Managing over 60 websites on a monthly basis gives a good overview of what’s happening and what can be done to move with the times as Google continues to make updates to the search algo, the penguin update has been the most fascinating change to date but we’re not convinced all the information out there is as accurate as many think.

We keep saying this but, the whole point of Google is to provide its searchers with the most relevant results possible so as to keep their share of the search market and the updates it releases are both designed to combat against sites trying to cheat the system but also account for the changing of the web and how people use it with regards to the many different social elements now in play.

Search Engine Optimisation is NOT about having as many links as you can get, it’s about being the most relevant. Of course this means there will be links pointing to your site but over the past 6 months we have found more and more focus being placed on the site itself and how the visitor experience is compared to that of competing websites. Elements such as good quality content, words that are easily readable, how long people spend on the page, what links are contained on a page to other internal pages and more so the image quality and tags are all things becoming the major player in where a website sits in the rankings. The bad news for many website owners is that their SEO company is not taking into account this focus and still continuing with major back-link campaigns.

Think about this for a second. If website A is at position 8 in the search results for a given phrase and gets a lower bounce rate, better click-through rate and longer visit time than the website at position 7 then it makes sense that Google should swap these results as it gives the searcher a better option. It’s these types of things that are more important than how many links a site has.

As for the original question, If the Google Penguin still alive? Well the answer is yes and it will only get harder to website owners and SEO agencies to work around any current loss of ranking. As many sit there waiting to be returned to their old position with the view that they’ve done nothing wrong so therefore it won’t last I’m afraid you’ll be very disappointed. The time for a site redesign and restructure many actually be closer than you think!

The UK SEO industry is growing each and every month, mainly because of existing businesses looking for help with their online exposure but also through the many people trying to kick-start their ventures and it’s this area where most people become unstuck and why Cheap UK SEO companies flourish. These cheap SEO agencies are the ones that normally outsource their work to lower paid countries such as India, Pakistan, the Philippines and many other states where not only are the rates of pay low but so too the quality that can be produced. I have nothing against these countries offering services and even selling them to the UK businesses but the problem comes when UK agencies mask them as their own because what the consumer thinks they are buying is a quality British service, manually implemented by someone behind a desk, not an automated, low quality system that does little for their rankings or reputation online.

SEO, or Search Optimisation as it’s becoming more known as, is about more than the link building these cheap services have to offer, it’s about the on-site experience, the speed at which a page loads, how long people spend on the site, what the bounce rates are like and many other things. Without the consumer even knowing that these are elements are important it’s not a wonder they fall into the link-building trap and it’s this education that needs to be put across.

It’s very unlikely there will ever be a definitive body to control what’s happening in our market but the ethical SEO agencies out there should be doing more to get across exactly what’s required to make a website successful (if they actually know that is). As a self-proclaimed ethical company we’ll be doing more and more over the coming months to try and get our message across and help UK businesses where we can – maybe even with some free workshops to help people help themselves.

Managed SEO means outsourcing not just a link building campaign, for that you would have to be of the opinion that simplistic link building actually works, no, a managed service takes into account the complete package and remit to get results. If SEO were about Link Building alone, or if even it was the main part of SEO, then it would not be called Search Engine Optimisation. The process of SEO takes into account many parts of the website, both on and off the page to ensure the maximum relevance. Elements such as Bounce rate, Click through rate, visit length and readability are becoming more and more prominent in the search engines quest to delivering their searchers the best results.

Is Google really that simple?

Let me ask a question. Can it really be that easy that the animal that is Google simply counts up who has the most links to their site and then place people in that order? Come on guys, get out of the 1990′s and get up to speed with the internet and how it has developed. Surely it’s more likely that Google takes into account the links, where they are from, what mix of sites, what links are behind these links, what content these pages hold, how readable the content is, are people on social networks talking about it, who created the links, when they were created and maybe 1000 other variables.

You get what you pay for (within reason)

Ultimately with SEO you get what you pay for to a certain extent. If you are of the opinion that backlinks from around the web are the way to go then fair enough, go and find a company that will spam links on other people’s sites for £50 per month but don’t start wondering why any boost it did give you only disappears after 2 months because all the site owners deleted your link. If however you now understand that you need a quality service, one that will be responsible for what it does and act in your long term interest then come and talk to us or any other ethical SEO agency out there (if they exist). There’s no need to go signing up to contracted periods or parting with large sums of cash up front, there are plenty of companies (if they know they’ll deliver results) that will work in arrears and charge when they can report the increase in ranking. If they carry out their plan properly, using high quality techniques then the results should last for years.

Over 50% of link seekers come back

I’ll end this post with the point (that always puts a smile on our face) that 50% of people that call and talk to us about affordable SEO and then end up taking out some cheap, worthless service end up coming back to talk to us again.

