It is because of this dramatic affect that speed has on user’s experience of a website, that Google has announced faster websites will be ranked higher. This is the first time that Google has officially announced that Speed does have a direct effect on Rankings. SEO guru’s have suspected this for a while and a fast website is always desired for usability reasons, but Google’s announcement has put any debate over this issue to rest.

Google uses its Googlebots to test how long a page takes to respond as well as Google toolbar to test page load times. Generate UK have invested a lot of time and money into our server capabilities. This means that the sites that we host on our server have quick and smooth load times. As demonstrated by the Google experiment speed not only judges your Google ranking but that the amount of users actually decreases with a slow website. This in turn will also have an effect on your conversion rate. With a slow running website traffic is less likely to stick around and ultimately not buy into your services or products.

A lot of people are concerned that this change will really only benefit larger organisations as they can afford to pay more for hosting. I believe this is a misconception. Small sites can often react and respond faster than larger corporations can to changes on the web.  Making small changes on a larger website can often be a slow process due to internal bureaucracy; whereas smaller sites can often make those small changes to help increase the speed of their website.

Currently less than 1% of search queries are effect by site speed according to Google. However Google have already released a list of tools to help test your sites speed. This could only be the beginning for the importance of site speed. Google’s passion for fast internet and dedication to releasing new tools demonstrates that this could be an extremely important signal for the future. Google have been using speed as a signal for several weeks now and there has been no dramatic change. But this simply could be the beginning of a bigger campaign for faster websites.

Generate UK has invested in a high performance server infrastructure for customers websites we host. We ensure that our server is fast, efficient and reliable. Google says that a 0.5 second delay in the page load speed of your website can reduce traffic by 20%. As a business can you afford to lose this amount of traffic? Generate UK servers deliver up to 35% more speed over traditional hardware, this is to ensure that your website does not suffer because of server speed restrictions.

On page content can also affect the speed of your website. Having a large number of images, flash files or Javascript can increase the time your page takes to load. There are tools that you can use to run reports on your websites speed which will tell you exactly how long each page takes to load as well as identifying areas that are slowing you website down. Follow this link to see which tools Google suggest you use. Alternatively there are other sites you can use such as websiteoptimisation.com.

It is important to remember that this is only one aspect or signal of SEO. Along with speed we still have to take into account on page and off page SEO. These are all areas of search engine optimisation that Generate UK specialises in. If you would like to get your website ranking higher in Google then why not talk to one of our SEO consultants. We can help advise you on areas of your site that may need improvement to benefit from higher rankings.

SEO is vitally important to help your website gain valuable traffic for desired keywords. There are two types of SEO, on page and off page. On page includes meta titles, keywords and quality content. . . all the things you would find on a web page while off page includes back links and all the things relating to your web page that aren’t on your page, simple. Many Search engine optimisation companies or SEO ‘Gurus’ will make huge promises to you offering you top spots on Google by optimising your site or buying links for you. However you do need to be slightly cautious of such people. In this blog I have compiled I list of things NOT to do in SEO, which I have appropriately titled SEO Fails! They say people learn from their mistakes, well here are a lot of other people’s mistakes for you to learn from!

1) Make sure all your URL’s are friendly.

The tagline of this site is ‘Internet made easy’ ironically their URL is not easy to read. Google hates URL’s like this, it is long, complicated and says nothing about what content is on this page. Make sure none of your pages look like this or have any % or ~ in them, keep it nice and easy for example www.generateuk.co.uk/seo.htm. The two other problems I have highlighted on this page is the navigation keywords are in white, therefore not readable as well as the content not actually being found! You do not want this on your website.

2) Use appropriate page titles

I think this site sells guitar straps . . . it’s just a guess! Although repetition gets your point across it also looks incredibly spamy! This website was ranking number one, but Google took disciplinary action and they are now on the second page. The title of you page is a great place to put your keywords, but make sure it doesn’t look like spam!

