SEO Brisbane

It’s important to be realistic about timeframes when it comes to search engine optimisation. SEO can achieve an incredible return on investment, but don’t expect an overnight success. Normally you’ll see some positive results within 4-6 months, but most SEO campaigns will take around 8-18 months to mature. Depending on the starting condition of your website and the level of competition in your industry you could expect to see significant increases in rankings anywhere between 3 and 9 months. Having realistic expectations around your SEO campaign is critical to your success, so you must give it time to work.

Your SEO campaign is tailored to your business, so your recommended investment will vary depending on the competition in your industry and how ambitious you want to be. Our aim is to make SEO affordable to the majority of businesses, so our regional SEO campaigns start from as little as $1,000 per month plus gst and our national SEO campaigns normally start from $3,000 per month plus gst. It’s important to confirm an SEO campaign with sufficient resources to achieve your goals, so make sure you focus on the outcomes you wish to achieve and find an SEO package that’s suitable. You can always start with a lower SEO package and increase over time, but just don’t be tempted by competitors offering SEO deals that seem too good to be true. To find out more about our SEO packages and the recommended budget to achieve your specific business goals, book in for your FREE Discovery Session today and we’ll explain your full range of options and what’s included.

No reputable SEO company can guarantee specific rankings. Google themselves provides a warning not to hire SEO companies offering guaranteed rankings or pretending to have any sort of special relationship or priority listing service with Google (no-one has a special relationship with Google!). At Media Heroes, we follow Google’s guidelines and as a ‘white hat’ SEO agency, we don’t make any ambiguous claims. We focus on doing SEO the right way and making our clients money.

Usually, the motivation for asking about guaranteed rankings is to gain some assurance around seeing results from your SEO investment. Our approach is to set clear KPIs for your campaign around impressions, rankings, organic visitors and conversions. We can then set specific goals around your performance, so you can clearly measure your SEO results. We aim to achieve and maintain at least 50% of your rankings on page one of Google for your primary keywords, but it’s important to recognise that the real focus is to ensure your SEO campaign is profitable, rather than worrying about individual rankings.

Ultimately, the success of most SEO campaigns comes down to how profitable they are. While profitability and return on investment are great metrics, they aren’t very useful in the early stages of an SEO campaign. SEO takes time to mature, so it’s important to have some clear KPIs, especially for the first 12 months. There are four KPIs (key performance indicators) that provide the most meaningful measures of success for SEO campaigns:

1. Impressions – This is a measure of online brand visibility. Essentially, it measures how many people are shown your website on a search result page within Google. Impressions will increase as both your primary keywords and any long tail keywords begin to rise in the search engines. This is normally the first metric that increases, so it’s one to take note of in the first few months. After 6-12 months this metric may plateau, so don’t expect this one to continue rising at the same rate as it does at the start of your campaign

2. Rankings – At the beginning of your SEO campaign, we’ll confirm a list of primary keywords to target. Your primary keywords are those that are the most valuable for your to rank for, based on a combination of search volume and relevancy. Rankings for your primary keywords will normally start to reach page one of Google after about 3-6 months, but your most competitive keywords may take much longer depending on your competition. Ideally, we want to maintain at least 50% of your primary keywords on page one, as your rankings will directly influence the amount of organic visitors your website attracts each month. While rankings are critical to the success of your SEO campaign, don’t focus too much on individual keywords or even natural fluctuations in the rankings and don’t expect too much too soon. While rankings are extremely important, remember that organic visitors and conversions from your SEO campaign are actually the measures that make you money

3. Organic Visitors – Whether we call them visitors, traffic, sessions or clicks, we essentially mean the same thing. We wish to measure how many user sessions take place on your site each month that have originated directly from a search engine. The get even more specific, we can isolate ‘non-branded organic visitors’, as this removes searches for your brand and gives us the purest measure of your SEO traffic. Once your SEO campaign begins to mature (after about 6 months), we can then use the ‘organic visitors’ metric to calculate your cost per click (CPC) from your SEO campaign. Knowing your SEO CPC allows you to compare your SEO costs directly with other digital marketing campaigns, such as AdWords, which is a great way to understand your comparative marketing costs. Your organic visitors will only begin to rise significantly once you’re ranking on page one for enough of your primary keywords, although some clients may see significant rises in organic visitors as a result of page one rankings for long tail keywords

