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How We Achieved a 600%+ Improvement... In Less Than 3 Months... With ZERO Backlinks, Just Content Distribution.

We’ll come back to this later and do a much more detailed explanation, but for now, as you can see in the Google chart above, this site achieved a >600% improvement in under 3 months.

With no backlinks, no funny business, just using content distribution.

What is content distribution? We’ll come onto that later…

For now, looking at the graph (which goes back to November 2020), you can see 3 arrows, these represent:

1. The start date of our work, the 14th January 2022.
2. The dip corresponds with the client switching his hosting to GoDaddy managed WordPress, and subsequently Google being unable to crawl the site and dropping pages. We switched the nameservers through Cloudflare, and it fixed the problem right away.
3. The site performance today – and it’s still climbing higher and higher.

This improvement in site performance (it’s showing impressions in the graph) has led to a 429% increase in visitor numbers, and a rapid, and continuing increase in average rank position across ALL pages.

With our specific “ranking method” (all above board and white-hat), some of the targeted pages have gone from the bottom of page 2, to 4th on page 1, in less than a fortnight.

All with nothing more than content distribution and smart thinking.

What Is Content Distribution?

Content distribution is a smart method of researching important topics and phrases, then creating pages to cover all of those topics, in smart clusters.

Lots of pages, added as quickly as possible, in clusters of topics that are tightly grouped around a main thought or idea or – well, topic, but with the pages meeting strict quality guidelines, and specific layout requirements.

In the case above we’ve only added 150 pages out of the 1000+ we plan to add.

Can you imagine the performance of that site when the rest of the pages go live and have aged?

Because one thing you need to realise is that pages need up to 12 months, and in some niches 18 months to season and age to Googles liking.

If this site looks like this in less than 3 months, can you even imagine where they will be in 18 months?

All with nothing more than smart content, in smart clusters, and ZERO backlinks.

We’ll come back to this again and update and expand on what we’re doing, but for now you might like to read some of our SEO articles that explain some of the principles of how SEO really works, how you can increase website traffic using simple “no SEO” methods, and how to increase sales on your website (important for creating pages using the content distribution method).

That’s it for now, be sure to check back to see how this site is doing, and to learn more of our no-SEO secrets used on this case study.

Okay so this is part 2 of the last topic “why isn’t anyone ordering from my website?”

Originally it was going to be one article, but once the first part had got to 3000 words and this one was going to be even longer, it became pretty clear that we needed to split it up!

The main reason this section is going to be long is that we want to give you some really specific examples of how you can increase sales from your website, or even your real-world bricks and mortar business.

The crazy thing is that in a way it’s the same issue for both online and offline businesses, but in another way it’s totally different!

I know that sounds completely nuts, so let me start by going through some really basic and yet not so basic (there I go again) sales type stuff for online and offline sales.

A Major Problem With Selling Online

One of the main issues with selling online is so obvious that it’s almost too obvious for most people to even realise that it exists.

This is that people get this weird idea in their heads that all they need to do is put up a website, any old website, whether it costs £50 or £5000 and somehow it will start generating sales like some kind of virtual cash machine.

But why would that happen, why would it be true?

There seems to be a kind of malaise, a laziness that has appeared over time where people think a website is a website, it’s this sales generating thing, no matter how much effort or thought is put into it, it’s a website and websites make money.

Kind of like a salesperson is a salesperson, so pay them £1 per day or £1000 per day and you’ll get the same result.

Well clearly you won’t, if you have a really capable salesperson who can generate huge sums of money for you, then you’d want to keep them and pay them well to keep the money coming in.

Another way of looking at it is to say a car is a car – why would I pay you £80,000 for that car when the guy down the road is selling one for £50?

Well, this is a brand new Rolls Royce and it’s an incredible deal, the one down the road is 30 years old, is mainly rust and filler, and has no engine.

You got a cheap car, but it doesn’t do anything and doesn’t function as a car. You got a cheap website, but it doesn’t do anything and doesn’t function as a website.

If you realise that there are literally hundreds of millions of websites out there, then first of all you need to get people to find you, then to convince them that you are the company to deal with, but if your website is a half-hearted, cheap thing thrown up to look like all the others, what does that say to anyone who manages to find you?

Assuming they find you in the first place.

You need to first convince Google to show people your website, then convince the people who find you to deal with you, and you’re not going to do that if you put in no effort.

It would be the equivalent of putting an ad in the newspaper simply saying, “Jones Brothers” (or whatever you’re called) and expecting that to explain what you do, how you do it, how you can solve people’s problems and expect them to give you money.

How could that possibly work?

Another Major problem With Selling Online

On top of the issue of getting yourself in front of the right people with the right website is giving people the right content.

For example, imagine you have a brick-and-mortar shop selling electronic cigarettes.

You sit in your shop all day long and anyone who comes through the door you can answer their questions, whether they’re a beginner or they’re looking for the latest ultra-new modified vape machine, you can put their mind at rest and lead them to a sale.

They might have 1001 different possible questions or worries, but you, as an expert face to face with them, can answer their queries and turn them into a customer.

But on a website every single person lands on the same page and reads the same block of text.

How can that single block of text answer every conceivable question, put every mind at rest and turn anyone into a customer?

It can’t, and yet people seem to have the idea that if you have a website, it somehow gets rid of the need to communicate with people and in some strange way replaces the need for human interactions.

You need to find a way to get the visitor to take some form of action, and whether they will take some form of action comes down not to showing them a list of products or talking about yourself, but by providing them with compelling content that tells them you have the answer to their problem.

Let’s take a look at an example of how good copy and the right approach can lead to big results.

How do I get more sales on my website?

I’ve mentioned newspapers a couple of times, and there’s a reason for that.

Before the internet and websites the main way a business could advertise was through newspaper ads.

Some of the most successful advertising men like David Ogilvy would produce ads that read like a news story, using carefully selected images and well-crafted words that didn’t just explain the product but sold the “dream” that the product could give to its owner.

One very famous story is from an advertising expert called Claude Hopkins and the work he did for Schlitz beer.

Back in the day all beer manufacturers tried to sell their beer by promoting the idea that their beer was “pure” and was therefore good for you.

All beer producers advertised their beer as “pure” and over time the ads got bigger and bigger, sometimes taking up a whole page with most of the page taken up with the word “pure”.

The problem was that no one really understood what pure meant, and if everyone is saying their beer is pure then how do you choose one over the other?

Claude Hopkins was asked by Schlitz to help them increase sales, they were languishing way down the league table of beer sellers and just couldn’t increase their sales.

They showed him around the plant, from the 1400 ft bore holes they extracted the water from, the master yeast cell that has been developed over years of experiments, the specific hops and barley they used from one particular genus, the pine chips they filtered the beer though, the cold filtering system and a whole host of other laborious processes.

Hopkins was blown away, he had (like everyone else) no idea that so much went into making a bottle of beer, and this clearly demonstrated what “pure” actually meant.

He simply asked them “Why don’t you just tell people how you make your beer?”

“Everyone produces beer like this” they replied.

