SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Internal links are those which take a user to other parts of your domain such as the homepage, a contact form, a service page or other blog post. Internal links are a great way of providing context and telling Google which pages they should be most interested in. For instance, if you had a blog about the best hatchback under £10,000, you could internally link to another blog that looks at the best family cars under £10,000.

To internally link effectively, creators must use relevant anchor text. Anchor text is the term used to describe the text that is used to put or anchor the link on. The anchor text is in many ways as important as the link itself and both must be relevant to one another.

Linking to other important pages on your site not only keeps people on your site long but it gives search engines an easier time once you’ve set your site live. As they scan the pages they can jump from page to page and get a quicker understanding of the website’s context. Further to this, a thorough internal link building plan can help improve usability for readers. As they’re reading about this one topic, they can get further context or information about it by clicking on the anchor text and heading to another piece of content that explains something else about it.

External links, or outbound links, are those that go from your domain to another URL that doesn’t belong to you. Adding links from other sites to yours that are authoritative and relevant to what you’re talking about can help improve the credibility of your website. This is because you’ve demonstrated that you’re aware of the authoritative sources in your industry or sector. When it comes to linking outwards, make sure you don’t link to spammy, irrelevant websites, you’re only going to suffer as a consequence.

In some instances, external linking can be a great way of getting your domain out there to fellow websites that may well return the favour and link to your site from there (called a backlink).

Both internal and external links should be given equal importance and are essential to creating a well-rounded piece of content.

Creating blogs for other people’s websites is the bread and butter of backlinks. Hundreds of sites – across more industries than you can count – are essentially guest blog platforms that accept content from people in return for backlinks. These guest blogs aren’t easy though and many places will have strict guidelines which need to be followed before they post your work. Expect to be writing 1000, 1500, even 2000 words of valuable content to achieve just one backlink. Our advice when it comes to guest posting is to do your research and find publications that have guidelines that align with your industry/expertise. It’s a bit of a commitment to guest post and write thousands of words so make sure the place you’re sending it to is going to provide the right link context for you.

Years ago, the Yellow Pages was the SEO of the day. Now, while no one has a directory sent to them, sites like the Yellow Pages very much exist. These directories have high DRs and are ideal to get links to your site from. These sites constantly accept submissions and all that you need to do is fill out a small profile detailing who you are and what you do. Another good thing about business directories is that you can ask to be listed in specific areas. So if you’re a Manchester SEO agency you can ask to be listed in the northwest section of the listings.

This isn’t a way to link build specifically, it’s more a part of the process. Building relationships with the people that decide if you’re content is worthy for their website is a great way of cementing long-term backlinks.

Good forums and blogs are out there! While some are spammy and complete nonsense there are genuinely insightful areas out there where users look to help one another. The golden rule for this type of link building is to point them to links that are relevant to what the blog or thread is about. With that link must come a thorough, genuinely insightful comment. Think authenticity and be prepared to offer advice.

Reading thousands of words on a topic is good, being able to interpret everything about that topic by looking at an infographic is better. Spending time to collate data and build eye-catching infographics not only provide a visual element to a website but can be shared and distributed amongst thousands of people, potentially.

Publications and magazines are hungry for content, especially in an online world. The need to fill virtual column inches never ceases – this is something you can leverage to your benefit. Keep an eye out on #journorequests and follow publications that are relevant to your industry. Outreach to journalists, build relationships with them and soon enough they’ll come to you asking for comments on something. Your price? Just a bunch of links to your site – it’s a win-win!

The first set of terms is fairly self-explanatory. The branded phrases are those that include a brand’s name as part of a larger term or are just the keyword themselves. Branded keywords are usually a good indication that a company has a good market share and is known by its audience. Unbranded keywords are those which don’t feature a company’s name. For businesses or individuals, you want to rank for as many unbranded terms as branded terms. Both come with benefits, the intent behind branded terms is more sales-y. If someone is typing a company’s name in, the chance of them purchasing something from them is higher because they know where to go.

