2011 has been a very successful year for each and every one of our clients too. As a reflection of the growth and ROI we have delivered, this has seen 60% of our clients increase their marketing budget with us which has allowed us to increase our working capacity and grow our in-house team of experts.

2011 Round Up For Our SEO Company

After spending the last 10 years working on private projects, Paul Gunter and Andrew Shorten decided to go public and offer their expertise to the high demand of small businesses struggling to find their breakthrough.  Paul and Andrew started SEO Essex  just 17 months ago which has grown into team of 8 and a very respectable and talked about marketing and SEO agency in Essex.

Amazon Best Selling Authors

Paul and Andrew signed a publishing deal earlier in the year to release a new book called The New Masters Of Online Marketing. The publishing company invited them to be part of this publication and contribute a chapter along with a select group of leading marketing and business celebrity experts from around the world. The publication was a great success and became an Amazon Best Seller that included their contributed chapter titled “The Secret To Exponential Growth – That 99 Out of 100 Online Businesses Overlook.”  Read more here.

SEO Essex At The Essex Business Awards

It was great to discover that SEO Essex had been nominated for the New Company Award in the Essex Business Awards this year. Although our main goal is to drive more leads, enquiries, sales profit and growth for every project/client we have a hand in to be recognised across the county of Essex for the results we have generated in our very short history was very rewarding.

SEO Essex Business Mastermind Mentoring

The reputation of results that Paul and Andrew are delivering for their clients have attracted more than just SEO clients for SEO Essex.  As well as considering the SEO for a business, there are many other fundamental areas that business owners struggle with including offline marketing strategies and customer service too. Each month Paul and Andrew meet with their mastermind group and spend an entire day discussing, discovering, creating, fine-tuning and formulating marketing strategies that will help to boost their businesses. Read more here.

If your business needs to succeed online, please call us and speak with one of our SEO experts to find out how we can help drive your business to the top of Google in 2012.

There are always ready-to-buy customers searching for a business just like yours offering the product or service that you provide. If you have no online presence or aren’t at the top of Google isn’t it time you did something about it?

If you want your website to have the best possible chance of ranking high on the search engines you must ensure that it has a solid foundation. It needs to be ‘on-page’ (or ‘on-site’ optimised e.g. any activity you carry out directly on your website as opposed to link building activities elsewhere. Your site must be structured correctly and filled with relevant content so that the search engines know exactly what your site is all about.

There are a number of elements that are missing from many business websites. This can have a negative effect on their search engine positions. In order for your website to begin its journey to the top, it is vital that you make sure it is correctly built, structured, and filled with keyword targeted content.

We have written a free report called:

3 Of The Most Common Mistakes Nearly All Businesses Make
With Their Website and Why It’s Damaging Their Search Engine Rankings

Please enter your details in the form below to request your copy of this report and we will send it to you right away.

Once you have read the report, we would love to hear what you think – please feel free to leave a comment in the form below.

Nothing pleases search engines more than finding relevant content. Google, in particular, wants to find good, quality and relevant information. Websites with the most informative and relevant content that matches a particular search is rewarded with a higher rank in the search engine, which in turn represents more authority and importance.

The use of target keywords is crucial in the ranking of your website, especially as search engine algorithms are constantly evolving. Research shows that 85% of the total factors that affect page ranking are based on activities that are happening off-page. Search engines determine the relevance of your site through links from “reputable sites” and site text content. Google places high value on what others think about your content. If high-ranking, authoritative websites link to your page, it simply means that they consider your page relevant enough for them to link to. The words that they used to describe it in their links are also significant indications of quality and relevance.

Getting links from authoritative sites is one of the most challenging and difficult aspect of Search Engine Optimisation. When social networking sites emerged and gave birth to social media marketing, this created a phenomenal effect in the field of SEO as it allows ordinary internet users to, knowingly or unknowingly, contribute to the success of their own websites. They cast their vote on which contains relevant contents by linking, bookmarking or tweeting it. This recent development has given website owners a wake-up call. Now, modern SEO copywriting involves the crafting of the freshest, the most compelling and interesting content so that other people will want to promote it by linking or sharing it to the world until it becomes viral. In addition, when writing content for your site it has evolved from just throwing in a bunch of words to now getting into the minds and hearts of your users. The aim is to produce website copy that contains all the right ingredients of good content that compel visitors to emotionally invest in the site by linking to it. These activities will create an impression amongst search engines that is translated into trust, relevance and authority in your chosen field. As a result, you will be rewarded with a higher rank for your target keywords.

In summary, relevant content is the key to getting noticed by users and the authoritative links (inbound links) that your page is getting is reflective of its worth in the eyes of users and consequently, the search engines. Without disregarding the significance of other optimisation methods that must be implemented to complement an SEO efforts, it is also highly important to have an SEO friendly website.

If you want to discuss our SEO Web Design services or on site SEO for your existing website, please contact one of our SEO consultants at SEO Essex.

We’re dedicated to bringing search engine success at a fair price – so much so, in fact, that we supply a free SEO and website analysis to those who are interested. We are aware that search engine optimisation is the buzz word on everyone’s lips at the moment: so we decided to give you a chance to find out what it is, and how it helps, before you decide to spend any money. We have no doubts in our minds that it works; you know it works; but we’d like to give you the chance to see it working so you can make an educated decision. As a successful Essex SEO company, we are fully aware of the importance of sensible investment (that’s our business, after all – helping our clients choose how to put their marketing funds into the most useful Internet channels). By providing our customers with a free, no obligation site “health check”, which shows them how their site is currently performing, and how it could perform if it was overhauled by the leading SEO company in Essex (that would be us).

Our client testimonials are self-explanatory: companies that have recently employed the services of SEO Essex have seen significantly improved and profitable search engine rankings.

Here at SEO Essex, we’re consistently able to bring our client’s websites onto the first page of the big search engine rankings. At any given time, your site will show in 10 top page rankings of at least one of the three most commonly used search engines

How Can An Essex SEO Company Deliver Such Impressive Results?

Simple. We have years of experience and through many different methods, we know how to achieve large amounts of usable traffic to websites. It’s called “niche marketing”, and it works by focusing on getting more specific or refined search queries. When our Essex SEO company starts any campaign, we begin by carrying out a full SEO analysis of the market and competition to determine where the traffic and profits lay.

Does it work? Proof can be seen from some of our SEO results. And you found us, didn’t you?  :)

If you want your website to perform well in the search engines , contact us today so we can take a look at your site, and we’ll see how high we can help you climb.

A Website That Is Designed Well Can Convert Traffic Into Sales

As a leading SEO company in Essex dedicating our time and effort to being an expert who can deliver top results, we have come up with some tips on how to keep visitors on your site engaged, so that they act on your call to action. This may be anything from a free subscription, an enquiry, a sale or a phone call.

The appearance of your site is very important simply because if you aren’t getting it right you will just be losing business. Your website shouldn’t fall short of high quality content. A website without clarity is going to fail to capture the attention of your website visitors and prevent them from acting on your call to action (if you have one).

What Do You Want Your Website To Do?

The objective of your website is most important and you should make sure that you know and focus on achieving it. Be specific about how you plan to communicate your message to your customers.

Content Is King

This is a very frequently used expression that simply means, content is undeniably vital when it comes to the world of the web.It’s important to write the right content and the appropriate amount that makes full English sense to the human reader.

Consider Structure And Formatting

If your website has lots of amazing content, make sure that it doesn’t looks hectic and cluttered – this will just put off those who try read it.
However, this isn’t to say that you need to cut down on the amount of content on your website, it just means that it needs to be cleverly structured and formatted to make it east to read. Always remember people have short attention spans when reading online and hard to read text will most definitely result in losing traffic from your site very quickly.

The Importance Of Easy Navigation

Content must be scannable but not only that, your website should be designed so that people can easily navigate from page to page with no complications.
To prevent readers from leaving your website must have good labelling and include good, useful information that’s short, sweet and to the point.
The user mustn’t be left to wonder where they might find something. If that’s the case, it should be altered as soon as possible. When people are guessing where things are, and unsure where to find certain things on your website, that’s when you know that your website isn’t doing what it should be doing. You should know how online users react to your site, ask others you know to visit the website and express their honest opinion about how they found their way around it and whether it was easy or too complex, then optimise their feedback.

Make It Easy For Your Website Visitors

Make sure your website visitors can find an easy way to get in contact with you. If they want to make an enquiry about your product or service, or even make an order from you but can’t find your contact details, you will be instantly losing money. Make it easy for them – they shouldn’t even have to try. You should have a contact page with different ways for them to contact you. Make it easy for them and they won’t make it hard for you.

These are just some of the important areas of web design that need to be considered. If you are looking for a new web presence and want to talk to one of our expert members of staff, please contact us today.

Any SEO company worth their salt must be able to demonstrate with ‘real’ and ‘live’ results what they have done and can do, not for just their clients but for themselves too. If a search engine optimisation company does not demonstrate results from the skills they are charging for, for their own business, how can you possibly trust them?

Are We The Leading SEO Company in Essex?

