Let’s face it, the days of people scouring through the phone book and their local paper for products or services are fast fading – we all head straight to Google these days when we want something.
So no matter if your business is looking to gain more customers locally, nationally or globally, having an effective website with pages that rank highly in Google is probably more important than any other aspect of your marketing efforts.
Why is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Important?
As we all know, very few people search beyond the first page of any search results so unless you’re on the first page, you’re not likely to receive many visitors to your website. Being on the first page of Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other major search engines is like having your business located on the busiest High Street in the country.
However, competition amongst website owners is fierce for those coveted top positions so having hiring an effective SEO company is absolutely crucial – and we hope you’ve now found your ideal SEO partner.
Why Trust Avara With Your SEO?
- We’re Ethical – we take a very holistic approach to SEO and our techniques are constantly being updated to ensure we don’t get your website into trouble with the search engines.
- We Get Results – we’re not interested in dazzling you with data. We appreciate you’re only interested in one thing and that’s securing more customers for your business.
- We Deliver Value – we won’t ask you to sign any lengthy contracts or drip-feed our projects to make them last longer than necessary. We believe in giving a real return on your investment.
- We’re User-Friendly – we’re based in the UK and you can pick up the phone and talk to somebody who actually wants to help you. Our aim is to form a long-term relationship with you.
Some Real SEO Ranking Results
Before we delve into the details about SEO, we think it’s important to demonstrate that we are a credible company to deal with. And with that in mind, we thought it would be useful to provide some real evidence that our SEO service actually delivers results. So here are some of our most recent ranking results in Google.co.uk for our Clients…
| RANK |
SEARCH PHRASE |
WEBSITE |
|---|
| #1 |
Fashion photographer Surrey |
www.ginnymarsh.co.uk |
| #1 |
Compulsive hoarding help Hampshire |
www.blitzable.com |
| #1 |
Probate valuation Hampshire |
www.averyassociates.co.uk |
| #1 |
Property law Farnborough |
www.simeous.com |
| #1 |
Chiropodist in Aldershot |
www.johnthefootman.com |
| #2 |
Lorry driver earnings |
www.nolgvbrokers.co.uk |
| #1 |
Self storage Surrey |
www.surreystorage.co.uk |
| #1 |
Commercial cleaning Farnborough |
www.cleankinguk.com |
| #2 |
Block paving company Aldershot |
www.pavepower.uk |
| #3 |
Demolition salvage Surrey |
www.runfolddemolition.co.uk |
| #1 |
Commercial Property Agents Aldershot |
www.emberson.com |
| #4 |
Roofers in Aldershot |
www.roof-doctor.uk |
| #1 |
Adrenal fatigue treatment London |
www.blueprintfitness.co.uk |
| #3 |
Church music label |
www.heraldav.co.uk |
| #3 |
Body conditioning Reigate |
www.rsbdance.co.uk |
| #2 |
Champagne Duntze |
www.dashingwines.uk |
| #3 |
House Clearance Hampshire |
www.averyassociates.co.uk |
| #3 |
Acid reflux pillow |
www.acidrefluxpillow.co.uk |
| #2 |
People development solutions |
www.lindahuckle.uk |
| #3 |
Voiceover Artist for explainer videos |
www.voiceoverdarren.com |
| #3 |
Shower fitters Torquay |
www.ashmanplumbing.uk |
| #2 |
Khukuri printed T-shirts |
www.gurkhabazaar.com |
| #1 |
VAT mitigation scheme |
www.innovate-solutions.co.uk |
Note: These rankings are correct as of 6th April 2016. Rankings fluctuate on almost a daily basis so the results might differ slightly when you search.
What is SEO And How Can it Help Your Business?
SEO is the initial and ongoing process of refining your website so it achieves a higher ranking in the search engines like Google and Bing when your prospective customers conduct a search, thus increasing the volume of visitors to your website with the net result being more sales for your.
By using effective, tried-and-tested SEO techniques, we aim to fine-tune your website to achieve the best possible search engine ranking for a multitude of keywords (search phrases), helping you overtake your competitors and dominate the search results in Google.
All SEO campaigns have three key elements:
- Keyword Analysis – Arguably the most important element of any SEO campaign. We will identify keywords that are actually being searched for by your potential customers, and we can even determine which keywords your competitors are gaining traffic from. All of the keywords we select must have a reasonable level of traffic and an acceptable level of competition. And of course, keyword diversity is also crucial
- On-page Optimisation – We conduct a thorough SEO appraisal of the pages that make up your website. There are literally scores of factors on any web page that determine how search engines interpret the page and decide how relevant it is to the searchers query. We will check and improve all of these factors.
