Search
Engine Optimisation

Learn what Google’s algorithms mean to your business and find out how to make them work for you.

Introduction to SEO

On Google alone, there are over 3.5 Billion searches a day. People turn to Google for answers to everything, and it’s not just people searching by typing into Google’s home page either, voice and image searching is also on the rise.

Why SEO should be a priority

The top 5 results on Google account for 67% of all clicks. So getting your website into the top half of page one for the keywords that matter to your organisation should be a top priority. If you’re at the bottom of page 1 in Google’s search results page, you’ve missed out on 97.6% of all clicks – if you’re on page 2 or further back, you’re almost missing out completely.

What are SERPs?

When you search, Google’s search engine results page (SERPS) are made up of different elements depending on the type of search make, for example, location-based searches ‘Restaurants in Warwick’ tend to bring up map results first. Google’s SERPs are made up of organic search results (10 per page) plus adverts, maps, recommended images, video results, shopping suggestions and more.

The good and the bad

There are good and bad ways of doing SEO. Many people call it black hat (less ethical) and white hat (following the guidelines). Google has clamped down on what it considers to be unhelpful, blackhat SEO practices.

Blackhat SEO

Practices focus on optimising your website, just for the search engines, tricking them into thinking that you are something you’re not. There’s little focus on the audience and meeting their needs as humans. You can get results this way, but they are often short-lived – Google is cracking down on all black hat strategies.

Whitehat SEO

Whitehat practices put humans at the centre, trying to give your audience what they are looking for while following Google’s recommendations and guidelines. It leads to strong, long term results but it’s hard work. For my clients, I only recommend ethical and whitehat SEO practices – it’s the only way to go.

Why is SEO of benefit to you?

1) There is more trust in the organic results

People trust organic search results more than adverts. Around 80% of the people searching will not click on adverts, instead, they trust Google to bring up relevant results based on their request. Being ranked well in Google will deliver more traffic with better intent.

2) Quality and conversion rate

Clicks from organic have a tendency to lead to a better conversion rate – although this very much depends on the nature of the content and keywords, organic clicks can be more qualified.

3) Volume potential greater

With Ads taking up only 10-20% of all clicks, getting a good organic ranking in Google can lead to a massive increase in clicks and visitors to your site. Good SEO can return up to a 20X more than PPC.

4) SEO is often better value

The cost of SEO is largely dependent on competition. The more competitors, the harder you have to work to beat them. The cost per click of SEO, to begin with, can be more than advertising, but the yield, in the long run, is far greater and often much better value.

5) Investment

The investment and effort with SEO can pay off big time. Getting recognised by Google may not be easy, but once you’re ranking the results can be impressive and far outweigh any advertising or PPC campaign.

I sometimes compare SEO and PPC to buying or renting a house. Renting is a bit like PPC, you have a home to live in, but as soon as you stop paying rent you’ve got nowhere to live. SEO is like buying a house, it’s often more expensive, but you’re investing in something that will actually be worth something in the long run.

Icebreaker

In order to find out if we’re the right kind of fit for each other, I ask all clients to fill out my icebreaker. This allows me to follow up with meaningful responses so that we can get down to roots of where you need help.

“I have no hesitation in recommending Steve as an expert in digital marketing. He is also just ‘one of life’s good guys’.”

Chris Elliott

“Steve took the time upfront to understand our business and translate that understanding into a digital strategy focused on delivering sales growth.

Russell Fraser

“Steve is approachable, thoughtful and dedicated. He sets his bar high and is always thinking ahead and coming up with creative and practical ways to approach digital marketing.”

Anna Lewin

“Steve has superb skills in digital growth strategy and digital marketing. He is a delight to deal with and I would wholeheartedly recommend him”

Nigel May

“Steve is creative, fun and consistently produces great results. I have worked with him many times over ten+ years and have no hesitation in recommending him.”

Simon Hook

“If you want help with digital strategies for growth or to generate sales via digital, I absolutely recommend Steve”

Tim Ollerenshaw

“Steve is truly passionate about understanding not just the goals of a campaign, but the business behind it.”

Stephen Emery

“I’ve worked with Steve for a number of years now, and he has a near unique ability to make the mystical world of digital make complete sense.”

Pete Freeman

How SEO works

There are four main pillars to SEO the way I explain it. All four pillars play a part in Google’s assessment of whether your website should be ranked highly. SEO should be seen as a longer-term strategy, there may be quick wins along the way, but don’t let anyone tell you they know a shortcut – it’s likely that using a less reputable blackhat technique.

1 Understanding

Understanding why people search

Like all forms of marketing, one of the secrets to good SEO is understanding your customer and why they are searching. Start with speaking to them and find out what is driving them to search, what are their pains and needs – you’ll find it’s not always as logical as you think it may be. Capturing this at the beginning is an essential learning and will help inform keyword ideas and search intent.

Discover their Search intent

This is ‘why’ behind a search query and it’s crucial to understand this. Intent falls into 3 distinct categories; Informational, Navigational and transactional. All three are important, but transactional keywords will always have higher intent and are normally used by people looking to buy.

Keyword volume

When researching keyword volumes don’t be tempted by volume. Imagine your company makes packaging for FMCGs. Trying to optimise your site for ‘packaging’ even though it has 18,000 searches in the UK each month is pointless. Rather focus on the specifics – longer search terms such as ‘Food packaging pouches’ which has 100 searches is far less competitive and much more relevant.

Which keywords to target

You’ll want to get this right. As SEO is a longer term strategy you don’t want to waste time optimising for the wrong terms. Your selection should come down choosing the keywords that drive enough traffic, with the best keyword intent, with the least amount of competition.

2 Content

Content is probably the most important aspect of SEO. Why you may ask? – Well Google is designed to serve up answers to peoples questions and it uses content to do this. Google always tries to serve up the most relevant and specific answer for its users – and it’s very good at it. So what are the things Google looks for?

EAT good content

No, i’m not suggesting you go and get a content snack, E-A-T (Expertise – Authority – Trustworthiness) is a format that Google introduced in 2018 to help people understand how it rates content. Following this will help ensure your content hits the mark.

Relevance

Good content is always relevant and helpful to the user, within the context of what they searched for. Think about how it solves their problems, eases their pain or educates them. Always address the customers needs and requirements and how it solves their problems rather than what the features are.

Freshness of content

When you publish content Google give it a score, which does fizzle out over time. Try and publish content on a regular basis and review older content by updating it and republishing every few months to ensure Google see’s that your publishing fresh content.

Cut the jargon

Google favors content with less jargon. Writing with clarity and simplicity is not only better for users, but also better for SEO. If you are able to do this, occasionally Google uses your site to provide direct answers in the SERPs (search engine results page) quoting your site and showing you right at the top of the page.

Length of content

Research shows that Google seems to favor longer more in depth articles. This year, the optimal length should be btweek 2,100 – 2,400 words. That’s not to say shorter pieces under 1,500 words won’t rank, but generally, longer form content performs better.

Keywords and semantics

Stuffing your content full of your chosen keywords isn’t going to do you any favors. Google is now smart enough to work out what you’re talking about, without keyword stuffing. Yes, do use your chosen keywords but write in a natural language that users will want to read and can enjoy.

3 Technical

For your website to rank well three things must happen. Firstly a search engine needs to be able to find your pages, then it must scan them to identify their topics and keywords and finally it needs to add them to it’s index. Google does this by using hundreds of algorithms.

Google looks at websites differently to humans, so it’s important to make sure that the things that Google deems to be important, are working well. There are hundreds of factors, but they are broadly broken down into the following areas.

Get secure

If your website isn’t yet running under HTTPS (with padlock in the browser window) you’ll not just be putting off users, Google themselves have said that the security of the site is a ranking factor. It’s easy and low cost to fix.

Remove canonicalisation

Canonicalisation is where your website appears under different URLS – for example www.yoursite.com and also https://yoursite.com (without the WWW) – this confuses Google as it doesn’t understand which is the authoritative source of information.

Make it fast

In 2018 Google announced that if your website is not fast loading on mobile devices, then your site will be penalized. You can use Google’s own testing tool to find how fast google thinks your site is. If you aren’t in the green zone, don’t panic. There are lots of things you can do to improve this.

Fix broken links

For Google to get around your site, it follows links within the navigation and content. It’s not a happy chicken when it finds a broken link! Use Google Search Console to identify and fix issues then make sure your site has a Google friendly XML sitemap.

Mobile friendly

Google now runs on a Mobile index – which means it ranks sites that it deems are set up as a priority for mobile users. You can easily check if your site is mobile friendly and if it’s not, it is one of the things that is definitely worth fixing as it is a major ranking factor.

Semantic markup

Well created pages are coded using semantic markup. This tells Google what the hierarchy of importance is in relation to content. For example a designer could put a big fat title at the top of a page, but if this is not reflected in the markup (with a H1 tag) then Google may choose to ignore it. Good semantic markup, tells Google which elements of the content are most important, regardless of the design or styling.

4 Authority

Your website or domain authority is basically your website’s reputation, which has been built up by a number of different factors. Its a measure of how well your website is likely to perform in the search engine results.

There are a number of companies that have their own algorithms to calculate your authority, the big ones being Moz.com, Ahrefs.com and majestic.com. Google doesn’t have an authority score itself, but it uses a bucket of metrics that are very similar. So, it’s important to understand what domain authority is and what factors will help improve this.

How do I increase my domain authority?

High authority links

One of the main factors is the quality of other sites that are linking to you. If the BBC (which has a domain authority of 95/100) published an article that linked to your website, then this would pass a lot of link ‘juice’ (yes this is an actual term). Links from very high authority sites are hard to attain, but in general, the higher authority the site that is linking to you the better, and the more link juice they pass on.

Greater volume

Volume is also important, but not at the expense of quality. If you are creating outstanding content on your website, the sort of content that people value, you may find that you naturally acquire links anyway, if not, making a regular effort to build in quality links will gradually increase your domain authority.

Remove bad links

In the same way that high quality links can pass a lot of value over, low quality ones can actually harm your domain authority. It’s a good idea to remove or disavow the low quality and spammy backlinks to prevent this from happening.

It’s important not to become obsessed with domain authority as a metric, because it is a score that is relative to your competition. Having a domain authority of 35 when your competitors are only in the 20’s means that you’re more likely to see success when you publish good content. Equally, having a domain authority of 30 isn’t going to be great when your competitors are all in the 50’s.

Frequently asked questions

What do look out for in a good SEO company

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