But no one had bothered to tell the consumer. So they set up an ad campaign to do exactly that and within a few months Schlitz was one of the top selling brands in the country.

This might seem like it wouldn’t work today, but Apple recently did a very similar thing with a new product they brought out.

With regards to your website think about how you present the product or service that you sell, do you simply say “we do X, Y, Z” like everyone else, or do you explain in great detail how you give your customer the best possible product or service?

This is also known in marketing as “length implies strength” which basically means the more you have to say about your product or service, the more implied value it has.

While your competitors are just saying “we do X” you are saying how you do “X”, the care and attention to detail, the processes you go through and all the rest of the things you do to provide it.

Which do you suppose sounds more appealing to the potential client?

How to increase sales on an Ecommerce website (How to increase online sales fast)

This is an important part of the psychology of buying, and I’ve included it here to show you how subtle the methods can be when you’re wondering how to get sales on your website.

If you need help then please reach out to us through our contact form.

This is based on a study done by the very impressive Dan Ariely, a Professor at MIT in the USA who specialises in the behaviour of people, and why they behave in those ways, usually unbeknown to themselves even.

He has an excellent book out called “Predictably Irrational” that I highly recommend you read, and you can also find some of his experiments on YouTube.

Be careful if you decide to try out any of the psychological methods he uses, if you don’t understand what you’re doing and get it wrong then you could harm your sales.

This is a demonstration of how people think they are making an informed, rational choice, but shows clearly how that choice is manipulated simply by the offer being changed slightly.

It’s from The Economist magazine and is kind of back to front because it starts with 3 options which struck Prof Ariely as a bit unusual, so he contacted them to try and work with them to run a real-life experiment.

Sadly, they simply reduced the options to 2, and so he ran his own experiment with his students instead, the video is below (apologies for the quality of it, but it’s the content that is important).

If you liked that video there’s a longer version below with some equally interesting examples of how our decision making changes depending on the choices we are presented with.

On your Ecommerce website you might have 2 options for pricing, so you can imagine if you went from 2 to 3 using this method, or if you have 3 options you could experiment with changing the pricing.

The upshot from this video in terms of sales is this:

For every 1000 subscribers that ad brought in with 3 options vs 2 options:

When the 2 options were available the total revenue per 1000 subscribers would be $80,120.

With 3 options the total revenue per 1000 subscribers was $114,440.

An increase of $34,320 or 42.84%!

Would you have ever imagined that something as simple as changing the pricing, or adding in an option that no one will want could help people to buy a more expensive option and increase your sales?

Note that this doesn’t require more visitors, or more advertising, it’s taking the same number of orders that you already get and potentially increasing your revenue by almost 50%.

We have actually done this with clients, and through experimenting with different prices and options increased sales tremendously.

One client had a digital product that they were selling around £1500 of per month. By getting this right we took their sales to almost £6500 per month for the self same product – just by changing the offer and pricing slightly!

It really can be that powerful!

More Examples From Dan Ariely

SEO Experts are based on the West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire border we work with businesses in Bradford, Leeds, Keighley, Skipton, Harrogate, Ilkley, Halifax, and Huddersfield, as well as nationwide.

Converting a Very Old HTML Website into a Mobile Friendly WordPress Site (That Looks Exactly Like the Old Site!)

This was a web design for Assured Stairlifts (assuredstairlifts.co.uk), a long established Keighley based company that specialises in refurbishing and installing stairlifts.

Their website had been built many, many years ago (c.2010), and while they were happy with the look of the site, the branding, etc, the site wasn’t performing well on mobile devices like phones or tablets.

This is often an issue with older HTML sites, they can’t render properly and are wider than the screen, in some cases (like this one) the visitor can neither “pinch” the screen to make the site smaller (or if they can the text becomes so small it’s impossible to read it), and also it’s not possible to scroll across to see the content that is being cut out.

Since the vast majority of traffic to the site was via mobiles, this was having a significant impact on visitor interaction and customer conversions, and also making it impractical to use Google Ads to drive traffic – there’s no point paying to get people to your site if they leave because the site is unusable – it’s just throwing money away.

So their objective was to keep the site looking as near to how it already did, but to make it mobile friendly, and then to set up an Ad campaign with Google.

In the end the easiest way to achieve this objective was to completely rebuild the site from the ground up using WordPress and Elementor as the theme builder, to create a completely bespoke WordPress theme, that looked as close to the original as possible.

We did add in a few conversion optimisation changes, like more prominent calls to action to encourage visitor engagement, and also some SEO adjustments such as rewriting some areas of the site, and increasing the interlinking between pages and sections.

We also made sure that the old “{dot}html” pages were redirected to the new, cleaner WordPress URL’s so that existing rankings wouldn’t be affected, and the site now ranks on page 1 of Google for many high value search terms like “refurbished stairlifts”

We then set up a Google Ads campaign to deliver laser focused traffic to specific pages.

Designed to keep the brand identitiy so returning visitors aren't confused by a different looking website, and optimised for maximum sales and search engine rankings.

Contact us today to find out how we can help you (click here)

WordPress E-commerce Website Rebuilt (to look exactly the same – again!)

This job was a website design for a Keighley company.

Ex-Pressed Steel Panels are a great West/North Yorkshire company based near Cowling, which is close to Keighley and Skipton.

They produce replacement panels for a range of classic cars like (if you’re old enough to remember) the Ford Zephyr or the Triumph among many others.

The original website was built a few years ago using WordPress, and looks great, but the site was only a few weeks old when there started to be a few problems of things not functioning properly.

Despite being built by a “full service digital agency” the person who had built the site had left, and no one there could fix the issues, meaning the site software and plugins couldn’t be updated (every time they tried the site broke), which then leaves you open to all kinds of security vulnerabilities.

Having tried another web designer who couldn’t fix the issues SEO Experts stepped in to help get the site back up and running, but it was very much a case of having to keep patching and fixing different problems as they arose.

Eventually Expressed Steel Panels decided they wanted to fix it all once and for all, and so we rebuilt the entire site (and it’s a very big site with lots of data and products), still using WordPress, but using Elementor Pro as the platform to create the theme.

Using the same fonts, the same images, and recreating the same layout, all of the problematic areas of the site were fixed, un-necessary plugins removed, and additional extras added.

It’s really important if you use WordPress to make sure you follow good standard practicies to avoid conflicts, issues, and broken features and functions on your website.

Elementor is a great help in easily and intuitively being able to create a site just how you want it to look.

Recreating the site to look exactly as it did previously, but without the constant worry of things breaking or not being able to update plugins

Contact us today to find out how we can help you (click here)

This was going to be a single helpful guide to answer one of the most common questions we hear of “why is no one ordering from my website?” and then some solutions to the flip side of that question “How do I get more sales on my website?”

However it ended up being such a long article that we’ve split this into 2 sections.

This is the first part addressing why people don’t buy products from a website, and the second part (here) gives you some ways that you can increase your websites sales.

Remember though that the reasons may vary depending on your products, niche, industry, website copy, pricing, and a hundred other things (we’re only scratching the surface of possibilities here in a as general a way as possible to help as many website owners as possible).

