin
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