We have outlined 5 of the most common, yet important, questions we are asked by Clients who are wishing to take on an agency for their SEO needs.

So let's start with the basics..

1. What is SEO?
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation. It is a series of strategies, techniques and tactics to help increase the amount of visitors (traffic) to your website by ensuring high rankings on the most typical Search Engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
So what are the types of traffic and what do they mean?

• Organic Traffic - traffic to your website through unpaid search results
• Direct Traffic - vistors who are typing in your website address directly
• Referral Traffic - vistors who have been referred from another website through a link

2. How long does it take to get results?
There are important variables to understand before being able to assess how long you should wait for results to start showing with SEO, let's explore some of them;

• Competition - how competitive your market is can make a significant difference in how quickly SEO will work for your company. Say for instance you are selling laptops, Googles search engines bring up 816,000,000 results for the keyphrase 'laptops' so you can see the amount of competition there is out there to try and stay on top of. That does not mean achieving the top spot cannot be done but it is a longer planned process that is required to ensure you get there. If you have a highly specific, bespoke, niche market then you will find results can start to show within a couple of months.
• Strategy - There are several strategies which can be looked at for SEO depending on your overall goal. In order to ensure a strategy is correctly put in place it is important, as a company, you know what keyphrases and searches you are looking to achieve a high ranking on. Doing this will save time and make SEO quicker for you or an agency doing the work.
• Investment - The amount of money and effort which is put into your SEO will make a significant difference in how quickly results will start to show. The more time you allow, the more work can be done, the quicker results will be.

3. Should I set an SEO Goal?
Yes, we believe it's important that you do before any work is started. An agency will be able to talk through an SEO plan with you and help you set a realistic target for your SEO that can be stuck to. This will also enable you to assess whether targets are being hit if more work is required or if you need to change your SEO focus.

4. What platform is best for SEO?
All website platforms can handle SEO, some are better than others however there are no restrictions found with the most common platforms such as Wordpress, Magento, Shopify or a custom CMS (Content Management System)
All platforms will allow you to manage page titles, content, sitemap submissions, good clean URL's and much more.

5. Do I need an Agency for SEO?
SEO is a challenging and competitive world with the need to keep constantly up to date with the latest rules and announcements, so in this case we would say yes. However, SEO can be done in-house. In fact, you may have been doing SEO without realising it with changes such as ensuring your content is relevant and not duplicating content on any pages, using blogs and backlinks and ensuring you have no blank or missing pages for your visitors to get lost in.
Some companies prefer to do their own initial SEO and then leave the more complicated elements to an agency, however it is important to keep on top of so hiring an agency can remove this stress for you.

We hope you have found our SEO information of use, if you would like to have a chat with our office please feel free to contact us.