Another brief guide to entry-level SEO services.

Basic SEO - All you need to know

Entry level is a term we use at Matchmaker Marketing to refer to natural or ‘organic’ SEO which is specifically intended to meet the requirements of the SME market. These services are often extremely cheap in the context of business to business products and SEOs offering this level of service will rarely charge more than £50 GBP per month for their work. It is important to understand exactly how such a service can benefit your business and also you need to have a realistic set of expectations for the scope of this level of search engine optimisation.

Firstly, good rankings in Google will help you to find new business and on a local or geographically specific search a first page Google listing is much more cost effective than any other form of local or regional advertising.

Entry level SEO is designed to promote local scale businesses on a local or countywide basis. It can not bring you to the top of Google for highly generic and competitive searches aimed at generalised words or phrases such as “driving instructor” or “wedding dresses” and in many cases such an achievement would be strategically useless anyway. The level of work that would be required to achieve these unhelpful results would cost thousands per month as whole teams of people would be required just to manage a social network presence that may even require viral marketing strategies.

Despite the apparent simplicity of entry level SEO, the Matchmaker Marketing SEO team often find that they have to carry out quite extensive remedial work on websites, hosting and back-link status in order to even begin the job in hand. This is one reason why such activity is best handed to those who are confident in the techniques and disciplines involved. There are also complex issues to do with content and the provision of keyword rich text content that will not raise issues with Google’s Latent Semantic Indexing process.

In summary the key points and questions to bare in mind are:-

• Ask yourself if the small fee for entry level SEO is more cost effective than running adds in the local press and other journals 365 days a year?
• Your company reputation will benefit from a good online presence.
• You will have a much more effective channel to communicate information to your clientele.

Other things that we would like you to consider:-

• The technicalities of SEO will require our technicians to have access to your site server via FTP or a CMS login for content managed sites.
• Matchmaker has access to fully corroborated Google traffic data that enables us to ascertain the very best keywords for your business.
• We will need to make modest changes to the text content of your site and possibly some of the coding as well.
• In very rare cases we may also consider some form of site rebuild in order to help you obtain the results you need.
• Rankings will take a little time to come to fruition as other off site activities are required and we will have to wait for Google to index new links and content on your site.
• You should not overwrite or make changes to the optimised content of your site during this indexing period.
• We continue to monitor the site behaviour in the search engines and will establish our own Google analytics monitoring path.
• We will keep you updated with the aid of comprehensive ranking reports.

There are on occasion a very limited number of sites that we are unable to work with due to certain technical anomalies or where re-directs are involved that we are unable to resolve due to access problems. Our technicians and consultants at Matchmaker Marketing will be able to advise on these.

O.W., 9th November 2009