Complex, but vital
SEO can be an intimidating area of marketing – it is both wide ranging and ever changing. Google alone has a list of over 200 factors that have a direct impact on a web page’s search engine rankings – and these factors are constantly shifting.
Even SEO experts will tell you that it can be like hitting a moving target, as the goalposts are shifting all the time. So it’s little wonder that many of the firms who approach have don’t really know where to start!
We tell our clients to think of it like this – at its most basic, SEO is all about making your website as easy as possible to use for your clients. The easier it is for them to navigate around your website and find the information they’re looking for, the better your chances of ranking higher in the search results. And, as we’ll show you, it’s fast becoming a non-negotiable part of your business’s marketing strategy.
The dominance of search engines
Why is SEO important?
Think about the last time you wanted to make a purchase. It’s highly likely that a search engine was involved somewhere along the way in your decision-making and purchasing processes. You may have searched for a restaurant with good reviews near you, researched the best laptops or smartphones at a certain price, or searched for a local conveyancing firm to help you with your upcoming house move.
The below statistics further demonstrate the dominance of search engines in the consideration and decision-making stages of the customer journey:
- 53% of consumers use search engines to investigate products before they buy
- 63% of all shopping begins online
- 75% of people will never go past Google’s first page of results
- 76% of people who search for a local business on their phone visit a related business within 24 hours
- SEO drives 1000% more traffic than organic social media
- Leads from search engines have a 14.6% conversion rate, compared with 1.7% for leads from outbound methods such as cold calling and direct mail.
The benefits of hiring external specialists
Why might you decide to contact a specialist SEO marketing agency
If your firm has historically secured new clients via word of mouth or other traditional marketing methods, you might question the need to invest in SEO.
While traditional marketing remains a valid way to secure leads for your business, you could be missing out on a ready-made audience who are searching for the exact services you provide and a marketing method with a conversion rate of nearly 15%.
We find that the clients who get in touch with us about SEO share several common problems:
- Their website isn’t being found online
- They’ve experienced an unexplained drop in website traffic or enquiries
- They’re just starting up and would like advice on how to quickly boost their organic traffic
- They don’t have the time or expertise to produce SEO-optimised content in-house.
If this sounds like you, then engaging a professional SEO company to support you could be highly beneficial for your business. We have the time, resources and expertise you may lack in-house to deliver the results your business is looking for.
Given that SEO can take anywhere between six and 18 months to produce the outcomes you are looking for, utilising an SEO agency will increase your chances of achieving these sooner than you could on your own. We can take care of all the tedious behind-the-scenes work and ongoing maintenance, so that you can continue to focus on what you do best.
What we do
Affordable SEO services for small businesses
TOMD’s SEO consultants help businesses like yours improve their search engine results, drive organic traffic to their website and boost their online presence. SEO is broadly split into two categories: on-page and off-page SEO (the latter is also known as technical SEO). When we first start working with a client, we follow a 4 step process that delivers both short and long-term benefits.
When we first start working with you, we’ll start by pulling off a report that tells us exactly how your website is performing now. This will inform us of any technical issues that may be impacting your website’s performance, as well as where your pages currently sit in the search rankings and the keywords you are ranking for. This will help us establish a baseline against which to measure all future performance.
Our next step will be to share the results of our SEO audit and to find out more about what you hope to get out of your SEO strategy. We’ll ask you what areas of your business you would most like to promote and which specific pages you would like to focus on. We’ll also want to know more about your ideal website visitor and what you want them to know about your business.
For example, you may be a financial services firm who would like to attract more prospective clients looking for wealth management and investment services. Particularly, you might be looking for clients who are looking to pass on their wealth to younger generations in the most tax-efficient manner possible. Based on this, we might recommend optimisations to your existing wealth management and investment services pages, as well as a series of blogs targeting competitive keywords such as ‘intergenerational wealth’, ‘wealth transfer’ and ‘family wealth management’.
We’ll then combine the results of the SEO audit with the information you have provided to devise an ongoing SEO strategy to achieve your marketing goals. This might include:
- Undertaking keyword research to select competitive keywords to rank for
- Optimising the existing content of your chosen pages
- Writing and uploading new, SEO-optimised content on a regular basis
- Resolving technical issues such as missing meta content and alt attributes, fixing site speed issues, fixing broken internal and external links, and resolving issues with the site’s structure and navigation
- Link building (i.e., backlinks from other websites to your own) to demonstrate your website’s trustworthiness and authoritativeness.
Due to the long-term and ongoing nature of SEO, we find that clients prefer to engage us on a monthly retainer basis, with the service level agreement depending on their business’s goals and budget.
As time goes by, we will track and provide regular reports on your SEO performance according to the key metrics we have selected. Some of the most common key performance indicators (KPIs) for SEO include:
- Keyword rankings
- Bounce rate
- Time spent on page
- Organic traffic
- Backlink growth
- Return on investment.
Let’s talk
Let’s have a chat
Whether you would like to get started with SEO but don’t quite know where to begin, or you’re an SEO veteran who requires a little extra support with certain aspects of your SEO strategy, we’d be delighted to help.
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