General Questions
The return on investment of SEO will continue to climb long after PPC has peaked. PPC has instant results and can generate visitors to your site whenever you want however, you pay on pay-per-click bases. SEO is a long term investment but can achieve great results for years to come, whereas once you stop bidding on keywords, so does the traffic.
For most business owners it’s difficult finding the right digital agency to work with. Though going agency can be much more expensive vs freelance, cheaper does not mean poor value.
Freelancers such as myself can offer you more support rather than sticking to a set of hours each month. A good freelancer will have years of experience working with digital agencies and a passion that is unparalleled when compared to managers who have a set amount of time and dedication to work on your site, depending on your monthly budget.
However, it can also be dangerous if that person doesn’t actually know SEO best practices and doesn’t follow the ethical way of doing SEO.
99% of the time, YES! It doesn’t matter what type of business you have, as long as there’s demand for your products and services then Organic traffic is a channel to invest in.
If you’re a local business, then acquiring customers around your local areas is important if you want to gain as much visibility as possible.
According to Google Over the last two years, searches for local places without the qualifier “near me” have grown 150%, faster than comparable searches that do not include “near me.”
Depending on what issues have been flagged during the audit process, there is a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes that the client doesn’t know about. This can include, researching, analysing data, technical amends, competitor analysis which all impacts Organic performance.
Being transparent and having affective communication with clients through on-going support and monthly reporting allows you to see what actions have been carried out each month, how the campaign is performing and what actions will be implemented the following month.
No, SEO has evolved since the early days and carrying out an SEO audit and data analysis require many hours of manual work and over 15 years of experience. 99% of free audits are very basic, often using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to generate an automated report that only highlight fundamental issues which, in most cases, won’t significantly improve your SEO visibility. My audits go much further than just crawling your site.
As a consultant, it takes many hours to thoroughly examine a site and understand the core issues that are impacting your organic performance. All my SEO audits have had a positive impact on clients sites that you won’t find in a free automated report.
Yes, I have a dedicated process for this here. If you’re planning on migrating your site, changing your CMS, or looking to improve your site, then you need an SEO migration plan to avoid SEO ramifications.
This includes an SEO migration plan that covers pre/post checks to ensure everything goes smoothly.
I’ve seen huge sites neglect SEO during their migrations, resulting in drops in organic traffic, rankings, and revenue, costing companies a lot of money.
I’ve successfully migrated sites for brands with over 1 million pages and complex challenges. With my experience, guidance, and auditing, you are in safe hands.
SEO Related Questions
Any freelancer or agency guaranteeing you rankings can’t be trusted. No one can control what sites can rank for any given term. Search engines like Google are constantly improving their algorithms.
I’ve come across clients who have worked with other digital agencies claiming they have some special relationship with Google or know someone who can help you rank better. This is not true and you should stay clear of anyone who tells you that.
Depending on what your objectives and goals are for your business, once an audit has been carried out to establish your Organic performance and what you currently rank for, we can then suggest and optimise your existing terms but also research more terms which you’re not currently targeting which could have good intent to convert better.
We map out your site to make sure the right terms are targeting the right pages.
Every SEO would be proud to rank for Solicitors, which is highly competitive and would cost a considerable amount of costs, time and resources to achieve something that broad.
However, ranking for Solicitors doesn’t necessarily mean it will convert into a lead for you. You could send as much traffic to your site as possible but if it doesn’t convert then what’s the point.
For example, if someone is looking for a Solicitors in Manchester, traffic from Alabama isn’t going to be relevant for your business. Having said that, its much more cost effective and pragmatic to target terms around your locations.
Let me be clear, rankings will fluctuate and change at random due to Google’s core updates and AI systems. In most cases, the changes I recommend are not directly attributed to these updates. This is why we use Google Search Console and other reliable data tools to analyse why a query has increased or dropped in performance.
Don’t get hung up on one keyword; individual pages will rank for hundreds of keyword variations, not just a single keyword.
This depends on the recommendation I put forward, but in most cases, I can implement the changes myself. I’ve worked across all CMS platforms, including WordPress, Magento, Shopify, Sitecore, Umbraco, and other bespoke CMS platforms.
If you don’t have any developer resources, I can tackle most of these issues. Any core code changes that need to be made can be handled by developers I know and trust to get the job done.
From the time of writing this, Google doesn’t separate voice query data vs text data. Generally speaking, the search intent differs depending on the query and whether it would be valuable as part of the keyword strategy.
People often use home devices such as Amazon Echo or Google Home to ask Google’s voice assistant “where is the nearest coffee shop near me” vs someone typing into Google “how do you make a face mask“. The latter is a spoken query that the voice assistant is more likely to respond to. Google and other voice assistants get their data from the knowledge graphs, the featured snippets from the search results, or Wikipedia pages.
Personally, there isn’t much value in voice search queries at the moment if your goal is to convert users online, however, I still think there is value if you own a local business, and people want to find the nearest coffee shop or find out what the opening times are. There are many ways you can do this, but making sure your Google My Business listing is correctly filled out will increase your chances of answering such queries with the voice assistant.
In classic SEO terms, “it depends.” It depends on the site’s authority, age, number of pages, current rankings, content quality, user engagement, and hundreds of other relevant factors. I’ve made technical tweaks to sites with 1 million pages that have seen organic traffic increase within days/weeks.
However, a new site with zero authority, no topical authority, and no rankings will take much longer. I also can’t predict what Google updates will come if I’ve never worked on your site before. I work with all clients on a month-by-month basis to establish a deliverables plan that will create exponential growth over time.
These range from 3 months to 12 months. I care deeply about people’s businesses, and if you ask any client I’ve worked with, they will all tell you I have their best interests at heart.