SEO Services Company London, UK

What’s Search Engine Optimisation?

SEO is a technique where you optimise your website layout, structure, content and UX to drive organic traffic through search engines, mainly the Google. Search engine optimisation has evolved itself over the years and has become more of a science than art. SEO is one of those rare skills that require certain aptitude (eye for details and analytics skills for example), lots of hands on experimenting along with regular education and keeping yourself abreast of how Google is modifying its search algorithm.

SEO or PPC?

All digital marketing activities are meant to generate awareness, leads or sales. The ultimate sales can be generated through organic traffic when you rank high in Google for a set of keywords with a higher SERP (search engine result placement). Or leads can be generated by placing paid ads on the web, be it search engines or social media networks sites using aka inorganic traffic.

As a start-up or a small business, you should divide your budget between SEO and PPC. Paid advertising can generate immediate “Leads >> Sales” to support your business cash-flow and give you confidence, while the SEO will bring organic traffic in the long run. You can generate leads and stay in top results in Google search or Google Display Network (GDN) using paid ads or PPC. However, the moment you stop paying, your sales stops significantly. On the contrary if you have established your website as an authority in the niche you are working in and are enjoying high SERP for your business keywords naturally, you can keep benefiting from organic traffic with regular maintenance of your website SEO which will cost you far less than paid ads.

PPC is good for initial lead generation and brand awareness when used CPM (you pay for 1000 impressions/views) on display network rather than CPC (you pay for each click).

How Does SEO Save Money?

Even though the average CPC (Cost Per Click) in Google is between ‎£1-2, CPC for highly competitive keywords averages £15 reaching to up to £40 per click. If you are getting an average cost per click of let’s say £5 per click and you are getting about 100 clicks a day, your monthly CPC budget will be just short of £15000. You can still get 100 clicks through organic traffic by spending one third of this amount on SEO. The decision on whether you need to use SEO services or PPC entirely depends upon revenue and cost per sales. Average CTR (click through rate) is 2% and the average conversion rate is between 3-5%. This means that if out of each hundred clicks, you are going to convert 3-5 customers. You need to see average revenue per sale to calculate your costs and ROI unless you are doing this for brand awareness reasons.

How Much Time it Takes to Rank in Google?

That’s a tough question to answer in fact. Ranking your keyword depends upon the competency of the keyword or in other words how many other websites are targeting the same keyword. If your service or the geographical area you cover is unique and only fewer websites are competing for that keyword, then with proper SEO, you can be on the first page during the first three months without any issue. If you are targeting highly competitive keyword, then ranking will depend upon the time and the effort you make in increasing your website authority and the number of back-links as compared to your competitors. However, the good news is that a smart SEO can help you rank for long tail keywords in less time so that you can start benefiting from organic traffic and have some revenue while you work on cracking the tough keywords. In all cases, SEO is your best weapon to generate online leads in the long run.

Are There Any Guarantees in SEO?

NO. That was an easy question to answer, wasn’t it? As the rankings depend upon third party (Google), no SEO is able to give you guarantee for your keyword ranking and timelines. However, SEO these days is not all about ranking, its more about content, user experience, organic traffic and conversions. So even though you are not ranking for the contracted keywords quickly, you still need to see organic traffic and conversions increasing as well as the website authority through proper content writing and syndication.

SEO needs to be transparent and you have the right to see the efforts and work done on your website by your SEO contractor. Any proper SEO work done on your website is definitely going to pay back one way or the other. Even proper optimisation of your landing pages for SEO can save your PPC bidding money on these pages because of their quality score.

For small business SEO service, or if you have fixed monthly budget for your digital marketing, please check our monthly fixed price SEO packages here.

Selecting Your SEO Services Company!

Here at ZaheerMalik, we see many companies are offering SEO services in London and the surrounding areas, some good and some bad. To avoid the cowboys, use our checklist:

PRICING – Does the agency offer itself at the current market rate? If they seem too good to be true, they usually are.
TIMING – SEO is not something you can action overnight and anyone telling you so is probably only out to make a fast buck.
PLANNING – Does the company have a realistic plan to present to you? Can they explain what they’re going to do using every day language?
TESTIMONIALS – Ask to see some of their previous work and check with the companies in question to see if they’re any good.
TOO PUSHY – If they’re urging you to sign up, ask for some time to think about it. Above all, any good SEO agency will be completely transparent and talk in understandable, every day language.