OK, so here’s the thing with SEO. Firstly, as I write this, I’m wearing two hats – 1. A PR consultant providing services to my clients and 2. A business owner who has just recently mulled over the pros and cons of paying someone to do my SEO.
As a PR consultant, I guess the mysteries of the secret world of SEO and Google’s magical algorithm, were mostly just that, a mystery. It wasn’t until I had a client exclaim to me in delight that because of all the content we had been writing for her, she had very quickly reached number one in her Google ranking. Whilst this was exciting, I hadn’t actually thought about applying any of these techniques to my own business.
It wasn’t until recently when the marketing, or lack thereof, bombshell dawned on me (ie I hadn’t ever done any for Bay PR!) that I even thought about my company’s Google ranking or how we present on Google Search.
When I hit ‘search’ for Bay PR, I found it very easily and so didn’t worry but after I went away and thought about it (yes it took me a while!) I realised that unless anybody is specifically looking for us by name, they wouldn’t find us. I punched in all the obvious key words, ‘PR agency Sydney’, ‘PR consultancy’ etc. and we didn’t show up anywhere that I could see – other than one ‘Consumer PR agency’, where we did at least show on the front page (mostly after all the others).
I then went into the back end of my website and after a very long time reading the tips and cross-checking with lots of on-line guides and tutorials (on Google of course!) made my best attempt at fixing up the key words on some of the page descriptions. But when I went to bed that night, I didn’t sleep too well. I just didn’t feel confident I had done the right thing and frankly, whether I’d made it any worse.
That’s when I called an SEO company. The guy was recommended to me by a client (as opposed to one of the many SEO company emails that land in my spam box).
“I just want to make sure that my website is set up with all the key words and the meta data coding etc.” I said.
He did a quick check of my website while I sat there, holding my breath.
“Not even in the first 100,” he diagnosed.
“Oh,” I said dismally. But then I remembered I definitely popped up under “Consumer PR Agency”.
I quickly showed him, feeling an uplifting sliver of hope.
“That’s Google Maps,” he said.
I looked at him quizzically.
“Google maps will list all “Consumer PR agencies” nearby – that’s you. If you were in the city or anywhere else, you wouldn’t show up at all.
Right then. Truly humbled.
So what to do? Well, the friendly SEO guy wanted to charge me for a 6-month campaign whereby he would fix up all the coding, key words and also then get his in-house content writers to write (my) content and place it on other sites.
“But that’s what I do!” I exclaimed.
“Yes but we do it differently,” he said, “We have a list of directories.”
Hmm. It sounded very similar to the type of work we do, writing, blogging and sharing content across a wide range of outlets – websites, publications, media outlets, etc. I didn’t really like the idea of having someone else write my content about my business for me.
Also, he wanted to charge me around $3,500 which seemed a big investment, when all I really wanted was to make sure my website key words etc. were set up properly and then perhaps I could attempt to increase my Google ranking myself, by sharing some good content and doing other PR and marketing activities and stuff.
Also, given the type of industry I work in, I’m wondering how many clients would decide to go with a PR agency that they Google searched cold? Feel free to let me know your thoughts on this, as I am curious.
So that’s what I have decided to do. In the meantime, I have taken on an SEO company to do me a quick ‘health check.’ I’m paying $375 as a one-off fee and then the rest is up to me.
I’ll let you know how I go. In the meantime, please provide any feedback or suggestions you have here – all gratefully received!