Getting Your Website Found

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the art of ranking your website well  in search engines (well Google really because most people use it) so that when a potential customer types in  ”plumber Brooklyn” – your website pops up.   There may be 440,000  websites mentioning  plumbers in New Zealand – but most visitors really only look at the first 10 sites – the sites on page 1. If your site is not on page 1 it really doesn’t matter if its on page 10 or 200 – its invisible.

There is a lot of nonsense talked about SEO – its really not particularly difficult – but it can be time consuming. The advantage that New Zealand businesses have is that there is often not much competition for their business in their local area. If you  want to promote your products on a worldwide stage then its more difficult to rank well in the main google.com listings (as compared to the google.co.nz NZ only sites).  There are two parts to the equation to ranking a website

On-Page Factors

If you have bought a website package from me than the first part of the equation is done – your on-page “factors” for the search engine rankings will be incorporated and we will have agreed on which keywords you want to rank your business for.

Off-Page Factors

This accounts for most of your ranking – its the links that other sites have to your site. There are several ways to get those links  -  some of them are less than approved by search engines. I prefer to use article marketing and local directory submissions (for New Zealand rankings).  Depending on the industry links from social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter can help too.

I make no guarantees of  when or even if your site will rank well,  particularly because a brand new site may take up to a year to really settle down and consistently rank in the  search results. Just like any form of advertising it takes a while to  establish your brand. Search engines add a lot of weight to  old sites – so if you have had a domain for a while (regardless of the quality of the website you’ve have on it) – don’t drop it without talking to me first!  Age really does add an advantage in this game.

SEO Pricing

Its hard to price SEO because there are so many variables – your site, your industry, your competition.  The search engines change their algorithms all the time – and yes sometimes a little bit of luck helps too!  I’ve given an indication of prices below but will confirm your particular needs before giving you a firm quote:

Price: NZ$250/month per keyword phrase

Initial order is a minimum of 3 months as its unlikely you will see useful results in less time than that.  This program will see me initially listing your site in several local directories plus 10 articles a month distributed with your link. At that point we can evaluate based on traffic to your site and actual rankings and fine-tune the plan. Basically though I would expect that  for a new site and a moderately competitive keyword that it will take a year. Once you have a stable ranking you have to do little to maintain it.  For this price I will provide ghost-written articles.