SEO how much investment is it worth for a new SME?

[Thornykate]

Firstly I do apologise if this has already been asked recently; I did MN search & flick through the last 7 pages of topics here & couldn't see anything though.

My website will be used for lead generation although I do not expect it to be my main source of work. I offer a local service business & am anticipating that most people who access my site for more information will be directed there from my suppliers 'find a practitioner' service on their websites, or through twitter or word of mouth.

I have been told that frequent updates to my site will raise the ranking significantly & plan to address this by using twitter feed. Maybe a daft question but does having the date & time showing count as update?

I am assuming that having twitter & facebook as 'quality links' will count as another way to boost ranking too due to their own popularity rankings?

My limited understanding is that SEO involves hiding frequently used search terms within the page & the more times the words appear the higher the site ranks is this correct?

Someone else told me that this is no longer as effective as it used to be anyway?

Finally, my main question; what else can an SEO expert offer my site, how much are the costs in general terms & is it worth it considering my needs?

So many questions! But I am loathe to ask any experts directly as I know that they are rightly in the business of selling these things so are unlikely to tell me they are not needed.

Any input gratefully received, thank-you in advance.

some info here
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/freelancers/1176690-Help-please-Google-Yahoo-search-engine-advertising

Hi Kate

Frequent updates are things like regularly updated blogs/news pages. Google likes websites that are updated regularly with unique content. So, date and time stamp that automatically updates is definitely not classed as updates - sorry!

Twitter and Facebook are good links to have for human visitors who are seeing your profiles and are clicking through to your site. However, as far as SEO goes, their links are 'nofollow', which means that they do not boost your rankings.

SEO starts with understanding the right keywords to target, and then using these to optimise the website with. Pls don't 'hide' keywords as this is a real no-no, but of course you need to ensure that they are used in your page titles, meta descriptions and website copy. Do not stuff keywords in, you should write more for your target audience (with a mind on search engines). i.e. it should sound quite natural.

SEO will consist of two broad areas: (1) Onsite optimisation (which you could learn yourself if you were so inclined) (2) Offsite optimisation (i.e. inbound links from other sites to yours).

As far as the question... 'is it worth paying an expert to do the work?' Well, that truly depends on a number of things:

• Can you DIY? (there is a lot that you can learn yourself, but it does take a bit of time to learn the theory and how to use SEO tools).
• How important is getting high rankings for the business?
• Can you afford to make ongoing investment into SEO? (proper SEO will cost you more than, say, £50 per month). As far as cost goes, it really is 'how long is a piece of string', I'm afraid, as it depends on what work is required to improve rankings.

If I were you, I would probably try and learn some of the basic theory and see how you get on with it. Then, if it's not working out, at least when you brief SEO agencies/freelancers, you know what you are asking for and can understand what is being offered to you.

Hope this helps.

marking place.

Saffra
well said
understanding what you are buying is desperately important in this area

the main thing I have found with DH's website is to regularly (around once a fortnight) google him under what we know (from the web stats) to be the main search terms and see what else is out there and how they are doing it.
DO NOT search your own name - unless you have a national reputation (luckily DH does now ; makes life so much easier)
search on what you offer
eg technical prrofreader science hertfordshire
as that is what clients will do
and be willing to right click, view source on the competition. They will be doing it to you.

I am lucky - after having the website live for nearly 8 years, I know that my adwords are as tuned as they will ever be (until he does something new - like he did this evening over dinner!) and the content / metatags on the main web pages get us to first page in google, bing and yahoo

BUT it is always worth looking every couple of weeks

ALSO - one use for googling your name - is there somebody else out there with the same name whose business needs to be differentiated from yours?
We have emailed a couple and both agreed to amend our websites to mutual benefit....

Thank-you for the replies.

Just to clarify re what google sees as updating with unique content; doesn't a widget from twitter/ facebook badge as opposed to a plain link cover this? I was hoping to use these for special offers & promoting new treatments & venues rather than keep updating the website as well as thinking they would count as updates in their own right.

Where are you? If you are in the midlands th B2B centre at Warwick university run an excellent course on this. I did it last year (it was free) and would not pay an SEO expert to do what you could do very easily for yourself.

Good luck with the business.

Do you have a blog? The B2B people recommended a blog as a means of updating the website. Personally I think it is a good idea to have a news section that you update frequently.

We've found twitter to be invaluable, and have used it to build up local networks of people and we've got quite a bit of business through it.

I am working in Manchester, but thanks for the info.

At the moment I am weighing up the pros & cons of how much I actually need SEO against how much time/ money it will cost. I have consciously tried to avoid doing technical stuff myself within reason; I am not a natural at IT so I think my time is better spent sticking to what I know.

I don't have a blog, was just going to use twitter as micro blog & hope that the frequent updates on that & my facebook business page could be fed directly onto my website.

How does the blog link to the website? My website designer set up a blog for me and I 've made weekly posts, but don't see any direct correlation with the website, as it doesn't appear on the site.

I'm very new to all this as you can tell!

Thornykate - Hmmm... I don't believe that Twitter/Facebook feeds encourage the Google robots to visit more regularly. The feeds are just a tiny bit of content on the page. Besides, you really want new pages of indexable content. Not tweaks to current pages. This probably sounds like hard work because, like most things in life, things worth doing usually are, unfortunately!

Whilst basic SEO is not rocket science, if you don't have the inclination/time to learn and practice, then by all means outsource. I do some myself and outsource some (the link building campaigns). But, my industry is highly competitive, whereas your keywords will include local terms, so is far less likely to need so much work.

Mumblechum1 - For the website to benefit from an SEO perspective, the blog should really be an integral part of your main site. However, even with a separate blog, there will be some benefit as that will still be generating traffic and creating links to the main site.

Thornykate - sounds like you've had some promising results so far from social media. TBH, it might work best if you focus your own efforts on these areas (linking what you do to your identified untapped markets?) and possibly outsource the SEO if you have the budget. You've got to think where you're going to get the max return on your investment - be it time or money.