Pay Per Results SEO – Choosing the Right SEO Company

 Ultimately, every website owner is looking to increase traffic to their site to maximise their sales conversions. Working on the SEO or search engine optimisation to gain top positions in the organic search engine listings will undoubtedly increase web traffic. But it is driving the quality traffic which determines the level of increased conversions. This hub concentrates on advising businesses on how to choose the right SEO Company; a company who will work with you to achieve your business goals with a pricing package that suits your business. Pay Per Results SEO is an innovative pricing system that allows the business to get the results before they pay…

Choosing an SEO company can be a minefield especially if you don’t have an understanding of how optimisation works. There are so many companies out there all offering different pricing packages, different promises of success with different ways of measuring and reporting that success. There is so much SEO jargon out there too which is a confusion in itself! Below I have listed some questions that you might ask a prospective SEO company and a few tips to help you check them out yourself:

• How long have they been in business?
• What are their techniques and strategies?
• Will they agree objectives and create a strategic action plan?
• Will they review your website content and structure?
• Do they provide technical advice and fix errors?
• Will they research the competition?
• How will the target keywords be determined?
• Ask about their link strategies – will they obtain quality relevant inbound links?
• Who will be responsible for content development?
• Will they be thinking about your long term business goals?
• Ask what results to expect and in what timeframe
• How will they communicate with you?
• How will they measure success?
• How will they report on the results?
• Will they be open and honest about strategies and let you know about changes they make to your website?
• Check that they follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
• Look at the SEO Company’s own website and its organic positions on the search engines.
• Ask to see their portfolio of clients or case studies and call them yourself.

One thing you can be sure of; there are no short cuts or magic solutions. The SEO strategies that work long term are all above board in google’s eyes. Any SEO company who promise you top positions over night are either offering false hope or if they are lucky enough to achieve rank for a short period of time it will not deliver the quality prospects. Timescales for results will depend on many factors including domain age, competition, existing web design and current ranking. Don’t be fooled by a clever SEO salesman who bombards you with jargon and is obsessed with undercutting the prices of his competitors.

The basic principles of SEO or search engine optimisation are very simple; Google wants to display a list of the most relevant websites according to the search term entered. Google bots or spiders scan web content to assess this relevance. The more often you update or add to your content the more frequently the bots will revisit your site. Aside from the content on the website, Google will look at the popularity or ‘vote of confidence’ given by other websites who link to it. Backlinking serves two purposes one is to reinforce the theme of your website and so improve natural organic ranking positions and the other is to bring actual traffic to your site. The best links do both!

Keywords

The first part of the search engine optimisation process is to establish the keywords or key phrases that you want to target. This is a very important stage of the process and where many less reputable SEO companies fail to do the research properly. There is no point optimising for key phrases that people hardly use because a top ranking for those phrases because it won’t result in sufficient quality traffic to grow your business.

However, if you only target very competitive phrases then you may be waiting longer for those top positions. As much as 80% of search phrases typed into search engines each day are unique and long tail i.e. 4, 5 or more words in the phrase so a sound strategy would involve getting the balance right.

On page optimisation

Once the keywords and phrases have been established, your SEO Company should do a thorough analysis of your website to plan the on-page or web page optimisation. The content and structure of the web pages need to be compliant with search engine standards. This ensures that search engines are able to find your webpage for specific keyword phrases easily, and your website gets listed high in the search engine results.

Blogs

As I mentioned before, adding fresh keyword targeted content on a regular basis is good SEO practice. One of the ways that many websites achieve this is by adding a blog or an article section to the site. A well written blog proves very effective in improving traffic to your website too and even helps improve traffic from search engines like Google blog search and others. Blogs also provide the opportunity to improve the internal linking of the web site.

Blogs facilitate interaction between the company and the customers or between individuals. So from a business point of view they can help the company to get customer feedback but also position the business as a ‘thought leader’ in their business sector if the blogs are well written and informative.

Link building

Link building is an important aspect of an SEO strategy and the number and quality of links that point to a website have a direct effect on the level of traffic received. A well structured and consistent SEO link building campaign should raise your online visibility, lead to an improvement in your search engine rankings, and an increase in the number of visitors to your website.