Google, the company worth billions and growing in different directions all the time is not stupid, surely everyone has to agree on that point. To grow from nothing to where they are now in a short space of time has to tell you they know what they’re doing and at the center of everything they do is the search engine, the place where a visitor can type in a phrase and Google will return what they think are the best websites for that person to view.

The through process of many SEO agencies out there, with their simplistic approach to off-site SEO is that Google is purely a voting engine, in simple terms the more links a website has the higher up the search results you will go – this is NOT the case and whilst Google are never going to give away the exact science behind the search results I think it’s quite obviously not as straight forward as that. Unfortunately this doesn’t stop these SEO agencies selling their services based on this approach and in some cases outsourcing their link building to lower cost countries such as India.

The whole point of Google is to provide the most relevant results, the website that show the most authority on a subject and will be of the most use to their searcher, when you think of it this way, considering Google would have no customer if the search results were bad, then you can only conclude that the number of links a website has is a small part of the overall process, yes it’s an important one but it’s not the most important and there are many more things like content, readability, site structure, page load time, images, video, tags and many others that please just as big a role if not bigger.

I don’t come to this opinion for the sake of creating an argument, I come to it from over 10 years of research and delivering results for many types of businesses that wanted to get ahead of the competition and use the Internet to do so. There are over 200 points in deciding the relevancy score of a site to the keyword phrase so please, if you sell SEO Services, stop selling something that is only a small part of the picture and start explaining or at least learning about SEO properly before you take the hard earned cash from a British business.

With anything cheap, like shoes, clothes, cars, etc. generally they don’t last as long, don’t do exactly what they should, are not of the same quality and are prone to break in a short space of time, we all know this and for (most) that buy cheap products you have to expect it. The same goes for SEO and what results you’ll see not just in the short term but in the longer term also.

We get approached by many (at least 3 times per day) SEO agencies based abroad and in the UK that want us to take on their services and resell them to our clients. Having this contact with “cheap” companies gives us an opportunity to quiz them from an expert point of view to find out exactly what they’re offering.

Q. So what do we get for $100?

A. We will put backlinks on blogs that are like the subject

Q. How many will we get?

A. we can produce about 200 links for $100

Q. What will happen when the site owners delete the spammy comments from their site?

A. We will make more for you

Q. So we have to keep using you all the time to replace the links?

A. Yes, that is what people do with SEO

Q. How fast will we see results?

A. We will get you top rankings very fast

Q. Can you tell me where your website is in Google?

A. We do not do it on our own website, we only do it for clients

Q. Do you use article marketing or anything else?

A. We do not do article marketing because it takes a long time to write but we can use forums and submit your site to 500 business directories

Q. Can I pay you when you have got the website to the top of Google?

A. No because we have to get our income to pay our staff

Q. What if I pay you double the price you are asking?

A. It will not work for us this way

Q. But you say we will definitely get results fast?

A. Yes you will

Q. So then what is the risk with not charging up front?

A. You pay and we will make the links for you?

Q. What about on-site SEO?

A. We do not need to do seo on your website because we do it all with backlinks

Q. Are you sure we don’t need to do SEO

A. Yes, we will get results very fast

After this exchange through Skype I got bored and cut off the conversation, the whole point that they are not interested in backing up their claims with payment after results, the sheer fact that they only give spammy back links and don’t cover on-site optimsiation tells me that the companies using these types of service are throwing their money away. There’s a slight chance improvements could be seen in the short term but certainly you’d never get a number 1 ranking for  a popular phrases and definitely whatever you do get would never last.

We work with companies that come from using these back linking services and we know the pain they’ve been through, especially when they have to explain to their boss what they’ve done with the budget. $100 is one of the cheaper companies out there where many “cheap” services have come around to the idea that by charging more they are somehow adding value to their service.

At Bigg SEO we are ALL about offering a quality service that delivers what it says it will at a reasonable price. there’s rarely a substitution for doing things properly in the first place and with SEO it’s no exception. It’s for these reasons that no client we have ever worked with paid anything up front or was made to sign a contract – keep delivering results and clients will stay, do what you say you will and they have no problem recommending you to a friend.

The more backlinks a site has does not directly reflect it’s search engine ranking!

If it really were as simple as creating backlinks by spamming forums and Blogs then everyone would be doing it for themselves or at least using some of the terrible automation software out there. If you’re to get SEO carried out properly on your website then you should seek out an expert, somebody that knows about all the aspects and has a good understanding of the 200+ points that Google would take into account when issuing it’s secret quality score.

I recently went to pitch for a new account from a company looking to get national coverage for several competitive phrases, I happened to be up against another SEO Agency in our local City and the contrast couldn’t have been different. About an hour into our discussion about the site, our experience and the services we could offer I was posed with the questions “So what exactly do we get for our money?” The answer was that I could not tell them as it’s not the way we work.

