when should you buy Professional SEO services?
As with any business decision, any investment should make a difference to your bottom line.
We see the purchase of regular SEO services as the sort of investment which compounds over time.
If we can bring in a 20-25% annual increase in the number of unique visitors to your website each year (towards the low end of the results we usually see) then that growth would result in 3 times more web traffic after 5 years.
If that resulted in 150% to 200% more sales, then you begin to see how professional SEO services can be a sensible investment.
SEO is typically thought of as optimising your site for search engines, given that SEO = Search Engine Optimisation. There is certainly overlap with the fields of customer journey design, user experience design, web design, website optimisation, and web development however.
By employing a full-service digital agency like 3B Digital, you have the ability to call on us for various skills aimed at the ultimate goal of increasing the volume and potency of traffic to your site.
The risks of hiring an SEO-only Service Specialist
This is in contrast to a specialist SEO firm who have a niche and deep SEO skillset. As the famous saying goes, to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
We don't see every website issue as a nail to be whacked with the SEO hammer, we would rather see the whole picture, the overall strategy, and provide business optimisation services under the broad umbrella of professional SEO services.
SEO Service Packages vary on timeframe and monthly investment.
Consider 2% of your revenue as a ballpark figure to invest in SEO-based marketing.
Example 3-month SEO plan (6 hours seo per month)
SEO needs discussed and agreed upon.
Inbound links tripled from 8 to 24 (not just social)
1 blog posted every month, client to write the first one, 3B can then suggest topics based on SEO needs.
Increased social media presence:
Now: 133 followers currently across FB (16), Twitter (61), LinkedIn (56) and Instagram (0)
Target: 300 followers across FB, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
note: most clients are happiest with us simply suggesting social posts to share, yet this almost always work better if we have autonomy over each of your accounts for insights and analysis, as well as the ability to part-automate posts where possible.
Clearly we would follow client brand guidelines, and offer examples to be signed off on, to ensure that the client is happy with what we're posting.
also note: It can be helpful to show us competitors who you feel are performing well on social so we can look at their methodology and learn from them without overtly copying them, i.e if they repeat things a lot, that looks bad and we wouldn't want to do that.Google search engine ranking improvements on the below search queries:
Query 1 (Ranked #13 today)
Query 2 (Ranked #40 today)
Query 3 (Ranked #39 today)
Query 4 (Ranked #42 today)
Target: #20 or lower for each.
note: We will never guarantee rankings as the only aspect of your Google search rankings which is in our power is the ability to carry out best practice principles.Bonus metric - win x projects through the website.
Example 6-month SEO plan (6 hours SEO per month)
SEO needs discussed and agreed upon.
Inbound links boosted by 5x from 8 to 60 (without just using social shares)
1 blog posted every month, client to write the first one, 3B can then suggest topics and subheadings based on SEO needs.
Past blogs, case studies and articles optimised for SEO needs.
Increased social media presence:
Now: 133 followers currently across FB (16), Twitter (61), LinkedIn (56) and Instagram (0)
Target: 600 followers across FB, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
We like to optimise our time here using software such as ContentCal and IFTTT where possible. Instagram usually requires a personal touch, however.Google search engine ranking improvements on the below search queries:
Query 1 (Ranked #19 today)
Query 2 (Ranked #22 today)
Query 3 (Ranked #28 today)
Query 4 (Ranked #29 today)
Query 5 (Ranked #42 today)
Query 6 (Ranked #44 today)
Query 7 (Ranked #51+ today)
Query 8 (Ranked #51+ today)
Target: #18 or lower for each.We do not guarantee rankings, but targets help to show us which search queries to put our efforts into at any given moment.
Event tracking and set up based on key sales-funnel metrics.
Bonus metric - win 1.2x as many projects through the website.
Example 12-month SEO plan (12 hours SEO per month)
All of the above + the below, by request
This plan would be suitable for any company with a revenue greater than £700,000 per year.
Understanding and breaking down your customer journeys
Workshopping known customer journeys backwards using your most valuable clients (inspired by the principle that 20% of your clients bring in 80% of the revenue).
Workshopping the customer journey from scratch with some rudimentary user journey testing. "Please find a company to hire for [your service]" and observe their thought processes through thinking-out-loud methodology.
Extend this user testing to your own website, and see how they interact with it. Your employees may know the website too well to think objectively about the kind of issues the general public might face using your site.
Establishing online communities in your sector
A reasonable budget such as this will allow us to dedicate someone to monitor your social accounts, including the creation and nurturing of a social community.
Focus on high quality traffic, not just search rankings
With a reasonable budget we can undertake analysis to pinpoint where your high quality leads come from, whereas many professional SEO services companies will simply guarantee you search ranking gains.
Our aim is to boost your bottom line through best practice organic SEO work. If you don't see a net-gain from your SEO expenditure after 12-24 months, then we would not recommend that you continue putting money into it!
Example SEO Audit (recommended every 12 months regardless of plan)
We have over 20 years of experience building website which has left us with a solid understanding of how things have changed, and will continue to change.
Google releases updates such as 'Penguin' and 'Panda' which throws the reliability of their incoming search traffic, and potentially their revenue, into disarray.
They don't do so with the aim of harming businesses, yet it will be inevitable that when some benefit from changes, others will not.
It is for this reason that an SEO audit is so important. We change our auditing methods every time Google release a patch to their algorithm so we can prioritise the gathering of crucial SEO data accordingly.
As it stands, an SEO audit will involve the following sections:
Accessibility (robots.txt, opengraph tags, meta data, user experience on mobile vs desktop, render-blocking script analysis, image alt textm, http vs https).
Indexability (html sitemaps, and xml sitemaps, server errors, site structure and navigation, breadcrumbs, technical compliance with Googlebot)
On page ranking factors (assigning each desired query to the existence or existence of a relevant landing page, linking between your own content)
Off page ranking factors (how other websites link to you and why, which content is linked to most, where this could be immediately improved)
Competitor analysis (similar analysis done for on-page and off-page SEO factors by your competitors)
Conclusions (Steps prioritised by ease and likely long term benefits)