Seed terms are the broad keywords that could cover a multitude of subtopics. These types of terms are usually searched for in the early stages of the buying journey. On the contrary, page-specific terms related to those phrases are a bit more specific and are looking for one thing.

Think of it like this, the seed phrases will be relevant to most of your website whereas the page specific ones will only really be relevant to one, maybe two pages on your site.

As we touched on, SEO keywords are so many because they can be almost any length. These are categorised into short and long-tail terms which are sometimes called ‘head and tail’ terms.

The shorter the keyword, the larger the search volume and the harder it is to rank for it. Whereas a long-tail term has lower search volume but is usually far easier to rank for. The keyword “socks” for example is going to take longer to rank for than “What are the best socks to wear with hiking boots?”.

Real inroads in search engine traffic can be made by aiming for those mid to long-tail keywords as they tend to have higher converting traffic.

A whole bunch of Google search terms can be segmented via the classic buyer journey. Different keywords will provide clues as to what stage in the buying journey someone is.

These clues can be used to leverage content toward them. The ultimate goal is to attract all the traffic from search engines for all the different buying phases so that you’ve constantly got different people, at different stages in the pipeline, coming to your business.

These segments of phrases explain themselves in a way. Local keywords are those which include terms that are relevant to the area in which you are based or feature a term that’s unique to an area. National phrases expand on that and focus on entire countries, with global terms not having a geographical bent and being more generic.

Audiences, target markets, and sectors all type different things that are associated with them and their identity. For instance, Manchester United fans may type terms that are related to their club as they are interested in the team and see it as part of their identity.

These terms allow you to align your marketing to the customers and learn what types of things they are searching for. You write content to that and you have a pretty successful, if niche, strategy.

Evergreen terms are phrases that never lose their relevance and are not affected by the time of year, outside influences, or changes in trends. Topical terms are the exact opposite and will suffer peaks and troughs depending on when people are interested in them and are searching.

A primary term is the main phrase you’re looking to rank for when writing a blog or a piece of content. As with many key topics, there are usually 5-10 sub-topics within it, these are what secondary phrases are, the keywords that will help support the performance of the target phrase.

First off you want to brainstorm all the broad-based topics that your business or website relate to – don’t worry about them being too broad, we’ll refine them on the next step. Just write down all the services, products or topics that you think your potential customers would come to you for.

Once you have a list of these keywords you can refer to the monthly search volume to decide how important they are to your audience.

Take this list of broad topics, split them up and carry our research for each one. You’ll find that underneath the broad term will be hundreds of terms that are to do with it. For instance, under the keyword, ‘SEO’ there would be terms such as ‘content marketing for SEO’ or ‘how does SEO work?’.

Get a list of these terms together for each of the main topics you found back in step one.

Here’s where the intent comes in. Underneath each keyword will be layers and layers of intent. It’s your job to decide what that intent is and how it relates to the buying journey. You can then target your content to satisfy that intent. The intent is so important in Google’s algorithm to the point where it surpasses things such as domain ranking and legacy authority. If you’re providing the right answer, putting out the best content for that query, you’re going to succeed. One of the best ways to decipher the intent behind a phrase is pretty simple – just Google that keyword and see what comes up.

Head to the related terms at the bottom of the search pages and check out the related terms. This added little trick is a great way of expanding the list of potential target keywords, especially if you operate in a niche sector.

Start creating your optimised, keyword-rich content that is optimised for leading search engines.

Not the most glamorous service but one of the most important ones, technical SEO involves all the work carried out to ensure that the indexing and crawling phase is as efficient and optimised as it can be. Tech SEO work has nothing to do with on-page work and is all carried out behind the scenes. So, while the user may not see or appreciate the efforts made from a technical standpoint, there’s a good chance that the reason they are on your website is that your tech SEO has made your site irresistible to Google and it has thus been ranked highly.

