I’ll quickly point something out before you start reading, I’m not an SEO specialist, a designer, a marketer or a techie. However, I do have a unique stand point when it comes to SEO – I work with all of those people I mentioned above as I run Carrot Media. Most of these people mentioned consider themselves to be experts or knowledgeable in the area of SEO but do they in fact know what they are doing?
I’m a business man and all I really want to know is, if I’m spending £1000, what is my return on the investment (ROI). Not only do I need to see my initial investment recovered but I need to make money and recover the costs involved in carrying out the work. So if I invest £1000 in a market strategy, I need to see a £5000 return. SEO is just another marketing strategy which should be reviewed on a regular basis in these kind of terms.
Let’s get back to basics. So, what is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation which means in basic English, getting someone to the top of a search engine for a particular keyword phrase. For example, if I type “Carrot Media” into Google are we top of the list? The answer is yes, but feel free to check. Sounds fairly simple doesn’t it? Unfortunately, it’s not and it’s a hugely complex area full of algorithms, rip off merchants and misunderstanding.
So what should you do?
At Carrot Media we don’t offer SEO as a service to our clients! However, every website we deliver is built with search engines in mind and includes things like: SEO friendly URLs, Robots.txt, XML Site Map, integration with Google Maps, etc. Our clients don’t need to really know what these technologies, tools and techniques do apart from it’s giving them the best possible base to work from and give them a chance of achieving good search engine results.
As most of our clients are small businesses we have the view that although we could do the SEO, the Return On Investment isn’t always achievable.
As an example, one of our clients has been working with a company specialising in SEO which has boosted their site traffic by 50%. Great you might think? Wrong! This client has in fact not actually seen a large enough increase in sales to cover the money spent.
Every site we now produce is built with a robust and SEO friendly content management system so we actually train our clients in the basics of SEO. This technique has seen us generate the best results for our clients way beyond selling SEO as a service.
There have been occasions when SEO specialists have been brought in but as we view every client as unique we can advise correctly for each case.