Google SEO

[Efbe]

My wife runs a small events management company.

I have setup a website for this, using wordpress, and integrating an events management addon.

Currently the majority of her sales of new customers come through Facebook. This makes for quite a lot of manual work for her, posting adverts etc.
We would like to get it to the point where the majority of new sales come through google, and so we need to get to the front page.

I have tried as well as I can to optimise the website for google. keyword density, titles, content, backlinks, etc. But I can only get the website onto the front page of google for the keywords + location names. For the keywords alone we are way down in page 5+. having carried out research on this from our customers we know that people only search for the keywords, so we don't get enough traffic.

So I think we need professional help.

Can anyone recommend me a company to do this, or give a guideline of how much one should expect to pay for an SEO service.

[Efbe]

two year old website. thanks for the link though

was hoping there maybe someone on here touting for business

[Efbe]

miniman said:

Have you installed Yoast SEO plugin?

What keyword(s) are you trying to rank for?

How much content do you have?

1) Yes Yoast is on there
2)"ghost hunting uk" - I should explain this is just one of the event types, but it has it's own website, (I would rather not link here)
3) Lots and lots of articles and content on there.

[Efbe]

thebraketester said:

http://www.google.com/adwords/

didn't do a thing. have pumped a few hundred into it, whilst the equivalent facebook credits pulled in quite a few people, but nowhere near as much as manual event listing/posting/advertising etc.

It's also money spent and gone, whereas a decent SEO will keep people coming back to the site with no expenditure.

[Efbe]

Dave_ST220 said:

Adwords lines the pocket of Google. Google have changed a LOT over the past few years. They don't give a st about giving the best results anymore, it's all about the highest payer (or Amazon & eBay). Google is STILL built on LINKS despite what they want you to believe with all their bullst algo's (Panda, Penguin etc). Links take them out of the equation.

tbh looking at the site at the top, I can see they have just used link building services to get there. so much for google looking for quality of content and links!

[Efbe]

otherman said:

Hoofy said:

Efbe said:

It's also money spent and gone, whereas a decent SEO will keep people coming back to the site with no expenditure.

Until Google change their algorithms.

Only if you try to target the rules. If you work with process, and focus on good content, the algorithms work for you. That's what they're there for - to bring good info to the top and push down spam with 'clever' SEO.

unfortunately this doesn't seem to work.

The site is an event management one, so focused on the events, the same as every other one in this category. In addition it also has large quantities of high quality, original articles/content. These have been linked to the respective social media sites for the company sites, but link bulding is certainly not something I have a great deal of knowledge about.

The sites above us in the rankings are mostly poor quality, badly made events sites with little or no other content. When I run SEO checks on them, ours scores higher in every category but links. When I look at the links of these sites, they are obviously from "link building" sites, and not of any quality.

This is why I now need help, it's beyond my knowledge/expertise.

[Efbe]

Dave_ST220 said:

You've answered your own question, like I said it's all about the links. I'd go far as saying if Google say do X then do Y! stty sites aren't ranking as a coincidence. Are there Adwords companies above you?

there are, but there are many that are not.

We are showing on page 6 of a search term I am pretty sure we should be able to get to the first or second page for.

I think either there is something drastically wrong with the site that SEO checking websites have not picked up on, or I just need to spam the site on "Link Building" sites.

this could go badly wrong though!

[Efbe]

it's hard to know what sites are good for linking and what aren't.

From google's own guidance, you need to go for sites with a closer relationship to .gov ones. Not exactly sure how that works though!

have been making plenty more changes to the site, whilst also going out to tender for some SEO services.

so far heard $200 a month from one company, and £65 an hour from another. No idea if this is good or not though

[Efbe]

Hoofy said:

technodup said:

t's not true every time, (and I think the OP said he's doing it for the wife so maybe not this time) but if I make money cleaning cars, I'd be wasting time and therefore money trying to learn SEO. Ten hours a month on SEO is ten cars not washed, ten cheques not cashed. Ten payments that might pay for a proper SEO guy.

Finding new clients is imo the most important part of any business. If you don't have expertise in that area, be it SEO, sales, marketing or whatever it seems to me the worst thing to scrimp on.

Let's put it in ROI terms.

If spending £200 on marketing (in whatever format) generates £1000 of sales, surely it is money well spent.

