SEO is about defining your business goals and online marketing objectives, followed by a continuous, focused and well structured process of search engine optimisation. In most cases, SEO success will take months if not years to deliver successfully.

Here some of our tips on how to deal with SEO Spam emails:

Ignore SEO email promising guaranteed, instant results.
Nobody can guarantee results and by making such claims clearly shows only one thing: The SEO company making this claim does not understand SEO. They are just fishing for new SEO business. The best strategy here is to ignore the email, mark or report it as spam and delete it from your inbox.
It is fairly easy to spot these types of spam SEO pitches. They normally have a headline grabbing subject line like ‘guaranteed ranking’. They tend to be sent from free google, hotmail, yahoo email addresses or domains without a website.

If in doubt, check how the SEO company can help your business.

If you think the SEO email received is well written, does not make to many outrageous claims and has got some substance, you might want to take it one step further. After all what have you got to lose. However, make sure you respond to the email with some very specific questions. Ask specific questions on what the SEO company will deliver. Best to challenge them immediately on how much they know about your business and what they can do for your website. Questions should include:

• What search terms would you suggest to target for my business?
• By how much can you improve my target traffic?
• What do you know about my business and my target market?
• Where is your business based?
• Explain the process of optimisation (specific to my website and my target market)
• Provide case studies for previous successful SEO optimisations delivered

If you consider engagement, ask for a proper SEO cost proposal.

If you feel the SEO email is very interesting to your particular business, make sure you ask for a proper SEO cost proposal. It is important that you fully understand all elements of SEO, all associated costs and cost to deliver a successful SEO campaign. Typical cost drivers for SEO campaigns are:

• Keyword research & analysis – one-off
• Optimising your website for keywords (on-page optimisation) – one-off
• Building inbound links for your website (off-page optimisation) – monthly

The more keywords you are trying to target, the more expensive the SEO campaign will be. As a rule of thumb if you aim for a 12 months campaign for 10 keywords you should budget £5k. Your budget should be significantly higher if your target keywords are highly competitive. Lower,  if your target keywords attract little competition. Things you should ask for in the SEO proposal:

• How many keywords will be targeted?
• Who will make keyword selection?
• How will keyword research be delivered?
• What exactly will be analysed?
• Who will be writing content for your website?
• Who will be making changes required to your website?
• Who will be maintaining your website to make sure it stays optimised?
• How many inbound links will be built by SEO agency?
• What type of links will be built?
• Is all the link building done manually?
• What will be the success criteria?
• Will the SEO agency make some gurantees?

Any serious SEO company will be more than happy to submit a well structured cost proposal.

How you will find a good SEO company

As a general rule, good SEO companies know the value of inbound marketing and get work through referrals, word of mouth or by being found on search engines. Good SEO companies don’t rely on spam emails to find customers and will have many other ways of customers finding them. If you need the service, you will find a good SEO professionals and not found by spam emails.

These are some examples of the kind of SEO Spam best to be avoided:

‘Guranteed #1 Rankings! No Cost Website Analysis and Ranking Report of Your Website! Is Your Website Ranked at Number One in The Search Engines?’

‘We are interested to increase traffic to your web back to us in order to discuss the possibility in further detail.’

‘Your site should be at the top of the major search engines.
Want a free site analysis? If you are interested, just reply to this email and we can give you a free appraisal with no strings.’

’75% of WEB SURFERS searching the Internet will never find your site unless you’re located on the first page of Yahoo, Google and MSN. If I assist you to achieve at least 7 times more WEB traffic to your online business by getting you to the top of the search engines would you be interested?’

‘At No Cost to You, our search engine optimization experts will run a ranking report showing you exactly where your website currently stands in all the major search engines. Then we will email you our analysis report along with the recommendations of how we can increase your ranking, and improve your websites traffic dramatically!’

‘I’m going to be brief and straight to the point. I will list your website in our search engine for free with static links to your website. With thousands of our pages indexed by Google and Yahoo!, you will literally get hundreds of links to your content pages in relevant static pages. These are the example of pages our users benefit from (just examples, your site will be listed in pages relevant to your content)’
If you have a website out there I am sure you will have  seen many more spam SEO emails. They are fairly easy to spot!

