SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a term for processes that elevate your website’s visibility in search engine results organically (ie. unpaid). 

For marketing managers, SEO means your brand is appearing in organic search engine results when your customers are searching for your product or service online. If your business is appearing in search engine results, then the greater the chance you have of potential customers visiting your website. 

For business owners, SEO is crucial in helping ensure that the volume of traffic to your website turns into high quality leads and sales. 

Most clicks and website traffic come from the first page of search engine results, therefore, getting on the first page (within the top 10 results) is the golden basket that will bring the golden eggs to your business. This is where an SEO expert can help by creating strategies and uncovering new keyword terms to target. SEO is a complicated process that often requires a series of important steps. At Icon, we don’t skip any of them and treat each one as important as a stand-alone service. 

We offer a wide range of SEO activities to our clients as part of their SEO program, including:

• SEO strategy development
• Keyword research & analysis
• Competitor analysis
• Content research & creation
• Meta tags optimisation
• Image optimisation
• On page & off page optimisation
• Speed/performance enhancement
• Screen/UX/mobile optimisation
• Link analysis & establishment

As a fast-growing digital marketing agency with over 15 years’ experience in SEO, Icon’s SEO team works with businesses large and small. From property developers and commercial food companies to industrial manufacturers and engineering firms, we can work with you to create a SEO strategy for your business.

With our extensive experience across a variety of industries, we can work with you as your outsourced marketing partner to design and execute your effective SEO strategy.

It’s worth noting that SEO is not a one size fits all solution; different businesses need different approaches to SEO. Our team never uses the same approach for multiple clients because we understand each website is unique and has its own capability. The SEO strategy we present you with is unique to your industry and unique to your business – 100 per cent tailormade with your goals and company in mind. 

If you are getting lost down the SEO rabbit hole and are unsure how to make SEO work better for your business, let Icon help out. 

Small business owners face many challenges, including high competition, resource pressures, and constrained budgets that may hinder their ability to effectively scale their business.

It is critical for all small businesses to have an effective online presence via a website. However, having a website is one thing; optimising it for search engines so your target audience can find it and engage with it requires much more than simply having a website.

This is where SEO helps. Icon’s SEO experts can help your business rank higher on search engine results pages. There are a range of front-end and back-end SEO strategies that we can employ that will boost your business’s rankings and drive organic traffic growth.

SEO can be a little more cost-effective than other strategies and can generate ongoing returns on your investment over time. This is why it is important for small businesses to invest in SEO.

The cost of SEO programs can vary. But one thing worth nothing is that SEO done right never comes cheaply. In times past, with some SEO trickery any SEO professional could manipulate search engine rankings using black hat SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing, PBN networks, and ghost traffic. However, those days are long gone and have been replaced with powerful algorithms that flipped the SEO industry on its head. So-called SEO experts became rookies almost overnight.

Now, those black hat SEO tactics are actually harmful for businesses. However, today there are still organisations out there offering these outdated and now invalid SEO strategies to businesses with cheap offers. 

Businesses who use these tactics are now penalised by search engines; and the damage is swift and expensive to reverse. So, be sure to give a wide berth to SEO companies who make offers such as, “Guaranteed first page search engine ranking in two weeks”, or similar. 

Such offers sound too good to be true – because they usually are too good to be true. It’s simply not worth risking your company’s reputation with Google and other leading search engines. In today’s market, most successful SEO projects cost between $900 and $2,000 a month, depending on your industry. So, it’s important to make sure that the ROI is in place before exhausting your SEO budget. 

Not sure where to start? Book an appointment with Icon to find out more about how the right SEO strategy can help you grow your business. 

Every search engine is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), and is governed by numerous rules and conventions that have been developed over a decade with the sole purpose of responding to search queries in the most efficient and precise way. 

However, there are literally billions of queries being requested every single second. Therefore, serving the best results to a specific request is much more challenging than it seems. AI can do a better job than us mere humans can, but even AI still needs to learn before it can fully understand the intention behind a search query. 

When search engines start indexing your website, they immediately enter the ‘learning phase’, which means the SERP needs to know what your content is about, why it exists and what its purpose is as part of the machine learning procedure.

