The Best Search Engine Optimization Agency in the UK
Advice from the best search engine optimization agency in the UK
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is essential for improving your presence online, and increasing your client base. If you haven’t had your business’ website properly optimised (and we’ll get to what constitutes ‘properly’ later), then you should seriously consider it.
In short, SEO is what it says on the tin: optimising web content so that search engines will ‘like’ it, and reward it with a high ranking in its results for a particular keyword. Studies show that people rarely scroll past Page 1 of Google’s results, so it really pays off to make sure your website finds itself there.
Many businesses think they know what SEO is, and can implement it by themselves; after all, it’s just scattering a key phrase throughout your text, right? Not quite. There’s actually a lot more to it than this – so if you aren’t seeing the increased traffic you wanted by doing this, don’t be surprised. Google has over 200 markers for ranking content, and updates its algorithms hundreds of times per month, so it’s unsurprising that a little keyword scattering isn’t cutting it. However, don’t despair – there are SEO experts out there, who spend hours studying how SEO works, and can implement a strategy that will work for your individual case. And this is key; the best keywords and the best overall approach will be highly individualised.
What’s the point of SEO? Generate demand and revenue.
All ecommerce sites want to see a spike in their web traffic. The more views, follows and likes you have are deemed to be markers of success in the social media age. While it’s true that increasing web traffic is a goal of SEO, this isn’t the whole picture, and it’s actually misguided to think that more views will equal more revenue for your business.
You want to be visible to your target audience, and gain more sales or other types of conversion from them – and this means ranking for the most suitable keywords for your business. Traffic for the sake of traffic won’t actually help your business, since it won’t result in sales or whatever other conversions you’re looking for. You need traffic from an audience who are going to stay on your website, and convert. Having the right keyword strategy in place in one aspect of achieving this aim, along with all the other components of a successful digital marketing campaign.
Every company is individual, and gaining traffic from the right source means working alongside an expert SEO consultant, who can offer tailored advice. Be wary of marketing agencies who promise dozens of Page 1 rankings for various keywords, especially if you’re a new start-up or growing business. It’s highly likely that these keywords are not a good fit for your agency, and don’t actually generate much traffic.
I can find high volume keywords on Moz. So why would I need an SEO service?
Websites like Moz do suggest keywords and tell you their volume. This might give the impression that it’s easy to just do your own keyword research, and simply assign various web pages keywords with high volume to gain traffic. Keyword research isn’t as simple as this – if it was, the many businesses who make the mistake of going after high volume phrases would find instant success.
Given the plethora of content on the internet, ranking for high volume keywords is incredibly difficult, and simply using the word won’t bring you onto page one. This is where you need a trained SEO agency who can make sense of the keyword landscape, and choose the most optimal keywords for your business needs, ones which will gain traffic from your client base. Competent SEO professionals know that this requires knowing your business, and knowing your audience. If you haven’t seen an increase in sales or leads recently, it might be time to start investigating why – reach out to our award-winning SEO team, and we’ll be happy to assist.
Link building is another key part of SEO. It creates useful connections between your website and other useful sites on the internet. These connections are links leading from another site to your own, so they’re known as backlinks. There are different types of backlinks, and they can be created in different ways.
As with keywords, successful backlink building isn’t just about mass – it’s not a case of how many backlinks you can create, and there are right and wrong ways to go about it. Incompetent agencies are likely to promise large numbers of backlinks, and some of these are likely to be sketchy or low quality backlinks, known as ‘toxic backlinks‘. Some dubious professionals will pay or exchange backlinks with other websites, which Google doesn’t allow, and can lead to manual action against your site.
With that in mind, what sort of link building approach should you look for in an agency? If you choose a reputable team like Seek Social, you’ll be offered quality links which influence Google’s authority scores (‘Page Authority’ and ‘Domain Authority’). Quality backlinks linking back to a given web page on your site increase your chances of ranking high on Google – resulting in more traffic, and therefore more leads and revenue for your business.
Link building is an important aspect of increasing your brand’s outreach, whatever sector you work in. There are several ways to create backlinks, but some of the ways Seek Social use.
This is essentially setting up profiles with online business directories. If you include your website URL, this will count as a backlink. While this sounds simple, it’s actually difficult to get right. Many businesses end up inadvertently creating toxic backlinks, which is why it’s sensible to consult a professional SEO consultant to do this. Seek Social has an updated list of whitelist, trustworthy directories that we can post to.
In short, web 2.0 involves creating pages which direct back to your website. If you plan on doing this yourself, you’ll need to have good knowledge of SEO, including how to write and edit text, and how to use ‘stop words’ – those non-content words like ‘the’ or ‘a’ that Google’s text crawler usually ignores. If you aren’t confident that you have a good handle on SEO, it’s best to enlist a professional agency.
Blogs are an incredibly useful link building method, as they are a means of reaching a wider range of people than just using faceless online directories. Creating a blog is also a way to work with a partner company, and offer each other a backlink to the other’s sites. Guest blogging is a further option – asking a professional contact to write a blog for you as a ‘guest’ for your site.
This method is focused on seeing opportunity rather than creating something. In brief, it’s a case of looking through a website or blog, finding a link for a particular piece of information that doesn’t work, or doesn’t deliver what it promises, you can reach out to the owner and ask if they could substitute the link for a link to your site.
This method can take longer than some of the above, but if done correctly, it can still deliver results. In essence, a link roundup is a regular, periodic collection of the latest news or informative content from a particular sector or a particular topic, which helps your SEO efforts by linking out to every piece of content that makes it into your Linkedin roundup, giving those sites a backlink. This might sound counterintuitive (why would you give someone else a backlink?), but it can pay off in the grand scheme of things. Firstly, some sites might give you a backlink in return as a favour. Secondly, if you curate the content in your link roundup well, you add value for the professionals in that sector who read it – making it more likely that they will link out to your roundup, increasing your online visibility in the longer term.
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A complicated picture – we’ll help you with it
Keyword research and wise keyword choice are not the whole story when it comes to ranking high on Google. Content is an important yet very small part of search engines’ ranking systems. Add to this that Google updates its algorithms hundreds of times per month, and constantly changes which content it ranks, and you’re not dealing with the simple ‘choose the right phrase, rank high’ beast you thought.
Again, this is why it’s advisable to seek expert advice if you want to gain web traffic from your lead sources. People who monitor the trends in Google – and other search engines’ – ranking systems, and use this knowledge to adopt the most successful SEO campaign for you.
Alongside keywords, there are many more aspects of SEO success, including website speed and the amount of content your site has. Our full service digital marketing team can build a professional-looking, high speed website for you – whether you have an existing site or would like a new one, we’ve created glitzy new sites for companies across many sectors, from pet-food to FTSE 100 companies. A high-functioning website is not only useful for impressing your target audience, but it’s also a part of your SEO strategy. Investing in a new website or updating an existing one is something you can’t neglect in terms of marketing.
Summary: enlist an SEO agency you can trust
The goal of SEO is to increase the number of quality leads your business gets, these being traffic from customers who actually convert, whether by making purchases on your site, downloading an app, or some other conversion that’s beneficial for your company. Most people want to see numbers – ranking on page one for as many keywords as possible, a bigger increase in web traffic – but none of this will result in more conventions. Ranking for the wrong keywords won’t result in more leads from your client base, and equally, simply gaining more web traffic is practically useless if that traffic isn’t your lead source.
Thorough knowledge of SEO techniques isn’t something that you can just acquire overnight by using tools like Moz, or even by reading any blogs online. SEO is not simply using particular keywords – it’s a multifaceted process that is constantly evolving (search engines do multiple updates every month – Google, for instance, completes hundreds!). With this considered, it makes sense to enlist an SEO expert to advise on the best strategy for your website or app.