What search optimising can do for you

Our SEO is designed to increase your website revenues by a substantial amount, and to improve your brand strength and business image. These areas are inter-related and dependent on each other in the long term. Impact is created by increasing visitor numbers and improving factors on the site that affect performance. There are also some additional off-site aspects in the area of reputation enhancement and business visibilty.

Therefore success is best measured by monthly income improvements - the only critical metric. Since this must improve year on year, other factors must come into play; and here we are referring to the ethical basis of the work. If shortcuts are taken, long-term results must be jeopardised. Our outlook, then, is based on one core requirement: gains must be both worthwhile and maintainable.

This is not the only definition of SEO; a popular alternative is that it simply concerns increasing traffic to a website. That isn't our definition, but it is certainly the version many an SEO agency works to.

Practical measurements

We have increased the sales of online stores by up to a factor of ten, and are simply never happy until we have doubled a client's revenue.

The best performer here was an online store that had been running for two years, with an expert Webmaster, but was performing poorly. There had been no proper SEO application, so because it was still all to play for with this site we managed to achieve a massive boost in sales, and in a very competitive market area as well. This site has a Google page 1 position for its main search terms, with a marketing budget of peanuts. Currently it has around eight number one positions for their chosen search terms (and those are real-world traffic generating and converting terms). Traffic and revenue is still growing; and all this was done with 95% Natural Search, 5% SEM (paid-for advertising) - and of course a great deal of on-site work, since many ecommerce systems are time-hungry in that respect.

Unfortunately, we cannot promise to do the same for your business, though we will certainly try - it is in all our best interests to do so. We certainly wouldn’t be happy with any result of less than a 50% increase in sales volume in the medium term for an established business new to the idea of SEO, which is achievable for many enterprises in that situation. Newer sites of course are looking at doubling their turnover or better, year on year; and Internet business volume is growing all the time, so the future looks bright.

Search engine optimising allows customers to find you; it generates more of them; it results in a higher percentage buying from you, due to usability and marketing improvements; and it allows you to compete successfully online just as you have done in the high street.

Of course, you may need us for our other capabilities as well: we are more than happy to take on all your website worries in addition to search optimisation work. Most other SEO firms cannot offer this service.

What search engine optimising did for us

This website opened its doors for business in mid-July 2007. It was a rebranding of existing efforts and a restart. The domain name had been bought three or four weeks earlier, so the whole kit and caboodle - including the domain name - was brand spanking new.

Six weeks later, on September 1st:

• With very few links (less than 100 at any rate)
• With no advertising whatsoever
• With a PageRank of zero (of course)
• With 100% ethical methods
• With absolutely no spamming or cloaking

- this site had a Google #3 position for its main search term, and #8 for its 2nd term (search optimising and search engine optimising). We're talking on both Google.com and Google.co.uk, which is important to us as most (but by no means all) of our business is in the UK. Note that our primary keyphrase is by no means the least competitive term we might have chosen, and the best choice for our geographic location.

That's within about six or seven weeks of the site being set up, and within about ten weeks of the domain name being bought. The #8 spot was three places below Bruce Clay on the first page of Google's results; and they are the biggest SEO operation in the world, and a multinational with a massive budget for promotion.

Two weeks later, on 14th September, this site was at Google #1 (both .com and .co.uk), around eight weeks after the startup. And that's in the SEO field, not the easiest in the world to get to the top of, since you're up against the world's top experts and some big budgets. In fairness there are reasons why a good SEO firm may not appear near the top of a search engine's results; but you can be sure that there are plenty of enterprises in that field devoting substantial resources to doing just that.

SEO success analysis

We were successful so early on for three reasons: the site pages were extremely relevant to the topic, the site had the makings of a useful resource, and it was presented optimally. Actually, we normally recommend getting more links and doing some advertising, but we wanted to see what was possible if things were done correctly but with a pure organic approach. We cannot afford to do this with clients' sites since we have a duty to acquire more links, and also of course to use advertising. Website-generated business was not that important for us as our work was normally sourced elsewhere.

In theory, these kinds of results aren't possible, at any rate ethically or without heavy expenditure. At least, there are plenty of respected SEO consultants who would probably tell you so. To be quite honest, before this achievement we would most likely have been among their number; there just aren't that many opportunities to do the amount of work this required, with a brand-new domain and website - it is simply not economically viable, time-wise. And a rather unusual direction, of course, since older domains have much more potential; and it makes more sense to work with a slightly different direction, with more emphasis on advertising and linking.

However, we had a point to prove, and time was no object. They say we are among the best around with on-site optimising; hard to argue with that, right now. These results are possible now because of the sophistication of the algorithms; in the past it was necessary to have huge numbers of links and heavy over-optimisation in order to be successful. It now seems as if pages that are truly relevant have a chance, even up against bigger opposition - provided that your pages really are relevant to the terms used, and VO-prioritised. This means visitor-optimised: arranged naturally so they read well for humans.

We don't live or die by the search results here, though, since 90% of our work comes from recommendation or via agencies, but it does show what can happen by using the right methods. We proved we could do it, against the best, and with a brand-new domain and website - beat that!

Time to let that #1 position slide, now, and concentrate on another area: another aspect of SEO and another set of challenges. Challenges are the name of the game!

For credits, for the CMS application and extensions used, visit the CMS - 2 page on the main menu.

Update

• We have never emailed / cold-called another website owner asking for a link.
  
• We have never submitted this site to a Directory for inclusion. (Any directories we appear in are those that search for and include URLs automatically; and occasionally of course we polished up the resulting listings.)
• We have never paid a penny for advertising this website. No PPC, no ads, no paid directories, no nothing.
  
• We don't actively pursue links for this site, so there aren't many. Therefore the page rank is comparatively low. Nevertheless, it competes well enough for its terms.
  

OK - but how does that affect your website?