“The results have been absolutely brilliant, my unique visitors have nearly quadrupled and my January totals alone have exceeded my first full year in business. These are converting into bookings as well, so my visit to Canary Dwarf was a 100% success!”
– Dave Slater, Birding Ecosse
Search engines have made finding stuff simple.
They’re one of the first tools your customers reach for when they want to solve a problem.
Google, the largest search engine in the UK, handles over five billion searches every month and over 90% of consumers worldwide use search engines to find and access websites.
So it’s vital that your website is search-engine friendly when customers are searching for what you have to sell or offer.
But they can be a minefield and the industry is notoriously full of cowboys offering false guarantees and dubious practices.
We don’t do ‘SEO’
Traditionally, the practice of getting websites higher in the results pages has been known as SEO, or search engine optimisation.
But In order to advocate what modern search engine marketing is about, we prefer to use the phrase optimising content for discovery and conversion, but it’s not just a different phrase, it’s a whole different ball game.
We like to look forward not back, and many of the practices favoured by search engine marketers of the past are now frowned upon or punishable, and a clear distinction made between good quality content and ‘tricks’ to get your website noticed.
The following practices are out of favour with Google and definitely NOT on the menu at Canary Dwarf:
- Keyword stuffing – excessive use of key words and phrases
- Thinly-veiled guest blogging – writing articles just to get links onto external websites
- Link farms, directories and exchanges – easy-to-get, but low-grade backlinks
- Low quality content – just words on a page to fool dumb search algorithms
Clearly none of these techniques provide any value for real people looking for your products and services, and slowly search engines have found ways to identify abuse and penalise websites by dropping them down the ranks.
Optimising content for discovery and conversion
The term was coined by highly respected internet marketers Copyblogger, and perfectly explains the real reasons for being found in search engines.
By removing the short-sighted need to reach the top spot in Google or any other search engine, we’ll optimise your website content so that it is discovered by people looking for what you have to offer.
This is where we will use our experience in the wider realms of marketing to capture and convert this traffic into customers. Our holistic approach means we will ensure your website is finely tuned for ‘conversion’ before we even consider how search engines might send more people along.
That’s the only sensible way to do it. And we follow search engine guidelines at ALL times and industry best practice. This is the only way to guarantee your website doesn’t fall foul of search engine penalties and get kicked off the ladder.
Panda and Penguin
And if you wondered why we haven’t made any references to these black and white animals yet, that’s because they’re not so important to websites which follow best practices. These animals are feared by SEO practitioners who sail too close to the wind and have to make adjustments every time they come visiting.
In fact, with our techniques, you’ll often see your website’s rank improve following one of these algorithmic updates, due either to a reward on your part, or a penalty on those previously above you.
Old-school SEO is a short-term solution locked into a payment model that feeds itself. Optimising content for discovery and conversion is a long-term approach to search engine marketing that is fed by a good content marketing strategy that can mostly be managed in-house by you and your staff. And we show you how to do it.
It’s cost-effective and not as hard as you might think. So if you’re ready to put the pandas and penguins to bed and generate some human interest in your site, get in touch with us today.