Hiring a London SEO company becomes necessary when a website requires optimization and an SEO presence. Google is the world’s largest search engine and users look for everything online using various search criteria. The words phrases or sentences used while searching for any website or any online content by users is known as keywords. To integrated SEO into websites, the content needs to be optimized targeting the keywords that are relevant for a specific website.

Optimizing the content on a website for the purpose of SEO is also a multipronged approach. One needs to put up written content that has the keywords which are being searched by the users. These keywords would be picked up by the search engines like Google while indexing the page and the website. Once the content has been regarded as relevant to those keywords, they are allotted a rank on the search engine. The objective of SEO for any London company is to achieve a first page ranking that will display their website on the very first page as and when a user searches with the targeted keywords.

The written content alone on the website cannot get a website the first page rank. Website design, proper naming of the URLs, onsite and offsite SEO and several other strategies have to be used to get the desired Google rankings. This is where a SEO company comes in. It is not practically possible for a business that is not specialized in SEO to effective perform their own website optimization or to create an SEO strategy. A SEO company, like Creative Brand Design, can provide you with an extensive, multipronged and effective SEO strategy.

The use of SEO enhances an already well built website. It’s not supposed to substitute questionable web design, bad advertising practices or any other website enhancing schemes. Search engine optimization is suppose to enhance—not break down a website’s quality. Since SEO directly affects how search engines find websites, using legitimate SEO practices is incredibly important.

The aim of SEO

Search engine optimization helps optimize your website for the Internet. This form of optimization usually comes in the form of using healthy target keywords, link-building, article marketing and several other techniques that can get rather complicated in nature.

All of these elements, however, can help increase web traffic to any website on the web—even yours. Why? It’s because the main aim of SEO is attracting the interests of web search users. Different types of SEO help more people find certain websites on the web, especially if they’re searching for something specific.

As an example, a person looking for certain key phrases via search engines might come across a website using said keywords, so the search engine itself can find it. When the search engine finds it, the users find it too. This process is optimized or make to work faster through SEO, hence the name.

Getting valuable website traffic with SEO

Search engine optimization draws web traffic to a site using different SEO London methods:

• If a user searches for a specific search query in a search engine.
• If a user encounters a paid advertisement related to your website and/or its search terms.
• If a users finds links to your website/web pages via another linked website and/or blog.
• If a user sees links to your website and/or web pages via social networking.

Whatever way people find your site, they probably will encounter your site using some kind of SEO London methods. When you think about the reach that SEO might potentially give your website, it’s no wonder so many people are still using SEO as a viable method to generate web traffic.

What about your website? Our London SEO company can help you get started with the latest SEO techniques used on the web today. Don’t let your website lose the exposure it needs—contact our London SEO company today for advice regarding how your website can get traffic.

• Social Media Monitoring and Management
• PPC (Pay Per Click) Research and Management
• Metrics and Reporting
• SEO Link Building
• SEO Research
• Competitor Analysis
• Content
• Tasks and Messaging

Now Creative Brand Design you are free to control and monitor all aspects of your SEO campaign, and can easily track the success of SEO performed by Creative Brand Design on your behalf. It has never been simpler to understand and be directly involved in your own campaign, with strictly no jargon and a dedicated campaign manager working especially for you. All this at no extra cost to you!

Taking into account a variety of trade secrets to maximising traffic to your site, and outstanding technical understanding of the plethora of complex analytic tools, the ultimate London SEO company will have the know-how to make your business shine. No business can afford to be without experienced SEO experts on their side, especially in the current climate in which online trade is booming. Those who do not engage an SEO for their business will quickly be left behind, as business after successful business compete for the ultimate in page ranking performance. Unless you’re on the first page of a Google search, you have pretty much had it.

Try searching for your business on Google, using a range of keywords. You may find that directly typing in your business name shows you high up on the page ranking. However, consider potential customers who might, as yet, be unfamiliar with your brand. What might they type into Google? Try Googling like a customer, and see how well your business name fares then. If you’re not high on page one, you are going to need some help from a London SEO company.

Have you ever heard of H1 tags? Metadata? SERPS? Do you know what Panda and Penguin are? And no, not the animals. Unless you are able to answer yes to all of these, give a full explanation and explain how you’d use them, then you need a London SEO company. There are no two ways about it. Simply having a website is not enough anymore. The marketplace is changing. Make sure that you don’t get left behind.

“Well,” my designer replied. He sighed and looked me in the eye. “Okay, so imagine Rapunzel, right? The princess? She’s all locked up in a tower and no one can see how super she is. How’s she going to get a boyfriend locked up in a tower?”

I crossed my arms. I wasn’t sure what my web designer was getting at. There was a long, awkward pause.

“Your website is Rapunzel. You need to get her some invites to some parties. Otherwise no one’s going to find out how great she is.”

Princesses? Towers? Parties? What does that have to do with my website? What parties am I supposed to be inviting my site to?

My web designer gave me a business card. SEO London. That’s what I needed. Like an amazing PA for my Rapunzel website, SEO London was going to get my site invited to some parties. Or something like that.

Let’s be clear now. SEO London is not the actual name of the company. SEO London is what I’m going to call them. Because SEO is what they do, and London (and the surrounding area) is where they do it. Also, the name SEO London sounds almost like the pen name of some sort of incredibly clever academic or writer. Almost.

Anyhow, I spoke to SEO London, and they sorted my Rapunzel out with some party invites. She got a good mention all over social media, made a heap of friends, was linked to some pretty big names, and before long she was getting recognised on the major search engines. Well, I say ‘before long’. These things take time. If SEO London was managing to send Rapunzel out to two or three parties a week, it would still take time for her to start to be recognised. So bear that in mind when you go after SEO London yourself. A fairy godmother can work her magic, but there’s also only so much SEO London can do. The rest is up to you. If your business doesn’t live up to its own hype, then you will have a lot more work to do on making it search-worthy before the SEO London magic can kick in.

However, if you’re confident that your business is worth everybody knowing about, then get with the SEO London programme! Without SEO, your website may as well spend its life locked in that tower, because no one’s going to see it unless it starts getting out and about.

So much comes down to the creative brand design you choose to represent your business. Making sure you choose creative brand design that not only represents your company accurately, but also professionally, can be a bit of a minefield. Even if you choose SEO London that is capable of producing a high quality website for your business, will they be able to provide the most effective SEO London to maximise your reach? You should choose a London SEO company that understands that to get to the top on Google will be paramount.

The main thing that your creative brand design should be physically doing for your company’s SEO is the writing of keyword-rich articles. Some will simply farm out copywriting jobs to cheap labour, which may keep the cost down, but also risks the unwelcome side effect of having badly written articles that link back to your company website floating about on the web. If you care about your company’s public image, choose an SEO London that works with skilled, native English speaking, professional copywriters. Put it this way: if you wouldn’t be proud to have the article on your company website itself, why would you want it representing your business anywhere else in cyberspace?

Consider your social media presence, and ask the company with whom you have chosen to work to clarify how they plan to manage your SEO London social media, as this is as vital to the success of your web campaign as the behind-the-scenes SEO. Your social media presence, i.e. pages and profiles on Facebook and Twitter, is integral to the creative brand design of your business. Social media posts and tweets should speak with your company’s own voice, whilst appealing to the right demographic of users in order to beckon in new customers. And if you are targeting SEO London in the wish of drumming up more customers in London and Surrey, your social media should reflect this: posting about events and news from these areas specifically.

For any business wanting to break into the digital world, choosing the right London SEO will be the most important starting place. Be sure that the creative brand design that the chosen company intends for your business is professional, and represents your company well, but also speaks with a friendly, relatable voice. There are many things to think about. Be sure to make a thorough plan before choosing an SEO company to work with. It could mean the difference between success and failure.

Do you store your client’s information on your server?

Then you’re legally responsible for the security of that data. Poor website hosting often means sub-standard security, this means a higher chance that you are legally liable for not properly securing your clients data as per the Data Protection Act 1998.

Your emails are hosted on your web server to!

What’s in your emails?.. Names, addresses, login information, bank information? Poor hosting often means sub-standard security,  therefore the more chances of your emails being compromised and the higher the chances of your personal information in your emails being accessed by un-authorised users. Is it worth saving a few pounds to significantly increase the chances of someone getting hold of you or your client’s personal information?

Cheap hosting means cut corners… how often is your server software updated?

Cheap hosting very often means that corners are cut, this leads to no/late software updates and therefore in turn to more chances of security loopholes. We’re talking about hundreds of exploits in software that unless kept up to date and patched, makes it very easy for people to get into your website.

9 times out of 10 when you have a virus on your server you are completely unaware of it. Whilst it has the potential to monitor and steal all of you’re and your clients information.

Cheap hosting = shared hosting, do you know who your sharing a server with?

When you think of hosting you have to think of a computer, which is used by lots of people.  The cheaper the hosting, the more people you’re sharing (200+ websites) your server with. Most of the time these people are like you and me, normal website owners. But you also end up sharing your server with people & websites hosting things that you may not want yourself or your website associated with – porn, gambling, illegal content, spamming etc.  You have your own little space on this server but they also do to, you’d be surprised at how many hosting companies offer private space, but this is only virtually private and allot of the time content and usage does overlap.

Who are you sharing your server with? What’s your host’s stance on Porn and Gambling?

When you cut corners with your hosting you’ll find very un-desirable answers to these questions.

Bad Hosting = Bad SEO

Where is your server? Who do you share it with? Does it have a unique IP address? Who else is on this ip address? Is this ip address blacklisted? How quick does your website load? How fast is your Server? What happens when your server hits high/burst demand? What’s your DNS information like?

Lots of questions, all that Google asks when they look at your website and rank it, what’s the point in your £250+ a month SEO campaign when you don’t even have the foundations in your hosting to achieve good rankings in the first place?

Shared IP Addresses.

Think of your ip address like your office. The cheap hosting packages mean that you get a cubicle in that office, with potentially hundreds of other people in that office with you.

Now think of Google like a potential client coming to your office for a meeting. Google walks in and sees all these other people you’re sharing your office with. Google assumes that you’re associated with all these other people and makes a judgement based on that.

If there’s a spammer on the same ip address as you, the whole ip address range gets blacklisted (that’s you too not just the spammer), meaning extremely bad SEO rankings and completely losing the ability to send emails.

Google, Bing, Yahoo, Mail Servers, Email authorities do not differentiate between your website and someone else’s if there on the same ip address, they ban the IP address and range, your website and emails included.

Server Load

How powerful is your server? Well if you’re on cheap run of the mill hosting, not very powerful, and then that not very powerful server is then shared between your website and all the other sites on the server.

You may be thinking, well my website is just small, we don’t get allot of hits.

This may be right, but is this the case for the up to 200 other sites your sharing your server with?

The answer is: No its not.

When a website that you share your server with gets lots of hits, it slows your website down too. Think an average server when shared will have up to 200 other websites on it, what happens when one of those sites gets high demand – it slows you down.

I’ve been there, where my site loading time when from 3 seconds to 47 seconds – this was on shared hosting. In the end I had to cancel the server and the hosting and move to a higher quality server/more private server.

No one’s going to wait around 50 seconds for a website, you may think this unlikely but in my 8 years hosting websites this has happened dozens of times when opting for poor quality hosting.

Support

What’s your hosting support like? What’s the support response time? What’s the service level agreement in place? What’s the guaranteed uptime?

If you can’t answer these questions you really need to pay more attention to your hosting.

Most of the time you’re hosting your website through your website design company. If they’re giving you a really cheap hosting deal for your website it’s often at the cost of support and relying on a third party who’s customer support is usually based abroad with very poor turnaround times.

Think of your website like your car, sooner or later it’s going to need maintenance and without support you’re broken down on the side of the road with no-one to help you.

At the end of the day with hosting you get what you pay for. Sub-standard, cheap hosting means that corners are being cut in quality to bring the cost right down for you. There is allot that goes on behind your website in order to get it live on the internet, and if you cut corners with your hosting and opt for a sub-standard hosting package, you’ll end up with a sub-standard and in-secure online presence.

A slick, modern, and relevant website is another factor in establishing a good outward impression to clientele. If you are not a trained web designer yourself, it is important that you employ a good designer to give you the most from your creative brand design. A good designer will understand the needs of your business, and is experienced at the art of creative brand design. Whatever the price, it will pay back dividends to have your creative brand design taken care of professionally.

Another fundamental must-have in your quest for dynamic, creative, brand design is your business card. This should feature the same design, layout and logo as used on your website, and show simply the most important details about your business. All business cards should show your name, your position and telephone and email contact details. The logo and company name should be clear and provide the main focal point of the business card. Too much information on a business card can confuse and repel potential business customers, so make sure that your creative brand design on your business cards and other printed material is up to scratch.

