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Category: Sheffield SEO

  • 5 reasons why it might be time to update your website content

    5 reasons why it might be time to update your website content

    5 reasons why it might be time to update your website content

    How long is it since the text on your website was updated? Have you been meaning to rewrite it for ages, but it keeps getting put to the bottom of the to-do list as more urgent work presses on your time? This is a common story for many website owners, however, it might actually be a good time to get your website content updated. Here’s why:

    1. Search engines love fresh content

    Google loves lots of recently updated content. Websites that regularly add new, unique content are often seen by search engines as more important, and more relevant to web users. That means, if you keep your website up to date, you should naturally rank higher in the search engines than a site whose content remains the same, or hasn’t been updated for quite a while.

    It’s also worth checking that your website copy includes the words and phrases that you would like to be found online for. Search engine optimised copy means that your website will be more likely to be found by search engine users when they search for a product or service that you offer, meaning more visitors to your site.

    2. A news section or blog is great for SEO

    Does your website have a news section? If so, when was it last updated? Adding and regularly updating a News page is a great way of keeping your website up to date with fresh content that search engines and potential customers will love.

    There’s nothing worse than checking out a company’s news page only to find that it hasn’t been updated for 6 months. Are they not very busy? Have they gone out of business? You might not think that your company has anything to shout about, but there are lots of things you could write a short article on. For example, a new product, a new member of staff, a great testimonial, or even industry news.

    3. Visitors trust up-to-date sites

    Regular, loyal customers who see you as a reliable and trustworthy business may be fairly familiar with your site. Why not give them something new to read when they next visit? Adding fresh material to your site on a regular basis means they will keep coming back to see what’s new!

    4. Your content is out-of-date or not accurate

    So your website copy has been the same since your site went live 3 years ago. If this rings true, you need to act, and fast. Businesses naturally progress and grow, and your website needs to reflect this. The chances are, you’ve developed your services, expanded your product range or gained the experience to specialise in a particular area. And it’s not just your business that may have developed, changes in your industry are inevitable, and keeping up to date with them is key to establishing trust between you and your customers.

    5. The contents is boring or not engaging

    Even the most brilliant content can become stale over time. The attention of online readers is incredibly short, you literally have a few seconds to grab them and make them want to keep reading. Your website copy may describe exactly what you do accurately, but is it lively enough to capture the attention of a reader and to keep them there?

    Content needs to be concise and captivating, getting to the point quickly, and providing the option for readers to find out more. Text should be in bite sized sections, making it easy to scan and process the information with little effort. Text heavy paragraphs that aren’t broken up by images or bullet points are a real put off too!

    I still don’t have time to update my website content!

    Getting an agency to refresh and rewrite website contents may be more affordable than you think. We’re based in Sheffield and are very experienced in writing copy for websites. We also specialise in SEO and SEO copywriting which is a very important consideration when updating your site. If you’ve been meaning to update your website copy but never quite got round to it, we can help.

    Call Seven Creative on 0114 383 0711 or get in touch through our contact page today.

  • Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – what is a sitemap?

    Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – what is a sitemap?

    If you’ve ever looked into search engine optimisation (aka SEO) in any detail you’ll probably have come across what’s known as a ‘sitemap’. And if you are new to SEO, you’ll also probably be asking yourself ‘what is a sitemap’? A sitemap, in its simplest form, is a file (or files) that provide information about files and pages on your website. It normally site with your other files but it used by search engines to more easily & quickly discover the content on your site. It’s normally simply called something along the lines of ‘sitemap’ and will also normally have an ‘.XML’ extension – e.g. ‘sitemap.xml’. Sitemaps are read by search engines and this information is used to get a clearer picture of things like which pages & files there are on a website; and what type of pages & files theses are (for example, contact pages, downloads, or blog posts)

    A sitemap is designed to help your site communicate with Google and the other search engines by providing detailed information about your sites pages and contents

    What is a sitemap and why does my website need one?