3) Don’t link to too many other websites

Although reciprocal links and link exchange can be a good way to increase your rankings, you again don’t want to come across as spam. This is an example of a website which has almost 100 links in its footer. Not very user friendly at all!

4) Make sure you own your own domain name!

This domain name is www.jimmatheson.com! So there is just one small thing wrong with Jim’s site and that is that it is promoting Claudia, his opposition! Make sure you own your own name or company name as a domain otherwise you are open to attack from competitors! For those who are going to try and find this site, it was taken down after the American election.

5)Do Not Keyword Stuff

Not only has this website stuffed its page with keywords he has also made them internal links. In terms of on page SEO, keywords and internal links in content are good. Just not to this extent!

All the above sites are examples of bad SEO. Hopefully by looking at these sites you would have laughed as well as learned something new. At Generate UK we take Search Engine Optimisation very seriously and want to make sure that your site ranks highly for your desired keywords. If you are concerned about your current Search Engine Optimisation or don’t actually do any SEO and would like to, then why not talk to one of our SEO Consultants.

The Internet marketers use all kinds of marketing techniques to get a formidable ranking which gives them the advantage of having created for themselves a leading edge over other similar Internet marketers. There are various marketing techniques used. However, the most important is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which forms the basic foundation in driving more and more traffic to your website. You need to have your business known to people, and SEO, if done correctly, provides you the automated way in getting traffic to your website. The important thing about doing SEO correctly is to research for correct keywords that you need to use. This needs your effort in spending time to find the keyword phrases and use them with the other known marketing techniques.

You need to learn SEO techniques only once, and as you gather the experience and get to understand the technique better, you should be able to apply the knowledge to all your future website designs. The main thing is selecting the proper keywords and keyword phrases for each of the websites you design which affects greatly the traffic driven to your sites. In order to succeed as an Internet marketer you would need to learn the other techniques involved, but SEO remains as the most important technique which can have your website exposed to the people looking for whatever you are trying to sell.

The intention in marketing your products, services, and anything else is to earn money, and more correctly you apply the concepts of SEO techniques and have traffic driven to your website, you stand a better chance to promote your business. There are tools like Google Adwords Tool which helps immensely to search for the right key phrases. There are several free stuffs available for SEO experts for proper handling of your advertising techniques, and when you combine these with the techniques for advanced marketing methods you get the results that you want.

SEO is vital to your Internet business since the traffic driven to your website is mainly through search engines. In order to gain the leading edge over your competitors, SEO plays a vital part in designing your website, and it is virtually the only way you could get a decent ranking in search results obtained through Google or like search engines. Search Engine optimisation techniques applied correctly to your website makes all the difference between high traffic frequency and being lost amidst the numerous other businesses.

WELCOME to Generate UK’s Festive Online Marketing Workshop.

Date: 9^th December 2009

Time: 9am-12.30pm

Venue: Donnington Grove Country Club - click here for directions

A workshop designed to help participants understand and embrace a number of key online marketing activities.

The workshop will be dynamic and focused on sharing experiences with clients, partners and each other providing the dos and don’ts when it come to implementing a proactive marketing strategy!

The workshop will discuss:

• The principles of SEO – what are they?
• Business Blogging – to blog or not to blog?
• An effective website – do you have one?
• Email marketing –does it work?

The workshop aims to be delivered in an informative yet relaxed atmosphere helping Marketers and business owners become more knowledgeable when looking to contribute to their online marketing strategy for 2010.

On top of this you’ll have a chance to network with industry professionals through an hour of speed networking! Plus you’ll be entered into a special draw to win a round of golf or dinner for two!

The workshop is limited in numbers so please register here to avoid disappointment or call 01635 550431 to book your space.

www.generateuk.co.uk

Search engines feed on keywords; these are the phrases that users type in when they are looking for a websites, services, products or specific pieces of content. It is important that you do your research to understand what keywords or phrases are being used by your potential visitors and customers. To research these statistics there are a number of keyword tools that are available to use, some free and some usually via a subscription.