- Off-page Optimisation – You may have already heard that search engines tend to rank pages by the volume and quality of links to a specific page. Each time somebody links to your website, search engines consider it a ‘vote’ for your website. The more (relevant, quality) ‘votes’ your site has, the greater credibility it has with the search engines and therefore, the higher it is likely to rank in the search results.
Every Position Counts
Let’s imagine your company sells Blue Widgets for £10.00 each and every months in Google, 1,000 people search for ‘Blue Widgets’. The following table demonstrates the difference in potential revenue that each of the positions on the first page of Google represents (assuming everyone searching purchased a ‘Blue Widget’ online).
| POSITION |
% CLICK FIRST |
ACTUAL VISITORS |
POTENTIAL REVENUE |
|---|
| #1 |
53% |
530 |
£5300 |
| #2 |
20% |
200 |
£2000 |
| #3 |
12% |
120 |
£1200 |
| #4 |
6% |
60 |
£600 |
| #5 |
3% |
30 |
£300 |
| #6 |
2% |
20 |
£200 |
| #7 |
1% |
10 |
£100 |
| #8 |
0.5% |
5 |
£50 |
| #9 |
0.3% |
3 |
£30 |
| #10 |
0.2% |
2 |
£20 |
As you can see from the above table, even for a modest search with a low-priced product, the difference between just a few places in the rankings equates to hundreds of pounds in potential revenue. Now imagine if this data were for a search phrase that received many thousands of searches every month, or for a product that was worth hundreds or thousands of pounds – can you now see the potential of an effective SEO campaign?
Your SEO Questions Answered…
Asking how much SEO costs is a bit like asking how much a car costs – there are simply too many variables that are unique to every Clients website and market to give a definitive answer. This is why buying SEO packages that some companies offer is a bad idea as one size most certainly does not fit all.
Looking at an example of the variables we need to consider, a small business wanting to attract new customers in their home town will be able to get a fairly affordable SEO deal as the competition will be relatively low. At the other end of the scale, an online store that sells mobile phones and wants to rank for the search term ‘buy an iPhone’ is going to have to spend a lot to get anywhere near the first page of Google.
In both instances, the cost of SEO will be apportioned in two specific areas:
- On-Page Optimisation – This is a one-off process that improves the relevance of the website page for any given keyword.
- Off-Page Optimisation – This is an ongoing process that creates content and links to bolster the authority of your website.
Depending on the level of competition, in some cases a business can actually gain a significant increase in rank just from the on-page optimisation. We should stress that results will only be known on completion of the SEO campaign and once Google has re-indexed the website.
Any company that claims they can ‘guarantee’ to get you to the top position on Google should be avoided at all costs. Carefully consider the following statement from Google (source):
“Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a ‘special relationship’ with Google, or advertise a ‘priority submit’ to Google. There is no priority submit for Google.”
Of course there are certain terms that you can ‘almost’ guarantee to get to the top of Google – usually the ones that have no commercial value and are therefore just vanity keywords.
Take for example this search term, ‘Buy a Yellow spotted new car’. Why not head over to Google and you’ll see is that a page from our website ranks at the No.1 position.
Now if that search terms was ‘buy a new car’, it would have huge commercial value because thousands of people conduct a search using that phrases every single week. However, the competition for that search phrase is huge so it would take a lot of time, and money, to even get close to the first page of Google.
The other aspect of these so-called ‘Guarantees’ you need to consider is that if you have competition online (as almost every single business does), how can an SEO company ‘guarantee’ to rank your site when they have no control over what SEO efforts your competitors are making? If eleven SEO companies all ‘guarantee’ to get their Clients website onto the first page of Google for the same search term, at least one of those Clients will be disappointed. What value is the ‘guarantee’ to that 11th Client?
No, they’re certainly not. Unfortunately our industry has more than it’s fair share of rogue SEO companies who make ridiculous promises and deliver very short-term results, if any results are delivered at all. You should be very wary of companies that ask you to sign long-term contracts that commit you to spending large amounts of money every month for, in some cases, well over a year.
There are also lots of less-than-ethical techniques that can be used to ‘cheat’ search engines in the short term. However, these techniques are unlikely to have any long-lasting effect on your website and in the worst case, your website could be banned altogether by Google. Unfortunately by the time you realise you’ve been conned, the SEO rogue has disappeared with your money.
The two key ingredients to the perfect SEO keywords are search volume and competition. If the you have a lower level of competition and a good volume of monthly searches then you have the perfect keyword.
