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2024/07/29 2024/07/29

Comprehensive SEO content strategy to elevate your rankings

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Ciao, my friend! Let me tell you, a robust SEO content creation process is like the secret sauce in Mamma’s spaghetti. It’s essential for increasing brand visibility, engaging visitors at every stage of their journey, and driving those qualified leads into your sales funnel. But listen, it’s not just about creating great content but mixing those SEO best practices to dominate Google’s SERP rankings. So, grab your espresso, sit back, and let’s craft an SEO content strategy that aligns perfectly with your business objectives and capisce.

 

By: Ryan Walsh

Date: 29/07/2024

 

Content Advice, Keyword Research, Marketing Strategies

 

Introduction to SEO Content Strategy

 

Ah, my dear friend, understanding SEO content goes far beyond producing high-quality content. While quality is crucial, you must invest time in incorporating SEO best practices to improve Google’s SERP rankings. This guide provides an SEO content checklist to help you demonstrate your content’s quality, relevance, and authority, ensuring it reaches your target audience effectively. Andiamo, let’s dive into this beautiful world of SEO and make your content shine!

 

Identifying valuable topics in your niche

Effective topic ideation and validation

 

Selecting suitable topics is the cornerstone of effective SEO content, my friend. It’s essential to understand your audience and what they seek.

Your content should address their needs within your core expertise area. Imagine you’re a chef and need to know what your diners crave to create a menu that keeps them coming back for more.

 

Topic Brainstorming Checklist:

 

To start, identify your audience’s pain points and create content that provides solutions.

Use keyword research tools to explore relevant topics. Consult your customer service teams to understand common inquiries. Analyse web analytics to identify high-performing content.  Stay updated with industry trends. Monitor social media to understand your audience’s concerns. Share case studies and original research to add credibility.

 

Did you know, my friend, that according to HubSpot, businesses that blog generate 67% more monthly leads than those that don’t?

 

Conducting comprehensive keyword research

Building your content around keywords

 

Does SEO content revolve around keywords and capisce? Google uses these keywords to match web pages to user queries. Conducting thorough keyword research is crucial for this process. Think of keywords as the spices in your recipe – without them, your dish would be bland and forgettable.

 

Keyword Research checklist:

 

Generate general topics related to your business (these are your seed keywords).

Use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to find related search terms for each theme. Evaluate keywords for traffic potential and competition. Aim for a mix of short-tail and long-tail keywords with varying volumes of search interest and keyword difficulties. Organise keywords into topic clusters and plan content to meet the search intent behind the keywords.

 

Here’s a spicy fact: 50% of search queries are four words or longer. Long-tail keywords are the linguine to your SEO Alfredo! Those long, specific phrases can help you capture niche markets and highly interested audiences.

In-Depth content research

 

With over 30 billion indexed web pages, matching search intent while creating engaging content is vital.

Research is not just about providing accurate information; it’s about understanding people-first content. Think of it like preparing a dish – you must know the ingredients and the best way to combine them to satisfy your guests.

 

 

Crafting new and engaging content

Strategic Content Creation

 

Understanding why someone might search for your keywords helps determine where they are in the buyer’s journey.

Use this insight to choose the correct content format—articles, FAQs, how-tos, or reviews—and create engaging SEO content. It’s like choosing the suitable dish for the right occasion; you need to know what will delight your guests.

 

Content Creation Checklist:

 

Define your topic and its purpose

Develop an organised outline with SEO-optimised headers and supporting points for each section. Write compelling, focused content using your expertise and authoritative sources. Follow the outline to keep your article focused. Use an appropriate tone for the piece and make the article easy to consume and compelling to read.

SEO content tools can help with readability and flow.

 

Businesses prioritising blogging are 13 times more likely to achieve a positive ROI.

That’s like getting a free dessert with your meal! It’s all about providing value, keeping your audience engaged, and coming back for more.

Prioritising Reader Value

 

Google’s helpful content system prioritises original, valuable content.

Aim to provide information that readers can apply directly to their situations. It’s like giving them a secret family recipe – helpful, something they can use and appreciate.

 

Helpful Content SEO Checklist:

 

Offer comprehensive answers and detailed solutions.

Provide downloadable guides and templates. Share real-life examples, original research, and unique viewpoints. Identify and fill topic gaps in top-ranking pages. Enhance your content with videos, charts, and graphs.

 

Did you know?

Visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media. It’s like the tiramisu of your content strategy—everyone wants a piece! Ensure your content is informative, visually appealing, and shareable.

Adhering to EEAT Principles

 

Google’s human raters assess content based on experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT). It’s like a judge in a cooking competition – they’re looking for the best of the best.

 

EEAT Checklist:

 

Highlight personal knowledge and industry achievements to demonstrate experience. Showcase certifications, accreditations, and relevant credentials to meet the expertise guidelines. Establish your business as a respected source to demonstrate authoritativeness. Ensure your website is secure and professional to build trustworthiness.

 

Remember, 85% of consumers conduct online research before making a purchase.

 

Natural Keyword Integration and Optimisation

 

Search engines now understand the context better, making keyword stuffing unnecessary. Instead, focus on natural keyword integration to enhance readability and SEO performance. It’s like adding just the right amount of seasoning – not too much, not too little.

Here’s a fact:

Websites with robust keyword strategies see a 5.66 times higher conversion rate. That’s like hitting the SEO jackpot! Proper keyword placement can significantly improve your search engine rankings and user experience.

 

Editing, Proofreading, and Internal Linking

 

Before publishing, make sure your content is polished and error-free, like a fine Italian wine. Use internal links to help Google understand your site structure and improve user experience. It’s like organising your ingredients and kitchen tools – everything needs to be in place.

 

Editing Checklist:

 

Check for spelling and grammar mistakes.

Review content for clarity and flow. Ensure formatting and stylistic consistency. Align content with brand voice and tone. Verify facts and statistics.

Optimise for on-page SEO elements like keywords, meta titles, descriptions, and structured data.

 

Internal Link Checklist:

 

Link new content to older articles.

Use primary keywords as anchor text for business-critical pages. Recommend related content to keep users engaged. This helps improve your site’s navigation and keeps visitors exploring your content.

 

Did you know?

Internal linking can boost your page views by 40%. It’s like offering more delicious courses at dinner – people can’t resist! Proper internal linking helps with SEO and enhances the user experience by guiding them through your content.

 

Calls to Action

 

External links to authoritative sources enhance credibility, while clear CTAs can boost engagement and conversions, like the perfect ending to a beautiful meal. It’s all about creating trust and guiding your visitors towards taking action.

 

External Links Checklist:

 

Choose reputable and original research sources. Use descriptive anchor text. Ensure you’re linking to recent studies and articles—open links in new windows. Use external links only when they add value to your content or back up your claims.

 

CTA Checklist:

 

Structuring content effectively

 

A well-structured page aids both readers and search engines.

Use headers, short paragraphs, and lists to make content easily digestible. It’s all about creating a seamless and enjoyable experience for your audience.

 

Content Structuring Checklist:

 

Use H2s, H3s, and H4s to organise content. Keep paragraphs concise for easy skimming. Use bulleted and numbered lists to summarise vital points. Highlight important information with visual elements like bold and italic fonts, pull quotes, and summary boxes.

 

 

Post-Launch Promotion and Maintenance

 

After publishing, promote your content to attract traffic and ensure it stays up to date, like a well-tended vineyard. It’s not enough to create great content; you need to get it in front of the right audience.

 

Post-Launch Checklist:

 

Submit pages through Google Search Console to request indexing.

Distribute content through social media and email marketing. Add internal links to your new content from your older content. Monitor performance using analytics tools like GA4.

 

Content Freshness Checklist:

 

Regularly review and audit your content inventory. Update out-of-date information. Cite newer research and studies if available. Check for broken links.

 

Here’s a spicy statistic: Fresh content can boost organic traffic by 111%. Keep it fresh like basil in your garden! Regular updates ensure that your content remains relevant and valuable to your audience.

 

Partner With an SEO Content Expert

 

Creating top-performing content requires attention to detail, from topic selection to demonstrating quality to Google. Our team can help customise your content strategy, ensuring all SEO checkboxes are ticked. Contact us today for a free consultation to learn how to create content that resonates with your audience, optimises your pages, and achieves your business goals.

 

By following this comprehensive guide, you can create an SEO content strategy that improves your search rankings and effectively engages your audience, driving meaningful results for your business. Buona fortuna, my friend!

2024/07/18 2024/07/18

Understanding and addressing crawlability issues with your website is crucial for unleashing the full potential of your SEO strategy.

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If not resolved, indexation issues can significantly hinder Google’s (Googlebot’s) ability to crawl your pages, negatively impacting your business’s organic SEO, potentially across a few pages or even the entire website!

 

Technical SEO

Some businesses only focus on writing content marketing and building backlinks until they are blue in the face.
Now, don’t get us wrong—these are still some of the most important ranking factors out there today; however, sometimes businesses overlook the importance of their website’s crawlability.

This article will explain why Google must be able to crawl your website and address any indexation problems you may encounter.

First things first, what are crawlability problems?

Your main pages or your blog posts, which you have been writing diligently for the last day or two that appear in Google’s results, must be able to get indexed.

It’s a bit like a large store that, let’s say, that is selling furniture. For that business to sell the item to you, it must first be scanned into the warehouse and tell the infantry control software to show that item is in stock.

This is similar to how Google’s algorithm works, once the page is indexed, Googlebot displays the page within the SERP’s.

For that, the Googlebot needs to crawl the page, and there are many ways to send a page for indexation: either manually submitting it via Google Search Console or by leaving Googlebot to find it.

However, if there are indexation issues, Googlebot will not be able to crawl and index the page blog post.

Googlebot can usually crawl and index pages on its own accord

Often, you don’t need to do anything to get a page indexed; you just need to simply add a site map and submit this to Google.

Often, it’s a Googlebot that can crawl and index the page without you having to do anything.

However, indexation problems can occur because of a no-index tab being left on or the page possibly sometimes being too slow for the Googlebot to index it. For instance, if the ‘no index’ tag is mistakenly applied to a page, it will not be indexed. Similarly, if a page takes too long to load, Googlebot may not index it.

 

No index tabs being left on incorrectly

Sometimes, no index tab can be left on, so “no-index” code might be written in the website’s header section, preventing the Googlebot from crawling that page. If this occurs, that page will never appear in Google’s results.

 

Incomplete indexing

incomplete indexing is when some pages are indexed, and others are not. This can occur for a range of different reasons. However, the web developers and your SEO team must use various tools, such as Screaming Frog to find which pages are getting indexed and which are not. Then, it’s a matter of correcting the problems; it could be that they are “orphan pages”, that is, pages with no links leading to it. There can be a considerable amount of 404 errors, and there could not possibly be no-index code written into the website’s header section within the robot.txt document.

 

Unreliable hosting

It can sometimes be the case that you employ an absolutely fantastic SEO team that got that business on the first page of Google.co.uk, possibly even in the number one position. However, if the hosting is unreliable, and the website is down for a long time regularly, perhaps due to server maintenance, probably because the hosting company is unreliable, or because the server is so slow, then Google might decide to drop that page out of its index.

 

No index code is written in the robots.txt document

The robots.txt provides instructions for the Googlebot on whether to crawl and index that page. However, if you get these instructions wrong, for example you tell Google to “no-index” a critical page, such as the homepage, then can’t get indexed, massively hampering your business’s organic SEO performance.

Do use of the Google Search Console it is brilliant. It is free and can show you some of your websites indexation issues.

 

Google Search Console and indexing errors

Your SEO consultant or in-house marketing team should routinely check for any indexing errors within your Google Search Console account.

For example, it could be the case that all the pages were getting indexed up until one week ago.

Yet the website might have gone through a redesign process recently. and your web designers have written in the code which now means some pages can’t get indexed, so this needs to be fixed if you want those pages to be indexed later.

 

Many SEO agencies use Screaming Frog

A lot of SEO agencies across the globe use Screaming Frog to find things like 404-page errors, for example.
An increase number of 404-pages and 404-page errors can massively impact your business’s SEO.

For example, your SEO consultant might have spent hundreds of hours building high-quality do follow links to send link equity link juice to that specific page. Then, if you decide to delete that page all of that link, equity can be lost overnight.

There’s also the matter of creating a poor user experience.

Shoppers will likely bounce off the website immediately if a custom 404 page greets them. Therefore, you should work closely with your web design and SEO teams to correct 404-page errors.

5xx Errors

A 5xx error signals that the server couldn’t carry out a request. Googlebot must be able to crawl and index the page, so the 5xx error could prevent . Googlebot from doing its work. If this happens that page might be removed and ranked lower in Google’s index.

 

504 Gateway Timeout:

504 Gateway Timeout: if your website is timing out, then this again can cause indexation issues, as again, the bot can’t access that page to crawl and index it.

Broken internal links

Internal links are a bit like a spider’s cobweb; you can follow them, and everything is interlinked.
However, if the links become broken, that’s to say a page that links directly to a different blog post which you have just written, if that link becomes a broken internal link. This will prevent Googlebot from following the link and then crawling that page, so broken internal links can waste your business’s crawl budget.

2024/07/10 2024/07/10

What does Google E-EAT mean, and how has it changed search engine optimisation (SEO)?

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If your business wants to get onto the first page of Google.co.uk, you must understand the principles of Google E-EAT.

This is paramount because it’s what Google’s algorithms use to assess how well-written the content marketing is on your website.

So, before putting your hands on the keyboard and writing your first blog post, you must understand the acronym Google E-EAT and its meaning. This will help you to write better quality content marketing, which can help your business to rank higher in Google’s search engine results pages.

 

Written by: Ryan Walsh
Date: 10/07/2024
Topic: On-page SEO

 

Introduction

In a nutshell, Google E-EAT stands for “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness”.

Google introduced this into the “Search Quality Rater guidelines” back in 2014. So it’s nothing new, but something all copywriters, businesses, and SEO agencies need to know about. Then, in 2022, Google added Experience to the acronym. We will discuss how this changed how companies should implement organic search engine optimisation.

We must consider the Google E-EAT signals as a significant factor Google uses to determine where a page should rank in the search results. This is not a minor ranking factor, like alt text, which is entirely different. E-EAT is used to evaluate the whole page’s quality to assess where it should rank in the search results.

 

Achieving and maintaining high search rankings

Getting to the top of Google is not straightforward; it’s like climbing Mount Everest. It’s a lot of work, yet we must persevere with grit and determination. It would be best if you had a good understanding of how Google’s algorithm works; therefore, as E-EAT is an integral part of that, you need to understand what the E-EAT acronym means, what the Google Helpful Content Update is, and why Google is now looking at every single page on a granular basis to assess is a good quality or not.

If your pages are generally of good quality, you can see an organic uplift in your business rankings, but if the quality is not good, this can mean your business is moved back down to the organic results.

 

What Does E-EAT Mean?

Can you tell us precisely what Google E-EAT means? What are the means, and how should they be introduced into SEO marketing strategy?

 

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Google wants to serve the best possible answer to a question

It doesn’t matter if it’s finding a local dog walking company or you’re looking for a divorce solicitor- Google (Alphabet) wants to present the best, most comprehensive answer to any query.
Google will want to use proven businesses where the pages have a meagre bounce rate, high dwell time, and a lot of (do-follow and no-follow) backlinks leading to them.

You also need to assess whether the text on the page is written by somebody who understands what they’re talking about or if it’s just a marketing waffle. This is where Google E-EAT comes in a framework Google uses to scan over the page and determine whether it is good quality information. For example, Google E-EAT will ask questions such as, who’s the author? Have they got a good understanding of what they are talking about? How many good-quality links lead to that page?

 

Google’s Knowledge Vault and Entity-Building

Essential things are interconnected; for example, celebrities will be interconnected with films they’ve made, who they have married, where they live, and significant life effects, such as if they won the BAFTA awards.
The significant things are known as “entities.” They are people, events, and products, and they will be interconnected to other things. Google understands these entities well, which is why Google’s Knowledge Vault and GoogleBot constantly crawl and index new information.

Therefore, the point we’re trying to make here is that if a page offers excellent information, contains mentions about entities, and shows that the person knows what they’re talking about because they’ve gone in-depth, really pushed the boat out and made an effort to offer a good quality answer to a question, and followed the advice in Google’s E-EAT, then Google rewards these pages with higher rankings; therefore, Google’s E-EAT is simply a framework evaluating whether that page is good quality or not.

 

Google’s Rank Brain

Google uses Google E-EAT to evaluate whether the content marketing on the page is good quality. It is written by somebody who doesn’t know how to engage the reader, or if it’s a boring read. It’s a bit like reading a book written by a professor at a University, it might be written to offer an in-depth answer, but it’s not that interesting to read; a lot of technical language is used, which alienates the reader, and they don’t know what the page is talking about, and the reader loses interest in reading any more, because the work is tedious, or overly technical, well this page will have a low dwell time a high bounce rate.

 

Google RankBrain and Google E-EAT.

This is why this SEO agency firmly believes that Google E-EAT is using the framework to evaluate whether the information is of good quality and how interested the reader is in reading the work through Google RankBrain.
For example, Google RankBrain will want to know what the bounce rate is for that page and how high dwell time is. These are all critical factors that Google’s algorithm uses to determine whether a page is of good quality or not.

 

Here’s what you need to know about Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and
Trustworthiness:

 

Experience

 

Does the person show in-depth experience of that particular product or service?

For example, a builder describes their services, explaining how they add property extensions to a house have they explain the construction process in an in-depth way.

When the copywriters work with a builder; they will be able to clearly show in-depth knowledge of the process, explaining step-by-step how the extension is built from the ground works through to writing about the roofing tiles being added.

Google’s algorithm can examine the page, use semantic SEO, examine the keywords on the page, and clearly ascertain whether or not the person knows what they are talking about. For example, if the author when they are writing about the construction process, of a new property extention if they mention breeze blocks, certain tiles, electrics first fixing, and plasterboard. All of these things are interconnected with making a property extension and the construction process, so it shows to Google’s algorithm that the person know to some level, what they are talking about.

You also need to write in such a way that engages the reader. Say if the reader spends over three minutes on average reading each page, so it’s clear to Googles algorithms the dwell time is high, Google’s Rank brain shows that you have engaged the reader. As of this page, it moves up the SERPs.

 

Expertise

Does the text show that the person clearly knows what they are talking about, and it is effortless for them to explain something to a customer. For example when you sit in front of a highly qualified barrister or solicitor; they should be able to convey complicated areas of law simply.

On the other hand, if the website is content-thin, has a small amount of text, then you cant expect to rank well in the SERPs. So you need to work with expert in their related field, who really know your stuff, and use their knowledge, expertise, advice and make sure that this is placed into the article.

 

Google’s Helpful Content Update

Google’s Helpful Content Update clearly shows that Google prioritises content marketing that will be helpful to the customer, that’s gone to the extra mile, to offer useful information that the customer will want.

Therefore, gone are the days of trying to push a product down a customer neck; instead, you have to walk in the customers’ shoes and help make their buying decision- by offering helpful and useful information . Content marketing must be helpful, insightful, and written by an expert.

If it’s not helpful, and you keep mentioning keywords all the time in a feeble attempt to try and get the business onto the first page of Google though black hat methods of SEO; well this attempt will not work- it will most likely result in the business incurring a big fat, Google penalty.

 

Authoritativeness

If your website offers high-quality information, such as excellent and well-written blog posts, you could attract many do-follow and no-follow backlinks to your company’s website.

Your website’s authority can improve as you accumulate more good-quality links.
As any good SEO consultant will tell you, links, also referred to as backlinks, are still one of the most important ranking factors.

This means Google deems links necessary when determining where to rank your business in the SERPs.
So, if you want your business to appear on page one of Google, you often need quality links.

 

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness is an arbitrary factor but an important aspect of Google’s E-EAT.
Therefore, Google will be trying to decipher whether a company’s website can be trusted.
For example, are you happy to include credit card details on the website?

 

  • Does a show company address?
  • Is the website secure in terms of having a padlock within the browser?
  • Is it clear if there is contact information, such as a company phone number?
  • How many positive reviews are there on the likes of Trust Pilot, for example?
  • Is there a Google Business profile, and if so, how many positive reviews does it have?

 

Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines

The Google E-EAT framework initially came from this: “the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines”.

The Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, published by Google, is a comprehensive document that provides detailed insight into how Google evaluates a page’s quality. It covers various aspects, such as content relevance, user experience, and trustworthiness, which are crucial for SEO. So, before you go burning the midnight oil writing a very long article, we highly recommend reading this document, “The Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines”.

 

SEO strategists

If your business is based in Cardiff, what’s to improve your organic search engine optimisation, then do call us today:
We can help improve the following aspects of your company’s SEO:

– Backlinks
– Content marketing
– Technical SEO
Call us today, and we can offer you a free, no-obligation quotation.

 

2024/05/24 2024/05/24

Effective paid search strategies for E-commerce Websites in 2024

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Maximising paid search advertising for E-commerce Success

E-commerce websites are thriving like never before, with payment processors such as Visa handling over 29 million online transactions daily.

The landscape of consumer behaviour has shifted significantly, and the internet offers a faster, more convenient way to shop.

However, with thousands of e-commerce sites vying for consumer attention, how can you ensure your site stands out?

The answer lies in a robust e-commerce digital marketing strategy.

By leveraging various paid search advertising options, you can effectively promote your products.

This guide will explore several powerful strategies to kickstart your e-commerce digital marketing efforts:

 

Leveraging Social Media for E-commerce Digital Marketing

In today’s digital age, social media is a powerful tool for e-commerce marketing.

With billions of users globally, social media platforms offer unparalleled opportunities for reaching potential customers.

On average, users spend about two hours daily on social media, making it a fertile ground for advertising.

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer highly effective paid advertising options.

Facebook ads, for instance, allow e-commerce businesses to create custom call-to-action buttons and target specific demographics, driving traffic to their stores.

However, to maximise the benefits of social media marketing, your efforts need to be organic.

This means regularly posting high-quality content that resonates with your audience.

For example, if your product is locally made, consider creating engaging videos showcasing the production process.

This not only draws attention but also builds a connection with your audience. While the cost of ads on platforms like Instagram and Facebook can offer great value, success hinges on understanding your audience and crafting content marketing that appeals to them.

 

Google Ads: elevating your ecommerce presence

 Google Ads also offers an excellent solution.

Google Ads ensures that your ecommerce website appears at the top of search results relevant to your business, driving essential traffic to your site.

Integrating Google Ads with Shopify can enhance your site’s SEO-friendliness and overall functionality.

Shopify simplifies the process of building your site from scratch and ensures it is mobile-ready, a crucial factor given the increasing volume of mobile transactions.

By utilising Google Ads, you can significantly improve your e-commerce site’s visibility, and attract a targeted audience actively searching for products like yours.

 

Harnessing the power of digital display advertising

Digital display advertising is another effective strategy for e-commerce businesses.

This approach involves placing ads on various websites, either by renting ad space directly or through services that distribute your ads across targeted sites for a monthly fee.

To maximise the impact of digital display advertising, focus on targeting websites with content related to your offerings.

Additionally, these ads can be customised based on user profiles, ensuring your ads are shown to individuals who have expressed interest in similar products or services.

By going the extra mile to target your ads effectively, you can drive significant traffic and boost your sales.

 

Exploring additional advertising options for E-commerce

Beyond social media and Google Ads, there are numerous other advertising options available for e-commerce websites.

Each strategy has its unique advantages, and the right choice depends on your specific business needs. Companies like Ryan C Walsh, offer personalised marketing strategies tailored to your business, helping you navigate the complex world of digital advertising.

 

Key Facts and statistics in E-commerce Digital Marketing

To underscore the effectiveness of these strategies, consider some relevant statistics:

 

Social Media Influence:

According to Statista, social media ad spending is projected to reach $229.5 billion by 2024, reflecting its growing influence in digital marketing .

Mobile Ecommerce Growth:

EMarketer reports that mobile ecommerce sales are expected to account for 72.9% of total ecommerce sales by 2021 .

Google Ads Efficiency:

A study by Google revealed that businesses make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 spent on Google Ads .

 

Conclusion: Achieving Ecommerce success with Paid Search Advertising

Implementing a comprehensive digital marketing strategy is essential for the success of your e-commerce business.

By leveraging social media advertising, Google Ads, and digital display advertising, you can significantly enhance your online presence and drive sales.

Understanding your audience and crafting targeted, engaging content will help you maximise the return on your advertising investment.

With the right approach, you can make your ecommerce site stand out in the crowded digital marketplace.

By incorporating these advanced strategies and understanding the dynamics of digital marketing, your ecommerce business can achieve remarkable growth and success.

2024/03/15 2024/03/15

A beginner’s guide as to how to carry out an SEO audit

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Written by: Ryan Christopher Walsh
Date: 15th/03/2024

 

Just as you wouldn’t embark upon a major construction project without first creating some architect plans, neither should you start to improve your business search engine optimisation without first carrying out an SEO audit.

Thankfully there are many SEO tools, such as Moz Pro, Ahrefs and Google Search Console that make this work a piece of cake. The hard part is then finding a highly experienced SEO consultant to interpret the information and come up with a plan of action as to how they plan on improving your company website.

 

For example, depending on what the SEO audit report says, they may recommend:

– Removing duplicated content marketing
– If there are toxic backlinks the marketing consultant may recommend disavowing them
– If the content marketing is “content thin” then improvements will need to be made to this work
– If there are indexation issues, these will also need to be rectified, such as “no-index” code left on pages for example
– And there are thousands of other areas which could also be improved as well

You’ve come to the right place to find out how carrying out an SEO audit could help your business, as we have been helping businesses now for more than ten years to improve their search engine optimisation in Wales.
So, before we do start any SEO work, one of the first places we start to carry out an SEO audit.

 

Off-Page SEO, On-Page SEO, Technical SEO

Just as a car’s engine can go into “limp home mode”, drastically reducing the car’s performance, something similar could happen to your company’s website if it were to incur let’s say a manual action penalty, imposed by Google.

