Any recommended SEO specialists? £500/m budget

[Dick Dastardly]

Jamster123 said:

....on the surface it all seems good, but I still have a major element of distrust shelling out next month, with no guarantee!

What kind of guarantees are you after?

I've found that there are no guarantees in any part of business, even less when it comes to experimental stuff like marketing and less still in something like SEO, where even the best practitioner is still at the mercy of Google changes and will only ever know a fraction of the ranking factors.

It sounds to me like your guy is keen and is doing a hell of a lot more than most would for £500. You may have found a keeper here.

[singlecoil]

Stevanos said:

The first place I would start would be by reading this http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/see-think-do-conten... and seeing how it applies to your business.

There's some excellent stuff in that link, a worthwhile read for anyone in business.

[Jamster123]

See the adword post made me think. In my field I can be pretty much get top spot all the time beating all the big boys such as, Rated people, Mybuilder and yell with a a £500 a month budget?

So whats the point in SEO if I can buy my way to the top ?

[Jamster123]

Dick Dastardly said:

What kind of guarantees are you after?

I've found that there are no guarantees in any part of business, even less when it comes to experimental stuff like marketing and less still in something like SEO, where even the best practitioner is still at the mercy of Google changes and will only ever know a fraction of the ranking factors.

It sounds to me like your guy is keen and is doing a hell of a lot more than most would for £500. You may have found a keeper here.

Dick, you could well be right, I may just be over suspicious of the guy, he could be a keeper

[MattS3]

We pay guys over £500 a day to manage this stuff, and there is a team of 3 or 4 of them on the account.
If your paying £500 a month, rest assured you'll not be his only client, probably one of at least 10.

Does that ease you worry over how good he might for £500 a month?

[MattS3]

Jamster123 said:

See the adword post made me think. In my field I can be pretty much get top spot all the time beating all the big boys such as, Rated people, Mybuilder and yell with a a £500 a month budget?

So whats the point in SEO if I can buy my way to the top ?

If you're getting enough traffic to support your business requirements, the no, don't pay for SEO if you're happy to pay £500 on PPC traffic.

[Jamster123]

So penalties remove, we are now on to back linking ? All sound like good plan ?

[Jamster123]

MattS3 said:

If you're getting enough traffic to support your business requirements, the no, don't pay for SEO if you're happy to pay £500 on PPC traffic.

I don't believe in business requirements as such, Im always looking for more and more work for growth. I don't need SEO or PPC to run my business, but if I can pull in more work I can employee more men and in turn make more money.Im exploring every possible avenue for more profit, and one being our online presence.

[Jamster123]

MattS3 said:

We pay guys over £500 a day to manage this stuff, and there is a team of 3 or 4 of them on the account.
If your paying £500 a month, rest assured you'll not be his only client, probably one of at least 10.

Does that ease you worry over how good he might for £500 a month?

Yes, Im just a bit apprehensive but I guess Ill just need to put some trust in the guy. Next £500 due tomorrow

[Stevanos]

Frimley111R said:

Did you even read this thread before posting?

Yes I did, the OP got burnt and was looking to find somewhere to spend £500 per month on SEO.

[cuneus]

MattS3 said:

We pay guys over £500 a day to manage this stuff, and there is a team of 3 or 4 of them on the account.
If your paying £500 a month, rest assured you'll not be his only client, probably one of at least 10.

Does that ease you worry over how good he might for £500 a month?

Let's hope it's generating 6 figure sales by itself then

[singlecoil]

Altrezia said:

singlecoil said:

What does great content mean in this context?

Great content always means text about the subject. If you're selling fancy hats, write content about fancy hats, how they are made, why yours are great, what are the benefits of using your hats (or hats in general), the history of hats etc.
Make your site an authority on the subject and it will do well.

I've been giving this some more thought.

I have a good deal of information on my subject, from the SEO point of view would it be better to present this as a series of photos and text, or as YouTube videos?

[MattS3]

cuneus said:

Let's hope it's generating 6 figure sales by itself then

Nope, the sales volume isn't 6 figures but the revenue generated certainly is well into 9 figures

[Whatty]

Altrezia said:

Make your site an authority on the subject and it will do well.

+1.

In my experience on both sides of the fence, good content equates to long term growth every time.

Print, web, digital, B2B or B2C it makes no difference, you really can't beat a good for new and repeat customer engagement.