This is just one of the many processes amongst many other major algorithms introduced over the last decade, such as Panda, Penguin, Humming Bird, RankBrain, and BERT that search engines run your website through before deciding where to rank your site. So how long does it actually take for all of this to occur and for your website to rank?

Well, it usually takes between four and six months. If your website has a sound history, great content and good authority, this timeframe can be much quicker. We have seen websites with fantastic SEO content ranked by search engines within two to three months.

It’s important to note that SEO is a long play; it’s not about quick wins. It takes time to get the first page of search engine results. But it’s more than worth the effort, as in return ongoing SEO can ensure a steady flow of traffic to your website and stable long-term sales. As such, SEO is one of the core marketing activities for growing your business.

Want to see your website from the perspective of a search engine? Want to understand your site authority score and learn how to improve it? Let us help you answer those questions. Partner with Icon to grow your business through SEO.  

Of course! We have several clients around greater New South Wales, as well as in Victoria and Queensland. These clients are all managed remotely using online video calls, emails and phone calls. Once a campaign is set up our clients have access to an online, customised reporting dashboard that delivers results in real-time so you can monitor your SEO performance from anywhere in Australia.

An audit is the very first activity for every SEO project. Understanding your strengths and weaknesses, coupled with understanding how your competitors are using SEO will help you to establish the best strategy for your business and provide clarity into the level of investment you will have to put in. 

So, what exactly does an SEO audit cover and how can it help your business? Most of the businesses we work with come to us with websites that are performing poorly in terms of SEO. Some clients are aware that their website is performing poorly, while others aren’t – even if there are critical things that need to be addressed.

The only way to truly get the full picture regarding your website’s performance and why search engines are ranking it a certain way is through a SEO audit. When we run a comprehensive SEO audit on your website, we’ll be able to identify exactly what needs to be done to get your SERP ranking where it should be. Imagine the potential added revenue that your business could gain if it got on the first page of search engine results? It could game-changer.

At Icon, our SEO professionals can implement, measure, and manage every aspect of your SEO, from technical SEO to content, to link building to competitor analysis.

No. SEO can never be automated. And it should never be attempted to be automated. Many people think SEO is a one-time deal – set it up once and you never have to touch it again and a steady flow of organic traffic will present itself to your website. In reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

When you choose SEO as your primary strategy, you need to be prepared to roll up your sleeves and put the work in. It will consume a lot of your time and it needs to be guided by a well-developed strategic plan and dedicated research before you actually get your hands dirty. 

SEO requires manual implementation. There’s no tool that can help you fix the technical issues without the technicians. No automated tool can brainstorm, plan, and create quality content without the involvement of human content marketers and copywriters. And there is no tool that can create backlinks without a proper link building strategy. 

SEO is a chain of manual processes that need to be precisely placed at the right time and in the right place. 

Neither. SEO and PPC are different strategies that deliver different results, and deciding which is better for your business depends on your business growth strategy. 

SEO is not a quick-win strategy; if you want a quick increase in traffic to your website, then SEO is not going to give you the results you want. SEO traffic is organic traffic that builds up steadily over time.

In contrast, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is the strategy for you if time is of the essence. PPC is the second most popular marketing channel. It works by businesses paying to get traffic to their website by placing an ad on search engine results pages or on other websites. 

When people click on the ad they are taken to your website. Each click – also known as a ‘hit’ – on your ad will cost you a certain amount of money and you can cancel the campaign at any time or reallocate your budget however you’d like.

PPC sounds a little too good to be true – fast traffic, and as much of it as you want, provided you can pay for it. So, what’s the catch? Well, SEO and PPC both have their advantages, but as the old saying goes, it’s never a good idea put all your eggs in one basket.

Organic traffic is hard to build up and requires patience, but in time SEO will guarantee stable and permanent traffic to your website – all without having to spend PPC. On the other hand, PPC ads can give you more traffic instantly, but you are paying for that traffic. And PPC campaigns can only be set up by a PPC expert. 

Choosing which is right for your business requires much consideration. Not sure which to choose? At Icon we have SEO and PPC professionals who can work with you to decide which strategy will deliver the right results for your business.