There are a number of ways to achieve this:

• Directory Submission - There are many directories on the internet that list websites or businesses on almost every subject you can think of. Submit to directories that are relevant to the subject or business sector of your website, you can also submit to general directories but choose the most suitable category. By submitting your site to a directory you will get a one-way link back to your site if it is accepted. This type of link rarely produces much traffic but is a good way to improve search engine indexing.

• Individual Site Submission - You will find some content based websites that provide links to other relevant sites as a resource for visitors. You can try and get a link to your site by contacting the web master who will then look at your site and decide if it is worthy of a link. These links are more valuable than directory links but getting them can be very time consuming.
• Article writing – or external content generation provides the opportunity to create some highly relevant content with links that point back to your site. There are many article submission sites but only a few quality ones worth submitting to.

• Forum / Blog Posting - Whatever your website is about there is bound to be a forum or blog where people discuss it. You can get involved in this discussion by asking or answering questions, at the end of each post you include a link to your website. Some forums have quite a high PageRank so this can be a fast way to get lots of little quality links to your site.

There is a big difference between attracting any old traffic to a website and devising an SEO strategy that will drive quality traffic. It is the quality traffic that will buy the goods or services that you are selling and generate more revenue. You don’t want unqualified visitors to your site, these are people that look at one page and quickly leave. Those visits may look good on Webmaster stat sheets, but it won’t do anything for your sales figures. For example targeting poorly researched key phrases will bring more unqualified traffic.

There are of course other reasons for high bounce rates but a good SEO company will develop a consultative relationship with you to look at the whole picture and ensure that every aspect of your online presence is perfected to achieve your goals. This includes the full website usability analysis.

 Now that you have the quality traffic it is important o make sure that you maximise the potential of that traffic to high conversions. Website usability issues are the things that affect your visitor’s experience of your website. If they have a good experience they will be more likely to do what you want them to i.e. buy something, fill out your contact form, sign up to your service/newsletter, tell their friends and bookmark your site so they can come back. Errors, slow loading pages, insufficient information and over complicated navigation are just some of the things that will loose visitors quickly.

Many SEO companies request payment upfront from the client and have a pricing structure based around optimising a set of key phrases and the positions they promise to achieve with those phrases. This is all very well but the client is taking all of the risk and in today’s economic climate this is something businesses can ill afford.

There are many people who have been burned in the past by SEO companies promising the earth and not performing. You know the sort –“you will get a guaranteed top 10 position or your money back”.

This is why only reputable SEO companies will offer pricing solutions that not only show their confidence in getting the results for their clients, but ensure no initial financial outlay for the client either. Pay Per Results SEO or performance based SEO is becoming a popular option.

A Pay Per Results SEO or performance based SEO Company however, is prepared to share the risk with the client and is in fact so confident in their skills that they are prepared to put their reputation and fees on the line. If you don’t perform you don’t get paid – simple. For many businesses this is an opportunity to bridge a financial gap; it allows for revenue increase before being charged for services as opposed to paying up front for just the possibility of improvement.

How does it work?

Pay Per Results SEO concentrates on organic or natural listings which appear on the left hand side of the page and fill the majority of the screen. Because of the nature of organic listings you will get a longer term benefit from this strategy as the effects are longer lasting rather than short lived like PPC.

Organic optimisation also feeds the 'long tail of search', a term coined to describe the many one-off search phrases that can bring your site relevant traffic. It is reported that 80% of search terms typed into search engines every day are unique. So the success of Pay Per Results SEO is based purely on actual click through search traffic arriving at your site from organic search - this means more and more actual visitors looking at your pages.

How will the results be measured?

The pay per results SEO Company will measure the results of the increased traffic specifically from organic traffic sources. An agreed traffic baseline will have been established and will then be monitored regularly. Using google analytics both the SEO company and the client will be able to assess precisely the increase in organic traffic. Couple this with all of the strategies and techniques mentioned in this hub and you have a winning SEO formula!