Ok so to clarify, we are completely willing to spend money on this site.

But, I want it to be money well spent.

Currently we use facebook advertising. The benefit of this is that every customer that comes through to us then may 'like' our page, and so see future communications, and ao their friends will also, so ouy network and advertising reash grows continuously. So £10 spent may just bring in 100 people initially, but in the long term this could be thousands.

£100 spent on google adwords will get me 100 people and thats it.

If I spend £??? on SEO for the site to drive it to the front page of google, then I won't need google adwords, because my traffic will be high enough anyway.

I am trying to quantify how much this £??? is for decent SEO for the site, how much I would need to spend ongoing and where I should buy from.

[Efbe]

Bikerjon said:

That's nice, but how many of those "likes" have converted into actual sales? I can certainly see how FB works well to spread the word for some types of business - particularly in the leisure sector, but at least with Adwords you are targeting people who are actively seeking a product or service and who are hopefully ready to buy.

It seems to work quite well. Though the likes don't do anything themselves, when my wife puts up an advert for an event, the uptake rate is pretty good.

When we first started on the advertising route, we put £100 into google and £100 into facebook advertising. Google gave us 1 sale, whilst facebook gave us 5. It was not a promising start, so we kept on for several weeks putting £20 a week into wach one. We saw a couple more from google, but plenty from facebook; plus we were starting to build a brand through facebook.
The money pumped into google gives us nothing in the longrun, other than repeat custom, which we would gain through any medium.
Adwords may well work in other sectors, but does not seem to in the leisure industry.

following this experience, I want to improve our google standings, but through SEO, not through adwords.

[Efbe]

Hoofy said:

Hang on, you're mixing AdWords and SEO.

am I?
correct me if I am wrong...

Google adwords = paid advertising, for every person that searches for a set of keywords, you pay to be shown at the top of this list.

SEO = search engine optimisation, optimising your site to be organically as high up the google search results for a given set of keywords for no fee.

[Efbe]

Hoofy said:

And in your last post I got the feeling you were talking about AdWords when we were discussing SEO?

ah right, no it was biker jon mentioning adwords.

I was just trying to explain that adwords is basically money down the drain, wheras decent SEO puts you in a better long term position (if you can stay at the top)

but as of yet, no luck in finding a decent company.
The places I have gone to so far want to completely rebuild the website, which for wordpress is quite daft. a new theme maybe, but starting from scratch is just trying to con customers.

[Efbe]

Hoofy said:

My mistake!

What's your budget? I've spoken to a few SEO companies in the past and none of them have mentioned a rebuild. (That might be because the site isn't badly designed, though!)

prob looking to spend c£300 on a review of the site and guidance on what to change/ how to improve.

I don't actually need anything doing, as I can code/amend anything I need to, I just don't have the expertise in SEO.

[Efbe]

jammy_basturd said:

It's a risky game to play.

With SEO, you can spend months and months and thousands of pounds working your way on to page 1 of the search results only to have Google drop another update which sends you into oblivion. A lot of people have been bitten by this. With SEO it's extremely difficult to plan what your ROI might be for a given spend.

At least with Adwords, you pays your money to get to a defined position which you expect to give you X traffic which you expect to be able to convert X%.

this maybe true, but in the past month I have gradually brought the site from page 10 to page 3.

However we have tried adwords before, and it just didn't work. If I am going to sink more money into advertising, then the conversion rate of facebook ads for us is tenfold better.

[Efbe]

Bikerjon said:

Sorry to bang on about Adwords - I know you're mostly interested in SEO - but Adwords is only money down the drain if you don't have an extremely well targeted advert, focussed keywords plus a landing page that completely relates to the search term. If you don't do all this then I agree it can be an expensive fail!

SEO is obviously important, but it's a moving target and one algorithm change can undo months of work. That's time down the drain.

I do fully get your point, and we may well try adwords again, but for our sector piling money into facebook advertising just works so much better.

What is frustrating me the most is when I put our site through an SEO tester, and by this I mean everyone I can find, our site rates much better than most of the sites above us for everything barring backlink volumes.
In every other aspects I see that these sites have many issues, with layour, keyword density, etc etc.

Therefore It seems to be backlinks driving most of the ranking power; but then when I look at their backlinks they are 90% obviously junk, created from free listing sites. This is something I would like to avoid!