Search engine optimisation or SEO is often seen as a secret world or a skill that only a few specialists can do; this is the view that we hear from many of our customers. It is true that, like any task in business, search engine optimisation requires some knowledge, training and experience to do it well. But it is a part of business life that in reality can be done, at least in part, within almost any organisation. We are always keen to work with our clients to help them understand the different aspects of SEO, educate their staff in how to be a part of their SEO strategy and to pass on some of the tasks that would like to do in-house.
The two most common questions we hear from prospective clients are ‘Why should I be doing SEO?’ and ‘What are the benefits of SEO?’. Perhaps a better question might be ‘Is there a good reason NOT to do SEO?’ and although there is of course a cost to doing search engine optimisation, the benefits far outweigh the cost.
In the following sections we clearly outline the different aspect of SEO. In an ideal world your business should be active in some way in all of these areas. Whether you want to outsource all of these, do some of them in-house or train your staff to take on all aspects of SEO, each one will contribute to the power of your web site, drive more prospects to your site and increase your competitivness in your industry.
Local SEO means optimising your web site and other resources to attract visitors who are performing local searches. Competing at a local level can often be the fastest way to expand the number of visitors to your site and grow your business. Getting seen by more local people and businesses is also much easier than increasing your web presence nationally or internationally simply because there is less competition. Today search engines display the top local results in what is sometimes referred to ‘Local Snack Pack’ results. The image on the left shows the results from a Google search for ‘attractions totnes’ and clearly demonstrates the benefits of optimising your site for local SEO.
If your business has products that would appeal to local customers or would like to attract more customers local to you then local SEO is definitely something you should be doing. With the majority of searches being performed on mobile devices and voice search on mobile, this also presents an opportunity for passsing trade. For instance, a visitor to your town might search for ‘attractions near me’ (where attractions is your product) and businesses with web sites optimised for local SEO would be the top results. To find out more about how local SEO could work for you, contact us for a free no oblication chat.
Taking on some or all of your SEO might seem like a scarry thought but with some basic one to one training at your premisis you will be up and running in no time. There might be some aspects of SEO that you would prefer not to do yourself and other things that you feel would fit well with the skills and staff that you have. Doing your own SEO could also mean that you feel more in control and might help you to better understand how your SEO efforts should be directed.
As part of your SEO training we will help you to understand:
Often seen as one of the most powerful way to increase the number of visitors to your site, link building is an essential part of your SEO strategy. Each time you gain a link from another site, it increases your ‘page authority’ in the eyes of the search engines and in turn this improves your rankings.
Links can be gained from many different places:
Generally the more links you gain, the higher your page authority will be. However, not all links are equal; the higher the domain authority of the linking site, the bigger the benefit you will gain. There are many more factors to consider when designing your link building & SEO strategy; give us a call or complete the contact form to see how many links you currently have and discuss how we can gain more links.
A major part of an SEO strategy is aimed to let the search engines know that you are an authority about the products you sell or the services you provide and content createing and marketing is an essential part of that. Link building forms a major part of this but holding it all together is the content you have written. Writing regularly about what you do shows the search engines that you are active, have something to say and are happy to share this information, which most importantly needs to be well written, original, of interest to your intened reader and informative. If very well written, some of your stories & articles might get linked to from other sites who wish to reference your piece, giving even more autority to your site.
There are many different types of things that you can write and many places that you can place your articles. Some but not all of these are:
Let us know what you need to write about and we can help with your SEO content strategy or help you write your articles.
E-mail marketing is a fantastic way to keep your brand alive in the eyes of your customers and prospects. As we all know, done badly e-mail marketing can be an annoyance and will result in readers unsubscribing and feeling negative about your company. But done well with informative, interesting and well written content, e-mail marketing is a great way to keep you customers and prospect updated about what is happening with your company, its products and services. Content ideas for e-mail marketing include:
As part of your overall search engine optimisation strategy, e-mail marketing can be a big part of your content marketing plan and can be a great way to communicate any promotions, offers or news stories that you want people to know about. In fact many experts in the industry believe that e-mail marketing is still the best way to reach out to your users, although it is not so easy to get right; there are many things you need to do to achieve this. Let us know how we can help or advise about your e-mail marketing.
One of the first things most good SEO companies will suggest you do is an SEO audit. This tends to most often be focused on the technical aspects of your site and is an essential part of creating your SEO strategy. Over the last several years, the technical performance you a web site have had an increasing impact on the ranking of key words and phrases in the search engines. Furthermore, Google has effectively given notice that speed, especially on mobile devices will become even more important in the future. There are more things that can affect the technical performance and speed of your web site than we can list here, so to find out if your site is optimised as much as it can be, get in touch and we can perform a free audit for you.
Speed is not the only thing that we look at in a technical audit. A sample of some of the things we look at in this process are:
Keyword research is essential to all of your SEO strategy. Keywords are the words, word combinations and longtail phrases that you want to optimise your site for and is the starting point from which you can optimise your site. A key part of the initial stages of any of our SEO projects will be to work with you to find the words and phrases that will drive your whole content marketing strategy. During this process we will:
From there we can decide on the articles, campaigns, press releases and on-page content that needs to be written, work out what is the page page structure for the site and create a plan of implementation. Get in contact and we can work out what you could be ranking for.