    Your main website navigation is how your website visitors find their way around your website, however, these links may not always provide the whole picture to visitors. For example, there may be pages that aren’t particularly relevant to a visitor so they may not be shown these. However, the website owner may actually want all the website pages to appear in Google (as this is an important source of website traffic for many sites) so a sitemap is a fast way of letting the search engine know things such as the following:

    • Which pages & files exist on a website
    • When each page was last updated
    • How often the page is updated
    • Alternate language versions of the individual page
    • For video, how long the video is, what is the appropriate age rating, what is the video category
    • For images, what is the image of, what type of image it is, and what is the image licence

    Having a sitemaps is particularly important for:

    • Sites that contain pages or areas that are not available through the site navigation
    • Sites that use technologies such as Ajax, Silverlight, or Flash which can’t be ready easily by search engines
    • Sites that are very large meaning web crawlers may miss some of the new or recently updated content
    • Sites that have a lot of pages that are isolated or not well linked together
    • Sites that have few external links for example, new websites)

    What does a sitemap look like?

    Sitemaps for newer websites are often dynamically generated so change when new content is added. They use the XML mark-up which is like HTML but don’t have any styling information attached. Looking at the raw file may be confusing, but an XML viewer will show you the file in a more user-friendly format. Some internet browsers have an in-built XML viewer. Here is are the sitemaps for this website:

    Here is another example of a simpler sitemap:

    This particular site is quite big which hundreds of blog posts, articles, images and pages so the sitemap structure is quite big

    Website sitemaps are a very established part of a website structure (having been introduced in 2005) and continue to be important for search engine optimisation purposes. If you want your site to index properly within search engines, then making sure your sitemap is up-to-date and working correctly a very important part of your activity

    Is my website’s sitemap up-to-date?

    There are several ways to find out if your sitemap is up-to-date – some fast and some a bit more fiddly and slow. Some sites may not even have a sitemap which may be a problem from an SEO perspective. The best way to find out for certain is by asking an SEO expert to have a look.

    If you’re looking for an SEO expert or an SEO company in Sheffield for help with your website and its search engine optimisation (SEO), please give us a call on 0114 383 0711 or visit our contact section

  • What is the ‘passive voice’ and why is it important in Search Engine optimisation?

    What is the ‘passive voice’ and why is it important in Search Engine optimisation?

    If you’ve ever delved a little more deeply into search engine optimisation, you may have come across talk of the ‘passive voice’ in relation to page content. Or more specifically, why you should be avoiding using the ‘passive voice’ too much. For example, one of the most popular and widely used SEO plugins is Yoast which specifically warns against a use of the passive voice in more than 10% of the page text content. Therefore, we thought we’d take this opportunity to discuss exactly what the ‘passive voice’ is, and how to improve your page content for SEO. Don’t forget, Seven Creative is a very well established Sheffield SEO agency providing SEO services for many years. Give us a call if you would like help with your website optimisation 

    Sheffield SEO company - an article all about the passive voice

    What is the passive voice?

    “The passive voice is used to show interest in the person or object that experiences an action rather than the person or object that performs the action. In other words, the most important thing or person becomes the subject of the sentence.” – ef.co.uk

    The ‘passive voice’ is a grammatical construction which contrasts with the ‘active voice’ (the standard English sentence structure). A good way to explain this is therefore to contrast the two with examples.

    Let’s start with the subject who does something (verb) to a thing (receiver) e.g. the man (actor) throws (direct verb) a ball at the wall (receiver). In the passive voice, the actor and receiver are switched making the receiver the grammatical subject. The meaning stays the same, just the word order changes e.g. the wall had a ball thrown at it by the man. You can even omit the actor completely and say ‘the wall had a ball thrown at it’ which is still perfectly understandable but simply omits some of the information

    So why omit the passive voice?

