Website SEO Consultancy Service

Yes, in nearly all cases. SEO provides the opportunity to reach free traffic without having to pay for every visitor. Google's dominance of the PPC market means that budgets can be quickly swallowed up, and once you stop your website instantly disappears from the search results. If you ignore SEO then your competitors will benefit from your absence, and you won't be able to quickly gain ground on them in the same way as you can with PPC.

You've probably seen prices varying from a few pounds per month (and questioned the value) to several thousand pounds per month and taken a sharp intake of breath! I primarily specialise in Technical and on-page SEO, which are performance related, and which form the basis of all SEO activity. Most digital agencies will also offer related services such as Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Digital PR and International SEO, and hence their pricing escalates very quickly. I'm a freelance consultant aiming to work with small businesses, who need their budgets to stretch as far as possible, and Technical and on-page SEO is an effective way to achieve a good result versus cost balance.

In many ways PPC and SEO are complementary activities, and generally it's wise to avoid being reliant on a single source of traffic. But, for many smaller businesses, budgets are not endless, so resources need to be allocated accordingly. SEO is a long term strategy and running some PPC advertising in parallel is usually a good overall strategy.

The important factor here is searcher intent and matching that to the purpose of your website or individual pages. Using online tools, and starting with a small set of related search phrases, you'll be able to discover search phrases people are using to find websites like yours. It's important to recognise though which phrases are going to provide the balance between traffic potential and reachability - some of the most obvious high volume search phrases often deliver poor conversion rates, and will be out of reach to a small website with a low level of visibility.

Web performance speed testing is much like race tuning your car to get the best out of it; getting under the bonnet to make sure you're getting the best out of it and spotting any signs of trouble. Web page delivery to your visitors is no different, sluggish websites offer a poor user experience and will penalise your website performance as visitors go elsewhere. So good quality hosting and correctly configured servers and page code are paramount for SEO.

Try entering site:yourdomain.co.uk into the Google search box and you'll get a good idea of which pages of your website Google has listed (works in Bing too). Even though your website may have lots of pages with original content they won't necessarily all be indexed and listed by search engines, and therefore they won't contribute to your overall search reach. Pages may be considered to be "thin" and lacking in content, duplication may be an issue, or perhaps some pages are seen as lower value because of where they lie in your link structure. Finding these pages and assessing the changes needed is an important part of SEO.