If you’d like some help and specific advice then please feel free to contact us – we’re here to help you.

Why am I not getting sales on my website?

There are a multitude of reasons why a website might perform poorly in terms of converting visitors into customers, and as mentioned previously each case is different, and each is probably due to a variety of issues.

The usual (very old school) sales advice you’ll get will be things like “sell benefits, not features,” “use influence to drive value,” “sell yourself before the product,” “build interest and desire with features and benefits,” etc – what does that stuff even mean?

It’s 3^rd rate nonsense from a 4^th rate sales training course that’s decades out of date, if it ever worked online to begin with!

Here are some very real problems that will stop people from buying from a website (we’ll explore each in more depth later):

1. Your website design is the problem
2. Your website copy is the problem
3. Your website doesn’t explain how your product or service can help the visitor
4. Your product or service doesn’t solve the problem of the visitor
5. The pricing / options are not clear

Lets go through these one by one.

1) Your website design is the problem

This is one of the most common issues that we see over and over again, and it’s something that business and website owners seem to find very hard to identify.

The issue is that as website platforms like WordPress have become more advanced, it’s become easier and easier to create complex looking “pretty” websites that look “professional,” and the web designers need less and less skill to create them.

In essence what happens is a client goes to a “web designer” wanting a website.

The “web designer” looks for an off the shelf design that they think looks “professional” and fits the industry of the client.

These websites have pre-defined areas for images, sliding galleries, twitter feeds, blocks of content, icons, etc.

The “web designer” simply installs it and then jams any old content into all of the areas and presto-magico you have a “professional” looking website to promote your business.

But what does “professional looking” mean?

The problem is that there has been no thought go into the visitor experience, most importantly of all what the visitor wants or needs, the sole emphasis is on building a website that the client will think “looks good” as though that will also impress the visitor and convince them to buy.

If you can be impartial, go and take a long hard look at your website and try and see it through the eyes of your ideal customer.

Think about what they want or need, and how your website presents the solution to their problems to them. Look at each element on your home page, the big slider, the wording, the twitter feed, etc, and ask yourself…

…what is the purpose of this slider – why is it there, how does it help the visitor, and is it likely to make them want to contact me or buy from me?

Why is there a twitter feed there – is the visitor interested in my tweets, do my tweets solve their problems, is it actually there for a specific, definable reason?

If I removed that twitter feed, would it result in a drop in business? If the answer is no – then why is it there?

Every item, every word, every image on your website should be there for a reason – not for decoration, not to stoke your ego, not to “look professional” – if it does not directly lead to an increase in visitor satisfaction and sales, then it should not be there, it is meaningless fluff that is causing harm rather than delivering any kind of benefit to you or the visitor.

This is why a lot of websites fail, they miss the entire point of the website being there in the first place – it is not there for you to tell the visitor all about you and your philosophies or qualifications or to impress them with how “professional” you look, it is there for the visitor, so you can explain to them exactly how you will solve their problems for them.

In order to do that you need to understand who your customers are, what their problems are, how those problems affect them, why they want those problems solved, and then build the site to address your customer’s needs.

You fit yourself and your website around them, not expect them to fit themselves around your ego and “professional, pretty looking” website. This is the basics of Conversion Rate Optimisation, and it’s really, REALLY important (even more important than SEO!)

2) Your website copy is the problem

Getting your message across in writing is a real skill and it’s one that most people really struggle with. If you get it wrong, you’ll sell nothing, if you get it right it can literally make you Millions.

This is why copywriters can charge Thousands of Pounds for writing a single sales page.

The vast majority of website owners haven’t got the first clue about writing copy that will encourage sales, and this is why the vast majority of websites fail utterly to generate the sales that they should.

We’ll look at this in more depth with a specific example in part 2, but to give you a couple of really quick and easy things to think about that will clarify this thought for you…

…As indicated in the first point above, most website designers simply look at what other websites look like, find a design that “looks about right” and then build a site based on looks and perception than thinking about how they can generate sales.

Amazingly this copycat kind of approach has resulted in websites today that are still presenting themselves in the same way the original sites were 30 years ago.

Back when the internet was first taking off there was no business being conducted online, there wasn’t even a payment processor available.

The only people who were creating websites were people like – well us – web geeks!

The only reason our websites existed was to show off our “design skills” and since the website had no real reason to exist the usual first thing you saw was “Welcome To My Website.”

This is known as the “above the fold” content. It comes from the newspaper industry where you see newspapers folded up and in those plastic boxes on petrol station forecourts, etc.

The headline – the important message – is above the literal fold in the paper.

That headline has to get your attention, so you pick it up and buy it. That’s why newspaper headlines are scandalous, scary, salacious, attention grabbing – if they can’t get your attention in a second you won’t buy it.

They never say, “Welcome to The Daily Mail”. They Say, “Shock Horror Scandalous Thing That You Need to Read RIGHT NOW!”

On a website the “above the fold” content is what you can see immediately on the page, before you have to scroll.

The reality is that many people (i.e. the vast majority) who land on a website will not bother to scroll down if they don’t see what they are looking for right away, and for this reason you HAVE to get your main message “above the fold”.

But website owners just don’t understand this lesson.

Let’s say you’ve been for a night out and you come home, you walk into your house and there’s water pouring through the kitchen ceiling.

You whip out your phone and do a search for “emergency plumbers in Keighley” (or Skipton, Leeds, wherever) and Google gives you a list of emergency plumbers.

You select one of the results and can clearly see the results tell you that you’re going to ABC Plumbers in Keighley.

The web page opens, and you are presented with:

Welcome to ABC Plumbers.

At ABC plumbers we have 20 years of experience of blah, blah, blah, we have these qualifications, we think this, we believe that our philosophy is X, Y, Z, yada, yada, yada.

If the visitor has to read about you, you, then you some more, then try and find the right thing to click to find if you can fix their problem, how much chance do you think you have of them becoming a customer?

Or will they simply leave and go to the next result? I’ll tell you; they won’t spend 5 minutes reading all about you to try and find out if you can fix their problem.

If they landed on that web page and they saw:

Burst Water Pipe or Other Plumbing Emergency?

We’re available 24/7, we’ll be there in 30 minutes and have you fixed in a jiffy. No call out fee, call now.

They won’t need to click anywhere else on your site or do any more reading, they’ll be calling you right there and then.

This is a very blatant example and it’s not always so obvious how you can get your point across, but the lesson is the same, you need to tell your potential client how you will fix their problem, if you cannot do that then they will not become your client.

On top of this is one of the other major issues with most websites, which is that the business feels like they have to talk like some kind of robotic corporate automaton.

I can’t quite work out why this is, I think it partly comes down again to the “sounding professional” mantra, that if I don’t talk like a corporation talking at some other business entity then I won’t be taken seriously.

But there is no such entity as a corporation or business, the words are being read by a person, a human being who is employed by a business or corporate structure, and the decision will be made by a person who feels a human connection that resonates with them.

So, you need to write your words as though you are talking to a person in the real world.

