Introduction

Here’s the thing, when it comes to search engine optimisation, a lot of businesses always want quick fixes, ways which that can generate more business in the click of a finger.

Well for that, you do need Google Adwords, which is sometimes called PPC “Pay Per Click”. We do offer to manage businesses Google Adwords accounts for them, but, in this article we are going to be talking about something totally different, and that is organic SEO.

What does local SEO mean?

However, we have to say before we continue any further, when it comes to search engine optimisation whether it be organic or local SEO, there are rarely any quick fixes, or ways you can generate more business is the click of a finger. That’s because the truth is when it comes to search engine optimisation, it’s a long old slog, and that’s why when you contact any marketing agency, they normally quote you a monthly fee.

So for local seo, prices at our agency range between £1000.00 and £7000.00 depend

The reason why their quote in you a monthly fee, is simply because work needs to be implemented every single month, so therefore it’s most definitely not like switching on a light and you instantly can start seeing results.

SEO is a slow process that’s for sure, and here’s some of the ways

First things first, you need to get a well-designed website  

So many businesses will buy cheap websites, let’s say for £300 or even sometimes less than that, and then turn to various seo agencies such as ours for advice on how they can optimise that site.

In our humble opinion, your unlikely to get a well-designed website for £300 or less, of course you haven’t got to totally push the boat out and spend a fortune on how the website designed, but it does need to be well designed, before any search engine optimisation (SEO) work can begin.

So, you need to think about having unique, high quality content marketing, need to have each service separated onto a different page, the website needs to be fast and it needs to be well designed.

If the website is not well, designed, and it’s a rather basic, then the first step in improving your local seo might be to have the website’s design improved and, in some cases, it might need to be totally redesigned by a web designer. However with that said, before you have any company website redesigned, make sure you consult with a leading seo agency for advice, to make sure the seo, and redesign work is carried out to a high standard.

Set up a Google My Business account

This is an absolute piece of cake to do, and it shouldn’t take you too long to do.

The good thing is that to set up a Google My Business account is absolutely free, so you most definitely should do it, do make sure the NAP details, that is the name of your business, the company address and phone number all match we company website.

Start to build business citations on yellow pages, Thomson local, Wales online

Again this is an absolute piece of cake to do, we would recommend to start building business citations, on quality websites, such as yell, Thomson local, and also Wales online,  and make sure that the nap details your businesses Google my business account, and the nap details mentioned on your company website.

Next step is to write quality content marketing, whether that’s blog posts, evergreen content marketing, or to create new pages

The content marketing you add to your company website, needs to be top quality, you need to spend long time writing it, it needs to be well researched it needs to be simply top quality work.

Need you need to start fixing the on page seo

Even if the website cost £50,000 to have built, and it’s designed by top quality web design agency, often it will still need perfecting, in terms of the on page seo will need to be improved.

A really good digital marketing agency should add schema to your company website, also to help to improve the on page seo, such as adding internal links, add new pages, and add meta titles.

Make it fast, make it super sonic

Your website needs to be supersonic fast, it needs load on our smart phone in the blink of an eye, if it does not, in then you might need to change your hosting company.

Off-site seo, building backlinks, Google My Business, business citations

Your seo company should also start building do-follow, and no follow backlinks, it is much better to earn links, and often you need to help of the digital marketing agency to start doing this.

Simply haven’t got the time?

Whether your hairdresser, an accountant or you are a leading solicitor within your area, often businesses haven’t got the time to be improving their own search engine optimisation, that’s why they call us.

Often therefore you need to outsource this work to an seo agency, like ours, and that’s where we step in.

We have been working with many businesses over the last seven years, to implement top quality white hat work.

If you want the very best quality search engine optimisation applied to your website, if you want us to help you to drum up more sales, if you want the work completed in a white hat way then you should call us.

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We have seo packages start from just £1000 a month, so why not give our business a ring today?

Introduction

So it does go without saying that right throughout the United Kingdom, there are quite simply a mass of SEO consultants. There are quite literally thousands of seo consultants.

And this is a bit like saying there are a huge number of hairdressers in the U.K , the only problem is some hairdressers will have you walking out of the salon, thinking that your barnet looks rather brilliant, and you may walk down the road feeling a million dollars.

Yet, there are some other hairdressers, lets say that are much less skilled, that might make you think that you don’t want to step outside your house again,  because they’ve made a right mess of your hair.

And this is exactly the same when it comes to search engine optimisation, there are some are simply quite brilliant seo experts out there, which can help your business to drum up more sales.

Then on the other hand, there are a mass of seo consultants, which are all intents and purposes winging it.

So this begs the question, how do you go about finding a true seo expert?  

Well, we think the truth is most definitely in the pudding, meaning that you only can know when you’ve hired an ace of an seo expert, when they start to generate more sales for your business.

However there are some things you can do to try and work out if you are dealing with an expert, or someone who’s just blagging it.

