Sisterly Advice For SEO
My sister in Australia got in touch recently asking for my advice about SEO. I no longer do SEO but I was able to give her good advice on how to choose somebody. I’m sharing the tips below:
Getting your site highly ranked on Google is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It’s a very tricky part of internet marketing and very labour intensive if it’s done well, so it can tend to be quite expensive. Anyone who tells you they can get your site ranked using software, or quickly, or if they are very cheap, walk away. You don’t want to mess with Google – if they catch you trying to trick them into ranking your site, they can blacklist you which is a fate worse than death. Usually you can expect it to take up 3-6 months to get a good ranking.
So my first message is – you won’t be able to do this effectively by yourselves. You need to engage a local SEO company to do this for you. I say local because they are more likely to be in tune with the language and search terms that your consumers will use. Even when I’m providing Internet Marketing training, I’m very clear on this – you can’t learn how to do it yourself in a day’s traning, it is more of an art than a skill to get a site number 1 on Google. The rules of the game change all the time.
Assuming you engage a firm to help you – what you should be looking for when making your selection:
- Ask them to give you a list of sites they have optimised / ranked. Go and search for those business on Google or Bing. But don’t search for the company name, anyone can get a listing on their own name, go and search for them using a keyword that a service user might use. If you find them, great. If not, walk away.
- When they describe their process – they should be using a mix of on page optimisation and off page link building. Hosting matters too.
- They should involve you in the keyword selection process. Don’t go with the first set of words they come back with – they will be the words that are easiest for them to rank you on. You need to be ranked on the words your clients will use. It’s about reaching a compromise between the two because obviously you can’t expect to get a number 1 ranking on the keyword “therapy”.. but you might be able to get a number 1 on “family therapy sydney” It’s about getting into the head of your consumer and coming up with the words that they would use – you are best placed to kick that off, your SEO company can expand that list and fill it out and include variations, and spelling mistakes, and other brand names, etc to get you a good keyword selection list.
I hope that helps.