With so many of our prospects asking why we request at least a minimum 12 month commitment to any search engine optimisation contract, we thought it might be a good time to write a blog post on the topic, and explain why ongoing SEO is critical to the overall success of any SEO campaign.

Unfortunatley, there is a fundamental lack of understanding of search engine optimisation strategies, even amongst people in the market calling themselves SEO specialists, with a large majority of Search Engine Optimisation and Online Marketing companies failing to do their job and manage SEO campains on a monthly basis.

Unlike Eifel 65, and Sinead O’Connor; SEO is no one-hit wonder:

Search Engine Optimisation is not a simple process. Nor is it a process that can be approached complacently. For an SEO campaign to be a wild success, it must be planned correctly, be considered, and backed up with hard evidence such as traffic reports, relevance of keywords, and appropriate fit for the company running the campaign. In the initial stages, a Search Engine Optimisation project must begin with a complete and comprehensive review of the client website, followed by a series of reports that will assist in developing the strategy to be taken, then the first stages of actual SEO work will be all of the on-page SEO changes that are required. Depending on the size of the website and the work required, this may take a few days, to a month to complete. All the way through, the SEO company, and the client should be in constant contact with each other, with the SEO agency seeking feedback and input from the client, then implementing these changes.

Rome wasn’t built in a day:

Following the on page SEO work, and online marketing campaign initiation, comes the start of long term off-page SEO work, which includes some of the following:

• Link building – the art (and it is an art) of finding, arranging and implementing quality links that will point to relevant pages on the client website. This is a complex task, and is achieved through direct requests, good quality directories, press releases, forum posts, and link baiting strategies.
• Content creation – Despite what you think, or what anyone may tell you, if your website is a mere 10-20 pages it will never be considered an authority in its industry. As with any business, you will always see new competitors enter your market, they are enthusiastic, motivated and eager to succeed. As these competitors enter the arena, it is important that you and your website maintains dominance in online positioning. One strong method of doing this is to continuously increase your content. By increasing and refreshing your content, you will establish credibility and provide additional pages to link to on your website.

SEO cannot be seen as a once off task. Think of an advertising campaign in a newspaper, whilst you continue to pay for your campaign, the ad will continue to run and be seen by readers of the paper. As soon as you stop paying for the ad, it will cease to run, and will no longer be seen by readers. Search Engine Optimisation is largely the same, you must continue to run the “ad”, continue to optimise the campaign, and increase the awareness of your website.

A quality web marketing agency will be honest with you and tell you the honest truth, even if it hurts. There is no use having a fantastic SEO campaign, with millions of hits on your website, but the site containing broken links, poor usability or frustrating navigation. That’s a sure fire way to annoy visitors, and they will leave as fast as they arrived. Your web marketing agency should work with you in the initial stages to ensure your site is user friendly, and has the best possible chance of not only gaining traffic - as that’s only half the battle - but actually is capable of converting that traffic into paying customer. The key to this is ongoing management, and tracking, and tweating to ensure results are being delivered.

For this reasons above, it is critical that your SEO agency implements not only a once off strategy, but one that includes an ongoing management program that ensures the sites success. There are many ongoing tasks required when it comes to SEO, so dont be fooled by the jokers out there telling you a once off approach with a single upfront fee will do the trick and see your site earning the traffic it deserves. Ask the SEO agency to run through with you specifically what they will do on a monthly basis, and what reports they will provide you with each month, to show the results of their work.

Search Engine Optimisation doesn’t need to be expensive, a high quality results driven campaign can cost as little as $340 a month - it’s a monthly event. Tasks such as as link building, content creation, linkbaiting, social media optimisation, local optimisation, reputation management, keyword research, analytics monitoring and reporting demand monthly attention. By selecting a web marketing agency that tries to convince you monthly SEO is not required, or by  allowing the agency to drop the ball on monthly SEO, you are probably better off taking your SEO advertising budget, going down to the nearest casino and throwing it all on black, as no matter how far you think they may have gotten you to this point, SEO is a monthly campaign, and requires monthly attention to ensure continued success and results for your website and business.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 8:15 am and is filed under SEO & Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.