You are right to ask this, considering the fact that we are actually putting ourselves forward as the company you should employ to
optimise your website. The competition for page rank in any highly competetive industry is fierce enough, so I am sure you can imagine,
competition for page rank amoungst the people who do this for a living is about as fierce as competition can get.
An SEO companies own page rank is understandably seen by the unknowing as the most powerful endorsement of them all. What better evidence
can there possibly be of an SEOs ability to achieve high page rankings than their own websites high page rank. Surely I am adding more
weight to this by saying how competetive it is. In some ways I am yes. Any web design or SEO company who achieve these results is very
impressive. Yet it is not necessarily impressive for the best reasons. We too have held very high page rank for certain keywords in the
major search engines. We continued to attain these figures and kept fighting to get higher too. However, with more and more competition
arriving hourly, brand new SEO companies with no reputation or advertising budget to earn business by any other means, this level of
competition began to become fierce to the point of no return, where Web Design and SEO companies were all fighting each other on a daily
basis to score slightly higher on the next set of algorythms that were used to rate our efforts. If you didnt have any work to do, then
this was fine, but for companies who had business coming in, this was becoming a more time consuming occupation than the actual work
itself. A time came when we needed to face a huge decision, and, like some of our other competitors we chose what would have been
unthinkable only a few years before. To sacrifice the highest search engine rankings possible for the sake of our actual website itself.
Each of our clients who also face a highly competetive industry are given the same choice.
Do you want to make a website for search engines, or for your actual customers? If you want to write content for your customers, then
you will not quickly score higher than others writing content for search engines. For some industries, the choice is that simple. There
is of course a balance that needs to be struck whichever route you choose. If you are ranking highly in the search engines, then yes you
will most probably get more traffic. Yet how much of that traffic is actually going to be interested in anything that you have to sell or
say when they arrive at a page with infinate ramblings on the same subject just using different keywords to say basically the same thing.
Or multiple pages on the same subject with slightly different locations in the header to make sure they are seen as localised businesses
in as many areas as possible. The other extreme is that you write amazing content offering great services or products, aimed at your
customers. Sure, the ones who arrive may buy what you are offering, however that would not usually be sufficient if only 2 people found
your website each year. It is a balancing act, and depending on your industry and your type of business, the scale of this will vary
enormously. Sometimes it is still possible to achieve both, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to do that. The more we recognised
how competitors above us were achieving these awe inspiring results, the more and more we looked for alternatives to avoid this growing
madness.
Adwords was born and we found our way out. This is not to say that we have ignored all of our SEO practices, on the contrary, we still
adopt them, and believe 100% that it is still worth every business adopting them, but only ever to the point of that balance. We will
never stray away from that. With the launch of new search engines, and vast improvements to existing ones, we are now beginning to see
some of the long over due punishments being dished out to some of the SEO black hat artists, and we remain confident that things will
keep on improving to the point where good quality websites and good reputations alone achieve good page rankings. Until that day, then
we will only work towards what we perceive to be an acceptable balance, because, it is after all our own reputation we consider, not
just your businesses reputation.
Do not get too distracted by a businesses page rank, especially when it comes to highly competetive industries. However strange it
sounds, many of the best SEO companies that we compete with every day have no actual specialised SEO techniques on their own websites.
It makes little sense until you realise that in some industries that no matter what you do, if enough people want that same business
but do not worry about establishing a reputation, then you will always be playing second fiddle to them in the search engines, no matter
how much time and money you spend on SEO services. Fact.
It is worth also mentioning that search engines are now beginning to personalise data, meaning that people signed in to say a google
account, will have search queries calculated via a number of things outside of any SEOs control. Their own personal information, age,
interests, location, previous web surfing habits. This still does not mean that you shouldnt optimise your website sufficiently, but
what it does mean is that the power of SEOs to impact page rank is deliberately being diminished. Although we are SEOs ourselves, we
believe that this a massive step in the right direction, and one that will eventually favour the legitimate SEOs.