The corporate brochure way of speaking is so utterly boring and meaningless, it’s full of buzz words and nonsense phrases that sound good but mean nothing, they convey no meaning or value, it is “bullshit bingo” – if I can jam in enough buzz words, I’ll sound like a high value executive!

No, you will sound like a cross between a fool and the most boring person on earth and on top of that you’ll sell nothing at all.

You can find these kinds of meaningless words on many websites, here are a few – see if you can even guess what industry they belong to:

“Our adaptability, skill, and experience are proven by our past results. We are ideally suited to handle any project.”

“Our completed projects stand as proof of the quality of our work; the fact that most of our clients retain enduring relationships with us is further proof that not only our work is excellent, but also that our concern for our clients is of paramount importance.”

These are meaningless platitudes that are meant to sound good, but that actually say nothing.

In fact, they are (as highlighted in the first point above) the generic text of an “off the shelf” website design, and these words appear on a number of websites across different industries in different countries.

The “web designer” couldn’t even be bothered to change the words to reflect the company the website represents.

So, Google aside and how they view dozens of websites all saying the same generic, meaningless things about themselves – how is this meaningless nonsense supposed to help your visitors decide to pay you money when you’re actually – saying nothing at all about how you will fix their problems?

If you’re following this path of “a website is a website” and as long as you have a website the sales should follow, but you’re not even considering the needs of your customers or putting in any effort, then what do you expect?

It’s kind of like saying a car is a car – why should I pay you £100K for this car when I can buy that car for £50? Well, the first is a brand new Bentley and that’s a great deal, the other is a 20 year old rust bucket with 500K miles on the clock and the engine needs replacing.

You get what you pay for, it’s as simple as that. Cheap is cheap for a reason.

There’s even more to this, but this has already gone on too long I’ll touch upon it in the 2^nd part with a famous real world example of really putting in the effort to explain what you do.

3) Your website doesn’t explain how your product or service can help the visitor

This might seem like a stupid comment, I mean you have your website you tell people what you do, you tell them what the product or service is, you tell them all about you.

Do you explain in great detail how you and your product or service will solve the visitor’s problem?

Do you even fully understand what their problems or needs are?

This really comes down to basic selling, and I’m not talking about the “gift of the gab”, or other notions people have about what selling is.

You need to understand what causes them problems, pain, or costs, and then work out how you can fix it. Then instead of you trying to sell them a set of screwdrivers they don’t really want, they are trying to buy a solution that only you can provide.

Selling online is very different to selling offline – but in some ways it’s also very much the same! As contradictory as that sounds we can totally justify exactly what we just said, if you want to know more just call us, and Yes, we do online and offline sales training as well.

If you can’t get this right, you’ll sell nothing. At all. Online or in person. Call us.

Check out part 2 for a real example of how powerful this is.

4) Your product or service doesn’t solve the problem of the visitor

This really comes down to 2 things: first your product doesn’t solve the problem; a bit like on Dragons Den where people have come up with a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist (or a problem that people don’t even realise that they have).

Alternatively, the people visiting your website are not the right fit for the product or service you offer. Sometimes there are lots of website visits, but no one is buying the products.

This could be down to how you obtain those visitors, through paid ads (like Google Ads) where the criteria to get the visitors is not selective enough, or maybe from social media personal relationships when it’s a more business appropriate offering, or vice versa.

It’s hard to say without looking at your site, so get in touch – often the issues are patently obvious to someone not emotionally invested in your business, whereas you could look at it all day long and never see the wood for the trees.

5) The pricing / options are not clear

This is another common issue that you probably won’t recognise when you view your website from the perspective of being the business owner.

To you, you may well understand your industry, business, service, products, your combinations of offerings and you know your own business and pricing inside out.

But it might be confusing to people not used to dealing with you or your industry.

As an extreme example it reminds me of that episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA where there was a guy called Sebastian who had a menu with 20 sauces and toppings that you could pick to go with 20 mains, and then 20 sides.

Giving you a confusing array of 8,000 different combinations all at different prices!

On the face of it, it might seem great, more choice for the customer, but the logistics of carrying that out, and the confusion about what you’re getting turned it into a disaster.

People want things to be as easy and simple as possible, the more complicated and more of a headache you create, the more they will avoid it.

You may well understand how your pricing works, what the options mean, etc, etc, but if it is not crystal clear to someone brand new, who has never worked with you before, and they have to sit there scratching their heads or trying to work out what this means or that means then they will probably just leave.

Keep things as simple as possible, don’t make things more complex than they need to be, and get opinions from people who are not your friends and family.

They will always tell you everything is great because they don’t want to hurt your feelings, but your feelings will be hurt a lot more (and your finances) if you get bad advice that costs you your business.

So, to answer your question of:

Why am I getting clicks but no sales?

It’s probably a combination of factors that relate to either not getting the right people to your website, or your website not presenting your offers effectively, or your website copy not being efficient at selling what you do and how you can fix your visitors problems, or your pricing not being clear.

These are the main reasons, but there could be many more depending on your industry and product or service, feel free to call us for a no obligation chat to see what a fresh pair of eyes can see.

Another question we get asked is:

Why is no one buying from my Shopify store

Often people tell us they have a Shopify store and they get plenty of clicks but no sales.

Well, it’s the same reasons as above usually.

Strangely people who use Shopify seem to be really geared up to signing up for all kinds of Shopify advertising platforms, social media marketing deals and similar things.

It’s almost like they think that there’s just some magic button that they haven’t found yet, but if they could just find it and press it then all of their problems would be solved.

Life and online sales just really don’t work this way, they really don’t, and so before you go looking for magic money button software please stop and think and take a long hard look at your website and layout, etc and try to imagine you are your ideal client arriving for the first time ever on your website – and try and imagine how you’d react.

We’ll continue this exploration in part 2, with some real world examples that you can really get your teeth into!

SEO Experts are based on the West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire border we work with businesses in Bradford, Leeds, Keighley, Skipton, Harrogate, Ilkley, Halifax, and Huddersfield, as well as nationwide.

Redesigning a struggling holiday cottage website & improving the SEO

No. 66 is a Haworth holiday cottage based right on the main street in this highly popular tourist destination near Keighley in West Yorkshire

The existing website was a WordPress site but, as we seem to keep on discovering, while WordPress is a really well designed modular web design software, many developers create sites in a very unusual, non-modular way that causes problems later.

In this case the menu was “fixed” to the left hand side, and because of the unusual way it had been built the menu was disappearing behind the logo, the image slider was blurred, distorted, and not rendering properly, and the site just would not rank in Google.

The easiest solution was to rebuild the site using Elementor and WordPress, incorporate a booking system tied into their existing (3rd party) system, and to make sure the website was properly built and SEO’d for Google AND designed for users as well.

Our objective was to help the site rank better (it’s now on page 1 in a very competitive niche), to make sure the site functioned properly, and to increase visitor engagement.

To aid with visitor interaction, and therefore conversion rate (increased bookings) we added a few simple, yet effective elements into the site.

Previously the “fixed” menu to the left was taking up a huge area on the screen, we moved the menu to the top and made it “sticky” so when you scroll, the menu is always accessible.

