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Search Engine Optimisation all the rage as local businesses seek to leverage web traffic
Cranleigh-based Flipside Digital has seen a significant uplift in demand from Surrey businesses seeking advice on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – the techniques employed in making sure a business website ranks highly when potential customers are searching for products or services online using Google, Yahoo or similar sites.
As part of Flipside Group, Flipside Digital not only builds websites but offers an SEO consultancy service to help businesses ensure their sites can be easily found by online buyers. Technical Director Anthony Basker has been working with such techniques for the past two years:
‘Quite rightly the ‘Googles’ of the world want to make sure their users have the most relevant and easy to use information available at their fingertips. Like others Google sends out electronic ‘spiders’ that crawl over sites, especially home pages, to report back what the site is all about.’
With hundreds of thousands of sites competing for attention that means it’s very important to get the right words and content on the home page and even into the URL – the name of the site. To a certain extent that means second-guessing what words browsers will key into a search in the first place.
‘Most people want to buy locally,’ says Basker, ‘and often something as simple as adding the words ‘in Surrey’ or ‘in Sussex’ to the home page content will leap you up the rankings, although for full SEO it’s a bit more scientific.’
Proof of the pudding is that Basker and his team have taken Farnborough Buy-to-Let market leader Imagine Homes regularly into a place in the top 5 on Google, something that had deeply impressed Imagine Homes’ Surry-based CEO Grant Bovey:
‘The internet has become the research medium of choice for the savvy investor’, says entrepreneur Bovey, ‘but with a million or more competitive pages on the web it’s essential to rank near the top.’
Basker points out that a benefit to smaller businesses is that while SEO takes some time to fully come into play and drive traffic to a site it’s relatively cheap. Meanwhile in the short term businesses can invest in ‘key words’ to drive visitors to their sites. Certainly the Flipside Group reports that clients are now closely analysing their complete marketing dynamic in light of web technologies.