First of all, SEO in Ireland is primarily about Google (though not all, Bing and Yahoo are relevant also). And it’s about giving Google what it wants. Let me explain what I mean by that. If you have a business, say you give karate classes to kids in Dublin and you have a website. How do you utilise the web to find yourself new customers using organic search (which is, after all, a relatively inexpensive form of advertising)?  An SEO person can tell you what you need to be doing online – both on your site and in other ways – to present yourself to Googles bots in an attractive way. For example, how to optimise your pages with your keywords:  ’karate’, ‘classes’, ‘kids’, ‘Dublin’.

There are a number of things an SEO person can see and do straight away, the success of which depends very much on the competitiveness of the area. Many of these can be seen in the SEO Starter Guide provided by Google (pdf).

After these tasks and issues have been dealt with, SEO can be become a bit of a grey area. This is because Google does not give away the secrets of their algorithms, they do not reveal exactly how they rank websites. This is for the very good reason that they do not want people to manipulate rankings. Overt manipulation contrary to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines is referred to as ‘black-hat SEO’ (whereas ‘white-hat‘ SEOs are the good guys).  The goal remains to serve up search results pages (SERPs) that are relevant and provide quality content. Therefore, you can get disagreement amongst SEOs about certain issues, duplicate content for example. As SEOs do not have access to the algorithm, it’s impossible for them to say exactly the effect of a certain approach. Also, the algorithm changes constantly, so what worked a year ago may not work today and effects seen before may not be re-created subsequently.

So if you’re new to SEO, here are the kind of questions you should be thinking about when you consider engaging an SEO consultant to work with you on promoting your website:

1. Do they have clients testimonials that you can check out?
2. What do they consider the most important SEO techniques?
3. What is the timeframe involved?
4. How do they intend to measure results?
5. Will they tell you exactly what they’re doing and why?
6. Will they leave you with ownership of any changes?
7. Do they engage with the SEO community in Ireland?
8. How long have they been established in SEO?
9. Do they follow Google Webmaster guidelines?
10. Do they see SEO and online marketing as inter-related disciplines?

Now you have a starting point to kick off your initial meeting with your SEO. It’s important in any meeting to go in there with your questions prepared. How often have you gone to the doctor and found it all very satisfactory until you went home and realised you didn’t ask the obvious questions!

No related posts.