    Well, this is an SEO article so it would be rude to not also talk about Google who are the largest and most sophisticated search engine. I say they’re a search engine put actually Google is an ad agency who sell access to us, the consumers, to the advertisers. To keep us loyal they need to provide us with the highest quality content. In other words, out of a thousand potential websites, they need to show us the best quality (and most relevant) ones first (this is page 1 of Google search results). As we humans prefer the active voice, Google therefore uses this factor in its ranking decisions (algorithm) and discriminates against sites that use the passive voice too much

    Firstly, the passive voice makes your sentence longer and wordier. Here is an excellent example from Yoast:

    1. The passive voice almost always makes your message less clear.

    2. Your message is almost always made less clear by using the passive voice.

    Secondly, using the passive voice makes your sentences more complex and require the audience to use more ‘thinking’ to understand it. Complex sentences mean more thinking which means it’s less likely you’ll get your message across

    So how do I swap to the ‘active’ voice?

    Almost every example of the passive voice has an active voice alternative so it’s simply a case of spending a little bit more time thinking about what you’ve written and re-writing those sentences that are wordy or more complex than they could be.

    When you rewrite your sentence to the active voice, not only will the verb form change, but also the actor and receiver will change places. Here are some examples:

    This blog post was written by me > I wrote this blog post (past simple)

    The website is being optimised by Seven Creative > Seven Creative are optimising the webpage (present simple continuous)

    The page will have been optimised by us > we will have optimised the page (future perfect)

    I could go on but I’m sure you get the gist!

    Are there exceptions?

    Not only is it sometimes just more logical to structure a sentence in the passive voice, but writing is an art, and you may simply prefer the passive voice.

    In other words, don’t avoid the passive voice at all costs. Rather, consider your audience in relation to your sentence and decide if the active voice may be a better alternative. However, to properly optimise your content for SEO purposes, aim for no more than about 10% use of the passive voice. Remember, in most cases, the active voice is easier to understand and that’s ultimately the aim of the game.

    A well search engine optimised website means better ranking and more leads

    Here at Seven Creative we’ve been working on SEO and optimising website for many years. If you’d like a hand with your site, give us a call on 0114 383 0711 or visit our contact section to get in touch

  • Restaurant, bar & hotel marketing – the fast way to get more customers     

    We’re in the midst of the Coronavirus lock-down at the moment but the restrictions on movement will be relaxed soon. Before we know it, pubs, bar, clubs and restaurants will be open again. The problem is, though, will the customers be as fast to start socialising and eating out again? How do we market our pubs, bars, clubs, and hotels? Is this even the right time for restaurant, bar & hotel marketing? 

    Restaurant, bar & hotel marketing – the fast way to get more customers
    Restaurant, bar & hotel marketing – the fast way to get more customers

    The last recession was very tough for nearly all businesses but there were some very interesting lessons learned. The most important one, however, is that you can’t be complacent. The successful business that came out of the recession stronger than ever were the ones that realised they had to ‘up their game.’ They knew that it would take time for things to return to normal so they had to fight for the customers or go bust. Many of the organisations who simply ‘battened down the hatches’ and stopped investing in their business went under. Now is the time to start your restaurant, bar & hotel marketing

    How to get more customers – restaurant, bar & hotel marketing the easy way

    I’ve been in sales & marketing for as long as the internet has existed. Since before Google, Twitter and Facebook existed. Even before smartphones and mobile data. The amazing thing over this time has been the change in customer behaviour. We don’t ‘take a punt’ on a new restaurant anymore. Rather we ‘check it out online’ first. We check the website and read the menus. Look at the photos and explore the virtual tour. If we’re not 100% sure it’s the place for us we hot ‘back’ and go to the next listing on Google. This is why it’s so important to get it right first time

    How to get new customers for bars, restaurants, and hotels

    1 – First of all make sure your website is up to scratch from the visitors perspective. Your customers don’t need much – don’t make it difficult for them to find what they need! On your website, make the following information very prominent; Opening times, your location & parking (with a link to Google Maps), reservation information if available, menus (please not in PDFs!!!), and any specials or happy hour info. This is the most important thing to consider when thinking about your restaurant, bar & hotel marketing

    2 – Make sure you have good quality and accurate photos (please no stock photos!)

