Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO as it’s often called) used to be seen as a bit of a dark art involving smoke and mirrors and whilst it is complex, it isn’t as difficult as some might have you believe.
The big thing is to make sure that if you have gone to the trouble and effort of having a site built, that it is visible to all the major search engines.
All our new sites are built from the ground up with search engine optimisation in mind, but if you have an existing site that isn’t getting the results your business needs, we can certainly help you make it more ‘friendly’ to the engines.
Our SEO techies love a challenge. Tell us what you want to achieve with your website and we will advise you on what we believe is feasible, taking into consideration your marketplace, your budget and the timeframe in which you want to achieve your results.
We know there is a lot of jargon spoken in this area of marketing, and we are always conscious to keep things in plain English, we will guide you through the entire SEO process making sure you understand how your site is progressing every step of the way.
We will produce regular reports and statistics for you, and as importantly we will make recommendations on things that we feel need to change in order to further improve results. We have consistently gained excellent search engine rankings for companies based in Chester, Liverpool, Manchester and further afield. Just give us a call or fill in the form above and we will provide you with a free initial search engine optimisation (SEO) audit of your current website.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation – which is the process of improving the quality and volume of traffic to a website using only algorithmic (sometimes called organic or natural) search results.
It’s important to note that SEO is about quality as well as quantity, whilst everyone is striving to get to number one, the target audience is often forgotten about and by that we mean the keywords or key phrases that an individual is using to find your products or services.
A great SEO campaign will begin with detailed keyword research, ensuring that you get ranked for the most relevant keywords is the first element any SEO expert will undertake. Bringing the right traffic to your site, and by that we mean the best converting traffic is critical and this will be largely driven by understanding your audience needs.
There are three main Search Engines to consider when putting together a SEM campaign (search engine marketing) Google, Yahoo and Bing (Microsofts own version) – each has slightly different requirements when deciding the position of your website in it’s natural search rankings. And each site changes it’s requirements to ensure that SEO experts don’t manipulate the results too much to their own liking (which means our SEO experts have to be constantly watching, listening, reading and learning).
In simple terms though we tend to break down an SEO or Search Engine Optimisation campaign into having two main elements, on-page and off-page.
On-page is as it sounds really – everything that is happening on your website, that is the quality of the build, is your site built with the Search engines in mind, and to best practice. Can the search engine ‘spiders’ get access to all your content easily (sounds like an obvious point, but you would be surprised at how many sites are built with the end user only in mind and disregard the search engines). How much keyword density is there in the content, are the page titles reflective of the keywords or phrases etc.
Off-page are all the peripheral but equally important activities, such as backlinks – that is how many other websites consider your website to be the very best and give you a link, (sometimes known as link popularity) the age of your domain age – ie how long have you been around, how often to people ‘talk’ about you else where on the web – ie are you mentioned on forums, blogs etc and how active are you on PR sites (this is largely to do with the link quality again).
Good search engine optimisation always starts with the keyword research and then looks at the on-page relevancy for the keywords that are right for your target audience and your competitive environment. A great SEO consultant will weigh up your websites on-page requirements and then draw up the strategy for the off-page SEO activity needs.
It’s true to say that an SEO campaign is a commitment so whether you are attempting to do it yourself or you are looking to appoint a search marketing agency, then you need to commit to at least a 12 month campaign. Both on page and off page Search Marketing takes time, effort and expertise. Our SEO experts spend a great deal of time researching, writing and analysing – so make sure that you really do allocate the very best resource to conduct your SEO campaign.
We hope that that explains what SEO is in a bit more detail, if you would like one of our search marketing experts to assist you in planning your SEO campaigns, or you would like us to undertake a free SEO audit on your website, then just request a free SEO Audit here.