Nowadays, a website for your business is an essential marketing tool, allowing you to promote your services to new customers and potential investors for a fraction of the cost of physical promotional materials. However there are literally thousands of other business vying for your customer's attention, and company can no longer rely simply on a strong brand and position in the "real world" market place to gain business, as can we can see from Amazon.co.uk's dominance over traditional entertainment outlets such as Waterstones and HMV. A frequent misconception made by website owners is that once a site is built, loyal customers will easily find your website and return regularly. The daunting reality is that despite there being thousands of potential customers browsing the web today, there are probably just as many websites to distract their attention from yours. To ensure the success of your online venture, you need to be easily found, and you should provide customers with a reason to return another day.

Thankfully, there is a solution to both of these issues that will benefit your site, your visitors and, eventually, your business - Search Engine Optimisation. Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) is the catch-all term for ensuring your site can be easily found and read by the various search engines, ensuring the content is relevent so that the search engines understand the overall theme, and will place you accordingly in their rankings. By continually updating your content with relevant articles, news stories, opinions and so on, you naturally increase the words that you might be found for, and provide your readers with new content to consume each time they visit the site.

Of course, this all sounds easier than it really is. Adjusting your site so that it can be read, then writing new content can be extremely time consuming. If implemented badly, this can be a huge waste of time, or worse, the search engines could drop your rankings if they deem you to be trying to "trick" them (such as writing text with excessive repetition of key phrases, or hiding text behind other website elements). Therefore, unless you're confident in your abilities working on your website, it might be in your interest to hire a local SEO agency to help you reach that coveted first page on Google.

So how do you select the SEO company or consultant for you?

Past Experience

Good SEO companies will be able to give you a sample list of the best performing keywords for another of their clients. Keywords ranking in top 20 positions are OK. Keywords ranking in top 10 positions are good. Keywords ranking in top 5 positions are excellent.

Competition

Are those sample keywords competitive? With a sample list of high ranking keywords, its now up to you to do some research on the competitiveness of those words and phrases; just because a phrase is at postion 1 in the search engines does not mean that it will be relevant to your site or drive new customers to you. Ask yourself if you would type that phrase into a search engine to find a given service. For example, if you sell flowers and someone wants to buy a bouquet of roses, would they type "Florists in Manchester" or "Rose flower shops"? Both phrases are indeed relevant but one will be used more in searches and therefore drive more traffic to ranking sites.

Look for quality not quantity. See if any obvious phrases that have been included on the report to 'fill it out'. If these 'filler rankings' constitute most of the report then you need to think carefully about employing this SEO agency. Even just a handful of high ranking competitive phrases that have been achieved as a direct result of that firms efforts is what you are looking for.

Locality

If you'd like to able to meet with SEO consultant in person you may wish to consider how local they are to your place of work. The most productive meetings are often held face to face, giving your consultant the chance walk you through each aspect of your SEO campaign and show you how they work. Locality should also be considered if the promotion of your business requires knowledge of the local area (within the tourist industry, for example).