Additionally we made the contact details sticky as well, so that they can always be seen on the page, but they take up very little space.

We also added some moving elements in the header and lower down the page.

People have a tendency to skim the page and miss important information, so we used icons and text to “slide in” this information to catch your eye.

This resulted in a better looking, better performing website that ranks in Google.

“My website was outdated and pretty messy. Dave redesigned it, patiently explaining what was needed to improve the ranking as well as the look of the website. It was a relief to speak to an expert who takes the time to communicate and now I’m on page 1 of Google. Job done!” – Glenda Joy, HaworthHolidayCottage.co.uk

Contact us today to find out how we can help you (click here)

Trying to understand what Google is looking for so that you can rank well using organic SEO is difficult.

It’s really difficult, but I’m going to tell you everything you need to know in this SEO guide.

Most people who attempt SEO give up because they fail.

Others achieve some success, but they aren’t really sure why or how to duplicate it.

People try and find shortcuts, tricks, and secret magic buttons that simply don’t exist.

They want fast SEO results that require little to no effort.

They get their information online from people they don’t know:

• They take bad SEO advice from “gurus” who aren’t really gurus.
• Listen to outdated ideas from “experts” who aren’t really experts.
• Try “Black Hat” schemes that Google doesn’t like.
• Pay for low quality services that will do more harm than good.

Then wonder why either their rankings don’t get better, or alternatively get worse.

If you try to find tricks, loopholes, and methods that Google already tells you it doesn’t like, the end result will not be success.

The truth is that SEO is a process that takes time and requires real work.

But processes, once you understand them, can be standardised and repeated like a blueprint.

And this gives you a massive advantage over your competition.

If you want to confirm everything I’m going to tell you below, take a look at Googles own search quality guidelines.

These are guides that they give to real people who spend their time grading how good a website is – in other words this is exactly what Google is looking for:

Google’s internal search quality guide.

How SEO Actually Works is GREAT News For You!

 

Because people:

• don’t understand how SEO works,
• and are too lazy to put in the necessary effort,

it leaves you with a golden opportunity if you do.

If you follow the good SEO practices outlined in this guide then you will be able to beat your competition for almost all of your keywords.

Once again remember it takes real work, but once you understand what you are doing you can standardise it, repeat it, and reap the benefits, which include:

It might take you several hours to produce a page that will dominate the SERP’s but putting in this SEO effort is worth the cost since you’ll reap the rewards from it for years to come.

If you think about the Return on Investment of that effort or cost you’ll eventually be picking up customers at a cost of pennies each.

In the meantime your competition will be spending money forever buying backlinks and out-dated SEO gigs that will get them nowhere.

What SEO Doesn’t Work Anymore?

SEO tactics that worked even 5 years ago don’t work anymore, and yet many SEO companies will still talk about them, and base their SEO services around them.

These include:

• Backlink campaigns
• Social media campaigns
• DA/PA (Domain Authority or Page Authority)
• Word Count

This is all pretty obvious and we’ll look at why in a minute, but first let’s consider why these old SEO methods don’t work anymore.

Backlinks

Google understands what a page is about much better now than even a few years ago.

Back then they needed some way to work out relevance, and they did this by counting and valuing backlinks.

They refined the process over time, eventually using methods like “The Hilltop Algorithm”.

But it was a flawed system because backlinks are so easily gamed.

If anyone can go and build backlinks then how do Google know which are genuine? And is simply counting the number and value of backlinks an indication of whether the content on a page helps the visitor?

If it were so simple then all you’d need to do is have 1 more backlink than the top result and you’d replace them, but it clearly doesn’t work that way.

See what John Mueller of Google says about backlinks in the video below:

Social Media Links

Similarly anyone can create mountains of social accounts and promote and link to any website to try and influence the SERP’s.

Some people think that it’s a good way to drive traffic and hopefully sales, but generally speaking visitors from Facebook, Twitter and even Pinterest and Instagram tend to be very poor at converting into customers.

It is particularly poor for B2B, and has practically no SEO impact at all

Website Metrics

Values like PA and DA (These are AHrefs measurements) are used by SEO companies to impress the gullible with how “powerful” their backlinks are.

A site like Facebook will have a very high score (it’s out of 100) and the claims are that a link from a site with a high DA, or from a page with a high PA will give your website a massive boost.

But it doesn’t work as discussed above.

Using the methodology below you won’t even need backlinks.

Words

Some SEOs will tell you that you need your content to be a certain number of words.

But as with number of backlinks you clearly if the top result has an article of 1500 words, you can’t replace it by simply writing 1501 words.

There is no doubt that longer pages get you better results, but that’s because the pages that do the best end up containing a lot of words because they are delivering a lot of useful information.

If your content is just written to meet a word count then it will probably be 10% value and 90% filler, and this is not going to satisfy the visitor or Google.

What SEO Signals Does Google Want to See?

 

Google owns:

• Google Search (they can see every search query made).
• Google Analytics (installed on 90%+ of websites – they can see every interaction between a searcher and a web page).
• Google Android (they know who you are, where you go, etc).

So what makes more sense in terms of deciding which websites should rank the highest?

1. Using outdated “game-able” measures like backlinks, DA, word count, etc, or,
2. Measuring actual user data to see whether any given web page answered a user’s query?

It’s obvious isn’t it?

SEO does not now come down to technical values and numbers like backlinks and word count, etc, SEO comes down to whether a page helped a person by answering their question.

So the SEO signals Google values are:

• Higher quality content than the existing pages
• Pages that are clearly optimised for the topic or keyword
• Clear interlinking between pages
• Formatting

Remember that Google is a machine, it doesn’t know everything about every topic, nor can it fully understand the meaning of content.

But over many years and trillions of searches it has identified what makes a web page likely to be a good one.

You can imagine this yourself by comparing 2 pages in a language you don’t read, like say German.

1. Page 1 is 800 words in one block of text.
2. Page 2 is 1800 words with formatted paragraphs, headings, subheadings, lists, charts, tables, images, etc.

Even though you can’t understand what those pages are saying, which do you think would be the most useful content?

This is what Google is looking at, coupled with user behaviour, and we need to make sure our pages follow that structure.

What SEO Does Work Today?

The SEO strategy that works today is to follow the guidance from the topics we’ve already looked at, and to avoid the ones that don’t work.

As you can see it requires a lot of thought, hard work, and knowing what you’re doing, but the benefits are:

This means you need to create content that genuinely answers the searchers query, and that is higher in quality than the existing content.

This means using careful formatting and plenty of the following:

• A Heading focused on the keyword or phrase
• Subheadings (keyword targeted)
• Content list
• Bullet points
• Numbered lists
• Images
• Tables
• Charts
• Videos
• Quality useful content
• Internal links
• External links

The page we create needs to be better quality and more useful than any other page out there.

In terms of the SEO elements we can control on the page you have:

1. The URL
2. Title
3. Meta data
4. H1
5. H2’s
6. H3’s
7. Content
8. Internal links
9. External links

What you need to do is to carefully combine the 2 lists above and produce a blueprint that will allow you to create the best quality content over and over again.

