What is SEO?

Improving your website’s ranking in search results - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - is the core of our business. “Search engine optimization” is the process of “optimizing” your website so that Google assesses it favourably and ranks it higher in “search” results.

Google computes rank according to three main criteria:

How easily and efficiently Google can discover, render, and index the pages on your website, what we term technical SEO;
The relevancy of your website’s content (in relation to specific search queries,what are called “keywords”); and
How many sites link to your site and the influence of those sites, what we call authority in the SEO world.

No doubt many aspects of SEO are highly technical and remain “under the hood” of the website, never visible to the ordinary person browsing a website. However, the main touchstone of search rank is something very simple and common sense: Does your website or web page efficiently address the question(s) intended by a given search query?

Thus, the best practitioners of SEO, like us, are not only abreast of Google’s latest official pronouncements and technical documentation but crack marketers who scratch beneath the surface of the assignment to understand the mindset and language used by consumers to search within a given product category. A consumer’s behavior and language when searching for, say, a bakery versus a car dealer, are undoubtedly very different. That said, there’s no such thing as a purely cookie-cutter approach to SEO. Instead, great SEO entails four kinds of knowledge:

Technical knowledge of SEO best practice;
Knowledge of the client’s industry;
Knowledge of the client-business’ competitive strengths and advantages within that industry;
Understanding consumer behavior, especially nomenclature, for that product category.

Many SEO agencies can do a serviceable job with the technical implementation but, at Cogney, we love rolling up our sleeves to get into the guts of your business. After all, great SEO is about the people doing it: do they possess the intellectual curiosity and breadth to step into the shoes of both consumer and the business owner? It is Cogney’s technical knowledge combined with our culture of going the extra mile that explains our peerless record of success across so many different industries.

Why do SEO?

Think about great SEO as the killer app of consumer marketing.

More traffic = More business

On a simple, crude basis, higher search rank translates into higher traffic. Higher traffic usually means more business.

Don’t get scooped by the competition

It gets your company, not a competitor’s, to show up at the top of search results at the exact moment when someone is searching for exactly what you sell. Ranking in search results is a zero sum game. There's always a winner and if you're not it, your competitor is.

Make sure your products show up where and how people are most likely to be looking for them

Similarly, you may be selling something which people NEVER search for, let’s say, “Jim Beam marmalade.” A great SEO agency, like Cogney, can get your product under the eyeballs of consumers who are searching for your product (but just didn’t know it existed) by devising a content strategy which gets your website ranked for keywords which dovetail with your product offering, e.g. “bourbon marmalades.”

Search rank affects brand credibility

People trust and remember brands when they appear in organic search results, as opposed to paid ads. For that matter, search rank has a very strong influence on the credibility of a search result and can even trump other cues of credibility, e.g., a media outlet’s reputation for reliability and accuracy.

Organic search traffic is most likely to buy

Web visitors clicking on organic search results have greater intent to buy than those coming from banner ads, social media, email, paid ads or referring websites. The only traffic with a higher intent to buy is direct traffic. (Direct traffic is when someone types the name of a website domain into their browser.)

FAQs

How long does it take to see results?

After your development team and copywriters have implemented our recommendations, it usually takes 1-3 months to see significant, upward improvement in ranking. But it also depends on the competitiveness of your industry and product category, including how many of your competitors are doing SEO, and your ability to get in-bound links.

How much will it cost?

Hiring an SEO agency in and of itself is not sufficient to boost search rank. Part and parcel of SEO is optimization of the code and content on your website. Thus, the first question is, do you have the development resources and budget to implement the necessary changes to your site? Next, the job scope is largely determined by the size of your product catalogue as well as your business model. For example, are you offering a finite catalogue of products where each product is listed by you and within your control or is your site a marketplace with a theoretically limitless number of products?. Finally, the cost depends on the number of ways that people try to find you (or that you want to sell under). Do you sell something so specific that only a few keywords are applicable to your product offering (e.g., “electron microscope”) or does your offering potentially fall under many keywords (e.g., “down jacket”, “winter jacket”, “men’s jacket”, “navy jacket”). If we take our example of “Jim Beam marmalade” again, the universe of keywords is bigger than you might imagine. For this unusual product, keywords would include “specialty marmalade” but also “jelly” or even “gourmet gift” potentially. To answer the original question, an SEO audit of a typical, medium-size website (based on finite number of products) begins at HK$80k.

Do you do Chinese SEO?

We have experience in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese SEO. You'll have the highest odds of ranking well in Hong Kong and Taiwan rather than mainland China. Baidu, China's dominant search engine, is a walled garden where the top search results are almost always Baidu-owned websites. For that reason, we recommend Baidu SEM to capture search demand in China. Hong Kong and Taiwan don't block Google like China does, so it's a fair playing field to do both SEO and SEM in these markets.

Does SEO always work?

In Our Philosophy, we make it clear that we never offer guarantees. What we do feel comfortable saying is that we are one of the best agencies in the world. That said, the main reason that we do not succeed is because the client does not implement our action plan.

Since many factors are not within our direct control, there is no crystal ball, only a high degree of probability of success when we take on a client or assignment. Below are some of those factors --

Your capacity to implement the recommendations in our site audit are central to SEO success. Do you have the budget and commitment to see this crucial phase of execution through?
Product-market fit: if you’re selling strawberry hot dogs, being the #1 organic search result probably won’t help you.
We cannot force other sites to link to you, only persuade and influence them to do so. For that matter, your own company’s reputation and brand figures significantly in whether a site will want to link to you.
We cannot control if competitors are doing SEO or if they have a killer commercial advantage which gets them more links, for example, a famous founder that everyone wants to write about. (Search rank is largely based on authority, i.e., links. Therefore, one of the main ways to overcome a competitor’s rank is to obtain more links than them.)
We cannot control if Google enters a vertical and exercises its monopoly power to give itself an unbeatable advantage. For example, when Google launched a “sponsored box” for consumer travel collating competitive pricing information for hotels and flights, they made it virtually impossible for other websites to successfully compete for clicks on the first page of search results.
Google’s zero click search results have an effect similar to what we’ve described above. When the answer to a search query such as “What is the time in New York City?” appears at the top of search results, there is no need to click on any search results. The result is a loss of traffic by those sites showing up in search results beneath that zero-click answer.
We cannot stop competitors from cheating. On the bright side, gains from cheating are short term.
We can’t control how quickly Google reassesses rankings. Take the example of new products such as cases for the newest model of iPhone (“cases for iPhone 11”), there can be a huge number of new pages coming up at the same time and, for a while, rankings will be in flux.
Historical events can sometimes impact where your site shows up. Let’s say your company is called “Bolton” but National Security Advisor, John Bolton, has been in the news a lot recently. Most likely, your site’s rank will be temporarily demoted to make room for results with greater freshness, i.e., links to news about John Bolton.
If your company is like “Apple” or “Asana” and shares its name with other objects, services, products or brands, search results will include links to other companies or products of the same name, and will not be about your company or products alone. In other words, when someone types “apple” into their browser, their intent is ambiguous. It’s not clear whether they want to learn about fruits or computers so search results contain links about both. Ditto for when they type in “asana”. They may very well want to research yoga poses, rather than software, or vice versa.