We’ve recently finished a new website at work but are having some major issues with SEO. Can anyone recommend an SEO expert that they’ve had good experience with?

Google it? The ones that come up first will probably be quite good 😉

We use a local bunch called iMarketing, they are based in Ipswich. Rachel is probably the woman to talk to.

Work out what you want first, what is your problem?

We’ve recently finished a new website at work but are having some major issues with SEO.

If you don’t know and you don’t get a very good one then there is every chance that could end up lighter in the wallet.

Google it? The ones that come up first will probably be quite good

Nice 🙂

Search for local Web & SEO companies. Did a little basic SEO a few years ago as the boss was too tight to pay someone. Seemed to be the kind of thing that where the rules change reasonably often so generally best get someone who is up to date on them.

[Edit: You can usually tell the good ones by getting references and checking up with the people they say they’ve helped]

Out of interest what sort of SEO issues?

I always find phoning Google and asking them to put you at the top of search results normally works 😀

One easy thing is to make sure you have got a local business listing with google. It’s free and quick to setup.

https://www.google.co.uk/business/

Regularly create lots of content that people want to read and, especially, want to discuss. Ensure your website is accessible to the visually impaired and doesn’t have oodles of waffle – get to the point.

Browse your website in a text mode browser like lynx and check you can read it. If not, sack you web people and get new ones.

Pretty much it.

Rachel (not that Rachel)

Thanks all! Lot’s of helpful stuff.

Don’t want to divulge too much on a forum.
Basically, we don’t get a single results on Google (for example), regardless of phrases or words used.

We’ve done some basic SEO and the score from the online audit tools (Zadro & seoptimer) place us at about 65/100..

I know I can Google it, but it’s always good to pick by reviews and real world experience, hence posting on here.

Worked with a lot of SEO companies with a couple of high profile companies. To say they take snake oil salesmen to a new higher level is an understatement.

That’s exactly my concern.
Would like to use white hat SEO techniques. Lots of the provides seem to focus on short term wins using black hat SEO, which then compromises the site long term.

Basically, we don’t get a single results on Google (for example), regardless of phrases or words used.

Do you mean you don’t get a single result, anywhere. Or you don’t have a highly ranked result?

How are your rankings before and after your redesign?

I gave up in the end.

We had a new website built, it was mucho expensive, or rather should have been – a customer owed(owes) us loads of money and we took it in part payment – that was a mistake, but not the first. The version they gave up was crap, the guy who encoded and hosted it for us did more of the design work than they did.

First ‘SEO expert’ was cheap, but for this small amount of money they only devoted 2 hours a month to it – worked out what the best search phrases were and went wild. We got LOTS and LOTS impressions (I think that’s the phrase – we turned up on the list near the top) but almost zero clicks. It seemed they decided that – ‘B&Q customer service’ was close enough to what we do so ran that for a month, until they looked at it again and said “that’s terrible” more money please. It went on for 6 months, I sacked them – total business gained £0.

Then I used a more expensive one, who wanted to include a lot of pay-per-click advertising but created ads that were basically click-bait, we work in IT, but business only and don’t do ad-hoc work, but he was running ads about fixing your own PC, lots of clicks from consumers who probably hated us when they landed on a page about anything but replacing a broken HDD- we burnt though hundreds and hundreds a month on it for 6 months, total business gained £0. Sacked them.

Finally, spoke to a Marketing Expert who came recommended from friends/clients he came back a few hours later to explain that despite working in IT, almost no one searched for what we do in our area – in fact it’s not a massively searched for thing in the UK. The SEO people would have known this, but they had services to sell, sites to sell etc. The first guy knew that if he did it right, we’d get maybe 2-3 clicks a month, not enough to justify him or the website. The second guy knew the same thing but he was making a cut from the Google spend and wanted us to spend as much as possible.

We’re still working on our on-line prescese, but doing so via building lots of useful content and pushing it out via social media and building a mailing list, it takes a long time and is very slow burn – but it works. Spending fortunes fiddling around with key words to try to ‘cheat’ your way up the results doesn’t.