As with on and off-page SEO, Tech SEO is a term that is packed with different practices. These practices include the more simple and rudimentary such as optimising your URL structure, adding breadcrumbs to your navigation, editing image filenames, and ensuring your website looks great on mobile. Technical optimisation work can also be extremely complex and include stuff such as structured data markups, XML site map optimisations, and canonical URLs.

Technical search engine optimisation is a big investment of time and resources but the value of it is immeasurable.

Virtually everyone you know will at some point have bought and maybe even sold something online. Added to that is the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought about 10 years’ worth of change to online retail in just 2 and it’s clear that the need for rigorous Ecommerce SEO tactics for shopping sites is very real.

In the world of ECommerce or ECom, very little attention is paid to SEO. The visual nature of selling products, coupled with the need to drive sales, means that paid ads, PPC, and even traditional advertising is put ahead of ranking on page one for relevant phrases. The fact is that billions of searches are being made every day, and a large chunk of those will involve some ECom aspect. By ranking on page one for the phrases that relate to what you’re selling, you’re basically (and this is very rudimentary) earning sales from a ‘free’, organic marketing platform.

Invest in ECommerce SEO, and enjoy earning revenue on autopilot.

Reach new markets, audiences and sectors by investing in international SEO for your business. Made up of various tactics, international SEO is all about expanding your internet presence beyond your business’s country of origin.

The bulk of the workaround global search engine optimisation is about adding a variety of signals to your site to tell Google that your content is suitable for audiences outside of X country. For instance, a unified URL structure that includes the codes of different countries – ‘de’ for Germany and ‘es’ for Spain, for example – is one of the key ways of expanding your reach. As well as URLs, geo-targeting, and hreflang tags are other techniques that will help you be seen by people across the world.

The benefits of international SEO are fairly obvious. Done right and you open yourself up to a limitless market of billions that flock to your website, bringing you more sales and revenue.

For businesses that want to become the market leader in their local area, optimising for and investing in a localised SEO strategy that targets specific places, towns and cities, is incredibly potent.

As with international SEO, its ‘Local’ sibling is all about structuring a site and its various profiles in such a way that it sends signals to Google’s crawlers to say it wants to be indexed in a certain way. For Local SEO, these involve optimising your Google My Business (GMB) page and building important name, address and phone number citations in websites that are being used by people looking for your services.

Crucially, working on optimising for local audiences is all about ranking for relevant area-specific keywords. It’s by writing and optimising key areas of your site for these phrases and terms which will bring you that online dominance in your local area.

Local SEO can also be quite a cost-effective solution as your budgets are focused on just one specific area, not the entire nation.

Carrying out an audit is the best way to understand the current state of your website and online presence. Audits done on sites such as SE Ranking or SEMRush will scan through your sites, rate your score out of 100 and highlight major red flags that need addressing. Audits, in many ways, are priceless because they provide you with the information you need to succeed – they are telling you what to do to improve your rankings.

Audits tie in nicely with Google’s Core Web Vitals which is the programme by which they judge websites on how fast they load, their user-friendliness, and technical merits. Search engines obsess over the user experience and are constantly looking for a way to provide the best answer (i.e. website) to the question/search term someone has just typed in. If you can combine the best content with Core Web Vitals scores that are in the 90+ percentile your website is in a fantastic position to be rewarded.

Undergoing vast, fundamental changes to your website to future proof it and improve the long-term performance of it all is an extremely delicate and serious job. Undergoing website migrations can be overwhelming and cause a great deal of damage to your site from an SEO point of view if done wrong. That’s why 99% of the time it’s best to invest in web migration services that will handle the entire process from start to finish.

Web migration can include moving from one domain to another, restructuring URLs, rebuilding the architecture of your website or a combination of all. Anything you do on your website that fundamentally changes it can be classed as a migration-like practice. They can be extremely beneficial, no doubt, people don’t do these sorts of things for fun. The long-term benefits will arrive as long as the short-term migration is handled with the utmost delicacy.