It’s hard work but once you’ve learned what you’re doing and spent a few hours producing content based around these SEO considerations, you’ll have a strategy to produce high ranking content.

Then you need to regularly create content.

The more pages you have, covering as many keywords as possible, coupled with regular new published pages equals a huge increase in visitor numbers and sales.

If this is combined with carefully created conversion rate optimised pages then the sky really is the limit.

The bottom line is you need to either put in the effort yourself, or pay someone to do it for you.

There are no “easy” shortcuts, but that is why you can win – your competition can’t be bothered.

How to Create a Successful SEO Blueprint

To create your standardised, repeatable process you need to:

1. Understand your product or service (per page)
2. Understand who your client is (Ideal Client Avatar)
3. Identify the right keywords
4. Identify what the existing pages have missed
5. Identify things not well covered by existing pages
6. Understand your call to action
7. Construct your content layout and conversion optimisation

Product or service

Salespeople have been told for years to sell the benefits of a product or service, and back it up with features.

You see this on almost all websites selling products – lists of features and benefits.

But this is very old school selling, and it doesn’t help us with creating SEO busting content.

Instead you need to really think about what problems does the product or service solve, and form your thinking around that.

This helps you to clearly identify the needs of the visitor.

Ideal client

Once you understand what a person looking for the product / service is looking to solve, you can identify your ideal client avatar.

This means working out who is the perfect person you’d like to get on your page (i.e., most likely to buy), and what they are trying to solve.

Keywords

By understanding the previous 2 steps you now have a much better idea of the kinds of keywords they might use to make a search.

So rather than trying to rank a page for a general keyword, you aim to match the page and content to your ideal client and what they’re looking for.

You build the page around the keywords most likely to lead to visitors who will buy.

Missing information

To create the content you can look at the pages that rank right now, and think about what they are missing on telling the visitor.

What vital information they will want to know is missing?

Make sure you cover it.

Not well covered

There may also be topics that are not well explained or covered, these are ideal areas for you to create the highest quality content available.

Call to action

Think about what your ideal client wants, how you can solve their problem in a way that will appeal to them, and prompt them to take some form of action.

This doesn’t necessarily need to be to buy something right there, it could be to get in touch.

Content blueprint

Once you have created your page and added the appropriate headings, etc, save the layout as a template or blueprint so you can follow the same structure again.

This doesn’t mean it needs to be laid out exactly the same way, but rather you can have at least a certain number of headings and subheadings, bullets, numbered lists, etc.

Make sure you think carefully about linking to pages within your website (internal links).

You want to have more links pointing to more important pages, from an SEO perspective this is telling Google and other search engines that we feel this page is an important part of our website.

This helps search engines work out the structure of your site and the hierarchy of pages.

When you do this you can create high quality pages that will rank very well in Google without the need for backlinks or other questionable tactics.

Want More?

Learn how to win in Google without backlinks or other complicated SEO:

    https://www.seoexperts.org.uk/how-can-i-increase-sales-on-my-website

    https://www.seoexperts.org.uk/when-is-the-best-time-to-start-seo-on-my-website

Work With Us

We only have time to work with people who are serious about improving their turnover through SEO and who understand there are no magic shortcuts.

If you want to win in Google and are prepared to commit to a real, solid process that works then let’s talk.

Rather do it yourself?

Feel free to read through our SEO guides and advice to learn everything you need to know.

About SEOExperts.org.uk

SEO Experts are based on the West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire border we work with businesses in Bradford, Leeds, Keighley, Skipton, Harrogate, Ilkley, Halifax, and Huddersfield, as well as nationwide.

The best time to start working on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for your website is right now. The reasons for this are that:

1. It takes a lot of time for any work you do to have any effect.
2. This is particularly true for new websites due to the Google “sandbox” effect.
3. The more “keywords” or topics you want your website to rank for, the more work needs doing. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll get results.

There are some other issues that we’ll touch on later, but for now let’s look at these 3 points in more detail.

[Before I answer this, and since I’m obsessed with the marketing companies use, whether it makes sense or not  – have you ever noticed that all clocks for sale ALWAYS show the time as ten to two, or ten past ten? Do you know why? Answer at the bottom with an amusing observation.]

It Takes time For SEO To Take Effect

There are different things you need to consider when it comes to SEO, and it has changed tremendously over the last few years.

In the past you could throw up a pretty “thin” (thin means a website that didn’t really have a lot of useful content on it, maybe 500 words per article, a page that is just there to mention the keyword or phrase so there’s something for Google to show in the results, but that doesn’t really help the person who is reading it) on an EMD (exact match domain – this means a website URL of say “tennisshoes(dot)something that is all about tennis shoes), and hey presto you’d be on page 1 of Google.

Well, that’s not quite all there is to it, of course you’d also blitz your website with lots of software driven backlinks (links from other websites that point at yours) using the “keywords” (like tennis shoes – instead of “click here” or “visit this website”), and then you would definitely be on page 1.

The more backlinks you built, the higher you’d go in the results, it was super easy.

Sadly it is nothing like that today, and even more sadly people still think it is, and throw money at supposed “seo gurus” to do the same things that worked 10 years ago, that today will at best do nothing, and at worst will get you banned.

When you get those emails offering you SEO services for $100, $300, $500 per month, or whatever, this is all they do. They fire up the 10 year old software, spam your website, and then eventually Google bans you.

SEO today is far more sophisticated, it’s much more content and end-user driven, and it requires much more time, effort, and know-how to make it work.

However, if you know what you’re doing then you can achieve fantastic results in the fastest possible time and at the lowest possible cost.

But – it is not what you might call “cheap” (if you think even £500 per month is going to cut it, then you’re in la-la land), and it’s not going to be a “do some work today, and tomorrow you’re on page 1” – it takes time and continued effort to get anywhere, the days of free business and money from Google are over.

What Is The Google Sandbox?

The Google sandbox was something I honestly thought we’d seen the end of for good.

Back in the day when the tricks and links and spammy methods I mentioned above worked, Google needed to build up some trust in your website, they didn’t want to rank you today and start sending people to you, only to find that suddenly your website was selling dodgy things, or getting involved in other potentially illegal activity.

Because scammers want fast results they wouldn’t hang around, so by having (in essence) a time delay between a new site being seen by Google, and it appearing in the results, it weeded out the trash.

As the Google algorithm got better and better the sandbox seemed to disappear, if you had a brand new website, and they were sure you were legit, then you’d rank fast. However…

…today it seems the sandbox is back with a vengeance, and a brand new site could be looking at a 6 to 8 month wait to really start seeing any kind of traffic.

Usually what happens is that after the 8 month or so wait you see a massive “hockey stick” type swing, where your traffic and visitors just go through the roof suddenly – as long as you’re doing the right things to make that happen, which we can help you with.

It’s really odd because it’s like going back in time to the way Google used to work before they had confidence in their algorithm and A.I. rank brain, but maybe as Googles A.I. capabilities increase, so do the A.I. capabilities of the spammers and scammers who are trying to trick them?