Regularly create lots of content that people want to read and, especially, want to discuss. Ensure your website is accessible to the visually impaired and doesn’t have oodles of waffle – get to the point.

This, because,

Worked with a lot of SEO companies with a couple of high profile companies. To say they take snake oil salesmen to a new higher level is an understatement.

This. You need to understand two fundamental things.

1) SEO has to be snake-oil by definition. Think about it – everyone who ever wrote a web page ever wants their page at the top of a search listing. No-one ever answers the question “where do you want your listing?” with “oh, page three or so would be grand, thanks.” If an SEO company “optimises” a website for a customer, and then a second competing customer employs the same company to do the same job, what’s going to happen? As Dire Straits once sang: “two men think they’re Jesus… one of them must be wrong.”

2) Back when the Internet was in black and white and anyone still used Yahoo!, SEO was a thing. Embedded keywords, hidden text, all that jazz. That was then, this is now. Thing is, one thing Google isn’t is silly. Every SEO trick in the book, Google will know about. Heck, they even mark you down for trying any bullshit to artificially boost your status.

The best way to generate a large crowd is to start with a small crowd. The only effective way to optimise search results in your favour is to have good, interesting content on your website that people will want to read. Promotion (eg, Twitter, Facebook) can drive customers to your site, getting them to come back again is down to the site quality.

As per Rachel, Cougar. At the risk of sounding really laissez faire – be very, very good at what you do and have a good story to tell.
You probably want someone to look at your site structure as a one off rather than paying a monthly agency fee. And avoid mixing up pay per click with the ability to be found organically.

Very interesting, thanks!
The projects had a fair amount of money thrown at it and we’ll continue this.
Senior management has global ambitions, so we definitely need to pursue this and get something formal setup to get a presence.

We’ve setup a blog area and will be adding on trend content weekly, along with videos and guides- hopefully that’ll help. Just in the process of working on the UI & mobile/tablet optimization.

google loves unique content so make sure you have custom written descriptions etc.

Google also loves content on multiple platforms which link to your page such as youtube videos but it is a fine line as blogs separate from your website tend to work against your rankings.

Organic ranking (anything you are not paying google for) can take months Google has to find the site then crawl the website and it is a long process.

To speed it up you can pay google using Google Adwords and use search terms that link to your site, you set your own budget but generally the more you spend the higher you can rank.

This is a very general overview of how it works. Source – I am a Pay Per Click specialist for a cycling company.

The only way to guarantee a high rank on Google is to give them money, set a web marketing budget and give it to Google every month. SEO companies can do this for you too, with the addition on their mark-up.

Hallam Internet in Nottingham are very good.

How long has it been live for?

Thanks again! Great replies.
Site has only been live 4 weeks. I know that Google can take 6 weeks before picking up new sites.

What does site:yoursitename.com say?

While I agree with you Cougar, I would point out that some sites really dont help getting ranked or picked up by search engines.
My employers site had no homepage text, not one key word or image tag or title, orphaned areas of the website 1900 identical page titles (all out company name), no Google business listing, no submission to search engines and way more outgoing links than inward…
In addition, most of what was posted on social media linked to other folks sites…

Worth checking the Google Webmaster Tools, it lets you see if Google have indexed your site, and if it had any problems.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Not sure if you got to the bottom of this, but if not, do me a wee favour…

Fire up your home page, view source code and search to make sure there’s no mention of either nofollow and/or noindex

These are put in by web dev’s while the site’s being built to dissuade search engines from crawling it and serving up half-baked content. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time on record someone had forgotten to remove the tas post-launch.

It’d certainly be nice if that’s all it was – 2 minute fix.

I used to use SEO but Google do regular updates that hit us from page 1 into oblivion. Now I use Adwords and pay google direct …… and it actually works! Similar sales to similar costs. You only need to watch a couple of adwords videos to get the feel of it and you’re away.

Might be worth having a conversation with http://morganonlinemarketing.co.uk/ he’s come and run some basic SEO workshops for our university students and seems to know his onions.