1. No control over all SEO elements

Rankings will always fluctuate and are  never permanent because you or your SEO agency will never be in control of all elements affecting Search Engine rankings

2. Search Engine algorithms change.

Search Engines are notorious for changing the algorithms used to display results. Changes to Search Engines can severely affect your site’s ranking almost overnight – positive and negative.

3. Competitors optimise too.

Competing websites might target the same search terms (keywords) with their own SEO campaign. This will affect your ranking, how much will depend on your competitors success.

4. SEO results depend on data centre

Search Engines use different local data centres, which will show different rankings in different regions for the same search terms and same websites.

5. Don’t log-in to check rankings

Your rankings will depend whether Search Engine users are logged in or not. For example when you log-in to your Google account all the search results will be customised to your history and will be different to when you log-out.

6. Some websites have more clout than your site

Popular social media sites or dominant news sites might publish articles with the same keyword focus as your site. Because these sites have a large number of indexed pages and are indexed hourly you might find your site loosing rankings as soon as a relevant article is published

7. Website age matters

New websites are more likely to fluctuate in ranking than mature websites because of the age of indexed content and the lack of clear keyword significance.

8. Website content matters

Uncontrolled uploading of content to your website can cause keyword dilution  and changes to the keyword significance Search Engines allocated to your site.  Even small changes to your content, especially  page titles can adversely affect rankings over time.

9. Consistent link building

Poor link building strategy will cause your rankings to fluctuate substantially. Spam links, infrequent link building, high volume link building activity followed by no activity at all will all make your search results less stable.

10. Keep your site up and running

Frequent website downtime and pages that can’t be found will over time form a picture of unreliability in Search Engine’s indices. Access, loading and technical problems will result in adverse and fluctuating rankings. Make sure you choose a good hosting provider and check all your links on your website.

There are a lot of other elements impacting your rankings such as age of your domain name and age of your content. For this reason alone never throw away your existing content and never launch a new website without proper redirection of your old pages. If in doubt, consult your Search Engine Optimisation company.

Don’t give up just yet!. We have complied our top ten tips on how to select an online marketing agency and make the business relationship successful.

1 . Do it yourself

Don’t delegate the selection process to a junior member of your team.  You have to be able to work with and trust your chosen agency. Make sure the chemistry and communication is good. You’ll be ideally working together for a long time (12-24months) so make sure you’re a good fit. Only you will know!!

2. Demand good business acumen

Good online marketing is firstly about understanding your business. In fact it is all about understanding your business.  Don’t appoint some bedroom SEO guru or some remote online agency with a bulk standard, off the shelf ‘service plan’.  Online marketing is about ideas on how to promote your business and how to get those ideas delivered.

3. Look at search results

Look at websites that rank well for important (high volume) keywords – in your industry or comparable industries. Find out which agency does their search engine optimization and online marketing and invite them to pitch.

4. Understand the basics

Read SEO and online marketing articles (the Internet is littered with them) so you have a basic understanding or at least have some specific questions on subjects you don’t understand. Don’t believe everything you read but use a little knowledge to structure your conversation in an agencies’ pitch.

5. Get recommendations

Surely you know some other business people or website owners. Who are they using, what are their views and what are their recommendations?

6. Get client references

As for client references early on in the agency pitch.  Ideally phone numbers of current clients that you can call and talk to. Find out if  online marketing has improved the overall success of their business, not just improved search engine rankings. Pick the agency that you feel has the best record of success and is most likely to help you grow your business.

7. Get a quote

If you get a standard proposal and a price list for standard services then you’ve got the wrong company. If you get a price range, keep talking and find out the likely cost for your specific needs. If you get a customised quote but it is outside  your budget, consider it anyway.  The higher cost might get you additional or accelerated benefits.

8. Understand services provided

Don’t haggle over price but let the agency explain the specific services provided. By knowing the services you are getting you can potentially reduce agency fees by trimming ‘non-essential’ services. You can always add those services back in at a later stage, if necessary for the success of your online marketing campaign.