Google have one A.I. swordsman trying to fight away the bad guys. The bad guys have 100,000 A.I. bad guys to pitch at Google – maybe it’s as simple as that? It has to learn how to defeat them all, one bad guy at a time?

Anyway, if you have a legitimate business website, and you are really providing a great product or service, and even if your website is brand new – there are some things we can do to help you get your site ranking much faster than 6 to 8 months, give us a call or drop us an email to discuss it.

More Topics = More Work

This is just common sense really, if you are a mechanic who fixes only rolls Royce’s, then you only need to rank in Google for Rolls Royce’s.

You’ll have a really tight, targeted group of customers, looking for a very specific service, and you’ll be able to focus solely on exactly what you do.

If you run a garage, you do servicing of every make and model of car, MOT’s, you buy and sell cars, etc and you’re in an area where lot’s of other people do that too…

…well you can see you have a lot more work to do.

Not only are you fighting a lot of other people for the same business, but you’re also trying to attract customers for a whole range of different services.

This requires a lot more time, effort, and money, so you need a strategy that focuses the main thrust of the effort at the beginning on the most lucrative business segment – like the 80/20 rule.

That is to say if 80% of your income is from 20% of what you offer, then focus all of your SEO efforts on that first. But make sure you get it right, because if you try spamming it by taking cheap short cuts, Google will ban you.

And then you’ve got real problems.

The Other Issues

This is not in any real order, but:

The main thing is that Google can see your website is alive and functioning and represents a real business, blog, or other online entity, so you need to keep adding fresh new content.

The more often you can add content the better, and it needs to be more than a couple of hundred words, it needs to be a good useful piece of information.

What tends to happen, as per the details above, is that people start their website, get fed up when nothing happens, maybe throw a load of money at online advertising, get fed up when that doesn’t work (because they don’t know what they are doing), and then they just stop doing anything.

So their website never progresses from more than a few feet off the launch pad, and just dies a slow and painful death.

You need to keep going until you hit the “hockey stick” where visitors suddenly go through the roof.

How Do You Get Hockey Stick Growth To Your Website?

The first thing is that you need to keep adding useful content, and you need to keep adding it regularly.

This is one of the things that really bugs me about companies like Yell Websites.

They charge you between £400 to £2500+ for a website, then charge you monthly fees, then charge “SEO packages” and all the rest, and really it’s useless.

The basic Yell website is (it might change over time but right now) 5 pages of content, and that includes a contact page, an about us page, and it might even include the terms and conditions page and privacy page.

Is a Yell website worth it? Here’s our detailed analysis (the answer is no).

Well, if you have 5 pages of generic content, at least 2 of which are useless in terms of explaining what you do to both your potential customers and Google – well how many customers do you think that website will bring you?

Especially when your competitor has a website with 10, or 20 or 50 or 100 or 200 pages of unique, specific content about the very services or products you offer in your town or city.

You can pay for all the Ads, SEO backlinks and other stuff you like, but you can’t fool Google, you can’t sway a visitor to buy from you when they got ten times more help from the other guy, so you need to really wake up to the reality of what you need to do to make your website work.

It doesn’t need to cost the earth, it just needs someone who really knows what they are doing – to do it for you!

If you get it right you’ll dominate your market forever, if you let someone else get there first you’ll always be looking for the crumbs while they take the cakes.

If you think we can help you, or would like to see if we can, then feel free to get in touch.

[Answer to the clock time conundrum – the genius marketers think the 10 to 2, or 10 past 10 angles of the hands looks like a smile, which will make you more likely to want to buy it.

However, they have forgotten why they do this, and so without any thought they also make digital clocks always say… can you guess what time?

Welcome to the world of marketing.]

Learn more about how SEO really works in our guide.

SEO Experts are based on the West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire border we work with businesses in Bradford, Leeds, Keighley, Skipton, Harrogate, Ilkley, Halifax, and Huddersfield, as well as nationwide.

Yes! Generally speaking it is definitely well worth the cost of hiring an SEO for most businesses.

To work out whether you should hire an SEO Expert or not depends on how much you can realistically increase your online sales vs the cost of those increased sales, whether SEO and better rankings will deliver the right kinds of “motivated to buy” visitors to your website, and how long you will enjoy the benefits of increased rankings.

For example, if employing an expert to work on your SEO will cost you £2000 per month, but after 6 months you’ll be turning over an additional £20,000 per month, and that increase will last, then clearly, it’s a great Return On Investment (ROI) and well worth the upfront cost.

In reality (and there are some real-life examples below from our own clients) the benefits can last permanently if things are done properly and can make way more than an extra £20,000 per month.

The key is to realise the value that an expert in a field that you probably don’t understand can add to your bottom line in a pretty rapid timeframe.

Unfortunately most business owners just can’t wrap their heads around it, and because they are blitzed on a regular basis by people who claim to be SEO experts from various parts of the world who promise the earth for $100 per month (but note – never EVER deliver), they can’t understand why they should pay £2000 per month for solid, measurable, real and tangible results, when “Joe Smith” from Mumbai says he can do it at a fraction of the price.

If you think about it, if someone could make you several £Million per year (which we HAVE done with some of our clients), why on Earth would they do that for you for $100?

If someone could make you £500K extra per year, would you complain at paying them £100K for that result?

We’ll come onto that in more detail in the case studies below.

How do you hire the best SEO expert for growing your business?

If you went back 10 years ago an SEO expert was simply someone who increased your rankings in Google, and it was pretty easy, but today there is a lot more to think about.

The conversion rate, the way you present your content to your visitors, the way you engage them, and of course the ways you drive that traffic all need to be carefully crafted.

On top of that are various ways you can dramatically increase sales if you understand the psychology of how people behave online (we looked at this here), and really, it’s this full package of service that you need if you want to see your online sales increase.

And if you think about it, that is really why people want SEO – it’s not about where they rank in Google alone that’s important to them, it’s how that will increase revenue and profit, and so trying to achieve one element of this equation without thinking about the others means you’re missing out on a HUGE amount of income.

So how do you make sure you’re hiring the best SEO for your business?

Talk to them rather than just reading a sales pitch, see not just whether they sound like they know what they are talking about, but if they ask you the pertinent questions about your business, your customers, what you want to achieve, timescales, etc.

If you’re confronted with someone who wants to spout jargon at you (often in the hope that you don’t have a clue what they’re talking about), and they don’t really ask you anything about you, then you’re better off avoiding them.

Coming back to the $100 SEO again.

You’ve been in business for how long? Years probably, you know your industry inside out and you know your customers and what they want.

How can some kid who knows nothing generate money for you for $100?

They’re hoping that you’ll believe there’s some magic secret formula that they know, but again, if they knew some magic money button, they wouldn’t be giving it to you for $100.

Personally, my background is from sales and marketing.

I worked for a FTSE 250 company that turned over around £800 million per year. I worked for an American company that turned over around $150 million, a German company that does probably a Billion Euros per year, and a Swiss company that does hundreds of millions.

You just don’t end up working for companies like that in sales and marketing unless you are very, very good at what you do.