4. Conversions – Goal completions or conversions are the output from your search engine optimisation campaign. Some clients focus on soft conversions, like gaining email marketing subscribers, video views, or document downloads. However, most business owners prioritise hard conversions like email enquires or phone enquiries (lead generation). Hard conversions for ecommece websites are easy, as we can measure actual online sales. If we assume most people wish to focus on hard conversions, we need to ensure the value gained from your SEO campaign is greater than your SEO investment. Building a profitable SEO campaign takes time, so you wouldn’t expect to see a positive return on your investment for at least the first 6 months, but between 6 and 12 months this metric should be improving steadily. For a lead generation website, we measure the number of leads gained as a direct result of the SEO campaign, so we can calculate the cost per lead (CPL). CPL is a useful comparative measure, so you can see how your SEO campaign stacks up against your other marketing campaigns. In order to calculate your return on investment (ROI), you need to understand your value per lead (VPL), which is essentially the average lifetime gross profit earned from each new enquiry. Don’t worry if this sounds a bit complex, our SEO consultants will work with you to explore the metrics that matter most to your business throughout your campaign. At the end of the day, your SEO campaign needs to generate leads and sales for your business, so your ‘conversion’ KPI is critical. Increases in conversions won’t happen straight away, so use impressions, rankings, and organic visitors first, then over the longer term switch your focus to conversions

Each SEO campaign has individual goals set for the four KPIs, as each website’s starting positions are different. These goals allow us to clearly measure how your SEO campaign is progressing over time, so everything is as transparent as possible.

Absolutely. SEO needs to be approached systematically to achieve long-term success. What makes our SEO campaigns so successful, is how we prioritise our time and where we focus our efforts. SEO isn’t about ‘going through the motions’ and just completing tasks or using ‘gut feel’ to solve problems. Each SEO campaign is different, but we do have some common stages within our SEO processes to ensure consistency and quality.

1. Strategy – Understanding your business, your goals and your ideal target market is fundamental to your SEO. With this in mind, we then complete thorough keyword research, competitor research and a complete website audit, so we know how to approach your campaign and the resources required to achieve success

2. Foundation – The first few months are spent on the foundations of your SEO campaign. These foundations are the onsite SEO factors within your website, which include website architecture, onsite content, coding and much more. In some cases, there may be a lot of work to do to even prepare your website for your SEO campaign, but time spent on this stage is essential. We maintain a strict set of SEO Standards to make sure all websites have the right foundations to perform at their best

3. Authority – Once the SEO foundations are in place, we can begin to focus on building authority. Domain authority (DA) is essentially how powerful your website is and it’s potential to rank on the first page of the search engines. This stage is a continual process within your SEO campaign and is actually broken up into sub-stages for new campaigns, then it moves into a ‘test and iterate’ approach as your campaign matures. Building authority is achieved through a broad range of actions including content marketing, link building and social signals

4. Auditing – We use a range of SEO tools to monitor your onsite SEO, offsite SEO and overall performance each month. These regular SEO audits are critical to help us focus our time and feed directly into our workflow planning for your campaign. The SEO audits may emphasis changes needed in response to new algorithm updates or there may be technical SEO factors that need priority attention. Our auditing process feeds back into both the foundation and authority stages to help us continually improve your SEO campaign

5. Review – Your business is constantly evolving in response to new opportunities, threats and competitors. This means your SEO campaign can’t operate in a vacuum. Our regular SEO consultations are a key part of your campaign, as they allow us to discuss important changes affecting your business. By building a strong partnership together and being able to have open and honest discussions, we can help you to continually achieve the best from your digital marketing investments. Our review process commonly leads to changes in keyword targeting, conversions, website enhancements and integration with other marketing activities

SEO takes time to generate results, so if you need a more immediate boost in enquiries an AdWords campaign can be incredibly powerful. If your budget allows, we strongly recommend running a simultaneous AdWords PPC campaign. In addition to generating leads and sales, AdWords provides a wealth of data and statistics to help refine your Brisbane SEO campaign. Even when your SEO is performing, having double brand exposure on the first page of Google has significant benefits and PPC has the flexibility to be a ‘volume control’ for lead generation over the long-term.

Google penalties can either be manual actions and/or algorithmic penalties and obviously both are bad news. If you suffer a manual penalty you‘ll receive a notification via your Google Search Console, so we can address the problem and seek a reconsideration request. Algorithmic penalties are harder to diagnose and although we can attempt to correlate the time you lost traffic with a known algorithm update, this doesn’t always work, as you could have several algorithmic penalties affecting your website at any one time. The only sure way to recover is to conduct a full SEO audit and address everything that could be holding your website back. Media Heroes can certainly assist you with SEO penalty recovery, but the only sure way to rank in the long-term is to play by the rules.

We sure do. It’s important that whoever you choose as your SEO agency, they follow the guidelines published by Google and the other major search engines. As a white hat SEO agency, we play by the rules and work to ensure our clients deserve their place on the first page. Media Heroes have developed our own SEO standards that exceed the webmaster guidelines for Google and those for Bing and Yahoo as well. The opposite approach is ‘black hat SEO’, which is where people attempt to trick or outsmart the search engines by using dubious techniques that may produce short term gains, but ultimately cause your site irreparable damage. If you value your business, please make sure your SEO agency is only using white-hat SEO techniques.