It’s also perfectly possible that a technical issue, stopping the pages from being crawled and indexed, such as robots.txt full of “no-index” code, could be holding your business’s search engine optimisation back. Therefore, these technical issues, as well as other on-site issues and web design issues, need to be fixed to get some businesses onto page one of Google.co.uk.

Indexation issues start with these, because if these are not fixed then the business won’t appear on Google
In a nutshell, if the pages can’t be indexed by Googlebot, that is, if they can’t be crawled and indexed by Googlebot on a regular basis, this means that those pages will blog post and have no chance of ever appearing in Google’s results. So, one of the first things an SEO consultant must do is see if there are any indexation issues. You can often use the Google Search Console to do this, as this tool should tell you if there are any indexation issues.

 

Toxic backlinks

The business might have a website, but it’s not even ranking on the first ten pages of Google and sometimes this is because of “toxic backlinks”. The business owners might think, well we’ve sacked our previous SEO company, we’ve got rid of them, and that’s the end. However, if the previous company has completed low-quality work, for example, if they’ve built low-quality toxic backlinks, this can have a lasting effect on the website.

The business can, therefore, incur a Google Penguin penalty- a business incurs this if it has a lot of low-quality spam links. The effect of such a penalty can be long-lasting, a business can rank much lower in Google’s organic SERPs after this penalty, and it can sometimes take some businesses years to recover from such a penalty.

So often, the SEO consultant needs to see if there are any significant problems, such as duplicated content causing an algorithmic penalty or perhaps, as we mentioned earlier if there are any toxic backlinks.

Toxic backlinks can be disavowed, however, this work should be carried out by an SEO expert.

 

Why do we need an SEO audit?

The long and short of the matter is, sure there are millions of companies which offer free SEO audit reports.
But as the old saying goes, nothing comes for free in life.

So, often instead of just an SEO report that’s offered for free, you need a comprehensive report, which is then interpreted by a highly experienced SEO consultant who sits down and digests the report to see which areas need to be improved.

So, is it worth paying for an SEO audit report?

Well, we would say most definitely, however, an SEO report is only useful if the person interpreting the data is highly experienced, highly knowledgeable and understands what areas need to then be improved.

Therefore after reading say the Moz Pro report, the SEO consultant should then be able to come back with a series of recommendations on how they would like to improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation.

 

How frequently should you carry out a website audit?

Well, you should most definitely be carried out when the company changes SEO company that’s for sure. However, the frequency of how often you should carry out an audit does depend on the size of the website, for example, a multi-million-pound business, that owns an e-commerce website is obviously going to be carrying out SEO reports more regularly than a sole trader, with a 7-page website.

Yet regardless of the size of the business, the SEO consultant should always be looking at whether there are any toxic links, or duplicated content marketing, and even if there a lot of content marketing generated by AI, then this could damage the businesses organic SEO.

 

How long does it take to undertake an SEO audit?

Well, there are various SEO tools that are extremely good, we recommend MOZ Pro, it’s brilliant tool that can be used on any company website.

Moz Pro can then generate a report often in the blink of an eye, however as you would expect, this data needs to be interpreted by an expert.

Otherwise, if you don’t hire an SEO company to interpret the data, well you’re just having, let’s say, a 25-page document that doesn’t mean anything to the business owner. However, a highly experienced agency will be able to interpret all of the information outlined in the SEO report quickly and then recommend which areas need improving.

 

Which SEO tools would you recommend using?

Well, there are some that require a monthly subscription, and we would highly recommend Moz Pro, we think this is a really good SEO tool. We think it’s absolutely fantastic, and in our 10 years of experience, we think it’s one of the best tools out there.
Then, you also have a Google Search Console our SEO agency uses Google Search Console on a daily basis for our clients. This, again, is a fabulous tool and it’s free, so all businesses should have it.

It’s brilliant because it’s made by Google (Alphabet), so the information it provides is reliable and also very up-to-date. You can check things like website backlinks and see if there are indexation issues and see if any manual actions may hold your website back.

 

With Google Search Console you can find the following information relating to your business SEO:

 

Are there any Google Manual Actions in place?

 

You can use Google Search Console to see if any manual actions could hold a website back.

If there are any Google Manual Actions, then do consult with an SEO expert on how you can get these issues fixed.

 

Does your website have any indexation issues?

 

You can use the Google Search Console, as well as many other SEO tools, to check for possible indexation issues that may hold your business’s search engine optimisation back. For example, a “no-index” tab being left on the homepage, will mean that the homepage will never ever appear within Google’s SERP’s.

So, if you want a page or blog post to appear in Google’s SERPs, you need to make sure the page can get indexed by Googlebot.

 

Keywords

You can also track where your businesses keywords are ranking, using Google Search Console- simply click “Performance” button and then select “Average Position” you will then instantly see where your business ranks in Google’s SERP’s.

 

Duplicated content and why it needs to be removed

There are various tools that you can use as plagiarism checkers, to see if there is an duplicated content marketing on your website. And our SEO agency would urge you to use them because if there is duplicated blog posts, this could mean the business gets a Google Penalty, which can sometimes mean the whole website is removed from Google.

We recommend using Copyscape to see if there are any duplicated pages or blog posts on your website.

 

Add a sitemap and a robot.txt file

We highly recommend having both a Robot.txt and also adding your company’s site map to Google Search Console, this will help Googlebot to find all of the pages and blog posts on your company website.

It’s a bit like giving someone trying to find a location a sat-nav unit, obviously, then they will find their destination much easier.

This is the same as when you give Googlebot a sitemap, you are giving Google a list of all the pages, and blog posts on your website, so they can be much more easily indexed.

 

You can use “Screaming Frog” or “Moz Pro” to find  any 404-page errors on your website

You can use various SEO tools, such as Screaming Frog, to look for 404-page errors.

You do need to rectify and fix any 404-page errors, because having 404-page errors, causes a bad user experience for your customers. It’s a bit like, going to a shop, that should be open, yet the shutters are down, you will be disappointed because you wanted to buy something.

This is a bit the same, when someone clicks on your business in Google’s SERPs, and then they instead of seeing the product they wanted, lets say it was a Bosch dishwasher, instead, they see a 404-page error instead. Most likely what will happen, is they leave your website, causing the bounce rate to increase, which is not good for your business’s search engine optimisation.

 

Mobile Responsiveness- Does your website work on a smartphone?

 

Before you agree with your web designers that the website is finished and you are happy with the website they have made for you, you must ensure it works perfectly on smartphones and tablets.

Does the website work well on say an Android smartphone? Does the website work well, on an iPhone?

You need to check to see if everything works correctly. If things don’t work efficiently for the customer, it will likely cause a high bounce rate- which will negatively impact your business’s search engine optimisation.

As any good marketing agency will tell you, they need to work hard to reduce the company’s bounce rate as far as possible.

 

 

We have over ten years of experience helping businesses to improve their SEO

Many marketing agencies come and go. However, ours has stood the test of time. We’ve worked with some fantastic businesses in the Cardiff area to help ramp up their sales. While we are not the cheapest marketing agency by a country mile, we can guarantee that every aspect of our work is white hat, and top quality.

 

If you would like a free quote, why not call us?

 

 

2024/02/27 2024/02/27

How to write a good quality blog post

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Content marketing

In the realm of digital marketing, the axiom “content is king” has never wavered in its truth.
However, it’s not just any content marketing that reigns supreme—it’s the meticulously crafted, engaging, and informative kind that does.

With the evolution of SEO practices, the emphasis has shifted towards creating content marketing that doesn’t just appeal to search engines, such as Google but also provides a superior user experience (UX).

John Mueller of Google once highlighted “awesomeness” as a critical factor for ranking success, underlining the importance of content quality.

 

What should we be writing about?

Before penning down your next masterpiece, it’s crucial to engage in thorough research to pinpoint topics that resonate with your audience.
The goal is to find subjects that not only spark interest but are questions thousands of shoppers are likely to be asking.
A pro tip is to use quality SEO tools, such as Moz Pro to help you with this.

 

Keywords

Before you let your creativity flow, take a moment to step into the shoes of your potential readers.
Understanding user intent is paramount.

Ask yourself: What information are they seeking before they buy a product?

What solutions do they need?

Keyword research, including the use of Google Suggest, will further refine your focus, allowing you to select primary and secondary keywords that enhance your organic SEO without compromising the natural flow of your article.

 

Structure

The structure of your blog post plays a pivotal role in keeping your audience engaged and reducing bounce rates—a signal to Google of your content’s quality. So do add page titles.

Also do incorporate various elements like images, videos, and infographics can significantly enhance readability and engagement.
Ensuring your headings are properly tagged and your content marketing is well-organised will make your post more accessible and appealing to both readers and search engines.

 

Page titles

The title of your blog post is your first opportunity to captivate potential readers.
It should be directly aligned with the search queries your audience is using, incorporating your primary keyword in a way that also that answers the shoppers question. Emotive and powerful words, along with clear indicators of the content’s value (such as “ultimate guide” or “5 simple steps”), can significantly increase click-through rates.

 

How many words should we be writing for each blog post?

In the realm of SEO, longer content (evergreen content marketing) often translates to higher rankings.
Aim for posts that are at least 1000 words, as they tend to provide more value, covering topics in-depth.
This not only benefits your SEO efforts but also establishes your blog as an authoritative source of information.

 

Social media

Promote your work on X, Facebook and Instagram.

In conclusion, crafting an SEO-optimised blog post that ranks well on Google and captivates readers requires a blend of well-written pages, user intent understanding, keyword optimisation, and innovative structuring.

By focusing on creating quality content marketing that is not only informative but also engaging and white hat you can achieve a prominent position on Google’s first page.
Remember, in the dynamic world of SEO, the combination of quality content and strategic optimisation is your key to success.

Facts and statistics are integral to reinforcing the credibility of your content marketing. For instance, according to HubSpot’s “State of Marketing Report 2021,” content marketing is used by 82% of marketers, reflecting its critical role in digital marketing strategies. Furthermore, a study by Backlinko found that the average Google first page result contains 1,447 words, highlighting the importance of comprehensive content in SEO efforts.

For further reading and statistics, consider exploring resources such as the HubSpot State of Marketing Report (https://www.hubspot.com/state-of-marketing) and the Backlinko SEO Statistics (https://backlinko.com/seo-stats). These sources provide valuable insights into the current trends and data supporting effective content marketing and SEO strategies.

 

 

 

 

2024/02/15 2024/02/15

Has your websites rankings decreased since the Google Helpful Content Update?

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Many businesses have seen their SERPs decrease after the Google helpful content update.

Therefore, copywriters are scrabbling across the globe for ways to fix their content marketing so that the Google helpful content update approves it and their SEO improves.

Therefore, this article has been written to help you improve your business’s content marketing.

 

Written by: Ryan Walsh

Date: 15/02/ 2024

It can happen to many businesses that work hard and diligently to get their companies right to the top of Google.co.uk. They might not make any further changes to their organic SEO, yet after the Google helpful content update, their rankings have sometimes substantially decreased.

 

So, how exactly does Google’s helpful content update work?

What is essential to note is that this could be a sitewide penalty. meaning that all the pages / blog posts are ranking notably lower on Google. Often this is because of the following:

– A lot of content thin content
– Content marketing that has a low Google E-EAT score

All of your pages and blog posts could get dragged down if you have a lot of low-quality pages, such as content or thin pages on your website.

So this means that if you have a lot of low-quality content marketing, such as content-thin articles, or just pages that are not that useful, as they don’t offer much useful advice to a shopper, your businesses rankings could get dragged down the ranking after this update.

Today in 2024 your content marketing has to be very good.

 

When you consider that there have been numerous updates rolled out by Google

Google has gone through an enormous effort, rolling out the Google Panda update, the Google Rank brain artificial intelligence update, and the Google hummingbird update. These have been significant updates, which have changed enormously where some businesses rank on the Google and therefore alterted these businesses organic rankings.

Therefore, this latest update, the Google helpful content update is just another step in weeding out low-quality content marketing. For example, if over 50% say of the blog posts are content thin, then the whole website, including main product pages may start to rank lower on Google’s organic results.

So basically, the long and short of it is this: if you hire the wrong agency which creates lacklustre, not very well written content marketing, what this can hold your website back. You might have been doing well, ranking at the top of Google.co.uk, but after that Google update, your business may move down the ranks, because of all the blog posts that haven’t been well written.
It can take a long time to recover from a Google penalty

As with all sorts of Google algorithmic or manual penalties, it does take time to recover, so let’s say that you believe the Google helpful content update has impacted your website. Let’s say that you have noticed that your rankings have plummeted after the Google helpful content update was rolled out. Then you will want to set about improving your content marketing.

However, it’s worth noting that with all algorithmic and manual updates, it can take a considerable amount of time, sometimes even years, from our experience, to recover from such an update. Therefore, it’s not simply a matter of updating the content marketing, and then watching the rankings improve, it does take time.

To recover from Google algorithm penalties therefore, you have to be extremely patient. And be continuously working on trying to improve your business content marketing

 

Could there be a possible over-optimisation issue?

There could be a possible over-optimisation issue that the SEO consultant or business has implemented. This could be over optimising the content marketing for a particular keyword.

Let’s say that that keyword is a particular brand of “ladies’ handbags”.

The marketing agency may have over-optimised the page or number of pages for that particular handbag brand.
Therefore, the marketing agency needs to go back and ensure that they don’t over-optimise; for example, if keyword stuffing has been used on that page.

Keyword stuffing is simply over-optimising the page, which can severely damage the business’s SEO moving forward.

 

Write for real humans.

Now, this might have you somewhat confused, scratching your head thinking, well, obviously, when writing content marketing it will be for humans, we’re not writing; therefore, for extraterrestrials, are we?

However, a problem that many SEO agencies and businesses have fallen into, is that they try to write content marketing just purely to try and improve their SEO.

However, you have to turn this marketing strategy entirely on its head.

If you write super helpful content marketing that is very useful, well written and has a high Google E-EAT then this type of work will rank high on Google.

So, by offering helpful advice, you are actually improving your seo.

 

Write detailed articles

Try to make your content marketing as detailed and in-depth as possible.

What you most definitely don’t want is for the content marketing to be deemed as “content-thin”.

So do work hard to make the content marketing detailed as possible. Perhaps you don’t want to publish a piece of content marketing every single week; instead, focus on writing superb and high-quality piece say perhaps just once a month. Use your time wisely; therefore, create quality content marketing, that’s instead of churning out low-quality content marketing.

 

Keep on point

This is a critical point that should be carefully considered.

Sometimes, some businesses start to talk about things within their company blog posts that are not directly related to the products or services they sell.

For example, a firm of solicitors might be talking about a rugby team they sponsor, so we recommend removing non-relevant content marketing if you have a lot of it. This can confuse search engines, such as Google as to what your business is offering.
For example Google’s algorithm may ask are you offering legal services, or are running a rugby team?

 

Fully understand Google E-EAT.

Google now wants content marketing to be written by an expert; it wants the writer to demonstrate expertise, on what they are writing about.

Google also wants the writer to to demonstrate real-life experience of what the person is writing about.

If any work on your website that doesn’t fully answer Google EEAT, then this work should be revisited and improved.
This might take a lot of time, but it needs to be done because this is a critical consideration in assessing whether the content marketing is deemed as high quality.

2024/02/07 2024/02/07

Content freshness and why this is important when improving your business SEO (organic & local)

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Introduction

If you want your business to climb to the top of Google’s SERPs, you must regularly add content marketing, such as new blog posts to your company website.

This article will explain why it’s essential to periodically add new pages and blog posts and evergreen content marketing to your website.

Written by: Ryan Walsh
Date: 07/02/2024

What Is Fresh Content?

What does an SEO company mean when they are talking about adding fresh content marketing?

Fresh content refers to content marketing, which is content marketing has recently added to your company website. It could be a brand-new blog post that you just took over 10 hours to write.

It could be a more in-depth article, such as a piece of evergreen content marketing, or an embedded video such as YouTube video. You could even be a SoundCloud recording or lets say a podcast that you recently did. It can even be social media updates which are embedded into your website.

 

Helping to reduce bounce rates

When a shopper comes to your website for advice, and they want to read one of your blog posts, that shopper will undoubtedly want to obtain up-to-date advice. For example if they are searching on Google for “the best mobile phone handsets to buy in 2024”.

Well they wont want to read an article that was published in 2018.

So what the SEO company can do is keep updating that same page every year; this improves the freshness of the page offering the most up to date advice to the customer. This can help to reduce the bounce rate.

Why is fresh content important for SEO?

 

Is Content Freshness a Google Ranking Factor?

Yes, we would say it is; websites which stay stagnant in terms of not adding new content marketing they can start dropping down the ranks quickly. That’s to say, if your direct rivals are adding top-quality blog posts, which have good Google E-EAT score, well a business not adding new work might start to get left behind by the competition.

The Google Freshness Update back in 2011

This important Google update aims to provide users with much more up-to-date information as possible. So if someones looking for advice, they receive up to date advice.

So, whats the best selling running trainer, obviously implies to the current year. The shopper therefore wont want to read a blog post written in 2017- as the companies making the products, such as Nike may have stopped making that item. This is why the

Google Freshness Update aims to serve answers, that is businesses, which offer up to date advice.

The Google Caffeine update 2010

There was also the Google caffeine update back in 2010, which again improved the speed and accuracy of the Google bots’ crawling and indexing process. This basically means pages got indexed much faster. So, if you wrote say a new blog post, its likely to appear in the Serp’s a lot faster.

 

New hasn’t got to mean new

So what we mean by this is you haven’t got to constantly churn out new content marketing at a rapid pace.
The copywriters could return to older pieces of content marketing to update them, improve, and make them more helpful to your customers.

Be consistent

It’s essential to be consistent when publishing your content marketing. What you don’t want to do us write is a large amount of say long blog posts, then to publish them all at once and then not publish any for months after.

You should instead publish regularly, set aside time to do this, say once a week or once a month and be consistent in the spacing. So if you write an article once a week, try to stick to that.

Create an editorial calendar to plan which content marketing you are going to write about

What can sometimes happen is if you write content marketing off-the-cuff—the problem with this is you may end up writing about the same topics again and again. What you need is to write about a wide range of issues relating to your business.

So we would recommend creating an Excel spreadsheet, plan what your going to write about. This way you can tick it off, and your not writing about the same stuff all of the time.

So for example, our business writes about:

-Technical SEO
-On-page SEO
-Off-page SEO
-Link building
-Local SEO
-Organic SEO
-Google algorithm changes

Digital marketing agency

We have over ten years of experience working with many different companies here in Wales. We can offer you quality search engine optimisation (SEO), and we can improve your local or organic SEO. If your business needs help writing content marketing, then why not call our SEO agency today?

 

 

2024/01/30 2024/01/30

How do writing blog posts help improve a company’s SEO?

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How important is content for SEO?

Content marketing, whether the writer is writing a blog post, a number of product descriptions or perhaps an evergreen piece of content marketing, if done right, can help to improve the business search engine optimisation.

However, the written work must be high-quality. For the work to be deemed as high quality it must meet the following quality standards:

– Google’s E-EAT
– Must be white hat
– Can’t be duplicated
– Can’t be “content thin”
– Must be helpful to the reader because of the Google Helpful Content update

So, in a nutshell, businesses can be improved by adding quality content marketing, but it can also go the other way, and it can be damaged if the business is adding low-quality or what might be deemed as spam content marketing.

Google is becoming much better, all of the time at spotting low-quality content marketing.

It used to be from businesses which were using what is called “spun content”, or using keyword stuffing methods, but now in 2024, and for a long time prior to that, these methods do not work now. They will result in the business incurring an algorithmic penalty, which will massively set your SEO back.

 

Improving organic traffic

So let’s say that you have a website and you might have been paying to have our website live for say the last seven years.
During that time, you receive no phone calls, no emails, it’s a bit like having a business card just languishing in your desk. Obviously, you will want that business card instead distributed to people who are interested in your business. And that’s a bit

like having a website, but not paying for SEO.

This is where the really good and talented SEO consultants come in.

Talented SEO consultants will make your website more visible; we do that by helping to drive more customers to your website and by helping your business obtain more organic traffic. One of the ways to do this is to write high-quality, unique, well-written content marketing.

 

Remove duplicated content marketing

You might have hired a particularly lazy SEO consultant in the past, and they might have been in-house or they might have been external.

You might have been busy copying and pasting other companies’ work onto your website; when it comes to search engine optimisation, this is a massive no-no.

If you use duplicated content marketing, this will trigger a Google penalty, which could massive

Offer helpful advice to shoppers (Google Helpful Content Update)

Here’s our best advice, most definitely write for humans first, that is your customers.

Then if the work is really good quality, then the bounce rate should be low, and the engagement should be high. This basically means shoppers are spending a long time reading the work, and this will help to improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation.

 

External and internal links

If the work is super high quality, then well-known brands and companies may choose to link to your website.

Let’s say for example that you manufacture quality paint here in Wales. An interior design magazine might decide to link to you, and mention your high-quality paint on their website. For example, in a magazine such as Period Living.

Therefore, this is our example of a good quality link because the magazine that’s linking to you is a well-known and respected company.

You also want to add many internal links, for example, an article talking about paint, you might want to take the reader to a page about wallpaper page on your website, this can help to improve your business’s seo as well.

 

Come to the experts

There are few search engine optimisation agencies here in Wales which have the level of experience we have.
Whether it’s writing content marketing, improving your business’s technical SEO, or perhaps link building we are the business call.

We work with well-known brands, that are well-known companies within Wales. We can offer you SEO advice, and offer to consult with your company as regularly as you would like. All we can offer monthly fixed-price packages, which can help start improving your business’s organic SEO.

2024/01/24 2024/01/24

A step-by-step guide on how to improve your business’s Local SEO

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Date: 24th of January 2024

Written by: Ryan Walsh

There are many businesses that hire digital marketing agencies to help the company to sell even more products on a national or even an international basis.

 

For example, the agency may complete the following work:

– Building backlinks
– Adding schema mark-up
– Adding NAP
– Building business citations
– Building backlinks

 

What is local SEO?

There are now more businesses than ever that want to promote their company locally within the immediate area in which their company is based.

For example, you might just want to get more customers in one single town or city. This is where “Local SEO” can help promote your business to better advertise the products or services you sell.

 

Formulate a detailed marketing strategy

As you walk around the local supermarket, grabbing things that are on offer- you might find that when you return home, you have spent, let’s say, over £100. Yet after all that expense and time, you might not have anything to make a meal out of!
If you have a shopping list, it’s much easier to make a meal plan; therefore, less food goes to waste.

Now you might think that we’re going off topic here are a bit! But trust us we are not, when it comes to search engine optimisation, its important to always have a plan.

It’s too easy to spend, let’s say, 1000 hours in total trying to improve your business’s search engine optimisation, yet you might not get anywhere unless theres a plan of what you need to do.

For example, you should ask yourself?

-How many quality backlinks do we need to get on page one of Google
– Is the website well designed?
-Do we need to add more pages
– How many quality blog posts do we need to write?
-These are just some of the questions you need to consider before you embark on improving your businesses SEO.
You, therefore, need to have a plan of which keywords, and you want to enhance how you can go about it.

 

 

Moz and Ahrefs

We would highly recommend using Moz or Ahrefs for keyword research.

And do make a really detailed marketing plan, as otherwise, you could spend a considerable amount of time trying to improve your company’s SEO and not get anywhere! That’s because you may not create a rounded marketing strategy. This simply means you may overly concentrate on say building links, when really you should spent more time improving the onsite SEO.

 

Carry out a local SEO audit

Hire a top Cardiff SEO consultant

First things first, even if you’re planning on doing the work yourself, talk to a SEO expert first to gain some initial advice to help come up with a marketing plan. This might sometimes be created for less than one thousand pounds. However, its well worth the expense, because, you will have a roadmap for how you can get your company on page one of Google.

The SEO consultant should therefore consider the following when writing your maketing plan:

-How many backlinks do your competitors have
-How many blog posts have they written

– How good is there onsite SEO?

 

Keywords

It’s essential to know which keywords you will optimise your website for. We would highly recommend using Ahrefs, this is the tool we would recommend using.

Some keywords might have an huge search volume and you can check this using “Google Search Console”.

If the keywords have a huge search volume, then this means you will want to get your company on the first page of Google for those keywords. That’s because if they describe a product / service you sell, then by getting your business on page one of Google, for that keyword, your likely to gain more business.

 

Technical SEO

Don’t purchase really cheap website hosting for your company, it’s a total waste of time- instead, you should choose a quality hosting company, which offers fast hosting, such as “Siteground”.

Do make sure the loading times on each and every page and blog post are good. We recommend either A2 hosting or Siteground website hosting.

 

Mobile optimisation

Use mobile optimisation methods, to make sure that your smartphone version of your website works well. Make sure your company website works well on i-phones and android phones.

 

A/B testing

You should use split testing to continuously improve the user experience (U.X) of your website.

 

Keep your Google Business Profile up-to-date

Obtain a Google My Business account and keep it up-to-date your

Ensure that your business obtains a Google Business Profile, it’s free so do obtain one. It only takes around less than an hour to

complete. It is straightforward to verify your business as well, then make sure you add as much detail as possible.

 

You should add the following information to your companies Google My Business account:

– Your businesses opening hours
– Ensure you choose the right business category
– Gain reviews from your customers
– Add your company logo
– Add your companies NAP (Name of business, address and phone number)
– Add a link to the home page
– Add phone number

 

Respond to customer reviews

Customer reviews can be left in many places, such as on Google My Business, Yelp, and other websites like Trustpilot. Therefore, if you do get a bad review, make sure that you respond to it, or if you believe it’s a fake, therefore a malicious view against your business, make sure you flag it as a fake business review.

Obtain a Google Analytics account (its completely free)
Obtaining a Google Analytics or Google Search Console account is completely free and really easy to set up so we would recommend obtaining one if you haven’t already?

A Google Analytics account gives you insight into how many organic visitors are coming to your website, which pages have a high bounce rate, and which pages have better engagement.