So, do read on, as some helpful pointers can be gleaned from this article. What we would say, before we go on any further is this, whether you hire an seo agency, that employs many people, or a freelancer working in a spare bedroom, it doesn’t matter if there a freelancer or large marketing business, it all boils down to the quality of the work.

The search engine optimisation work must be top quality, so you really do need to take your time finding a company, make sure that they are offering you quality work.

So one way of knowing if the work is quality or not, is you could do it yourself? 

You could learn seo yourself, yet take it from that it takes hundreds of hours to learn, its not as simple as some people would have you believe.

And saying learn seo yourself, well,  that’s a bit like saying to someone, don’t use  a translator, go and learn the language yourself. Well, not everyone has the time for that, and that’s why its outsourced to agencies like ours.

But, again, the work must be super high quality, it must follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, it must also be approved by Googles EAT, it must also not be deemed as “spam” by Google’s algorithm, so as you can see, Google, and  the other major search engines, well they go to great lengths to make sure spam is removed, websites that have spam are penalised, and the businesses with partner with good seo consultants, are rewarded with higher rankings, if the work is good quality.

So, lets get down to the main point on this article, what is an SEO expert?

So first things first, what is an seo expert? Well, quite simply put it somebody who understands how Google’s algorithm works, that has spent huge amount of time practising different methods, to get businesses to the top of Google. That’s to say, they most likely have learnt not just by reading hundreds of seo articles online, but also will have most likely had test websites, where they have tested their methods, to see what seo methods work, and which ones don’t.

An seo expert is somebody who has a huge amount of experience, and can clealy demonstrate that they have got many businesses the top of Google. The really good seo consultants will be able to demonstrate they got businesses the top of Google in highly competitive business sectors, such as the car insurance industry, legal sector, or perhaps for e-commerce website, selling products in a very competitive business sector, such as a company which sells clothing online.

The seo expert should be able to clearly show, they have moved many businesses higher in Google’s  search engine result pages (SERPs).

So the name of the game is obviously to get businesses higher up in Google’s Serps, an seo expert should be able to show they can do this for many different companies, and this will obviously demonstrate that have the skill set to help your business to get onto the first page of Google.

However as a business, you need to make sure that they are using white hat methods.

Competitive keywords  

As earlier mentioned,, if the seo expert can demonstrate they have managed to get many businesses onto the first page of Google, and for highly competitive keywords, such as “car insurance” then this again shows clearly that they have a lots of knowledge in what they do, as long as they use white hat methods to get those business there.

The seo expert should have a huge amount of knowledge, experience and most likely have spent hundreds of hours testing their methods. Some might describe this as honing their craft, yet what’s for sure, is you can read about seo, and read some more, and some more, yet, nothing really compare to registering some domain names, and testing your seo methods yourself, as its only then you get a sense for what works and what doesn’t.

How does someone become an SEO Expert? How do you learn the Matrix?

This is a really good question, we would say just comes down to trial and error, obviously you can’t take a trial-and-error approach with a client’s website, as they are paying to see results.

What you can do however, is use your own domain names, as test websites, to move websites up in different industries, you may even if you get those domain names to page one of Google. If these websites do get onto the first page, you may, sometimes be able to sell, those domain names, to a business that may want to use the domain name, lets say “name of  business sector  + city name”  so that they could use the domain names to help improve their seo.

That’s if there has been sufficient seo strength assigned to that domain name, then the next business that uses that same domain name, may see there seo improved. Of course, the work needs to be white hat.

A huge amount of reading

To become an expert at search engine optimisation, you need to do a huge amount of reading, you need to visit many quality websites, we would highly recommend Search Engine Roundtable, Moz and also Backlinko, if you are to start learning how seo is done.

So you do need to spend hundreds of hours reading various articles, reading about everything from how to build backlinks, how to write content marketing, and how to improve your onsite seo.

Spend time reading about how the search engines work

Search engines, well there more complicated than any car engine that’s for sure, a good seo consultant should know a lot about the following:

–        Googlebot, how it works, and what it does

–        Quality content marketing, when its done right, it can be truly effective

–        Write for the customer, not for the search engines

–        Various Google updates, the seo consultant should know about the more significant updates, the Google Pande update,  the Google Penguin update, the Google Hummingbird update

–        How Google’s algorithm penalises low quality seo

The seo expert needs to have a good understanding of how Google’s algorithm works, how its been refined and improved over years, from the days of Google’s PageRank, through to more recent updates, such as the introduction of how Google’s RankBrain, using AI is now changing SEO. 

“The only way the know-how Google algorithm really works is to have a bunch of test websites, that you own, and test various seo methods out yourself.”

 University  

Some people would have studied SEO at university, but in our opinion we think is far better to learn about seo yourself, have a bunch of test websites and you simply test different white hat methods, until you find a process that works for you.

You could learn seo at university, but really, we think its better to study yourself, test your seo methods, and just keep your seo knowledge as up to date as you can.

For us, learning SEO at university did not appeal to us at all, a but for some others, it may be their route to success, and a great career.

Why are really good SEO consultants so expensive?

The simple fact of the matter is there are thousands of so-called “SEO Experts” out there, they may well be in Scotland, in England and in Wales, the country is full of them.

But the problem is this, in reality, we think are very few that there are actually any good, that can cut the mustard, that know exactly what they’re talking about, and that have a huge level of experience in doing what they do.

so what we would say is there’s a massive difference between somebody who talks the talk and then can walk the walk.

So really good seo consultants are normally hired by large plc companies, or they work for themselves as consultants, and the really good seo consultants well can charge high daily rates simply because if they are good at what they do, their services will be in high demand.

Skills An SEO expert will need

As you are probably aware already, organic SEO can be split into a broad areas including:

•   Technical SEO

An seo consultant needs to have a good knowledge of technical seo, so for example, making sure there’s a site map and every page and blog post can be crawled and indexed.

•   On-Site SEO

A really good seo expert should have knowledge about to improve the businesses onsite seo, sometimes referred to as on page seo.

•  Off-Site SEO

An seo expert should be able to build quality backlinks.

Here some of the other areas that an seo consultant should have knowledge about as well

 Page speed and performance optimisation

It’s really important that the seo expert that you hire understands how we can make your website load faster on smartphones. If a website loads just a second slower, well, this could mean a competitor may rank higher than your business.

•  Crawl budget optimisation

Each website will get crawled and indexed, by Googlebot at different intervals, it does depend on your business, your seo consultants’ job is to make sure every page can get crawled and indexed.

•   Site architecture  

The seo expert that you hire should have understanding of site architecture, and how to create main pages in order to  improve your businesses seo.

•     Keyword research

The seo consultant should have knowledge of how to carry out keyword research

•     On-page optimisation

They should also have a good understanding of the following:

•     They should create an internal linking strategy
•     How to improve a websites User experience
  
•     They should write a plan on how they will build backlinks for the business
•     They should write a “content calendar” and mention what they intend to write about, and when they will publish that work.
•   They should have knowledge about how to build citations   
•     Google My business creation, plus how they will optimise that listing

Introduction

This is a question which many business owners will have pondered over for some time, sipping on their cup of tea, and thinking well, should we hire an in-house search engine optimisation consultant in-house? Or perhaps, instead hire a digital marketing agency to help to get our business in the top position on Google?

Price

And sometimes a business arrives at their decision, based on price alone, that’s to say, you might be able to hire a full-time search engine optimisation consultant for let’s say £30,000 a year and they may help with the following tasks:

–        Improve the onsite seo

–        Build backlinks

–        Write new content marketing

Should we hire a full time SEO consultant?

And to a lot of businesses, well, this might sound appealing having a full time seo consultant working for the business and trying to improve the seo, for say 35 hours a week.

Yet  if you fork out the same amount to a local seo agency, well, that might mean they are only working on improving the search engine optimisation for a lot less hours, for example, they may only in comparison, say work on improving the businesses seo, for say 10 hours, for the same money?

Of course, rates vary depending on which search engine optimisation company your hire.

Yet here’s the thing, what you really need, is an seo consultant that has a huge amount of seo experience.

And we would say, in our opinion, often the really highly experienced search engine optimisation consultants either work themselves, or as part of a large agency.

That’s not to say, there’s still some really good seo staff in-house who can do a brilliant job, but often the really talented seo consultants, they don’t come cheap. So, if you hire someone at say 30k, well how much experience do they have?

If they have a ton of experience, well, that’s all well and good.

Yet, in areas like London, Bristol, Cardiff, well, you might struggle, to find an search engine optimisation consultant that’s hugely experienced at what they do, for around that money

TYPES OF SEO SERVICES

Here are the types of seo tasks that your seo consultant or agency should be working on, in order to improve your businesses search engine optimisation:

Technical SEO

The first thing to do is to see if there are any technical seo issues, these could be something as simple as a 404-page error, or let’s say a 301 redirect is needed.

Depending on the size of the website, for example if it’s a large e-commerce website, then to sort out the technical seo issues, well this might take quite a while, however if it’s a simple brochure website, say 10 pages, or less, well this work can often be completed in a shorter period of time.

You should create a marketing strategy

So, we would say it’s always a good idea to have a plan, whether it’s a business plan, or simply you shopping list which you have scribble down on a piece of paper, so that you come home from the local supermarket with the food that you need.

So, we think always a good idea to have a plan, and this is no exception with your businesses marketing.

We think your marketing agency should have a plan, they should therefore create a plan for what content marketing they are going to write, also they should plan of how they are going to go about building backlinks for your business, and also another plan how they will improve the on-site seo for your business.

Content marketing

So let’s say that you operate in a business sector, that is massively competitive, that’s the say your business is based, in a large city such as Cardiff, and you could have 100 directs competitors that are all based within the same city, which are also paying seo agencies, like ours, to improve the companies organic seo.

So let’s say that you run a family law practice in the city of Cardiff.

Now, let’s say that on average your solicitors are billed out at around £350 per hour, do you really want your solicitors to be writing the content marketing for your website? That’s to say if it might take them the whole day to write one long, 3,000 word article?

That’s when you could instead hire a seo agency, like ours at £70 an hour to do the same work? So our seo agency, offers fantastic value for money.

Link-building

Link building is massively time-consuming job, for example, to build one single quality backlink, whether its do-follow, or no follow,, it might take three days of solid work to obtain a quality backlink for your business.

Sure, you could build a business citation (NAP) in a much shorter period of time, but what we are talking about is quality backlinks, and they take a long time to build.

Therefore, even if you have one full time member of staff working on improving your organic seo, in-house for your business, you still might want an seo agency to help build backlinks for your business.

Graphic design.

You should think about whether or not you’re going to hire somebody in-house that can create graphic design work for your business.

For example, you might want to create an infographic, yet if the member of staff in-house hasn’t got the skill set to create infographic, then you might need to hire an seo agency or a web design company to help you. So sometimes you will still need the help of a digital marketing agency, even if you have inhouse seo staff.

Social media

Social media can take up a lot of time as well, because is not just about writing posts and publishing them on a regular basis, you often have to respond to your customers questions that they post, on say your Facebook account.

For example, let’s say that an angry customer that is not particularly happy with the service they have received,, writes a comment on one of your companies social media accounts.

Well, as the business owner, you will not want that customer saying negative things about your business on social media, without your business posting a reply back to that comment, so what we mean is, your often going to need someone managing your businesses social media on a daily basis, so that customer feedback is replied to promptly.

So, you do have to think about in regards to your businesses social media, whether you want to outsource that work to an marketing agency, or whether you want to employ somebody in-house to manage your businesses social media?

OUTSOURCING SEO SERVICES

Should you outsource your seo services?

This does depend entirely upon your business, and your marketing budget which you have available to you, what is for sure is that whether you employ somebody in-house to improve your seo, or if you were to outsource the seo work,  you are going to need to invest in white hat, and high quality seo.

So, you received an e-mail from your web designers, to tell you that the website they have been busy building for the last six months is now finished.

You take a look at the website, and you are very happy with the finished design, you think it looks brilliant. However, there is a problem, many months roll by, and you don’t receive a single enquiry. You start to think should I have forked out all that money on having an expensive website designed for my business?

This has you scratching your head, thinking I just spent £10,000 on this new website, why on earth isn’t it generating me any sales?

Well, the simple answer is, often it’s not enough today just to have a website designed in order to generate more sales, instead you also need to also invest in search engine optimisation.

Thankfully there are thousands of SEO agencies, here in the United Kingdom, however you really do need one that is worth their weight in gold.

What we mean by that is there are a lot of agencies which offer low quality SEO work, avoid these hire a really good SEO agency like top space.

Why is SEO super important for your brand?

It doesn’t matter that you sell aluminium ladders online, expensive hair straighteners or car parts, you’re obviously going to want to sell more products, and often to do this a lot of businesses to invest in quality search engine optimisation to help your business stand out

So, before you go in higher a local SEO agency it’s a good idea to know some of the terms that they often use, when they are describing how they are going to improve the SEO on your company website.

Domain Authority

You don’t hear this term used that much anymore, because it refers back to the days of page rank, however some SCO tools still use domain authority to explain how strong a business’s SEO is

Competitor Research

Your SEO agency should undertake what is called competitor research, they should look at your competitors backlinks, content marketing and also business citations, to see how strong your competitors SEO is, so the agency can then work out how much work is needed to do in order to get your businesses SEO to rank on the first page.

Often SEO agencies such as ours often undertake this work right at the start, it’s often called an SEO audit, so that we can work out how much to quote our clients for our SEO services.

Content Marketing

Regardless of which industry your businesses in, whether you run a hairdressing salon, or you are an accountant or perhaps you are a builder?

To improve your search engine optimisation, you will need high quality content marketing.

Duplicate Website Content

Whichever online marketing agency you do end up hiring, they should make sure by using different SEO tools, that your website hasn’t got any duplicated content marketing, if it has then this should be replaced straightaway, as it could damage your businesses search engine optimisation.

 Link Building

Your digital marketing agency is likely to spend a huge amount of time link building, your business is therefore going to need a lot of quality do follow and no follow backlinks.

What is Digital PR?

Your online marketing agency should capitalise on when your company wins any business awards.

For example, a local newspaper might write a story about your business winning a business award, you could then ask the newspaper for a backlink.

On-site content and blogging

Blogging can take up a lot of time, for example writing a 1000 words blog post can take up a huge amount of time sometimes.

Therefore you might wish to hire an SCO agency to do this work

Page Performance and Page Speed

If somebody wants to buy a product from your website, let’s say a new blender for the kitchen, and they’re doing this on the way home from work, using say on their android smartphone, well if your website simply takes too long to load on a smart phone, then that shopper is likely to buy from a competitor’s website instead

Therefore whichever digital marketing agency you hire in Cardiff, they should make sure that your website is fast.

What is Meta Data?

Whether the marketing agency is adding a blog post, a new page they should always write a meta title and meta description for every single page.

Keyword Research

Before an SEO company starts to improve  a businesses organic search engine optimisation, the digital marketing agency should carry out keyword research, this is to  see which words they should be optimising the company website for.

So, for example if we were working a plumbing business, then we would use a really good quality SEO tool to undertake keyword research, that SEO tool is likely to tell us that we need to optimise the website boiler repair, heating engineers and local plumbers.

Technical SEO

Your SEO agency should improve your businesses technical SEO as well.

Redirects and 404s

If there are any 404 page errors, your web designer should fix these

Sitemaps and Submitting URLs

If you web designers design a new page, your web designers should then submit the URL to make sure that it can get crawled and indexed as soon as possible, also the site map should be updated.

Google Analytics

We would highly recommend getting a Google Analytics account.

What is Google Search Console?

We would also highly recommend getting a Google Search Console account.

Does social media help SEO?

It’s most definitely does, let’s say that you spend three days writing a long blog post, let’s say that 7000 words in total your obviously going to want as many readers to read it is possible, so that they might possibly buy a product from you.

A way therefore of getting potentially thousands of readers to read your blog post, that you have just finished writing, is to is to promote it using social media such as Facebook.

The difference between Organic SEO and Pay Per Click (PPC)

with organic SEO, you could have let’s say 1 million visitors to your website and you don’t pay one penny for each visitor, that’s because organic visitors can visit your website for free.

Pay per click is totally different, you have to pay for every click to your website.

Core Web vital updates 2022

It’s been all bar one year since Google first introduced what is called the “page expedience signals”, you may have read about this on other digital marketing company websites. These metrics are based on what are known as “core web vitals”, which may have been mentioned in an seo report you have read?

When are going to take a look at what has happened to seo since the Core Web vital seo update

Core Web Vitals and seo

What are Google core web vitals?

Google first introduced core web vitals to help website owners, and web design companies to manage their websites to help improve what is called the “UX”, also referred to as “user experience”.

A lot of seo agencies believe that these are now a very important signal, of course does traditional ranking signals such as content marketing, backlinks and citations still matter, but it’s now also about creating a positive user experience-you might be wondering what that mean?

So, for those of you that are in a bit of a rush let’s put it into bullet points

·        Your website must be fast

·        You should aim to reduce your businesses “bounce rate” as much as possible

The current set of core web vitals includes

    Largest Contentful Paint – This simply mean how fast a web page loads

This sounds complicated but it returns to our previous example that we mentioned above simply put, your company website must be fast

    First Input Delay – how quickly a page becomes interactive

Again when you talk to your web design agency they will talk about making your website fast, you might want to switch to a fast hosting company

    Cumulative Layout Shift – how long before a page becomes stable

Let’s say you are booking a hotel for the evening, yet when you go on the website and actually make the reservation, the page loads then disappeared comes back again the different elements are loaded onto the page.

Therefore, the cumulative layout shift is all about working out how long it takes before the page becomes stable

How does this change seo?

Core web vitals SEO

Many experts believe that in 2022 and beyond use experienced signal such as how fast your website loads will become more and more important.

For example, traditionally SEO agencies thought about backlinks and content marketing building business citations, but now is also about offering a good customer experience.

Therefore, all about helping the customer to buy products or services that they want easily, this to happen you need to web design, that needs to be supported by ultra-fast hosting.

Is therefore not good enough just to purchase a website and start doing the basic SEO any more, often you need a digital marketing agency which has web developers in-house that can also help to improve the user experience signals.

For example, a lot of time might be spent on split testing, redesigning the homepage to see if you can improve it.

For example, you might redesign totally the main menu, to find that it helps improve your sales, this will improve your user experience signals because you happen the customer find products or services that they want easily.

A lot of digital marketing agencies, think that Google is just starting to use user experience signals, and that we are only just getting started with these being a form of ranking factor in terms of working out where your website ranks on Google. It is widely thought that Google will start to introduce other use experienced metrics in order to improve the customer experience. At, for example some people have cited that bounce rate. To be considered more closely.

If your website therefore has an ultra-high bounce rate then this is something you might want to work on reducing

Some people think that Google core web vitals which is the ranking factor for mobile search results, however from February 2022 it is thought that it will start to be used to determine desktop rankings as well

Make sure that you pick an SEO agency which understands how to improve your website to user experience, this means UX for short.

Here at this digital marketing agency, we believe that in the future user experience signals are only can get important.

And this stands to reason, the only indicator of whether the shopper has found what they want on your website.

Let’s have a look at some of the ranking signals which rethink are going to grow in terms of their importance in the future.

Time on-site

This is a bit like browsing around products in a department store, if you like spending time in that department store you can spend longer looking at the products and possibly buying them.

This is the same for your website, if shoppers are spending longer on your website, then this is it indicator that you are selling the items that they want and that you are offering the information about the products so that they can read it and spend longer on your website.

If they are spending mere seconds browsing the different products that you offer, and they believe to go a competitor’s website then this is are very clear signal your website is not offering what they want which could adversely affect your SEO if this is amplified across thousands of different shoppers doing the same thing.

Bounce rate

This again ties into our previous point about time on-site, somebody is visiting only one page, and then leaving straightaway then this is an indicator that is you will not offering what they are looking for at a price that they are interested so good digital marketing agency look to reduce that bounce rate as far as can.

Introduction

Let’s be fair, there are so many SEO agencies out there, so you absolutely have a huge selection of businesses that you can choose from. From your freelancers, right through agencies employing over 300 staff, there are a huge number of businesses scattered all across the United Kingdom.

Yet, it’s rather like looking at a menu full of delicious food, that is you only need one meal, but what one should you select?

Well, we thought we would write a rather handy guide to help you think about some of the things that you need to consider when picking an seo agency

Now what it all boils down to, is quality, don’t therefore jump into a deal that seems too good to be true, because often it’s just that, it’s too good to be true.

When the price is too low you have to contemplate this, how much work are you actually going to get out of any agency for a very low monthly fee?

Let’s say the actual staff member working at the company gets paid let’s say minimum of £17 an hour, then you have to think of the profit the marketing agency is going to make from that employees work.

So in reality what are you really can get for say £200 per month? In reality probably very little work from the marketing company.

You might only have say seven hours spent on your account over the month, which will most likely be absolutely a drop in the ocean to what a lot of companies need in terms of seo work to push the needle in the direction of winning.

So that leads us on nicely to our first point

If it sounds too good to be true it probably is

You’ve probably heard the saying, “you get what you pay for”, while this is sometimes true when you picking an seo company, yet point granted there are some freelancers which work for a very low-cost and might do brilliant work.

Yet when you think of an agency and the office costs, the staff costs the business rates, and everything else that goes with running an office, the heating, lighting, insurances you name it, and also all those costly seo tools, what you got to think of is this, what can you really expect for a low fee?

And in reality, is the agency just going to waste your time?

In that the not really going to deliver the results that you want, and to be fair, should you even expect them to it produce brilliant seo results if they are getting paid, well practically anything?

So that’s the first point over done and dusted, you do get what you pay for when it comes  to hiring an seo agency.

However, with that said, paying through the nose doesn’t make it a good deal neither

Point taken, we have just said you get what you pay for, but we also have to balance that argument and say this, paying a small fortune for seo (search engine optimisation) doesn’t mean your always going to get a brilliant deal neither.

It’s not like buying a car, where if you pay more, on a brand-new car, well you often get more for your money.

This principle cant be extended when describing marketing agencies,because there are agencies which set up, which look absolutely brilliant, they are set up in the most desirable business locations, fancy offices, they may have a large amount of staff, but then bang, overnight the disappear and the set up under a new name somewhere else.

So don’t think that paying a fortune for seo will get you everything you want, because sometimes it simply doesn’t.

Its not about how much your paying, it’s the quality of the work that matters.

You need an agency you can work with

Now you might be scratching your head thinking, well this blog post is just stating the absolute obvious, of course we need an agency we can work with.

Yet let us  elaborate a bit on what we mean by this, what we mean is did you should actively enjoy working with the agency.

The reason why this is important is because seo is very different from other services that your business may require.

So for example if you need an electrician to turn up and do something for your business, well it doesn’t really matter if they have a bad attitude, as they fix the lighting in a short amount of time and then you might not ever need them again.

But if you gets appointed a project manager for your seo, and you don’t like their attitude and their managing your seo on an ongoing basis, then things can become an uphill struggle.

The reason is you need to find somebody you enjoy working with, that you know you can pick the phone and talk to them and voice any concerns or simply just see how things are going, and that you enjoy working with them.

The reason why this is so important is because organic seo, it never really comes to a stop, of course it does stop when you stop paying, what we mean is when you do stop paying then your business can start to go back down the serps again, so often businesses invest for years.

For example, is not uncommon for businesses to invest every single month for say 10 years. The reason for that is that businesses are constantly competing with other businesses in order to get your business up the ranks on Google.

The soon as your agency takes their fourth of the accelerator, then you can start drop back down Google’s serps, and sometimes fast if your business is in a highly competitive business sector.

So the point we are trying to make is this, you need an seo agency that you really enjoy working with, better still when they get along well with them, you might even want a pint after work and discuss your seo, so the marketing agency should be your friends, and help your business, and then you can have a good working relationship that may last many years, helping your business, and the agencies.

Understands the latest methods

With seo, things are constantly evolving, changing and therefore marketing strategies need to adapt to reflect this.

You will always have those seo agencies which think that they can cut corners and that they see a loophole that they can use their advantage, from our experience however, successful marketing strategies come down to hard work and using the latest seo methods.

And this does involve a lot of reading, so you do need an agency which understands the latest seo methods and keeps their skills up-to-date.

Because if the marketing agency gets a little bit rusty in regards to their seo knowledge, then its easy for other agencies which have their finger a bit more on the pulse to quickly overtake your company.

You really do need an agency that understands what is called the latest “white hat” methods, and you might not think the seo changes all that often but it does.

Small incremental changes are made to Google’s algorithm, so if you don’t keep up on top of these changes then your seo agency may well become a dinosaur within the seo industry, and won’t be long before they become extinct.

So, what you really need to do is to make sure that you have an agency which understands the latest seo methods.

Now probably the best way of gathering if your seo agency has its finger on the pulse is not a quiz the staff members, with whether they know something or not, such as saying “tell me all about Google’s penguin update” because this might be seen as testing, testing of their patience .

Instead, what you might want to do is to ask for clients that are currently working for, and then see where they are ranking on Google.

Are they doing well? Are they ranking on page 1 of Google?

Or are they are languishing on page 10 of , Google which is not a good sign that they using the best seo methods.

Why not ask the agency if you can contact their clients directly, or at least one of them have a quick chat on the phone?

You will then begin to decipher whether they have a good working relationship with that client or not and if they have managed to improve the seo for that business.

And at the end of the day the proof is in the pudding

You can stare into fancy graphs for was long as you want, you can purchase the most expensive seo tools on the market, and you can sit down and drink as much coffee as you want with your seo agency, at the end of the day the proof is in the pudding.

What we mean by the proof is in the pudding is, are your sales improving?

 If things are getting better and obviously the seo agency might be playing their part in that success.

If you’re getting more sales then this is great, then you simply need to weigh up is it translating into a good investment or not.

Because the truth is you can stare into graphs and look at facts and figures until you’re blue in the face, but sometimes it comes down to one thing and as turnover.

If your sales are improving online, then your seo agency might be doing their job.

Introduction

When you visit a competitor’s website, you might be thinking, they have been busy bees, they have been writing hundreds of articles, so you may think, well we have some catching up to do.

And may gather your staff, create an excel spreadsheet, and start a rota of writing articles and publishing them on your website every couple of days. So you think, well by doing so, this will surely improve my rankings, and our seo will be very strong- however, this is a misconception that a lot of businesses get themselves into, thinking that they need to publish x amount of content marketing, and try and beat their competitors by publishing more often, and by writing more, they think they can stay one step ahead.

Let us tell you one of the most major things we have learnt from working for our clients over the years, that is, when it comes to writing content marketing, don’t focus on quantity over quality.

If you can manage quantity and quality, then that is fine, yet don’t let producing x amount of articles come and the cost of the written work being below par.

Valuable, relevant, and optimised content   

Our best recommendation is therefore to write valuable content marketing, that’s relevant to your business and optimised.

So what does this all mean?

Well, the valuable part, that is, you have to put yourself in  your customers shoes, will they find  the work useful?

Will they after reading think, that helped me, whether it helped them put up a book case, buy a boat, or buy the right mortgage, its all about making the work useful.

Improve

Why improve content marketing you’ve already written and published?

Writing content marketing is bit like being on a cycle bike, in that you may have a target you want to hit, lets say 1hr intense cycling, and you don’t want to stop, you want to hit your target.

Well writing content marketing a bit like this, you may have a target, lets say to write 3,000 words per blog post, and to publish once a week. Its just sometimes, a business can writing for the sake of it, just to hit that goal, when in reality what’s needed sometimes is not quantity but quality.

That’s why sometimes a digital marketing agency will go back and need to look over what’s been already written, to improve it.

That’s why this whole article is not about writing new articles, its about improving the ones that are already on your website. As what we think can sometimes happen is articles which have been poorly written, well they can be acting like an anchor on your website, dragging your ranking down.

So that anchor needs to be cut loose, and to do that, we need to improve the existing content marketing on your website.

Re-optimising

Weve all heard of optimising, its what seo is all about optimising a website so it ranks higher on Google.

But a term used less often, is re-optimising so lets see what this means:

Google algorithm updates

These days Google’s algorithm updates are all about quality,  that is if a business is using white hat methods, and publishing top quality content marketing, then the business will be rewarded.

However, many businesses used duplicated content marketing, scraped, and keyword stuffed content marketing in the past, which is, yes you guessed it the anchor dragging your rankings down.

Even if your search engine optimisation has drastically improved, and lets say your fired your last seo agency for a new one, which now is doing a better job, this work you added say 7 years back, well it could still be damaging your seo, so its time its improved.

Content thin

Lets face it, if your running a  business, and at the start couldn’t afford an seo agency, well you may have been writing all of the blog posts yourself. And you may have been burning the midnight oil, writing say 1,000 words a week, which on your part felt like you making a big effort.

But in reality, if the 1,000 words were complete waffle, that you writing say when you was tired at the end of a busy week, well, it might be these blog posts that need revisiting, and strengthening.

Because they may well be what we call “content thin”.

What does content thin mean?

Well, it simply means lacks substance, is a bit wishy washy, doesn’t have any backbone.

So what we mean by this is, lets say you sell, dog treats, well, someone might want to research what is in say ice cream for dogs.