If local search tactics target your nearby area and international SEO aims to expand your presence globally, it stands to reason that national optimisation techniques are about getting your name out across the country.

Investing in National SEO is ideal for businesses at a certain growth stage who are looking to expand their brand to places beyond their current location. In a granular sense, optimising for national attention is just a scaled-up version of local SEO where instead of trying to rank for one area, you’re working to be visible across multiple.

One of the key ways of achieving national SEO success is to create bespoke content for different locations. Having multiple different URLs and pages that target Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and York, for example, would be an example of a national search engine optimisation campaign. Optimising GMB profiles, developing a coherent website architecture, and conducting thorough keyword research are some of the most important elements of national SEO.

According to Sistrix, around 64% of all searches are made on mobile devices such as phones and tablets. With three out of five people tapping rather than typing into Google, investing in mobile SEO is an absolute must. Almost every industry should think of their internet presence as mobile-first, meaning that everything you do, and every investment you make, should be geared toward making your site run on mobile well first, before you even think about the desktop. This is especially true if you’re in an industry like the Food & Drink sector.

Attention spans are the lowest they’ve ever been and if users land on your site and find that JavaScript or CSS is being blocked, images are slow to load, and the pages weren’t optimised for the device they are on, they’ll simply go elsewhere.

All these little steps need to be resolved if your mobile SEO is to be the best it can be. Once it is, your site will be nothing but a joy for people to visit, meaning they’ll come back time and time again.

Making all the visual elements of your website the best they can be can drastically improve rankings and visibility. Known as On-Page SEO, this type of service is about getting all the elements of a page that a user can see to be as optimised to your target keyword as possible. On-Page SEO includes multiple ranking factors like URLs, heading tags, images, heading tags, alt-text, and metadata.

On-page SEO is the total opposite of Off-page SEO which focuses on carrying out things that happen off your websites such as guest blogs and backlink building.

Working on the front end optimisation has become so important in the last few years as Google’s algorithm has become more nuanced and intelligent. It’s judging how presentable and optimised your site is for the user to the same degree it’s looking at your schema markup and URL structure. The proper on-page investment will aid search engines and users in their quest to understand the context of your website.

More and more, Google is aligning its ranking factors to the factors that make a user want to click on your site.

A technical SEO audit is a process by which you or a digital marketing agency checks the technical aspects of your website to make sure it’s optimised and healthy. The need to remain relevant and respond to Google et als ever-changing algorithms. Carrying out technical SEO audits once every few months ensures your site is optimised for the newest and most impactful ranking factors.

The stark reality, and the reason why you need to carry out technical SEO audits, is that 93% of clicks are made on page one.

Technical SEO audits can be long or short. However long you intend to make your tech audit, just ensure it is thorough and well planned out. Creating checklists and giving every on and off-page aspect of your site a pass or fail mark will help you determine what areas you need to work on and which areas need to be left alone.

Our technical audits are by their nature rigorous and performed by experts who’ve done hundreds of them between them. We’ll look at the front end factors of your site such as URL structures and the sitemap, as well as back-end elements like indexing and hosting. We also, as standard, examine the areas that impact your websites such as link quality and current backlink profile.

Loosely related to local SEO, small business search engine optimisation refers to how those new companies make themselves known online. Often with a small investment or available funds, small business SEO is all about maximising budgets and ensuring optimum ROI. While some small businesses shy away from investing resources in search, it should be seen as an opportunity to disrupt the bigger competitors. With so many keywords, small business SEO can be clever and target those lower value, long-tail keywords that aren’t being covered by rivals.

Startup search engine optimisation can also leverage free tools such as Google My Business and free backlinks from directories or guest blog sites to grow their presence for a cost that is within budget.

In our experience, businesses that are fewer than 50 staff can use clever, in some cases more radical tactics to rank well. Spending time writing long-form content, for example, is just one of the ways that a business can include ontology, earn greater keyword visibility, and steal ranking positions from legacy businesses that have neglected their website.