Fighting over the competitive keywords to increase the level of traffic is a priority for many business owners. From our perspective, we cannot stress enough how important it is to do your keyword research and we don’t mean do it once and think that the jobs done! Markets change, companies change, people change in the way they search, therefore so should your keywords.

Keywords should be considered as the platform for your online strategy and should be used throughout your website and all online marketing collateral.

When researching your keywords, don’t put all of your eggs into the most popular keywords. Whilst it may be true that they are important for your business, they may also be the most competitive and therefore will take a more sustained approach to build good ranking. Consider your locality, your products and your service.

Ideally you are looking for keywords that generate good levels of traffic i.e. highly searched for, however are relatively low in their competitiveness i.e. the amount of times they appear as keywords in other websites.  These Keywords are calculated using a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) out of 10 and the higher the KPI the better.

As we have already mentioned in other areas of this blog that research shows that people do use multiple keywords rather than just one. Categorising your keywords into groups often helps structure your approach, taking the generic word and creating more targeted phrases from them, for example Restaurant > Italian Restaurant > Italian Restaurant in Newbury

As a strategy, decide upon your primary keywords and choose a number of secondary keywords for each page.  Ideally you’ll have 10-20 highly focused keywords for your home page, and approximately 2-3 secondary keywords for each sub page. This may equate to approximately 20 secondary keywords in total.  Be careful not to have too many as this can dilute the importance and effectiveness of each page and therefore have a negative impact.

Have faith in your keywords and use them in all your online marketing collateral. Use them in the titles, heading, meta descriptions, Alt texts and anchor texts i.e. links within the content itself. This will help the search engines understand what your content is about and provide you with a greater opportunity to move up the search rankings when your keywords are being searched.

Are You INTO TECHnology?

The Red House has been a part of the Whitchurch community for over 50 years and has now been sympathetically modernised, retaining much of its traditional charm. The original open fires are now complimented by a warm and friendly atmosphere, great service, an excellent menu and some very ‘fishy’ wallpaper! 

The Red House quickly realised that managing their online reputation was paramount in encouraging customers through the doors; local customers needed to be made aware that The Red House was again open for business and the venue needed to be found by potential customers from outside the area who may have never visited before. 

The Red House also wanted to focus on making their site as visible as possible in the search engine results through a campaign of search engine optimisation. This ensured that location based searches delivered ‘The Red House’ website as a result, raising the venue’s profile both locally and nationally. 

The results are clear; using web based review and directory sites, a significant growth in the volume of site traffic has been measured (an increase of approximately 270% since March 2009). In fact, 25% of all website visitors are currently from these sites. Traffic generated by search engine referrals has also grown and is now up to approximately 40%. 

This substantial increase in the number of unique visitors to The Red House website has not only generated more reservations and Internet enquiries, but has also promoted The Red House brand to a substantial number of homes and businesses. 

Generate UK look forward to a very successful year working alongside The Red House team. 

Sandra Bryant, Proprietor of The Red House Pub and Restaurant stated “The key challenge for any new business is letting people know that you exist. Generate UK were confident from the outset that they could build an online presence quickly that would help build our business reputation.  The work Generate UK are doing is brilliant; they are professional, always deliver their promises and have a very grounded commercial thought process. I’m very excited about the work that Generate UK and The Red House will be completing in the future.”

Click to view The Red House website 

If you would like to discuss how online PR or search engine optimisation could help your business please do not hesitate to contact us on 01635 550431.

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An informed linking strategy for your web site will improve your rankings in the search engines and set you apart from your competitors. Most of the major search engines encourage web site owners to increase the number of back links a site has in order to encourage greater and more targeted traffic. 

In the democratic world of search engines, the more back links you have for a chosen keyword, the higher you will rank in the results. Of course, this implies that the process is very simple, which is certainly not the case. There is a myriad of additional variables to consider, not least the authority of the web site and the link relevance. 

We’re working on the principle that the vast majority of web site owners who are looking to improve the performance of their website care little for the technicalities of search engine algorithms; their interest is in the results. So regarding links; the general rule is that back links are good, as long as you concentrate on creating links to your site in the right places. 

The thought process you should go through when thinking about your back links is very important. For example, the keyword or phrase you would like your site linked with should be well researched. If your business wants to rank well for “Rental properties in Thatcham”, you should use that phrase as your link. 

If you’re an Estate Agent in Thatcham and “Rental properties in Thatcham” is indeed your chosen keyword, your first task would be to understand more about your competitors for this phrase. For example, how many back links do they have, who is utilising the local business results, what keywords are they using in their page titles. 

Once you understand all of this, you can start to build a campaign that takes into account their strategy for ranking for that phrase. You can identify how many links they have, which search engines their links are indexed in; if you know what you are looking for you can identify their whole search engine optimisation strategy. Of course, many companies have a list of targeted phrases, so you can begin to see how complex this task could be. 

This is a very simplistic way of looking and this has been done on purpose. I know we have some experienced SEO people who read this blog and I’ll be in the dog house for trying to simplify this process, however we have a larger number of marketing people, sales people and folk who do not want or need to lift the lid on complex algorithms, and instead just want a broad understanding of how search engines work. 

These are the people that we meet every day as part of our role as a digital marketing agency. They are looking for more information about link building, online PR and SEO because their business is putting them under pressure to ensure their web site is performing. This is where many companies are struggling; there could be 1,001 reasons why the site is not performing, with SEO being a small part of that. 

We believe that search engine optimisation is just a part of the online marketing strategy. It’s an ongoing process, where the rules and the competitive landscape changes almost daily. I don’t know a single senior marketing professional who has the time to monitor all of this. They need enough information to be able to satisfy their business that they are increasing the effectiveness of their online channel.

This is where a close relationship with a digital marketing agency pays dividends. By sharing the goals and objectives of your web site, your agency can come up with a detailed marketing plan that is designed to deliver against your business objectives. The great thing about online marketing is that it is measurable. What a great way to work; goal based objectives, regular analytics and no need to try and become a web guru in order to satisfy the demands of your business. 

What do you think? Please feel free to comment below, are we being fair to marketing professionals? Do you think they do have enough time to become experts in this area as well as experts in their businesses? If you would like to discuss this blog post or what Generate UK could do for you, please do not hesitate to call us on 01635 550431.

If you’ve been to any of our seminars or met anyone from Generate UK, you’ll know how passionate we are about blogs. Particularly their importance when it comes to increasing your online footprint.

If you follow webmaster guidelines, it’s unlikely that you will be able to get your site to top rank for more than a dozen of your key phrases. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, but generally a site is pretty static and narrow in its focus. This is where blogs can really help in terms of widening the net.

This is fundamental to our approach to digital marketing and it really works for our customers. The blog post below provides some additional information about what it takes to build and maintain a successful blog.

The Birth of a Professional Blog

The 3 main ingredients needed to build a successful professional blog are the ability to supply quality content, the need to develop and maintain a base of loyal readers, and offering quality products.

Working together these 3 components can create a steady and significant online income for the right individual.

What does it take to for an aspiring internet marketer to create and maintain a money making blog such as this?

Let’s take a look at the 3 key components needed to be a successful professional blogger:

Quality Content

The origin of any popular blog is the quality of content posted to it. Whether your posts are shocking, interesting, or informative, you need to gain the attention and then the approval of new visitors with content that appeals to them. By doing so you’ve increase the chances of them returning. Another important aspect of your content appeal is its ability to motivate visitors to recommend your site to others. This ‘viral’ effect will help boost traffic to your blog and hopefully the recommendations will continue to spiral upward from that point forward.

Maintaining Reader Loyalty

First and foremost the content of the blog must remain consistent with the original theme or purpose for which the site was created. To deviate from the original purpose of the blog would create confusion and disillusionment amongst the readers. This would eventually lead to a decrease in the subscription base.

