Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of making a website attractive to search engines to improve its relative position in the search engine results pages for keywords and phrases relevant to a businesses products and / or services.
SEO can be quite a complex process and solutions vary greatly from business to business and market to market.
Ultimately, the cost and effort required to optimise a website comes down to the relative competitiveness for any given keyword or phrase.
There are only '10' organic listings on each search engine results page and as you know, if you are not on the first page you are virtually invisible. If you are competing against major organisations for keywords and phrases that are highly desirable to your business, it can be very difficult to almost impossible to gain a first page position for these keywords.
For example, if you were in the 'real estate' business and you wanted to rank on the first page of Google for the phrase 'real estate', you would be up against some of the most aggressive businesses in one of the most agressive SEO spaces in the world. At the time of writing this content, there were 561,000,000 pages indexed on Google.com containing the phrase 'real estate' and 821,000 pages on Google.com.au.
Now you can see how it might be a difficult task in obtaining a position in the top 10 listings.
Some other industries that are highly competitive are travel, accomodation, insurance and automotive.
Whilst it is not always easy to gain first page prominance for some of the most highly searched generic terms, most companies can greatly benefit by optimising their website for search engines.
Often there are less competitive search terms that may be highly relevant to your products and / or services that will bring highly qualified and motivated visitors to your site.
For example, if you were in the business of say chartering flights, if you were to optimise for the word 'airfare' or 'cheap airfare', you would virtually have no chance of getting into the top 100 results. If your service was for say flights from Melbourne to Mt Hotham, you would be highly likely to get a first page position for phrases like "airfare melbourne mt hotham" or "airfare to mt hotham" which are far more qualified anyway.
In most circumstances (unless you have already collected sufficient data), SEMA advises against its clients launching into an extensive SEO strategy until it undertakes comprehensive keyword research and validates the effectiveness of those keywords.
The best way to do this, based on our experience, is to conduct a pay-per-click campaign in the first instance, for a period of no less than 3 months.
This enables us to collect data about search volumes for keywords, determine the competition for those keywords and evaluate which keywords provide the best return on investment.
Our SEO services include:
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Initial SEO review to determine if an SEO strategy will deliver a satisfactory ROI
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On-page changes to your website's code to ensure search engines index it for target keywords and phrases
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Link development which ultimately determines where your website will rank in the natural listings.
If you would be interested in knowing more about your own specific SEO needs, please contact SEMA.