Online advertising spend in Australia is set to increase to $13 billion in 2012 as competition for online visibility continues to increase. With organic search said to deliver on average 90% of traffic, investment in SEO is the natural method to gain more traffic. However, with SEO being a specialist practice, you generally have four options when it comes to determining the best solution:
- DIY SEO – Read up on the subject yourself or have a staff member polish up their knowledge for some basic optimisation. Pros: Cheap! Learning & development opportunity for yourself or staff. Cons: Risk of errors through inexperience. Slow results. Generally non-scalable
- Hire an SEO Company – Australia has tonnes of SEO companies with perhaps six large players and over a hundred small. Pros: Support staff. Well oiled processes. Professional Reporting. Plausible Deniability. Cons: Ethical SEO companies are hard to come by. Lack of accountability.
- Hire an SEO Consultant – A handful of SEO’s in Australian work alone, preferring to consult on an hourly or per-project basis. Pros: Highly Experienced. Single point of contact. Good for large organisations who need adhoc advice or guidance to support traditional marketing activities. Cons: Cost. Lack of support staff or scalability. Many unproven ‘Experts’.
- Employ an In-house SEO – If you’re budget (Generally >$90k per annum) exceeds that of hiring a full time employee, hiring an in-house SEO specialist can provide great return. Pros: High accountability. Detailed reporting. Cons: Cost. Availability.
When deciding which solution to go with, you’ll want to place a focus on the long term return on your investment and the tactics used by your SEO provider. Quick results often mean the use of unethical methods and incredibly low pricing, like any product or service, equates to either low quality or quantity of work.
You also want to ensure accountability is in place and that the person or organisation you’re hiring is going to deliver long term value. As an SEO Consultant who works both in-house and with other businesses, I’m biased in my view that hiring an SEO consultant is a lower risk strategy if you’re either dipping your toe in the water or are a large organisation who just need strategy advice.
Here are four questions, accompanied by my favourite istock-tastic ‘cheesy consultant’ images, to help you identify a good provider.
How do you determine the right keywords to target?
Hmmm, pensive!
Keyword selection is the single most important step of any SEO campaign. You, or your consultant, may have an idea of some of the generic keywords for your industry however you really want to be investing a lot of time in this activity.
A good SEO will ask questions to identify all of the products and services that you offer, who your ideal customer is and whether you’re a national or local provider. These questions can help you to identify keywords that yield a higher return, such as ‘lawyer melbourne’ rather than ‘lawyer’.
The former is a more targeted, ‘action driven’ keyword whereas ‘lawyer’ is very broad and doesn’t necessarily mean the searcher is looking for legal services. Additionally, ensuring you cover all products or services can in turn lead to structural changes that may be required for your website to perform in search engines so that you can promote all of your products or services rather than just focussing on one or two.
If you already have Google Analytics installed on your site, a good SEO will request access to your reports to determine the search habits of your existing customers and identify trends or patterns in long tail keywords that can deliver high value. Similarly, if you are running any paid advertising (PPC) such as Google Adwords, access to PPC reports (combined with Analytics) can help identify keywords that convert well into sales.
Finally, there are a myriad of keyword selection tools out there with Google’s own Keyword tool being a popular choice for determining the estimated search volume of certain keywords. Be wary that this isn’t entirely accurate; I.e. don’t base business decisions on these figures.
Once determined, the keywords will be split into their relevant sections of the website and implemented into Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Header Tags, Content, Images and even Video. Be sure however that the focus on these elements isn’t overdone as search engines frown upon pages that overdo it and ‘stuff’ a page with keywords. For example, rather than having a header tag of ‘Lawyer Melbourne’ with unnatural content such as ‘if you are looking for a lawyer melbourne’, you’ll want to use a heading such as ‘Acme Lawyers – Melbourne Based Law Firm’ with content such as ‘The Acme lawyers melbourne office was opened in 1934′.
It’s important that you’re content and page design continues to appeal to Customers. There’s no point in ruining the experience for your visitors in the effort to get them to the page, only for your page to not sell or promote your services sufficiently to stop visitors turning into buyers.
What link building strategies do you use?
She doesn't look too sure...
If you have done any research into building you’ll have heard of the terms ‘black hat’ and ‘white hat’ (and ‘grey hat’ somewhere in the middle there!). Black hat tactics are generally considered to be anything that is against Google guidelines. This includes, and mainly refers to, buying links however it can also extend to link exchange schemes, link networks and in the worst instance hacking websites to place links.
Purchased links will often provide very quick results however they have a high risk attached. Not only will the site hosting the bought link continue to sell links to websites until your link value is diminished to be just one amongst hundreds (including low quality adult, gambling or drug sites), should the link be discovered by Google (and trust me, they’re cleverer than you or I could ever be) or reported to them by a bitter competitor, you face the wrath of Google. This equates to your site either being penalised for a certain period of time or banned altogether. Both will equate to your traffic being next to zero with questions over whether you would ever gain any traffic again.
Search engines are now looking at the quality of the links pointing to your site which is determined by factors such as the placement of the link (a link within textual and relevant content is much, much better than a link in the footer or amongst a list of links) which can often be attained for free or at little expense.
An good SEO will have a shortlist of sites they have identified as being complimentary to your industry. For example, should you sell wedding dresses, you could look to obtain links from a bridal forum, wedding directory, wedding cake supplier, wedding photographer, wedding venue, a women’s fashion magazine, celebrants, material suppliers, resellers etc. Once selected, it’s about finding the best tactic to gain a valuable link on these sites. It may be via a product review, a guest blog (which are great ways to demonstrate your expertise in a field and build your reputation), a badge advertising your site or simply a link with a description of your business.
There are literally hundreds of ways to build links to your site and the experienced SEO will be able to identify the strength of your business, whether it be you, your products or your brand.
What level of reporting do you provide?
Welcome to the asylum...Jack!
You will want to set reporting deliverables at the very start of your campaign. Ask for a sample report to be sent to you and to be talked through what each section relates to. Reports should include keyword ranking figures along with traffic. Generally its recommended to review this on a monthly basis as, whilst keyword rankings and traffic vary daily, monthly comparisons provide a good benchmark for movements over time.
You will also want to have a report on the work complete over the last month, links that have been built and new link targets that have been identified. Reports could also include what strategies the SEO is currently working on to improve your rankings or notes to explain how or why certain rankings or traffic may have increased or decreased.
What level of traffic increase can I expect?
My favourite - Mr Shakey hand iStock man 
Some rough estimations can be forecast for potential traffic increases from certain keywords moving to higher ranking positions. Generally, being in the top 5 results for your keywords can deliver roughly 50% of the estimated search volume whilst being in #1 for your keywords can see you enjoy over 40%. Be warned however that nobody can guarantee a No 1 or even Page 1 position in search engines and neither would you want this. Your shared objective should be sales led by traffic, not rankings. Whilst that might sound odd, your focus should be on promoting all of your products and several clusters of keywords (I currently optimise for over 1200 keywords in my in-house role!) rather than a set of 6 or 10 big keywords.
Your SEO should also be ensuring that you establish passive link building strategies such as a your own articles (which can be keyword driven), social media engagement with customers and user generated content such as reviews. These all promote your brand and authority in your industry to both your users and search engines. By targeting users needs, they are more likely to link to you or your products voluntarily (The Holy Grail!)
Search Engine Optimisation is the centrepiece of your online marketing strategy and plays an important part in growing traffic. When you’re hiring an SEO consultant, be sure that you trust them and ensure they have your business’ best interest at heart. Of course, you could make life easy on yourself and just hire me 