The content now needs to supply ongoing value to readers. The heart and soul of any blog is the ability to provide useful, thought provoking, entertaining, insightful, or informative content to its readers. Failure to provide this will reduce the reader’s loyalty or discourage them from further recommending your blog to others.

Quality Products

Now that you’re maintaining reader loyalty and attracting a growing subscriber base we can make a couple assumptions here.

1) Your readers have an interest in the theme upon which your blog is based

2) You command a certain respect from your readers pertaining to your knowledge of the blog’s subject matter.

It is at this point that you can passively start to make recommendations to your readers on particular products that would fit their needs or interest.

The way you introduce your passive promoting is up to you. It can be in the form of a post that reviews a particular product, a post where the subject may naturally lead into a product referral, or even banner ads.

Take caution here not to crowd your blog with advertisements or hammer your readers with sales pitches. Remember they originally subscribed just for your content and not to be sold anything.

In order to build a successful professional blog you’ll need to maintain your consistency with the reader base. Continue to supply them with the content they desire while offering to them helpful products using a soft sell approach. You’ve worked too hard to gain their loyalty just to drive them away with your ‘overselling’ them!

T.J Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina.

For more information on succeeding in blog marketing and to receive a free guide that demonstrates how to find both profitable markets and products visit: http://blogbrawn.com

What do you think? Was this blog post useful? Please comment below or add to the debate. Please do not hesitate to contact Generate UK for more information and ideas about how to we can help you set up your own business blog.

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One part of SEO that is often hard to explain to people not familiar with search engine optimisation parlance is the importance of Nofollow and Dofollow links. Anyway, I was going to write an article on this, however after reading the one below by Kevin John Lewis, it’s pretty hard to top. So have a read and see what you think.

No Nofollow Here - Join the Anti Nofollow Movement

Many people aren’t actually aware of this, but many of the backlinks you’re creating to your website by replying to relevant blog posts, are completely pointless, thanks to the use of Nofollow tags.

(When I say this, I am assuming that you create good, valuable content in blog comments - rather than just blog spam comments - but the very fact you’re reading this says you’re probably not the blog spamming type, if blog spammers spent time reading about what they’re doing, they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing - as most of it is completely pointless)

Nofollow tags simple tell search engine spiders not to follow links on a page - and they were introduced in order to help stop the motivation for spammers to plague blogs & forums with pointless, valueless spam comments just in order to get backlinks.

Personally I think it was a bit of a strange movement that most of the web marketing community have followed. The real value of spending time & effort creating valuable content by replying to blog posts, and other forms of content, has been taken away just to deter spammers!

If there is a link on your website that you don’t want there - you don’t want it there because it has no value to your reader, so you’ll want it deleting, not making nofollow. If you just make it nofollow & don’t spend the time to make sure that your visitors time isn’t wasted by following spam links, but you do spend the time making sure that these links aren’t followed by the search engines, what you’re saying is that you’re making your website for the search engines, not for your visitors!

So - what is the point of nofollow? In my opinion there’s absolutely no need for it, spam links should be deleted, or prevented from appearing in the first place with the use of anti spam tools - of which there are many, especially for the more popular blog packages - just setting all comments to nofollow so that spam links don’t effect your website negatively in terms of SEO, is saying that you don’t care as much about your visitors than you do about search engine ranking.

So why is everyone still using nofollow? Well, firstly not everyone is using nofollow, there is now a strong movement away from nofollow, there are growing numbers of people who share this same opinion as I do.

Having said that, the vast majority of blogs use nofollow and many large websites, including wikipedia.

Most of this is due to the fact that most blogs are set to nofollow as standard, and most people don’t realise there is a need to change this.

The easiest way to see if links are set to nofollow, is to use the seobook SEO for Firefox addon, which is a simple plug in for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Just download the plug in, go to options, and select for nofollow links to be highlighted - you’ll then be opened to a whole new world of nofollow links - and you may notice some interesting things.

Firstly, check if your own blog is set to nofollow the comments - if it is, then I encourage you to join the movement, bring the value back to blogs by saying no to nofollow. You can do this by downloading add ons for your blog package.  If you use wordpress, as I do, there are a number of nofollow remover plugins you can use.

