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. Identify Your Target Audience

What is it that you are offering? What is your unique selling point (USP)? Who is going to be interested in your offering? What kind of  information, products and services are search engine users searching for? You will be surprised by how much you will be able to identify by investing in some research. A quick way of understanding demand and target audience, can often be search term research and analysis.

2. Uncover Your Competitors

Once you understand your target audience and what kind of things they are looking for on the web you can start looking for your competitors. How many other companies and websites are in the same space? How crowded is the marketplace for what you want to offer or sell? The good news is that in the online world, competitors are not hiding. They want to be found and they want to be visible. You can uncover most of your serious competitors by searching for your business keywords on popular search engines and see who is getting listed on page one. Beware online competitors might not have the same offering as you, but by occupying top search ranking positions they prevent you getting access to your target audience.

3. Develop A Clear Business Model

You know your target audience, your identified keywords and your main competitor for your chosen products and services. How are you going to make your money? What makes your visitors part with their cash or how are you going monetise your visitors in other ways? There are many business models you could follow. In addition to selling products or services online you could develop innovative subscription models, capture data and leads, implement affiliate schemes or just build email lists, which you can monetise. Whatever you business model, make sure it is unique, clear for users to understand, compelling and good value. A well structured online business plan will help you focus and succeed.

4. Align Your Website With Your Business Needs

Produce a site that fits your immediate requirements but build it so it is scaleable for your future business needs too.  If you are planning on selling products locally you require a shopping cart and a  reliable online payment system.  However if you are planning on selling products globally, you will require features such as multi-currency, localisation and advanced security. If you have to add and edit high volumes of  content you will require a suitable content management system (CMS).  Draw up a road map of what you need to start with and what you think you will need inside the next three years.  A typical life cycle of a website is three years.

5. Optimise Your Website

The Internet is cluttered with websites that do not have any visitors and no visibility. It is estimated that last year alone over 47 million new websites were created. Your success will largely depend on how visible your online business will be and how you’re going to attract visitors to your website.  It is paramount that you optimise your website for your target audience and your target keywords. This can be done for new and existing websites and there are plenty of search engine optimisation companies out there eager to help.

6. Increase Your Online Visibility

Search engine optimisation is a must. However it is not the only way to increase your websites visibility and site traffic. If you have the budget you can try PPC to  generate instant visits to your site.  Social media, blogs and organic link building are equally valid but often lower cost methods to drive traffic to your site. Expert Marketers can help you with email- and viral marketing techniques.  Anything to get the word out and bring visitors to your site

7. Reassure Your Visitors

When you’re setting up a new site  it’s essential that you stand out from the crowd and communicate to your visitors what your site is all about. If visitors find your site useful, trustworthy and your site satisfies their needs or solves their problems they are more likely to buy or subscribe.  Make sure you are clear on what you are offering otherwise your hard earned visitors will bounce.

8. Convert Visitors

Call-To-Action, Call-To-Action, Call-To-Action. Encourage your visitors to do what makes your online business successful. Get them to buy, subscribe, register, download and participate. Whatever it takes but make sure your visitors convert into sales, leads or enquiries.  Make it easy for them to buy, make it clear where to register and encourage them to consume more content until they convert.

9. Retain Visitors

New customer acquisition is more expensive than existing customer retention. The internet is no different. Recycling exiting website traffic is less expensive than generating new traffic. Make sure you give your visitors and customers reasons to come back to your site. Use of CRM tools, publishing of unique interesting content, free tools, email based  promotions and offers will give visitors a reason to come back to your site.

10. Measure Your Success (Or Your Failure)

Web analytics can help you to gain insight into your site traffic. Where are your visitors coming from? How are visitors responding to your site and your content? Why are visitors exiting the site before being converted into business?  There are lots of packages to choose from – some paid, some free. Google Analytics is a very  good package to use if you’re just starting out.

If you get most of the above right, your web-based business will be successful. Don’t despair, nothing is ever perfect from day one and online marketing techniques evolve permanently. Consult an online marketing company for some of the specialist areas.

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 some factors to consider:

1. Is your business idea / business model truly unique. If not can you improve on the existing business models?
2. What are your USP (unique selling points)?
3. Are you entering a market which is mature or growing. Either way, will the challenge for your business be a different one?
4. Where will you get your business leads from and at what cost?
5. Have you had an independent view on your business model, other than approval from friends and family?
6. Have you checked out size and sophistication of your competitors?
7. How long can you run your business on zero income?
8. Will your business model still be required in two years time?
9. Is your business satisfying a consumer or business need or are you just realising your own dream?
10. What ongoing time commitment and capital will you require to run the business for the next two years?

We hope the above list will get you thinking and planning before you even spend a penny on business collateral. Remember logo / website designs come fairly cheap these days but they are still a waste of money if you do not have a business model.