Proposal for FD and IT Director work

Proposal  

Here is a proposal I created this week - client seemed to like it. 

Thanks for taking the time to meet again this week.  As discussed I’ve done some preliminary research into your website and reached the following initial conclusions.

Overview.

Your website is already a successful online store and you are generating around £20K per month in online revenue from it.  Google however has a particular approach that it uses for all larger sites which is designed to reward sites that have good reputations, and to act as a barrier to new entrants, preventing new sites appearing with large numbers of pages and grabbing traffic, their approach  also “encourages” sites (conveniently) to spend directly with Google’s Adwords advertising program.

You are already familiar with the concept of Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) but an area I recommend you read up on is known as the “Google Crawl Budget” this basically means that Google limits the amount of pages it crawls and therefore indexes based on the number of unique sites of quality that link to your site.

All website are given a basic crawl budget and for 99% of sites that is more than enough, and therefore needs no further consideration.  It works by sites being allowed both a certain % , and an absolute number of pages that Google includes in their index at any one time.  These change on a dynamic basis as your sites backlink profile evolves.

As an example a medium sized site with strong DA and 1,000’s of backlinks can expect a very high % of their site to be indexed, but very large sites even with very high DA’s need huge numbers of referring urls to support their size and scale.  Likewise large sites with low DA and low numbers of backlinks can expect only very low %’s of their sites to be indexed for example my reportingaccounts.com website and to a lesser degree hiddenfashion.com

Google is however reasonable in that it chooses what it considers to be your best pages for inclusion in their crawl budget, which pages are indexed are determined as follows:-

• Proximity to home page
• Backlinks to each page
• Metrics of each page – Time on Page, CTR, and Bounce Rate.

A proportion of your pages will drop and be replaced by others continually as Google dynamically evaluates and re-evaluating pages in real time.

What this means for your website

Based on the glance of your Google Search Console, which I had whilst in your office it appears that around 2,100 of your pages are in the Google Index out of around 88,000 pages, which Google is aware of from either  your site maps or its general crawling activity.

So around 2.4% of your site is currently indexed.

Most businesses and websites make 80% of their revenue from around 20% of their products, so that suggests that another 17% of your site could perform if your crawl budget was higher.  Or put another way your traffic could be expected to increase by around a factor of 8x if your crawl budget was increased enough to allow another 17% of your site to perform. 

That ought to represent a very significant increase in income, in theory at least, the actual outcome of course depends on the potential of pages not currently indexed and their associated products to sell compared to the ones that already perform.

Here is an example mini site on Google.

How to improve.

Your cautious approach to SEO has paid dividends as you already have a successful business, but here are some observations I can share with you :-

Ø               Successful competitor ecommerce stores spend around £15K monthly on link building.

Ø               There is an adage in SEO that “a rising tide lifts all ships” which means increasing the quality and number of backlinks leads to more pages performing which then in turn means more sales, more traffic and greater success.

Ø               You should be aiming to spend around 20% of current turnover on backlink building and scaling that up until you are approaching the £15K or so spend level I suggest above.

Ø               It is very important to only use proven SEO providers who are very experienced with white hat techniques, and have good track records.  I recommend dealing only with providers who are well known within the MOZ community, these will be expensive, but quality is what is needed and Google is getting ever stricter with this aspect.

Ø               Your key weakness is a “Sheer lack of good links”

The main reason their marketing activity and level of spend is so high, is that SEO is now a tough area and only high quality and therefore expensive marketers can be relied on to deliver, plus getting into high quality publications usually takes a spend of some form or another, either on direct approaches or using some sort of intermediate approach, an example being my building of an IOS app to achieve a Dofollow backlink from itunes.

At one time I owned and ran a Search Marketing business, but we rarely worked for external customers and only worked on our own in house projects, with this approach still in mind I don’t offer services to third parties, I am prepared however to use my knowledge and experience to add value for companies I am working with as their Director of Finance or Director of Finance & IT

What am I looking for?

I am building a portfolio of companies which employ me part time, I already work around three days per week and are looking for around two more days per week to complete my diary.

My skills in SEO are as strong as my financial ones, and therefore my ideal role is that of a Director of Finance and IT or Director of Finance and Digital Marketing.

We talked about how that could work for your website

As an example I can help you as a part time FD – producing good management information and helping to source debt and equity finance whilst forecasting ahead both for profit and cash flow purposes.   My experience and reputation can help with the credibility needed during finance raising.

As a part time IT Director I can help with the direction and strategy of your online campaigns and to monitor and review the activities of any external provides we may use.

In the very short term I can help you gain high quality links, though in something like the way a newly qualified accountant is likely to be faster and better value than myself at accounts preparation, a professional link builder is likely to be more cost effective at building links, though as you know it is very hard to sort out quality providers from low quality ones.

I don’t mind turning my hand to manual link building if that offers value and an opportunity for me to prove myself to you in the short term,

You asked for suggestions so here is an example list of the sorts of sites, that I consider to be appropriate to target for link acquisition, these are “low hanging fruit” and ones which will help to begin to move the dial on your SEO.

My personal experience is that no follow links appear to help with the count of referring urls and therefore crawl budgets, but not with rankings so I recommend a mix of both dofollow and nofollow links for your situation given the crawl budget issues you appear to have.

An example selection of sites to target and to build links from:-

                    Wikipedia.org                             becomegorgeous.com

                    Medium.com                               List.ly

                    Bloglovin.com                            itunes.com

                    Flickr.com                                  youtube.com

                    Thriveglobal.com                       reddit.com

                    Mcafeesecure.com                      huffingtonpost.com

                    Strikingly.com                            moz.com

These are all strong sites with good DA, though Huff post is now very problematic to get into.

These needs to be complemented by niche on topic sites that are closely related to Fashion and ideally younger female fashion blogs and women’s interest type of sites. I would need to research a suitable list but the sites that comprise asos.com backlink profile are along the correct lines.

In this way you can increase your total of referring domains and contribute to an increased DA score.

I estimate that you need to add around 80 links of the quality of the above on a monthly basis to notice any change in indexing, but by building that sort of volume of links you should notice results in around a three month timescale, maybe sooner and in so doing begin the process of pushing forwards and upwards with your traffic and rankings.

Let me know what your thoughts are and how and when we can move forward.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

Adrian