Personally I use two plugins - one called Nofollow case-by-case which allows you to be selective in your use of Nofollow, rather than setting is as default, and another plugin called Nofollow Reciprocity, a very clever plugin which allows you to automatically nofollow links to those larger websites who are known to be using the nofollow attribute in order to help them to sculpt their pagerank.

You see, although most people use the nofollow attribute now because it’s set as standard in blog packages, there are a number of people who’re using it in order to help them to get a better link popularity.

The idea many people have is that the link popularity coming in to any page of your site, known as “link juice” is set out through links, so by getting as many links as possible into your site, and letting out as few as possible - your juice will rise, and your Google page rank will increase.

The truth is that it doesn’t quite work like that, you don’t “lose” link juice by linking to other pages, it’s simply that the amount of link juice that goes to the page you’re linking to is divided by the number of links on the page. Yes, if you only have three links from a page then each of these links are going to do a lot better off from the link than they would if you linked to 100 pages from the same page - but it wouldn’t do your site any harm either way.

The link juice you share with other sites isn’t lost.

Many people have the idea that if you keep all your links in your blog pages internal links, you’ll keep all the link juice passing back in a loop through your own site, instead of sharing. In practice however this isn’t the case, and link juice hoarding isn’t a great long-term strategy - for many reasons.

Firstly -  Google and all other search engines, do not like tricks, cheats & shortcuts - anything that they feel is being abused, will be changed so it can no longer be abused - and may even be reversed so that sites that were benefiting from such a strategy may be penalized for continuing to use it. We’ve seen this happen with many strategies in the past.

The use of the nofollow attribute to hoard pagerank, is now basically being used to show visitors one thing, and show another thing to the search engines - to the point that entire websites are full of links to websites that they are not allowing the search engines to follow. Google are very clever, they employ a lot of very clever people - they will already be onto the fact that the nofollow attribute is being abused in this way, and they will already be finding a way to filter out the effects of this strategy.

I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to start to see websites with very low numbers of outbound links, being penalized for hoarding link juice in this way - at the very least the effectiveness of this kind of strategy will diminish, as do all strategies of increasing results without increasing value to the visitor.

Secondly - outbound links are important! A website with good content will always include links to interesting & relevant websites. Google do not recognize nofollow links as outbound links at all, so if you show google a site with virtually no outbound links, you’re showing them a website which isn’t giving as much value to the visitor as a site that does have outbound links.  Outbound links to relevant, quality websites, using anchor text (link text) relevant to your topic or industry, are good for your website. Yes, we do need to be careful not to allow spam links to bad neighbourhoods, and we do this with the use of good housekeeping & clever antispam tools, but we don’t need to make every link nofollow.

There are many other reasons not to attempt to hoard link juice in this way.

· You risk making enemies of past & future allies.

Many people are not aware of nofollow links, and give content in forms of blog content, forum posts, and other forms of content, thinking that they’re gaining something in return - give & take. If you’re using the nofollow attribute to get without giving, while allowing contributors to believe that they were actually getting something in return, you’ll find that people stop giving you content.

As more & more people are becoming aware of nofollow, many people are checking this before giving content, in the form of blog replies, forum posts, whatever it may be - so you will probably find as time goes on, less & less people will be visiting your blog who do actually have the ability to add good content. Think about it, if someone can spend their time contributing somewhere that does give something back by allowing a backlink which does count - or they can spend their time contributing to somewhere that will not allow backlinks which count, where are you going to contribute?

· You risk your reputation

More & more people are becoming aware of - and annoyed by, the use of the nofollow attribute. There is even an uprising against large websites such as Wikipedia, who now use the nofollow attribute on all outbound links - and with tools such as Nofollow Reciprocity which publish the details of all of the larger websites which use nofollow for outbound links, and with a growing movement away from nofollow, wesbites which use nofollow for all outbound links are going to start being seen as lesser quality websites, and their reputation may be at risk over the next few years.