Lets take a look at the facts first…

• The domain name was re-registered on 7 May 2010.
• We launched a new SEOEssex.co.uk website at the end of May 2010.
• The date of the first blog post we made on this website is 26 May 2010.

How We Progressed To The Top Of Google

Each and every client that works with us knows how important keyword domains play in an online strategy. We employed this tactic for our SEO company from the very beginning, when we acquired the domain name SEOEssex.co.uk to use for our website after deciding that our main keywords are ‘SEO Essex’ .

After putting together our search engine friendly website (which is still work in progress) and implementing our SEO strategy, we soon climbed the ranks of Google. As the weeks passed, we made a note on the white board in the office everytime we our SE positions in Google changed. Here is a summary of these notes.

27 May 2010 – Straight into Google at position 33
1 June 2010 – Position 11
15 June 2010 – Position 4
19 June 2010 – Position 3
29 June 2010 – Position 2
21 July 2010 – Position 1
1 August 2010 – Position 2
4 August 2010 – Position 1

Since 4 August 2010, we have held first position on Google for ‘SEO Essex’ plus many other variations of our target keywords.

So…Have We Been Lucky To Achieve 4 Positions In The Top 10 Results Of Google?

Results speak for themselves. We are now approaching the 6 month mark of SEOEssex.co.uk and so much has already been achieved for us and more importantly our clients. Here are some of our current achievements.

• 3 positions from the top 10 for ’SEO Essex’
• 4 positions from the top 10 for ‘Essex SEO’
• 4 positions from the top 10 for ’Essex SEO Company’
• 2 positions from the top 10 for ‘SEO Company Essex’
• 3 positions from the top 10 for ‘SEO Company in Essex’

This is just an example of what we have done for our own website – Google domination. We are an SEO company who has demonstrated what we can do for your business too.

So..are we the leading or best SEO company in Essex? The evidence is out there.

Are You Serious About Getting Your Website To The Top Of Google?

Still not convinced? Take a look here at some of our other page 1 results. Maybe search engine optimisation is just luck? What do you think?

If you are a serious business owner who wants to get to the top of Google and work with a friendly, professional, no-nonsense SEO company in Essex, please contact us today. We will be delighted to hear from you.

Negative keywords permit you, as an advertiser, to choose or specify when your adverts should not be displayed and these instances include searches for a particular keyword that has several meanings or is part of other popular queries. For instance, your business sells cars and you are advertising on the keyword “BMW 3 series”, there is a big possibility that users will see your ad if they searched for “BMW 3 series toy”, or “BMW 3 series model”. This can result in clicks where people would click on adverts without even reading the text and later on, realize that the ad refers to something else. These clicks can result to huge expenses on competitive keywords.

The addition of negative keywords to your advert groups or campaign will filter out unwanted search results that have nothing to do with the products or services that you offer and therefore, help you reach your target market. You would then see an increase in the overall CTR since it decreases the number of searches viewing the advert but not clicking it. A higher click through rate will help your ad attain a higher placement in the search results for your keyword. This will result to a reduction of your CPC (cost per click) and increase your ROI (return of investment).

Keep in mind that when you run a PPC campaign, you’re spending money. Therefore, it is important that you do everything in your control to enhance the profitability of your advertising budget. SEO Essex highly recommend that you continuously track, measure, test and tweak your advert groups by adding negative keywords to your campaign. When you employ negative keywords you will see a noticeable boost in the performance of your PPC campaign.

If you are looking to improve your short term success in the search engines, contact SEO Essex today and speak to one of our expert PPC Consultants.

Local listings, on the other hand, rely on geographically targeted pages. This appears whenever customers affix a location to their keywords (e.g. Essex SEO company). Other times, search engines provide results basing on particular post codes, search terms or categories. Local listings appear next to the little map at the top of the Google search results. Keep in mind that this listing is specific to the area you have added with your search terms. This process narrows down the search to businesses that are more conveniently accessible to that location. Like SEO in general, local SEO is also about target keywords except with the geographical query as the modifier. Therefore, it is also imperative that the keywords you target are related to the products or services that your business offers.

There are a growing number of potential customers or leads gravitating towards local listings versus a paid and sometimes organic listing. These potential customers are specifically looking to do business in their local area.

It is relatively easy to place your business into the local business directories. The most popular local business listing service is offered through Google Maps as it has a wider reach due to its huge base of users. One of the most important features of a Google Map listing is the “review page” where previous clients can comment on their experience of dealing with you, and on the quality of your service and products. Testimonials or product reviews give other users the confidence to make a decision on whether or not they wish to carry out any business with any particular company. This is something a lot of businesses with local listings are missing and when used to its potential, this gives you better chance to attract more leads and generate more profit, as well as establish your company’s authority and reputation in the internet.

