Improve search rank

How long does it take to see results?

After your development team has implemented our recommendations, it usually takes 1-3 months to see significant, upward improvement in ranking. These optimizations are technical code changes and content revisions which only you can do. But it also depends on the competitiveness of your industry and product category, including how many of your competitors are doing SEO, and your ability to get in-bound links.

How much will it cost?

Hiring an SEO agency in and of itself is not sufficient to boost search rank. Part and parcel of SEO is optimization of the code and content on your website. Thus, the first question is, do you have the development resources and budget to implement the necessary changes to your site? Next, the job scope is largely determined by the size of your product catalogue as well as your business model. For example, are you offering a finite catalogue of products where each product is listed by you and within your control or is your site a marketplace with a theoretically limitless number of products?. Finally, the cost depends on the number of ways that people try to find you (or that you want to sell under). Do you sell something so specific that only a few keywords are applicable to your product offering (e.g., “electron microscope”) or does your offering potentially fall under many keywords (e.g., “down jacket”, “winter jacket”, “men’s jacket”, “navy jacket”). If we take our example of “Jim Beam marmalade” again, the universe of keywords is bigger than you might imagine. For this unusual product, keywords would include “specialty marmalade” but also “jelly” or even “gourmet gift” potentially. To answer the original question, an SEO audit of a typical, medium-size website (based on finite number of products) begins at US$10k.

Does SEO always work?

In Our Philosophy, we make it clear that we never offer guarantees. What we do feel comfortable saying is that we are one of the best agencies in the world. That said, the main reason that we do not succeed is because the client does not implement our action plan.

Since many factors are not within our direct control, there is no crystal ball, only a high degree of probability of success when we take on a client or assignment. Below are some of those factors --

• Your capacity to implement the recommendations in our site audit are central to SEO success. Do you have the budget and commitment to see this crucial phase of execution through?
• Product-market fit: if you’re selling strawberry hot dogs, being the #1 organic search result probably won’t help you.
• We cannot force other sites to link to you, only persuade and influence them to do so. For that matter, your own company’s reputation and brand figures significantly in whether a site will want to link to you.
• We cannot control if competitors are doing SEO or if they have a killer commercial advantage which gets them more links, for example, a famous founder that everyone wants to write about. (Search rank is largely based on authority, i.e., links. Therefore, one of the main ways to overcome a competitor’s rank is to obtain more links than them.)
• We cannot control if Google enters a vertical and exercises its monopoly power to give itself an unbeatable advantage. For example, when Google launched a “sponsored box” for consumer travel collating competitive pricing information for hotels and flights, they made it virtually impossible for other websites to successfully compete for clicks on the first page of search results.
• Google’s zero click search results have an effect similar to what we’ve described above. When the answer to a search query such as “What is the time in New York City?” appears at the top of search results, there is no need to click on any search results. The result is a loss of traffic by those sites showing up in search results beneath that zero-click answer.
• We cannot stop competitors from cheating. On the bright side, gains from cheating are short term.
• We can’t control how quickly Google reassesses rankings. Take the example of new products such as cases for the newest model of iPhone (“cases for iPhone 11”), there can be a huge number of new pages coming up at the same time and, for a while, rankings will be in flux.
• Historical events can sometimes impact where your site shows up. Let’s say your company is called “Bolton” but National Security Advisor, John Bolton, has been in the news a lot recently. Most likely, your site’s rank will be temporarily demoted to make room for results with greater freshness, i.e., links to news about John Bolton.
• If your company is like “Apple” or “Asana” and shares its name with other objects, services, products or brands, search results will include links to other companies or products of the same name, and will not be about your company or products alone. In other words, when someone types “apple” into their browser, their intent is ambiguous. It’s not clear whether they want to learn about fruits or computers so search results contain links about both. Ditto for when they type in “asana”. They may very well want to research yoga poses, rather than software, or vice versa.