Ever heard the term 'If you build it, they will come'?
Well, unfortunately, that does not apply to Websites. The truth is that once you have your Website in place and online there is work to be done to get visitors to visit it. The process of designing a site to maximise traffic from search engines is termed Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

Increasing your ranking in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, etc can be a complicated one involving skilled use of many web disciplines. 'Ranking' refers to your site's position when a person does a search for a particular word or term. A high rank would place you in the first few 'non paid for' positions.

At its simplest, SEO involves the careful adjustment of the wording and content within your site to match terms your target audience are likely to use when searching the web for your products. This is called Keyword optimisation, and it is very important that your site's content and structure has been laid out optimally. As a customer of thesingingduck.com your site will have such a structure as part of it's initial design. For customers with pre-existing websites , it is very important that this issue is addressed. Potential customers need to be able to find you easily. The cost of Keyword optimisation of your site depends on the size and complexity of the site, but costs are very reasonable - even on large sites. View our pricing guidelines here.

At it's more complicated, SEO involves a systematic multi-tiered strategy involving tools such as Keyword optimisation, linking/back-linking, marketing, Blogging, Community building, and much more. Getting your site to appear in the highest positions in the search engines takes time and effort over months. Staying there is a continous process also. Costs for this type of service are obviously higher due to the sheer volume of work involved, but returns are greater due to the increasing ranking your site achieves, thereby ensuring more potential customers visit your site.

Many companies specialise in SEO alone. Thats all they do! For this service of increasing a website's ranking in search engines, and thereby increasing traffic, they charge thousands - per month. A spend of ,say, a thousand euro per month is only good value though if that investment results in thousands of euro per month in extra sales.

So how do you decide how much to spend on SEO

A few factors to take into account when deciding on how much to spend on search engine optimisation are:

1. How many extra visitors will a higher ranking bring me?
2. Out of every 100 extra visitors, how many can I convert into customers?
3. How much is each of these customers worth to me?
4. Finally, how much of a loss is it for a potential customer to not find my site, or to find my competitor's sites long before mine.

Think about it like this, if it costs 20 euro to get a person to your site and you make 100 euro from a sale to that customer, that is good business. If you save the 20 euro cost, and so forego the 100 euro from sales, is that good business?

Only you can make that decision.

To discuss the options available to you for SEO, get in touch with us and we will be glad to help. Contact Us

Another type of Optimisation that is relevant to a website's profitability is site optimisation. Consider the 4 points raised above. If the answer to question 2 - were quite low it would be very worthwhile to reassess the structure of a site to find out just why the conversion rate was so low. Getting new visitors to a site is fine, but if many of those hard-earned visitors are not being converted into paying customers, there is something that needs to be addressed other than just traffic. A site with a conversion rate of 10%, getting 1000 visitors a day is failing to sell to 900 people a day. Spending money on SEO to attract more visitors may not be the best approach here. Improving the customer experience to raise that 10% would be cheaper, easier, and would yield much better long-term success.

There is a phrase we always keep in mind when building sites.

Every visitor is a potential customer
Every customer is a potential repeat customer
Every repeat customer is a potential referrer
Every referrer is a potential affiliate
Every affiliate is a potential source of all of the above.