You might be surprised to learn that videos can be optimised for SEO, as well as text! That’s right, video SEO is a type of optimisation service, one which can be very effective if you’re a business whose main industry is visual.

From the outset, it’s important to know that there is only so much you can do with video SEO, and it’s not as powerful as ‘regular’ SEO. This is primarily because the video itself – i.e. the visual and audio elements – cannot be altered after it’s been filmed. That’s not to say it can’t be beneficial, the transcripts, descriptions, titles, and tags can all be changed and tweaked so that they are more relevant to the terms you’re looking to target.

Setting goals is so important when making a plan for your search engine optimisation tactics. Goals will ensure everyone knows what the point is behind what they are doing. In addition, work will be done with that goal in mind, making it more relevant and impactful.

With your goals set you can start to decide which platforms and types of content to invest your time in, as opposed to just throwing money at things and not knowing if they are relevant to you. If performance isn’t where you expected or it’s not helping you get to where you want to be, you can make small adjustments because you set goals at the start and have a north star to face it.

Your indicators of performance could be anything, they just need to be specific, like doubling the traffic in 6 months, increasing sales by 30% in one year, or increasing the number of page one keywords to 50. Whatever they are, goals will help you measure ROI which will allow you to budget more effectively going forward.

No matter your industry, you’ll have competitors who are online and ranking on page one for the keywords that are just as relevant to them as they are to you. So when the time comes for you to invest in SEO make sure you research the content your competitors are putting out. Check out their backlink profiles, keyword rankings, online reviews, blog strategy, everything. After all, they are winning in the online world.

Analyse your competitors and the people who are ranking for the key terms you want to rank for. The latter may not be direct competitors but at the end of the day, they are doing something right and are therefore worthy to be analysed.

It sounds obvious but with it being so integral, it’s certainly worth a mention. Undergoing extensive keyword research is vital if you’re going to create targeted content that ranks for what you want it to rank for.

You wouldn’t believe the number of businesses that write and write and write without thinking about what it is they are targeting. Advanced keyword research allows you to avoid cannibalizing rankings (this is where two pages of the same domain end up competing with each other for the same ranking) and reducing the impact of the pages that you’ve worked so hard to complete.

Keyword research equals better ROI, there’s no greater incentive to do it than that.

A strong backlink profile that is packed with external links from authoritative websites is one of the best signals to Google that your site is authoritative and worthy of strong rankings.

Spend real time earning quality links over a high volume. The value of those high-quality backlinks (those with a DR of 60, 70+) is worth far, far more than 10 links from spammy websites that aren’t relevant to what you do as a business.

Once these links get indexed and scanned by Google, your rankings will rise.

Your content could be the wittiest, most engaging piece of work you’ve written but if it doesn’t match the intent of the query it’ll never succeed. Certain keywords you’re looking to target may be driven by a particular type of intent that just doesn’t match what you’re creating.

Be sure to analyse the intent of the first 10 or so results for a keyword, you’ll get a better understanding of how the content is matching the intent.

A car is only as good as the tires it runs on. The same principle applies to a website. If your website isn’t technically optimised then your on-page content isn’t going to perform to the best of its abilities. Providing the best user experience starts with back end optimisation – removing bloated code, reducing image sizes, ensuring your site has breadcrumbs, these three things just scrape the surface of what needs to be done from a backend perspective.

Building a website is a great opportunity to get these back-end practices in as you’re building them rather than having to put them in after. Doing them as you build them is a great way of ensuring your website’s launch has the fullest possible impact.

SEO is a long game, with so many different pieces of content to index every single second, getting ranked online can take a while. Once you’re indexed, the process of moving through the rankings takes a great deal of time. All the while you should be looking to add fresh content to that page to further enhance its relevancy and potency.

Once your blog, page, or entire site is published, the hardest part is to wait and let it index. You really should wait 3, 4, 5, or even 6 months to check your website’s online visibility, rankings, and traffic.