 

Keep an eye on your direct competitors SEO

Just like when you’re running your business, and look at the products and services your competitors are offering, you need to do this with your competitor’s SEO. This is so they don’t get a competitive advantage, for example, they may start building do-follow backlinks, from well known company, this could soar them to the top of Google. So you do need to monitor your competitors SEO.

 

We are a very well-known SEO agency that’s located in the heart of Cardiff. If you want to improve your business’s local or national or international search engine optimisation, then why not give our business a ring today? We have SEO consultants which now have well over 10 years experience helping many brands to get to the top of Google.co.uk.

2024/01/23 2024/01/23

How SEO can help a business to grow

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SEO

How can SEO be used to grow a business?

When SEO work is completed correctly, then search engine optimisation can help the business significantly increase its organic traffic. Therefore, you need an experienced SEO company that is really good at what they do, like our agency.
However, whichever agency you hire, they have to follow what are called “white hat methods”.
The benefit of this is that if you partner with the right company, then they can significantly increase your business’s organic traffic significantly, which can help to draw in more customers to your business.

Aim to offer excellent and helpful advice

Your business should create a highly effective SEO strategy to improve the number of organic visitors visiting your website.
One way of doing this is to write high-quality content marketing, which should be written in a way so its extremely useful to your customers. Therefore, to do this, you must understand the audience; for example, what questions do they often ask your business? A lot of marketing companies refer to this as the customers “pain point”.
Pain points is simply are a term that is used to describe the questions, that your customers often have before they proceed to buy a product or service. Such as “how long does it take to build a garden room”. Once the question has been answered the customer might be more inclined to buy,

On page SEO

When you hire a freelance marketing consultant, or perhaps you have hired an SEO business, the company needs to enhance the on-site SEO, thats to improve your business’s search engine visibility. One of the ways that your business will do this is to focus on enhancing meta descriptions and titles, improving or writing new content marketing, and adding internal links.
There are hundreds of different ways to improve the business’s on-site SEO, and this involves adding new pages, improving existing blog posts, adding internal links, and checking that each page can be crawled and indexed.

 

Technical SEO

At the same time, SEO consultants will often start work on improving the business’s technical search engine optimisation.
For example, the agency might start to improve the seo via mobile optimisation, redesigning the mobile version of the website, perhaps to lower the company’s bounce rate. The agency might also work hard on enhancing the whole web design, that’s to make the website easier and more simpler to use. The agency might also work on improving the company’s website by making it faster, reducing the company’s bounce rate. Fixing these technical SEO issues can help to enhance the overall organic search engine optimisation.

 

 

Off page optimisation

Sometimes, some businesses think this is just about link building; although link building is a massive part of off-page SEO, there is much more to it than just building links. For example, the agency should be building citations and helping to manage business reviews in terms of replying to customers.

Whether the feedback from customers is good or bad the business may want to reply to business reviews. It’s also about getting your business mentioned, so that the semantic SEO can pick up this.

After all this work is complete, the marketing agency should send you a monthly SEO report so you can track search engine rankings and organic traffic.

This is an excellent way to analyse whether the SEO strategy is improving every month. It’s a little bit like flying an aeroplane; if the plane goes of course slightly, of course, you will want to bring the plane back on track. This is the same as your business’s organic search engine optimisation: if the rankings aren’t improving as fast as you hoped, perhaps it’s worth changing tactics.

For example, instead of writing so much content marketing and focusing on the on-page search engine optimisation, you might want to change to, for example, building more do follow, quality backlinks?

Google algorithm updates

Google’s algorithms are constantly changing, evolving and improving every single week.
Therefore, this means that for SEO consultants, and for marketing agencies alike, you have to have your finger on the pulse and stay ahead. The consultants should therefore be regularly learning about Googles important updates, such as the “Google Helpful Content update”.

For example, if an update rolls out, that means that all the blog posts, say written ten years ago, and only had 400 words of text, may now be dragging the rankings down- simply because of the content marketing being deemed as “content thin”. This means the marketing agency has to be quick to rectify this and has to act fast to improve the business organic rankings if the business has been negatively impacted by a Google update.

Our agency is excellent at improving your on-page and off-page optimisation. Don’t get us wrong; this is not a fast process at all; for search engine optimisation to be done right, you have to put in some hard work, and the results need to be monitored every month. At a minimum, it takes at least six months to improve the business’s local search engine optimisation, and for national or international seo, well it can sometimes take much longer.

If your business wants to start improving its sales, by generating more organic traffic, then why not talk to our agency. We have some of the best consultants working for us. If you want quality advice, then why not call us today?

2024/01/19 2024/01/19

An in-depth guide on how to improve your businesses technical search engine optimisation

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Date: 19 of January 2024

Written by: Ryan Walsh

SEO

 

A detailed guide to help your business to improve its technical search engine optimisation

Is your business looking to improve its technical search engine optimisation, and your organic rankings? Then you come to the right place. We are the experts, as improving the business’s technical SEO. Whether that’s fixing broken links, switching your website hosting so it’s superfast, or perhaps something as simple as adding internal links to improve the indexation of pages. We are the agency to help.

 

Check to see if each page has been indexed or not

Imagine if you spent over 100 hours writing various blog posts, only to find that none of them have been indexed at all. This basically means, they will be helping to improve your company’s search engine optimisation at all. We have seen this happen many times before, to some companies, and sometimes it can be as simple as setting within the content management system that stops that particular page from getting indexed.

If a page can’t be crawled or indexed, then that page will never help to improve your business’s SEO.

The solution is simple, often you need to work with the search engine optimisation company, like ours, to rectify the issue. sometimes a web developer will also be needed. That’s because code might have been written into the header section, such as no index code, that stopped at page from getting indexed. Therefore this code needs to be fully removed, so that the blog post can be indexed.

Sometimes it’s because of what is called a robot.txt file, which is actually stopping the page from getting indexed. This needs to be fixed, that if you want the page to be indexed. Yet often it only takes sometimes just an hour to fix this problem with some businesses.

If you have a relatively simple WordPress website, you might have seven pages or less, so it’s a piece of cake for a web developer to remove the no-index code stopping the page from getting indexed.

On a larger e-commerce website, might take much longer to fix indexation issues.

 

Broken links

This is a problem which a lot of businesses incur, especially e-commerce websites. Let’s say you are selling thousands of products every single week, let’s say you are selling various health and safety items such as gloves, masks and helmets. Then an e-commerce website can readily incur 404 page errors. However thankfully, there are really good tools, such as screaming frog, we might wish to use MOZ which is another brilliant quality tool, for spotting broken links.

 

301 redirects and how to fix broken links

However what the product gets replaced by a newer product, sometimes web designers just delete that page, however, it is perfectly possible that shoppers are finding a broken link through the search engines, which means that they are simply going to competitor’s website rather than yours.

This could cause you not just to lose customers, but also for the 404 errors to increase, causing the e-commerce website bounce rate increase. This bounce rate is increased for a substantial amount of time, then this can negatively impact the business’s search engine optimisation. For example a large amount of 404 errors, that’s because the website to drop off the first page of Google.

This is why if you run an e-commerce business, or you have a brochure website, fix any broken links, such as 404 broken links straightaway.

You should work with your search engine optimisation company, to rectify this issue, for example, they will often use an seo tool, such as ahrefs, or they might use screaming frog which will show them all the various 404 page errors existing on your website in just a matter of only a few seconds.

 

Screaming frog is an absolutely excellent tool, for spotting broken links.

Once you have found these 404 page errors, they should start to be rectified, you might want to do redirects, such as 301 redirects or you might want to recreate the old page and add a different product onto that existing URL. You do need to take some advice, from a marketing agency, on which approach is best for your business.

There are various seo tools, which are very good, such as screaming frog, this tool is actually excellent at finding broken links, such as 404 page errors.

 

Keywords

Difficulty

Your whole website design and technical SEO, as well as the on-site SEO should be geared around which keywords you want to improve your businesses searching engine optimisation for. If Your business has a limited marketing budget, then don’t go after the really difficult keywords, think about instead optimising your website for longtail keywords, it is normally easier for you to see results in a shorter timeframe if you go after longtail keywords.

Check to see if you website works correctly on a tablet, mobile phone and on the desktop

It’s possible sometimes, to visit your web designer, they may show you the website they have just designed and built on say the laptop. And it might look absolutely brilliant, yet what might happen, is that the mobile version the website, it might not be so well designed. For example it could be very difficult for the shopper to use. For example, you could be slow, the main menu might not work correctly, and also it might be difficult to read the text.

There could be other technical issues with the website as well, for example, they could be broken links for example.
So our best advice is this, do make sure that you extensively check your website over before paying the web designer,. sho then also check the website for broken links and other SEO problems on a fairly regular basis, let’s say every three months, because it is possible after WordPress update, such as when plugins updates, that glitches start to occur. These need to be fixed, as otherwise your company’s bounce rate could increase .

 

Choose superfast website hosting

This is a mistake that a lot of businesses can make, that is, the business might be a start-up business and they are looking to reduce their costs on their web design and also their monthly website hosting costs. This sometimes means that they picked the cheapest hosting option that is available to the business, this can sometimes mean that the hosting is super slow.

Don’t purchase super slow hosting, it’s an absolute for the economy because it will damage your companies SEO.

This put your website at a huge disadvantage right from the get go, because how fast your website loads, is a ranking factor. Basically meaning if you have a superfast website, then this is advantageous to your business’s search engine optimisation.

 

Add internal links

This is super simple to do, in matter of fact is’s often only takes a few seconds, yet adding internal links to your blog posts and also across your main pages this could improve the indexation of new pages that have been added. The reason for this is is assist with your website being crawled and indexed, for example, if there is a link from the main page for blog posts, this is likely to be followed and speed up the indexation that particular page.

 

Make sure the main menu is super simple to use

Sometimes some businesses, when having a website designed, sometimes the main menu is not well designed, by the web developer, and this is the problem of the web designer, not the actual CMS.

For example, you should make the main menu an absolute piece of cake to use, with just a few clicks for the customer to get to the exact product or service that they want.

If you are looking for a search engine optimisation consultant, within the city of Cardiff, look no further than our company. We have some of the most highly experienced, marketing consultants and the whole of the city working for us. Some of our consultants, we now have over 10 years of experience, helping to improve businesses local as well as organic SEO.

 

2024/01/18 2024/01/18

How does your SEO agency predict that search engine optimisation will change in 2024?

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It’s fair to say that Google’s algorithms are changing as regular as clockwork these days. If you talk to any good SEO consultant worth their salt, they will tell you that there was a lot of Google ranking flux last year. Plus, the more major algorithm updates, such as Google’s Helpful content update seems to happening more and more often these days.

 

Partner with the right digital marketing agency

What this basically means is that your business, more that ever needs to partner with a really good SEO business. Thats because you need a company that has its finger on the pulse- helping to keep your website on page one of Google.  

 

 

Focus on the customer offer the best possible advice you can (Google E-EAT)

Experience’ was added to Google’s E-A-T guidelines fairly recently, what this basically tell is that the content marketing you and your website needs to be superb quality today.  It needs to be well written, plus demonstrate real life experience of what you’re talking about. Or at least you need to talk to an expert on the matter, so you can put their advice into your content marketing.

Now instead Google is looking to see how helpful the content is, by using the algorithm update known as “Google’s Helpful Content Update”. Plus, the Google E-EAT update.

The algorithm is now working through the content marketing, the see how helpful it is, as well as to ascertain the following:

 

Level of experience (Google E-EAT)

Does the person who is writing the actual content marketing, do they have real-world experience of what they are talking about?

Can walk the walk so to speak, what we basically mean by this is, if somebody is writing about how to install a bathroom suite, on a a plumber?  

 

 

Google is now looking at whether the author is an expert or at least talked to one, to gain their input before starting to write the content marketing.

Let us elaborate a little bit further on what we are talking about, for example let’s say that you are offering advice, to do when you are purchasing a used car.

Now within that article, there likely to be talking about various car manufacturers, you likely to site how the car has been rated in terms of its reliability and safety. If the author is an expert at what they do, they likely to point the customer where they can find further advice. For example they may cite reliability surveys such as JD Powers website. They are likely to mention a lot of helpful advice.

 

Authoritativeness

Now if you were to ask our SEO consultants, how Google assesses the authoritativeness of the piece of work, will often what they do is they basically look at the number of incoming “do-follow” and “no-follow” backlinks that particular page and website.

If you have a lot of strong, powerful and really good quality backlinks, from authoritative sources let’s say from the Independent newspaper’s website. Well this can have a dramatic effect on improving your businesses search engine optimisation if the links are indeed do-follow or no-follow and the are high-quality backlinks

Google is looking at the trustworthiness of the content marketing

The facts and statistics that are cited within the work, are they factually, correct? Google’s algorithm will check this.

Is the written work free of spelling mistakes and is it high quality?

 

Make more use of the level of experience and expertise within your company

As we move forward into 2024, more and more companies are looking to leverage and use A.I (Artificial Intelligence) tools to generate content marketing.

A.I tools can speed up other processes, such as, generating blog posts, at a rate of production that can only be seen on a factory production line. However, we wouldn’t recommend using A.I to write your business content marketing, instead either an expert on the subject should write it, or a copywriter.

However, our prediction for this year, is that the larger businesses, and the businesses with really understand search engine optimisation, they will start to leverage the expertise and the experience that they have within their companies and uses the absolute maximum.

What we mean by this is you likely to have staff in your company some of which have 30 years experience, possibly even more, and they might not have before actively work with your marketing company. However, the product experts within your company, now need to work hand in glove with your marketing company, to produce content marketing, which Google’s E-EAT will deem as high quality.

So by your copywriters and your seo team, working with your highly experienced staff, you can produce really detailed and really well written content marketing.

 

Don’t rely on AI.

Now a good copy writer, working with product experts within your company, this written work will have the edge over some AI content.

 

2024/01/17 2024/01/17

What does “Keyword Cannibalisation” mean?

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Keyword Cannibalisation

In the realm of digital marketing, particularly in the UK’s ultra-competitive SEO landscape, the concept of keyword cannibalisation has emerged as a crucial factor influencing search engine optimisation strategies. This phenomenon, while often overlooked by some companies, can be a significant hurdle in maximising a website’s search engine visibility and effectiveness.

 

What is “Keyword Cannibalisation”?

Keyword cannibalisation occurs when multiple webpages on a single domain inadvertently compete against each other in search engine rankings by targeting identical or very similar keywords.

So, lets say you sell legal advice and you run a solicitors practice. Let’s say you specialise in offering employment law advice- well, you might have say 5 main pages, which explain that you specialise in offering this service, but how well Google know which is the page to rank for “employment solicitors” as they might all be similar.

This internal competition can dilute the effectiveness of your organic SEO efforts, leading to a fragmented strategy that hinders rather than helps your online presence.

 

How keyword cannibalisation can impact your company’s organic SEO and visitor numbers.

The consequences of keyword cannibalisation are not to be underestimated. Websites suffering from this issue often experience a noticeable decline in organic traffic- as the main pages on your company website may well be competing with each other.
For instance, a study by Moz indicated that addressing keyword cannibalisation can lead to a 9% increase in organic traffic (Source: Moz) This loss of traffic directly correlates to a decrease in potential revenue and leads, making it a critical concern for marketers.

 

Which SEO tools can we use to spot possible keyword cannibalisation issues?

Identifying keyword cannibalisation requires a keen eye for detail and a deep understanding of your website’s content marketing.

A good highly experienced SEO consultant should be able to spot the problem relatively quickly. However there are tools you can use like Google Analytics and SEMrush offer insights into keyword rankings and can help pinpoint where cannibalisation might be occurring.

In the UK market, where the level of SEO competition is intense, regular audits of keyword performance are essential to stay ahead.

 

How to address keyword cannibalisation issues

Addressing keyword cannibalisation involves a careful balance of content consolidation, strategic redirection, and keyword diversification. However, every company website is different, so you do need to obtain tailored marketing advice on this. The goal is to create a coherent content strategy that aligns with user intent while avoiding internal competition. Implementing a hub-and-spoke model, where a main ‘hub’ page links to various ‘spoke’ pages targeting related but distinct keywords, is a proven method to combat this issue.

In many cases, addressing keyword cannibalisation isn’t just about fixing a problem; it’s about uncovering opportunities for growth. Consolidating content marketing and refining your keyword strategy can lead to stronger, more focused pages (more in-depth higher word count content marketing) that perform better in search rankings. This proactive approach can transform a potential weakness into a competitive advantage.

Preventing future instances of keyword cannibalisation demands ongoing work from an SEO consultant, and a dynamic approach to content strategy- meaning rather than just keep adding new work, you address problems older pages / blog posts. For example, its worth going through each page to see if it can be improved. This includes regular reviews of keyword performance, staying updated with SEO best practices, (white hat)and adapting to the ever-changing landscape of search engine algorithms. Embracing this proactive mindset ensures that your SEO efforts are both effective and resilient.

In conclusion, keyword cannibalisation is more than just an SEO challenge; it’s a critical aspect of a holistic digital marketing strategy. By understanding its impact, identifying its presence, and implementing strategic solutions, UK marketers can turn this challenge into an opportunity for growth and enhanced online visibility.

For example, rather than having three pages all competing with each other, one page can emerge as the main page, and be improved so its SEO is improved. This page may then rank higher in Google’s SERPs.

 

 

2024/01/09 2024/01/09

How good quality content marketing can help to sky-rocket your businesses SEO

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Why its worth creating high-quality content marketing

 

Blimey! Want to get your brand noticed and make it a doddle for your customers to find you online?

It’s time to whip up some smashing SEO content marketing. Follow these tips for crafting content marketing that’ll not only have your audience glued to their screens but will also make Google  place your business higher in the SERP’s.

 

Lets start with ineffective SEO and its a “No-Go”

 

Ever spent hours crafting a masterpiece, only to find it’s not getting many organic visitors? It’s gutting,right? But don’t chuck your SEO strategy out the window just yet. It’s a game-changer when done right, with a bit of know-how and a dash of SEO magic. You just have to keep going, as its not about writing just one article, you need many added over a long period of time, to see your organic SEO improve.

 

So what is content marketing- Whys it such a big deal?

 

What’s all this fuss about SEO content marketing? It’s not about cramming in keywords like sardines in a tin- as this will result in the business obtaining a Google Panda penalty. This means your businesses rankings will nose-dive

Instead it’s about creating top-notch content marketing, that’s white hat that solves your audience’s questions, all whist giving the signals to the search engines that the onsite is good quality. So the meta title, description, alt text, everything must be good quality.

 

The impact that good quality content marketing can have on your business

 

Why bother writing SEO content marketing? It will take so much time to write, so whats the benefit?

Well, it’s the bee’s knees (we write super high quality content marketing for businesses) it can help you obtain more organic traffic, helping turn shoppers into buyers, helping you to obtain backlinks, and helping to improve brand awareness.

 

How to write quality content marketing

 

Today’s SEO content marketing needs to be written so its like the the life of the party – engaging, useful, and chock-full of the good stuff. But how do you spin this yarn? It’s all about answering your audience’s burning questions in a style that’s as engaging as a chat over a cuppa.

 

What is the ideal length for SEO content marketing  

 

When it comes to SEO content marketing, its not just about writing a blog post so it has a super high word count. Whether it’s 500 words or 2,000, what really matters is the quality of the information you are writing about. But, keeping an eye on what’s working for your rivals in terms of word count can give you a leg up in the competition as well.

 

SEO content marketing and E-E-A-T and “Google’s Helpful Content update”

 

Writing SEO content isn’t just about putting words on a page; it’s about creating something that’s as tasty as fish and chips on a Friday night.

You want to be mindful of E-E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) and Google’s helpful content system to ensure that your copywriters are writing quality content marketing.

 

Google’s  E-E-A-T  

 

Ladies and gents, gather ’round as we embark on a riveting exploration of the grand ol’ E-E-A-T – that’s Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness for those not in the know.

It’s the crème de la crème that Google’s Search Quality Raters are using to sift through the blog posts and pages, looking for those glittering needles of quality content marketing.  

 

 

 The Helpful Content System: Google’s Latest Curveball in 2022

 

Late 2022 saw Google drop its helpful content system, stirring up a right storm in the SEO teacup. This crafty system’s all about hoisting up content marketing that’s high quality and written for people,. It’s a bit of a shake-up, with some spammy sites taking a nosedive in their rankings, so don’t write low quality blog posts or pages, as this will damage your companies seo.

 

  

How to write SEO content  marketing that’s the Bee’s Knees

 

Ready for a peek behind the curtain? Here’s how to churn out SEO content that’s not just read but helps improve your company’s SEO.

 

Thanks to E-E-A-T and our Google’s helpful content update, zeroing in on content marketing that resonates with your audience and shows your expertise is crucial.  

 

 What should our company be writing about?  

Struggling to brainstorm content topics?

Fear not! Embark on a thrilling adventure with a tool like Ahrefs and perform a content marketing gap analysis. This isn’t your ordinary analysis; it’s a Sherlock-Holmes-level investigation into what your rivals are doing and how you can do it better.

 

 

To begin your analytical quest, pop over to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, and chuck in your URL. Then, navigate to the ‘Content gap’ in the ‘Organic search’ section, and brace yourself for some eye-opening insights.

 

 

 ! Input your competitors’ URLs and hit ‘Show keywords’. What you’ll see next is a treasure trove of keywords your adversaries are using, but you aren’t… yet.

2023/12/28 2023/12/28

What does “AMP” mean?

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The rise of AMP- should our business get an Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) website?

Welcome, folks! Let’s talk about something changing the game in mobile SEO: AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages. You might be wondering, “What’s all the fuss about AMP?” Let’s unravel this digital conundrum together, and we will explain why your business should strongly consider getting an AMP version of your website design.

 

What is AMP, and why is it causing a mobile revolution?

Why is everyone who works in digital marketing chatting about AMP? It’s simple: AMP pages are like a bullet train in Japan for transport, for what it can offer your customers, that’s loading at an almost unbelievable pace on your smartphones and tablets. It’s a super-fast version of your company website.

 

Does my business need an AMP version of the website?

So, what makes AMP the talk of the town? For starters, it’s not just a trend; it’s a necessity for some. For large brands to keep their competitive edge and to keep that business high on Google, they often need to improve all aspects of the website to ensure that their search engine optimisation has the edge over the competition. With mobile devices ruling the roost, having a website that caters to mobile users isn’t just lovely; it’s critical.

 

Speed is now the name of the game:

When it comes to SEO and mobile optimisation, speed is king. AMP takes this very seriously.
Imagine a web page that loads faster than you can say- “accelerated mobile pages” – that’s AMP for you. It’s not just about loading fast; it’s about creating a good U.X. because it’s a bit like a lift in a shopping centre; customers prefer to get to where they want to go fast rather than slowly. This is the same for your company’s website; they will want to get to the product they want to buy as fast as they can, so if the website is too slow, this may increase the company’s bounce rate.

Here’s something to ponder: faster web pages mean more engaged users and a lower bounce rate, which can mean better business. With AMP, your pages aren’t just quick; they’re efficient and streamlined, making for a seamless user experience. As any good SEO consultant will tell you, your marketing agency should work hard to improve your company’s U.X. A happy user often translates to a happy business owner.

 

 

How does AMP work?

AMP isn’t just magic; it’s a marvel of technical ingenuity- and the most suitable web designers will be able to design an AMP version of your website. From prioritising resource loading to optimising JavaScript, AMP is like a finely tuned engine on a sports car that ensures your website runs smoothly and swiftly, no matter the traffic.

 

So, what does the future hold for AMP?

In the ever-evolving world of SEO, AMP isn’t just a passing trend; it’s a cornerstone of the future. It can enhance your website’s U.X., meaning that because you made your company website fast, shoppers will appreciate this; they will see how quickly every page loads, making it easier to browse more products. Because you’ve made it easier for your customers, making the website load faster can help reduce your company’s bounce rate.

With mobile usage skyrocketing, AMP isn’t just a choice; staying ahead in the SEO race is necessary.

FAQ:

Your burning questions About AMP answered:

 

What Exactly is AMP?

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. In layperson’s terms, it’s a way to build web pages and blog posts for static content that load much faster.

 

Why does my business need AMP?

In the fast-paced digital world, user experience (U.X) is everything. AMP enhances user experience by drastically reducing load time, leading to better engagement, lower bounce rates, and potentially higher revenue.

 

How Does AMP Work?

Without getting too technical, AMP works by simplifying the HTML code, optimising files like CSS and JavaScript so that the page loads much faster, and leveraging various performance techniques. It’s like streamlining your website to be more efficient.

 

Is AMP only for mobile devices?

Primarily, yes. AMP is designed to make web pages load faster on mobile devices such as your iPhone or Android smartphone. While it works on desktops, its main focus is improving mobile user experience.

 

Will AMP help improve my website’s organic SEO?

Faster load times and better user experience (U.X) can indirectly improve your business’s organic SEO. While AMP isn’t a ranking factor, its benefits can increase search rankings.

2023/12/18 2023/12/18

What is the “Google Helpful Content Update”- and how should it change your business creates content marketing?

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Written by: Ryan Walsh

Date: 18/12/2023

 

It might be the case that your business’s rankings have taken a nosedive. This could be due to many reasons. However, many websites were impacted by the helpful content update Google rolled out.

Google rolled out many updates every year, yet the Google helpful update impacted many businesses.
Other updtaes, such as the Google Hummingbird, they are much more well known about. So this update, we would say is equally important, yet many businesses don’t know what it is. Yet, if your company website has a lot of pages and blog posts, well its especially important to see if the written work on every page is good quality, and follows Google’s EEAT advice.

 

Google’s Helpful Content Update

The initial rollout of the update was back in September 2022, and many SEO consultants believe there have been many updates since. Therefore your organic traffic may not have decreased straightaway, as Google indexed, and revaluated old pages, its possible, yoru rankings may have decreased some time after.

 

Crawl Budget

It does boil down to how much of crawl budget Google has placed on your company website. A website such as BBC, a well known brand, its likely to get crawled and indexed by Googlebot everyday. A small business, that hasn’t invest much in search engine optimisation, well, that business may get indexed once a month, and not all pages may get indexed, so its possible that the business only feels the effect of Google Helpful Content update many months later, and that’s after each roll out of the Google update.

