Category Archives: Digital

Our website is currently appearing on page 1 of Google for over 30 keyphrases. SO Creative are not experts in search engine optimisation, but surprisingly we achieved this without the need for a specialist search engine optimisation company (SEO).

When you consider that three independent, UK based SEO companies estimated £500 per month (PER MONTH!) on a minimum 6 month contract to achieve far less results than this (page 1 for just the 3 keyphrases above), it’s pretty unbelievable.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not questioning the value of SEO in general. It’s effectiveness is undisputed and some SEO challenges involving highly competitive, broad keywords or keyphrases obviously take a huge investment of expertise, knowledge, time and money to hit the top spots.

What I am questioning though, is the honesty and integrity of three independent, UK based, ‘award winning’ SEO companies. One of whom seemed quite confident that to get my home page to rank on page 1 of Google for ‘London creative agency’ alone, would take nothing short of rocket science and up to 6 months. With an average of 4,400 monthly UK searches, it would apparently involve not only well optimised copy, (and a lot of it), but also internal link building, external link building, article writing, postings, a dash of this, a dusting of that and £500+Vat per month (indefinitely and with no guarantees offered). Why per month? Because apparently these processes would need to be added to or tweaked on a monthly basis otherwise the rank would start slipping again. Wow! SEO sounded really hard.

It is important to remember here that I did not ask to rank page one for a highly competitive, broad keyphrase such as ‘design agency’. No, I was advised to choose less competitive, longtail keyphrases (more words) in order to stick to this ‘low’ budget.

So, how did we do it?

Whilst I was in the process of selecting an SEO company to work with, my senior designer, in-house web developer and I were busy revamping our website. The design was complete and the build was underway. I was assured by all three SEO companies that work should start immediately and did not need to wait until the build was complete.

Despite this advice, I was not convinced I would get my money’s worth by signing on the dotted line before the site was launched, so I stalled. And while I was waiting I did a bit of internet based research to make sure I fully understood what my money was going to buy.

The interface of our content managment system (CMS) is very intuitive and user friendly and we have control over many aspects that search engines use to organise and make sense of web page data. As I was in the process of uploading content anyway and had access to these areas I thought I may as well also complete the SEO information. Obviously, it would take more than this (£500 per month more I assumed) to rank on page 1 of Google, but I was curious to see what I could achieve before the experts worked their magic.

So, I set to work and optimised not just three, but every single page of our website. A laborious process requiring basic SEO knowledge and common sense.

The waiting game

The results of optimising your site are never immediate. It takes a while for Google to ‘crawl’ your site and pick up on the changes and up to six months for the full effects to be realised. So initially (after about a week or so) I noticed that I was at least now appearing on pages ranging from 1-5 for some of my keyphrases. Page 1 for keyphrases with seemingly little competition (e.g ‘luxury brochure design’) and page 5 for more common search terms (e.g ‘London creative agency’). Pretty cool I thought and wondered what would happen if I sat back and waited.

Every so often I checked our rank for ‘London creative agency’ – my most ambitious keyphrase. Starting at page 5, it took about two months to reach page 3 and that is where it stayed until all of a sudden, after six months, a few in-bound links and a small number of articles later, there was a huge shift and we arrived at page 1.

Upon further inspection we discovered we also now ranked on page one for over 30 highly relevant keyphrases (with varying degrees of competition and popularity).

Perhaps I am missing something and I welcome any comments to prove me wrong, but if the advice I was given is to be believed, in order to maintain our positions we will need to invest significant time (£500 worth) in our SEO every month….we’ll see. For now the number of hits we receive is increasing week on week as are the number of new clients who have found their way to us through a search engine.

Sound SEO advice

As a London creative agency we have designed, built and maintained many websites over the years, but we never previously offered search engine optimisation advice or services believing it best left to the experts. Whilst this is often still the case, many of our clients require nothing particularly complex and now, along with great website design and robust build we can also give sound advice on how to rank on page 1 of Google without breaking the bank!

Search Engine Optimisation London