SEO Consultancy services  provides your business with an in depth vision of your existing performance and future potential.

Many businesses are frustrated by the lack of return of their Internet presence. SEO consultancy services provides businesses with a clear understanding of what is working and what could be improved.

1. Establishing current performance
2. Full Internet Marketing audit / Defining target markets

1. Current performance

The first stage of seo consultancy services is to understand where the business sits currently:

• How many visitors does the website receive?
• where did those visitors come from
• How many visitors were lost (commonly referred to as “bounce rate”)?
• How many of the retained visitors were converted?

Retention rate, on average, should be 50% or higher and conversion rate should be in the region of 15 -30% for a consumer website. Although conversion rates will be higher for niche products/services and significantly lower for high value items.

The important first step is to focus on the retention and conversion rates. It is often possible to at least double conversion rates by increasing retention. I.e. If your business is losing 80% of total visitors but your conversion rate is 20% there will be a quick win in improving the content to retain more visitors,

For example your website attracts 1,000 visitors per day. You retain 20% leaving you with 200 active visitors you convert 25% of those retained visitors into sales. Your average sale price is £300 hence your daily income is £15,000. By improving content we increase retention levels to 60% and using the same conversion rate business increases to £45,000.

Given the above example you can see that by actually improving what you have can have a significant impact on your business within a very short time frame.

However, this is by no means the end of the story. The next step is to understand where your business sits within the market and the greater opportunity that may exist.

2. SEO consultancy services / Defining target markets

In “1. Current performance” above we established quick wins by tuning content to retain and convert more visitors into business. In this section we address the market opportunities that already exist.

The Internet has an enormous population of people that turn to it to find goods and/or services they require usually within a short timeframe. For consumer items this could be 7-10 days for services like insurance it is more likely to be 2-3 days and of course for B2B sales your business needs to be highly visible in order to be considered.

The question is “how to align your business to this, or these, lucrative markets?” Research is the answer and there is no need for a Crystal ball. Unlike any other market large amounts of data exist in terms of keywords used by people to find what they are looking for. You can even get seasonality and trending data.

The downside is that you need to know where to look, what to look for and be able to interpret what you get into:

• Market size
• Business opportunity
• Competitor analysis
• SWOT analysis of your existing website per competitor and overall per keyword market

In much the same way as it was necessary to improve your content to retain your existing visitors in 1. above. It is now necessary to develop content to attract visitors from new markets.

When researching potential markets the focus is on the business opportunity. Obtaining new markets is expensive and time consuming therefore it is very important to know what the return is likely to be before committing.

Market size

Market size relates to the number of searches made for each keyword per month. Often it is necessary to identify a foundation “keyword” and “tails” for example a foundation keyword may be “SEO” and tails for this would be “SEO Services”, “SEO Services UK” etc.

As of today the keyword “SEO” creates somewhere between 5million and 9million searches per month. It is prudent to work with the lesser of the numbers given as they are only a guide and only to used to provide an order of magnitude.

The numbers above relate to global searches which is interesting to know but not necessarily relevant if your business target the EU or the UK.

The UK search volumes for SEO is circa 500K given a high of 1million. However as stated above the numbers we have discussed so far are the foundation keyword “SEO” which whilst a target it may take considerably longer to compete for a foundation keyword as opposed to a long tail keyword.

The strategy is to achieve good search positions for relevant keyword markets to obtain qualified traffic that will create revenue growth.

long tail keywords build toward obtaining search positions for the foundation keyword. Hence the traffic volumes for ”SEO services UK” is circa 6-8,000 searches per month and “SEO consulting” is around 20,000.

Long tail keywords are easier to target and form an important part of the strategy to successfully target the foundation keyword.

Business Opportunity

In “market size” above we established that the market for the most relevant foundation keyword provides a total market size. As foundation keywords will take a significant amount of time and effort to achieve good marjet positioning the sensible approach is to target long tail keywords based on the foundation.

The business opportunity excludes the foundation keyword but includes the top ten most relevant long tail keywords. To keep this simple using “SEO” as the example we established that the market size for “SEO” globally is 5million searches per month and the UK search volume is approximately 10% at 500,000 monthly searches. As such we need to identify the top ten long tail keywords that will work toward to achieving a good market position for “SEO” but also generate a respectable return in terms for growth now.

1. SEO Services – average search volume (ASV) 65,000
2. SEO UK – asv 44,000
3. SEO Company – asv 33,000
4. SEO Companies – asv 22,000
5. SEO Firms – asv 14,500
6. SEO Consulting – asv 14,000
7. SEO engine optimisation – asv 12,000
8. SEO Specialist – asv 12,000
9. SEO Analysis – asv 9,000
10. SEO Services UK – asv 6,000

Given the above we can now start to look at the business opportunity.

To do this we also need to establish market share based on where the website appears for each keyword. To demonstrate this refer to the chart below.

seo search top ten position market share – Click to enlarge

The chart above tells us what traffic volume we can expect from each of the top ten keywords for each position, within the top ten position for page one, we achieve in search results.

To complete the exercise it is now possible to use the volume data and apply the retention and conversion data we established in “1. Current performance” above.

Using the same data the chart below predicts the associated revenue for each keyword for each position.

seo search top ten position revenue share – Click to enlarge

Using the charts above it is clear that the market opportunity for the selected keywords would bring an incremental revenue stream of between £120,000 at position 10 per month to a much more desirable £2,8million per month at position 1.

Review

In 1. Current performance we looked at short term gains by increasing retention by targeting content to your existing visitors. In retaining more visitors we saw a potential growth from £15,000 per day to £45,000 by actually doing very little.

In 2. Full Internet Marketing audit / Defining target markets we were able to target relevant traffic streams to generate incremental and sustainable growth to potentially £2,8million per month.

Combined monthly revenues would climb to circa £3million per month. this may be a good time to introduce seasonality to convert the above into potential cashflow estimates.

keyword “seo” trend 2011 – Click to enlarge