 

Can we recover from the Google Helpful update?

Well, often, a business can recover; however, it’s essential to take the advice of an expert on this. It could be the case that many factors are holding your website back, such as spammy links, thin content pages, and just a website with a high bounce rate. So, it’s essential to consult with an expert.

What we mean by this is, sometimes a business may think it’s the Google Helpful Content Update that placed the business lower in the SERP’s. However, it could be many different updates, for example a link update, or lets say Google’s RankBrain spotting that the website has a very high bounce rate.

 

So, what was the primary purpose of Google’s Helpful Content System?

The main purpose, we believe, is to reward pages and blog posts which are helpful to the business’s customers. Now, you might be thinking, surely that would be every page? Not really, as here’s the thing: so many companies, and we are talking about millions of separate businesses here, will have blog posts and main pages just written to improve the company’s SEO.

So, many businesses wrote complete waffle, in a weak attempt to get the business to rank higher on Google. However as Google got better and better at detecting spam, and low quality SEO, these businesses are getting deindexed, and removed off Google altogether.

So, a word to the wise, only implement quality SEO.

 

What are content thin pages?

So, these could be “content-thin” pages that do not offer much helpful information.
For example, you may want to read more about a product or service, and you’re presented with just one paragraph, which is not helpful to the reader.

So, for example, you want to learn about lets say a product, yet, the page doesn’t answer your question. Rather than having useful advice, such as a detailed product description, you just have one line of text, which doesn’t answer the question you have.

 

Keyword stuffing / over-optimised.

Too many businesses get lazy regarding their SEO; they know keywords they want to rank higher on Google. But sometimes, the business obtains poor advice; what happens is that the text, say a blog post, just gets over-optimised by repeatedly mentioning keywords the company wants to rank for. This can result in the business incurring a Google Panda penalty.

 

Google Panda

Since 2011, Google has been trying to eliminate low-quality SEO pages, such as thin content pages, from its index.
Therefore, the Google Helpful update continues this effort to reward businesses that write beneficial content marketing for their customers.

It takes a lot of time to write a detailed, helpful article. Yet, these businesses will end up ranking higher in Google’s results, as Google’s algorithm rewards businesses with higher rankings if they write top-quality content marketing.

 

Google’s EEAT update

So, if you’re doing SEO in-house, do take some time to understand Google’s EEAT guidelines. Basically, in a nutshell, the written work needs to be written by an expert who has real-world experience of what they are writing about so they can reliably offer advice.

So, for example, let’s say that you sell high-performance engine oil for high-performance cars for track days. The work needs to be written by someone who, say, a mechanic, can explain the compounds within the oil that make that product of such high quality.
Google’s algorithm is just so clever.

Many years ago, Google’s algorithm started understanding semantic SEO and the links between entities.

So, for example, if you’re writing a detailed blog post following the advice of Google EEAT, then what will happen is you are more than likely to mention many entities.

Google understands these entities and how everything is interlinked, and therefore, will know if the article offers super reliable advice or just a marketing waffle.

 

Google’s RankBrain

Google’s Rankbrain is used to decipher how real shoppers are using your company website if, for example, they are spending a long time on the website or just leaving after a few seconds. Bounce rates, time on site and dwell time are therefore all considered.

 

Don’t make sudden changes, and don’t expect results overnight.

So, if your organic rankings have decreased, don’t make significant sweeping changes to your website. Make slow, carefully thought improvements, so if you notice a content-thin page with only 100 words of text, do take the time to expand and add much more detail.

And don’t expect results overnight; you might work late into the night, making changes, hoping Google will reward your efforts the next day and place your business back on the first page. But SEO doesn’t work like this; seeing any noticeable improvements could take many months.

 

Carry out a content audit.

So, we SEOs are a bit like hamsters on a wheel sometimes, writing and writing more blog posts. However, there’s a time to stop, to take stock, and think, well, is the work reported, say, seven years back, still relevant? Is it good quality? Does it follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines? Does it meet the standard of SEO that Google EEAT now expects?

Then, ask the following:

  • Is the work good quality?
  • Does the work offer helpful advice?

Does the work meet the standard that Google’s EEAT expects?

What to do if you don’t think the content marketing is excellent:

 

Add more detail

Add new paragraphs and more up-to-date statistics, and generally improve the work.

 

Make the work more valuable.

So, when you started your business, you may not have been able to pay a digital marketing agency for advice. But now you can; they might want to revisit the work implemented years ago to see if it can be improved.
So, why not rewrite some paragraphs and offer more helpful advice?

2023/12/12 2023/12/12

What exactly is local SEO?

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Local SEO is simply the process of optimising a website so that it appears higher within the organic search results and also so that the company appears Google My Business results.

Google’s algorithms will take into account the proximity of where the person is at that moment in time.

For example, if they ask Google to find for a “local MOT station”, then that person will be shown local garages based on exactly where they are standing at that moment in time. If they are North of Cardiff, garages will be shown in that area, as that’s where they are at that time. Google will presume you want businesses which are close to where you are standing at that point in time.

If they were to change the location later on the day, let’s say to a different part of Cardiff, the results would be different again within the Google My Business results.

Prominence

How important is that business within the local area? How many quality backlinks does the website have for example? How many positive reviews they have?

Relevance

How relevant is the business to the product or service the persons looking for it? For example, somebody might ask to find a local bakery, and they may also ask Google to find companies that make wedding cakes.

Therefore, there might be a bakery just around the corner, but if the website doesn’t stipulate that they make wedding cakes, then that business is unlikely to be shown in the results.

 

 

Why we think your business needs to invest in quality SEO

In our opinion, there are often many excellent SEO consultants in any given city; these people can help to place your business higher within Google’s organic search results and help to get your business ranked in the Google My Business results as well.

When you think about how many shoppers use Google daily, to find everything from post office opening times to finding a local solicitor. As a matter of fact, Google’s global search engine market share was 92.06%.

A representative from Google also stated in 2018 that 46% of Google’s searches have local intent.

This is why so many businesses invest in seo, as it can help your business to draw in more customers.

 

Here is what you should think about before investing in SEO: whether you will outsource this work to a local marketing agency or perhaps you would like to do it yourself, we would highly recommend that you must understand white hat SEO.

For example, that gives you a quick example of what not to do; let’s say that you are creating a Google Business Profile; you might think it’s a brilliant idea to add a keyword you want to rank higher for on Google. For example, you might add the company’s name, plus electricians and the name of the city where your business is based.

But you shouldn’t do this, you should just write your companies name, as it appears on companies house.
So for example, if “electricians + name of city” is not part of your business name, then don’t add this within the business name section on

Google My Business, this is not a white hat. This is just one example, of what not to do, there are a lot more.
In a nutshell, only use white hat seo methods.

NAP details

Your business premises, where you meet your customers, this will form part of the NAP information.

NAP information represents your company’s name, address, and phone number.

We can help your business improve your local SEO

We have partnered with many businesses here in South Wales for over 10 years, to help get those businesses onto page one of Google.

We have helped these businesses dramatically increase the number of organic shoppers which visit their websites. This has helped those companies to increase their profits.

If you would like to learn more about how local SEO can increase your sales, why not give us a ring today?

2023/12/08 2023/12/08

What is “Bard”, and how good is Google’s new Bard AI?

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Google has released its own conversational A. I chatbot, its therefore a rival to ChatGPT which has taken the world by storm.

 

What is Bard AI?

Google’s Bard

Google’s Bard is a chatbot, and it is trained using a huge language model.
The language model it uses is called LaMDA for short, which most users will not know, but what they will want to know is how good it is, and it, like ChatGPT, helps people to save time. For example, lets say you have written an article, its too wordy, its 3,000 words, reading it will require an espresso to keep the reader awake, so you could ask Google’s A.I, to summarise the article, to say 700 words, but to keep within that text, the critical points.

 

What can you use Google’s Bard for?

Well, anything, from instructions on cooking a tasty curry to how to best maintain your wood burning stove.
But the significant part is the A.I am conversational, so what do we mean by that?

Well, you could talk to the A.In a similar way you would speak to a shop assistant, to gain helpful advice.

So, I have a question, can you follow on with another question if you so wish?

Okay, so how do I make a tasty vegetarian korma curry?

Then Google’s Bard replies with an answer.

Then you could reply, but I have no coconut milk, what can I use as a substitute?

So, it’s bit like having a chef standing next to you, as you cook, you can ask questions and get answers in real-time.

Who doesn’t love a good digital showdown? Here, we highlight some key differences between Google Bard and ChatGPT.

 

How will AI tools such as Google’s Bard and ChatGPT change SEO?

A lot of various SEO agencies have stated how they think A. I tools, such as Google’s Bard, is changing SEO.
What for sure, is that it is having an impact; people may get so used to using chat bots, like ChatGPT, that they don’t use Google as much; what we would say is its still too early to tell right now what the uptake is is, how many people have stopped using Bing or Google so much, and now use their AI app instead.

However, as SEO consultants, we have to adapt, and therefore, this poses the real question, could shortly we have fewer organic visitors coming via the search engines to our client’s websites, if so, it’s a bit like having fewer people visiting a car showroom, the people are there because they want to buy a car, yet there might be less shoppers.

Yet what this means, is that these shoppers become even more valuable to the business, as you still want to make sales.
So we think businesses must concentrate on offering the best U.X, customer service, and us SEO agencies, must be delivering very high quality SEO, because there may well be less organic visitors coming to the clients website. Us SEO consultants might have to work just as hard, to gain less clicks, as the number organic visitors may decrease, even though the business climbs Googles organic ranks.

 

 

 

 

2023/12/06 2023/12/06

What exactly is a CDN, and could it be used to improve your business search engine optimisation?

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Written by: Ryan Walsh

Date: 06/12/2023

You might’ve heard your SEO company talk about the many advantages of having a content delivery network, also often called CDN. You might also wonder what this is and the main benefits of purchasing a CDN.

A CDN is simply a network of servers located in many different countries across the globe, and what they do is allow your company website to be served much faster to a shopper and more reliably from servers situated closer to where the shoppers are.

So, for example, let’s say somebody is shopping for a nice suit; it will be better to visit that website using a server in Amsterdam if the shopper is based in the U.K rather than the website coming from a server in America.
So the main benefit is speed; the website loads faster for the shopper, allowing FCP, or First Contentful Paint, and therefore offers a better user experience (U.X) because someday may want to look at, say, 17 different items before they make a purchase. If the e-commerce website is slow, then they’re likely to get frustrated- the shopper is likely to buy there suit from elsewhere. They could even leave the website and visit a competitor’s website- causing the business to have a higher bounce rate.

So having a quality CDN, where the businesses website is much faster, can lead to a better user experience and potentially lower your business bounce rate.

 

So, how exactly does a CDN work?

What you want is to purchase a high-quality CDN; these companies should have different servers based in multiple locations worldwide.

The primary purpose of purchasing a CDN is simply that the hosting company which owns the servers will have a server-based closer to the shopper is.

So, if somebody is shopping for an item in the United Kingdom, it could be possible that there is a server in Birmingham; therefore, positioning the servers much closer to the shopper allows the website to load much more quickly and therefore, this could help a business to reduce its bounce rate.

 

Improved page loading times

Let’s say peak times when people are coming home from work, say at 5:30 or 7:30 in the evening- this is lilkely when a lot of people will be purchasing items here in Britain.

The person might be packed into a train, shopping for items on their iPhone and are simply looking to buy a rather generic item such as a duvet set for their home.

However, if the website they are on is extremely slow and are likely to leave that website and visit a competitor’s site- causing the business to have a high bounce rate.

So, by purchasing a quality CDN, this allows your company website to load much faster because the website is coming from a server closer to where the shopper is.

For example, you could have a server in the United Kingdom rather than just hiring a hosting company based in America. Therefore, the website will likely load faster if your shopper is here and your hosting companies server is within the same country.

 

Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

This is a free tool; we would recommend using it to see if you can make your website faster.

 

Which companies offer CDN services?

A famous company is called Cloudflare, this company uses something called Smart Routing to ensure that your website is delivered to the shopper quickly.

 

There’s also Amazon Web services

This is another famous company used for CDN services; Amazon Web services can also be easily integrated into your WordPress content management system, and we would recommend this company also.

 

 

 

 

 

2023/12/05 2023/12/05

What exactly are XML site maps?

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Technical SEO

Written by: Ryan Walsh

05th of December 2023

 

Introduction

XML site maps are important because they can help ensure that all the pages and blog posts on your website get indexed by Googlebot.

Its also a piece of cake to create an XML site map, you can simply submit your XML site map to Google Search Console.

This is important because it acts like a map for Googlebot, a set of directions, as to what to index.
Googlebot will have a complete list of all the blog posts and pages to know where to crawl and index every page.

 

So, what exactly is an XML site map?

An XML sitemap sounds complicated; however, it is actually really simple; an XML site map is simply a file, sometimes using something as simple as Microsoft Notepad, which contains a full list of all the URLs on your website that you want to have indexed by Googlebot.

It’s also important to update your XML file on a regular basis, sometimes, they an XML file will automatically update, but if you are keeping the document updated yourself, remember to add new pages and new blog posts to the list to make sure they get indexed by Googlebot.

 

How can an XML site map help to improve our business’s organic SEO?

By adding to Google Search Console, a complete XML file, this will help Google to understand a complete list of all the blog posts and all the main pages on your website so that they can be crawled and indexed.

Also, suppose you make any subsequent changes to these pages. In that case, they can get re-indexed and therefore Googlebot will notice these changes, and Google’s algorthim, may then rank that page higher or lower in the SERP’s.

So what this mean is if you want your business to appear within Google’s organic results, first of all, the page will need to be crawled and indexed.
If the page is not crawled and indexed by Googlebot, it will not able to appear within Google’s results.

 

Does my business need to have an XML site map?

Regardless of how many pages your website has, whether its just ten pages or perhaps 10 million pages, we would always recommend having an XML site map added to your companies Google Search Console account.

For many different reasons, a significant page can sometimes be missed by Googlebot. Simply meaning, it doesn’t get crawled and indexed; therefore, it won’t appear in Google’s organic results, so we recommend creating an XML site map.

Otherwise, a significant page might not be crawled and indexed. Therefore, you could be missing out on sales, thats because that page does not appear in Google’s results.

 

Do you own a WordPress website?

If you have a WordPress website, you can use free plugin like Yoast SEO. This is simply a brilliant pluggin, and they can automatically create an XML site map for you.

You can also automatically generate an XML site map with other quality SEO tools, such as Screaming Frog.

Google Search Console

Regardless of the size of the business you run, whether you have a website of just seven pages or a company with a website of 7 million pages, we recommend owning a Google Search Console account and adding an XML file.

 

We can improve your business’s Technical SEO

Adding an XML site map is just one way you can help improve your business’s technical SEO.

Our highly skilled SEO consultants will analyse whether there is any indexation issues with your website and we can start to resolve these issues.

We can also add internal links and also make your company website faster.

Some of our SEO consultants have over ten years of experience improving our client’s SEO; therefore, if you pick our search engine optimisation business, you will choose one of Wales’s most highly experienced digital marketing companies.

We currently work with a wide range of clients, helping to improve their technical SEO, we also work hard to improve their on-site and also off-site seo. Many lawyers and large e-commerce businesses work with various us, because we have a proven track record of helping companies increase their sales.

If you would like a free quotation, why not call us today? And we can advise you on how it can improve your businesses off-site, on-site seo, and also your companies technical seo.

 

 

 

 

2023/12/04 2023/12/04

How to best use internal links on your company website

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How to best use internal links to improve your business’s organic SEO

Date: 04/12/2023

Written by: Ryan Walsh

Internal links can help improve your company’s search engine optimisation. For example, using internal links effectively can help keep potentially thousands of shoppers on your website longer. They can also reduce your business’s bounce rate and help your shoppers find different products they may wish to purchase.
Let’s say you write a comprehensive article explaining the best electric vehicle to buy that year, and your company offers various leasing deals, well you might wish to add internal links to the pages where the customer can express an interest in the product- for example requesting a call back from a sales person.
For example, they could click the internal link, and then they could view the cars details and fill in a simple form for a callback.

 

How does internal linking help improve a business’s organic SEO?

Internal links help both shoppers and also the search engines such as Google and Bing to crawl and index new pages.
Internal backlinks can be used by the search engines to crawl and index internal links, they can start to understand the website hierarchy structure and which pages are more important than others.

For example, if the page with the most links on your website, is to with “roof replacement”- then its likely the main service your business offers is roofing services.

Google can also gain an appreciation for all of the different services and products you offer, and by following these internal links, they may discover a brand-new page you have just published, such as a blog post, and Googlebot may crawl and index that page.

 

Great for shoppers

Internal links are also great for shoppers because if they are not interested in that particular product, they could click the internal link and view a different product.
Whereas if you did not offer that internal link, they might have bounced off the website and gone to a competitor’s website.

What exactly are internal links? And how do you add one to the page?

Adding an internal link is an absolute piece of cake if you have a CMS, like a WordPress content management system.
You can simply put the cursor over the text, highlight the text you wish to use as the anchor text, click the link button, and the hyperlink is created.
For example, you might have written a blog post promoting your businesses ten best selling products you sell; why not add internal links to the pages selling those products?

What is anchor text?

Those who don’t know much about SEO, may be under the false assumption that it’s best to keep highlighting the words, they want to improve the SEO for.
However, this is a common mistake that a lot of businesses make. Instead, you need to add internal links that will help the shopper; it’s all about being practical and helpful guiding the shopper to the right products. If you over optimise by adding too many internal links and using exact match anchor text, this can cause large SEO problems.
This means you should must only use the anchor text to accurately describe the page or blog post that it leads to in a way that helps the shopper fully understand what is being sold on that page.
For example, if you sell dog coats and keep overusing the anchor text dog coats excessively, this could even lead to a penalty from Google, which will massively and adversely affect your business’s seo.

 

404 and 410 status codes

As you add internal links, it’s essential that all of these are functional and working correctly; if too many of them lead to a page, which causes a 404 error, which is simply means page not found, then this could lead to a poor user experience.

Therefore, this could adversely affect your business’s seo.

Therefore, it’s worth using a quality seo tool, such as Screaming Frog, to see if there are any 404-page errors and whether these can be fixed.

 

Make sure that people can see the internal links

Many people purchase products and services on their smartphones; if they read a blog post, and they can’t see the internal link because it’s not highlighted- then could mean that they don’t see the internal link. So do make sure the text is not a different colour from the main text, as otherwise they are unlikely to click on it.

So do talk to your web designers. When an internal link is added, we recommend the word be underlined, perhaps make the text a different colour so it stands out.

 

Avoid keyword stuffing

This again continue on from our previous point that we made earlier, in that let’s say that you want to rank for “organic chocolate”, in Googles organic results; , then you shouldn’t mention this too many times in the article, to the point the text reads unnaturally, because it could be considered to be written in an unnatural way, which could lead to a penalty.

Equally, what you don’t want to do is to keep using the exact anchor text repeatedly as , again, this will lead to a penalty.

 

It helps to reduce the bounce rate

By using internal links effectively, you can help guide your shoppers to products or services they might want to buy. So it’s a bit like driving down the road; instead of seeing a block end and thinking we must turn back, you could offer a diversion, an alternative route.

For example, they might land on the page to view a well known brand washing machine, but you might want to say the simple block of text: why not also look at our other washing machines- we also stock these brands? Then, you can use anchor text to recommend different brands, and they may wish to click on these because they are instantly recognisable brands and might want to look at those products as well.

What you have, therefore, done is help the shopper find a different product-rather than just leaving the page, and increasing your companies bounce rate.

Consequently, you have helped to reduce the bounce rate, as they might have left the page and gone to a competitor’s website otherwise, and bought the goods from their.

 

Experienced seo experts

We have been helping businesses of all sizes all across Wales succeed with their search engine optimisation. We have helped companies to increase the number of sales they make dramatically; if you would like a quote for us to help your business, why not call us?

2023/12/01 2023/12/01

Why you shouldn’t keyword stuff your business’s content marketing

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SEO

Written by: Ryan Walsh

01/ December /2023

It’s an SEO technique you don’t see used that often because most businesses, including their marketing agencies, know it is simply a black hat SEO practice and, therefore, should be avoided like the plague.

 

So, what exactly is keyword stuffing?

So, keyword stuffing is simply placing words or phrases you want your business to appear on Google by repeatedly mentioning them within the written text. Also, within the other elements of your business SEO.

So, for example, you might repeatedly write them within the meta title and meta description. However, this is an absolute surefire way for the business to incur Google penalties, and sometimes, it can even take years to recover from. So, our best advice is to write the sentences naturally, not keyword stuff.

You might have read an outdated blog post by mentioning keywords within the text many times; this will help improve your business’s search engine optimisation.

You should write your content marketing in a way that is helpful to the reader. Therefore, count how many times you need to input the keywords because if you naturally write the sentences, you will need to know how many times you enter the keywords.

Google’s crawl bots are super clever at detecting spam, so if you write the keywords too much, this is likely to result in the business incurring a penalty.

So, for example, if you sell aluminium ladders and want to rank for that on the first page of Google within the organic results if you mention this product too much, it is likely to mean the business will incur an algorithmic penalty.

Avoid these methods of SEO as well:

 

Cloaking

Again, this is a black-hat method of SEO and should be avoided. Simply when you make the text the same colour as the background, therefore rendering the text invisible. This will trigger an algorithmic penalty, severely damaging your business’s search engine optimisation.

 

Bounce rate

So, let’s say that somebody wants to find some advice to solve a problem they might have. So, for example, somebody might be fixing their car, and they can’t get the fuel open.

If you write a beneficial article explaining how that model car, you can fix the problem by purchasing a particular product, which is likely to be proper content marketing; therefore, you might sell more products.

If, on the other hand, you use keyword stuffing, and you keep mentioning the brand of the car and the problem, and then try to offer some links to the product. The person reading the text will likely get annoyed because it will read. Naturally, you won’t provide valuable advice; therefore, the bounce rate is expected to go through the roof.

If the bounce rate is exceptionally high, Google will notice that the bounce rate has increased, meaning that your website is likely to be deemed spam.

 

 

Demote or remove altogether.

Some people, especially those who don’t know much about search engine optimisation but want to improve their own businesses’ SEO, might not fully appreciate the severity of a Google penalty. Still, they most certainly should because it could massively reduce the number of organic visitors.

For example, you could go from having 10,000 visitors a month to not having any organic visitors after a Google penalty, meaning you don’t have any sales. You might have to increase your PPC to gain customers.

 

 

Panda Update – February 24th, 2011.

 

What was the Panda Update – February 24th of, 2011?

We assigned a quality score to web pages, which was used for ranking and page authority.

I checked for ‘thin content’, user-generated spam and keyword stuffing.

Many SEO consultants widely think that the Google Panda Update analysed if the page was spam; for example, was keyword stuffing used or is the work content marketing content thin?

Suppose the work is content-thin, which doesn’t offer much helpful or valuable advice. It might also have a meagre word count, so it doesn’t cover the topic in detail. In that case, this work will likely be deemed low quality, negatively impacting your business’s SEO.

Updates to this algorithm over the years have made penalties and fixes quicker.

 

 

Hummingbird – August 22nd, 2013

The Google Hummingbird update of August 22nd, 2013

Better results with search intent.

This critical update incorporated latent semantic indexing, producing more accurate results.

 

The Google Bert – October 22nd, 2019

Focused on ‘poorly written content’, we recommend writing the work in a Microsoft Word processor so that you can check for spelling mistakes; this update also looks for keyword stuffing.
Websites that use keyword stuffing would incur a penalty.

 

 

 

 

2023/11/28 2023/11/28

How to improve your business’s local SEO, so that it appears within the Google Maps results

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Date 28/11/2023

Local SEO

 

Has your business got a Google My Business account, yet when you look for it on Google you don’t see it in the Google results.
You want the business to appear in Google, my business results, but it doesn’t seem to be showing there at all.

According to reliable data from Bright Local, 98% of shoppers, look on the Internet for information about local businesses and nearly 33% of them carry out a local search for a business multiple times a week.
This could range from looking for a local pizza shop, right through to a local accountant, but quite simply put, if your company, regardless of how large a business is it’s not showing up in the Google My Business results, well you could be missing out on a huge amount of business.

A lot of companies, simply make the mistake, that they can set up a Google My Business account and then they think, that in a matter of minutes, the business will appear in the results. They might also falsely believe that the sales are just going to start rolling in overnight.

However ever since the Google Possum update, the number of businesses that were displayed in the business results has greatly reduced, often from seven businesses down to 3.

So, let’s say for example that you run a business, that offers mortgage advice, now, you are often competing with a large number of other companies to get your company to appear in the Google My Business results.

Therefore, to get your business in the Google My Business results, wallets often involve a lot of work, and it can’t be instantly completed it often needs a substantial amount of work, creating business citations that, also make sure that the company’s NAP nation can be crawled and indexed on the website, this often means placing it in the footer and also putting it on the contact page of the website as well.

 

Relevance

This is why, it’s so crucial to accurately describe your business in a business description. Also, when you are allowed to select your business sector, make sure that you accurately describe the business, for example, somebody might pick a rather generic business classification, such as gardening services, when really what they specialize in is tree surgery, therefore by simply not speaking the correct business classification, you could have your business appear for work that you might not necessarily.

This is why you must take your time, to accurately fill out all of the boxes, and to make sure that your business is listed as offering the right services and products.

 

Distance

The algorithm will simply calculate the distance from where the person is, to your business, it will know these two bits of information from the Google My Business account, as it will mention your business address, it will also know where the shopper is if they have their location data switched on their smartphone,

If the shopper is closer to your business, they might only be less than three minutes away, well that company years much more likely to appear, than one which is 17 miles away, because the algorithm will believe that the person wants convenience, therefore, they will want a more local business.

For example, if you fancy really tasty, nice woodfired pizza, well you’re going to want it delivered to your door at least lukewarm if it’s coming from a company that is based on the other side of Cardiff, well going to get to your doorstep rather cold.

