Frequently Asked Questions
SEO is complex, and we’re sure you’re bursting with questions about the services we provide. We’ve collected answers to the queries we most commonly receive from our clients.
There is no right or wrong answer here, and Freelance SEO Essex can work with almost any budget. However, it’s important that we agree a set monthly fee that’s both realistic and sustainable.
In order for us to carry out work that’s of the quality required to generate better long-term exposure, we require a minimum budget of £500 per month for localised search campaigns, National campaigns will require a bespoke package costing.
To provide a comprehensive optimisation service, we will need access to your website’s CMS or FTP files in order to make small changes to your tags and text that will enhance your search engine presence. If you would prefer to not give us your site’s login details, in most cases you will be able to carry out any necessary changes yourself under our guidance.
We take several different factors into consideration when selecting the best keywords for your SEO campaign.
We use Google’s own Keyword Planner tool to check the monthly search volumes on the keywords that you want to work with. Generally, the more the keyword is searched for, the harder it’ll be to rank well for it – however, the level of competition surrounding each search term is also determined by the nature of the business, the number of results that are returned in the organic listings, and who is currently dominating the market.
If targeting your initial set of keywords within the specified budget just isn’t realistic, we’ll source different keyword variations that we can incorporate into your package to ensure you get the best possible results from the work we’re doing. For example, we may suggest localising your keywords and targeting specific regions, or working with product pages as opposed to category pages.
We cannot guarantee that you’ll see improvements in positions within a particular timeframe. The pace of your campaign will depend on the competitiveness of the targeted keywords.
Once your onsite optimisation is in place we should see initial spikes in positions as the search engines crawl and index the keyword-rich content. Positions will then tend to fluctuate for 2-3 months as the search bots get used to our link building work. After that, we would expect to see steady progress.
If you have the time and resources, we can suggest ways that you can support our work in-house. This may range from being as active as possible on your own onsite blog to regularly managing your social media accounts.
You will be invited to take part in the creation of your content and we encourage you to send across as much supporting information as possible if you have particular topics or ideas that you’d like us to work with. If you wish, we will give you the opportunity to approve and sign off all copy before it’s uploaded to your website or sent out externally online.
Our blog is full of great SEO tips and advice if you want to learn more.
No. We use organic link building methods that adhere to the search engines’ algorithmic guidelines, which means that your website is highly unlikely to be penalised for unacceptable link building tactics at any point in the future. Here’s more information on our link building methods.
At the end of every month you’ll receive a ranking report, which will outline your progress in the organic listings. We will also give you a summary of the work that’s been carried out and provide links to your external content where applicable.
In some cases, we can put together more in-depth link reports. Please bear in mind that, as we co-ordinate a network of freelance link builders, it can take a few days for us to collect and collate all the information at month end.
Your reporting email can then be followed up with a phone call or a face-to-face meeting if required. We recommend arranging campaign review meetings every 3, 6 and 12 months.
The short answer is no! We operate on rolling monthly contracts but we do ask that you commit to your campaign for at least 3 months. This is because improvements are not normally instantaneous and it can take a number of weeks for our work to be crawled and indexed by the search engines. Larger, more complicated campaigns will require an initial commitment of 6 months.
We don’t tie clients into contracts because our services speak for themselves. Take a look at our testimonials here.
We ask for payment upfront for the majority of our services, with the exception of some copywriting and web design projects.
We ask for payment via standing order, BACs transfer or cheque. Unfortunately we currently do not have the facility to take card payments.