You certainly will not get someone of that calibre for $100 per month.

Would you work for $100 per month? If you did, would you think it reasonable your employer would expect you to generate £Millions for them?

Of course not, and yet in the SEO / Online marketing world, people seem to think this is reality.

There are probably kids earning more than $100 per month for doing a paper round. Would you put the future of your business at that level?

Hiring a good SEO Expert is an investment in your business and your future, and you really want someone with their eye on the future.

If they are paying attention to how things are changing, how things look like they might move, and they are working on these things for you ahead of time, then you have someone worth their weight in gold.

How To Spot a Bad SEO Consultant

Of course, you want to make sure you get the right person, but just trying to go for the cheapest possible will inevitably end in tears.

If you use someone who charges $100 or $250 and etc, they will undoubtedly just use software to spam your website with low value links, and if they do that then it will end up harming (or getting your website banned) by Google.

So how can you identify a bad SEO? Watch out for the following:

1. They talk a lot about backlinks and “how many” they will build per month, as though quantity is more important than quality.
2. They can’t tell you the difference between a good or bad backlink in a convincing way.
3. They won’t or can’t be specific about exactly what they will do (this is critical to avoid people who will do “black-hat” tricks to try and game Google – and end up getting you banned).
4. They talk about On-Site SEO being headlines, meta titles, meta descriptions, etc, the general things that have been talked about for the last 20 years with no real technical understanding.
5. They talk about “quality content” but can’t tell you how quality content is defined.
6. They obsess over visitor numbers with no thought about conversion rates or controlling visitor behaviour.
7. They very rarely take the time to ask you about you, what you want or are looking to achieve.

You want to make sure that you understand what they are going to do for you and your business, and don’t just pick the cheapest option.

I know you think I would say that, but it’s the truth and you hopefully can see that if someone has the key to making you a lot of money, they aren’t going to give it to you for next to nothing so you can sit in your mansion, and they can eat a tin of cold beans.

Ask them about what exactly you will get for your money, you want to see total transparency from them.

Understand also that you can’t expect to hire someone today, and see immediate results tomorrow, this is in the hands of the Google Gods, and we need to accept they will decide how quickly you’ll see results.

However, if you’ve agreed on specific, measurable results with your SEO then you can see if things are going in the right direction or not.

There’s no such thing as “cheap” SEO, there are tens of thousands of shysters and ten-a-penny useless SEO companies out there who you can give a bit of money to and get no results.

If you can afford genuine SEO then expect to pay for it, and if your business is in the right position it’s probably worth hiring someone full time.

Is It Worth Hiring an SEO Expert for a Small Business?

Hiring an SEO expert as a freelancer, an agency, or an in-house employee is a matter of choice and where your business is in terms of growth, etc.

In some circumstances outsourcing might be more cost effective, but again you need to appreciate that the price you pay are not just their wages, there are also some pretty hefty costs to be covered, so even £2500 per month (or c. a £30K per year salary) might only provide them with £1500 of income, meaning they need to work for multiple clients.

On the other hand, if you paid them a £45,000 salary and had them work for you 100% of their time, then you’re not going to just get twice as much for your money, it could be 3 or 4 or more times since their entire focus is on you and your business.

As they become more and more adept and skilled in understanding what you do, and the effects of their full-time efforts build, then you could easily end up with a seriously better online business (e.g., by a factor of 10 or more) than trying to save a little money by outsourcing.

The point at which you should consider hiring a full-time in-house SEO manager is when you can see that there is an opportunity to really experience some serious growth if you can hit the market effectively.

If you end up with someone who knows what they are doing, then you’ll have work being done and content being added to your site that will keep bringing you more and more business for years to come.

A good SEO who knows what they are doing is incredibly valuable and can literally add £Millions to the value of your business.

So really you need to make sure that the person you work with, if they’re a freelance SEO expert or you bring them in house, knows what they are doing.

A good thing to do is ask them about methods to increase sales on a website, ask them about conversion rate optimisation, and how they plan on driving people to the website, and how and why all of that will work.

To give you 2 examples of massive gains we’ve made for clients in the past:

• A company selling a home refurbishment product.

The client was struggling when we were first approached by them, they’d used some very dodgy foreign SEO company who had spammed their website with links and got the site totally removed from Google.

We managed to recover it (we had to use the Google disavow tool and it took weeks), but when the site recovered, we then did some ethical SEO for them.

The client then asked us to take over their Google Ads campaigns, and the managing of the site, which we did since it made it easier to have it all under one roof, so everything was pulling in the same direction.

We rationalised their Google Ads campaigns and increase their spend from £4500 per month to £6500 per month, but their sales went from £125K to £375K per month, and the sales mix shifted from mainly a product with a 10% margin to a range of products with 25% to 45% margins.

• Another client wanted to get into electric car charger installation

This was a local electrician with a couple of members of staff, and they were not installing EV chargers at all at this point.

We made a website for them with a very specific layout and format for some very tactical (conversion optimisation) reasons and ran a small ad campaign via Google.

In less than a year they were installing 120 to 150 units per month, turning over in excess of £1 million, and are now probably the largest installer of EV chargers in the UK.

This wasn’t just electric vehicle charger SEO, it was a carefully thought-out, well-planned website to target specific geographic areas, specific types of people, specific vehicle types, and to encourage a response from the visitors.

The website was at one time getting a response rate of c.17% (that is to say 17 out of every 100 visitors were getting in touch).

The average response rate across all websites in all industries is less than 1.5%.

Where is the Best Place to Hire an SEO Expert?

You are probably better off finding an SEO expert from either a word-of-mouth recommendation, or an online search where you find someone who seems to understand what you’re about and what you want.

Please do not use the supposed professional freelancer sites like Upwork, odesk, Fiverr etc, these are just full of people who have no idea what they are doing.

I mean Fiverr as a prime example. If someone can generate Hundreds of Thousands for you – why are they promoting themselves on a website where they charge $5 as a starting point?

If I’d discovered the secret to turning base metals into gold, I can assure you that I wouldn’t be telling you how to do it for 5 dollars.

SEO experts don’t waste time on Fiverr or other sites full of scammers and idiots.

Asking “Is it worth it to hire an SEO expert from Upwork?” is like asking “I have this really high-tech piece of equipment that keeps my business alive.

Should I pay the approved repair guy, or see if someone in India can do it for $5 instead?”

I mean, come on.

Basically, your business is your livelihood, and you may have taken years to build it, don’t try to game Google by choosing some “on a shoestring” SEO company that will use banned and bad practices and potentially cost you Thousands of pounds.

Similarly, if you’re at the point where you could really accelerate and grow your business online, then take the time to find a good solid partner, or even a full-time employee who can deliver the results you believe are achievable and pay a fair price for that employee.

As we said earlier, they are literally worth their weight in gold.

Want to do it yourself?

Check out our “How SEO really works” page, and our free SEO guides here.

SEO Experts are based on the West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire border we work with businesses in Bradford, Leeds, Keighley, Skipton, Harrogate, Ilkley, Halifax, and Huddersfield, as well as nationwide.