Does SEO Work? Which SEO Company to Choose?
One of the major problems within the UK SEO industry is who to believe when everyone has an opinion and a voice, but none are acclaimed experts.
Here are 100 comments on SEO companies and how customers found working with them.
In a recent meeting we had in London, a client showed a proposal from another SEO agency which was exactly the opposite of what we were proposing. So who is right?
We tell clients not to believe anything we say until we can prove it. If something feels uncomfortable, a piece of content is a poor idea, or the reasons for changing the site architecture seem incorrect, we encourage clients to question. You are the expert in your business. You know what needs to happen with new customers to entice them to buy.
Don’t let terminology convince you!
So many clients worry about what they can’t comprehend. Site speed, meta tags, title tags. Anything else is part of the dark art of Google optimisation. As this is an industry where you don’t know how it works or what the processes are, sometimes the jargon can convince you that the company is the right fit for you. They know what they’re doing, right? But as you’ll come to find, this is not always the case.
The problem is that anyone can become an SEO and learn it
The problem is SEO is very easy to learn. I think I can teach anyone relatively quickly to get through an interview to work in SEO. Basic principles are easy to understand if you know how to use a computer. However, that’s just basic SEO, there’s more to it when you want to enter more competitive spaces.
Ask your SEO company to demonstrate their knowledge, and they will wax lyrical about all of the SEO elements, metadata, header tags, canonical URLs, site structure, keywords, rich snippets, JSON, semantic search, and backlinks.
But you’ve heard content is king, so the real talent is knowing how important content is, what to plan and how to strategies so you can sell to your customer and rank. Many technical SEOs fall at this hurdle, they’re not creative beasts. The problem is they do not know what to write or how to fill in the blanks. They know the database but have no idea what data to add. A little knowledge is dangerous as these “experts” can convince you to part with your money but can’t deliver!
We’re a content-led driven agency
We have worked with over 50 clients, published over a thousand websites, and have servers on three continents. Every day is a school day. We are learning and researching new algorithmic changes and improvements to our general optimization.
- We are not experts; we are specialists.
Our results are outstanding because we create human-generated copy and content monthly (view our content marketing services). Whereas other SEO companies claim success by ranking your website for keywords no one searches for, where we achieve #1 results for top-asked customer questions that have a transactional intent.
Does that mean we’re not technical?
Technical SEO is an ever-changing sphere dictated by a highly technical company driven by code, not content. That is Google. The changes and improvements to the algorithms that are made public are always slight technical tweaks that can help Google’s PR, which is the most advanced, ever-changing search engine.
What is not spoken about is how Google is trying to deliver the right information at the right time via studying content and storytelling and overall web design and UX. The excitement on whether or not Google has improved its understanding of pages and where they fit into an overall site architecture is not exciting news. However, it is exactly the reason for Google search engine existing.
Whilst our SEO is all about content, we still have the technical know-how to make that content go further. The content we create includes everything from CSS, JavaScript, images, video, HTML, PHP, and various markup languages like rich snippets, etc. Every story we tell is cloaked in code, which helps Google understand exactly what we tell the user.
- However, code optimisation is always 2nd to the creative narrative.
The narrative is to sell your company’s products and services. It is to promote your company as their first choice to buy from. Practically every story we tell for clients is a version of “what we can do for your new customer” and “why you should choose us.”
Google ranks our content higher than other websites because our work is designed to promote, inform, and convert a new customer. To us, that is magic. That is why we are called Vanilla Circus.