Creative brand design is not about keeping up with the latest fashions in design, nor about communicating your personal tastes. Your creative brand design should reflect the tastes of your potential clients. A company who wishes to attract sophistocated, corporate or financially gravitated clientele may wish to consider a more formal, monochrome colour scheme in their creative brand design. On the other hand, a cake designer or children’s illustrator for example, will do better with creative brand design that features more colour and pattern. Creative brand design is about attracting the right clients for your business.

Being consistent with your creative brand design across all media and in every aspect of your brand’s visibility is key to establishing an easily identifiable brand image. Imagine that your business is attending a trade fair, in the hopes of attracting more business. If your stall at the trade fair features the same colour scheme as is featured on the business cards you hand out and the website that any visitors to your stall potentially visit afterwards, then potential clients will quickly learn to identify a specific colour scheme with your brand. Creative brand design, therefore, is also about working yourself into the psychology of your clientele. Make your creative brand design match!

As vital as creative brand design is to the establishment of a successful business brand, it should also be a pleasure. Seeing your creative brand design grow across all media, and seeing your brand become instantly recognisable with the public is enough to give any business owner a sense of satisfaction in their own brand. To make the most of your creative brand design, a good web developer, who is prepared to assist with your creative brand design and online marketing requirements, is a necessary business outlay that no business owner can safely afford to do without.

Getting your head around the jargon like link building, on-site SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), Analytics, Social Media, Flux capacitors….. (Well maybe not Flux capacitors) Can be difficult.

So rather than being mind boggled by the SEO guys, just look for good indicators of what makes a decent SEO company.

Here a 10 things that we try to adhere to as a SEO and Website Design company, we hope this helps you make the right decision:

1. Experience

Experience is a key factor in determining which SEO company to hire. The Internet is constantly changing, so the longer someone has been providing SEO services, the better the chances are that he or she is staying ahead of the latest advances in search engine algorithms and social media trends.

2. Ranking

If the company’s good at what they do, you should see their clients pages high in results for searches. Ask for examples of previous work they’ve done to prove their ability to achieve high rankings for you.

3. Testimonials

An SEO firm should be able to provide you with a list of satisfied customers, as well as testimonials from those customers. Ask for some references that you can contact personally to ask questions about previous customer service experiences.

4. Marketing savvy

Once you get beyond the technical issues of a website, SEO is a lot like traditional marketing, Content needs to be written in a way that outlines the benefit to the user while leading them to a sale. And it all has to be done in a way that also appeals to the people at the other end of a search engine who are looking for what your company has to offer.

5. The capability to fit in with your company’s culture

SEO experts must interact with many different areas of a business including IT, marketing, customer service, analytics, and sales. The ability for the SEO to work well with members of these teams is essential.

6. Budget

Be upfront about how much you are willing to spend, and demand a clear budget, broken down into itemized expenses. While you should expect to pay for good SEO, the company you hire, should have no problem revealing exactly how much of your money is being on marketing your business, and how much is paying for professional services.

7. Promises

Run away if you are promised top results in a search engine. While the goal is to give you the very best ranking you can get in your market, no one can realistically promise you a #1 ranking or fast results. It could happen, but it’s more likely that it will take at least six months to start seeing the long-lasting results of an SEO campaign.

8. Reporting

Your chosen SEO professional should report back to you on a regular basis concerning the tactics being used to market your business. If there is something you don’t understand, you should be able to ask questions without being told to let the professionals handle it.

9. Interest

Any company you work with should treat you with the same respect and priority that it treats bigger companies and more expensive clients. You should never be shoved aside for someone else with bigger pockets, so make sure that the company you choose shows genuine interest in helping you before you sign on the dotted line.

10. Structure

An SEO professional should be structured and professional. No one wants to hire someone to do SEO work who does it “on the side.” Instead, the person or company you hire, should be structured and abide by deadlines.

Furthermore, you should have no problem contacting him or her when you need to, and phone calls should not take several days to return.

We hope this list helps you, these are guide lines that we stick to with our clients and you should expect the same from any other SEO company out there. If your not happy with your current provider, drop us a SEO enquiry and we’ll see what we can do to help.