When you contact a search engine optimisation (SEO) company, you will likely hear terms like "organic or natural listings", "ranking reports", "keywords", and more. It can get confusing, but understanding what these terms mean can help business owners to make smarter decisions when it comes to their SEO campaigns.
SEO companies improve your website's rankings on search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (formerly MSN/Live). A search engine like Google has two main types of listings - organic (also known as natural) listings and sponsored listings. Sponsored listings are the links you see running along the top and right hand sides of the Google search result page. For example, if you type "Online Marketing Perth" in to www.google.com.au, you will see the following:An SEO company's job is to improve a website's organic listings for chosen keywords. The closer your website listing is to the top, the more people will click on it to visit your website.
...many users are at the search egine's mercy and mainly click the top links..." - Jacko Nielsen's User Skills Research
There is no way for SEO companies to provide an exact time frame as to how long it will take for search engine rankings to improve. None of us control search engines - we can only nudge them in the right direction. SEO improvements can take days, weeks, or months to show up so to stay safe, we tell our Perth SEO clients that it can take up to about three months to see notable improvement in their search engine rankings.
SEO companiescan get your website to the #1 spot on Google in the sense that it's possible. However as we mentioned before, nobody controls Google and SEO companies cannot responsibly promise to get any one SEO client to the #1 search engine position. In fact, it would be wise to steer clear of SEO companies that say they can get you to the top spot, as mentioned in our blog post about things to consider before choosing an SEO company.
So SEO companies can't guarantee a set time frame for you to see results of your SEO efforts - they can't even guarantee that you'll get to #1 on Google! What are they good for then, really? What can you expect from SEO companies? A top professional SEO company will review your website and make expectations clear. At the least, you can expect substantially improved search engine rankings and therefore improve your website traffic. If an SEO company is unable to deliver this for your website it should be clear about it from the very beginning. Some SEO companies (including Bang Online Marketing) only track the first 3 pages of Google rankings for their clients because anything after three pages is too far back to matter - not many searchers browse that far through the results.
When you choose your professional SEO company, it will likely present you with a list of keywords at some point in time. Keywords are the words or phrases related to your business that people are searching for. These are the phrases you want your website to show up as high as possible for when searched in Google. If you are a Perth florist, for example, you want your website to appear as close to the first page as possible when someone searches for "Perth florist", "florist Perth", "flowers in Perth", and other related phrases in Google.The ultimate goal for a top SEO company remains getting clients into the number one spot on Google.
Organic listings - The non-sponsored results that are delivered by a search engine when a user enters a search term. These results are generated by the Google algorithm and designed to provide an unbiased listing of results ordered by most relevant at the top.Ranking Reports - A report compiled to show a website's current user search position or "rank" on the search engines for chosen keywords.SEO Keywords or Key Phrases- Words or phrases which people search for that are relevant to a particular website and have sufficient search volumes to increase traffic to that site. These keywords are used to optimise the website in order for the website to be displayed higher in result pages when they are searched.