As an example, let’s look at the keyword ‘cheap flights to New York’ which (at the time of writing) receives over 450,000 monthly searches in Google UK.
This keyword may seem ideal if you want tons of traffic but if you search this key phrase in Google UK you’ll see that there are 114 million competing pages! Any SEO campaign for this key phrase will be long and very, very expensive.
So let’s try a less competitive keyword, ‘cheap flights to Bognor Regis’. There are only 16,100 competing pages for this keyword, a much more acceptable level. However, the downside to this is that virtually nobody searches for this keyword in Google. So you could be No.1 in Google for the search term ‘cheap flights to Bognor Regis’ but you’ll receive barely any visitors to your website.
The initial part of our SEO service is to identify keywords for your business which have an acceptable level of searches and competition. Getting this right is the cornerstone of any SEO campaign.
A link is like a digital ‘vote’ for your website. The more links your site has, generally the more credibility it has with search engines. However, and this is important, Google is extremely efficient in detecting artificial link patterns and if it does detect that a website has been using artificial link-building techniques, you stand the risk of receiving a Web Spam penalty which would render your website virtually invisible in Google.
This is why your choice of SEO company is so important. There are still SEO companies around (particularly those ones who send out spam email every day) who still use spam-based link-building techniques. Whilst you might get some short term gain in your website ranking, you’ll be living on borrowed time if you hire and SEO company that uses these high-risk link strategies.
Regardless of which company you choose for your SEO, there are some fundamental factors that you should bear in mind:
- No SEO Company has insider knowledge of the algorithms that search engines like Google use to decide on website rankings. Any credible SEO Company will use a combination of best-practices and tried-and-trusted techniques to help your website rank higher but there are definitely no ‘insider secrets’ available to any SEO company.
- SEO is NOT an exact science. Most search engines make minor tweaks to their ranking algorithms on a regular basis and no SEO company can predict these changes. For this reason, rankings are never stable and this is why it’s absolutely crucial to spread your SEO efforts over as many keywords as possible (by having a diverse range of content on your website). Relying on the majority of your website traffic from just a few, high competition keywords is a deeply flawed strategy.
- SEO should not be relied upon to promote websites that have poor or irrelevant content. If your website lacks good-quality content or you try to rank for key phrases that may mislead visitors, any initial success you have will be short lived. The single most important statement to consider with your website is ‘Content is King’. Informative and relevant content is crucial with any website that wants to achieve positive, long-term rankings.
You may have spotted that when you search in Google, there are a number of ‘Sponsored Results’ at the top and side of the main results. These are paid adverts on the Google Adwords and we can help you create effective campaigns that deliver a real return on your marketing budget.
As a certified Google Partner, we manage hundreds of campaigns for our Clients who trust us with thousands of pounds of their marketing budget every single day. Read on to learn more about how we can help your business to develop effective Google Adwords Campaigns.
How Does Google Adwords Work?
Adwords is a highly-complex system that allows you to place adverts for your business on Google’s search results page whenever somebody conducts a search that includes terms (or keywords) you have decided are relevant, such as ‘Plumbers in Guildford’. If the person that made the search subsequently clicks on your advert, you pay a set fee for that click – this is known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
The amount you pay for each click on your advert varies depending on a number of factors. For most businesses working in a sector that is competitive (which is most businesses), you can expect to pay from around 50p for each click, up to £20+ for high-value products (like double glazing or loft conversions) or in highly-competitive sectors (like personal loans). Basically the more competition you have, the more you can expect to pay. However, if your advertising is managed properly, you should always see a decent return on your advertising costs.
Watch this short video from Google which gives you an overview of how their system works…
Why Most Businesses Get Adwords Wrong
Adwords is a complex animal and it’s fairly easy to get things wrong when setting-up your campaigns, keywords and adverts. Beyond Adwords itself, you need to ensure that your website is properly set-up to receive these (expensive) new visitors.
We often hear tales of business owners blowing hundreds of pounds in Adwords with absolutely no enquiries generated – this is typically down to one or all of the following reasons…
- Sending Adwords Traffic to Your Home Page – most website home pages are not set-up correctly to convert your visitors into new enquiries and you can’t expect visitors to spend any time searching your website for a solution. We overcome this problem by using landing pages which are optimised specifically for people who land on your website from an Adwords advert.
- Not Focussing on Relevance – in a lot of cases, the business owner simply adds hundreds of keywords to their campaign with little thought to how relevant each keyword is to the page on their website the visitor will actually land. If somebody is specifically looking for ‘Red Striped Socks’, they don’t want to land on a general page about clothing.
