Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of improving a website’s ‘organic’ search performance by engineering on-site content or favourably influencing the actions of other ‘off-site’ websites.
An SEO strategy begins with a full audit of your current website - to determine whether there be any SEO in place at all, or perhaps a small level of optimisation.
What's included in Search Engine Optimisation?
- A comprehensive website audit - Is the website modern, up-to-date, seo-friendly and even ready to have some SEO put in place? We often find a website needs fixing first although many of the on-page strategies (as shown below) will ensure some of those fixes are done anyway.
- Keyword and Competitor Analysis - A successful SEO strategy requires identifying the right keywords/phrases to help produce the best search results. It is also an understanding of what your competitors are doing/using in their online strategy. The less competitive your industry is online the easier it is for you to out-perform your competition.
- On-Page Optimisation - the practice of optimising individual pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. It refers to all the things that you can do ON your website to help you rank higher, such as page titles, internal linking, meta tags & descriptions, etc.
- Technical Optimisation - Off-Site and Technical SEO refer to site additions or changes that may influence the actions of other websites or online channels in a way that helps improve the performance of your website.
What is a Website Audit?
When we run an audit on your website, over 200 items are checked against your website with a full report to follow indicating those items needing attention.
As part of this report we will include a quotation to make edits / repairs to your website so ensure your website is optimal for providing all the features every website should have to improve its chances of being found by a search term.
Depending on this website audit, we will then work in a number of ways to optimise your site based on your level of requirement.
What is Keyword Research
Keyword Research is the process of identifying the right keywords and phrases for your website pages.
We ascertain what the target audience is looking for and gather some pertinent keywords/phrases you might be aware of, then use tools and techniques to create a concise list of target keywords/phrases that might be considered useful as topic pages for your website. From that, we can identify the strongest opportunities for search results.
It is normally advisable to concentrate on one to five key phrases for a whole website around a core theme. Then, for individual pages only one to three phrases.
For large sites though with hundreds of pages, it is hard to optimise every single page.
What is On-Page Optimisation
On-Page website optimisation manipulates the visual components of your website to help improve the search results coming to your website. Some of the items we check are:
- Metadata Information
- Unique Page Titles / Unique Meta Descriptions per Page
- Topic related Keywords and Phrases included in URLs, Page Titles and meta descriptions
- Internal Page Links within main content
- Heading Tags used on all topic pages
- Sitemap created and uploaded to root folder
- Footer info to include NAP and Privacy Policy
- Logo linking back to Home Page
- Use of Alt tags on all images
- Favicon
- Social Media logos and links to any pages
but lots more as well.
Off-Page and Technical SEO inclusions
- Keyword Analysis
- Competitor Analysis
- Google Analytics Account setup
- Google My Business account setup
- Bing site verification and submission
- Correct Caching
- Website compression
- Google Search Console Setup
- SSL Certificate
- Redirects as required
- URL Canonical Verification
- SPF Records
- Use of Media Queries
- File aggregation
- Robots.txt file
- Use of a Blog
- Microdata / schema.org
- Image optimisation
- Reduction of server response times
Take Note
- No one can guarantee you a number 1 ranking. It must be earned and maintained by being the best and most relevant.
- Keywords by themselves are almost irrelevant
- Key phrases and website content are now just 2 of the many items needed to be set up properly to have Google find you and send visitors to your website.
- CONTENT is KING!
- You need an excellent user experience on your website
- Your website needs to answer people’s problems
- Is your website mobile-friendly? How quickly does the site load?
- Do you have lots of good quality content on pages specific to a topic visitors might be looking for?
- How is that content being shared around the web? Is it shared on Social Media?
- ‘Be your customer’ - what are your customers looking for? What are they putting into the search engines?
- SEO is competitive. There is only one front page and only one top slot so it is important to know your competition and perform better. What are they doing? Where do they rank and for which keywords? Who is linking to their website and why?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is when you adjust your website to improve its ranking in organic search results. With SEO your clicks are free.
Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to paid search advertising, also known as pay-per-click or PPC.
Both of these strategies fall under the umbrella term search marketing – referring to any online marketing which occurs on a search engine.
Advertising on Google or Bing is an easy way to pay your way to the top of results, but it doesn’t work alone.
It’s worth investing in both campaigns as PPC can bring you fast results, but SEO will provide sustainable growth and higher traffic in the long term than paid ads.
There are hundreds of factors that help Google decide where your website appears when someone uses keywords in their search. As their algorithm is constantly changing, it’s important to stay on top of the things that help your website appear on page 1 of Google.
We use best practice SEO techniques for quality online traffic and long-term results. We manage your SEO, so you can focus on running your company.
Get your site in front of potential customers by optimising your site with keyword phrases used carefully throughout your content, videos and links from other sites to improve your search rankings.
