For many years we offered paid SEO services, and monthly subscriptions. We DO NOT do this anymore because the whole SEO field is so unpredictable. For example, at one point we worked hard on a website (actually our own) to build hundreds of inbound links from other websites trying to improve our ranking. And guess what? Our rank went down and not up. After having tried many things for many people, we have realised it's impossible to guarantee the results that you see people guaranteeing everywhere. If the internet is like the Wild West 2.0 (and you know it is) then SEO marketers are like the snake oil salesmen. :(
We cannot guarantee to rank your site at the top of page one, or even on page one at all. Any SEO marketer who does is lying, or following a script they have been given. What we can guarantee is that if you don't do certain things (which nearly everyone else is doing) you will be certain to not rank at all. But if you do all the things believed to work (meta tags, inbound links etc etc) you simply level yourself with millions of other websites, and only ten can rank on page one.
There is one way to absolutely guarantee a page one, or top spot ranking, and that is through the use of paid Google Ads. We offer this service too, but outside of this, there are many unknowns... but there are three big factors, and that is what this page is about.
It's all about empathy. You need to firstly put yourself in the shoes of the people at Google. Then once you are in thier shoes, you'll need to put yourself in the shoes of your clients. Let me explain further.
If the Google search engine (or any search engine) was terrible at providing accurate results, nobody would use it. For them to be a success and make decent money, they need the websites they suggest to people to be exactly what they are looking for. So if they recommend a page about Paul the Octopus, but you were interested in Guinea Pigs, and this type of thing happened regularly, you wouldn't use them anymore. But even if they were slightly off consistently you would begin to use a competitor with a better knack for providing the right answers. So when your website is recommended by Google to someone, you need it to be the right site for that person. If it is, then Google will be doing a good job for its clients.
Google have develped a few ways to measure whether the traffic that goes to your site actually thinks your site is the right answer to their query. They track the behaviour of visitors to your site. This is done through Google Analytics and also the users on the Google website. They know what links a user clicks, and then they know through Analytics and Analysis how a user behaves after they click a link.
So when a user clicks on a link, that is like a vote for that website, saying "this is the right match for this query." When a website matches a query over and over again, Google pushes it up the ranks knowing they have found a winner. BUT, if someone clicks through to a website and then realise this wasn't what they were looking for, and they go back to pick another site, they have just sent a signal to Google too... that this website is NOT a good match for this query. And if that happens over and over again, that site goes down the rankings. One of the really big signals that Google uses is the bounce rate for your webiste.
The bounce rate is a measurement as a percentage of people who go to your website and then immediately leave again. They 'bounce.' Our goal for you is to get this bounce rate down under 40%. In other words 6 out of 10 people who land on your website or web pages are signalling to Google that this was a great match for their query. This makes Google happy because they have found a good match for thier client, who is ultimately your client too.
I told you it was about empathising with Google. You have to put yourself in thier shoes.
The speed of a website is how fast a page loads. And you will notice that the webpages on our site load faster. The reason why this is a factor is that people get impatient very quickly and if a website is taking more than about 5 seconds to load people click the back arrow... they bounce. In other words, speeding up your site is one of the ways to reduce your bounce rate, and tell Google your site is a good match for thier clients. Our goal is to get your website loading faster than 4 seconds, and our ulimate goal is to have your site load in 1 second or less. Sometimes to do that we need to make drastic choices like cutting a lot of code out, and removing heavy pictures and video. We have tricks... talk to us about how we can speed up your site.
The third factor is providing what your client actually is looking for so that they stay on your site and use it. If you are an ecommerce business selling things, and you have plenty of traffic but no sales, then something isn't matching with customer expectations. It could be that your have the wrong products, or the price is too high. For service oriented pages (like this one) it could be that you don't provide enough information so people leave (they bounce) and go find the information they need elsewhere. Google measure this factor with how long people spend on your site. Our goal is to get your clients to click thorugh to at least a second page and spend more than two minutes on your site. IF they do this, it signals to Google that they have recommended a site with some value to their clients, who are also your clients.
At the end of the day, Google apparently have over 100 ranking factors, but we don't know (nor does anyone) what most of them are, but these three we have listed are clear points we can focus on. If the people who come to your site stay there and use it, Google is given a signal that your site is a good match, and that is the goal we are working towards. Improving the speed of the site and the materials so they match what a client wants are our goals.
Remember at the top we told you how we had build hundreds of inbound links to our site and our rank went down? Well, if we were attracting clients with the wrong wording, and they came with wrong ideas about what the site was like when they got there... they bounced. Even if the bounce isn't off the Google page, but from somewhere else when a link is clicked, its still a bounce. And so despite having more traffic from the links we built, none of it was the right traffic and it reduced our rankings. And this illustrates how by making things simple as we are trying to do, we can endeavor to get the right people to your site.
Our recomendation is that we start by speeding up your site, and simplifying everything. Talk to us.