- Lack of Call to Action (CTA) – a CTA is a method of encouraging your website visitors to actually do something once they’ve looked at the page. It’s not simply enough to ask them to ‘contact us’; a strong, incentive-lead CTA needs to be in place to encourage enquiries.
- Failure to Measure – every customer enquiry or order you receive as a direct result of an Adwords campaign has a value. If you don’t set-up conversion goals which tell you exactly which campaigns, adverts and keywords are delivering the best results (or otherwise), you’re throwing your marketing budget down the drain.
Let’s Remove The Pain and Help With The Gain
If you are currently running, or thinking about running and Adwords campaign for your business, it’s definitely worth having a chat with us. We offer a range of Adwords set-up and management services for all sorts of businesses and our existing Clients are currently enjoying conversion rates around 600% better than the average Adwords conversion rate.
With over 31 million users in the UK alone, Facebook offers an incredible opportunity for businesses to connect with new customers. There are a myriad of ways you can promote your business on Facebook and even businesses with a limited budget can tap into this market of potential new customers.
We offer a range of highly-effective Facebook marketing solutions to help you to drive more potential customers to your website and boost your sales.
Our Range of Facebook Marketing Services
We’ve spent over 3 years trialling and testing the most effective ways to use Facebook as a marketing tool to ensure that the services we offer are the best use of your marketing budget. Here are our range of services…
Facebook Page Set-up
Every Facebook marketing strategy needs a Facebook page set-up for your business. If you want a Facebook page that really promotes your business in a positive light then you need to get the foundations right and our set-up service covers all these crucial elements…
- We’ll conduct the initial set-up and categorisation of your business listing on Facebook
- We’ll create a professionally designed header image (cover) and your profile icon
- We’ll add all your business info including contact details and opening hours
- We’ll provide you with a our comprehensive user guide to help you make the most of your new page
PRICE = £150.00
Facebook Post Creation
One of the biggest mistakes that most businesses make when using Facebook is to constantly post bland and blatant adverts. Most consumers will only engage with content on Facebook if it’s relevant to them and our Post Creation service ensures that your business is delivering a relevant, engaging message. Here’s what our Post Creation service includes…
- We’ll help you identify who your ideal prospect is and what message you want to deliver
- We’ll create a professionally designed, eye-catching post image to grab the attention of your prospects
- We’ll help you create an effective ‘Call to Action’ (CTA) to ensure your prospect take action
- We’ll help you to create an effective sales funnel so that your prospects are more likely to buy from you
PRICE = £250.00
Facebook Paid Advertising Management
Like any form of advertising, Facebook adverts can be a huge success or a dismal failure. The key Here’s what our Post Creation service includes…
- We’ll help you identify who your ideal prospect is and what message you want to deliver
- We’ll create a professionally designed, eye-catching advert image to grab the attention of your prospects
- We’ll help you create an effective ‘Call to Action’ (CTA) to ensure your prospect take action
- We’ll help you to create an effective sales funnel so that your prospects are more likely to buy from you
- We’ll set-up your campaign within Facebook including targeting the ideal audience
- We’ll manage your campaign for 30 days to ensure it’s delivering the optimum results
ONE-OFF CHARGE = £150.00 SET-UP CHARGE
PRICE = £300.00 PER CAMPAIGN
If you run a business that and want to take advantage of free traffic (visitors) to your website and create a website that is seen as an authority powerhouse in Google, you absolutely need to have a content marketing strategy – if you don’t, your competitors certainly will.
With our Content Marketing Service, we’ll help you to conceive, create and distribute engaging content your target audience will love and share.
What is Content Marketing?
Broadly speaking, content marketing is simply the process of adding content to your website (typically through a blog) that is of value to your customers, and then distributing that content in places where your customers gather online. Traditionally, most business websites contain page after page of content that does nothing but promote the business – there is virtually no focus on the customer or providing interesting or useful content that they want.
Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. If you come across a page of bland, self-promoting content on a website, are you likely to find any value in that content, let alone share it with others?
However, if your customer finds content on your website that is helpful or interesting then they are far more likely to engage with you. You need to give a little to win the trust of your website visitors so they become customers.
Why is Content Marketing Important?
Most of the old techniques that were used to get free traffic from the search engines, such as SEO, are becoming higher-risk and more unpredictable. Furthermore, it is no longer good enough to simply have a website full of ‘marketing noise’ – your business needs to be creating content that is of value to, and likely to be shared by your target audience (your customers).
This is where our content marketing services can add REAL value to your business.
And before you think this is simply just another marketing fad, the following charts show data from the Content Marketing Institute which suggests that 86% of businesses surveyed in 2015 intend to maintain or increase their content marketing campaigns.
