SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It covers a broad range of practices that have one overall goal:
To help your website appear higher up in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
When a customer searches for a keyword related to your business in Google, you ideally want them to find your website in the top 10 results. A solid SEO strategy will help this to happen.
Want to get a new power tool? Find a nearby restaurant? Hire a new accountant? These days, the search engine (which often means Google) is the place where most people start their search. If you want your target customers to find your business, you need to have a solid SEO strategy in place.
By improving your SEO, you can help your business to appear higher up in the SERPs for relevant searches. E.g. If you run a plumbing business in Manchester, you want to show up for searches like ‘plumber Manchester’ or ‘best Manchester plumber’.
By appearing in the search engines for relevant keyword searches, you will generate more visits to your website – known as ‘traffic’. And more traffic should lead to more sales.
SEO is not the only way to get more traffic to your website. You could use PPC advertising, social media marketing, email marketing and several other online marketing techniques. They all have their place, and many businesses use multiple digital marketing techniques at the same time.
There is a lot involved in an effective SEO strategy, which is why many businesses decide to leave it to the experts.
As a basic overview, the search engines use algorithms to decide which websites to show in the search results for which keywords. These are very complex, and they are constantly evolving and improving.
Google and other search engines will crawl every web page to find out what it is about. The algorithms will then analyse the pages using dozens of ranking factors (often called ranking signals) to decide where they should appear.
It’s therefore important to optimise the web pages to improve their rankings. This includes on-page factors like the depth and quality on the content on the page, site structure, use of keywords and more. It also involves off-page factors like the links pointing back to the page from relevant and trustworthy sources, plus a whole range of other factors.
Overall, the search engines have one mission: to provide their users with the most relevant results for their searches. Your goal is to follow the search engine guidelines to meet their requirements and get higher up the search engine rankings as a result.
Why is it a great invesment?
SEO is particularly effective because it can generate a large amount of targeted traffic to your website over weeks, months and years. By appearing in the search results at the exact moment that people search for the products or services you provide, you can generate a consistent source of new business without the need to pay advertising costs.
That does not mean that you can run an SEO campaign, boost your visibility, and then stop all your SEO activity. It is an ongoing investment and you will need to keep working on your SEO strategy to maintain and improve your position in the SERPs over time.
Off-page Development
Off-page SEO relates to the things that happen off your website, and this is more of an ongoing process. Off-page SEO is incredibly important because while your website can be in a great position to show up in the search results, without regular off-page SEO, it will be hard to get it ranking.
The backlink profile is one of the most important parts of off-page SEO. This refers to the websites that link back to your site. If your site has lots of links from relevant and authoritative websites, this will help your site to rank.
On the other hand, lots of links from spam websites will hurt your ranking. Off-page SEO involves creating content that gets shared, promoting your blogs to influencers, monitoring brand mentions and using a wide range of other tactics to ensure your off-page SEO is as good as it can be.
On-page Development
Once we get started, we work on your on-page SEO. This involves optimising the on-page factors to ensure your website is in the best possible shape to start ranking.
On-page SEO focuses on the content, title tags, meta descriptions, information architecture, internal linking structure, images, website speed and usability, and other factors.
Website Audits
The first stage is to carry out a complete SEO audit of your website. We need to know your current situation and how visible your website is as well as several technical factors that will give us a good starting point. We essentially look at your website from an SEO perspective and find out where it is going right and what needs to be improved.
This includes looking at factors like the website design and speed, content, links, URLs, images and more. It also includes competitor analysis. We need to find out how well your competitors are doing with their own SEO efforts so we know what it will take to beat them.
Putting all of this information together gives you a clear idea of what it will take to get your SEO into shape, and it allows us to develop a bespoke SEO strategy for your business.
Keyword Research
Keyword research plays an important role in any SEO strategy. We need to know which keywords you need to rank for so we can then start incorporating them into your wider SEO strategy.
It is not a one-off process. While we carry out detailed keyword research at the start, it’s important to know that keyword usage and trends change over time. Regular keyword research ensures you keep your keyword strategy relevant.
Professional Marketing
So what do our SEO services actually involve? As you may already know, SEO involves more than just launching a website and hoping the right people come across it in the search engines. We have been providing professional SEO services for years, and we provide several services to help businesses improve their SEO.
Our services are customised for every business. SEO can never take a cookie-cutter approach to be effective, and we always take the time to formulate a custom strategy for your business. With that in mind, here are the main SEO services we provide.
Monthly Reporting
As you already know, SEO is an ongoing process and monthly reports play a big role in this. We create detailed reports every month that look at how your website is doing and where it is ranking for certain keywords.
Not only do these reports provide you with full transparency, but we also use them to decide what we need to focus on in the coming month and whether we need to continue with the existing strategy or make changes. This ensures we are constantly improving your SEO.
Why outsource your SEO? Because there is a lot involved in boosting your search engine rankings. It’s not something you can do once a week or month and then forget.
SEO is constantly evolving. You have to keep up with the algorithm changes and avoid making mistakes that can seriously hurt your rankings. It is a skilled area that incorporates many factors, and many businesses simply don’t have the time, specialist tools or experience to do it successfully.
We have proven results over many years helping clients in a wide range of industries to get the visibility they need in the search engines, generating more traffic and sales. If that’s what you want for your business, get in touch today.
So, whether you run a local business, ecommerce business or any other type of business or organisation, we can develop an SEO strategy to help you become more visible in search – and stay visible.
We can help your business boost its visibility in the search engines by developing a custom SEO strategy. From the initial SEO audit to ongoing off-page SEO strategies, we’ve got you covered. So contact us today to find out more about how we can improve your SEO so you can get ahead of your competition in the search engine results.