Deciding to embark upon a SEO journey is your first step to seriously improving your online business presence, but due to the fact that there are no guarantees in SEO, clients tend to become anxious, especially if progress is slower than expected. You have to strike a balance between being involved in your SEO campaign and leaving the experts to work their ranking magic. It is completely up to a particular business how involved they want to be; some choose to leave it up to the expert and others will want to know absolutely everything about what’s going on. Whichever kind of SEO client category you fall into, here are 5 things you need to know – they’ll really put your mind to rest.
It’s Not All About #1 Rankings
Granted, rankings are one of the main priorities of any SEO campaign, but remember job of an SEO is to build and nurture your business’s online presence. Finally making it to the top spot for one of your targeted keywords is an incredible accomplishment, but it takes time and hard work to build up the reputation with the search engines that achieves this sort of status.
Sometimes businesses that are very powerful tend to occupy the top spot due to time, man-power and money, but don’t be fooled into thinking that top spot always get more click-throughs and conversions. According to a Chikita data report in June 2013, first position is thought to get 32.5% of traffic, second position receives 17.6%, and third position receives 11.4%. Looking past the obvious statistics that first position will generate the most traffic, both second and third place share a big proportion of the traffic. Occupying one of these two positions can do your campaign a great deal of good.
Remember, ranking for thirty keywords within the top ten positions will benefit you more than ranking first for just one keyword. Spreading your resources across different keywords is more likely to get a broader range of traffic to your website.
Not Everything that Matt Cutts Says is the Gospel
Now, by no means are we saying that Matt Cutts has no substance behind anything he says. He is well-respected in his field and he is one of Google’s main men. However, understandably, his primary intent is to protect Google’s algorithms. With this in mind, the information and advice that he provides is known to be somewhat calculated. Much of Matt Cutts’ advice and explanations are usually perfectly valid in any blue sky scenario, but nothing’s ever simple – there is information that is left unsaid by Cutts purposefully to direct people away from tactics that are not supposed to work, but do!
Our advice to our SEO clients is to take what Matt Cutts says with a pinch of salt. Your SEO expert is exactly that – an expert. Chances are that your SEO is already on the case and has been aware of any changes a long time ago, so put trust in your SEO expert.
You don’t have to be on Every Social Network
Social media is a huge part of today’s society, and is becoming ever-more important to businesses. Whether you are guilty of this or not, many business will go a bit mad with their social media presence, and then feel extremely overwhelmed with the amount of interaction involved in making your presence on a particular social platform worthwhile. More often than not, there are only one or two platforms that will be valuable to your business.
Your SEO will have the knowledge and knowhow to determine which one is best for your business, helping you build up a social media plan that will be worth every minute of effort.
Be fearless of Panda and Penguin Updates
There is no need for you as an SEO client to be worried about Google’s major updates. Your SEO will be well aware of the road the Google is choosing to head down next, so will have usually already implemented safeguards to protect you from these kinds of update. It is important to remember that SEOs do not have a crystal ball that they can look into for details of Google’s future plans, but a good SEO will make educated decisions for your campaign based on what is happening in the industry.
Ignore Emails informing you that your Site is not Optimised
There is no such thing as a perfectly optimised site because it is an ongoing project. There will always be links to be built, content to be written, and new rivals to compete with. Once you get to the top, you have to work just as hard to stay there. Some SEOs are out there to poach work from other SEOs, and usually the emails they distribute to try and win your business are sent to anyone and everyone (and fall straight into the spam category). Ask yourself this: if your site is so badly optimised, how did they find you to email you in the first place?
So now you can wipe your brow and embrace this new found trust for your SEO expert. If they’re good, they’ll have it all covered.
Danny Hall is Co-Director for Freelance SEO Essex. Based in Great Baddow, FSE’s primary focus is to provide personalised SEO solutions to help small businesses grow to their full potential.