As the owner of an SEO company, much of my time is spent meeting with people, explaining what SEO is, and convincing clients in favour of a particular course of action. Many of these people are experienced marketing managers in their own right, and often beholden to senior figures in their own company who’ve been around decades before ‘internet marketing‘ and ‘SEO’ were even invented. So even if I persuade them that this is a valuable investment, they then have to go upstairs to explain on their own behalf why a particular monthly spend might be warranted and what that’s going to do for the company. It’s a tricky process and one which hangs or falls on the level of education it’s possible to impart in the course of a short meeting. Although I’ve by no means perfected the art, here are a few tips to making the process a little easier.
If you want to be on Bond Street, you have to pay the rent.
The web is like conventional real estate – is a phrase I often use to start. If you want your shop front in an old lot in a flaking suburb, the rent will be cheaper. If you want it on Bond Street, the rent is going to be significantly higher. The first part of understanding SEO is to understand that the goal is to move your website onto Bond Street. Understanding how to do that is what makes any digital marketing consultant worth hiring.
The rents are higher on Bond Street but you can make more money there
Once you’re on Bond Street, happily ensconced in your new premises, your chances of making a return on your investment, and the quality of clientele, is going to be a lot higher. The footfall is astronomical here, and there is even late night shopping! But it takes resources to get there! And getting a website ranked in difficult niches is significantly more complex than simply paying someone the necessary rent: it requires relationships, an authority acquired over time, technical know-how, a lot of consistent effort.
Getting onto Bond Street is not going to happen over night
Unlike conventional real estate, this isn’t about paying the man and moving in. In the days of black-hat SEO, people used to adopt Mafioso style tactics intended to trick, bribe or shortcut their way onto Bond Street, until Google got wise and clever enough to prevent it. Now, getting onto Bond Street necessitates comes with certain strict requirements. Does your website genuinely deserve to be there? Are your associations (or backlinks) suggestive of the type of company who would be fitting in a plush locale like Bond Street. Do you have the reputation, are you trustworthy, is your shop front design stylish enough? All of this is what you hire an SEO company for, but even then it takes time! We digital marketers are like trainers hired by companies to get a website into the necessary shape where it can genuinely deserve to be on Bond Street. But you can’t go from being out of shape to peak fitness over night. Slowly, slowly wins the race. Expect to wait at least 6 months to a year before you start to see this really working.
What exactly are we paying you people for?
In my experience, you can charge someone £10k for a website and they won’t bat an eyelid. After all, continuing with the Bond Street metaphor, they’re getting bricks and mortar for their money, they’re getting a slick, shiny storefront which will form a cornerstone of their business. However, if you suggest to someone that they pay £2k per month for SEO, their jaw will drop, their upper lip will bead with sweat, and they will often feel thoroughly affronted before saying no. Why is this? Do people feel they should be on Bond Street for free? Do they feel they should be able to reap the immense rewards of the millions of people walking down Bond Street at no cost? It’s a tricky one and, as I suggested at the beginning of the article, comes down to education. Most of the old guard simply don’t understand the mechanics of SEO, therefore they imagine that money going down a black hole. Even if they do sign up, the typical panic moment comes at three months, when they’ve outlaid a significant amount and have yet to see return on investment. Nine clients out of ten, we have a sit down at three months, with lots of tea and biscuits, in which we try to reassure people that all is well, this is normal, there’s no need to worry. Many, however, simply leave, convinced that it’s all a waste of time and doesn’t work.
The basic mechanics of getting you onto Bond Street
A common metric in SEO is domain authority or the perceived value of a website as it may appear to Google. Put simply, sites with high DA rank well, sites with little or no DA do not. DA is another word for quality, so our job as marketers is to raise the quality of your site. How do we do this? Firstly, we overhaul the site itself, working on a number of technical factors. Secondly, we analyse and improve the offsite factors, that is those websites which have mentioned or linked to you. So if you’re selling chocolates and you’re mentioned on the websites of, say, Green and Blacks, Fortnum and Mason and The International Cocoa Organization, those are good indicators that your company is worth checking out. If the only mention of your site is on the Facebook page of your mate Dave that’s less impressive. The great skill with offsite SEO (as with PR) is knowing what the most important links are, and how to obtain them. It takes tremendous resources, skill, creativity and effort to do this. You can’t simply walk up to Fortnum and Mason and say can we have a link? You have to deserve a link! Doing this every month, in diverse places, and consistently across the highest profile websites on the web, is real digital wizardry and it is worth paying for. Why? Because when you have enough of these links, your quality or DA goes up. And then one day you wake up and you’re on Bond Street, your shop is packed with people, the till is ringing morning, noon and night.