It turned out the the ‘competition’ were quoting for a backlinking type service where you pay £X per month and in return you would get say 200 social links, 50 PR5 links, etc, etc (I’m not sure exactly what it was but I’ve seen these services before). Great, if you want to throw your money away but although they were able to give precisely what the client would get for their money in the long term the client wouldn’t see results from this alone, in fact I’m a believer that these things just don’t deliver top positions but here is the problem:

If you go to a shop and buy a suit, you have bought the suit, it is a product and you now own it. If you go to an SEO Agency selling links as a product then you buy the product and you receive it. How does this help your rankings? It doesn’t. Who is responsible for bad results? You are.

Search Engine Optimisation is a process; it’s a service with an end goal – to get to the top of the search engine for the most popularly used phrases. Taking this approach it should not matter if 1 link or 1000 links are produced as long as the end results is the client happy and seeing results. Service based industries should be judged on results and these results should also determine client retention and that’s exactly why we never use contracts – we let the results do the talking!

SEO is about more than just buying links, especially where these link packages get their links and the quality of them. SEO should cover on-site, off-site and the competitior analysis to constantly give feedback to the client on which direction to take next. SEO Agencies should be service providers and not product creators buying from a lower waged country and selling to the UK. If an SEO Agency really wants to sell packages then brand them as such and make it clear that you are not responsible for poor results as you’d make our life a lot easier when it comes to explaining to new clients that have been ripped off (or believe they have) before

These so-called SEO agencies for some reason cannot even get the basics of quoting search volumes right and it’s important that everyone understands how to calculate it properly, what information to read and what to ignore so read on to see exactly what to look out for.

Phrase Volume

Phrase volume is what some of these SEO companies are quoting as the number of times people type the word or phrase into the search engine but what it actually is, is the number of times that word or number of words are typed into the search engine either alone or as part of another phrase. For example, the word transport gets many millions of searches when you look at the phrase based volume and that’s because it can be combined with other words to make phrases like “Best transport”, “Public transport”, “Freight transport”. Phrase information is almost useless especially when looking from an SEO perspective so make sure that you ask the SEO agency exactly what they’ve based their research on.

Exact Volume

This is what you need to be looking for, it counts for the exact phrase or word being typed into the search engine and how many times it’s used. Taking the above example of “Transport” as an exact word typed into the search engine Google it comes up around 9000 per month.

You can see by the above examples that to quote millions when it should be thousands can make a massive difference and you can imagine a business making a decision based on millions that may not make the same decision on thousands. There is also the point that with millions of searches the business may go for it but when considered that it goes along with so many other phrases in so many different industries it really is not targeted at all.

Always check how the phrase counts are generated for your SEO Service, always ask questions and don’t be afraid to ask for our help. Obviously we do everything the right way because we know our industry inside out but we’re also here to help you and ensure you are not mislead in the wrong direction by some of the rouge companies out there.

If you were to not use a Meta Description then the search engine will pull the content from your website. If you’ve built your website exactly right then you could be lucky and get the information you want into the description the search engines holds as overview of your service. If you don’t get it right then you leave it to the search engine to choose for itself what it thinks is right and that can open a can of worms.

Using the Meta Description for Search Engine Optimisation will mean that you tell the search engine and therefore your potential visitors what your site is about. This should not be name and phone number, it should not be a list of keywords and it certainly should not be paragraphs of information.

The best Meta descriptions will have 100 to 160 characters of text, be brief and to the point. If you want to make them really effective then include a chosen keyword phrase at the beginning of the sentance but this is not as important as most people think. The main thing to remember is that the description, if used, will be what the search engine displays as the text for your site in the search results when people try and find your company.

If you need help getting your meta keywords correct then feel free to contact us and let our SEO Services experts talk you through the right way to be as effective as possible.

When asked which a company should go for I always try and direct them to SEO and the high organic listing becuase ultimately this will give them a long term ROI far greater than most other advertising models. SEO, the process of increasing a websites organic ranking does take time but there is no doubt, especially with research showing that PPC (pay-per-click) is becoming less efective in some platforms.

Internet users are getting to know that the PPC adverts have been bought and whether they knowing avoid them or are just too used to them more people look to the organic listings as a source of authority on a subject as after all, these companies have earned their position in the search engine and not just paid their way to the top.

That said, PPC does have its place and with Facebook offering a PPC based model there are still legs in the ‘old dog’. I know companies that use PPC to start, grow and build their business but at the same time invest in SEO so that at some point they can drop their PPC costs when keyword phrases are puliing them up organically.

Whether PPC or SEO is better for a company really does depend on the type of business and its profit margins. If your profit per job is £10 and it’s costing you £20 worth of PPC to get a customer with no real chance of repeat business then it just doesn’t add up, if your profit per sale is higher than your PPC spend then it may make sense.

Bigg SEO offer all customers a free consultation which takes things like this into account. We manage PPC campaigns for some clients with a view to replacing them with high organic rankings using our core SEO service