This is certainly the case for large websites - but for smaller websites in niche markets, the damage to a websites reputation could happen a lot quicker, as news travels a lot quicker in smaller niche markets.  It only takes a few people within a market to start talking about a particular website that was well respected in that particular market, to start to be seen in a dimmer light once people realise that the indiscriminate use of nofollow tags is being used in order to selfishly hoard link juice.

SO - in conclusion, I recommend that you do not use the nofollow attribute in blog comments in order to hoard link juice. If there is a link on your blog that you do not think adds valuable content that you would like to link to - then why allow your visitors to waste their time visiting the link?  If you think it’s a link to a lousy site, delete it all together.

Visit my SEO Blog, as long as you’re contributing to my blog posts with decent replies, and your website appears to be a genuine website with unique content, that is relevant to web marketing, SEO, online business, then it will be left where it is - spam posts won’t even get on thanks to the use of decent anti spam tools.

Based in Cheshire, UK (Close to Manchester) - SEO Consultant Kevin John Lewis delivers effective SEO services, and SEO web design and Re-design and prides himself on the increases in the quantity & quality of search engine traffic that he achieves for his clients.

What do you think? Was this blog post useful? Please comment below or add to the debate. Please do not hesitate to contact Generate UK for more information and ideas about how Dofollow and Nofollow links affect your business.

For a while now, there has been something about search engine optimisation that has been bothering me. It’s not the practise of SEO in general, it’s not even the multitude of companies popping up with their “New SEO services” conveniently added to their portfolio as the hot new thing to talk about. What is bothering me is that there are too many companies out there offering SEO in a market that does not offer an industry quality standard. They are offering a service in a market that has not really been defined.

This means that there is potential for customers to get ripped off and for SEO in general to be given a bad name, some will argue that this is already happening. I don’t have a huge amount of sympathy for companies who sign up with SEO firms without doing their homework, usually the better SEO firms benefit in the long term as companies who have had their fingers burned understand the true value of what SEO is and will make better decisions next time. The lesson they learn is that SEO should form a portion of their wider marketing objectives, SEO alone is only part of the story. A defined Internet marketing strategy that incorporates SEO and a whole host of other digital marketing techniques is where the magic happens.

This view and these comments are not typical of our industry, but they are a key mantra for us at Generate UK. This is because if you look at the average SEO key performance indicators, they do not sit pretty with what the company business goals might be. Let’s use keyword ranking as an example; this is a great metric that your SEO company will use to demonstrate to you that they have had a positive impact on your rankings. They have a clear before and after picture that can not be doubted. This is absolutely true, however would you use this metric when measuring the success of your site? If you were a business owner, would you prefer to measure the success of how high you rank for a specific keyword or how many new orders you have received? I know you could argue that the higher you rank the more targeted traffic you receive, but this asumes keyword research. More importantly, it assumes that you have a super landing page that is making the most from your visitors. Put another way, high rankings does not necessarily mean conversations.

Hopefully, this arguement is allowing us to make our point. SEO alone is not enough anymore, the real value from a digital marketing agency is that they should know how to deliver targeted traffic to your site, traffic that converts and is delivered within your budget. SEO absolutely forms a part of that, but it is not the total solution that is being pitched in our market space. Let’s look at another example, SEO firms will point to a growth in traffic via the search engines as a result of their work, it’s a straightforward to measurement and is undeniable. The question is whether or not that increase in traffic meant more sales for you, did it convert, did you receive more sign ups, if the answer is no, then is the increase in traffic worth it?

We maintain that the only way to measure your digital marketing agency, regardless of whether they are providing just SEO or the full spectrum of search marketing services is via conversions. Only then are they adding true value to your business and working in line with your marketing objectives. By understanding your marketing objectives, they fully understand what constitutes success, therefore the SEO companies can then provide you with metrics that actually mean something to you. SEO alone is a tool that might help you towards your goal, a digital marketing strategy will enable you to exceed it.