    3 – A good quality virtual tour is the number one factor in choosing a restaurant, bar or hotel. If your new potential customers are able to explore by themselves when it’s convenient for them, you’re much more likely to get them to visit in person.

    4 – Next, make sure your website can be found. There is a very nice article on DIY SEO here, however, I’d recommend hiring an expert SEO to optimise your site and build a few links for you whilst they’re at it

    5 – Make the most of what Google has to offer. Get your virtual tour on Google Maps, Google Search, Google Street View, and Google My Business. This is all part of getting a virtual tour done. See this article on integrating your virtual tour into Google

    What next?

    Here is a list of suppliers you may want to get in touch with:

    Web development (click here) – make sure your website is up-to-scratch. Click here for good quality web development

    Virtual tour & photography (click here) – good quality photos and a high-quality HDR Matterport virtual tour are two of the most important things you’ll need. Get a quote for a virtual tour here

    Search engine optimisation (click here) (SEO) – get your site indexing on Google and make sure new customers can find you – Click here to find out more about Search Engine Optimisation

    Google virtual tour integration (click here) – get your photos and virtual tour on Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Search and Google Street View with a Trusted Google Photographer

     

     

     

  • The origins of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

    I’ve been working with websites since before search engine optimisation (SEO) was a ‘thing’. I originally taught myself HTML as a young teenager using a book I found lying about by Carol Vordernman and the rest, as they say, for me at least, is history. I’ve been providing SEO in Sheffield & further afield now for many years. The first of the more sophisticated search engines to start ‘crawling’ the web and using ‘back-links’ to help evaluate a website was BackRub (later Google) back in 1996. It ranked pages using citation notation, meaning any mention of a website on another site would count it as a kind of vote toward the site it pointed to. In other words, basic things like how many links and the quality of those links to a site would improve its ranking and thus the search engine optimisation industry was born.

    Sheffield SEO (Search Engine optimisation)
    Sheffield SEO (Search Engine optimisation)

    It was very easy to manipulate search engines in the early days

    Back in those early halcyon days, the world wide web was not widely understood and search engines were very easy to manipulate. As businesses began to see the potential of the internet, ‘experts’ appeared who promised to get them ‘up the rankings’. It was actually very easy to do using techniques such as keyword stuffing (for example, a hundred instances of a phrase, right at the bottom of a website, in white writing and on a white background or hiding keywords in the source code) and it actually worked! This, in conjunction with very little search engine competition, created a very profitable business for many SEOs. However, this situation meant that a poor quality site could often easily rank better than a good quality sites – and Google certainly didn’t like being manipulated. Google therefore developed & improved their search algorithm to spot ‘keyword stuffed’ sites and the big change came when they released the infamous Penguin update in 2012 – overnight, many poor quality and keyword stuffed websites dropped out of the search results.

    The new Penguin rules were:

    • Show all of your content.
    • Never stuff keywords in your text or in your images’ ‘alt text’.
    • Don’t use lists of keywords to promote your content.

    If you’re interested in a bit the internet history, you click here to read the official Google Webmaster Blog post entitled ‘Another step to reward high-quality sites’ from 24th April 2012

    SEO in 2020

    Roll on to 2020, and although SEO or search engine optimisation is still a thing, it’s actually almost unrecognisable compared to what it was in those early days. Nowadays we need to focus on providing value to the audience. This, in theory anyway, means that the audience will engage with it and the ‘signals’ (such as social shares, time spent on a site, inbound links) will naturally happen. These signals are what Google use to decide where your site should rank.

