My Journey To Setting Up My Seo Business In The Uk
In mid 2007 I was building a few small Wordpress websites to try and promote some affiliate programs
. As they weren't appearing in the search engines I started to look into the concept of SEO and how this could help me to get the sites on to page 1 or 2 of Google.
As I learnt more about search engine optimization I began to think about perhaps working within the SEO industry in Manchester, UK.
It turned out that my age and lack of actual experience seemed to be a problem for the companies that I contacted. I can understand their attitude now because there were no doubt more suitable candidates than I looking for an SEO job.
At the time however it left me somewhat disillusioned. Out of frustration I set up a website called SEO Manchester targeting the exact same keywords. I suppose I did it more as a test of my own self-taught SEO skills against those of the SEO companies in Manchester. I thought that I'd just see how well I could get my website to perform against the might of the large companies sitting on the first couple of pages of Google for my search term "seo manchester".
It appeared way down in the Google rankings at first but I concentrated on getting the on-page SEO right and within 16 days it hit page 1. It then did the 'Google Dance' and dropped into obscurity for a while, bouncing back and forth between page 6 and page 1. It then seemed to settle after 4 weeks at number 9 or 10. With a bit more SEO effort it eventually hit the number 2 spot and remained there for a good 6 weeks.
During the seventh week I got the result I'd been working towards. The site was at number 1!
My site held on for 10 days before swapping places with the large SEO company sitting at number 2. Knowing that I would have my work cut out to get the top spot back again I commenced an intense program of on-page and off-page search engine optimization.
I then received an email about 2 months later asking if I'd realised that I was back at the number 1 spot again.
I received that email on 16th October, 2009 and since then my site has remained at number one, that's nearly 6 months.
Not long after my website got to number 1 on Google the first of a number of requests came in from small business owners. Having seen my achievement with my site they wanted to know if I could do the same with their business sites. I initially turned these requests down because I was unsure about actually being able to perform SEO on business sites belonging to other people.
I was contacted just before Christmas of 2009 by a commercial photographer based in Manchester. He had been watching my site move up the rankings in Google and had been reading my blog posts on a regular basis. He knew my story and the fact that I was a relative novice when it came to SEO but he was still interested in me working on his business website. As his site didn't rank anywhere for any of his keywords he felt that I could only improve things. Well, I decided to give it a go.
That was my first SEO customer. We had a look at his competition, targeted one main keyword and 3 secondary keywords, carried out on-page optimization, added content including images and videos and then worked on the off-page SEO. We were aiming to rank as high as possible for both local and national searches.
Currently, his website is on page 1 of Google for all his secondary keywords when performing both a local and UK search. It is on page 3 for a UK search on his main keyword and page 1 for a local search. He now pays me a monthly retainer to carry out an ongoing SEO program.
As a result of the positive rankings I achieved with my first customer I then felt confident of taking on more work. It shows the rewards that can be reaped by appearing high up in Google as I have not had to advertise my service in any way. My site attracts free organic traffic.
I therefore have regular enquiries coming in each week via the contact page on my site.
Not only that, I have also been offered 2 SEO jobs and been asked if I would like to sell the site. I have politely declined these offers.
What started out as a bit of fun has come full circle and ended up with me having my own SEO business. I suppose in a lot of ways I'm now grateful to those companies who, for their own good reasons at the time, didn't consider me suitable for an SEO job with them.
I have some great clients who I really enjoy working with and I am considering outsourcing some of my SEO tasks to give me more time to work on additional ways of attracting customers to their websites.
After all that's the aim of my SEO service - Helping small businesses attract more customers and increase profitability.
by: Mark Watts.
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