So, what Google does is prioritize businesses that are closer to the shopper, for example, you might need a new power tool, let’s say drill, and you have a DIY task you want to complete.

Therefore, what Google will do is show your local businesses, that are close to where you are at that moment in time, making it more convenient for you to find the products and services that you require.

 

Prominence

Here is where there is a bit of a crossover between having a good location for your company, and also how successful your Google My Business will be in drawing in new customers.
So for example, let’s say you have an excellent location on the high street and there is a lot of footfall and passing cars which will see your business.

It is therefore much more likely that you will get more customers into your business, yet at the same time it’s also much more likely that you will obtain more Google My Business reviews, which is a massive deciding factor on whether your company appears in the results or not.

So, for example, let’s say that you run a restaurant, if your business accumulates let’s say 100 positive reviews, and people will say how great the food is, the atmosphere, and also the staff, well this means your businesses are much more likely to appear in the Google My Business results, compared to a business that hasn’t had any feedback from customers via reviews.

 

So how do you get your business to appear in Google Maps, a step-by-step guide

 

Knowledge panel

 

Let’s say that somebody wanted to quickly find your company’s phone number, well even if your business doesn’t appear directly in the Google My Business results, what it can help is for customers to find the information they require by simply asking Google.

A knowledge panel will then appear, so whether you want to know the phone number or the address it’s there, and with a click of a button, you can simply call the business.

 

Create business citations

This can take some time to complete, and it can feel like you are going around in circles, simply because you have to keep entering the same information, such as the company’s name, address, and phone number repeatedly many different websites.

So, this work is sure, rather repetitive however what it can do is reinforce your company’s NAP information, and the should match with what is mentioned on your website, and also on your company’s Google My Business account.

Therefore, when this all matches it gives Google greater confidence that your business is based there, at that location, that your phone number is correct, and that the name of the business also matches, this gives your company a much better chance of appearing in the Google M my business results.

Plus, also you have to be careful when building business citations because what you want, is for every single one of those to match exactly. If they don’t, and let’s say for example some say the company’s board address, where you are based let’s say three years back, and others your new address, this can cause what are known as conflicting citations.

 

Which basically can damage your business’s local SEO.

 

Keep your Google My Business account

It’s also important, to try and keep your businesses Google My Business account as up-to-date as you possibly can. This will help to keep your customers much better informed, for example, let’s say that you fancy closing your company a little bit earlier on a Friday afternoon,

Well, if you don’t update your then you’re likely to have customers knocking on the door, and being more than frustrated because they may have driven 30 minutes to get there, and instead of an open sign on the door it simply means closed.
So, what you want to do is to keep your business Google My Business account as up-to-date as you possibly can.

This also includes the address and phone number,

 

Your web designers should add schema

Adding schema is relatively easy to do, and what does is highlight your company’s NAP information so that it can be much easier read by Googlebot.

2023/11/27 2023/11/27

The “Google Over Optimisation Penalty”-was your company website adversely affected?

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Google Updates

Web Spam

For those of us who regularly read blog posts regarding SEO, you will likely have read countless articles explaining how Google is working very hard to remove spam from its index.

For example, pages which use a lot of “keyword stuffing”, “spun content marketing”, or simply “content thin” pages. Google’s algorithm is actively looking to remove these pages from its index.


What exactly are the Google updates targeting?

 

High-quality SEO

So, there are no two ways SEO is hard work. It can take many months to see any results, which can mean sometimes dedicating hundreds of hours to try and improve a business’s organic search engine optimization.

So, it can take up a considerable amount of time. You need to have a lot of expertise to do SEO correctly, and you need to ensure that you’re following the best “white hat methods”, which are fully explained in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Needless to say, when anything is hard work, we mean millions of companies looking to take shortcuts and not put in the hard work that’s needed.

This can result in the business incurring an “algorithmic penalty” from Google, sometimes resulting in a massive loss of organic visitors to the company’s website.

That’s exactly what this update did to many websites; it analyzed pages, as well as blog posts, to look for low-quality content marketing and penalized those pages by either removing the page from Google’s index or simply lowering it to a position on Google where it’s likely to have little or no organic traffic because it might be repositioned onto page 10.

 


 

Do you have keyword-stuffed pages?

Suppose you’ve hired the wrong SEO company, a business that doesn’t know what it’s doing in that it’s not following white hat methods or Google’s Webmaster guidelines. In that case, the marketing company may have created low-quality pages.

For example, suppose your business sells a particular brand of handbags, and they hire a rubbish marketing company. In that case, the content writer might mention that handbag brand repeatedly throughout the article.

If the work reads unnaturally, in that it’s not offering helpful advice to the shopper, it keeps repeating the exact keywords, so the blog post reads like a broken record.

What we mean by that is the article has the keywords mentioned way too much, in an excessive way. The Google Over-Optimisation Penalty (Penguin Update) would likely have impacted that page or the entire website.

 


 

Spun content marketing

Many businesses, because they need to produce over 100 blog posts, sometimes make the wrong decision and use spun content marketing. We would not recommend using this technique; it’s a surefire way to damage your business’s search engine optimization and incur a Google penalty.

 


 

Excessive and over optimized anchor text

We would say that something your business should avoid is using unnecessary, over-optimized and excessive internal backlinks.

So, what do we mean by this?

Well, let’s say that you sell a product, and that item is, let’s say, cordless drills, yet instead of adding internal links, that would help the shopper to find the power tools that they would like to buy. Instead, the marketing company uses excessive over-optimized anchor text on a page, mentioning “cordless drills” in the anchor text excessively; this is likely to lead to over-optimization.

Instead of helping the shopper find the product they need, you will try to write the keywords that you want the SEO to improve for within the anchor text; however, this could lead to over-optimization issues and a Google penalty.

So, instead, make sure you write the anchor text in a “white hat” way and help shoppers find the right items they may like to purchase.

 


 

Would you like us to increase your business’s sales?

We have worked with many companies; some of these businesses are very well-known brands here in the U.K.

We have helped some of these businesses drastically increase the number of organic sales that they make each month. Whether you are completing SEO in 2023 or perhaps in 2030, what’s important is the focus on quality.

Always follow white hat methods of SEO.

 

 

 

2023/11/24 2023/11/24

A comprehensive guide to identifying and repairing broken links

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Introduction

November 24, 2023

Hello there! Let’s discuss something crucial for your website – spotting and mending those broken links. It’s more important than you might think, so let’s dive into why and how you can keep your site in tip-top shape.

Fixing backlinks is essential for improving your company’s search engine optimization.
The reason for this is that on those pages, you may have a lot of excellent quality, do-follow backlinks, which are the bees’ knees in helping your company rank higher on Google.

But its a bit like having a fuel tank in your car, but the gearbox is broken; you’re not going anywhere.

And this is the same with broken links 404 broken links; what can happen is that you might have, say, a mass of 100 quality backlinks leading to that page on your website, but if the links are broken, well, you’re missing out on getting link equity sent to that page. Instead, the links are broken; all shown is a 404 page.

So instead of leading to a main page, which sold, for example, kitchen blenders, and that page possibly being ranked on page one of Google, in position 1, d you get a 404-page error, meaning you’re missing out on sales!

 

The Trouble with Broken Links

Picture this: you’re on a website, clicking a link, and – oh no! – it leads nowhere. These broken links, especially those dreaded 404 errors, can damage the UX. They’re like uninvited guests at a party, spoiling the fun for everyone else.

 

Broken internal links

Sometimes, these broken links are within your website, such as a link from a post to a main page.

 

Understanding crawl budgets

Think of Google’s bots as shoppers looking to buy a product. If you’re sending them on a wild goose chase to non-existent items you sell because the product pages have broken links, they’re using up their precious time – the “crawl budget”. Fix these, and they can instead discover the shiny new content marketing you’ve posted.
What exactly is link juice?

“Link juice” and “link equity” sound fancy, right? They’re all about the strength one website passes to another through links. Say, for example, The Independent, a newspaper, links to a company that produces a new appliance you should buy for your kitchen– that’s some quality link juice right there, boosting the manufacturer’s SEO and helping that business rank higher in Google.

 

Google Search Console: your link detective

Here’s a handy tool – Google Search Console- it’s free and brilliant at providing useful SEO information, such as which backlinks lead to your website. It’s like a magnifying glass for finding those broken links. Check the ‘Not Found’ tab, and you’ll see a list of links leading to a dead end generating 404 errors.

We would highly recommend getting a Screaming Frog account (there’s a free version)

Screaming Frog, a favourite among SEO consultants, is brilliant for sniffing out broken links, whether internal or external. And guess what? It’s got a free version too. It’s like having a detective on your team without spending a penny.

 

Google Analytics: Another great tool you can use to improve your SEO

Google Analytics isn’t just about how many organic visitors have visited your company website; it’s also great for tracking broken links and 404 errors. You can set up a custom report; it takes a matter of minutes, and you’ll catch those broken links in no time.

 

So, how do you go about fixing those broken links?

Now, how do you fix these broken links? There are a few ways to do this; it depends on how many broken links you have in terms of how long it will take to fix them. You can redirect them, fix typos, or recreate missing pages. It’s like setting a patch in a quilt – it’ll be good as new in no time.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What causes broken links on websites?

Broken links often occur due to removed pages, changed URLs, or typos. It’s like misplacing your keys – sometimes, things go missing.

Why are broken links bad for SEO?

Think of broken links as roadblocks for search engines. They hinder the exploration of your website, leading to a poorer understanding of your site’s structure. This can negatively impact your rankings.

How can I identify broken links on my website?

Use tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Google Analytics. They are like detectives, uncovering broken links in your website’s nooks and crannies.

What’s the best way to fix a broken link?

Options include setting up a 301 redirect, fixing typos, or recreating the missing page. It’s like redirecting traffic smoothly in a busy city.

How often should I check my website for broken links?

Regular check-ups, like a car service, are crucial. Monthly checks are an excellent practice to keep your website running smoothly.

Can broken links affect my website’s traffic?

Absolutely! Like a lousy signpost, they can lead visitors astray, causing frustration and potentially reducing traffic.

What is link equity, and how does it relate to broken links?

Link equity is the value passed through links. Broken links are like leaks in a pipeline, losing the valuable link equity that could have been passed on.

How does fixing broken links improve user experience?

Mending broken links is like fixing potholes on a road; it leads to a smoother, more enjoyable journey for your visitors.

Can redirecting a broken link preserve link equity?

Yes, it’s like redirecting a river’s flow – the water (link equity) still reaches its destination via a different route.

Is it necessary to fix all broken links on my website?

While it’s ideal to fix as many as possible, prioritize those significantly impacting user experience or SEO.

What’s the impact of broken links on crawl budgets?

They waste the limited time search engines spend on your site, like a shopper wandering in a store.

Can broken links lead to penalties from search engines?

While not direct penalties, they can indirectly affect your SEO performance and rankings.

What are some standard tools to find broken links besides Google Analytics and Screaming Frog?

Several other tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz offer unique features to hunt down those elusive broken links.

Is it better to delete a broken link or redirect it?

It depends on the context. If a relevant replacement exists, redirect. If not, deletion might be the way to go.

How does fixing broken links impact sales and conversions?

A smooth-running website, free of broken links, is like a well-oiled machine – it encourages visitors to stay longer and potentially convert into customers.

Do broken links affect site loading speed?

They can contribute to a less efficient site structure, which might indirectly impact loading times.

How can I prevent broken links on my website?

Regular maintenance, careful URL updates, and thorough checks when removing pages can help prevent broken links.

What’s the role of 404 pages in managing broken links?

A well-designed 404 page can be a temporary band-aid, helping lost visitors find their way back.

Can external broken links affect my website’s SEO?

Yes, they can. It’s like having a faulty signpost outside your shop – it doesn’t reflect well on your business.

How do I communicate fixed broken links to search engines?

Use tools like Google Search Console to resubmit your sitemap or inform search engines of the updates.

2023/11/23 2023/11/23

What should the word count be for our blog posts? When trying to improve our SEO?

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23/11/2023

 

So, even though you might be an expert on the subject, writing 3,000  words on anything will take a lot of time.
Many businesses are, therefore, wondering how long the word count can be for a main page, blog post, or product page.

You don’t want to go overboard, to the point you are shattered from writing so much, and at the same time, you don’t want to put next to no effort into the work, and Google deems the text as “content thin”, and this then damages your businesses search engine optimisation.

So, there most definitely is a balance.

 

Quality is more important.

Have you ever heard of Google’s EEAT? Well, let us explain what this means. Google is now looking at “Experience”, “Expertise”, “Authoritativeness”, and “Trustworthiness” of the content marketing you write.

So, in a nutshell, quality is more important than trying to write 1,000 articles that are rubbish.
So, before we go any further, concentrate on writing quality.

 

Just answer the question.

So, some copywriters get caught up with being tasked with 1,000 words on something they may not have a jar of glue to write about.

Let’s say they need to write work for a scaffolding company; for instance, they may think they’re just metal tubes; how hard can it be?

Well, many health and safety guidelines go into constructing scaffolding, so it’s safe to use, but an expert on scaffolding will only know all of this.
So, here’s the key: don’t outsource your SEO to a company and have no input into the work; work with the marketing company to create excellent content marketing from an SEO perspective and incorporate the knowledge from an expert on the subject.

 

Product pages

So, here may confuse the reader briefly, but bear with us while we elaborate more.
Always write the pages, regardless of word count, for the customer, not the search engine- and why do we say this?

Well, it’s simple: you’re buying a product. Do you want to see 3,000 words of text added to the page- no, you most likely haven’t got the time to read so much text.

You will need the product’s price, description, and a paragraph of text describing the product.

This should be well-written, unique text written in a white hat way.

Putting a very high word count on a product page, well, that’s high enough to send the page bounce rate sky-high, resulting in

Google’s algorithms place that page lower in the SERPs.

 

Blog articles

Well, the world is your oyster here.

If you want to write 700 words, do that if it answers the question in enough detail.

However, if it’s something more complex you’re writing about, you could quickly be writing 3,000 words if that’s what’s needed to answer the question.

So, yes, it does come down to how many words are needed to answer the question in detail.

 

Evergreen content marketing / white papers

So, now and then, businesses often publish a white paper, your chance as a business to answer a question in-depth.

It also allows the business to show off their expertise, that they have staff working for the company that knows their stuff well.

So, for example, a digital marketing agency may write a 4,000-word article on “How A. I am changing SEO”-and because many people will be interested in reading this article, it may have a low bounce rate and high time on site, which will help improve the company’s SEO.

 

Valuable

So, one of our best tips would be to structure your entire article with many titles so a reader can skip to the part they want to read.

Also, if you can write the work in a question-and-answer style, this serves two primary purposes: the reader can skip to the question they want to find an answer to, but it will also help that page or blog post to appear for more queries.

So, for example, if you use the title “What paint can I use on my fence, it lasts a long period?”- as this is a title on the page. It is something a shopper wants to find the answer to, then it is likely to precisely answer the shopper’s question and, therefore, be clicked on by shoppers in Google’s results.

This is instead due to content marketing being more vague, such as just having a title “paint for garden fences” and listing different brands and colour shades.

The shopper may not know which colour they want their fence to be; they want long-lasting paint so they don’t have to paint the wall every year. Once that question has been answered through the blog post, they may start browsing the paint you have for sale because you’ve responded to their question and then presented products that offer exactly what they are looking for.

 

Don’t waffle

So, have you ever read through a blog post, say the article was 1,000 words in length, then come to the end and thought, well, that hasn’t answered the question?

We have read plenty of articles like this, and it’s clear the writer hasn’t much knowledge regarding what they are talking about, so the work is likely to be deemed as “content thin”,- which means it’s more likely to damage the company’s SEO than improve it.

 

Why not hire us?

When you hire our digital marketing agency, we write content marketing that’s well-written and also follows Google’s EEAT advice. This is how we have helped many businesses in Wales get onto page one of Google.

2023/11/22 2023/11/22

Are backlinks still as important as they were since the days of Google’s PageRank?

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22/11/2023

Gary Lllyes famously recently stated, “I think they’re important, but I think people overestimate the importance of links”,- which has many SEOs thinking, well, how important are backlinks?

To summarise, they are still important; there are no two ways to do it.
We would say they still have to be in the top 3 rankings factors; A.I.’s RankBrain has to be there, then content, so are backlinks still number 1?

We seriously doubt that backlinks are still number 1. We think it is more like the third most important ranking factor, but still, it is super important. That’s, of course, if you have quality backlinks because if you don’t, low-quality backlinks could act like a giant anchor, dragging your whole website’s rankings down.

 

Not as crucial as since the days of Google’s PageRank

Google’s PageRank mostly uses backlinks to determine where a website should be ranked.
However, since Google’s Penguin update, many businesses with spam links have received a link penalty.

We think, and this is only our humble opinion, but we believe Google is using more A.I., through Google’s RankBrain, to monitor how engaged shoppers are with a website, for example:

-How long is the average shopper spending on the website?
-How many pages does the shopper visit?
– How many shoppers return to Google’s search results after visiting your company’s website, or do you instead have a large percentage of your shoppers stay and purchase from you?

What are backlinks?

So, what exactly is a backlink?

Well, a backlink is an inbound backlink from an external website. It could be a do-follow backlink, so this will send “link juice”.

The link could also be a no-follow, meaning it won’t send link equity. It can still have some SEO benefit because Google and the other search engines want to see backlinks leading to a website which is a mixture of do-follow and no-follow, as this looks like those businesses have linked to you, but because they want to, not because you have bought the links.

 

Just don’t buy backlinks- it’s not worth it.

So many businesses see how many backlinks their direct competitors have, say over 1,000, and they are a start-up company, so they think it will take years to build that many links, which it often does.

Yet, don’t cut corners; buy buying backlinks; it is not worth it, as it will lead to a Google link penalty.

A Google link penalty can be algorithmic or a manual action penalty- in either case, the website will incur a sudden, dramatic drop in organic visitor numbers, and trust us, it can take a very long time, sometimes, to recover from.

 

Moving more towards- E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust; Google is looking for this when weighing how good content marketing is.

If your content marketing is very high quality, it may be on the first page of Google with no backlinks.

This is why we say U.X. factors and A.I. are now becoming more critical than backlinks, in our opinion.

However, as we mentioned earlier, in Google’s E-E-A-T, to prove authority, you need backlinks.

That’s because consider this: say there are 100 law firms in an area; businesses with a lot of quality backlinks from relevant websites to do with the law will often rank number 1 on Google.

Be crawled more frequently, ensuring their content is swiftly and regularly indexed.

 

Are all backlinks worth the same?

In a nutshell, there are backlinks, then there are backlinks- and what do we mean by that statement?

Well, quite simply put, any highly influential website, let’s say, Harvard University, let’s say they link to your business, then could give your organic SEO a massive boost.

Yet, a link from a blog that no one reads may only get, say, less than ten visitors per year; that’s not going to help improve the business’s search engine optimization.

Plus, low-quality links, so backlinks built to try and game the algorithms, to try and improve the company SEO, are even worse. These are called spam links; they will lead to the business incurring a penalty.

 

Link juice

So, all SEO agencies aim to send “link juice” from quality websites through to the business’s main pages, which will help them rank higher in Google.

So, let’s give you an example; take our business; we would want our homepage to rank high on Google, then the leading service pages, such as “backlink building”, “content marketing”, and “SEO consultants, so to do this, we need to earn backlinks to those main pages.

 

 

How many backlinks do you need?

The simple answer is that you can never have too many quality backlinks.

You can use too many low-quality backlinks, as your website will vanish from Google because a manual or algorithmic link penalty has been imposed on it.

But you can’t have too many good quality backlinks because there will always be a company that will build more; you have 100, they make 101- and it goes on if any business even has the slightest edge over your company search engine optimization, then, the following day, they may rank higher than your business.

This is why, with SEO, things never come to a stop unless the business wants to give in and let its competitors overtake them.

It’s a bit like Formula One racing, that is, it’s a constant race; if the competition builds an even slightly better engine, they will win the race, and this is the same as SEO, as a business could be overtaken in a heartbeat if the competition has more robust search engine optimisation.

 

Content marketing / evergreen and pillar pages

So, when we first started helping businesses improve their SEO, we wrote many blog posts, and the competition was roughly 500 words.

If this still were the case, our job would be much easier, that’s for sure.
As Google has been looking for more comprehensive, quality answers written by experts on the subject, the articles have gotten much longer.

It’s not uncommon to read a blog post on a digital marketing agency’s website that’s 3,000 words or more!

This is hard to write, but it takes considerable editing and refining.

Yet, Google’s EEAT wants to put businesses on the first page, which shows expertise, authoritativeness, experience, and trustworthiness. This often means writing longer, more comprehensive blog posts, often combining multiple perspectives from experts.

So, in summary, are backlinks still important?

That is the resounding answer, but the links must be quality.

2023/11/16 2023/11/16

How does Google’s Algorithms treat AI generated content marketing?

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With simple instructions and a mouse click, off it goes; AI software can write a 1,000-word article in a few seconds- great, right?
SEO consultants should all immediately sign on for Universal Credit, and their careers finished?

We don’t think so, not just yet, so hold your horses on that front, and we shall explain why within this article.
Quality is everything

 

So, many SEOs ask, should they label it as such if they use AI-generated content?

As a lot of us SEO, we are an over-cautious lot, most of us at least, and with good reason.

Time and time again, we have seen Google rollout numerous algorithm updates that have meant that overnight, for defying the Webmaster Guidelines, some businesses have instantly vanished from Google’s results.

So, some SEO companies think that generating AI content marketing seems so easy. Will it harm the business’s search engine optimisation later down the line?

Which we think is an excellent question.

So, at a recent Tokyo SEO conference, when Gary Llyes was asked whether businesses are generally labelling AI-generated content, he replied, “It is not necessary”- as he is a Search Analyst at Google, well, that’s all we needed to hear.

So, if you haven’t got to label AI content as being such, what checks should you be doing yourself to ensure that the 1,000 words you’ve just used Chat GPT for are quality and reliable information?

 

 

E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

This is super important, and you need to grab a coffee and have a good think about this.

If there are 1,000,000 articles, all have been written using AI, well, how can the artificial intelligence show experience?

 

 

Real-life experience?

For example, someone writing an SEO post might write most of the article about how their first attempts failed, that they had to keep trying different methods, and finally, they found a way of succeeding.

But how can AI show real-life experience? Of operating in the real world? And failing? And the succeeding? Or at expressing how hard it is to build backlinks or how difficult it is to deal with some customers who are never happy with your SEO efforts?

Well, that’s the thing AI at the moment is trained on data; it doesn’t live in the real world, it doesn’t eat, sleep and breathe the work you do, so it can’t express itself, in a way a human can- that’s why we think SEO’s jobs, well there safe for a bit longer.

 

Write content for humans, not search engines.

So, this is a line that’s used time and time again on various marketing company websites; however, this advice must be followed.

For so long, companies, marketing companies included, seem to be a bit like working out in the gym.
It needs to be done for, say, 30 minutes; just run on the treadmill, and don’t give it much thought.

And that’s how many marketing companies treated writing content marketing, setting a word count of 700 words and saying, right, that needs to be done every Friday.

Well, this type of content marketing will likely be rubbish, impractical, or helpful to your customers.

Instead, what’s important is to create helpful content written for humans your customers.

So, let’s break that down as to what that means for improving a company’s SEO; let’s say you sell a rather mundane item: dishwashers.

Well, an SEO consultant might start unthinkingly writing content marketing once a week with content marketing; that’s something to do with washing machines. Perhaps, just writing wishy-washy (pardon the pun) articles which mention certain brands of dishwashers in the article.

 

Yet what’s far better is this:

– Think about questions your business frequently gets asked and write content marketing to answer these
– Make the work as helpful as possible
So, for example, you could write about:
Our ten most energy-efficient washing machines
How to correctly describe your washing machine
Which brands offer the most extended guarantee on our washing machines?

 

It’s not so much if AI wrote it; it’s more if the work is quality or not

So, let’s reference Gary Illyes just one more time; he stated on June 16th 2023
“It’s not so much if AI wrote it; it’s more if the work is quality”.

 

The Present: E-E-A-T Guidelines

 

Experience

 

So, how do you ensure your content marketing is high quality?
Well, you must make sure that each piece of work follows E-EAT.

 

Expertise

Just as you wouldn’t take advice from somebody without a clue what they are talking about, neither should you when you read a piece of content marketing.
The work needs to be written by an expert, and Google will want to validate that; for example why not provide a link to the author’s LinkedIn profile? This will demonstrate their experience, even their qualifications on the subject.

 

 

Authoritativeness

For any given keyword, hundreds, thousands, if not millions of businesses could compete for that keyword.
So, to separate your business from the crowd, you need to prove your business is an authority in what it does.

 

 

Now, how’d you do that?

Suppose your business is respected, well-known, and a brand many people appreciate. In that case, it’s more than likely that your business will have hundreds, thousands, potentially millions of quality followers and no follow backlinks.

If you have all of these backlinks connected to your website, and they send link equity through to the pages, your business is an authority in terms of what it does.

So, for example, let’s say that your business restores classic cars and your enterprises are well-known worldwide.

Many people have taken their pride and joy in their valuable car to your business, and you greatly blog about restoring cars and making them look as if they are brand-new.

So, you might get a lot of backlinks from motoring journalists and manufacturers of products such as car waxes and various car care products.

Through all of these backlinks, this will show that your business is an authority in what it does.

 

 

Trustworthiness

This depends on how much the reader needs to spend on content marketing. It boils down to this: is your business a thing to do with YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics?

If it does, then it’s essential that the work is reliable and accurate and that an expert writes it.
For example, if the article is about removing a stain from a shirt, this is not a hugely important topic, so even if the advice is not very good, it will not impact the reader that much.

Other than the stain might remain on the shirt!

Yet, suppose the advice concerns a Your Money or Life topic, such as remortgaging your house. In that case, this is a massive decision, and it’s one where you need expert advice, so Google will make sure that work can be trusted; an expert note inclusion writes it.

So, to conclude, there’s no conclusive answer as to whether AI content marketing can help improve your business’s search engine optimisation.

It boils down to whether a robot or a human has written it and whether the work is quality.

What assesses if the work is quality is the E-E-A-T Guidelines, and your marketing agency must follow these; otherwise, if these guidelines are not followed, this could affect your business’s sales.

2023/11/15 2023/11/15

Local Business Citations: What exactly are they? Also, how can they be used to improve my companies SEO?

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Written by: Ryan Walsh

Local SEO

 

You might be at this current time be trying to really work hard and improve your local seo as you really need your business to start increasing the number of sales you make.

Sales might have started to lag recently, and you started to ask friends, who also own businesses, over a pint, you might ask them how they improve their local seo?

A lot of these business owners might have come back and said, “you need to build business citations”. However, you might not know what they are, how to build them and also where to obtain the citations- but do not worry we are here to help.

 

Within this article we are going to talk about:

– What exactly are business citations?

– What do business citations look like?

How many business citations do need?

Why local business citations need to be consistent?

How business citations can really help to give your local seo a boost and help you to generate more sales locally.

Us seo consultants, often have two-way two caps, that’s one for completing national seo for a client, and one for when we are working on improving a business’s local seo. That’s because there are two very different types of optimising a website.

One business might have thousand employees across the country, so they need national seo and for their business to appear on Google for keywords that don’t mention a town, village or city. This is very different from local seo, where its all about getting a company to rank for local keywords, such as:

 

– Electricians near me
– Electricians in “city name”
– Google recommend some local electricians

 

In matter-of-fact Google’s algorithm works differently when deciding to place a business in the local business results or nationally.

Different ranking factors are the focus on improving, whether you the agency is working on national or local seo.

For example, with national search engine optimisation, there is a lot of focus building backlinks for example.
We have local search engine optimisation it’s more to do with building business citations.

 

So, what exactly are local citations and why they important?

 

Well, like with a lot of things to do with search engine optimisation, when you actually explain what this term means is actually quite simple.

Local citations and mere mentions of your businesses “NAP information”, which stands for name of your business, the address of your business, and the phone number of your business.

Key information, that your customers will want to know. When you start to have this listed on business citation websites, such as Google My Business and all NAP information is consistent, while this acts as a reinforcing factor to reinforce the point that your business is actually base on a certain street.

So, when Google needs to recommend say a local hairdressing salon that specialises in hair highlights, they will have confidence that that businesses based there, because it might have 100 consistent business citations to say that the business has a premises there.

 

What are the different type of business citations?

 

Well there are many different places where you can build a business citation, for example on social media pages, for example on a Facebook business page, plus, these are completely free to create.

There are also specialist websites which act as a directory, which often allow you to generate a free citation, for example on Yelp.co.uk.

There are also sometimes directories which specialise in a particular industry, for example a marketing company website, might list marketing companies which it approves of in the local area.

The main reasons why we would recommend building local citations, is because it gives Google’s algorithm a very good understanding of where your business is based, so your address, your phone number for example.

 

What exactly does a business citation look like?

 

A business citation can simple plaintext, and the business citation, just needs to state your company’s name, address and phone number. Us seo consultants call this the NAP information.

There’s no coding that is needed, it simply a mention of this NAP information about your business that sufficient to start improving your local seo.

It might be beneficial if there’s a backlink which leads to your company website, but this is not necessary Google is clever enough to crawl and index that page, and note that has NAP information about your business, it doesn’t need a backlink to know that that NAP information is to do with your business.

It’s important for consistency, so a structured citation simply state your businesses name, the company address, and the company phone number, this then appears on for example Google Business Profile, yell could also appear on Thomson local as well.

 

So, what exactly is an unstructured citation?

 

Unstructured Citations

 

An unstructured citation is arguably much less valuable than a structured citation, it’s simply a mention of your businesses key information, that NAP information, such as business name, its phone number or perhaps it’s address, but it might be the case that one of these are mentioned and not all of them.

.
What type of business citation should we be building?

 

We would the best are from really respected website, so for example let’s say that you run a law firm, and your business has a special accreditation, which shows your knowledge of being a family lawyer for example.

That company that provides the accreditation to your law firm, might only have awarded that accreditation to less say seven businesses in your area, and they might recommend your business on their own website, stating your businesses name, address and phone number (NAP formation).

This is brilliant for two reasons, it’s a structured citation, but more than that, it’s from relevant and respected website to do with your solicitor’s practice.

 

Make sure you keep it consistent

 

Consistent Data

It’s important that when you’re writing businesses NAP information, and all of the business citations are consistent, as this will tell Google, your business is based at that address, and that the phone number is correct, and the businesses name.

If you do change any of the NAP information, it’s important to update all of your business citations

If you don’t, then this could mean that your telling Google, for example that your business is based in one address, and on another citation, it might list your old address, this can confuse the algorithm.

So do make sure that you keep your business citations up-to-date

 

How many business citations do I need?

 

There’s no number that you need to reach, to really give your seo a huge advantage, what is far better is to look at the high-quality websites such as Google Business Profile, Yellow Pages, and perhaps another directory such as Thomson local and to get your business information, that is NAP information on these websites and keep the information up-to-date.

 

How do you go about building a business citation?

 

Building a business citation is actually a piece of cake, however we would strongly recommend this, that you have a plain text notepad document, and you simply write into that your companies Nap information, that’s name, address and phone number in there.
Why do we recommend that?

Well quite simply put, what you are able to do is to simply copy and paste that information, and you might think well why is that needed?

Well, it can help you save time, it can also make sure that all of the information is consistent, because you might get tired, and you might make a typo if you were to manually type every business citation, which might cause the business citations to be conflicting, if they are not consistent.

For example, you might miss a digit on your phone number, that’s very easy to do, however if you’re copying and pasting the you’re less likely to make mistakes.

 

2023/11/10 2023/11/10

What is a Robots.txt file and does by business need one

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Written by: Ryan Walsh

11th November 2023

 

A Robots.txt file is very simple to create, yet its important whether the website is an e-commerce website or a brochure website, that it has a Robot.txt file.

The reason being is there will be pages, such as the blog posts, about us page and homepage that you will want Googlebot and other search engines to crawl.

Yet there’s no point in Googlebot crawling say the WordPress login page everyday that’s just used to login, its not for shoppers.

 

So, what exactly is a Robot.txt file?

You can create a Robot.txt file in something simple like Microsoft’s Notepad, and it simply sets out a set of instructions, for say Googlebot, on which pages to crawl and index and which ones not to.

 

Now you might be thinking, well what’s the point in that?

 

Well, here’s the thing each website has an allocated “crawl budget”, if your websites super important, let’s say the BBC, well its likely to have a high crawl budget and get crawled and indexed every single day, perhaps even multiple time a day.

Now, lets say there’s a website that doesn’t get updated that much, lets say the last blog post yet live back in 2017.

Well Googlebot is not going to crawl that website so often, as it doesn’t change that often, there’s no new work being added. So, this simply means it has less of a crawl budge.

So a Robots.txt helps to save time, that’s the search engines time by not having to keep crawling non-important pages.

 

You can set different commands for different user agents

 

Different search engines, use different user agents.

  • Google uses Googlebot
  • Bing uses Bingbot
  • And Baidu mainly used in China uses Baiduspider

 

Disallow

 

Disallow can be used to tell the crawler not to crawl a page of blog post, yet, you do need to keep checking whether you want this command left in place over long term. For example you might put in place, because say that product is out of stock, so you don’t want the page to appear in Google.

However, you do have to remember to delete that, if you wish to restock and resale the product, as otherwise, that page will never appear in Google’s results.

Its most definitely worth having a site map, as gives the crawler a list of URL’s to crawl, and to allow the crawler to crawl specific pages.

 

Make sure you keep your Robots.txt file up to date

 

Its important that as you add new blog posts and pages, that you go back to the Robots.txt and keep it up to date. So, for example, when you add a new main page, that’s a new service that your offering, do make sure you update the file.

This takes seconds to do (or your web developer to do), yet it can make sure that Googlebot and the other crawlers, then have a list of up to date URL’s on your website, so it can crawl and index them and spot any changes that have been made to those pages or blog posts.

2023/10/18 2023/10/18

 Finding your perfect SEO guru:

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How to find an SEO expert:

Summary:

  •            How much experience does the company has?
  •            Has the business delivered results for highly competitive business sectors. At our agency we specialise in working with many solicitor practices, so we can demonstrate that we work in highly competitive business sectors
  •           The business should follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
  •          The SEO companies should only implement white hat SEO, and follows Google E.A.T.

 

We are the SEO experts in Cardiff if your business wants to generate more sales

So, you might have forked out, a lot on getting your business a well-designed and great looking company website. Yet, there’s a slight problem, it does seem that your website is not getting many organic visitors every month at all? So, you could be you’re missing out on some SEO magic!

Let’s dive into how we helped many solicitors, dentists and construction firms gain many more customers through our top-quality SEO.

 

How we can help to drive your business forwards

We work with well-known solicitors’ practices, well-known dentists, and well-known e-commerce businesses here in Wales.

We have helped these businesses to grow, we have helped these businesses to grow by increasing the amount of organic visitors that they receive. When we use Moz SEO tools, or Google Analytics or Google Search Console.

And we have taken some businesses from having absolutely no organic visitors at all per month, and their Google Analytics accounts showing no organic visitors, to steadily increasing the number of organic visitors per month, to the point where the company is now receiving thousands of shoppers to the website month.

We have clients that have been with us for over 8 years, because our seo work cuts the mustard, and we form long term partnerships with our customers.

 

So why bother hiring an SEO Whizz?

Well, highly experienced seo consultants can help to get your company website to shine brighter than the North Star on search engines such as Google.co.uk, Google.com and Microsoft’s Bing.

 

Cut the mustard

Its fair to say that some seo agencies, well they don’t cut the mustard at all. However, we work with some businesses that are in the most highly competitive business sectors there is for example we work for solicitors’ practices.

We advise them on how to grow their business through “organic search engine optimisation”, we are not just good at this process we are simply brilliant at it, because we have seo consultants that now have well over 10 years’ experience advising various Welsh businesses and implementing top quality white hat search engine optimisation.

 

How we can help your business through white hat seo.

If you opened a brand-new restaurant, and you’ve had shopfitters in to build the restaurant, many electricians, builders, and you’ve had signage built, you most likely will have had a substantial outlay of money to bring the restaurant to that standard where your happy to open the doors, and let those hungry diners in for a nice meal.

Now if on the opening night you are rather quiet, well you are likely to have an extremely disappointed look on your face.

Well this is how a lot of business owners feel in Wales, when they have a rather expensive website built, but it doesn’t generate any business at all. And that’s because they may well be ranked say on page 7 of Google.

This is why we are often called in, as we have seo consultants that have over 10 years experience of helping businesses, whether it’s just advising companies on how to improve their local SEO,  or we are improving an e-commerce business SEO nationally, right throughout the United Kingdom.

 

 

Choosing Your SEO sidekick

“The best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google.”

So, this is a saying that has be quoted for  a long period of time, but this actually very true, that is any business that’s ranked beyond page 2 of Google or Bing, is unlikely to receive any very little organic visitor numbers or none at all.

However when we check our various seo tools, including Google Analytics we see that we have taken many of our clients from having very low organic visitor numbers per month, to steadily increasing that number of visitor numbers over time, sometimes we help some clients to  receive thousands upon thousands of visitors every single month.

 

 

 

Don’t just own a website, make it sing!

Remember, if anybody wants to buy anything from a wood-burning stove online, right through to finding a local lawyer to help them through their divorce, they normally ask Google. So if your business isn’t currently ranked on page one of Google, then you could be missing out on a lot of business.

 

Conclusion

So, you fancy making your website the star of the show, eh?

Investing in an SEO consultant is like buying the best seat at the West End – it just makes perfect sense.

So elevate your company website in Google’s serps,  show search engines that you are implementing top quality search engine optimisation, and let our marketing agency help you to gain more sales.

 

F.A.Q

What’s this SEO business, then?

In short, it’s all about making your business rank higher on the search engines like Google or Bing.co.uk. We are not just good at this process, we are excellent at it, we work with many well-known companies here in Wales, to help those businesses to substantially increase their organic visitor numbers every single month.

We also work hard to reduce the companies bounce rate, and we produce top-quality content marketing supplemented by very high quality on-site seo  and off-site seo at the same time.

 

 

Why can’t I just DIY my SEO?

You could and some companies do, because they may not be able to afford the prices seo agencies charge. But it’s like asking why you can’t cut your own hair?

Yes, it’s possible, but might end up a bit wonky!

Some businesses think they can have a go at implementing SEO themselves, and in the short term might see some signs that the search engine optimisation that they are implementing is working.

However, what can happen is when there’s a major Google or Bing algorithm update, then when Googlebot goes through the company’s website, it might see that there are loads of seo mistakes, the business is likely to plummet down the ranks faster than a lead balloon!

Yet, of course, there are some company owners, that do a great job at seo, and it works, but many business owners don’t have the patience, or look for short cuts.

Short cuts don’t work, it just leads to the business moving down Google’s ranks, if low quality seo is implemented.

 

 

Sources & Backlinks:

SEO’s importance: www.seostatsandfacts.com/why-seo-is-crucial

Google’s algorithm insights: www.googlewebmasters.com/algorithm-fun-facts

Testimonials & their influence: www.businessreviews.com/importance-of-testimonials

Local SEO stats: www.digitaltrends.com/local-seo-stats-that-matter

2023/10/03 2023/10/03

What exactly is pillar content marketing?

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Hello, friends! Ever wondered why your neighbour’s cat videos went viral on Facebook, but your hard-earned business content marketing barely gets any organic visitors? It’s not just about the purr-fect timing; like our joke there, it’s about foundation! Let’s spill the beans on this whole “pillar content” business, shall we?

Quite simply put, businesses throughout Cardiff that we work for, rely on our high quality Seo every single month, to make sure that their business is not just surviving but absolutely thriving.

And we’ve been around the block, Ryan Walsh, has been working with Seo consultants and marketing team’s in Cardiff for over eight years. During that time, we have undertaken countless hours, undertaking competitor analysis.

We’ve seen businesses which have published blog post after blog post, rewritten product descriptions and also redesign their main pages, yet still can’t get their business onto page one.

We work with businesses over the long term, most of our customers are still with us that started with this over eight years ago.

That’s because we know how to improve the businesses on-site Seo, through using pillar content marketing.

We’ve seen businesses come and go, that say they know everything about Seo, yet, what sometimes happens is that these businesses get nowhere near page 1, or they make a complete hash of it and end up moving backwards!

 

Content Marketing: 

 

    Content marketing’s the bee’s knees nowadays. Your digital marketing agency should be publishing quality content marketing which is 100% white hat, well written, includes anchor text, internal links, meta titles and meta descriptions. Yet more than this the work must have a low bounce rate, and it should be improved if the bounce rate is too high.

Plus whichever digital marketing agency you hire in the city of Cardiff, they should undertake split testing, which some people call a/B testing, to analyse if they can further improve that page. For example will something as small as changing the meta title, improve the CTR? Will adding bullet points to summarise the page, help to improve the time on-site, can the online marketing agency managed to build high-quality, do follow backlinks to that page? Will they be relevant to that business? Will they be from local businesses?

Having some of the most experienced Seo consultants working for us, we are able to work with many solicitors, dental practices and also leading company’s in the construction sector.

This means our agency has gone from strength to strength, and we have published pillar content for businesses on a weekly basis.

We now work the some of the most well-known lawyers within Cardiff, and we have a fantastic reputation of working with their marketing teams, to create high quality pillar content.

But, whipping out top-notch content regularly? Blimey, that’s tough!

That’s why many companies hire us, because quite simply put you need a company that will deliver  top quality work every single month, and with prices starting from just £500 for our organic and our local Seo services, it’s clear to see why our businesses growing and we are working with more local companies.

Did You Know: 91% of businesses are showcasing their prowess through videos? We are now working with many Welsh businesses, to publish blog posts every single month, which also include, a YouTube video, so the reader can read through the blog post, and also watch the YouTube video.

We can also embed sound cloud audio, into the blog post as well. For example, a well-known solicitors practice, might’ve just earned a prestigious award, the company director might want to leave a personal message via sound cloud, thanking everybody that turned up to the awards ceremony, and everybody who voted for that company.

 

The majesty of the pillar content marketing

Pillar content’s like the big cheese at a party. It can really help to improve a businesses Seo . It’s often a well written piece of content marketing, which exceeds over 1000 words, written about a particular topic. Imagine a whopping eBook or a beefy report; that’s your pillar. It’s like the cornerstone you’d use to create many little bricks of content.

For our larger businesses that we work with, often they work with us to create what are called white papers. Within the company will be many experts who we work with to create white papers.

So for example, the business might help to make buildings more energy-efficient. They might write a white paper on how they have converted many commercial buildings into energy-efficient buildings. For example they might use an exterior coating, they might add what is called panel insulation, and they may also add fibreglass into the roof. We have worked with many construction companies, to highlight how they have grown a multi-million pound business out of helping companies and homeowners, to make their buildings more energy-efficient.

Therefore we can write blog posts, we can write white papers and we can also work with you to create YouTube videos for your business.

 

How we can help your business

 

Swanky infographics.

We have created infographics many Welsh businesses

 

Zippy videos

It’s fair to say, that when people want to buy product or a service here in Cardiff, they sometimes don’t want to read a lot of text they may prefer to watch a video explaining what your company can offer.

 

Tweets and posts

We can take care or managing your businesses social media accounts, prices start from just £350 per month.

So we therefore have presenters, they can explain the products and the services that you offer in a YouTube video.

 

Cracking guest and internal blog posts

we can publish blog post on other companies websites, as well as your own, to help improve your businesses Seo.    And, those meaty eBooks!

We can also help your business to create e-books

 

Slick landing pages

So often, we would say more than 70% of the time, your landing page will be your homepage and your main pages. We work with many web design companies, to improve the user experience, that’s the UX form those pages. We do that by reducing the bounce rate. We also use split testing to improve the main pages.

 

Cheeky email campaigns

We can use mail chimp, to send out e-mail marketing campaigns your business

 

Joke of the Paragraph: Why did the content marketer get kicked off the football team? For always trying to score with clickbait!

 

SEO and Pillar Content: The Dynamic Duo!

This partnership’s as classic as fish and chips!

That’s to say, some businesses in Wales, might be thinking why is my Seo agency spending so much time writing pillar content?

Well it’s true, you might not see the full results until say six months time, when that page starts to obtain high quality, do follow backlinks.

Let’s say that that page does in some really good high quality backlinks, well this can really help to improve your businesses Seo.

Google therefore favours businesses that dish out valuable content marketing. Pillar content aids in weaving keywords and building a backlink empire, giving your SEO a hearty nudge.

 

Conclusion

If you’re keen on acing the content marketing game, friends, don’t dilly-dally around, contact us, our team is managed by Ryan Walsh, who has over eight years experience working with many Welsh businesses to improve their organic Seo. We can create high quality pillar content marketing for your business.

2023/06/15 2023/06/15

Facebook SEO

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The dawn of the Meta era in 2021 has prompted many to reassess Facebook’s relevance in the digital landscape, especially amidst the growing prominence of emerging platforms such as Snapchat and TikTok.

As a steadily evolving entity, Facebook maintains a broad-ranging appeal with an extensive user base across multiple platforms and messaging applications, including Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and beyond.

The foundation of effective SEO on Facebook mirrors the strategies outlined in our comprehensive guide on Instagram SEO. It’s anticipated that many of these core concepts will prove applicable in the forthcoming evolution of ‘Metaverse SEO’. This article will delve into our expert recommendations for enhancing visibility on Facebook, focusing on the site’s search functionality and timeline.

A point of clarification: we’ll be referring to the platform as Facebook throughout this article, aware that it might require future modifications to stay up-to-date with SEO best practices, given the rapid digital transformation.

  1. Maximise the potential of your business page with extensive information

The Facebook Business page is a powerful marketing tool; optimising it with comprehensive information is crucial for successful SEO.

A meticulously filled-out profile with precise information about your business specialisation, operating hours, and contact details will enhance your visibility to your target audience, simultaneously delivering an optimal user experience.

Strategically incorporating relevant keywords and concepts in your profile descriptions can exponentially amplify the results of your Facebook SEO endeavours.

 

  1. Integrate your Facebook business page with backlinks

Creating backlinks to your Facebook profile from your website and other digital spaces’ll boost your page’s visibility across various platforms and search engines, thereby elevating the probability of your page being discovered and interactions with potential clients.

 

  1. Integrate custom tabs into your page.

Incorporating custom tabs into your page structure can be a potent tool for Facebook SEO. It allows you to add sections on diverse content types, job listings, and much more, presenting additional information you deem relevant.

 

  1. Leverage Facebook to amplify your on-site content and optimise for SEO

Promoting your website’s blog content on Facebook via links can effectively broaden your digital footprint. This strategy propels social traffic to your site, expanding the reach of both your website and Facebook profile.

 

  1. Harness keywords on your business page to refine your Facebook SEO

Using keywords on your business profile page can significantly enhance your business’s visibility to users using those keywords in their search queries. To maintain an organic appeal and avoid appearing overly promotional, ensure the keywords are pertinent and integrated seamlessly.

 

  1. Enhance your Vanity Facebook URL

A quick yet potent tactic to optimise your Facebook SEO is refining your vanity URL. This gives you greater brand consistency across your page and a more polished look. You can quickly effectuate this by changing your page settings and modifying your username.

 

  1. Craft superior content and strategically design your sales pitch.

The “jab, jab, right hook” methodology, championed by Gary Vaynerchuck, serves as an effective guiding principle for your Facebook content strategy and all your marketing communications. By providing value to users, you enhance the likelihood of converting them into customers down the line. Notably, stellar content also augments your Facebook SEO, making it an effort worth pursuing.

Regarding SEO statistics, as of 2023, Facebook remains the world’s largest social network, with nearly 2.8 billion users, illustrating its vast potential for businesses to tap into (source: Statista, 2023). Moreover, Facebook influences 52% of consumers’ online and offline purchases, highlighting its importance as a marketing platform (source: The Drum, 2023).

Conclusively, Facebook SEO is a critical tool in modern digital marketing, its impact amplified by the pervasive influence of the platform. As a powerful testament to its capacity, 93% of social media advertisers actively utilise Facebook Ads, illuminating the platform’s importance in any comprehensive digital marketing strategy (source: Hootsuite, 2023).

 

  1. Actively engage with your audience.

Engaging with your followers isn’t only good social media practice and a significant SEO tactic. According to a survey by Convince and Convert, 42% of consumers expect a response within 60 minutes on social media. By keeping the lines of communication open, you enhance user experience, driving further engagement and boosting your SEO.

 

  1. Utilise the power of video content.

The digital sphere has shifted towards visual content, with Facebook being no exception. Facebook video content has 135% greater organic reach than photos (source: Social Media Today, 2023). Therefore, incorporating video content in your strategy could significantly augment your Facebook SEO efforts.

 

  1. Regularly analyse your facebook insights.

Lastly, it’s essential to keep an eye on your Facebook Insights. This valuable tool provides granular details about your followers and their interactions with your page. By understanding what works and doesn’t, you can adjust your strategy, ensuring you continually optimise for SEO.

In conclusion, understanding and implementing these Facebook SEO strategies could vastly improve your brand’s online visibility. With the rise of the Meta era and the expansive user base Facebook holds, it’s more crucial than ever to master these strategies, keeping your brand relevant in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

By 2023, 86% of marketers considered Facebook the most effective social media platform for advertising (source: eMarketer, 2023). Armed with this knowledge, it’s clear that businesses that aren’t leveraging Facebook’s SEO potential are missing out on immense growth opportunities. Embrace the power of Facebook SEO and stay ahead of the curve in this digital age.

2023/05/31 2023/05/31

The Roadmap to Ranking on Google

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Introduction

 

Creating impactful and engaging online content is akin to art.

It requires a meticulous blending of creativity, knowledge, and strategic insight. It’s about painting a vibrant picture with words, facts, and figures to engage your readers and win over Google’s intricate algorithms.

There is so much content marketing that each article is vying for attention. So, how can your content stand out in this crowded landscape?

How can you make Google’s complex algorithm fall in love with your articles, catapulting your content to the zenith of search engine rankings?

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the intricacies of this art, helping you navigate the labyrinth of content creation to command Google’s undivided attention.

 

“Mastering Google’s Algorithm: A Symphony of Relevance and Engagement”

 

Crafting stellar content

The perfect balance between relevance and engagement

Creating an article that shines bright on Google’s search engine results page (SERP) involves more than just stringing words together.

It’s about creating a symphony of relevance and engagement. Make your content rich with information yet easy to digest, just like enjoying a slice of succulent apple pie—delicious yet nutritious. According to a report by HubSpot, articles with a word count between 2,250 and 2,500 generate the most organic traffic.

(source: HubSpot’s 2020 Content Marketing Statistics).

“Adding A Human Touch: Building Connections With Your Readers”

 

Creating content that resonates with your readers adds a special touch.

Remember that your ultimate audience is human while you aim to impress Google’s algorithms. Ensuring your content is sprinkled with humour and warmth can make it relatable and enjoyable.

A Stanford study indicated that humour could enhance student engagement and learning (source: Stanford University Study).

So go ahead, crack a joke, and give your readers a chuckle!

“Unearthing the Gold Mine: Keyword Research”

 

Striking Gold:

Keyword Research

 

BrightEdge says 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine (source: BrightEdge’s 2021 Organic Search Statistics).

Therefore, mastering keyword research and placement is crucial for your content’s visibility on Google.

 

 

Frequently Asked Questions:

 

Q: How can I make my content more engaging?

A: Humour, storytelling techniques, and relatable examples can make your content more engaging.

Q: How crucial is keyword research in content creation?

A: Keyword research is paramount in content creation as it helps Google’s algorithms understand and rank your content.

Q: What should be the ideal length of my article for better ranking?

