Script

Hi and welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, today we’re going to discuss organic SEO timescales and whether an SEO consultant can successfully predict an accurate timescale for a client or a website to perform.

The first thing to consider when assessing the potential success of a website is the domain name. There are several factors that are well worth checking.

Domain age: If the domain has been around for a long time then it will probably hold some authority in Google or other search engines.

Domain content: This can link in with the domain age, if your website has had related content on the domain for a period of time, it contributes to a smooth optimization process.

Domain Authority or Page Rank: Google assigns each web page with a page rank, Page rank is a link analysis algorithm that depends on the incoming and outgoing links on a website or web page. I you are unfamiliar with PageRank, we’ve included a Wikipedia link on our supporting blog post.

Domain Choice: If the domain name contains a keyword, this again contributes towards helping organic listings. You can of course, get to page one without one, but it all helps.

The importance of domains can be overlooked, but if you are optimizing a brand new domain name, you run this risk of Google easily spotting your eager SEO activity and potentially getting sand-boxed as a result. All SEO activity must be natural.

Secondly have a look at the content throughout the site, if it already mentions the chosen keywords then this will help the site to perform. Remember the SEO saying: ‘Content is king’.

Current performance is another important factor, If your web site appears for its phrases already, raising the phrases is easier than ranking them from scratch.

Next is Backward link analysis: If your website has a Page Rank, then it will more than likely have links pointing to it from other websites. An SEO consultant should analyze these incoming links and asses whether they could be manipulated to better reflect the keywords and content on the target website.

If an SEO consultant correctly analyses these variables – it can help them to predict the success and timescales of a new keyword campaign.

Thanks for watching, we hope this has been helpful. If you have any questions of comments please leave them on our YouTube Channel or supporting blog post.

Script:

- Nick -

Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, you often see articles and companies asking this simple question, what returns the better investment, organic search engine optimisation or pay per click advertisements?

- James -

It can be a difficult question to answer and we think that it is individual to each company trying to market on the internet, however we also think that a correctly organized organic campaign can be more effective in the long run in terms of cost.

- Nick -

When we first thought about answering this question, user behavior came to mind, so we found this eye tracking report from enquiro. This shows a very nice visual representation of where an average Google user looks once they have performed a search query.

- James -

You can see from the image that the user naturally looks towards the top left hand side of the results and in particular the first Pay Per Click result and top 2 organic listings. This suggests that if you want to gain the full benefit from your campaign then you need to be in the top 3 positions.

What this means is if you are going pay for your listings with Google Adwords then you really have to be the highest bidder in order to be the first listing.

- Nick -

With this in mind we thought we would use the information that the external keyword tool provides to estimate the cost of optimising for a couple of phrases, organic vs PPC.

You can see we have taken the average search volume for the phrases ‘air conditioning’ and ‘web design’, then the click through rate or CTR based on 3%. 3 -5 % is pretty average for CTR (Click through rate), but it can vary with each campaign. We have then multiplied the CTR with the CPC or cost per click to get a monthly cost.

So as you can see for ‘air conditioning’ it would cost on average £1200 per month to be in position 1-3 on Google Adwords, to be position one constantly it would it would undoubtedly cost most. Organically Creare would charge somewhere in the region of £500 per month for this phrase.

The other phrase we analyzed ‘web design’ would cost Creare over £5000 per month to be in position 1-3 on Google’s sponsored listings, so our organic listing provides us a much more profitable return on investment.

- James -

Of course you do have to remember that with Pay Per Click the results are instant, but with organic SEO there are a large amount of factors which contribute to a site performing in a search engine organically. What this means is that an organic campaign has a time scale attached to it. Going back to what we said at the start, organic will provide a better ROI, but you have to patient and expect to see a fluctuation in results until the domain reaches the required authority to list in the top 3 positions.

- Nick -

There is no reason of course that you cannot run Pay Per Click campaigns along side your organic strategy in order to reap the benefits of both. Thanks for watching if you have any question or comments please leave them on You tube or the supporting blog post.

Enquiro eye tracking report on Google

There are many factors (white hat - web page content and global HTML tags, natural links) that can significantly help promote organic rankings with a website and there is of course many factors (black hat - spamming, link bombing, duplicate content, cloaking etc etc.) that will hinder your site. With poor optimisation and black hat techniques a site can even remain in a form of quarantine for weeks or even months (sandbox).

Therefore there is a need to make your site not only looks good and performs well for the visitor it also has to be search engine friendly. In the search for good factors that contribute to good SEO practise with search engine ranking algorithms (secret formula - that search engines use to determine results page and position ranking) the following list could be used.

1. HTML PAGE title. This is probably the most important factor in an internal SEO strategy. The unique HTML title is the first friendly port the ‘search engine robots’ (crawlers or spiders) analyze. Get this right and every individual page of your website will be indexed faster resulting in higher listing.
2. Visible HTML text on the page. Content, content and more content with quality keyword density (250 to 1000 words per page with 5% target keywords).
3. Inbound links. Good quality inbound links, the more the better (helps bring authority to the site, quality over quantity).
4. Anchor text that links text internally (on site) and externally (off site) directories, topical community and social book marking sites.
5. Age of Domain. The older the site the more authority or history it has.
6. Meta tags and image ALT tags (coding see * page source - download google toolbar for firefox) can also influence the ratings.

There are of course additional factors that can influence the rankings of a site. These factors would include careful analysis and specialist SEO strategy that use a variety of resources that take time and patience to implement.