9. Define delivery period

Understand time required to deliver on your requirements.  Many agencies ask for twelve-month contract.  Online marketing and in particular SEO takes time o implement and to see the results can take many months. Don’t try to cram everything into a few months, as up front cost will be extremely high. Longer contracts give both you and the SEO campaign more security and reduce the pressure of having unwarranted expectations that cannot be met. You can also ask for the same amount of work to be performed over a longer period of time. This will create a slower path to improved performance, but will fit your budget better without cutting essential services.

10.Have limited budgets?

If your budget is too small to buy you an online marketing campaign with a reputable agency, find one that offers consulting on a hourly or day rate basis.  Good SEO advice from an expert agency is well worth a few hundred pounds per day and you won’t have any long-term commitments.

Here is our guide on Social Media and the key steps in the Social Media process:

1. Content, content, content

If you are not able to generate good quality, unique and useful content on a regular basis you might as well stay clear of the Social Media route. Good content, if promoted correctly, gets you an audience. Ongoing good content gets you a following.

2. Become the expert

Not only do you need to publish good content you also need to become an expert in your field, publishing on blogs,  writing articles and white papers,  answering questions on niche forums.

3. Keyword focus

Make sure each post, document, video or status update you publish includes keyword rich anchor text to relevant pages on your website.

4. Automate content distribution

There are many ways you can automate communication with your target audience.  RSS feeds and ping allow users to subscribe to your content.

5. Publish, publish, publish

Publish your content wherever and whenever you can.  Avoid duplicate content and article spamming. Use blogs, forums, social networks, potcasts, youtube, flickr and other websites to publish quality content and comments.

6. Capture emails

Wherever you can, make sure you capture email addresses, that way you can support your Social Media activities with targeted email campaigns.

7. Drive Traffic to your main site

Anything you publish should link back to your main business website,  ideally to a page with relevant content. the web page should also have contact information and email sign-up forms.

8. Maintain Conversation

Keep in touch with your audience through social networks, forums, twitter, blog comments etc. Maintain the same identity so your audience can identify you as a trusted source.

9. Maintain steady effort

Keep up your Social Media effort at the same or increasing pace. Don’t stop and start.  Try to do something every day.

10. Budget for Social Media

Although most social media sites are free to use, your time is not.  Larger companies have teams to deliver their Social Media strategies. Other companies outsource to agencies at substantial costs. Social Media Marketing requires considerable effort and time.

Social Media is not free. Don’t fall for it.

Here is what we include in  SEO audits and what we think you should look at when you define SEO projects for your business:

1. Business Objectives

SEO needs to be aligned with your business objectives. You need to know what you want to achieve and how to measure this. Especially if you are thinking of outsourcing SEO or recruiting staff to deliver SEO

2. Understand your Competitors

SEO success often depends what other companies do. Find out who your competitors are, both direct and online and what  their visibility is online.

3. Keyword Research and Analysis

Identify all business relevant key phrases. Think out of the box. What would search engine users type in to Google to find your business? Read more on keyword research.

4. Check indexation

If you have an existing site, make sure the website is indexed in search engines. Make sure there are no access limitations for robots, no site or server performance issues , no dead links or  site loading issues.

5. Ranking Report

You have to understand your current rankings for all major search engines. Which URLs are shown for which search term and at which position. You don’t want to undo good rankings. Equally you want to focus on rankings that can be improved.

6. On-page Optimisation

Is your current site keyword optimised? If you are launching a new website for your business make sure you define the optimal site structure before you build the website.

7. Internal Link Structure

Are you web pages linked in a ‘search engine’ optimised way. Have you used relevant keywords as link text between pages. For new websites, we highly recommend that you have a well defined link structure before you build your site.

8. Inbound Link Analysis

External links to your site are critical for SEO success. If you have existing links, are these links SEO optimised? Do they come from good neighbourhoods ? What links do your competitors have?

9. Resourcing

Search Engine Optimisation requires both upfront and ongoing resources. Do you have internal resources that can be trained or do you need to get an agency involved to deliver all or part of your SEO project.

10. SEO Budget

SEO costs money. Even very small SEO projects can cost £10k or more to achieve good rankings for a small number of keywords. You have to define your budget before you start SEO. Running out of money half way through any SEO campaign will do your ranking more harm than good. If you only have a small budget, set smaller targets.

If you want to find out more on SEO audits and our services please contact us or sign-up to our newsletter.