FAQs
Many people think of Google when they think of SEO (which stands for Search Engine Optimisation, sometimes you will see the American spelling of Optimisation as Optimization with ‘z’). Google is a ‘search engine’ which allows for people to search for the answers to questions, services, products and other things of interest. Of course, Google is not the only search engine. You can think of anything that has the ability for you to search which is backed up by an algorithm to show you a set of results as a search engine.
YouTube is a search engine, Amazon is a search engine too but most people think of Google when they think of a search engine.
SEO allows people to find you in a search engine when they are looking for something but more importantly it allows you to appear higher in the search results than your competitors.
There are lots of ways that you can optimise for search and it really depends upon the type of business you have and who your target market is, that’s why at Graham SEO we use different tactics depending upon your goals.
Google wants to give it’s users the best answer for the queries it is given. If you need an emergency plumber, for example, you are most likely to click the local results or even Paid Ads at the top of Google simply because of the urgency of your search.
However, in most cases 85% of people who use Google are not ready to buy yet – they are merely browsing.
Google is smart enough to know the difference between the types of searcher intent and will show you a website that matches this.
It doesn’t always get it right though but it’s still the best search engine in the world and our best resource for general search enquiries. Most people still use it over and above others such as Bing, Yahoo etc so this is where most SEO providers will focus their efforts.
Google uses a “search bot” which is software that crawls your website to try and understand the purpose of the website and the page or blog post it is crawling, you may hear this called a ‘spider’.
Google caches the websites it crawls and stores it on their servers ready to be presented to you for when you perform a search.
No, that’s why Graham SEO offer different types of SEO services. You may be a local business trying to target a local audience or a nationally focused business with a wider spread of target customer.
The age and history of your domain name counts too, this can go in your favour or against you when you are doing SEO.
We think of clients as either in phase 1,2 or 3. Phase 1 is a brand new start up business with no history or presence on the internet.
Phase 2 is a client that has been around for a while but does not have a huge amount of visibility on the internet but does have a strong brand in the offline world and get’s searched for by it’s brand name online.
Phase 3 means you are already performing well in search and have a lot of opportunities known as low hanging fruity to capitalise upon when you start doing SEO.
We take a bespoke, individual approach to your website and tailor the strategy according to these basic factors.
We look at your competitors too, just to see if they’re doing anything that you can be inspired by but then do it even better.
Our final phase is to grow your business using content marketing and the creation of further content assets. We have a team of writers and content creators here at Graham SEO or we can work directly with your writers in house.
We measure our performance using Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and here at Graham SEO our top KPI’s are:
Leads for your business
Traffic growth to your website
Rankings in search engines
In that order.
Yes you should see a Return On Investment for your SEO spend but it depends on the history of your domain and where your target market is but our results are proof that we can do what we say we can.
Graham SEO is lead by a very experienced SEO Consultant, Graham McCormack.
Graham is the project lead on every single project we undertake.
We are a small close knit team of writers, content creators, link builders, technical SEO’s and client management personnel.
Yes, you have a lot of choice but only the results matter and we’ve been getting results for over 10 years for our clients. The vast majority of our clients now come from word of mouth recommendations and it is very rare that clients cancel with us.
If you are still unsure who you should work with then put us to the test. If you have an existing SEO provider we’ll be more than happy to give you an appraisal of their work and show you exactly where your business is up to (using real provable data) and where you COULD be if you work with Graham and the team.
We don’t do them in house because we’re a specialist SEO team but we do work with many web designers and can certainly help you get a site done. The main difference is that we’ll work shoulder to shoulder with them to ensure that you hit the ground running with SEO once it is complete.
We can also help with website management too, in fact we can help with anything digital – we can be your one stop digital shop, just ask any of our existing clients and you may be surprised at the lengths that we’ve gone to help them with their technology needs.
Good SEO is not cookie cutter. You can follow a set of instructions and still not get results, especially if you are up against a seasoned SEO professional.
Most serious businesses these days invest in SEO as a part of their digital marketing and so the playing field is not level.
Yes, you could certainly follow a set of rules and get some results but this would be the equivalent of installing a boiler with a DIY book and expecting to be able to install boilers for everybody else.
If you read our other FAQ’s you will have seen that we take your business on and employ a bespoke strategy for your website based upon over 10 years experience of what works and what doesn’t and no two websites will ever be the same.
Our SEO services start at £350 per month but each price is different dependant upon where your website is up to in terms of your current level of SEO and how big your target market is.
Our campaigns are bespoke and our aim is to give you a Return On Investment so we can discuss your budget with you and set a fair figure which is affordable and designed to ensure you get your money back with profit on top.
We are not expensive, our goal is to make you money but if you buy cheap you get cheap and may end up getting a Google penalty. We’ve heard it all over the years, and the section below this is full of some of those sayings with our advisory answers.
Our campaigns are bespoke to you. SEO packages don’t work.
Don’t be fooled by their simplicity you could be doing the wrong thing at the wrong time and wind up in a tricky situation very difficult to recover from with Google.
I am an SEO Consultant based in Wirral (SEO Wirral) in the North West sat between Chester and Liverpool.
For some of my target locations near you (we are not restricted to any particular location) see the following pages: