SEO (this stands for Search Engine Optimization) is process of changing your website content to improve non-paid or organic visibility of your website on the search engine result pages (SERP). So it is safe to say that SEO is also a marketing strategy since it will substantially improve your ability to reach your target market.
Since Search Engines regularly updating their algorithms or rules, SEO strategies to stay effective have to change accordingly. Things that would boost your ranking year ago might not have effect to your ranking today. There are as many different SEO strategies as there is websites, since there are no written rules on what will work 100%.
Search Engines are using highly confidential sets of rules to determine how important your website is in comparison to other websites that are competing for the same keyword or set of keywords.
How much will it cost, to get ahead of my competitors?
As it is a highly guarded secret, giving guaranties for certain placement in SEO is actually really funny. Even if you could control Google for instance, you cannot control your competitors SEO strategies, or how much work they will do on their website. The more money they invest in their SEO more money you will have to invest to keep up with them.
Quick note here, Good quality SEO takes time, cheap SEO often means deceiving SEO results and/or Black-Hat alert, and Black-Hat SEO can put you in sand-box (Google banning your site completely from it’s search results) for six months or more. Any SEO that is not approved by search engines is called Black-Hat SEO.
What I can expect from SEO?
It seams that it is getting harder and harder to get high up on SERP, that’s because, currently, every single day Internet getting bigger for 150 000 new URL’s. So competition growing rapidly. 5 years ago On Site SEO was good enough for the most websites to give them decent organic exposure. Now days aggressive Off Site SEO becoming only thing that will give you decent organic exposure. The more competitive your keywords are more aggressive your Off Site SEO has to be.
On site SEO now days is consider as a bare minimum amount of work you need to do to make your website recognized by google. Been indexed is not the same as been recognized; indexed means that google considering your website, and been recognized is that google actually recognized that you might have some value for given keyword. To improve that value you need to work on your Off Site SEO, building inbound links from the websites relevant to you niche.
How Much SEO cost?
That all depends how many keywords you targeting and how competitive your keywords are. In general On Site SEO cost can be predicted, because mostly depends on number of pages you have and amount of content you have on each page.
On the other hand, Off-Site SEO is hard to estimate. It can cost you a fortune for very competitive keywords, in that case it is always smart to look in to the paid visibility alternative or AdWords. The main difference is that AdWords will guaranty you exposure scaleable to your budget, while SEO will not. Any experience SEO expert can give you more information regarding this.
Can I do SEO myself?
Many SEO companies, will keep their clients dependent on them. Some companies (like Aroma Web Design) take a different approach. Aroma provides a special SEO coaching service for it’s design clients, teaching them to do On Page SEO themselves. This can save thousands of dollars of SEO investment over years.
Aroma Web Design offers SEO and SEM services, for more information on website design, and personal SEO coaching,
contact Aroma Web Design.