Mitigate the risks of SEO not working
Many UK businesses that trade online battle with the logic of using Google ads for Facebook ads instead of using SEO to grow their business.
With simple paper click values, it is much clearer to work out marketing spend and ROI.
It is a widely held belief that improving a website with better design and more persuasive content is a good long term strategy, why are so many businesses shying away from paying for SEO?
Safety in numbers
With Google and Facebook ads, you could argue that you know precisely where you stand.
But, of course, there are the disadvantages of simply spending too much, and just because you use Google ads or advertise on Instagram does not mean that your company will flourish.
However, in this sense, there is a degree of inevitability in using a simple metric of cost per click.
Measuring SEO success
Using SEO company, on the other hand, has no such simple metric for measuring success.
Some SEO companies I have spoken to promise a number one position within Google within weeks with a money-back guarantee.
Most of these companies now, thankfully have gone.
To measure SEO impact when engaging an SEO agency is a simple process of putting a stick in the sand and measuring current organic search traffic gain from Google and giving that revenue value.
So, for example, if Google’s organic search traffic to the site is 1000, and this results in 30 inquiries, this in a sense is the value.
Results
It is a simple no-brainer that if a client’s organic search traffic grows to 2000 PCM, and now generates 60 enquiries, the client has gained value from their SEO campaign.
However, SEO is never quite that simple.
Many of the more honest SEO companies will tell you that SEO takes time. This time is required for Google to rank not only your website but website re-rank around also indexing and taking into account new content new blogs, new URLs, new Social media signals and backlinks.
All of this takes time.
Websites are all scored by Google from 0 to infinity. Just because you have successfully optimised your website does not guarantee that it will score more than the site ranked above it.
SEO is very much a case of ‘hurry up and wait.’
Reality check
However, the reality for many London based businesses that engage SEO companies is that their results are not as black and white as doubling the traffic or seeing a 100% increase in enquiries or sales.
Whilst the people working on the website for them may offer a number of KPIs that might be suggested by their SEO is working; like page position/SERPs for obscure keywords, impression numbers increasing etc. the bottom-line increase in traffic and the promised growth in client acquisition numbers just doesn’t happen.
I am not suggesting that all SEOs are crooks, simply that organic search is less predictable than PPC.
Mitigating the risk without buying Google
The way the VC mitigates this risk is by ensuring that every client has as a minimum set number of new pages or new blogs created and written per month.
This is complemented by a number of new backlinks built to the website. We refer to this as a ‘minimum deliverables’ for every month.
We cannot guarantee that Google will rank your website #1 for your keywords. We are a very good SEO company however we do not own Google.
What we can guarantee
What we can guarantee and set out on in a contract is a minimum amount of work per month each client receives.
So should your SEO results not be as clear as doubling your traffic or doubling your sales revenue the worst-case scenario is that you will end up with a much better cleaner more persuasive and larger website that will stand you in good stead for the future.
Vanilla Circus is fortunate that the majority of our clients stay with us for an average of 3 to 4 years. This is because we are successful 82% of the time.
With our minimum delivery options and of course our hard work we can take the gamble out of employing SEO as part of your overall growth strategy for your business.
