Common Search Marketing Myths – Part 3: Ongoing SEO, Website Hosting and Mobile Optimisation
SEO is a Constant, Ongoing Necessity
Most SEO agencies, Varn included, will offer ongoing SEO services which are paid for on a monthly basis. This might cover ongoing technical SEO, backlink optimisation, content creation or even AdWords management – amongst a range of other search marketing services. But are the ongoing payments and potential benefits really worth it?
A reputable SEO company will carefully consider your search marketing requirements before recommending a service which is bespoke to your business – whether that’s a one-off, standalone service or something more long-term and recurring. One-off services might include a Bespoke SEO Audit, setting up Google Analytics and corresponding goals / funnels or custom reports, for example. Ongoing tasks could include monthly reporting, email newsletter creation or paid search management. Despite the vast range of SEO services available, one thing is certain – not everyone will require or even necessarily benefit from ongoing SEO.
In order to determine whether you’re paying for more SEO than you really need, you should take a look at three separate factors – what your competition are doing, the type of keywords and clients you’re targeting and your return on investment. If you’re targeting long-tail, specific or branded keywords, for example, with minimal competition who aren’t doing much in the way of SEO themselves, you might not need recurring search marketing services in order for your website to rank well and target your ideal consumers.
Varn can help produce a bespoke SEO strategy suited to your specific requirements – whether that means ongoing services or a one-off review. Don’t spend more than you have to on search marketing – contact the experts at Varn today for a discussion on how we can help.
Cheap hosting is Good Value for Money
If you’re looking for website hosting, it’s understandable that you might head straight for the hosting package with the smallest price tag. After all, a new website can cost a pretty penny – so you might want to try and save a bit of change elsewhere. However, as alluring as cheap hosting might be, it’s almost always too good to be true.
The price you pay for website hosting will be reflected within the quality of service you receive. Not only should you choose a host with specifications which suit your requirements, you also need to make sure they offer great customer support, they’re easy to contact, they have an accessible control panel and favourable server response times. If not, your website loading speeds can be negatively impacted and your site may even go down and be completely inaccessible due to server downtime.
Not only will slow loading speeds and downtime make your site inaccessible for multiple potential customers, they can also have a negative impact on your SEO. As explained within our recent blog about website speed, an industry rule of thumb in 2017 is that a webpage should be loaded within around 0.5 of a second to retain interest from visitors. Page load time has been a ranking factor within Google’s algorithms for some time now – pages which are slow to load will have high bounce rates, resulting in fewer conversions. If your site is down for more than a few days due to server downtime, you even risk being penalised by Google.
Remember, your website and corresponding hosting is an investment. The quality of service you get from your hosts will almost always reflect the price you pay. For more information on how loading speeds can impact your SEO, contact the professionals at Varn.
Mobile SEO isn’t as Important as Desktop SEO
When it comes to SEO, most of us optimise the desktop version of a website before even considering mobile optimisation. We may even design mobile versions of a site and ensure the site is built to be responsive, with the content displaying correctly when viewed on different devices. However, it’s rare that anyone spends as much time looking into mobile specific SEO as they do within the desktop version of a website.
This year, Google have announced that the majority of searches are now mobile driven and that search results and rankings will soon be determined on a mobile-first indexing system. When auditing or optimising your site, it’s more important than ever to review how Google’s smartphone Googlebot (crawler) accesses your pages and not just their desktop bot. Ensuring your website is properly optimised for mobile will help you get the most from your website rankings and stay ahead of your competition.
So how do you make sure your website is mobile friendly according to Google’s crawlers? There are a number of test you can carry out to help, including Google’s Mobile-Friendly test and Google Search Console. Search Console provides a ‘fetch as Google’ functionality which can be used to fetch and render your site the same way as Google would on a mobile, as well as a Mobile Usability report to help uncover any potential issues regarding mobile SEO.
You can also contact the search experts at Varn for more information on how to make sure your website is mobile friendly. We can help you make the most of your site and associated rankings; on both mobile and desktop. Stay one step ahead of your competition with Varn – get in touch with us today for more information.
That’s it for another instalment of Common Search Marketing Myths! If you haven’t already, remember to check out the previous posts within this series, covering Exact Match Domains, Backlinks and Search Engines, and Meta Tags, H1 Headings and Google AdWords. Until next time…
