I’m often contacted by clients asking how we can help increase the ranking of their site on search engines. Now this is a fair enough question but I always answer it initially with the counter question “what’s the problem you’re trying to solve”.

The problem of course, 99% of the time, is a requirement to generate more business from the website. The fact that people automatically equate search engine ranking with more business is testimony to the success of the SEO industry’s own marketing.

So my advice is – don’t spend money on SEO or Google Adwords until you’ve taken a look at some other, less costly, things that could be done to lead to more business from your site.

• Conversion ratio – are visitors coming to the site but not engaging – i.e contacting you, buying or whatever the aim of your site is? Some simple tweaks to your site might be all that is needed to make improvements here.
• Are you and all your employees spreading the word about your site in all correspondence – e.g. email signatures?
• Does all your offline marketing include references to your website?
• Do you have a blog? Blogs can have a dramatic effect of search engine rankings and need not require a great amount of investment in effort.
• Are you using social media?

All these factors can make an improvement to the performance of your website without spending huge amounts of money.

Finally, if you do decide spend money on SEO or Adwords, get the advice of a trusted professional. Don’t respond to one of the many unsolicited emails or phone calls that we all get promoting the latest “get-to-the-top-of-Google” SEO wheeze.