SEO By the Page Without a Contract

Posted on by Bob Ottaway

If your business’ goal is to be seen on the internet, then you’ll need to embrace SEO or pay for Google AdWords. Consider these facts:

  • 91% of all visitors to a web page do not search beyond Page One.
  • 94% of all clicks are on the Organic listings.
  • 87% of all clicks on the Organic listings are on the first five listings.
  • Google serves up 57,000 searches per second.
  • 94% of all purchase decisions are researched on the internet before the buy is made.
With these facts well established and in place, the key to be a part of all of this is SEO. Your site can’t be a player unless it has “authority” with Google. That begins with well researched and implemented SEO practices. SEO is comprised of three key components:
  • Content Marketing
  • Social Marketing
  • Site Structure Composition
You have two options:
  1. Enter into a relationship for an SEO consultancy on a month-to-month agreement or long-term contract basis. There are firms that will do month-to-month like OttawayDigital.com, SEObythesea.com, tophatrank.com, and makeitactive.com to name a few.
  2.  Buy SEO services by the page. This isn’t as beneficial as hiring a consultant to work with your site over a longer term, but it can be effective if you already have page rank and need a rewrite, a new page, work done on your Facebook Business Page, or need your Google My Business Page created and verified. Companies like UnbundledSEO.com, upwork.com, freelancer.com, and raydigitalmarketing.com are a few of the many sites that can help you with SEO on an “a la carte” so to speak.

There are at least 50 different “requirements” that the Google computers have been programed to look for on every website. If your site doesn’t meet those requirements and is operating at the levels that Google thinks is best for its customers when they do a search, then your site will be “marked down” and your page rank on Google will be lowered. Here’s an example of one of Google’s top requirements:

Google SEO

SITE SPEED: Your site must load quickly. It would be most acceptable to Google if it loaded in 3 seconds or less. If it doesn’t, it’s going to be marked down and lose page rank for every second over the 3 second benchmark. Fair or unfair, Google is a private company that owns its own website and they can make any rules that they like.

A good SEO company will be aware of many of Google’s requirements, and over the term of your consultancy, will bring your website into the acceptable ranges that Google has established and programmed in their “algorithms” to decipher and grade in about 2/10s of a second with each search request.

Feel overwhelmed? We understand. We’ve been there, too. Especially when a new Google update is revealed that affects traffic to many websites. They tend to call them Panda or Penguin, but for you as owner of an affected website, it’s just a bad headache. Keeping up with all of these updates is critical. They may or may not affect your website, but you need to know.

What should you do? Get your site in the best compliance with SEO Best Practices as possible. If your budget doesn’t permit the hiring of an SEO consultant right now, use one of the “SEO By The Page” firms listed above to get glaring issues under control. If you’re not getting traffic to your site and leads from your site, you need to get SEO help soon.

Don’t know where to start? Contact one of the companies above or do your own search. A website is like your dog; it should be trained and obey!