Don't ask me how I know I'm too busy

[200bhp]

So glad someone else had started this thread as its exactly why I came on here this morning!

We've recently had our website redesigned and whilst it looks a hundred times better than the previous 1990's style we have dropped down the google rankings for certain key words in just a matter of days - Going from a top 5 result to half way down the second page!

We dont have many competitors as our market is quite small but the unfortunate thing is that the name for it is different here in Australia to what it is elsewhere in the world. The Aussie name "hyrail" sounds the same as the American version "hi-Rail" but is obviously written differently. Searching the Aussie term gets us to the number one spot and given we're and Aussie brand we cant use the American spelling all over the site.

I got the coding guy to add both spellings to the keywords in the metadata, but if the Google rankings are based on how many times the keywords appear in the content, how can I get what is effectively a miss-spelling into the content?

www.ariesrail.com.au is the site if anyone is interested enough to take a look.

[Stevanos]

200bhp said:

We've recently had our website redesigned and whilst it looks a hundred times better than the previous 1990's style we have dropped down the google rankings for certain key words in just a matter of days - Going from a top 5 result to half way down the second page!

.

How are you attributing that to the site design?

[200bhp]

Stevanos said:

How are you attributing that to the site design?

The day before the new site went live we were top 3.

Immediately the new site went live, the descriptions on Google were still the same as the old site and we were in the top three. However, very soon after that the description in the search results updated to the new description and we dropped to page 2.

Anyway, with the help of a few replies to this thread and others on PH I've sent the designer a long list of things he should be doing to help things.

• Change page titles to plain-english rather than random text and numbers.
• Remove the dummy pages that arent actually linked to through the finished pages but still show up if you know the url.
• Change the page titles tags to be relevant to the content of that page, including some keywords and not a generic title throughout.
• Change the metatag descriptions to something relevant to that page and not a general site-wide description.
• Change the H1 tag from one that means nothing (it's currently the word "fresh") to something relevant.

[Stevanos]

200bhp said:

The day before the new site went live we were top 3.

Immediately the new site went live, the descriptions on Google were still the same as the old site and we were in the top three. However, very soon after that the description in the search results updated to the new description and we dropped to page 2.

Anyway, with the help of a few replies to this thread and others on PH I've sent the designer a long list of things he should be doing to help things.

• Change page titles to plain-english rather than random text and numbers.
• Remove the dummy pages that arent actually linked to through the finished pages but still show up if you know the url.
• Change the page titles tags to be relevant to the content of that page, including some keywords and not a generic title throughout.
• Change the metatag descriptions to something relevant to that page and not a general site-wide description.
• Change the H1 tag from one that means nothing (it's currently the word "fresh") to something relevant.

Seems like you have a good list of things to fix, the reason I asked is that I have seen devs make changes to sites at the same time as a Google algorithm update and either everyone blames the dev or the other way round without delving in to the problem properly.

[Frimley111R]

Stevanos said:

200bhp said:

The day before the new site went live we were top 3.

Immediately the new site went live, the descriptions on Google were still the same as the old site and we were in the top three. However, very soon after that the description in the search results updated to the new description and we dropped to page 2.

Anyway, with the help of a few replies to this thread and others on PH I've sent the designer a long list of things he should be doing to help things.

• Change page titles to plain-english rather than random text and numbers.
• Remove the dummy pages that arent actually linked to through the finished pages but still show up if you know the url.
• Change the page titles tags to be relevant to the content of that page, including some keywords and not a generic title throughout.
• Change the metatag descriptions to something relevant to that page and not a general site-wide description.
• Change the H1 tag from one that means nothing (it's currently the word "fresh") to something relevant.

Seems like you have a good list of things to fix, the reason I asked is that I have seen devs make changes to sites at the same time as a Google algorithm update and either everyone blames the dev or the other way round without delving in to the problem properly.

Check that 301 redirects have been done
Are there fewer pages on your new site?
Have the pages been correctly optimised?

[cuneus]

200bhp said:

I've sent the designer a long list of things he should be doing to help things.

• Change page titles to plain-english rather than random text and numbers.
• Remove the dummy pages that arent actually linked to through the finished pages but still show up if you know the url.
• Change the page titles tags to be relevant to the content of that page, including some keywords and not a generic title throughout.
• Change the metatag descriptions to something relevant to that page and not a general site-wide description.
• Change the H1 tag from one that means nothing (it's currently the word "fresh") to something relevant.

This might help the designer: