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If you have been told before that you need to start a search engine optimisation campaign and don’t know where to start, this guide is for you. From setting up your site for success to targeting the right keywords and creating a comprehensive SEO plan, we will cover every aspect of SEO marketing, so you can pull in highly targeted visitors from Google and other search engines straight to your landing pages.
What is SEO and How It Works
SEO is basically setting up your website for maximum visibility in search engine results. It is a tedious process, and much slower than paying for traffic. You’ll need a detailed plan and have to crunch numbers in order to get it right. With the right tools, this job can be made easier.
SEO is the correct and natural placements of keywords and phrases into your website in order to tell the search engine spiders what you are writing about. Misleading search engines was possible back 15-20 years ago, but today – more than ever – you will have to play by Google’s books.
SEO settings on site will tell search engines about what your site and pages, posts are about. Off-site SEO will determine your site’s popularity score, leading to higher authority, domain trust and page quality score. The higher your trust and authority scores are the more likely your pages will be featured at the top of search results.
Of course, there are plenty of other elements of SEO, such as technical search engine website optimisations, site speed, and user experience.
Why is SEO Important for Businesses
If your business has a limited marketing budget, you might not have a healthy enough amount to throw at advertising. This leaves you with no traffic source, unless you’ve got a referral network or collaboration with partners. In order to get more traffic, you can create an SEO & digital marketing plan and implement it.
SEO can drive motivated buyers to your website on autopilot. Once the settings are in place and you have ticked all the boxes you will see your positions and traffic rise. You will draw visitors to your site for whatever your goal is: lead generation, online sales, appointment booking, etc. SEO traffic can also aid sales teams as it can provide qualified leads for them to close instead of having to go in cold.
How I Go about Ranking My Site
As you might be aware, we are in partnership with Digital4Trades, an agency for UK trades businesses. We pool our resources and use the same SEO methods to rank a local joiner’s site as we do to rank our own website. In fact, a huge majority of our traffic comes from search engines, and this is reflected in our lead conversion rate and quality.
While the basic structure of our site has been in place for a while, we’ve published a lot more pages and blog posts since it was set up. I monitor the changes in rankings, and keep an eye on the competition. You always need to know what other businesses are doing, especially if you are a small digital marketing agency among hundreds of thousands.
We regularly review the rankings as well as the user experience. We track conversions on each page, and see where we are losing out. If the rankings for one particular keyword drop, we improve the quality of the content in order to regain the positions. In summary, SEO is a never ending process, but it’s well worth the effort.
How to Improve SEO in WordPress
Most of our clients’ sites are built on WordPress, and we love working with the platform. The sites we’ve built or rebuilt all have Yoast SEO, in order to allow the quick settings that will inform search engines about the keywords and the topics. However, having software is not enough. You’ll need a plan.
We use several SEO software, but our main one is SE Ranking. Once we have access to clients’ Google Analytics and Search Console accounts, we create a benchmark document. This will show us where the main room for improvement is and we can come up with a plan.
We create the site structure, internal and external linking plan, as well as the content strategy. This might involve tweaking the content, restructuring pages, or simply adding the keywords to the SEO plugin. It’s all about making continuous improvements. If you would like to find out how your site can be improved, check out our SEO Score calculator or learn more about our SEO marketing agency.
WordPress is loved by Google, and it is easy to optimise once you know what you are doing. However, this doesn’t mean that we cannot work with other platforms. In fact, we’ve got some GoDaddy websites grow their search engine traffic by a minimum of 15 percent month-on-month. In recent years, Squarespace and Wix have improved their SEO tools, and they are much easier to optimise than before.
Impact of SEO on Lead Quality
Based on our combined experience of 45 years in digital marketing, we can fairly state that traffic coming from search engines is far superior to paid or referral traffic. That’s why we encourage our clients to heavily invest their resources into SEO if they have a long term vision.
Of course, this depends on which keywords you are targeting. Information keywords are not necessarily going to result in sales, so you will have to examine buyer intent before coming up with an SEO strategy.
Most SEO tools will give you an indication of the buyer intent; these are generally informational, navigational, local, transactional, or commercial. If you are looking to sell products, you will have to go for commercial intent to increase your conversions, if you would like to get leads for your services, transactional intent is your best bet. Of course, this is a bit more complicated than that, and a lot of work and research goes into getting our clients the right quality leads.
No matter how good your SEO is if your lead generation sucks. Focus on your landing page designs and implement AB testing to continuously improve your conversion rates.