Now one article may just concentrate on mentioning ice cream for dogs, which is boring to read, bad for seo, and the shopper, well they may come away none the wiser what goes into the ice cream.

Yet another company, well they may explain the ingredients, and then start to go into answering a series of frequently asked questions, regarding dogs ice cream.

Such as, will it hurt the dogs digestion?

And because these are the questions that are frequently asked, regarding dog ice cream, well this written work is likely to be deemed as quality.

And the work that keeps mentioning dog ice cream, but doesn’t really offer any useful advice, well that’s likely to be deem low quality written work, that’s content thin.

 Content cannibalization

what is content cannibalization?

Lets say you run a business, where you build loft conversions for example, its so easy to keep writing content marketing, such as blog posts about the same thing.

That’s to say, you may write a post about “the benefits of having your loft converted” yet then write an article with the same title in 6 months time, then you have content cannibalization, which simply means, you have two pieces of content marketing, which are competing with each other on the same website.

Which can damage your seo, as you will want one page to appear in the serps, not to have two pages about the same thing.

Plus, this can cause confusion to the search engines as well, that’s to say, if the business has two similar pages, well which one should rank higher?

Google Analytics

How do you know which pieces of content marketing need improving?

Well, this is a great question, that’s because whether you’re doing the work inhouse, within your company or your outsourcing this work to a marketing agency, there’s only so many hours in the day to do all of this work.

That’s to say if you’ve published over 300 blog posts, well, there’s unlikely to be enough time to improve all of these, and some of the written work might not need improving, it might be perfect the way it is.

This is why you should use Google Analytics to look at which work may need improving

Bounce rates, and engagement time

Using metrics like bounce rate, you can identify which pages shoppers are leaving almost immediately if the bounce rate is high, and the time spent onsite is low.

So what does this mean?

Well in a nutshell, the bounce rate is expressed as a percentage, so if the percentage is say 78%, what this means is that is the percentage that are landing on that page and leaving straight away, there not visiting another page.

If you combine this with time on site, and that page also is only managing to retain a shopper for seconds, then this is a clear indicator that page is not offering what shoppers want for some reason, so then its time to improve the page. It could be something as simple as improving the product description for that page.

Improve

This is where the work starts, that is improving the content marketing, you may therefore choose to:

Bring up to date

It could be that a piece of content marketing is simply way out of date, so may wish to spend time updating the statistics with more relevant facts and figures.

You may want to add to the text, as there may well be parts where you can now offer more advice.

You may want to improve by embedding a YouTube video for example.

Duplication

So its important to remove any duplicated content marketing, you might find that when your on this mission to improve your content marketing, that an seo tool flags some written work that’s duplicated.

Duplicated content marketing could be damaging your companies organic seo, it could be like we described earlier, acting like an anchor to you improving your companies organic search engine optimisation.

So the duplicated content marketing should be removed, and replaced with text that’s unique, that’s well written, and of course white hat.

Add too

Sometimes, when you’re just starting a business, you might think well 300 words is enough for a blog post, and to be fair, sometimes for some purposes it is. However, you might find that you could be writing a lot more, and you’re not answering frequently asked questions that some shoppers have, so why not add more detail to old blog posts, and strengthen them, by writing more information which shoppers may useful.

 Measure, repeat, improve even more

The thing is this improvement process never really comes to an end, that’s because there’s always going to be another group of direct competitors looking to climb above who ever occupies the top spot on Google.

So, let’s say your number 1 right now on Google, well if you don’t work on holding that position by improving existing work, and adding new work, well, its more than likely going to be taken over by a direct competitor.

So, the point we are trying to make is this, use Google Analytics, and other really good seo tools to improve your content marketing, so here’s some of the statistics you should be monitoring:

Backlinks

A really good piece of content marketing, that’s useful, well written, and helps customers, that will attract something called backlinks. Now in seo, agencies up and down the land still think that backlinks are important, just because Google now has done away with using PageRank, this doesn’t mean that backlinks are still not a very important ranking factor.

So, the point we are trying to make is this, if a piece of content marketing is earning quality links, then this work is helping to improve your websites seo.

If the content marketing is not attracting any backlinks, well, this could be because it needs improving. In a nutshell, you haven’t given other websites enough of a reason to want to link to you. Yet if the information your offering is so good, then they will want to.

Let’s give you an example, just for a second, let’s say you sell mortgages.

And you’ve written a super useful article, explaining how much first-time buyers normally need to obtain a mortgage, now if this article is well written, and let’s say you add a video including a mortgage advisor offering advice, well this blog post may well be so well produced, that you obtain a lot of backlinks.

Organic visitor numbers

You should use Google analytics to look at how many organic visitors each blog post in obtaining.

If the number of organic visitors is low to a blog post, you may want to improve that blog post, and then use Google analytics to see if you are obtaining more visitors, after you have improved it.

Do note that making improvements to your blog posts, this doesn’t mean that overnight that the number of organic visitors is going to sky-rocket, as often it doesn’t, it does take a lot of time and patience before you may start to see improvements.