    Here is a list of good SEO practice from Google’s perspective in 2020:

    • Help Google find your content
    • Tell Google which pages shouldn’t be crawled
    • Help Google (and users) understand your content
    • Manage your appearance in Google Search results
    • Organise your site hierarchy
    • Optimise your content
    • Optimise your images
    • Make your site mobile-friendly
    • ‘Promote your website’
    • Analyse your search performance and user behaviour

    I’m not going to go into detail here about exactly what these ‘guidelines’ mean as each one warrants its own 1000 word article, however, the rules basically mean that you (as a site owner) and Google (as a search engine) need to meet in the middle. Google does as much as it can to ‘understand’ your site and you need to do as much as you can to help Google ‘understood’ your site.

    However, it all becomes a lot easier to understand when you consider the following facts:

    • Google is first and foremost an advertising agency
    • In order to remain as profitable as possible, Google need to provide the best value to it’s customers (the advertisers) by providing the biggest and most relevant audience (allowing more targeted ads which improves the ROI)
    • Google’s value therefore is in the audience it provides for its advertisers
    • The audience will naturally gravitate to the best search engine experience which includes:
      • High quality
      • Relevant
      • Fast
      • Trustworthy
      • Choice

    Therefore, the better your experience, the more likely you are to use their services.

    The only company who would be potentially able to do this better that Google is Facebook. However, the reason Facebook currently can’t compete is:

    • We don’t trust them anymore. The Cambridge Analytica scandal had a lot to do with this. Their app is also far too intrusive. For example, if you have a recent Android phone, have you tried removing or even disabling the Facebook app that comes pre-installed?
    • Their results aren’t always relevant or high-quality. The content is user-generated or created by advertisers so there often simply isn’t enough choice, quality or relevance

    More importantly than that, though, is that many of us can live quite happily without Facebook but how many of us can cope without a search engine?

    Improve your search engine rankings

    Google is a fact of life but your website languishing on page 4 isn’t. You’ve seen that good search engine optimsation is no longer ‘smoke and mirrors’, rather it’s a combination of providing quality to your audience and communicating effectively with Google. Time-consuming maybe but certainly not rocket-science (or should that be ‘rocket-surgery’?) If you’d like to know where your site can be improved, give us a call on 0114 383 0711   

     

  • Extend the registration period of your domain name for better SEO

    SEO boost - extend the renewal period of your domain name
    For an SEO boost – extend the renewal period of your domain name

    The website domain name is often overlooked in SEO terms as people focus on inbound links and optimised web copy, however, your domain name – or in this instance the information relating to it – is one of the important criteria used by Google when evaluating your website.

    We all know that new domain registrations are likely to be sand-boxed as Google prefers to err on the side of caution when it comes to a potential pop-up website, however, once your site is established and your domain name is at least a good few months old, Google will begin its ongoing assessment of your website including the information relating to the domain and use it to decide how important your site it.

    Google really ‘likes’ older domain names with long registration periods to go. You can now commonly register the most popular domain names for up-to 10 years. Not only will you save money and not have the hassle of trying to remember when it’s due for renewal, you’ll have the extra SEO benefit of indexing better within the search results!

    If you’re still unsure about why this is important, think about it like this. If I were of a nefarious persuasion with wicked SEO skills, I could very easily set up an eCommerce website, optimise it to get it to the top of the search results and start taking money off people. This is very easy to do and there were, for example, some very high profile cases of this happening, for example, during the most recent Wimbledon tennis tournament.

    This type of site has to be quick – people are going to start complaining pretty quickly when they don’t get what they’ve bought so the site isn’t going to be up for that long when the authorities find out. Therefore, if Google sees a new website with a recently registered domain name and a short registration period, alarm bells will go off! This is why a pre-emptive suppression within the search engine results is the simplest solution to this potential problem. The legitimate sites will register their domains for longer and they’ll still be up and running in a few months. It’s a bit like a website probationary period.

    In summary, if you want your site to be taken seriously by Google and indexed properly, extend the registration period of your domain name.

