As SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is one of the pillars for any business and in our article, any online marketing agency, it is vital to know how it behaves in different places, especially what is its impact on Berlin-based web design agencies. Based on Mobiteam experience, there are a couple of things that are good to know before running an SEO campaign:

Articles. Online Courses. SEO agencies

For sure this is not your first article about SEO that you are reading, there are thousands of resources that teach you, free or paid, on how to handle SEO, how to start a campaign, run it and gain profit. Let’s take them one by one:

1. SEO articles are meant to rank higher in search engines based on popular keywords – this is the main goal, and any information contained represent fragmented information, sometimes useless, that contradicts other articles and opinions. By far these articles cannot be called professional, no matter the URL that provides them. Just by reading them, some may find them informative, or slightly useful. Keep in mind: no one will hand you an article with valuable intel gathered in years, based on the real experience and share real the results so that you can use them and create competition on the market.
2. Online Courses are somehow more relevant, but for the money you pay, the maximum you can get is the SEO basic practices. A start line and nothing more. Online courses are a more complex issue, and the reasons SEO “experts” run them, is to get high ranking, traffic due to the popularity their courses will get, and ultimately – money. They still have to teach you something for the money you paid, but the theory is different from practice, and each case is unique.
3. SEO agencies – something most of you would trust, and pay the money to get high enough on search engines. There is no precise number of them, lots of web agencies also provide this service and not all are resultative enough to be believed. But even more – sadly, are scamming their clients.

As for Berlin, Web Design agencies struggle to get on the first page on search engines based on different keywords, use backlinks, reviews, social media, and any other tools that would impact their ranking on search engines. Among others, there are as well lots of articles, online courses, and agencies that claim to provide high-quality SEO services. In other words, if you are planning to get any web design, web development, mobile development, marketing, media & public relations services, their ranking on Search Engine is for sure not the only key performance indicator for an agency, and some more research would be recommended.

SEO Tools: Free or Paid?

If there is something web agencies count on, that’s for sure SEO tools. From various reasons like lack of time or small marketing investments up to their wish of saving time and money, most of the web agencies opt-in for SEO tools. This is again a very difficult choice for web design agencies, if they want to rank higher on search engines, as no SEO tools are efficient, either no clear instructions are given on how to use them, no real results provided, too expensive or simply it takes too much time to get used to the new features and trends.

For good reasons, paid SEO tools that invade the market are not a reasonable choice – no matter which one you will choose, they will cost you a lot. Moreover, some tools that are considered strong enough are prohibited by search engines, as they offer keyword sales, or fake SEO analysis for your website so that a business owner interested in a specific tool should hand over more money.

Also, SEO tools are the ultimate creation of SEO agencies meant to bring profit as the agency itself has compromised their image or so by practicing blackhat SEO, using doorways, link trade, and other strategies to get asap a higher rank in search engines, for a client, so that the last one will get a ban from search engines by using irregular practices.

We will not name bad or good SEO tools that provided results for other web design agencies from Berlin or elsewhere. Even though we are aware of how other agencies got a good ranking on search engines, we strongly recommend in your SEO process, to follow Google Webmaster Tools Guidelines, use Google Analytics, and Google Search Console and all other official tools provided directly by search engines to promote your business on the internet.

Yes, it will take time, at least 6 months to see your first results, but, it worths it. There is even more motivation to use Google official tools – it’s free, it works for and from any location, it offers detailed insights about your clicks, CTR, Pages, average position and lots more. Everything you need and beyond.

Reviews  – How? When? Where?

Reviews are a dangerous playground, to be honest, and especially when combining web reviews with SEO and web agencies. What is known is that all reviews count, have an impact on potential customers, clients, partners and the more reviews – the better. But, there is a key feature of web reviews in combination with SEO, and no one should hurry to get more reviews just as soon as they put the business online.

From the search engine perspective, review websites are having a higher rank than a brand new startup page due to big popularity that brings traffic and other users find review websites more relevant than a business website. This is why the number one rule is no review before a solid presence on the web. The rule is to prevent a review website rank higher than your own website based on a keyword that represents your business name, or direct services & products the business provides.

E.G. A startup named “The Doors” will ask users to review their profile on a review website. 4 clients of The Doors review their profile there, but on the other hand, The Doors just launched their own website. The outcome is horrible – When users type TheDoors.com on Google – the first result will be the review website and not the business one. This way, the whole TheDoors.com traffic will go on the review website, and moreover, anybody else can handle online reputation on TheDoors.com with negative reviews. The startup is a dead newborn.  

This is why, it is best to ask for reviews after the business website is connected to search engines by a series of keywords, starting with the business name. To understand better why reviews are important and how do they impact your business, I invite you to study this article on Mobiteam.

The SEO topic can always go into an endless debate or a series of concrete actions to build your online reputation. The Marketing Department from Mobiteam created this article to raise the awareness of how tricky the SEO industry can be and to bring out the best solutions to follow.