Money into Adwords or SEO?

[R.O.S.S.I]

As a company would you want to plough your money into Adwords or SEO? or have a mix of both and if so, what kind of mix, more Adwords less SEO, 50:50 etc?

I ask as the place I am currently working does no PPC work at all at the moment but has a web company in managing the SEO for their website.

Now we aren't a company whereby you can track conversions per se as we don't sell any tangible product which you can buy through our website - our website is a vehicle purely for people to find out about us, the services we offer and then ultimately get in touch with us etc.

Say for arguments sake we spend £1000 per month on SEO and £0 on adwords, I know its difficult to say without examining likely costs of keywords but what proportion do you think we should employ for Adwords if we were to take it from the SEO budget? Or do you think we should spend the same amount? More?

I don't know much about this area, and I think SEO is a bit of a dark art in some respects, but even though this is a bit of a vague question in general should we be doing more Adwords stuff or more SEO?

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

We appear to show on Google on the first page for most things related to "place name + various services we offer" which I imagine is down to the SEO on the site.

But im not sure thats because im logged into Google with my work business Google account so not sure if it shows our own business higher ranked to just us. Is there a way of running Google searches as a general member of the public, or are the results i see going to be the same as everyone else?

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

Have you also got a Google+ account setup for the business that is verified etc

Yep. Google Plus page set up with business address and verified.

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

Have you also got a Google+ account setup for the business that is verified etc

Ah I will check that out tomorrow see if it brings any differennt results up.

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

We do Twitter, LinkedIn and G+ atm in terms of social media. I'm going to push for them to open a Facebook page too which we may sink some advertising in as well.

We're pretty regular with blogs on our website too so in that respect the content is pretty fresh. I aim to get at least 2 blogs up a month about topical things so hoping this helps with SEO.

I'm going to look into adwords and see what the likely costs are for the keywords we'd be looking at. Google must be making an absolute fortune from Adwords. I've seen some keywords at higher than £12 a click so the mind boggles just how much money its making them!

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

The pertinent question is what are the SEO company doing for £X per month (I hope it isn't a £1000!!)?

Can you give your site URL ?

This is what their strategy from Jan-March was..... (and no we don't pay £1000 for SEO!)

Continue refreshing landing pages on the site - To improve user
engagement on the site, which will help users find the information they are
looking for quickly -and geo targeting

Local optimisation - review and refresh meta titles on category
pages. - Improve local visibility in search results for terms appearing
alongside the areas you operate

Carry out a full review of the backlink profile - Identify and remove
links in the profile which no longer provide value to the overall quality score ofthe link profile

Google Analytics Review Monitoring - Google Analytics to identify and monitor any trends, issues or opportunities

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

That's what I'm thinking - I've no idea they are doing what they say. Apparently we have ten hours of their time each month which is what they divvy up in that list (or were doing in Jan-March.

I know they do send though content change suggestions for various pages on our site but other than that I know very little of what they actually do.

Does anyone know what the going rate is per hour for decent SEO management?