SEO ranking consultancy and Search Engine Optimisation services
SEO is an acronym which stands for Search Engine Optimisation, that is to say the overall activities (on-site and off-site) to improve website ranking on search engines.
The necessity to do seo stems from the fact that search engines, first of all Google, show results in a hierarchical fashion in reply to search keywords’ users. Among the websites shown the ones better ranked obtained more clicks.
The main objective of every search engine is to provide a useful service, which means results that meet users’ expectations in terms of websites relevance and quality. The reason is very basic: if the search results provided are not satisfactory users will turn to other search engines.
This very reason explains why it is not possible to pay to increase ranking (internet PPC advertising is different), otherwise websites with best contents would not be recognised and rewarded to the detriment of users and, ultimately, of search engines.
The first page in Google must be gained through the quality of the contents and a good seo work.
The criteria used by Google to determine websites and each single page ranking are many and change over time. For this reason SEO experts need to keep up to date with the development of technologies which operate indexation and ranking of websites and all internet informations. Googlebot, the google’s spider, crawls the web in search of new pages and gets constantly updated to refining the mathematical algorithms in charge of websites indexation and ranking.
Therefore we can say that search engines are the arbiters and websites the players of a more and more fierce competition where who knows the rules better, and has got more to offer, wins. SEO campaigns, subcategory of SEM (Search Engine Marketing), are an inescapable means to participate in the competition.
It is easy to understand what it means when it comes to digital marketing for online shops and eCommerce websites with large catalogues. Indexing all product pages and to rank them well among the search engine results’ SERPs guarantees important savings on online advertising and PPC campaigns. A significant starting SEO budget becomes money saving in the mid-long term. That’s what is SEO.
Not always is possible to aim at ranking in Google’s first page. Here it comes into play the seo consultant’s honesty who always ought to give to the client a realistic picture of the market and the results that are most likely to occur.
SEO needs analysis: consultancy and optimisation
Opt for a SEO consultancy those companies which can count on personnel enough skilled to adopt consultant guidelines and realise on their own the seo optimisation process. Businesses which cannot count on adequate internal resources entrust to the online marketing consultant both analysis and practise.
The first clarification needed, the less expected though, is that the most intelligent SEO is the one implemented during the website planning and creation. The technology choosen, the page organisation and information architecture, social media integration, even design, influence website SEO impact.
Effectiveness of SEO campaigns lauched when websites are already online and rigidly structured gets reduced or, in the worst cases, invalidated.
Whereas an ongoing content marketing production is planned, to give an example, a contemporary seo optimisation should always be put in place to improve visibility and increase ranking on search engines.
Estimating the work effort to rank a website well for a set of keywords requires a prior investment to:
- analyse the actual online website ranking for a given set of keywords plus variants;
- check online website status and popularity;
- verify website architectural technology, code, speed, content organisation and design to spot possible deficiencies;
- check competition level within the business sector;
- investigate what SEO strategies competitors have taken on.
Only after this study it is possible to define a realistic goal for the SEO service, estimate costs and provide a price quotation.
In particular, setting an international SEO strategy which includes localisation services or eCommerce SEO can be challenging and, for sure, requires an accurate preparatory market study.
Afterwards the company will be able to appreciate the services provided by the SEO consultant or the web agency.
In most cases a small website with a few pages and a low profile online presence will not be able to compete for the first page in Google for most of the keywords targeted by the seo campaign. Create false expectations damage the work relationship. The SEO consultant who promises impossible results is a charlatan.
Moreover, small websites owners which do not publish many contents or need frequent updates should be wary of consultants who offer complete service packs or long-term contracts: they are a way to spill money out without offering a real service. Once the seo campaign is completed, for these kind of wesites, it is enough to intervene with a seo check/optimisation a couple of times a year.
Instead, medium-sized websites like blogs, portals, eCommerce shops, usually need an ongoing optimisation activity or, at least, recurring seo services. According to objectives and budget settled the main interventions may be:
- direct insertions in the code (tags and meta-tags html, javascript management, robots.txt and htaccess editing, ecc.);
- contents reorganisation;
- texts revision or copywriting;
- internal linking activity;
- files renaming (photos and images, pdf, video, etc.);
- url renaming (permalinks);
- link building to increase backlinks (off-site seo);
- sitemap creation or fixing (indexation);
- microdata implementation;
- SMO (Social Media Optimisation) which is a SEO work made on social media pages and posts.
All these techniques contribute to increase website’s visitors through a better pages ranking; however, given the growing importance of social signals and social backlinks coming from social networks, social media marketing and SMO are likely to become crucial to get a good website and social media ranking.
SMO otherwise SEO optimisation applied to Social Media
Considering the relevance acquired by social networks and other online communities as indicators used by search engines to measure websites value, social media optimisation has turned into an important activity within SEM (Search Engine Marketing).
SMO has two main purposes:
- improving relevance and ranking of social media as business channels in themselves;
- social profiles and contents optimisation to improve SEO ranking of associated websites.
SMO consists in making social media and contents published more consistent with search engines preferences.
For this reason SMO can be considered a speciality of social media marketing, that is to say online marketing developed across blogs, social networks, forum, web communities.
Through SMO strategies like domain name customisation, accurate keywords, links and informations insertion, likewise appropriate tags selection, social media visibility improves bringing more subscriptions and engagement, which are indicators used by search engines to appreciate social channels importance.
This search engines’ recognition partly passes on the related websites. Without forgetting that social media with many followers represent in themselves main sources of traffic to the website.
Too often overlooked by firms, SMO optimisation should always accompanying SEO campaigns. The two activities are complementaries and reinforce each other.
SEO services and websites promotion on Google and other major search engines
- basic knowledges about technologies and codes used to make dynamic websites and online shops;
- thorough understanding of how search engines work and what criteria they follow to indaxing and ranking web pages (it is essential to keep especially up to date with Googlebot changes: PageRank, Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird);
- language skills to optimise contents with the right keywords keeping high quality of texts
- ability to leverage different web environments (blogs, forum, social networks, online communities…) to enhance contents and get a better internet ranking.
For a SEO consultancy to be truly effective it is crucial to have access to visitors statistics and website users behaviour analysis. All these data can be turned by seo consultants into actionable information to adjust the seo strategy. The lack of web analytics tools limits the power of online marketing.
It will be clear by now that getting all web pages indexed and well ranked is a complex task whose success depends on many factors. SEO consultancy will achieve its goals as much as the collaboration between the client and the seo expert will develop positively.
If the former aims just to keep costs low thinking of knowing already what are all his online marketing needs, and the latter aim mainly at maximising profits, the results of the SEO campaign will be lower than its real potentialities.