How do you get ranked with 24 hours? What’s the cheapest SEO? How can we do search engine optimisation on autopilot? I’m going to address a few common misconceptions in this blog post which may open a few eyes and instill a little more clarity into some of the observations that are made of the SEO industry. I frequent the forums, network in person quite a bit, am a member of various niche related groups and communicate frequently with lots of professionals like myself in our business. These are the conclusions that I draw.
Whenever a client commences with a SEO campaign they have certain expectations about what is going to happen. These expectations might include how many new visitors they will receive as a result of the work being carried out and how their web presence is general is going to take on a new shape (for instance, they’re going to start using social media more, more websites are going to link (backlinks) to their website, their on-page SEO is going to improve and so on). These are very reasonable expectations and they are based upon a client’s past experience with other SEO companies or web professionals, what they’ve read, what they’ve been told and so on. Our clients have predetermined expectations about what is going to happen and what our SEO work for them is going to entail and what the end results will be. It is up to us to manage these expectations and we must also realise that we are up against certain rogues in our industry who charge cheap and don’t even upsell up from that point. These rogues, like those which are present in other industries such as with tradespeople, tend to negatively colour general perception of SEO practitioners and what they do. But all cannot and should not be tarred with the same brush. After all, a professional and reputable SEO practitioner or SEO company that does a great job, will help to drive more targeted traffic to a business.
So how do you get ranked in 24 hours?
Well, the answer is it depends. I find it misleading when SEO companies advertise number 1 spots in the SERPs (search engine results page). After all, low value, low competition, low converting keywords can be ranking quite quickly even for a new website. But will they generate targeted traffic? It is unlikely. Ranking depends on various factors including domain age, existing backlinks, your business and a plethora of other factors. Google bots tend to visit sites more frequently when they are popular, indexing can happen more quickly for these sites. High authority sites can get rankings within 1 hour, never mind 24 hours. New sites will not achieve this, unless the keywords that they are attempting to rank for are low value, low traffic, low competition. You get the picture. It’s worth noting that too many so-called SEO companies tend to string clients along without the kind of monthly or 3 monthly reviews that we provide clients with. We taken this business from these so-called SEO companies because they either weren’t managing the project properly or didn’t really know how to take the SEO campaign to the next level. What does I mean by this? Well, let’s look at this example – client seeks SEO company, SEO company analyses client’s website, business, competitors, etc and draws up SEO agreement, client accepts, 12 months in client paying certain constant fees, results consistent for workflow in correlation with fee but SEO company should have proposed that budget be raised as per review. Alternately, SEO company might not have been doing the right amount of workflow for the budget or the work done might have been in the wrong areas, wrong priorities and so on. In conclusion, I’m not saying that a SEO company should necessary disclose their processes to a client but communication is key to a successful campaign and it is a SEO company’s role to manage expectations, propose budget alterations and so on. After all, we are dealing with uncontrollable variables such as Google, the client has to do their part so their must be good channels of communication and the client must choose a good SEO company in the first place. For me, a good SEO company is one that involves the client throughout the process.
What is the cheapest SEO?
I understand how it can be difficult for anyone looking for SEO work to be done to their website, to actually find the right SEO consultancy that they are looking for. We see ridiculously low prices which aren’t even just promotional prices, these are monthly prices set so low that we can only wonder about the quality of work that is being done that these low amounts. Realise that low quality SEO can damage rankings and recognise that you get what you pay for. How does Internet Marketing Platinum get around and compete with the “SEO people” who charge cheap (and their clients often end up paying twice – to a more reputation SEO company)? Well, we find that there are two main types of SEO companies out there and each resides at the opposite ends of the spectrum. The first practices the smoke and mirrors type of SEO where their methods are very hush-hush, a bit secret and then there are companies like Internet Marketing Platinum which believe in education. We’ve learned a lot from larger (and more expensive) SEO companies which we aspire to be like – they educate their clients. But this consultative approach is paid for by clients as part of the package. But our packages aren’t £10 per month! We’ll also provide clients with solutions which they either do or don’t accept. We’ll explain the rationale behind what we are proposing and leave the decision with the client. Our clients are paying us as professionals but it is their decision and their business. It’s also good for clients to be in control of marketing decisions and know that we merely lead them to an idea and it was their decision to implement it. We find that this works very well.
How can we do search engine optimisation on autopilot?
I like this question and I get asked this a lot. Let’s give one thing straight, automating SEO or putting SEO on autopilot as a long-term solution, a kind of set and forget system will not work. This is, however, different to doing mundane tasks more quickly using bespoke script or software. As with anything, automation can be abused and this is considered spam. Low quality, poorly constructed, poorly though out rubbish plaques the world wide web and if you’re a part of this then Google will most likely find you, sooner or later, and your website will be penalised, usually pending a manual review. But finding quicker and more automated ways of getting things done is just good business sense. Your bookkeeper wouldn’t use pen and paper to carry out your accounting work when Excel or even Sage is available. Why is Sage being used as an example of automation? Sage doesn’t do everything for you! No it doesn’t but it consists of a relational database which means if you update a field in one table, another view will also change, thus removing any duplication which would exist in a flat-file Excel spreadsheet. Why is this relevant to SEO? Well, I can’t pickup Sage and use it and a non-SEO trained person cannot pickup any SEO software I use and use it. If you use IFFFT as another example, which is a clever social media and web 2.0 property solution, you’ll need to know what you would like to achieve before you even use the system. I am a big believer in knowing how to complete tasks manually before I even use software and I’m willing to wager that your bookkeeper was sat in a classroom learning the theory then practising with pen and paper way before Sage was introduced to them. Just as I learned how to program, in Notepad, without any kind of software to autocomplete, help or guide me, just my brain and my tutor to help me make the connections.
So to conclude this section and wrap up where we’re going with this. Can you, the restaurant owner or locksmith or roofer, put your SEO on autopilot using automation software? No. You have to learn SEO and know how it works step-by-step. Software will just speed up, help organise, save to retrieve later, help backup more easily, help categorise and so on. But so will a filing cabinet, a drawer, alongside a desk and pen and paper. Learn how to do it manually first before you even try software. Because you can make a mess of your rankings if you misuse SEO automation software. It’s powerful. You wouldn’t try to run before you can walk, nor would you try to drive a Ferrari because you’ve mastered driving a smaller, less powerful car. Having said that, you don’t need to know how an engine works to drive a car, you just need to know how to put fuel in it and you don’t need to know how SEO works in order to get some results by writing some articles and blasting them off to a few hundred article directories with a some article directory submitting software. But then this would not be a holistic online marketing strategy and you’ll spend so much time trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t, how much to do of a certain thing. To those who want to do their own SEO to their website I say. So why not just hire a trusted SEO company who does it day in, day out, as an idea of how much to do for your niche, has contact setup ready to link to you and boost your site’s traffic? Why try to be a jack of all trades but a master of none? Why try to learn someone else’s job when you should be focusing on your own?