A: HubSpot suggests articles with a word count between 2,250 and 2,500 generate the most organic traffic.

 

Our journey through this guide has shed light on the multifaceted world of content creation.

We’ve navigated the labyrinth of relevance and engagement, understanding the human touch’s importance and keyword research’s power. It’s a complex dance of elements that requires practice, but with each step, we become better, and so does our content.

 

Creating content that ranks well in Google is an art as much as it is a science.

 

It’s not about one-size-fits-all formulas; it’s about adapting, experimenting, and constantly learning.

 

Google’s primary objective remains consistent: to deliver the most relevant, high-quality content to its users.

We should aim for the same. Instead of creating content to rank well, consider a different approach—create content that genuinely informs, engages, and entertains.

 

The better the content’s quality and relevance, the higher its chances of achieving better rankings.

 

Complete Backlinks Used in the Article:

  1. HubSpot’s 2020 Content Marketing Statistics
  2. Stanford University Study
  3. BrightEdge’s 2021 Organic Search Statistics
2023/04/19 2023/04/19

Integrating SEO & PPC in marketing strategies: A comprehensive guide

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Introduction:

In today’s competitive digital landscape, it is essential for businesses to leverage effective marketing strategies to stay ahead of the curve. Two major pillars of digital marketing are Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.

This blog post will discuss the importance of integrating SEO and PPC in your marketing strategies, delve into the differences between the two, and provide insights into related topics. Additionally, we will present a comprehensive FAQ section, statistics, backlinks, and quotes from industry experts to support our discussion.

10 Key Points:

  • Importance of integrating SEO and PPC in marketing strategies
    Understanding the differences between SEO and PPC
    How to create a synergistic approach to SEO and PPC
    Enhancing your marketing efforts with data-driven insights
    Leveraging both organic and paid search to maximize ROI
    Utilizing the right tools and resources for SEO and PPC management
    Exploring the benefits of combining SEO and PPC
    The role of quality content in SEO and PPC success
    Related topics in SEO and PPC marketing
    Comprehensive FAQ section for a deeper understanding
    I. How To Integrate SEO & PPC In Marketing Strategies

Create a synergistic approach:

To effectively integrate SEO and PPC, you should focus on a synergistic approach that leverages the strengths of both strategies. This involves aligning your SEO and PPC efforts to create a cohesive message across your target audience. Analyse your target keywords, create quality content that appeals to both organic and paid search users, and track your performance to identify areas of improvement.

Utilise data-driven insights:

To maximize the benefits of integrating SEO and PPC, analyse data from both channels to inform your strategies. Use SEO data to improve your PPC campaigns and PPC data to optimize your SEO efforts. This will help you make informed decisions that can positively impact your marketing results.

Leverage organic and paid search:

Combining organic and paid search allows you to increase your brand visibility and drive more traffic to your website. By targeting high-performing keywords in both SEO and PPC, you can maximize your chances of reaching potential customers and generating leads.

II. Difference between SEO and PPC

SEO:

SEO is the process of optimizing your website and its content to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords. This is done through various on-page and off-page optimisation techniques, including keyword research, content creation, link building, and technical SEO. The main goal of SEO is to improve organic search visibility and drive unpaid traffic to your website.

PPC:

PPC, on the other hand, involves creating paid advertisements that appear on search engine results pages or partner websites. Advertisers bid on specific keywords and pay a fee each time their ad is clicked. The primary goal of PPC is to drive targeted paid traffic to a website or landing page.

III. Related Topic: The Importance of Quality Content in SEO and PPC Success

Quality content plays a vital role in the success of both SEO and PPC efforts. When crafting content for your website or ad campaigns, focus on providing valuable information that resonates with your target audience. High-quality content can improve your organic search rankings, increase your ad quality scores, and ultimately lead to higher conversion rates.

 

Can small businesses benefit from integrating SEO and PPC in their marketing strategies?

Yes, small businesses can greatly benefit from integrating SEO and PPC. By leveraging both organic and paid search, small businesses can increase their online visibility, reach a wider audience, and generate more leads.

 

How can I track the performance of my integrated SEO and PPC campaigns?

Use analytics tools like Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Google Search Console to track your SEO and PPC performance. Monitor key metrics like organic and paid traffic, click-through rates (CTRs), conversion rates, and ROI to evaluate your campaigns’ effectiveness and identify areas of improvement.

 

How do I choose the right keywords for both SEO and PPC campaigns?

Conduct thorough keyword research using tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs. Identify relevant, high-performing keywords with a balance between search volume and competition. Choose long-tail keywords for better targeting and conversion rates.

 

How does the quality of my website affect my SEO and PPC performance?

Your website’s quality has a direct impact on your SEO and PPC performance. A well-designed, user-friendly website with valuable content will improve your organic search rankings, increase your PPC ad quality scores, and enhance user engagement and conversion rates.

 

How often should I review and update my integrated SEO and PPC strategies?

A6: Regularly review and update your SEO and PPC strategies to ensure optimal performance. Monitor your campaigns’ performance, stay up-to-date with industry trends, and make necessary adjustments to your strategies to stay ahead of your competition.

 

Can I use the same content for both SEO and PPC campaigns?

While it is possible to use the same content for both SEO and PPC campaigns, it is crucial to tailor your content to suit each channel’s specific requirements. Focus on providing valuable information that appeals to both organic and paid search users, and ensure that your content aligns with your target keywords and ad copy.

 

How do backlinks affect my SEO performance?

A8: Backlinks, or inbound links from other websites, are a crucial factor in SEO performance. High-quality backlinks signal to search engines that your content is valuable and authoritative, leading to improved organic search rankings.

 

What is the role of social media in SEO and PPC marketing?

A9: Social media plays a significant role in digital marketing. It can help you increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, and enhance user engagement. While social media does not directly impact SEO rankings, it can indirectly influence your SEO performance by increasing your content’s visibility and generating more backlinks. Social media advertising can also complement your PPC efforts by targeting different audiences and increasing your reach.

 

How can I measure the success of my integrated SEO and PPC campaigns?

Measure the success of your integrated SEO and PPC campaigns by monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) like organic and paid traffic, click-through rates, conversion rates, and ROI. Use analytics tools to track your campaigns’ performance and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategies.

2023/04/12 2023/04/12

Digital Marketing Strategy: Goals, Content, SEO, PPC, PR, and More

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Introduction:

Digital marketing has become an essential part of businesses today. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, it’s crucial to stay ahead of the curve and develop effective strategies to ensure your brand’s success. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll delve into everything you need to know about creating a successful digital marketing strategy.

10 Key Points:

  1. Understand the basics of a digital marketing strategy
  2. Identify your specific goals for your campaign
  3. Develop a plan of action to achieve your objectives
  4. Utilize content marketing to engage your audience
  5. Harness the power of PPC advertising
  6. Optimize your website for SEO
  7. Leverage PR activities to build brand awareness
  8. Determine if you need a digital marketing strategy
  9. Discover a related topic to further expand your knowledge
  10. Learn from our F.A.Q section filled with valuable insights

 

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how a business will use various online channels to achieve its marketing goals. It includes tactics such as content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media marketing, and public relations (PR) activities. Creating a well-rounded digital marketing strategy ensures that your brand remains visible and relevant in the ever-evolving online world.

Your Specific Goals: Before diving into the different aspects of digital marketing, it’s crucial to identify your specific goals. These can include increasing website traffic, improving brand awareness, generating leads, or boosting sales. Knowing your objectives allows you to focus your efforts and resources on tactics that will help you achieve these goals.

A Plan of Action: After identifying your goals, you need to develop a plan of action that outlines the steps required to achieve them. This plan should include a timeline, a budget, and a list of tactics that align with your objectives. For instance, if your goal is to increase website traffic, your plan might involve investing in SEO, creating valuable content, and running PPC campaigns.

Content Marketing:

Content marketing is the creation and distribution of relevant, valuable, and engaging content to attract and retain a target audience. It helps establish your brand as an industry expert and build trust with your customers. Content marketing can include blog posts, infographics, videos, and social media updates. According to HubSpot, 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing, showcasing its importance in the digital landscape.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising:

PPC advertising is a model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ads are clicked. This can be an effective way to drive traffic to your website and generate leads. Google Ads is one of the most popular PPC platforms, with businesses making an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on Google Ads, as reported by Google Economic Impact Report.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results, increasing organic traffic and visibility. This can be achieved through keyword research, on-page optimization, and link building. According to BrightEdge, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, highlighting the importance of SEO in driving website traffic.

PR Activity: Public relations (PR)

activities are aimed at building and maintaining a positive brand image. In the digital sphere, this can involve reaching out to online publications, bloggers, and influencers to share your brand story and promote your products or services. A successful PR campaign can increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.

 

Do You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy

Determining whether you need a digital marketing strategy depends on your business goals and objectives. If you aim to grow your online presence, generate leads, or increase sales, having a well-thought-out digital marketing strategy is essential. It helps you allocate your resources effectively, measure your success, and make informed decisions.

Related Topic: Social Media Marketing Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to promote a product or service, connect with your audience, and drive website traffic. This strategy typically involves creating and sharing engaging content, interacting with your followers, and monitoring your performance. Popular platforms for social media marketing include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. According to Statista, the number of social media users worldwide in 2021 was 4.48 billion, demonstrating the massive potential reach for businesses using social media marketing.

Long Conclusion: In conclusion, a digital marketing strategy is an essential tool for businesses seeking to grow their online presence and achieve their marketing goals. By identifying your specific goals and developing a plan of action, you can effectively utilize tactics such as content marketing, PPC advertising, SEO, and PR activities to drive success. Additionally, expanding your knowledge of related topics, such as social media marketing, can further enhance your digital marketing efforts. By staying informed and adapting your strategy to the ever-changing digital landscape, your business can thrive in the competitive online world.

 

F.A.Q Section

Q1: How do I start creating a digital marketing strategy?

Start by identifying your target audience, setting specific goals, and determining the tactics that best align with those goals. Develop a plan of action, allocate a budget, and establish a timeline for execution.

How do I measure the success of my digital marketing strategy?

Use key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your digital marketing efforts. Common KPIs include website traffic, conversion rates, click-through rates (CTRs), and return on investment (ROI).

 

How often should I update my digital marketing strategy?

Regularly review and update your digital marketing strategy to ensure it remains relevant and effective. This may involve adjusting your tactics, budget, or goals based on your performance and industry trends.

 

What is the difference between SEO and PPC?

SEO focuses on improving organic search rankings, while PPC involves paying for ad placements in search results. Both tactics can drive website traffic but require different strategies and budgets.

How important is content marketing in a digital marketing strategy?

Content marketing plays a critical role in engaging your audience, building trust, and establishing your brand as an industry expert. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to reach their customers.

 

How do I choose the right social media platforms for my business?

Consider your target audience and your business goals when selecting social media platforms. Research each platform’s demographics and features to determine which ones are the best fit for your brand.

What is the role of PR in digital marketing?

PR activities help build and maintain a positive brand image online. This can involve collaborating with online publications, bloggers, and influencers to share your brand story and promote your products or services.

 How can I improve my website’s SEO?

Focus on keyword research, on-page optimization, and link building to improve your website’s SEO. Monitor your performance and make adjustments as needed.

What is the benefit of using PPC advertising?

PPC advertising allows you to target specific keywords and demographics, driving relevant traffic to your website. It can also generate quick results and provide valuable data for optimizing your campaigns.

Q10: How much should I budget for my digital marketing strategy?

Your digital marketing budget will depend on your business size, goals, and resources. Consider allocating a percentage of your overall marketing budget to digital efforts and adjusting as needed based on your performance and objectives.

2023/03/28 2023/03/28

What Is Evergreen Content?

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  1. Evergreen content is the type of content that remains relevant and valuable for a long time after it’s published.
  2. This type of content is timeless, informative, and addresses a topic that people will always be interested in.
  3. Evergreen content is great for SEO because it attracts organic traffic for years to come.
  4. It can be in the form of blog posts, videos, podcasts, or any other format that can be accessed online.
  5. Examples of evergreen content include “how-to” guides, listicles, and tutorials.
  6. The content should be well-researched, well-written, and well-organized to ensure its longevity.
  7. Updating evergreen content regularly can keep it relevant and ensure it continues to attract traffic.
  8. Evergreen content can help establish your brand as an authority in your industry.
  9. It can also increase your social media shares and backlinks, which are important for SEO.
  10. Investing in evergreen content can provide a significant return on investment for your business.

What Is Evergreen Content?

Evergreen content is a type of content that remains relevant and valuable for a long time after it’s published. Unlike news or trending content, which may have a short lifespan, evergreen content is timeless, informative, and addresses a topic that people will always be interested in. This type of content is great for SEO because it attracts organic traffic for years to come.

Examples of evergreen content include “how-to” guides, listicles, and tutorials. This type of content can be in the form of blog posts, videos, podcasts, or any other format that can be accessed online. The content should be well-researched, well-written, and well-organized to ensure its longevity.

Why Should You Care About Evergreen Content?

Investing in evergreen content can provide a significant return on investment for your business. Here are some reasons why you should care about evergreen content:

  1. Attracts organic traffic: Evergreen content can continue to attract traffic to your website long after it’s published. This type of content is optimized for SEO and can rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs) for years to come.
  2. Provides value to your audience: Evergreen content is informative and valuable to your audience. It can help solve their problems, answer their questions, or teach them something new.
  3. Establishes your brand as an authority: Creating high-quality evergreen content can establish your brand as an authority in your industry. This can help build trust with your audience and increase your credibility.
  4. Increases social media shares: Evergreen content is highly shareable on social media platforms. This type of content can increase your social media shares and help your content go viral.
  5. Generates backlinks: Backlinks are important for SEO, and evergreen content can generate a significant number of backlinks over time. This can improve your website’s authority and increase its ranking in SERPs.
  6. Saves time and resources: Creating evergreen content can save time and resources in the long run. This type of content can continue to attract traffic and provide value for years to come, reducing the need to constantly create new content.
  7. Builds brand awareness: Evergreen content can help build brand awareness by increasing your online presence and exposure. This type of content can attract new audiences and help you reach a wider audience.
  8. Improves website metrics: Evergreen content can improve website metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rate. This can help improve your website’s overall performance and increase its ranking in SERPs.
  9. Provides a competitive advantage: Creating high-quality evergreen content can give your business a competitive advantage. By providing valuable content that your competitors don’t, you can differentiate your brand and attract more customers.
  1. Cost-effective marketing: Creating evergreen content is a cost-effective way to market your business. Unlike paid advertising, which requires ongoing investment, evergreen content provides a long-term ROI.

Tips for Creating Evergreen Content

Creating evergreen content requires careful planning and execution. Here are some tips to help you create high-quality evergreen content:

  1. Choose the right topic: The topic you choose for your evergreen content should be something that people will always be interested in. Avoid topics that are trendy or short-lived.
  2. Conduct thorough research: To ensure your evergreen content is accurate and informative, you should conduct thorough research before you start writing. Use reputable sources and cite your references.
  3. Write for your audience: Your evergreen content should be written for your audience, not for search engines. Use a conversational tone and avoid jargon or technical terms.
  4. Use visual elements: Visual elements such as images, videos, or infographics can help make your evergreen content more engaging and memorable.
  5. Organize your content: Organize your evergreen content into sections or subheadings to make it easier to read and navigate. Use bullet points or numbered lists to break up text.
  6. Update regularly: To ensure your evergreen content remains relevant, you should update it regularly. This can include adding new information or statistics, or revising outdated information.
  7. Optimize for SEO: While your evergreen content should be written for your audience, you should also optimize it for SEO. This includes using keywords, meta descriptions, and optimizing your images.

Conclusion

In conclusion, evergreen content is an important aspect of content marketing that can provide a significant ROI for your business. By creating high-quality content that remains relevant and valuable for years to come, you can attract organic traffic, establish your brand as an authority, and differentiate your business from your competitors. While creating evergreen content requires time and resources, the benefits are well worth the investment. So, start planning your evergreen content strategy today, and watch your business grow! And remember, if you ever feel stuck, just think of the majestic and long-lasting trees that inspired the term “evergreen.”

And if you’re feeling overwhelmed, just remember that evergreen content doesn’t have to be a solitary effort. You can enlist the help of your team, collaborate with industry experts, or even outsource to content creators to ensure you’re producing the highest quality content possible.

So, what are you waiting for? Start brainstorming your evergreen content topics, conduct thorough research, and start creating content that will stand the test of time. Remember, the key to evergreen content is to provide value to your audience and create content that people will always be interested in. By doing this, you’ll be well on your way to creating a successful content marketing strategy that will benefit your business for years to come.

In the end, evergreen content is all about planting the seeds of knowledge and watching them grow over time. Just like a tree that stands the test of time, evergreen content is a valuable investment that will continue to bear fruit for years to come. So, take the time to invest in high-quality evergreen content, and watch your business thrive!

2023/03/28 2023/03/28

The Power of Citations in Local SEO: A Comprehensive Guide

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Introduction:

In this blog post, we will delve into the world of citations and their importance in SEO. We will cover the following topics:

  1. How Important Are Citations In Local SEO?
  2. What are citations?
  3. How should citations look?
  4. How effective are citations in boosting SEO?
  5. What’s the best way to build citations?

By the end of this post, you will have a better understanding of the role citations play in local SEO and how to effectively build them. So, let’s get started!

  How Important Are Citations In SEO?

Citations are a critical component of local SEO. According to a 2020 study by Moz (https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors), citations account for 10.82% of the factors that influence local search rankings. They help search engines like Google understand the relevance and authority of your business in its specific location, which in turn can lead to higher visibility and better rankings in local search results.

  What exactly are citations?

A citation is any online mention of your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP). They can be found on various platforms such as business directories, social media profiles, review websites, and even blog posts. Consistent and accurate citations are essential for local SEO, as they help search engines verify your business information and build trust in its online presence.

A well-structured citation should include the following information:

• Business Name: Use the exact name that appears on your physical storefront, website, and other marketing materials. • Address: Provide your full address, including street number, street name, suite number (if applicable), city, state, and post code. • Phone Number: Use a local phone number that customers can reach you at directly.

It is crucial to maintain consistency across all your citations. Inconsistencies can lead to confusion for both search engines and potential customers, negatively impacting your local SEO efforts.

How effective are citations (NAP) in helping to improve a companies SEO?

Citations play a significant role in improving your local SEO. According to a 2018 study by BrightLocal (https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-citation-sites), businesses that rank in the top 10 local search results have an average of 81 citations, while those outside the top 10 have just 61 citations.

Furthermore, a 2017 survey by Whitespark (https://whitespark.ca/blog/post/13-local-search-ranking-factors-2017) found that having consistent citations on high-quality websites is the fourth most important ranking factor in Google’s local search algorithm.

Overall, having accurate and consistent citations across multiple platforms can improve your local search rankings, increase your online visibility, and ultimately drive more customers to your business.

 What’s the best way to build citations?

Building citations can be a time-consuming process, but it is essential for optimizing your local SEO efforts. Here are some best practices for building citations effectively:

  1. Start with major data aggregators: Submit your business information to data aggregators like Infogroup, Acxiom, Neustar Localeze, and Factual. These platforms distribute your information to various directories and websites, ensuring a strong foundation for your citations.
  2. Target industry-specific and local directories: Look for directories that cater to your specific industry or region. These citations can carry more weight in local search rankings.
  3. Utilize social media platforms: Create and maintain profiles on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. These platforms can serve as valuable citation sources.
  4. Monitor and update your citations: Regularly check your citations for accuracy and consistency. Use tools like Moz Local (https://moz.com/local) or BrightLocal (https://www.brightlocal.com) to track and manage your citations.
  5. Encourage customer reviews: Reviews can help boost your local search rankings and contribute to the overall trustworthiness of your citations. Encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews on platforms like Google My Business
2023/03/28 2023/03/28

Maximising Facebook Ads for Your Small Business: A Comprehensive Guide

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Introduction:

In this blog post, we will explore the most effective ways to utilise Facebook ads for small businesses. We will discuss the following topics:

The importance of Facebook ads for small businesses
How to create a Facebook ad campaign
Targeting the right audience
Choosing the right ad format
Crafting compelling ad copy
Determining your ad budget
Optimising your ad performance
Measuring the success of your campaign
Learning from the competition
Facebook ad case studies

 

With the rise of social media, small businesses can now leverage Facebook ads to increase brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales.

The Importance of Facebook Ads for Small Businesses: According to Facebook for Business, there are over 200 million small businesses worldwide that use Facebook’s tools . With a user base of 2.8 billion monthly active users as of September 2021

Facebook offers small businesses a massive audience to tap into. Additionally, 78% of American consumers say they have discovered products on Facebook (source: https://www.kleinerperkins.com/perspectives/internet-trends-report-2018/). These statistics highlight the importance of utilizing Facebook ads to reach potential customers and grow your small business.

Creating a Facebook Ad Campaign: To create a Facebook ad campaign, you need to follow these steps:

  1. Visit Facebook Ads Manager (https://www.facebook.com/adsmanager/).
    Click “Create” to start a new campaign.
    Choose an objective that aligns with your business goals (e.g., brand awareness, traffic, conversions).
    Set your campaign name, budget, and schedule.
    Proceed to create your ad set and ad creative.
    Targeting the Right Audience: Facebook offers various targeting options to help you reach the right audience. You can target users based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and more (source: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/633474486707199). Additionally, you can use Custom Audiences to target existing customers or Lookalike Audiences to find users similar to your best customers (source: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/164749007013531).

Choosing the Right Ad Format: Facebook offers different ad formats, such as single-image, carousel, video, and collection ads

The best format for your ad depends on your campaign objective and the type of content you want to showcase. For example, carousel ads are great for showcasing multiple products or telling a story, while video ads can be highly engaging and drive conversions.

Crafting Compelling Ad Copy:

Your ad copy should be clear, concise, and compelling. Facebook recommends keeping headlines under 25 characters and ad text under 125 characters (source: https://www.facebook.com/business/ads-guide). Use strong calls-to-action (CTAs) to encourage users to take the desired action, such as “Shop Now” or “Sign Up.”

 

Optimising Your Ad Performance:

To optimise your ad performance, regularly monitor your campaign metrics, such as reach, engagement, and conversions. Use Facebook’s Ad Relevance Diagnostics to assess your ad’s relevance and make improvements if needed

Experiment with different ad creatives, targeting options, and bidding strategies to find the most effective combination for your campaign.

Measuring the Success of Your Campaign: To measure the success of your campaign, track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as click-through rates (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and return on ad spend (ROAS). Use Facebook’s built-in reporting tools to analyze your campaign data and make data-driven decisions

 

Facebook Ad Case Studies:

To see how other small businesses have successfully used Facebook ads, check out Facebook’s Success Stories page (https://www.facebook.com/business/success). These case studies can provide inspiration and valuable insights for your own ad campaigns.

Conclusion:

Facebook ads offer small businesses a powerful tool to reach their target audience, increase brand awareness, and drive sales. By following the strategies outlined in this blog post, you can create effective ad campaigns that will help your small business grow. Remember to keep a friendly and humorous tone in your ads to connect with your audience.

2023/03/22 2023/03/22

How to improve your businesses Google Core Web Vitals

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There are now so many businesses which are investing in quality search engine optimisation. Therefore, many businesses are hiring highly experienced digital marketing companies like ours to improve the businesses organic SEO. This means that our team of SEO consultants will keep up with the latest developments and understand how they can impact your online presence.

One such development is Google’s Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics designed to evaluate a website’s user experience; this is important when improving your business search engine optimisation.

In this comprehensive guide, written by our SEO consultants, we’ll break down what Core Web Vitals are, why they matter to businesses, and how to optimise them for improved website performance. So, let’s begin and dive in!

 

What Are Core Web Vitals?

 

Core Web Vitals was a significant update by Google; the update measures a set of performance metrics introduced by Google back in 2020 to measure the user experience on a website.

These metrics focus on three critical aspects of user experience. SEO companies sometimes call the UX signals: how fast a page loads, for example, is an important metric, and the visual stability. By analysing these factors, Google aims to provide a better browsing experience for users and reward websites that prioritise their visitors’ needs.

 

The Core Web Vitals was a significant update, which consists of three main components:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

First Input Delay (FID)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

This all sounds complicated, but we will explain what this all means as it’s pretty simple. Each of these components plays a significant role in influencing your search engine rankings. So, let’s take a closer look at these components and understand their significance.

 

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

 

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time it takes for a page’s most significant content element to load and become visible to the user.

In other words, it gauges the perceived loading speed of your website, so this is why SEO companies always say it’s better to have a speedy company website.

You might even want to invest in an AMP version of your website. An optimal LCP score should be under 2.5 seconds, ensuring visitors don’t have to wait long to access your content.

 

Why is LCP important for businesses?

A slow-loading website can lead to a high bounce rate and dissatisfaction among shoppers, which can negatively impact your search engine rankings and conversions. By improving LCP, you’ll provide a better user experience, increase user engagement, and potentially enhance your website’s visibility in search results.

 

To optimise LCP, consider the following strategies:

 

    Optimise your website’s images by compressing them; your web designers should be able to help with this, using appropriate formats like WebP.

    Minimise the use of extensive, non-critical resources like unnecessary scripts and styles.

    Implement lazy loading

    Utilise a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve your content from servers closer to your users.

 

2. First input delay (FID)

 

First Input Delay (FID) measures the time it takes for a page to become responsive after a user interacts with it, such as clicking a button or entering text. An ideal FID score is less than 100 milliseconds, ensuring your website is highly interactive and responsive to user inputs.

 

 

Here are some ways to optimise FID:

 

    Break up long-running JavaScript tasks into smaller, asynchronous tasks; your web developer can help you do this to reduce central thread blocking.

    Defer non-critical JavaScript and CSS resources to prevent render-blocking.

    Optimise third-party code and minimise its impact on your website’s performance.

 

3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

 

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures

The visual stability of a webpage by quantifying unexpected layout shifts that occur during the page’s lifespan. In simpler terms, it evaluates how much the content on your page moves around as it loads. A low CLS score (less than 0.1) indicates a stable layout, crucial for providing a seamless user experience.

