Plenty of people write about SEO, and a myriad SEO companies sell their services, but only occasionally are we lucky enough to catch glimpse of the giants involved in working their website wizardry on search engines. There are some notable exceptions – SEOmoz have Whiteboard Fridays, Matt Cutts is comfortable explaining what the future of search is likely to hold (or who cut his hair this time!) and occasionally we get to see guest speakers at the latest SEO conference. But for 99% of companies and individuals, 99% of the time we have only their blogs, articles and avatars by which to understand them.
Last week Channel M’s Andy Crane had the pleasure of interviewing the founder of the top UK search engine consultancy, FirstFound. Founded a decade ago, this Manchester based SEO company has experienced steady growth and last year announced a record turnover of £4m. Chris Bellamy explains:
We started this ten years ago when the Internet was in its infancy. Clients were coming along and buying a new website and saying: ‘what a waste of money that was.’ because nobody is finding them. We drive traffic to those websites by making sure they rank when someone searches for either their product or service.
Chris does not divulge any secrets to his success, but points out that a couple of hundred different ranking factors are taken into account when placing a website in the search results.
What we have to do is work out which of those are the most important…we’ll make some changes to that website, we’ll make some changes that are off the website that will make a big difference and we’ll do some testing.
Chris goes on to explain a bit about how split testing helps them identify the improvement these changes make, enabling them to further improve the optimisation, making SEO is an ongoing process. In the current climate, few markets are experiencing any real growth, but Chris was very optimistic about the future of online sales:
It’s a boom time, and it has been for 9 or 10 years yet, and I think it will be for some time to come. The increase for last Christmas was 15% and I suspect sales this year on the Internet will be approaching £9bn in the UK, which is colossal.
He is not exaggerating either, last Christmas saw a significant increase in online sales, Chris goes on to explain this phenomenon:
I think [sales are] predominantly moving out of the high-street. The high-street is changing and is becoming the Internet. Which high-street brand doesn’t have an Internet brand?
Andy points out that ITV has suffered a significant downturn in advertising in recent times, but is pleased with the ratings they get from X Factor, saying that a 30 second slot in the semi finals will set advertisers back a cool quarter of a million pounds. Chris replies:
The first half of this year was the first time that Internet advertising overtook television advertising, so there are issues there, we all know the ITV have issues, but give me the quarter of a million and I’ll do a better job!
Tags: chris bellamy, firstfound, founder, interviews, manchester seo, search engine consultants, SEO
Thanks for summing up the video into bitesize chunks, some really relevant stuff! £4m turnover is impressive by anybodys standards, would love our company to one day achieve that! Thanks again