Search Engine Optimisation. Basics of SEO FAQs

It can be beneficial to outsource your SEO to an online marketing agency like SF Media. Many companies don't have the expertise to do it in-house or the budget to hire an experienced SEO professional. However, when working with SF Media, you have an SEO expert at your disposal who will create and implement an effective SEO strategy to help maximise your online presence. 

Our team has worked with a whole range of clients in various different industries, making us perfectly placed to carry out effective SEO work that will benefit your business. To find out more information about SF Media and why you should work with us, please visit our About Us page.

No, there isn't a minimum contract for our SEO service. However, given the nature of SEO and that the results are instant, we advise our clients to continue with our service for a minimum of six months to ensure that they can see the positive impact that we are having upon their website and their business.

As no business is the same, the cost of our SEO service really depends on the individual client and their circumstances. We are very flexible with what we can offer to clients, and so our pricing can be tailored to reflect the work that we are doing for that individual client. For more information regarding the price of our SEO service, please see our Pricing Guide.

We use a variety of different on-page SEO techniques that help to improve our client’s website and their overall search engine ranking positions. Firstly, we develop high quality, keyword focused content for your site to ensure that you are using the correct key phrases that your customers are searching for. We also optimise key text sequences throughout your website code to ensure that the right keywords are in the right places for the search engines to pick up on. If you would like further information about how we conduct our onsite optimisation and the techniques we use, please visit our Onsite Optimisation page.

Our approach to off-page SEO includes a range of effective techniques that enhance your online presence and build your websites' authority, by developing a strong backlink portfolio. Some of the main techniques that we implement are article marketing, press releases, online directories, local citations and product editorials, as not only do they provide a high quality and relevant back link to your website, they also help to get your name in front of your target audience. Find out more information about our off-page SEO techniques from our Offsite Exposure page to see how we can help grow your business online. 

Yes. We have worked on implementing a successful SEO strategy on many eCommerce websites in the past. A problem that many eCommerce websites have is duplicate product content, as the products have come straight from the manufacturer and appear exactly the same on other retailers websites. However, we have the knowledge and expertise to give your eCommerce site a competitive edge. We focus on creating relevant and keyword focused page content, product and category descriptions that will stand your eCommerce store apart from your competition, which helps to drive more online traffic and increased online sales.

Please refer to our Success Stories to read some of our SEO case studies and to see how our SEO work has benefited many other past and present clients. 

Our SEO consultations are typically a chance for us to get to know you, your business and your online marketing objectives. We will find out more about your website, your products or services and your business sector and based on this information, we can begin to start planning your SEO strategy so you understand that the approach we have suggested is the right one for your business.

This is also the time for us to discuss the details of the project, such as deadlines, cost, any requirements you may have and any other details that we may want to talk about with you.

To find out more information about our SEO consultations, please visit our Consultation page or Contact Us to book your own SEO consultation.

No, the initial SEO consultation is free of charge as this gives us the opportunity to get to know you and your business and to provide you with a no-obligation quotation for the SEO strategy we have proposed.

The length of a consultation will vary depending on the complexity of the project. The purpose of the consultation is to get to know your business and marketing objectives so that we can recommend a plan of action to improve your websites SEO. This usually takes no more than two hours to gather the information we need and to discuss all the required points. 

We can conduct an SEO audit of your website to review the current SEO performance, as well as looking at how we could make positive changes to achieve your desired results. To receive your free SEO audit, please complete our Free SEO Review form.

Keyword research involves using various tools to identify which search phrases customers are searching for when looking for your products or services online. By identifying the most popular keywords, we can then create an effective keyword focus for your website content to ensure that you are targeting the right search phrases and that your website is then relevant for these terms. To find out more information about the way in which we conduct our keyword research, please visit our Keyword Research page.

Selecting the correct keywords to focus your website and content around can be tricky. It is often easy to fall into the trap of selecting the most popular terms, but they might not always be the most relevant. Depending on the type of business and keywords involved, you may also have to consider the existing competition and evaluate the potential of getting your site ranked for that keyword or phrase. The ideal keywords to target would be ones which have high monthly search volumes, but also where there is potential for your content to be better than the content that is already ranking for those terms.