Content Marketing for B2C Companies
Content Marketing for B2B Companies
How Can Content Marketing Help Your Business?
Search engines like Google are built upon delivering the best content they can find for any particular search so by creating content-rich pages, search engines are more likely to reward your website with free traffic.
If you think about Wikipedia and how many time you see it near the top of Google’s search results for literally millions of different search terms, this is a case in point. Wikipedia don’t spend any money on SEO; they simply have in-depth content on a myriad of subjects that Google knows is likely to be of value to it’s users. The net result is that Google rewards Wikipedia for this great content by ranking it’s pages highly.
When applying content marketing to your business, it’s really a ‘win-win’ strategy because not only are your customers more likely to do business with you because you provided them something of value to them, but they are also far more likely to share that interesting or useful content. This means that your customers will actually do your marketing for you by sharing your great content on social media websites like Facebook and Twitter.
The spin-off from this is that your website and brand will, over time, become a real authority in your industry sector. If you sell ‘Widgets’ and have a lot of interesting, informative content about Widgets on your website then the search engines will be far more likely to send visitors your way when somebody conducts a Widget-related search.
And the icing on the cake is that you can’t buy authority in the search engines so you’re actually creating a valuable asset for your business – content marketing, unlike paid advertising or even traditional SEO, is an investment that will add real value to your business.
What Content Can You Add to Your Website?
Many businesses are already sitting on a goldmine of potentially great content without realising it. Typically, good ideas for content can be promoted in a number of ways, for example:
BLOG POSTS – Ideal for answering common questions that your typical customer might have. For example, an Accountant might produce a detailed blog post entitled ‘How Small Businesses Can Reduce Their Tax Bill’. Not only can this blog post be used as a reference for future Clients but whenever a small business owner types ‘small business reduce tax bill’ into a search engine, there is a good chance this content will rank highly.
VIDEOS – People love watching videos and many prefer watching a video than reading long articles. By creating informative videos that show your website visitors how your products or services work, or maybe some tips on solving a problem they might have, they are far more likely to do business with you.
IMAGES – If the products or services you offer can be represented with good quality images then these will catch the imagination of your website visitors. If you provide a home-improvement service then you could show before and after images. If you sell products, you could provide better images than are typically provided by the product manufacturer like the product actually being used.
VOUCHERS – There is massive consumer demand for discount vouchers which has been fuelled by the popularity of voucher websites like Wowcher and Groupon. The great thing about vouchers is that people love to share them so a well-constructed voucher promotion can have far-reaching benefits for your business.
These are just a few examples of the myriad of ways to create great content on your website; content that is likely to be loved and shared by your visitors and in turn, helping you to build a productive relationship with your website visitors.
Don’t worry if creating great content seems a daunting prospect, we can help you create great content for your website and ensure that is distributed in places on the web where it will be seen and shared by your potential customers.
How do You Get Started With Content Marketing?
Content marketing is not an ‘off-the-shelf’ solution – every business will have different opportunities and will require very specific content to maximise those opportunities. Our content marketing service will help you develop a robust, effective strategy that is based on sound research and proven techniques.
If you have any questions or would like to get a clearer idea on how content marketing can help your business, call us on 01252 416 222 or complete the form below…
Did you know that if you put a video at the top of a page on your website, 94% of your visitors will watch the video rather than read the words on the page? Video has the power to ‘sell’ your products or services far more effectively than a 1,000 words of text ever could.
Video is an extremely powerful medium and arguably the single best type of content you can add to your website for grabbing the attention of your visitors.
Our Video Creation Service
We can produce videos up to 2 minutes long (the maximum length for engagement) that include both animated and real-life imagery. The ideal video will not be an obvious advert but a medium that helps to solve a commercial need for your target audience. Our comprehensive video production service includes all of the following elements required for a professional, effective video…
- Script Writing – we’ll write an engaging script that is built upon sound marketing principles
- Custom Animation – the best type of video is one that includes animated elements which we’ll design around your brand and target audience
- Professional Voiceover – we work with a number of professional UK voice artists who will narrate your video
- Website Deployment – we’ll format your new video so it can be added to your website and uploaded to websites like YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook
Some Examples of Client Videos
Here are a couple of examples of videos we’ve created for our Clients…
What Our Clients Say…
“We’ve used Avara on several occasions with regards to online ventures including the design and build of two websites as well as utilising their expert SEO services. We are very pleased with how they have helped our business grow online. Highly recommended.”
Sean Pargeter – Managing Director, EP Training
Need Help With Any of This?
Call us on 01252 416 222 or Click The Button Below
