SEO Website

Son

Hi

I thought id put this here as im sure some of you have websites.

I want to improve my website ranking position for a service in the Dublin area.The website is about 6 pages and purely provides information and contact about my service.
There seems so many of these companys all offering the same thing.

*Im afraid to hand over a wad of cash and see little or no improvement*

Whats a rough....ball park figure one should pay for a small business?
I know it depends on the competitiveness of the business...im talking rough figure!!! Shouldn't be more than 400?

R3al

With regard to SEO the costs vary quite considerably depending on factors such as the SEO provider and how competitive your particular area is etc. Your best bet is to do a couple of searches for seo services and see which companies consistently come out in the top 4-5 listings, there are plenty of scammers out there when it comes to seo, but you can generally discover the charlatans by seeing how well their own website ranks on the search engines.

Generally speaking SEO is an expensive service with no guarantee of results, you might consider a pay per click campaign instead as the results from these are easier to quantify and you have complete control over the costs.

webtargets

First thing - install google analytics on your website.

Get on analytics and take note of how many visitors you get each day, how long they spend on the site, how they behave etc.

Set targets and work towards them.

Do things to promote the site and measure the results on analytics.

Maybe you could find someone who charges based on results?

furst things first, Empower yourself by master analytics anyway.

At least then you can talk the talk with these guys.

Good luck

Andy_Black

Hi Son,

Start with keyword research, and then an initial Adwords campaign to get actual search volumes.

As webtargets says, get Google Analytics installed, but be aware that this will only tell you what the people who get to your site are doing. Set up correctly, Adwords is going to tell you about all that juicy traffic your missing.

Check out my post here: http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?threadid=2055721635

I've also got various articles on my website that might be of interest to you.

Remember, it's not about being ranked top for various keywords.
PPC and SEO are tools to help you construct your sales funnel something like below:

Search Engine Sales Funnel:

Google searches
....convert into
Impressions of Ads, or displays of "Organic" Listings
....convert into
Clicks (visitors)
....convert into
Sales leads (phone calls / emails)
....convert into
Sales (first time purchases)
....convert into
Customers (repeat business)
....convert into
Referrers (gets you more business)
....convert into
Champions (unpaid employees helping to protect your brand)


Ideally you convert buyers into customers (by upselling or cross-selling) and thus increase your average lifetime visitor value, which means you can spend more on your marketing campaigns and get into a positive feedback loop.

If you can then regularly convert buyers into referrers then your business starts going viral.

If you can pull this off for one of your offerings then you can reinvest profits (and reuse knowledge) and concentrate on the next offering until you have dominated your market.


I hope this helps.

Regards,
Andy


Grow Your Business With Digital Insight
www.digitalinsight.ie

MOH

Run a mile from anyone who guarantees to get you into the top position for keyword blah. No one can guarantee that.
I'd be wary of any companies who promise to submit your site to x number of search engines (aside from the fact that the vast majority of searches are through google, they should pick up your site themselves, and once you go past google, yahoo and bing, submitting your site to 20 more engines isn't going to get you a lot more traffic).
Also, submitting your site to y number online directories might provide a short term boost in your rankings, but if they're the spammy type they may end up being devalued by search engines and the benefit won't last.
That's not to say there aren't benefits to directory submissions, but getting proper SEO done on your site will involve a lot more than that.

One thing you can easily do yourself which could help a lot is to submit your site to Google's Local Business Centre

Atlas_IRL

also look at seobook.com lots of free advice there

D.W

Son wrote: »

Hi

I thought id put this here as im sure some of you have websites.

I want to improve my website ranking position for a service in the Dublin area.The website is about 6 pages and purely provides information and contact about my service.
There seems so many of these companys all offering the same thing.

*Im afraid to hand over a wad of cash and see little or no improvement*

Whats a rough....ball park figure one should pay for a small business?
I know it depends on the competitiveness of the business...im talking rough figure!!! Shouldn't be more than 400?

As others have already mentioned seo can be an expensive thing to undertake with no guarantees. It depends on a large number of factors and requires a lot of patience. However €400 wont get you much with any decent seo person/company as they wouldn't be interested IMO. The best advise given was to use Google Local Listings. You can have a crack at this yourself fairly easily-however there is also a bit of knowledge required to rank in Local Search depending on the niche in question. I'd be happy to have a look at this if you want to PM details as have had good sucess with local search to date.

conolan

Inbound links are best if you can get them. SEO voodoo should be treated with caution. Can you bribe your customers to have links on their site to you?

Andy_Black

I hope no-one minds me pointing to an article I've written for people in just your situation:

Title: You Don’t Need A Website, You Need Sales!
URL: http://digitalinsight.ie/you-dont-need-a-website-you-need-sales

It does have estimated costs as requested in the OP, and yes, I do provide the service but I'm genuinely trying to help, not spamming you guys.

Please take from it what applies.


I hope it helps.

Andy


Grow Your Business With Digital Insight
www.digitalinsight.ie

fiscalstudent

I'd reccommend http://www.ajazi.com/ They offer free SEO services

PeakOutput

if you have any interest you could do alittle research then buy seoelite and do it yourself would save you quite a bit i imagine

MOH

fiscalstudent wrote: »

I'd reccommend http://www.ajazi.com/ They offer free SEO services

Free in exchange for a link - and not taking on new customers at the moment anyway

PeakOutput wrote: »

if you have any interest you could do alittle research then buy seoelite and do it yourself would save you quite a bit i imagine

I'd be worried about spending money on a tool that claims it will get you into the top 10, but who's own website doesn't appear in the top 10 for any SEO related term I can come up with.

[edit] $47 per month?! No way.

byrne0f56789

SEO requires a lot of work. Really good SEO costs a lot because it offers you a lot.

However, try doing it yourself.

I think the best thing to do is install Wordpress (FREE) and use it to develop your site. Get a host that has SimpleScripts so that you can easily install it yourself.

Enable plugins that make the SEO labeling easy and connect to twitter plus the other social bookmarking sites. It's really important that you have a social bookmarking button.

Hit message boards with your signature. Set up a blog and update it as much as possible. Write an ebook and uploaded it to Scribd. Presentations to Slideshare. Videos to YouTube and as many other video sites as you can. Get your friends to social bookmark your blog posts. Use Squidoo and other hub style sites. Submit to DMOZ. Write articles and submit them to various article directories.

However, the single most important thing that you need to do is to have something comment worthy. The more people link back to your site the better.

Some quick links:
Free keyword research
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

Checking out your competitors' websites
http://www.spyfu.com/

I'm sure I left out a lot of things. But that's enough to get you started. Good luck.

PeakOutput

MOH wrote: »

I'd be worried about spending money on a tool that claims it will get you into the top 10, but who's own website doesn't appear in the top 10 for any SEO related term I can come up with.

[edit] $47 per month?! No way.

i havnt used it myself yet and havnt decided weather or not i need it for what im doing but i know alot of successful internet marketers who swear by it but its personal choice

but i cant even get my new site indexed right now so what do i know

Sonnenblumen

Update your site content on a regular basis. A content rich site will be embraced by most search engines and it doesn't cost a penny.

Improving the SEO is best done the hard way, add blog, links, dynamic content, write articles etc etc etc all help well.

The paying way is a bit of a scam.

We've never spent a penny on adwords, SEO etc and have page 1 ranking on several keywords and I ain't no SEO geek!!