Greatson Media: Search Engine Optimization and Placement SEO FAQ's

1. What is SEO?
2. Why SEO?
3. How complicated is SEO? Can't I just do it myself?
4. What search engines do you focus on?
5. How long will it take my site to rank for my keywords?
6. Is a contract required?
7. I saw someone promising top rankings for $50 per month. Are they legitimate?
8. Do I need to pay someone to submit my site to the search engines?

1. What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. The main goal of SEO is to optimize your website so that it ranks at the top of the search results for your desired keywords. The process of SEO involves making changes to the pages of your site itself, known as "on site" optimization, as well as performing tactics known as "off site" optimization, such as getting inbound links, listed in directories, and more. At Greatson Media, we have hundreds of tactics in our arsenal we use to get sites highly ranked, and a different set of tools/methods is used for each client depending on their situation.

2. Why SEO?
If your business has a website, you need SEO. People are searching every hour of every day for terms that are related to your business. If your site is not at the top of the results, your competitors are receiving the visits, pageviews, and sales from these keyword searches.

Neglecting SEO is an expensive business mistake. It's costing your company sales and customers, and even worse; it's allowing your competition to get them! In addition, pay-per-click advertising is continually getting more expensive. The bid prices for targeted keywords are always rising. SEO can allow you to get the same number of clicks, but at a much lower per-click cost. This is because you're spreading all of your clicks across a fixed monthly SEO cost.

Finally, according to many research studies, SEO clicks convert to sales at a higher rate than those derived via pay-per-click campaigns. This is often because certain credibility is perceived for sites that are highly ranked. Anyone can buy a pay-per-click advertisement. It's much harder to get top ranked in the search results.

3. How complicated is SEO? Can't I just do it myself?
To be straightforward, SEO is a pretty complex subject. The reason lies in that the search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, and the way they rank pages/sites. With SEO, you are trying to reverse engineer how search engines rank websites. Trying to crack the formula for each search engine is not an easy task, and if it was, everyone would be top ranked on Google getting very rich.

In addition, becoming an 'SEO Expert' is not taught in colleges/universities, mainly because it evolves so quickly and hence textbooks would become out of date. Hence, it's an ongoing learning process that you must keep up with. To give you an idea of how complex SEO can be, many fortune 500 firms either outsource their SEO to firms like ours, or have an entire department dedicated to SEO.

In addition, trying to teach yourself SEO by scouring the internet may not be the best use of your time. You have a business to run. It's like going to dental school so you can clean your own teeth to save money on dental appointments. Unless you plan on doing it for a living, it just doesn't make sense to spend all the time required to be proficient in the craft.

4. What search engines do you focus on?
We typically optimize for Google, Bing/MSN, and Yahoo; since they drive the majority of all searches executed in the world. If additional engines are necessary, please just let us know and we can try to incorporate them into the SEO campaign.

5. How long will it take my site to rank for my keywords?
The answer to this question depends on a multitude of factors including:

How many keywords you've chosen. The more you target, the longer it takes.
How competitive your keywords are. Meaning, how many sites are targeting them.
How well optimized your competitors' sites are. You're competing against them.
How well optimized your site currently is and its current rankings for the keywords. This determines our starting point.
The age of your domain name and website. The older, the better, and the faster you'll see improvements.

Typically, we see top rankings for clients within 3 to 24 months depending on the above factors. Once you Request A Quote, we can evaluate your site and give you a ballpark estimate of how many months until you'll begin seeing good results.

6. Is a contract required?
All contracts are month to month, and you can cancel at any time. Since we deliver quality results, we don't need to lock you into anything!

7. I saw someone promising top rankings for $50 per month. Are they legitimate?
No. This is a common scam. If their cheap services actually worked, we'd be outsourcing all of our work to them! By charging low monthly fees, they can get away with delivering nothing and still keep your money; because it's not worth suing over. It's a volume 'churn and burn' business model, and they simply sell a little garbage to a lot of people. They cycle new people in each day. Remember, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

8. Do I need to pay someone to submit my site to the search engines?
Absolutely not. The search engines can easily pickup your site if you have quality inbound links. Never pay a company to submit your site to the search engines!