A long tail keyword is a longer keyword phrase of typically three or four words, and very specific to the topic in question. For example, a short keyword would be ‘Samsung Mobile Phones’ whereas a longer tail example may be ‘Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge Mobile Phone’. Although long tail keywords are often associated with lower average monthly searches, the people that search using these keywords are almost certainly going to be interested in your business and what you offer, based on the specificity of their search. 

If during our keyword research we find a strong keyword or series of keywords that are relevant to your business and achieve a good level of monthly searches, we will aim to implement them into the content that is on your website. If there isn't any content that relevant to your chosen keywords, our expert copywriting team will create quality content to publish to the site, with the keyword focus in mind.

When implementing a keyword focus into the pages on your website, it is often advised to have one main keyword and another one to two keywords targeted within the content of each page. However, a lot of the focus for search engines, such as Google, is on the user and providing them with a great experience. This includes great quality content that is easy to read, and so any keywords implemented into the content would have to feel natural for the user to read. Many experts suggest that for this reason, there is no optimal amount of keywords, but too many keywords could damage the quality of the content.

Competitor analysis involves analysing what your competitors are doing in terms of SEO and seeing how we can adapt that in a way that will benefit your business. It will often involve monitoring and analysing their website, as well as using specialist tools to take a look at various relevant elements to their work such as their backlink portfolio and any keyword focuses that they have. Please visit our Market Research page to find out more information about the competitor analysis and other research that we conduct.

Competitor analysis will help your SEO because we will be able to get new ideas of tried and tested methods that work within your industry. By monitoring what your competitors do and then adapting that to what we are doing, we can achieve better results and continuously improve on the work that we do.

A strong portfolio of good quality and high authority backlinks that are relevant to your business will contribute to increasing your ranking positions within the search engines. However, bad backlinks can also contribute to a decrease in your ranking positions or hold you back from being ranked as high as you should be. Backlinks are seen by search engines as an endorsement of your website or content and so the more endorsements you have, the stronger your potential rankings will be. That said, it is very much a quality over quantity scenario, so one quality link from a very high authority site would be valued much higher than 10 lower quality ones from lesser known sites.

The simple answer here is no. It is very much against the webmaster guidelines provided by Google and other search engines. As backlinks are used by the search engines as an endorsement, they want the links people make to each other to be natural. Backlinks should be earned by creating high quality and engaging content which other sites want to link to. 

A good backlink is a link back to your website from another website, preferably within the same niche as your business or that has a similar target audience to you. The backlink should also be from a website that has a high authority and unique to other links that may be in your backlink portfolio. The aim of this backlink should be to not only build on your backlink portfolio and increase your authority, but to also bring relevant traffic to your website. 

There are many different ways in which a good quality backlink to your site can be acquired, including listing your site on relevant directories, participating in forum discussions, article marketing, distributing press releases and more. However, the key aspect to earning backlinks is to create quality and engaging content for your site that people want to link to. To find out more information about the work that we do to acquire backlinks, please visit our Offsite Exposure page.

A 'followed' link allows the authority and power of a website to pass through to your site via the good quality link that you have acquired, whereas a nofollow link would tell the search engine spiders not to crawl this link and essentially not recognise it in relation to the SEO of the website. However, nofollow links do carry some value in relation to SEO, in the sense that it is good practice to have a more rounded portfolio of links, with a healthy balance between followed and nofollowed links.

Ultimately, the success of your SEO campaign will be measured on the difference it makes to your business, be that sales or enquiries. However, there are a number of other metrics we use to look at the effectiveness of the work we have undertaken in this area. A key indicator is monitoring keyword positions in Google; the work we do on and off site should see your keyword positioning in Google improve over time. The higher your website ranks for your chosen keywords, the more traffic you will get. Other key metrics such as Analytics stats give us a great insight into the success of a campaign.

We provide monthly reports for all clients, which can be viewed in our online client centre. Within the client centre, you will see the statistics for the key metrics that reflect the success of our work, and you will also see how well the keywords for your website are ranking. If there is anything specific that you would like us to report on, or if you would like more in depth monthly reporting on all aspects of our work, then we are more than happy to do so. For more information regarding the reports that we produce for our clients, please visit our Monthly Reporting page.

As there are many different factors that contribute to the ranking of a website, it is very difficult to allocate an amount of time in which ranking positions will increase. It is essential to allow time for SEO work to achieve results, and investing time and patience into SEO will certainly help the work that we do over a sustained period of time, meaning that we can achieve the very best results possible.