Honest London’s Founder, Lauren has over 10 years experience when it comes to digital marketing, celebrity management, comms and PR.
After experiencing working in-house and client side for a variety of agencies, Lauren set the goal of creating a friendly, honest agency with the overall goal of having not only a fun work environment and never experiencing ‘the dread’ again for herself, dog and colleagues but working with brands/people that truly interest her especially if they’re considered taboo/troublesome.
Here Lauren answers the most asked SEO based questions received from potential clients.
Is SEO actually important?
L: If you want people to visit your website, yes. Your SEO positioning is the equivalent of where your physical store would be in a high street. Ranking on key terms in position one or two is the equivalent of being bang in the middle of Oxford Street, loads of people seeing your site/store. If you’re ranking 3-5, maybe you’re in the quiet back streets… Page 2, onwards… You’re in the highlands of Scotland.
SEO can make or break a brand and in my humble opinion, the most important factor of digital marketing. If you rely on leads/data or sales through your website, SEO should be your number one priority on getting right and staying on top of it.
A key mistake brands make is ranking on page one and getting comfortable presuming the work is done. It is never done, you’ll have hundreds and sometimes thousands of websites working hard trying to beat you and if you get complacent and slow on updating… It could be detrimental to your brand.
Can I just do SEO for a month or 2?
L: Of course you can, but it’s not wise. Websites are organic and constantly change and evolve. SEO is the same way. We're often asked for short SEO contracts because our clients just want to ‘get SEO over with' and move on. It just doesn’t work like that. Throughout the month, the Honest team conducts a lot of various tasks - monitoring your website via Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, adding additional Event and Goal tracking, performing on-page optimisation, answering questions, tracking campaigns, making SEO and usability recommendations, all while correcting crawl errors, broken links and spelling errors... To name a few. We're also analysing the information coming through and making adjustments, while staying on top of current research in the SEO field - reading articles and newsletters, attending conferences, following the major SEO players, performing trial and error on our sites, etc.
It’s more than adding a couple of keywords.
Can you get us to rank for this super general term, like ‘Golf'?
L: While the traffic numbers for very general terms can seem enticing, there are two major reasons why you would not want to pursue such broad keywords.
One is sheer difficulty. Google has decided to bias itself in favour of major brands, especially for brand terms, as a means of keeping low-quality sites out of its rankings. Sometimes this isn't fair, but it means that it's extraordinarily difficult to compete with major, widely known and visited sites for keywords used by people looking for information not relevant to your destination.
The second reason helps us understand why this isn't such a bad thing. Of all the people searching for information on some broad subject that is not related to your destination, the vast majority will not be looking for the type of content you have to offer. That is to say, they're not well-qualified leads. Just as it wouldn't be productive to blast your email to large numbers of people that are not interested in what you have to offer, it wouldn't be productive to invest the resources necessary to gain rankings for a very broad term given the low conversion rate you're likely to experience with that prospective audience.
Let’s use ‘golf’ as an example, you’re a cake shop that happens to sell a golf decorated cake. Do you really think people searching the term ‘golf’ are hoping to come across a cake shop? Google has to put its users first for a seamless experience, providing them with what they are looking for.
We need a guarantee that we will have the top 10 search engine rankings for target keywords. If I pay you to do SEO, is this in the bag?
L: The goal of any online marketing campaign should be increased exposure, traffic and conversions. While all of the on-page and off-page optimisation we do will most likely increase your rankings over time, nothing is ‘in the bag.'
Google alone changes its algorithm 500-600 times a year; while most of these alterations are minor, every once in a while Google rolls out a major update to their algorithm that may affect your website in major ways. We stay on top of what popular search engines (such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing) are doing and make changes to the way we are doing things when needed.
Additionally, there are thousands of words used each year to search for your site, some of which are "long-tail" (longer and more specific, but are less common). So, if you just focus on how you're ranking for those 10 "short-tail" words (the most popular or frequently searched) you're missing out on thousands of other terms. These "long-tail" terms may send less traffic, but the visitors will be more likely to be highly qualified and more apt to make conversions on your site.
At Honest London, we track your rankings monthly for a minimum of 25 keyword phrases, but we're constantly adding to that list. And through our monthly correspondence, you're getting much more than that. You can't forget about those thousands of other phrases that can potentially send traffic to your site. As Google starts to look at you as the authority on all things your destination has to offer, you will start to rank for a lot of those long-tail keywords (increasing your traffic), regardless of if you're ranking #1, 2 or 3 for those keywords that you deem most important (but may not be keyword phrases that convert).
