A Rant about SEO

I’m sure you’ve seen the emails. SEO specialists trying to convince you to engage them to get you better rankings on search engines.

Hopefully you have been cautious about these sorts of people in the past and treated them with the suspicion that any such unsolicited mail deserves.

Well I thought it might be worth explaining a little bit as to why I think these people should be treated with caution, and also why I think that most of the significant improvements to your SEO can be done in-house.

The less scrupulous end of SEO specialists are concerned primarily with delivering traffic to your website via higher rankings, but you will find that this traffic is generally, if not always not the relevant traffic you are after. This is quantity not quality. They will deliver against target almost certainly, in terms of the increased volume of traffic routed to your site, but this will almost certainly not be the traffic that will ‘convert.’

So what do we mean by convert? Well, put simply, it’s people who are going to get in touch / purchase your product / sign-up for a newsletter, or whatever metric you decide upon is considered an action or expression of interest on your site.

Secondly, in terms of you building a compelling SEO presence, we know that providing valuable content on your website is going to encourage link building and return visits. Well, put simply, the best people to do this is you, and not a third party. I’m sure that third parties will want to bill you for writing this content, but the fact is that no-one knows your marketplace better than you. Content written by a third party will almost certainly sound awkward and require lots of corrections by your internal team to appear convincing.

In short you ought to focus on writing your content for people and not for search engines.

By all means, engage an agency (such as Jellybean!) to put in place a strategy and plan as to who ought to produce the content, when and based on what sort of topics and issues, but almost without fail you are the best people to produce this content.

In short, there is an awful lot of work that can easily be done in-house to improve your SEO, and with the right advice and the right plan, you can take this work in-house in perpetuity and see the conversions come in.

We are Canvas Digital, a web design agency based in Surrey.