Thursday 24 April 2014

SEO. The 4 most important elements to getting a page 1 result.



A question we get asked a lot is; how long will it take to get to page one on Google? This is a very difficult question to answer because it’s very specific to the site and how competitive the search term is. Generally we’re able to predict how long it will take based on the number of words and how geographical the search term is but it’s still very hard to be 100% accurate.

May factors make the difference between sites that succeed with their SEO and those that don’t but here are the most common factors in a sites ultimate success.

1. Making the on-site changes. It’s critical that after you’ve signed up you make the recommended on-site changes. These are located both within your report and via the SEO analyser. You need to achieve a relevance rating of over 75 out of 100. The sooner these changes are made, the sooner the search engines will appreciate your relevance for your chosen search terms.

2. Allow the backlinks to get indexed. It can take between 3 and 9 months for the back links that we build to show up on any checker. The way in which we request your back links and then our partner webmasters place them is totally white hat, but can take a little bit of time to take effect.

3. Social awareness. The search engines are focusing more on social signals and in particular how many likes and follows you have. They’re also looking at the quality of the likes and follows you have. Our like to follow system will help you achieve this and is totally unique in the market.

4. Patience. This is the most key element. The work we do takes time to have an impact. Generally the Google results are based on who sticks out their strategy the longest. Don’t get us wrong, we do get clients all the time that see good results after just a few weeks but on average it takes between 3 and 9 months to see noticeable impact. The reason for this is just down to how competitive your search term is. Good results are always achievable but it can just take a bit of time for certain search terms.

Our quarterly service is built around these and lots of other more technical elements that we see becoming more important to rankings. We’re constantly investing in new products that you can benefit from at no additional cost in order to take advantage of these factors.

We hope you found this article interesting and if you have any questions relating to our services feel free to get in touch.

Thursday 17 April 2014

Seasonal traffic fluctuations



We often get back in to the office after bank holidays to e-mails from panicked clients saying that their hits have dropped dramatically and they don’t know why.

With the Easter weekend upon us we thought it would be a good time to approach the subject of traffic fluctuations. We’ve done some research across all of our SEO and Adwords campaigns analysing click data in order to produce one of the first definitive guides to how the holiday season affects traffic.

While there are certain sites that will attract more traffic over a weekend or holiday weekend, generally traffic is lower. Over the Christmas period we saw a decrease in traffic over 31.2% across our 3,000 plus clients. We will monitor and update this post after the Easter holidays to see how this period compares with Christmas.

In terms of other factors that affect traffic. Major sporting events can have an impact so it will be interesting to monitor things over the upcoming world cup. We will certainly blog about this when the time comes.
It makes for interesting reading and gives you a small insight in to one of many factors we are able to monitor due to the size of our client base.

Hope you found this interesting and from everyone at Click Submit... Happy Easter!

Wednesday 9 April 2014

Rankutation!



Everyone's always trying to second guess the search engines in order to position themselves higher and outfox the competition. There are many factors that we see are important but an area that we're starting to see some great movement is reputation. The search engines and in particular Google are staring to place an increasing amount of significance on reputation.

The reason for this is firstly, they see review sites as a possible threat to their search. So, bringing an element of reputation to a Google users experience would negate their need to search a review site directly and therefore put out a potential long term threat from the review sites.

We know that if you get over 40 reviews within a 12 month period on either trust pilot or the review centre then Google will show your star rating on your search listing.

What we also know is that click through rate (CTR) is not just important for Adwords but it’s also a factor on the natural rankings, if your listing has a star rating then your CTR will improve. Therefore, your reputation can have a direct impact on your natural rankings.
If you're a user of Adwords of course the star rating will also improve the CTR on your Ad thus driving down the cost per click, which is good news!

So, a good reputation is key. Real clients giving real feedback but how can you fend against bad reviews? We have the solution. We’re currently developing a new product called ‘positivity’ which we’re looking to roll it out over the summer, and the best bit? It will be available to our clients at no additional cost!

Friday 4 April 2014

The secret heartbeat of Google and the diversification of its product base



If you search Google news on the keyword ‘SEO’ the internet is full of so called experts second guessing what they think ranks you better, while also making sweeping statements about what Google thinks is bad.

Google is a very rare beast, a publicly owned company with a secret algorithm at its core. A secret that can make or break business and personal reputations.

So, how can a public company that influences so much be allowed to keep this a secret?

Google has the ultimate power but it’s also the ultimate democracy. People give them power by using their search but if they were to start abusing that power than in theory people could start using other services. So a competitive search environment is important in order to self-regulate the industry.

Google's come under fire recently for being to ‘big brotherish’ but as the pressure grows to continue their financial growth they may push their users too far and that could lead to their eventual downfall.

Our opinion is that Google understand the feeling in terms of user’s privacy and are therefore looking at diversification as a route to growth by moving in to operating systems and software. This diversification also increases peoples dependence on Google and ups the migration pain to almost unbearable. Although Apple is king of this tactic Google are now a close second.

Whatever the future holds one thing is for sure, Google aren't going anywhere and neither are we! While the market second guesses what Google are doing we’re able to see more clearly what’s going on due to the high volume of active campaigns we’re operating.

We recently celebrated our 3,000th active client, this enables us to monitor trends, then based on that data we engineer new unique products that help direct traffic to a website. Our quarterly service, charged at just £49.99 allows you to lock in these and any future products that we launch.

Hope you've enjoyed this article and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch.