SEO

Outsourcing Your Website SEO Properly

The ability to carry out effective SEO to increase the ranking of your website might be something you desire, but for many reasons, it might not be possible for you to do this yourself. There could restrictions on your time, you may not fully understand what is required, or you simply do not wish to divert your focus away from the other activities that your business requires you to do.

When any, or all of these come into play, but you still want your website to rank higher, it is time call in the services of an experienced SEO consultant such as Slinky Digital. Before going any further, we need to discuss the differences between the two.

An SEO consultant is an individual who has expertise in search engine optimisation and has the tools and the skills to help improve the ranking of your website. They can be found in many places online such as their own website, or from freelancing websites like Upwork. You will even find SEO consultants on Fiverr.

It’s at this point you need to consider the size of budget you have available to hire an SEO consultant and then assess at what level this allows you to employ one. Obviously, someone on Fiverr is going to be a lot cheaper than one who has their own site and works for individual clients for a fee which can run to several hundred dollars.

If your budget is tight then cheaper freelance consultants will still be able to give you sound SEO advice, and they can produce positive results. It may worthwhile hiring one with good reviews and feedback to see what difference they make to your rankings. Bear in mind, freelancers on Upwork and Fiverr, rely heavily on their feedback and satisfaction ratings, so they will be very highly motivated to produce good results for you.

For those consultants with a premium service and premium price to go with it, it is imperative that you seek out testimonials and reviews from their past clients. If they are as good as they claim to be, they should have no issue with you contacting one or two of these clients to confirm their ability to produce results.

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Logical Approach To SEO

Taking A Logical Approach To SEO

Whether your website design is brand new or has been running for a while, SEO must be a key part of your marketing efforts. The problem is that, while many website owners know this, when it comes to taking action, they do so in an unorganised, and illogical manner. The result is all their efforts bring no results, they grow frustrated, and end up abandoning SEO as ‘something that doesn’t work’.

How wrong they are, and if they only took a more thoughtful approach to SEO for the same, or even less, effort, they may have seen the results they were looking for.

The first task in most plans is to assess where you are at and then decide what actions you need to take. This applies as much to SEO as it does to any other field. Therefore, what you must do is carry out an SEO audit of your website. This can identify issues such as, on-page SEO which may be missing, quantify both the amount and the quality of backlinks to your site, and highlight other useful data and feedback. Armed with all this information you can then map out a systematic approach to putting right what is wrong, and making other improvements to the SEO of your website.

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SEO Performance Metrics

5 Performance Metrics To Measure Your SEO Success

If you have taken steps to improve the SEO of your website then you have done more than a lot of your competitors will. This gives you an advantage, however, only by measuring specific performance metrics can you ensure that your SEO efforts are bearing fruit. Again, this is where many website owners miss out, whereby they have SEO tactics in place but have no idea whether they are having a positive effect on their business.

#1 Traffic Levels

The first, and most obvious measure, is the amount of organic traffic that is visiting your site. Note, that we say organic, which is free traffic from the search engines, and not traffic generated by PPC campaigns. Using a tool such as Google Analytics will allow you to track whether your SEO efforts are generating the desired increase in traffic.

One point to note here is that SEO does not generally result in an overnight spike in traffic so you should track your traffic levels over a period of a month or so to get the full picture.

#2 Conversion Rate

Ultimately you want visitors to your website to take action, which might not always necessarily be to buy something. Often it may be that you want them to sign up for a webinar, or give you their email address in return for a free report. Regardless of what the desired action is, you should track the rate at which visitors ‘convert’ by taking that action.

This can indicate the quality of the traffic coming to your site, or whether there needs to be an improvement in terms of the website’s sales copy or call to action. The levels of conversion have a direct correlation to the amount of revenue a site is generating, which in turn influences the budget available for SEO resources in the future.

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Why Your Web Hosting Can Impact On Your SEO

Website HostingOf all the elements that get measured, tweaked, enhanced and improved to make sure a website’s SEO is as good as it can be, there is one that very rarely gets mentioned, and that is the site’s web hosting. We are not talking about specific companies as it unlikely any one brand of hosting company will influence your site’s ranking. However, the performance of your web hosting service in three crucial areas can affect your site’s ranking positively if it is up to standard or negatively if it is not.

Physical Location

This is of particular interest to you if your business targets customers locally in terms of the country you live in, rather than across the entire internet. For example, let’s say your business is located in Melbourne, and your customer base is anyone who lives in Australia. When someone in Australia searches for one of your keywords, the search engines are more likely to display websites of Australian businesses, but only if they are hosted there.

The search engines can do this by checking the IP address of the site, which tells them where the hosting servers are located. With this knowledge, if your business is country specific it would make sense for you to select a web hosting company that can offer to host your site on servers located in the country of your choice.

On the other hand, if you sell products to anywhere in the world, such as digital downloads, then it would be wise to host on servers located in the country with your biggest markets. Normally this would be the USA, but that may differ depending on the products or services you sell.

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