We've saved our clients over £19 million in 5 years!

When we launched Click Submit back in 2009 lots of people doubted that SEO could be done for such a low price but through a huge initial and on-going investment in ingenuity we did it. Now our 3,500+ client base are benefiting from a product and service that matches up to even our most expensive competitors.

Taking our competitions average price of £499.99 per month and comparing that to our price of £49.99 per quarter (for fairness including the managed on-site changes at a one off cost of £49.99) the average annual saving our clients make is £5,749.93.

This means that across our entire network we’ve saved our clients over £19,791,259!

Managed SEO on-site changes launched

When we launched Click Submit back in 2009 we made three ground breaking decisions.

The first was to put the emphasis for the simple on-site changes required to the client. We let our clients know what they need to change on their site then it’s up to them or their web developer to make these changes.

The second was to invest over £250,000 ($400,000) in to a unique way of link building that streamlines the process without any detriment to the quality of the backlinks.

The third was the most important. We decided to pass these cost savings on to our clients.

We listen to our clients and in doing so noticed we were regularly getting asked if we were able to make the recommended on-site changes for them? As a result of this feedback we have decided to launch a new “managed on-site changes” option.

For a one off fee of just £49.99 in VAT we can now do the on-site changes that we recommend. As with every product we launch we’ve kept costs to an absolute minimum hence the low one off cost.

This new option also gives our white label resellers further flexibility when deciding on their product offering.

Over the next week we will be allowing clients to order this new option via their control panel but in the meantime if you would like to take advantage of this new product simply get in touch and we will get everything set up for you.

The 4 golden SEO rules when updating your website

A question we get asked a lot is, “if we're updating our site will this affect our SEO?” the answer is generally no but there are some pit falls you must avoid.

1. Make sure the URLs stay the same. Sometimes it's tempting to change the URL structure of your site in order to make things more organised. For example maybe you have a URL like www.yourdomain.com/product -101 which has a high ranking on the search term “product 101”. If you change the URL to www.yourdomain.com/product-1 then that page would almost immediately drop off Google, your traffic will decrease and you’ll be wondering what’s happened. Sometimes people think a way around this is to 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. This can work but Google can sometimes ignore 301 redirects. Another thing to watch out for are site builders that automatically alter your URLs when you change the page title of a page.

2. Make sure your Meta Data stays the same. Sometimes when you update a site the Meta Data, and in particular your pages titles can change. An example that we've seen many times is where someone's updated their website and after the new site goes live the home page title is simply set to “Home”( See our previous “home is not where your site lives” article). This generally comes about where web design companies are so design led that they ignore critical SEO based continuity when updating a sites design.

3. Pain text content. Make sure that the plain text based content that’s on your existing site is replicated on the new site. So often we’ve see people update their site for a more image heavily “less is more” approach. From a humans perspective these sites can look great, however the search engines are not human. It’s therefore important to make sure that the great looking design sits alongside relevant text based content that the search engines can see and appreciate.

4. The forth rule is easy. Don’t use flash!

We hope you found this article useful and if you have any further questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Panda 4.0 and a bad week for Ebay!

Yesterday Google rolled out their latest Panda update and early indications are very positive for our clients.

We’ve seen a general uplift in rankings across all campaigns since the roll out and we think we know why.

The main talking point has been the impact on large networks that eat up virtually every sector related search term. An example of this is Ebay who were yesterday reportedly seeing a decrease in organic traffic of up to 50%!

Although it’s early days it would appear that for our clients it's generally good news. Our price point means we attract small and medium sized businesses that have been positively affected by this update.

We will continue to monitor this across our network of over 3,500 live SEO campaigns and update this post accordingly over the coming days.

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.

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!

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!