If you haven’t noticed, recently, Google has been placing search results with local listings in its search pages. This gives an indication of how many businesses and customers are now using the Internet for in the local search marketing field.

Google Maps is very essential for your own business as it can help you to boost traffic and increase leads, enquiries and profit. If your organisation is not yet taking advantage of using local business listings, you are missing out on attracting local people who want to find a business just like yours.

Getting your business listed on Google’s Local Business Listing is free to do and you can have your own listing in no time at all. At SEO Essex we are experienced in optimising your listing so that it appears above your competitors in Google Maps. If you want to discuss your local search marketing strategy and find out how we can help the internet marketing for your business, please contact one of our SEO Experts.

Lack of SEO knowledge and poor website management

Whether we like it or not, SEO fundamentals are imperative and should be in the list of a website developer’s task.  In the world of big brands and sites, to ignore the search engines’ chief guidelines for ranking and crawling a website can lead to anonymity for that website. Anonymity in the sense that it will get further lost it in the clutter of the Internet. This is one of the primary detriments or negative effects that must be avoided as it renders all your efforts futile. It just wastes heaps of your time and loads of your cash. A good SEO campaign, on the other hand, goes a long way and delivers exceptional results.

Disregarding the benefits of hiring a full-time SEO company

If you are not SEO savvy or do not have someone within your business who is, it is more beneficial to hire a full-time SEO company since they have access to professional and experienced staff and unlimited online resources.  SEO companies provide a service that will improve the quality and quantity of the traffic towards your website through natural search engine rankings. In other words, search engine optimisation companies worth their salt know how to propel your website to the top of the first page. The cost of it is worth it if you know the new business that it brings in can repay that investment. When you know that it can eventually be recovered due to an increase in traffic, sales and exposure then this will grow your business at a healthier rate.

An In-house SEO team is usually composed of the company’s IT techs. These individuals, although familiar with how the internet works, do not really possess the knowledge nor the expertise to handle SEO. Most of the time they only achieve minimal success.

Lack of concrete vision, strategies and planning

You should only consider search engine optimisation if you have created a specific strategic plan in mind, otherwise forget it. We can’t deny the importance of strategy since it aids us in achieving good results. However, a strategy without thorough planning will leave you with no specific course of action to follow and will not improve your search engine rankings. It is a known fact that SEO is deeply rooted in advertising and marketing hence, it requires almost the same planning requirements. In the same way, a campaign without a clear vision of how it will end up is just a waste of money, time and effort. Those businesses that don’t have strategies or plans eventually reap disappointing results.

Is everyone in the know?

Always remember that your SEO team is the equivalent of your marketing wing in the real world. Not including them in the decision, or planning process can become a big problem in the long run.
Your SEO consultant must be aware of what to market, and who to target in your campaigns. To isolate the individuals that handle your online marketing, is the same as you getting someone right off the street and telling them to sell your product or services. Online and offline marketing must move and act in the same direction in order to be productive.

If you wish to discuss your SEO strategy and find out how SEO Essex can help you to achieve great results, please contact us today.

If you do decide to let an SEO expert handle your optimisation, you still want to be able to monitor the progress of the optimisation operation. You need to know what to look for to know how SEO is progressively benefitting your website.

The first thing you should look at is content. There is no fixed number for the amount of content you need to have on your website. It varies among websites and is mostly dependent on the amount of information you need to relay to your potential customers regarding your products or services. Try to look at your content the way a customer would and see if your message is clearly presented. Make sure your content is relevant and helpful to potential clients. Also, see to it that your content is routinely updated to keep the public interested in visiting your site.

The next area you would want to check are the links interconnecting the pages of your website. Make sure the links are working properly so that search engine spiders are able to thoroughly explore your site. See to it that your links are strategically located and very visible so as to allow efficient navigation in and around your website’s pages.

Has you website considered the URL structures of the pages? Confusing and complicated structuring of these URLs will not help your rankings. In order to achieve optimum results, these structures should clearly reflect what is contained in the page it is attached to.

If your website contains images, make sure the images are appropriate to your business and the products and/or services you have. These images have to be relevant to the content within the page where the image is posted. Image searches may be of great help to online marketing so these should be optimised by correctly naming and tagging them.

As a business owner, you want to make sure that every penny you spend is being maximised to its full worth. So if you are paying someone else to do the SEO for your website, ensure that you are checking the areas discussed in this article and this will give you a bird’s eye view of how your SEO operation is moving along.

If you want to find out the effectiveness of your current SEO campaign, contact SEO Essex today and speak to one of our experts.