So how do you go about finding one that you can rely on? The most obvious answer is to go to a search engine, such as Google, and do a search for something like:
Whoever appears at the top must be the best at SEO, right? After all if they are number 1 in the search results and they must have used SEO to get there. So common sense would say that this must be the best company for SEO York.
Well, yes and no.
It is true that the company appears at the top of the results so this is a good thing. However, there is actually much more to SEO than your position in Google for a particular term. This article will try to explain what is involved in good SEO so that you can pick the best company for you.
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation and originally described techniques that a website owner could follow in order to appear as high as possible in search results. This resulted in a whole industry springing up to provide these services. The key to SEO isn’t getting to number 1 but to understand why this is important.
Website owners wanted their web site to appear at number 1 in Google because they knew that most people click the top results. In fact recent studies show that unless you are in the top 3 results you will get almost no clicks. As a result the race was on to get to the top because you got clicks which is more commonly known as traffic. The more traffic you have the more potential customers you can sell to.
This means that the key to a successful website is traffic so the assumption is that getting to number 1 on Google will provide this traffic. True, but it isn’t the only way. Traffic can arrive from many places, not just search engines.
If you have a local business in York, for example doing SEO, then being number 1 in Google for “SEO York” might sound brilliant. You may even pay an SEO expert to get you there. After a short while you sit proudly at the top of the results and you think everything is great and wait for the clients to roll in. After a few weeks you can’t help but be disappointed at the lack of sales on your site.
Why did this happen?
Simple, it’s probably because of one simple step you forgot about. You need to measure the potential traffic to your website for the phrase “SEO York”. If you use some of the SEO tools available they will tell you how many times someone actually searches for the phrase “SEO York” each month. You can then use this to estimate the extra traffic the phrase will generate. If the phrase will only give you 10 visitors per month then you probably won’t notice any increased sales on your website. However if your analysis shows that 1000 visitors will come to your site per month this would have an impact.
Pick the right phrases otherwise you may end up wasting your money.
Did you know what the 2nd biggest search engine is? It’s not Bing or Yahoo. In fact you may be surprised to hear that it isn’t really a search engine tool as such at all. It’s YouTube.
So perhaps creating a short video on a YouTube channel might be a better way of generating sales. This technique has proved very successful for people that have products to sell that they want to promote. YouTube allows potential customers to see what the product can do for themselves which makes them keener to buy when they click through to your website. You can imagine they would be far keener having went from a video than if they have just clicked a text link from Google.
So sometimes it’s smarter to use other ways to generate traffic. This may mean that for SEO experts they don’t market on Google. Instead they may prefer to use other techniques so generate leads which may mean they don’t appear at the top of Google’s results for “SEO York”.
