5 ways to make your SEO Agency even happier
28th January 2010 by Pete Handley
If you work with an SEO agency, or have plans to do so, there are some things that you can do to help them with their work that will make them even happier to be working with you.
1) Write Content – if you are a regular reader of SEO material, you will often hear that “content is king”. Content is very important for SEO work, as Search Engines love to read words on websites – and without words on your website, you are really going to struggle to be found for much.
By writing words across your website, you give the search engines the “food” they want to receive when they come to crawl the site.
2) Update your website regularly – whether this is by writing content on a blog, or updating company news (or even hiring people to write industry news for you) by updating the website on a regular basis, you keep the “food” that the search engines want to be “eating” coming, and in return, the search engines will come to visit your website more often.
Pop in some relevant and keyword rich internal links whilst you are doing it, helps to keep the search engines interested in other pages across your website, and reinforces the messages that a good SEO will be leaving across your website to tell search engines what pages you want them to rank for which phrases.
3) Don’t get fixated on PageRank – toolbar PageRank can be the bane of an SEO’s life at times. There isn’t a simpler measure of very quickly assessing whether or not a web page has any authority with Google, and I will confess to using it as indicator of this myself. However it doesn’t alone (like many other SEO factors) mean anything. I’ve seen site’s go up in traffic, but lose Toolbar PageRank, and vice versa – ultimately, Toolbar PageRank will not affect a website’s bottom line earnings (unless it’s selling links as its main income, in which case it may well ultimately lose its vital green bar that generates the money). Focus on things that can help make you money – get visitors to your website and convert them into enquiries, customers, readers or contacts – whatever the goal is for your website.
4) Working with PR Agencies – many of my clients work with PR agencies, both to aid online and offline efforts. SEO and PR companies can work together very effectively, but it helps to know of each others existence.
Links are an incredibly important factor in improving website rankings, and PR can generate links from sources that SEO can often find hard to reach. However, sometimes these links, whilst potentially fantastic traffic drivers, and of great authority, aren’t reaching their maximum potential because they link with the URL, or a company name. Whilst this isn’t terrible, it can be maximised by expanding upon the link, from just a company name, and help you further by utilising some of the keyphrases that you are looking to target in those links. Also, it’s great to link to specific resources within the site, where there is some more useful information on what that release is about, rather than sending them to the home page. Or, perhaps link to both.
I’ve worked closely with many PR agencies over the last few years, and many of them now know what to add, where to add it to, and how to maximise it for the greatest benefits to our shared clients.
5) Don’t “just” look at Google – ok, I KNOW Google is the most important engine, and many of my efforts are focused on improving a websites visibility in Google and its capability to gain traffic from this source.
But there are other search engines out there that are still able to give you the traffic and customers that you need. Google has 85-90% of the UK search market, but there are still enough other visitors in that remaining 10% to make it worthwhile looking at ensuring you are visible in those engines too.
Also, from my experience, conversion rates from smaller search engines are somewhat higher than those from Google. Of course, due to the visitor numbers available from those sources, it isn’t likely to generate the same number of sales, but any paying customer has got to be good right? I certainly wouldn’t pass them up!
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