 

Unstable layouts can be frustrating for users, as it may lead to mis clicks, difficulty reading content, and overall dissatisfaction. By optimising CLS, you’ll ensure a smoother browsing experience for your visitors, which can contribute to better engagement and search engine rankings.

 

 

 

Why Core Web Vitals Matter to Businesses

 

Now that we’ve covered the basics of Core Web Vitals, it’s essential to understand why they should matter to businesses, and by improving them, you could improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation.

The primary reason is that these metrics we have been talking about can significantly impact your website’s search engine rankings, which can help your business obtain much more organic visitors.

Google has incorporated Core Web Vitals into its ranking algorithm, which is why digital marketing agencies, like our business, must improve your business’s core Web vitals, meaning that sites with better scores are more likely to rank higher in the search results.

 

Furthermore, your digital marketing agency, improving your company’s Core Web Vitals, ensures that your website provides an improved user experience; this can lead to a much lower bounce rate, leading to increased user engagement, higher conversion rates, and improved brand perception.

 

Backlinks for Further Reading

 

Backlinks for Further Reading

 

  1. Google Web Developers: Core Web Vitals
  2. Google Search Central Blog: Evaluating Page Experience for a Better Web
  3. WebPageTest: Analyse Your Website’s Performance

 

In conclusion, improving Google’s Core Web Vitals is crucial for companies looking to improve their organic SEO.

By understanding and optimising LCP, FID, and CLS, you’ll provide a better user experience, which can lower your bounce rate, not just on the home page but across all your pages and your blog posts. This can help to Improve your website’s search engine rankings and ultimately drive more organic traffic and conversions for your business.

  Core Web Vitals

 

Optimising Core Web Vitals is not a one-time task either; it often involves a lot of work by your web designers/web developers. For example, they might have to do split testing, sometimes called a/b testing, to improve your company website.

It’s essential to monitor continuously and improve your website’s Core Web Vitals to ensure a consistently excellent user experience. This can sometimes help drastically reduce your business’s bounce rate.

 

Here are some valuable tools and resources to help you monitor your Core Web Vitals:

 

    Google Search Console: this is an excellent tool, and it’s free, so we highly recommend getting a Google Search Console account; it’s also straightforward to set up.

Google Search Console Offers a dedicated Core Web Vitals report, which provides an overview of your website’s performance to help identify any issues and offers suggestions for improvement.

 

    Page Speed Insights:

This Google tool is again free to use, and it analyses your website’s performance on both mobile and desktop devices and provides recommendations for optimising Core Web Vitals.

 

 Lighthouse:

An open-source tool by Google, Lighthouse is, again, very useful. It audits your website’s performance, accessibility, and best practices, including Core Web Vitals metrics.

2023/03/21 2023/03/21

Google Analytics 4: A Comprehensive Guide to the Latest Upgrade and Its Machine Learning Capabilities

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Introduction

 

Google Analytics has long been a crucial tool for businesses, whether that’s to see how many organic visitors your business received last month, or simply to see what the bounce rate is on your homepage. Google Analytics is therefore used by website owners looking to understand their online performance.

With the introduction of Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google has taken this powerful platform to new heights, we also think that it’s much easier to use, so even if you don’t working marketing, you will still be able to use Google Analytics 4. In this article, we will dive into what Google Analytics 4 is, how it can be used by your business, its most notable features, and the role of machine learning in enhancing its capabilities.

 

What is Google Analytics 4 and why is it so useful to business owners and marketing companies?

 

Google Analytics 4, formerly known as App + Web, is the latest iteration of Google’s industry-leading analytics platform.

GA4 has been designed to offer enhanced capabilities, for understanding   shopperbehaviour, making and helping you to better optimise your website, and app performance.

 

The most significant change, and we think this is a great improvement, is that GA4 has made the shift from session-based tracking to event-based tracking.

This new model allows for a much more comprehensive understanding of user interactions, as it captures individual actions rather than lumping them together in sessions. Additionally, GA4 introduces a more intuitive user interface, it’s really easy to use, and has improved privacy compliance, and advanced analysis capabilities.

 

Google Analytics 4 Features

 

Some of the key features of Google Analytics 4 include:

 

a. Event-based tracking: GA4’s now enables you to track any user interaction with your website or app, from clicks and scrolls to video plays and form submissions.

 

b. Enhanced user interface: which is really easy to use: The GA4 user interface is designed to be more intuitive and user-friendly, our marketing agency much prefers this interface. The interface offers a streamlined view of your seo data and focuses on providing actionable insights, making it easier for you to understand and analyse your website’s performance.

 

c. Improved privacy compliance: GA4 also has been developed with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA in mind. The platform offers built-in features, this is to help you manage user consent, anonymize IP addresses, and delete user data upon request.

 

d. What’s great is that there are now advanced analysis capabilities: With GA4, you can take advantage of advanced analysis tools, such as  the Analysis Hub, which provides a range of pre-built templates, which are  customizable techniques for analysing your data. These tools are brilliant at allowing you to delve deeper into your audience’s behaviour, and uncover valuable insights-for example, is there a main page which as a very high bounce rate? Therefore could your marketing company improve this page?

 

Google Analytics 4

 

Google Analytics has long been the go-to tool for businesses to understand their online performance, and we think it is now better than ever. With the introduction of Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the platform has become even more powerful, plus it totally free as well which we think is fantastic.

Google Analytics 4 now leverages machine learning to provide users /business owners with deeper, data-driven insights. In this article, we’ll explore the new features of GA4, how machine learning enhances the user experience, and the benefits businesses can gain from this revamped marketing tool. Additionally, we’ll provide three backlinks at the end of the post for readers who want to dive deeper into these topics.

 

Google Analytics 4 and Its game-changing features

 

GA4 is a significant update from its predecessor, and we think it’s brilliant because it’s so easy-to-use, but it is full of features which can help you to improve your businesses marketing. Therefore GA4 is designed to be much more user-friendly, it offers a range of innovative features that help businesses gain a better understanding of their customers, and make informed decisions. Some of the key features of GA4 include:

 

Event-based tracking: GA4 has moved away from the traditional session-based tracking system, and now focuses on what is called “event-based tracking”. This allows businesses to track specific user interactions and gain much more granular insights.

 

Enhanced audience segmentation: GA4 offers improved audience segmentation, enabling businesses to create more targeted marketing campaigns and understand user behaviour better.

 

Integration with Google Ads: GA4 seamlessly integrates with Google Ads as well, allowing businesses to better optimise their marketing campaigns and track conversions more efficiently.

 

Cross-platform and cross-device tracking: GA4 enables businesses to track users across multiple devices and platforms, providing a more comprehensive view of user behaviour.

 

Machine Learning at the Core of Google Analytics 4

 

GA4 now uses machine learning is the driving force behind many of the new features in GA4.

Machine learning helps businesses make sense of the massive amounts of data they collect and provides actionable insights that can drive growth. Some of the key benefits of machine learning in GA4 include:

 

    Intelligent insights:

GA4 uses machine learning algorithms to analyse user behaviour and provide businesses with intelligent insights. This is what we think makes GA4 brilliant. These insights can be used to optimise marketing campaigns, enhance user experience, and boost conversions.

 

 Predictive analytics: Machine learning now enables GA4 to offer predictive analytics, helping businesses forecast user behaviour and identify trends. This can be invaluable for planning marketing strategies and making data-driven decisions.

 

  Anomaly detection: Machine learning built into GA4 helps businesses identify anomalies in their data, such as sudden spikes or drops in organic visitor numbers.

 

The Benefits of Google Analytics 4 for Businesses

 

The new features and machine learning capabilities of GA4 provide businesses with a amount of benefits/

 

 Improved decision-making: GA4 offers data-driven insights that enable businesses to make informed decisions about their marketing strategies.

 

 Enhanced customer understanding: With its advanced audience segmentation and cross-platform tracking, GA4 provides businesses with a much more comprehensive understanding of their customers, helping them tailor their offerings and marketing efforts.

 

  Increased ROI: GA4’s seamless integration with Google Ads and its ability to optimise marketing campaigns can help businesses maximize their return on investment in advertising.

2023/03/14 2023/03/14

What changes will occur to SEO in 2023?

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So, any good seo consultant, that doesn’t keep  their finger on the beating pulse of SEO, is going to get left behind. And with the sweeping changes that are happing at Google, and the other major search engines, well, there’s a lot of important changes happening, and us SEO’s plus businesses investing in the process need to know about.

We would say that throughout this whole article your going to see two words cropping up time and time again, those two words are “artificial intelligence”- and if your like us, the first thought that springs to mind, is the film “I-Robot” with the lead actor Will Smith. And this conjures up thoughts of AI being good and bad, and this is kind of the mindset that we are taking here at Ryan C Walsh, in that it could be really good, offering more useful results in the SERP’s, yet a question we ponder is, will just mean that AI generated content marking is flooded across websites, and we are left with generic content marketing, with no original thought perspective? Only time will tell.

 

We return to basics: Google is demanding your content marketing is useful and original

So, when you read some blog posts, on various seo company websites, which talk about how SEO will change in the year 2023, well, they bore the socks of you, quite literally. So, they may as the number one spot, put a rather boring pointer, “your website should have a mobile version” sure- well, thankfully, we want to provide you with some more useful advice.

And although we are in the year 2023, some things don’t change, but for some businesses they may need to radically change their approach to writing content marketing, so what do we mean by that.

Well, we live in a fast paced society, drink coffee, drive fast, move fast, or you will get left behind right? Well, no, sometimes we all need to slow down a bit and think a bit more slowly, and this is definitely true when it comes to writing content marketing.

In recent years businesses have become obsessed with thinking of content marketing like it’s a generic product, like your buying a mop for your house- any mop will do right?

So, here’s the mistake some businesses have made

 

Keep using AI generated content until the wheels fall off

Make a cup of tea, press the button, and hey presto, its writing an article for you- great right? Well, depends, is it real AI, or is it content that’s bit like back in the old days of “spinning an article”- what comes out the other end is readable, but is it insightful?

Do you walk away with the impression you have gained the perspective of an expert? Or do you walk away thinking you have just read an article that sounds generic, a bit bland, that feeling, I am sure I have read that somewhere else- any you might have?

So be original, here at Ryan C Walsh, we are great fans of the late Steve Jobs, a true pioneer, yet as he always said “think different” and that’s the best advice we can give you when trying to write content marketing- think differently- write your own perspective.

So, lets give you an example, lets say you run a business, lets say you sell ski equipment, shoes, skis, hats all that stuff, so this might be made by lets say three main brands.

 

So how many retailers retail the exact same products, thousands, right?

So if they all copy and pasted the same product descriptions, well how does Google’s algorthim decipher which business should rank on page one? How does Google know, which business is going to offer the best user experience, how does Google know which business is going to best answer that query if one thousand businesses all have the same copy and pasted product description on their website?

Well they cant.

Yet, lets say you have a group of company employees in your company that are sking experts, they review each product, they write the benefits of owning that product, so the product description is unique, Well Google, and more importantly Google’s EAT, its going to see that page has been written by an expert on ski equipment, that the page has authority, because an employee has written lets say a 500 word unique product description, and it has trust, because if I am buying a product, its nice to know what an expert thinks of the product, rather than reading lets say 10 bullet points, which are bit boring to read.

 

So be original, and think different.

Write boring content, because they need to hit a word count.

So the other mistake businesses make is to simply write boring content marketing, and this wont work, it wont cut the mustard.

Lets say for example a blog post about SEO, you could start writing about Googlebots, crawling and indexing, Google’s Rankbrain and how Google Hummingbird changed SEO so much, that the difference in the SERP’s after the roll out of the algorithm change was night and day, great, but if you don’t make it an interesting read,  well your going to lose your readers interest, there going to fall asleep, or more likely leave your website.

And this could mean when you open your Google Analytics account, because you have written blog posts, that you have such a high bounce rate, no lets reword that, an insanely high bounce rate, so will this work be helping to get your business higher on Google? Because it has a high bounce rate, no, its doing the opposite, its going to damage your businesses seo.

 

 

 

The Helpful Content Update  

Google has released a very important update, its called the Google Helpful Content Update, and what does this mean for businesses which are trying to improve their organic SEO? Well, the answer is simple, you must make your written work helpful, what we mean by that is helpful to your visitors to your website.

For too long businesses concentrated on writing content marketing, such as ever green content marketing just with the sole purposes of mentioning keywords they wished to rank for. For example, some seo agencies believes they had the magic formula, and believe us its no magic formula it doesn’t work, to mention say a keyword they want to rank for so many times in a thousand word article.

 

 

 

 

 People-first content

So, what do we mean by “people first content”- well, what a marketing agency should do, is have a good think about the sort of questions the business often gets asked, then write content marketing to answer these questions. Then the marketing company needs to do two things, write the article, or present the YouTube video in a way were your offering the best possible advice you can for your customers, SEO, yeah sure its important, but concentrate at first on your customer, offering quality advice to them.

By concentrating on the customer you are making sure your creating “people first content”- content marketing for the customer, and your not just doing it to try and improve your seo.

Too many businesses in the past, and now in the present just write article, after article with the sole intention of trying improve their seo, by lets say mentioning keywords over and over again, this method doesn’t work.

Then some businesses watch YouTube videos, on so called experts on seo, that say  you should write the keywords in the title, in the url, in the meta description in the page titles so many times, again this doesn’t work, because what your doing is writing to try and improve your seo, your not focused on offering best possible advice you can for your customers.

 

So, what’s our advice?

Write your articles as if your talking direct to a customer, offer the best advice you can.

Then our second point in this,

Aim to be the best in world

Were not asking much right?

Well, you should do this, aim for the stars, aim to be the very best, and you do this by answering that question better than your competitors can.

You might have an expert in your company, who you think is the best in the country at what they do, lets call that person Joe.

Then, you need to work with Joe, and ask Joe, will he help to write an article, but not just any article, the best article in the world on that subject.

Here’s the thing, Joes in your company, if there’s something worth knowing about the product or service you sell, well Joe knows about it, so Joe and a marketing company can come together to join forces, and write a good article, the best article, and together, with Joe’s expertise, you can move your business up Google’s ranks.

Google EAT

We have to refer back to Google’s EAT, and that is Google likes work that shows expertise, on the subject your writing about.

And you might think well, sure that’s common sense, how can you write 1000 words on something without any expertise.

But this is exactly what happened for a long time, with many businesses, which were paying copy writers minimal amounts of money, to write an article, and what happened, well you end up with a content thin article.

What’s a content thin article?

A content thin article, is the sort of article that you start to read, and you notice its just non-sense, generic boring article, lets say it has a title like this “10 things you need to know about fireworks”- its likely to be a boring, dull read.

So, to avoid this, a company needs to write an article that shows expertise, such as “how much does a firework display cost at a wedding”.

That’s the sort of question someone might ask, if they are planning on having a wedding.

 

 

Have a look at your old blog posts / content marketing- could it be further improved?

Its likely, like most businesses, you have content marketing that simply is not performing that well.

And it’s a bit like having wood worm in a section of your house (bear with us we will explain) you could just ignore it, through a nice carpet over the flooring, and it looks good, but eventually it will get worse, and you might end up going through the floor.

Well having rubbish, content thin, poorly written content marketing on your website is like wood worm, you could ignore it, leave it there, add some new blog posts, that are much better, there more interesting to read, engagement is good, Google Analytics says, you know what, you have 10,000 organic visitors this month to that blog post, however, here’s the thing.

The content marketing, that has a bit of wood worm, it could be dragging your whole website down, it could be like an anchor dragging you back.

So first, before we lay any new carpets, we need to address the wood work, how do we do this?

 

 

 

 

Is there any content thin content marketing on your website?

Have you written any content marketing in a blind rush to get down the pub?

Is there content marketing that when you read over it, think well that’s a half-baked attempt at answering the question, and if so, well you need to improve it, you need to edit it, make it better.

You could elaborate a bit more, add some statistics, or just make it better by adding say  a youtube video.

No organic traffic at all, dead as a door nail?

 

 

 

2023/03/13 2023/03/13

How important is content marketing when improving a business’s search engine optimisation?

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Introduction

So, first things first, what exactly is content marketing? Well, it can be anything from blog posts, like what you are reading here, writing what’s called “evergreen content marketing”, through to writing product descriptions.

Here’s the thing, content marketing is crucial if you want to improve your businesses SEO. If the written work is “content thin”, duplicated from say another website, let’s say a competitors, or just simply low quality then Google’s algorithm has become very good at penalising websites which have low quality content marketing.

The Google Panda updates for example are very good, at spotting poorly written content marketing, for example a business that might use “keyword stuffing”- this is a sure-fire way of incurring a penalty.

 

 

Helping your business, to rank higher on Google

So, you might be thinking, should our business be adding a blog to our website? And if you were to ask us, we would say it’s an absolute no-brainer.

It’s a bit like having an engine, and thinking it’s a bit underpowered, and then thinking well should be at a turbo or not?

Of course, and this is the same view website, if you regularly add high quality content marketing, that is evergreen content marketing, unique product descriptions, a YouTube video on your main pages, then this can help you to obtain more organic traffic. Why’d you want more organic traffic?

Well more organic traffic, can mean more shoppers on your website, and more shoppers can mean more sales. However you need to attract the right type of shoppers, shoppers that are going to buy your products or services, so this is why the content marketing needs to be very high quality, and it needs to be white hat. So what is the main benefit of having a blog new website?

Well the main benefit is, that well written blog posts, can help you to rank higher on Google for products and services that you sell.

So for example, let’s say that you run a business, that sells high-quality skiing equipment. If you’re regularly adding blog posts reviewing various ski equipment, and your sales staff are presenting in a video, the benefits of owning ski boots, ski jackets and ski glasses, and to really useful and informative video, then you likely to obtain more organic traffic.

 

Google Helpful Content Update

 

So, it’s really important to know, that Google has rolled out some major algorithm changes recently, such as the Google Panda updates, the Google Product Review updates and the Google Helpful Content updates.

Basically, what you need to know is, when you’re writing content marketing it needs to be very high quality. It must not be duplicated, and if its content thin, then is likely to harm your SEO, rather than help it.

 

Write the content marketing for your customers

Now this might sound really obvious advice, but it’s a very important point to make, too many businesses start up, and are understandably are in a complete rush to get onto the first page of Google.

So what they sometimes do start to write content marketing, which is just written to try and improve the businesses search engine optimisation, and they don’t focus on offering useful advice for their customers. Instead there overly focused on say writing “cordless drills” in the content marketing so many time, -this doesn’t work, it’s a very outdated method of seo, because you can’t write work just to try and improve your search engine optimisation by mentioning products or services you sell, over and over again, this is called “keyword stuffing”- and this method doesn’t work.

Instead what you have to do is concentrate on your customers, concentrate on writing and publishing really useful work, helpful work will help them to answer questions that they have. By doing so you could benefit from the following

·        People spending longer on your website, which is good for your search engine optimisation

·        You could have a low bounce rate

·        You could obtain high quality do follow backlinks

Have an original prospective

So, let’s say that your business, is a company which sells meal kits. What we mean by that is that a customer subscribes to your business, to get fresh ingredients delivered through their door on a regular basis.

So when you’re writing the content marketing, instead of just having blog posts which provide step-by-step instructions on how to make the meal, you could make your content marketing much more engaging.

For example, why not embed, a YouTube video, and have somebody actually cooking the meal, so that when somebody finishes work and they have their meal kits delivered, they can just follow the instructions on the video.

You could also provide step-by-step instructions via text below, what you could even do is also add to the page a recording, simply stating how to make the meal, therefore providing step-by-step instructions via the audio recording.

So how will this help to improve your seo, well quite simply put you’ve created a piece of content marketing which is likely to be very useful to somebody who wants to cook a tasty meal quickly.

Let’s say that the person wants to cook a chicken korma, rather than reading a rather bland blog posts with bullet points, explaining how to cook a chicken korma, instead you have created a piece of content marketing, which is much more interesting, includes YouTube videos, step-by-step instructions via text and also a sound recording.

Therefore, the work is much more engaging, it’s much more useful and this means that your customers more likely to return back to the website for advice on how to cook a tasty meal.

This means that your content marketing could benefit from the following.

 

A low bounce rate

Because you done such a good job of helping somebody to cook a tasty meal, they are likely to stay on the page for let’s say 30 minutes, while they gain instructions on how to cook chicken korma.

This means that the person looking to cook a tasty meal, is engaged with your company website, because it’s providing quality advice, which means that your business may have a low bounce rate.

 

Time on-site

the longer that you can keep a shopper on your website the better, it’s indicator that your website is offering quality advice.

So for example if a business was to provide complex instructions on how to cook a chicken korma, which is not easy to follow, then the person might spend less than 60 seconds reading advice.

However, when you compare this to your website, and somebody is following how to cook a chicken korma from start to finish, that might take let’s say 25 minutes plus, this means that they are on your website for a long period, 25 minutes. This is really good for your seo.

Backlinks

 

Because you have published content marketing, which is very high-quality and also useful, you may obtain high quality backlinks.

 

Add internal links

Are it’s important, that when you’re writing new blog posts, or simply linking between main pages, that you use internal links.

So, what are internal links?

Well, internal links, are simply backlinks, which take you from one page, or blog posts to another page on your website. So for example let’s say that you are writing a blog post, about ski boots, you might mention another brand of ski boot that you sell, and you might links that main page, therefore you added a internal link, from one of your blog posts, to a main page, that sells that brand of ski boot.

Engagement

engagement, is something that we mentioned earlier, however we think it’s worth mentioning again, that is when your writing your blog posts, you should make the work really interesting to read.

So for example it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about how to reduce tooth pain, or how to paint a garden fence, you should make the blog post as interesting as possible.

For example if you can, also make a YouTube video, with a member of staff, explaining a brand-new product or service that your offering, this may help to keep a shopper, more interested in what your business is selling.

For example, if the shopper, had to read say 1000 words, to find the answer to that question, then they may quickly get bored of reading text, and leave to find the answer elsewhere.

However if you had embedded in a YouTube video onto the page, which offers  advice on how to cook that curry, then the person might sit and watch our video the say over 30 minutes, which will increase time on-site, which many seo agencies believe helps improve your businesses search engine optimisation.

The reason for that is, if obviously a shopper, is spending 30 minutes watching a video on your company’s website, then they are obviously interested in the products or services you are selling.

If they were to spend in comparison let’s say less than 10 seconds on your website, then they are not likely to be interested in the products or services that you are selling.

So, if your digital marketing agency, manages to increase your time on-site, that is the length of time that the average shopper spends on your website, then this can help to improve what seo agencies, often referred to as the engagement signals.

That is the more engaged you can get your shoppers, with your company’s website, by spending longer on your company’s website, then this can help to improve your search engine optimisation.

2023/03/03 2023/03/03

Can your business complete SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) work in-house?

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Sometimes it takes quite a while to get the answer when reading a blog post, but we are going to say straightaway that the answer the question is a resounding yes. Theoretically, there’s nothing stopping a business completing search engine optimisation work in-house, yet there are some barriers that stop a lot of businesses from completing this work, some of these we shall detail now.

 

Lack of knowledge

A lot of businesses simply make the mistake of thinking that search engine optimisation is straightforward and simple, a walk in the park so to speak.

However Google’s algorithm is now very sophisticated, ever since major algorithm updates, such as the Google Hummingbird updates, it’s also sensitive to all of the SEO work that you complete, in that even minor changes, can sometimes cause fluctuations to your website ranks in the serps. 

 

What businesses have to appreciate is that over recent years, updates such as:

The Google Helpful Content Update

The Google Panda updates

The Google Penguin updates

These are just some of Google’s algorithmic  updates which are used to workout whether the seo is good quality or not.

 

Some businesses simply start implementing low quality seo, which later results in a Google penalty.

Sometimes businesses get themselves into a negative spiral, where they believe that they are completing the SEO work the right way, what they are actually doing is seriously damaging the businesses search engine optimisation, sometimes to the point where it will recover for years to come.  

 

Here are some of the advantages of completing SEO work in-house

 

Cost saving

You have to think of PPC (Google Adwords), a bit like a light switch, it’s either on or it’s off, and when its off, its obviously not generating any new sales for you.

However with search engine optimisation things are different, in that if the SEO agency does a really good job, then you could see an influx of organic shoppers (visitors to your website, that come from Google’s organic results) , this can sometimes last for a period even when the SEO company has finished optimising the website. So, for example, sometimes, the seo business will stop completing work, but you may still continue to receive shoppers, because your website for a period of time, after the seo work has stopped, continues to remain, lets say on page 1 of Google. Yet how long it stays there, does depend on the competition, for example, if they are heavily investing in seo, you’re your business may be overtaken more quickly.

 

By completing seo work in house you could save money

So the most obvious benefits of not hiring an agency, is saving costs. If a marketing agency is really good at what it does, that it has a huge amount of experience, a lot of clients, that agency is likely to charge quite an expensive day rate to consultant, and complete the search engine optimisation work.

So the most obvious benefit of completing the work in-house, rather than hiring an agency to do this work, is that you will be saving money.

 

You are the expert of your business sector

Even when you hire one of the top marketing agencies in the country, to help improve your businesses search engine optimisation (SEO), often they still need to take time of your staff, within your business, that is to work with your business, to understand  products and services that your business retails.

Therefore even when you hire an seo company, they may still require the time. So, by completing the work in house, you wont have time spent dealing with your marketing company, instead all of the digital marketing work, will be managed inhouse. This can sometimes save time, where you don’t have to call, e-mail and have meetings with your seo company.

 

The main benefits of hiring are an seo agency

We think that there are a huge number of benefits that come with hiring an seo agency like ours, but of course we would say that, right?

Well, to explain why we think it’s worth hiring in a good seo agency, we will explain.:

We can’t over emphasise enough the word “good”, when picking an seo agency- quite simply put there are a massive number of marketing companies out there to pick from, and you can choose from quite literally millions of different companies.

However with that said, if you partner with a really good agency, one the cuts the mustard, then they could have a transformative effect on your businesses.