Why Do You Need SEO?
We are now living in the digital age. This means that people turn to their computers, tablets and smartphones to solve their problems.
A decade or two ago, people would turn to their physical yellow pages directory or something similar if they were looking for a specific type of product or service. They may even have called up a friend to ask for recommendations.
These days people do their own research on the internet (and mostly using Google).
So, if a potential patient is looking for a specific kind of service (plumber, lawyer, accountant and so on) in Google, your website needs to appear at the top of those results. 60% of the volume of clicks goes to the top 3 results. If you are not in those top 3 results you are losing out on a huge amount of potential new patients, and if you are not on the first page you can forget about people finding your website.
SEO (or search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing your website with having the correct structure, pages and backlink profile so that you will appear at the top of the results for specific keywords related to your business.
(a backlink is a link pointing to your website from another website – Google sees this as a “referral” or “vote” that your site is worthy of ranking. Thus, the more high quality backlinks you have from relevant sites to your industry, the higher you will rank).
To sum up, your website needs to be at the top of the Google results for as many keywords related to your industry as possible, e.g.:
yourbusiness + city/area
yourservice + city/area
Here at SERPSHAKE, we are the best digital marketing agency for businesses and professionals in Singapore. We know your industry, we know your customers and we get you the results you need.
But, People Say SEO is Dead?
Organic search is (still in 2015 and beyond) the biggest source of digital traffic and lead generation. As long as Google exists (and as long as it dominates market share), it will continue to drive highly targeted users to billions of search queries every single day.
With the number of internet users growing at an enormous rate (currently 3 billion people in this world have internet access), every business should spend a portion of their marketing budget on obtaining top search results for keywords related to their business (because if your customers can’t find you, you’re losing business to your competition).
The more keywords you rank for, the more traffic you will receive. (Unless you are an incredibly well-known brand like Coca Cola), there is a good chance many people have never even heard of your existence. And what happens when they search for a product or service that you offer but you don’t appear in the search engine (or your competitor outranks you)…?
That’s right, you just lost a potential sale that clicked right into your competitor’s site.
The people who are screaming that SEO is dead and not worth pursuing are most likely the people who are trying to scare others away from SEO so they can keep all that Google search traffic for themselves and their own clients.
Some Quick SEO Facts
If you’re still on the fence about needing to rank, here are some quick facts about SEO:
- 61% of global Internet users research products online. (Interconnected World: Shopping and Personal Finance, 2012)
- 44% of online shoppers begin by using a search engine. (Interconnected World: Shopping and Personal Finance, 2012)
- Worldwide, we conduct 131 billion searches per month on the web. (Comscore, January 2010)
- 57% of TV viewers use the web simultaneously. (Nielson, 2009)
- 70% of the links search users click on are organic, not paid. (Marketing Sherpa, February 2007)
- 60% of all organic clicks go to the top three organic search results. (MarketingSherpa, February 2007)
- 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results. (MarketShareHitsLink.com, October 2010)
- The average click-through rate for paid search in 2010 (worldwide) was 2%. (Convario, January 2011)
- Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links. (HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Report, 2010)
- Businesses with websites of 401-1000 pages get 6x more leads than those with 51-100 pages. (HubSpot Lead Generation Lessons from 4,000 Businesses, 2011)
Is our SEO Safe?
You may have head the warnings or horror stories of SEO agencies doing work on a business’s website and that website getting a penalty and losing all rankings and traffic.
While nobody can guarantee Google rankings (because Google controls their algorithm), we are proud to say that we always strive to do the safest possible form of SEO because we not only study Google’s algorithm extensively, we also invest tens of thousands of dollars annually into our own tests and experiments to see what works with Google.
Our clients are incredibly important to us because we know that without them, we would have no business.
We aim to stay within Google’s guidelines of building “natural” links on relevant sites, sticking within anchor text ratio’s and content outreach. We also aim to have 100% control of every link that we build for our clients, so that these can be edited or removed when necessary.
We avoid use of any automated tools, software of link blasts that send hundreds or thousands of dangerous links to your website. These methods worked many years ago, and they worked very well. Today, using methods like these will get your site penalized, and possibly crippled for life.
How much does SEO cost?
How much does a car cost? Well, it depends. If you’re purely looking to go from A to B with the bare minimum, you can buy yourself a small fiat or a beat up car for a minimal amount. If you’re looking for safety, speed, comfort and reliability, you’ll end up spending a lot more.
As with many things, with SEO you usually get what you pay for.
There will be many people who try to sell you SEO for $99 per month or even $499 per month, claiming it’ll get you the best results and drive countless new leads to your site. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
Good SEO is not cheap. It takes an experienced person or team to know where to obtain links and how to obtain those links. Most of the time, these links are not free and cost money to obtain. It also takes time and attention to ensure that your website gets the necessary links and social signals, spread out over the right amount of time.
If the above is not done correctly, you’re likely to either not get results, or to get initial results and then have your site be penalized (or you may just end up without results and a penalized site).
Whatever you decide to choose in regards to doing SEO for your site, we urge you NOT to choose a cheap provider that promises results. Once damage has been done to your site, it can be incredibly difficult (even for experience professionals) to repair your site and regain the rankings you lost.
In business, ultimately it does not matter how much a service costs, as long as that service generates a positive ROI on your investment. SEO can generate enormous returns (especially when your business is in an industry with high average customer values), but only when targeting the correct keywords. Visitors to your website mean nothing if those visitors don’t convert. Thus, investing in SEO will only be profitable for you if you choose a capable service provider AND if you target the correct keywords.
Here at Serpshake, we take pride in helping and educating our customers to ensure that their SEO campaigns provide the highest possible ROI.
SEO Singapore, What’s Next?
To learn more about how we can improve your search result rankings in Google.com.sg (and Google.com internationally), we offer a free consultation to help you make a decision.
SEO Singapore: there are no hidden charges or fine print. We’re offering 100% pure value, 100% free of charge.