Getting to page one on Google is a great achievement, but it’s only half the battle. If you don’t continue investing in SEO, then you’ll soon experience a loss in rankings. Marketing is about doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t, so if your SEO is making you money, why would you stop? Beyond the obvious risks to your business, there are three main reasons to continue investing in SEO services:

1. Ranking Defence – Once you’re on page one, you have to defend your position or you’ll quickly lose your new rankings. Remember that you took your rankings from someone else and they’re going to want them back! The first page of Google is very competitive for most industries, so once you reach page one, you become a threat to everyone already there. Your competitors are likely to increase their SEO efforts when you reach page one, so this is the time to build on your momentum. Discontinuing your SEO at this point, simply makes no sense, as all the hard work to reach page one will have been for nothing

2. Higher Positions, More Clicks – The amount of clicks you receive increases dramatically as you move from the bottom of page one towards the top. The first position on page one will achieve a click through rate (CTR) of around 30% (i.e. 30% of all searches for that query will click on your listing). This drops to about a 12% CTR for position three and falls to only around a 2% CTR for positions nine and ten. It’s clear that just getting to page one is not enough. Once you reach the first page on Google, the aim is to get as close to the top as possible. As you climb further up the first page, the level of competition towards the top increases substantially, so you need to work incredibly hard to reach and then defend the top positions. Once again, stopping a successful SEO campaign makes no sense, as you are simply opening the door for your competitors

3. Algorithm Updates – It’s estimated that Google makes roughly 500-600 algorithm updates every year, which makes the SEO environment very dynamic. Just because you are ranking well today, doesn’t mean you can become complacent. If reach the first page of Google, then stop your SEO campaign, you become very vulnerable to a loss of rankings due to algorithm updates. Maintaining your rankings takes just as much work as gaining them in the first place, so once it’s working, keep at it

Google crawls and categorises every web page it can find across the world. At the current time this totals over 130 trillion pages and it’s growing every day. These pages are sorted within Google’s index by their content, plus a range of other factors. Google’s algorithm is essentially a series of programs and mathematical formulas that sorts through the index and matches search queries to web pages. The results are ordered and ranked based on over 200 factors (and more than 10,000 individual weighted variables), encompassing things like relevancy, quality and recency.

Google’s algorithm is constantly changing. Each year there are approximately 500-600 algorithm updates, so our SEO team spends a good deal of time researching and testing. If you want to see some of the major updates, take a look at the algorithm change history by Moz. Google makes these algorithm updates to improve the search results, fight spam, counter black-hat SEO and to test new formulas. As Media Heroes uses only white-hat SEO, we look forward to algorithm updates, as they normally benefit our clients. Our philosophy is to try and understand Google’s intention, which is always centred around the user. By focusing on the same goal as Google (plus lots of testing and research), we can stay ahead of the algorithm updates and we tend to be rewarded as new updates are released.

By choosing a leading SEO company like Media Heroes, you are far less vulnerable to algorithm updates, although minor ranking fluctuations are quite normal. The big risk for your business is if your SEO company is using outdated or black-hat SEO techniques, as this can result in sudden and dramatic falls in rankings. Trying to outsmart or trick Google is a mugs game and eventually you’ll pay the price. Play by the rules and follow the philosophy at Media Heroes and you too will be looking forward to the next algorithm update.

Nope. Unlike many SEO companies, we don’t have 12-month contracts for our SEO services, as we feel our partnership should be based on results and performance. Instead, we have a very simple 90-day notice period for our SEO campaigns. The reason for our 90-day notice period is twofold:

1. 90-Day Campaign Planning – We create rolling 90-day plans for your SEO campaign allowing us to pool your campaign resources over 3 months to execute the tasks that will have the most impact on your campaign. If we didn’t do this, we would be extremely restricted to tackle critical tasks that may require more than a single month’s time allocation. Any SEO agency with month-to-month plans can’t forward plan effectively or complete time-intensive tasks that may be critical for optimum performance, placing their clients at a distinct disadvantage. Media Heroes is able to generate such strong results for our clients, due in part to our ability to plan ahead and to focus on tasks that will help you to out-perform your competition.

2. Commitment To Your Success – SEO is a medium to long-term strategy and requires consistent effort over many months to build and maintain momentum. SEO requires a genuine client-agency partnership based on mutual trust and commitment for it to be effective. If SEO campaign budgets were able to be changed from month-to-month, the effect on your SEO performance would be catastrophic. If you’re serious about getting results from your SEO campaign, you need to commit to the campaign for at least 6-12 months to allow it to mature and show results. Our 90-day notice period helps to protect your interests, as both parties are committed to getting results. You will start to see indicative results over the first 3-4 months, so use this time to assess if the partnership is the right fit for your business and during this time we can show you clear metrics in terms of your increasing SEO performance. This is much better approach than trying to find a month-to-month SEO agency who doesn’t invest time to build long-term relationships with their clients and is happy to simply replace them if things don’t work out. At Media Heroes, once we welcome you on board as a client, we’re totally committed to your success.