Considerations for New Website Optimisations
When you set up a new website, you cannot ignore creating a search engine optimization campaign at the same time. There’s absolutely no point paying thousands of pounds for design if nobody will find and visit your site.
A logical site structure should be the basis of your organic SEO marketing plan. User experience is one of the main ranking factors today, so make sure that you follow the logic of your potential clients when creating the navigations.
Next, you’ll have to ensure that every on site element of the site is in place, and the pages are optimised for speedy delivery and mobile displays. Google’s Mobile First indexing has been in place for a few years now. Still, we can see so many sites that are unreadable or hard to navigate on mobile devices.
So, once you’ve got the structure of the site, you will have to create a keyword plan. You’ll also have to select the cornerstone content and let Google know which pages you think are the most important. Remember; Google bots can follow code and instructions, not common sense.
Finally, once you’ve assigned keywords to each page, it’s time to write some well-researched content based on what’s trending. You might want to look at what your competitors are doing and do better than them if you want to rank higher.
Having a content marketing plan for the future is also crucial, as you will need to keep your site fresh, so search engines can keep on visiting it crawling the new pages and posts.
And finally, you’ll need to create a backlinking strategy, taking a leaf out of your competitors’ book. A good SEO tool will tell you where your main competitors are getting linked from, so you can get an idea of what works.
Bear in mind that this is just the beginning of your search engine optimisation campaign. You’ll need to keep on making continuous improvements if you would like to improve and retain your search engine positions.
That said, it is not guaranteed that you will see fast SEO results, especially if you are in a competitive market. You will have to search long and hard to find low hanging fruit keywords that will get you the traffic you need. However, chances are that your competitors have already clocked onto them.
Should You Use AI Tools to Build an SEO Website?
As previously mentioned in a blog post, you can use AI for SEO, but not without supervision. Human input is not only encouraged, but also essential for success.
You might have a built in AI tool that will be using the most popular keywords in your industry and even choose the image tags, However, it will not understand buyers’ intent. For example, if I told an AI tool to talk about funnel optimisation, chances are that it would come up with an industrial design of a funnel, not what I really meant.
Use ChatGTP and other tools with caution. Remember that Google ranks sites based on the uniqueness and usefulness of content. Quality matters much more than quantity.
Paid Traffic or Organic SEO Marketing
As mentioned above, you can choose to get fast results with paid traffic, but you need a healthy budget. Alternatively, you can design a search engine optimisation campaign long term, but you will need to wait a few months for the results to show up. There are benefits of both approaches.
If you absolutely cannot wait to get new leads and customers, and you have a healthy budget, a search marketing campaign can be beneficial. If you are happy with going slowly and want to test the waters, SEO is your best option.
The main benefit of investing in a search engine optimisation campaign is that you will be able to reap the benefits many years after the plan has been implemented. Yes, it’s hard work in the beginning, even for an SEO agency, but it will continue to deliver consistent results without having to pay for ads.
Of course, it’s important to mention that some paid traffic sources have a much better conversion rate than others. For example, LinkedIn ads are much more effective for B2B marketing than those on Instagram or Facebook. Google ads or product placements are great for eCommerce sites, but you’ll need a minimum budget of £500 to actually make a dent. For LinkedIn, you’ll need much, much more. Compared with that, you can create long term results for a fraction of the cost of monthly traffic.
The choice is yours; after all, it is about what your business needs right now.
Our Approach to SEO & Digital Marketing
We don’t offer set packages for SEO as every business is different. We don’t charge an hourly rate as some marketing agencies do. Our project management and planning system allows us to size up the search engine optimisation campaign and provide a 6-12 month plan on an individual basis.
This plan is reviewed after the initial period, the results are assessed and analysed. This is when we discuss with clients what else we can do to further improve their positions. Generally, they ask us this question themselves, as they can already see what’s possible with the power of SEO. Then we go ahead and create a new search engine optimisation plan that we implement in collaboration with the client. We explore new opportunities for collaboration, branding, awareness, or client acquisition.
We don’t believe in exchanging time or skills for money; we believe in generating a high return on marketing investment. There is one promise we always keep: we listen to our SEO clients before creating a search engine optimisation campaign and find the fastest and easiest way to achieve their goals.
We also offer monthly reports and meetings, so you are never left in the dark about your website optimisations. You will see in black and white the progress we’ve made, the changes in your rankings, and the increasing traffic. We’ve got nothing to hide, as a transparent search engine optimisation business. Plus, we want to keep you as a client as long as we deliver results, and communication and collaboration are the foundation of everything we do.
Would you like to find out more about how we approach SEO & digital marketing?
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