    If you need help with your domain renewal period, or anything else relating to SEO or search engine optimisation, call us here at Seven Creative on 0114 235 2002 or see the other contact options 

  • Improve Your Website’s Search Engine Rankings with These 5 SEO Tips

    As a business owner, you’re no doubt bombarded by spammy emails offering you SEO services from companies that promise they can get your website on the first page of Google. As a reputable Sheffield SEO company we know that no-one can really guarantee these results with 100% certainty. But there are certain things that you can do to help your website rank highly in the search engines, therefore increasing traffic to your website. 

    Search Engine Optimisation (SEO services) from Seven Creative
    Search Engine Optimisation (SEO services) from Seven Creative

    SEO is an abbreviation of search engine optimisation. This is the process of improving the ranking of a website in the results pages of a search engine for certain keywords in order to get more organic traffic to the site. When carried out properly, search engine optimisation provides valuable results that make a significant improvement to the amount of traffic your website receives. With that in mind, here are our top 5 SEO tips that will help to improve the ranking of your website in the search engines.

    1. Write Interesting, Engaging Content

    Interesting, engaging content has never been more important for SEO on your website or blog. Great content helps to establish you as a thought leader in your industry, and an expert in your field. Search engines prefer fresh, original content that engages users, and writing relevant content that users find interesting will not only engage users, but also build your credibility. And as you become a trusted resource for information, users will be more likely to buy your services.

    2. Share your Content on Social Media

    Another great way to boost your SEO efforts is to share your content on social media. The more your content is shared, the more links and traffic it will receive. Therefore, the more popular and relevant it seems to Google. Use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest to promote your content, and get it shared by other users. Do your best to promote your content on relevant forums, blogs and newsletters too.

    3. Optimise Meta Data and Tags

    Optimising your titles, meta-tags, meta-descriptions and images for SEO is a must for on-page optimisation. Title tags are used on search engine results pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given web page, and are important for both SEO and social sharing. Titles should be a concise and accurate description of a page’s content; getting it right is really important for both the user experience and search engine optimisation. Also, remember to use ‘Alt text’ for images, because without them, your images won’t be read by search engines, meaning that they’ll have no SEO value whatsoever.

    4. Optimise Content with Keywords

    When creating content, focus on writing great content for human readers that includes keywords and phrases to help search engines find it. But make sure that you use these keywords naturally; cramming them in where they don’t make sense or don’t read comfortably could be detrimental to your site.

    5. Use Analytics to Monitor Performance

    After all this hard work, you want to know whether or not your SEO efforts are working, right? The best way to keep track of your success is to use a tracking tool such as Google analytics to monitor the traffic coming to your website. This will enable you to pinpoint the keywords that are driving traffic, identify the pages that have had the highest numbers of visitors, and figure out which pages your customers are converting on. By keeping your eye on your analytics, you can make regular tweaks and changes to optimise your results.

    Sheffield SEO Company and Marketing Agency

    Although carrying out successful search engine optimisation takes effort, it can bring real traffic to your website. Taking these steps will certainly help you on the way to increasing the amount of web introduced business you generate. If you need some help, or would simply like to chat to an expert, Seven Creative can help. Give us a call on 0114 383 0711 or email us at info@sevencreative.co.uk to find out how we can help to grow your business with quality SEO services in Sheffield.

  • Improve Your Website SEO with These 5 Helpful Tips

    Adapting to SEO trends remains a constant challenge. Yet it needn’t be something that causes frustration. By sticking to clear, concise strategy you can look forward to improved web rankings – and ultimately more genuine traffic to your site.

    You can minimise the impact of algorithm changes by taking care to publish optimised, organic, useful content on your site. Not only will this always be well-received by Google; it will also retain customers visiting your site for longer (also great for SEO).

    Whether you’re looking for one-off SEO site work, or ongoing content production, you need to make sure that you pick the right company to carry out the work for you. As Sheffield SEO experts, Seven Creative are well-placed to help:

    Have a Clear Idea of Your Goals

    For your SEO campaign, make sure that you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve before you start. If you work within a competitive trade, for example, you’ll be more likely to see page 1 results by targeting one of your niche services. Similarly, adding a geographical focus to your activity can also help you maximise the benefits of SEO.

