What is SEO and what is a Search Engine?

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.

How does Google work?

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.

Is SEO a one size fits all approach?

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.

Will we see a benefit from SEO for our business?

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.

There's lots of SEO providers, why Graham SEO?

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.

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.

How much does SEO cost?

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.

I've seen cheaper SEO than you - why?

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.

I just bought 300 links last month for £15 so why would I pay you £350?

To put it simply because: SEO link building is not about quantity You didn’t consider your current link velocity You didn’t consider your current anchor text ratio The links will likely be worthless for SEO You may be penalised by Google Link building is an art and buying link packages is an invite for trouble, we don’t recommend it no matter how much money you think you can save. The different types of Google penalty that can be imposed could mean that you never really even find out if you are penalised or not, you simply will never see results in the Google search engine for your website.

I've had SEO before & it didn't work for me, why should I try Graham SEO?

We’ve heard this one a lot and the simple answer is that your previous SEO is probably rubbish at SEO. Put us to the test, we’ll make an assessment of your website and tell you exactly what has been going on and what we can do to fix it for you and get you great results.

Yes we provide detailed monthly reports which explain exactly where the visitors to your website are coming from and how they are reaching you. We show you how SEO is performing and what we’ve done to get those results. We also explain what will happen next along with any related SEO news that is pertinent for your campaign or website. We create our reports using Google Data Studio combined with Pro Rank Tracker and all of the data is fed directly and by Google themselves.

We want to go with a northern company because we think you'll be cheaper than a company in the south, is this right?

Possibly, our prices reflect what we can achieve and we don’t have huge overheads to fulfil. Our customers are happy with our prices, we don’t set our prices in relation to your geographical location unless it means your niche is more competitive.

I am an SEO Consultant based in Wirral in the North West sat between Chester and Liverpool.

How To Find Page Views in Google Analytics

Which are the best performing pages and posts on your website? How to find page views in Google Analytics? Here’s a quick, simple guide:

Login to your Google Analytics account and select the website you want to find the page views for.
Navigate to Behaviour > All Pages from the menu on the left hand side.
Decide whether you want to see All Pages or just the Landing Pages.
Filter the information to show the page within a date range and for a particular segment such as your Organic SEO traffic.
Further filter your view to see which pages were selected during the user journey (optional).

Not only can you find the page views in Google Analytics but you can furthermore filter the data to reveal some pretty interesting things (including which SEO keywords are driving traffic), where your sales are coming from and more. Let me give you a quick answer first and feel free to check out my other posts below this one to explore things further.

Login to your Google Analytics account and select the website you want to find the page views for

Make sure you are using the correct Google Analytics account and that the view you select is the appropriate one you want to use (if you this set up otherwise just choose the Main View).

Decide Whether You Want to See All Pages or Landing Pages

Landing pages are the first page on your website that your visitors visit from another place such as a Google search. The data shown in the Landing Page can show you where they visit (on your website) next. All Pages view will show you the total number of views a page gets including the visitors who navigated to it from their landing page.

Let’s look at All Pages:

Navigate to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages from the menu on the left hand side

Navigate to find page views in Google Analytics

This will show you the individual pages along with the information you require including the average amount of time spent on each page, the bounce rate and more.

Image showing page count in Google Analytics

You can further filter the information to show the page view information within a date range and for a particular segment such as your Organic SEO traffic

To filter the date range go to the date selector on the top right of your screen and select the appropriate date range you want to analyse the page views for.

Selecting the appropriate date range for page views in Google Analytics

You can select which segment you would like to view data for too, e.g. Organic Traffic (this is your organic search traffic).

Setting the segment type for page views in Google Analytics

This will then allow you to compare the behaviour of your selected segment against your overall visitor traffic.

You can change the way the data is shown to you in the graph by selecting the appropriate option on the top right hand side of the graph here:

Showing the graph type for page count in Google Analytics

To see which pages were selected during the user journey click this option at the top left hand side of the graph:

To see the previous and next pages for page views in Google Analytics select the Navigation Summary

by selecting navigational Summary you can then see the previous page and next page the user visits in relation to your currently selected page (this image shows it as /Home).

To select a different page simply head back to the Explorer view and click on the page you want to this information for. Here I have selected “Basket.html”.

Image showing the previous and next page for page views in Google Analytics

So the information in the image below (for example) is now showing me the Organic (SEO) traffic to the Basket.html and how the users navigated there and where they went next.

Overview image showing the organic traffic along with previous and next pages for page views in Google Analytics

If I wanted to I could further choose to group the view by categories and show more rows if wanted to.