Small Business SEO Packages

Search engine optimisation / SEO is a widely used, but poorly understood term / acronym respectively. It is a multi-billion dollar industry globally, and has always been rife with misinformation, disinformation, and endless theories on what does and does not work. Couple that with;

• a lack of ethics from many self-styled SEO “consultants”
• an array of dodgy marketing tactics
• a willingness to ignore best practice and industry guidelines

and you have a recipe for unhappiness on the part of many innocent website owners who are unable to discern the genuine and ethical from the snake oil salesmen. People get taken advantage of… To avoid that, really you need to know what SEO is, and what it is not…

As the first step in any of our small business SEO packages I conduct a comprehensive website audit to identify all issues and options that could be impeding the site’s rankings. We then systematically work through remedying any Panda (content ) and Penguin algorithm (links) penalties that may have been incurred. Often, this is due to prior unskilled or unethical SEO efforts.

What SEO Is

According to a survey of SEO teams, agencies and individual consultants in late 2018, links are still the most important element affecting website rankings.

There’s a none-too-delicate irony in this of course, because getting caught out actively building links to manipulate your website rankings is a breach of Google’s terms of service…  Punishable by either a manual or algorithmic penalty depending on the severity of the offence.

The second most important aspect is website quality… and Google’s line is that if you build great content, editorial links will follow as a matter of course because visitors will WANT to link to you.

Not to put to fine a point on that, but if you are a small business in a big town; such as a plumber, electrician, garage, carpenter etc – you probably don’t have the time, skills or budget to create the array of fascinating, Topic-based content articles that might attract natural / organic links… So whilst TheSEOguy.co.nz agrees that links are your best option, but most of the the people providing link-building services have no comprehension of what constitutes a “good” link or a “toxic” one… A significant number of them don’t even care! All they are intent on doing is suckering you out of a few dollars for a quick’n dirty link building package.

Resolving Google Penalties

Since 2012, this has been a big part of what we do;

1. Google now scrutinises your site for any overt evidence of “over-optimisation” via the Panda algorithm in content on the website and assesses its overall quality.
2. The Penguin algorithm evaluates your site’s link profile and quality of incoming links.

That paradigm shift occurred in 2012 and can damage rankings severely.

There are sundry other algorithms that examine different facets of your site for various transgressions; too many advertisements above the fold etc. You can read through the algorithm launch sequences here; https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change 

How to Optimise Web Page Load Speed