    You Must See SEO as a Long-Term Marketing Strategy

    It’s essential that you remain patient with this digital marketing strategy. For monthly campaigns in particular, it needs to be something that you invest in for the long term. A re-work of your website can improve your positions fairly quickly depending on how competitive your keywords are, but if you then don’t continue to add regular, organic content -whilst your competitors do – you’ll soon find yourself sliding back down the SERP’s.

    Detailed Monthly Reports Are a Must

    SEO needn’t be all smoke and mirrors. If you’ve had a bad experience with paid services previously, that will only be heightened. A company that provides you with detailed, transparent, monthly reports can be worth their weight in gold; and you’d be wise to choose such a firm to carry out any SEO work that you need.

    Regular Blogging is Vital

    Don’t underestimate the importance of business blogging, which can be great for your brand image. When optimised correctly, this content is perhaps the most important factor with relation to how the Google Algorithm deciphers your website.

    Engaging news articles, case studies and blog articles are the best way to show the search engines that you have something of value to offer on your site, so this really is an opportunity not to be missed.

    Make Sure New Content is Optimised

    Whenever it comes to adding new content to your site, make sure that it’s optimised for the search engines. If you’ve hired an SEO company for one-off site work but now want to try it yourself, it’s essential to maintain good practices such as adding descriptions and alternative title text to any new images you add to your site.

    SEO Experts in Sheffield

    Maintaining practices such as the ones mentioned here will stand you in good stead for your SEO campaign. To implement the strategy, it’s well worth hiring professionals Seven Creative, who are here to help.

    Their SEO experts in Sheffield can provide you with engaging web copy; that will stand the test of Google updates to fire you up the rankings – and then keep you there. You can get in touch with them today on 0114 383 0711 to find out more.

  • Ever wondered if SEO will work for your business?

    Sheffield SEO
    Sheffield SEO

    One of our fastest expanding services we provide at Seven Creative, here in Sheffield, is SEO, and there is one thing that nearly all our new SEO enquiries have in common – they’re nervous about the idea of embarking on an SEO campaign!

    So, why is this? Firstly, not many people truly understand what SEO actually is. To me, it’s simply about making sure a site is of high quality meaning that it can effectively communicate with Google about its subject and purpose (which is a win-win for everyone). It’s certainly not about creating a million inbound links from poor quality sites to manipulate the search results! Secondly, the results seem to intangible. This was something we noticed early on so we made sure that an activity report was available to everyone – regardless of their budget – on a monthly basis. Thirdly, many people have been ripped off in the past. Even now, knowing what we know about how Google evaluates websites, poor quality companies with unethical sales people are still conning trusting people out of their cash by providing poor quality SEO that somewhere between little and no effect to how a site indexes – in fact, poor quality SEO will often have a negative effect on rankings; so don’t underestimate Google’s increasing ability to spot a cheap link!

    It’s perfectly understandable why Google doesn’t like the current SEO industry – Google wants to be the one evaluating websites; historically, SEO has been about manipulating results to make a site appear more relevant and important that it would normally appear – so everything the search giant is doing in terms of regularly updating its algorithm is pushing site owners towards best practice and high quality content; and away from link building.

    So, to refer back to the initial question, it depends. Of course I would say you should call us but if you don’t here are my top tips to make sure you pick a good company:

    • Avoid companies that outsource – it’s probably a sign that it’s going to be poor quality SEO
    • Ask to see examples of reports – this won’t give you an idea of the results you’re likely to achieve but you’ll be able to see the way those results are presented.
    • Speak to their current customers – happy customers are happy to recommend.
    • Avoid pay-on-results agreements – this incentives the SEO company to provide poor quality SEO for an immediate boost that wears of very quickly when you stop paying.
    • Go local – we all know how nice knowing that the person you’re relying on is available when you need them!

    For more information about Sheffield SEO services, call Seven Creative on 0114 383 0711 or click here for more contact options