2026/03/10 2026/03/10

How to improve your ranking on Google: A 2026 guide

By Sarah Jones|Categories: Uncategorized|Tags: |Comments Off on How to improve your ranking on Google: A 2026 guide

A comprehensive guide on how to improve your ranking on Google

Table of contents:

How to improve your websites U.X (User Experience)
Why it’s important to create high-quality content marketing, keeping Google EEAT in mind
How to improve your business’s on-page SEO
How to improve your business’s off-page SEO
What is technical SEO and how to improve it

How can we help

So, you’ve just returned from the web designers, let’s just say they have knocked it out of the park.

The website is amazing, well designed, and you’re happy that it conveys your business’s products and services perfectly.

But what happens when the phone then doesn’t ring?

Your not anywhere to be found in Google search, your missing out on business opportunities and sales- well this is where we can help.

It’s not simple

Okay first things first, SEO is no walk in the park.

Its most definitely not a piece of cake.

Any business therefore saying they can magically wave a wand and get your businesses flooded with new sales through organic SEO, well there telling porky pies.

Search engine optimisation is about optimising the website, this takes time. You need to create valuable content, optimise the on-page factors such as titles, make the website user friendly and build a ton on quality backlinks.

This is all massively time consuming. However, don’t be deterred, although its important to understand and appreciate how much work is actually needed.

How can we improve our organic ranking on Google?

Improve your user experience (U.X)

When reading various blog posts that dispense SEO wisdom, well you’ve most likely time and time again come across this term U.X.

U.X or to give its full title “user experience” well this sounds complicated to optimise for doesn’t it?

Its not really, it basically means in a nutshell make your website a piece of cake to use. Make the main menu simple to use, lay the pages out in a logical way. It also means making the website fast, designing a well-designed mobile version of the website. It means basically, making the shoppers life that bit easier.

We have all been on say an e-commerce website, where the design is just, well a bit rubbish.

For example, stocking thousands of products, and not being able to tell if there in stock, when they can be delivered. You might even have then a prompt, call us to obtain delivery times.

You don’t want that, if your buying say a part to repair your bathroom, such as shower tray, you want it delivered almost instantly!

Content marketing is king

Without superb content marketing, you’re not going to be able to retain a shopper’s interest.

Whether that’s a blog post, dispensing rather lengthy advice or a product page where there’s a product description.

The shopper will have questions, that’s before they whip out there credit card to make a purchase.

If those questions are not answered on-page, well the shopper then “pogo-sticks” or just bounces onto another website.

This increases a business “bounce rate” if only one page was visited.

It also means that in Google Analytics the dwell time is normally a bit low.

Now this tells Google, well shoppers are not that interested in the products or services on that page..

Then if the majority of shoppers all do this, well it means that the page is “meeting searchers intent”.

Meaning if they have set out that morning to buy a “suit to look like Austin Powers”- and your website doesn’t offer this, because the bounce rate is much higher than the competition, then you move down Google’s SERP’s.

The websites that move up, are the ones matching search intent, meaning they have exact Austin Power suits. They are keeping the shopper on the website for longer, due to higher dwell times, lower bounce rates.

How do we optimise our on-page SEO

On-page SEO is your key to organic SEO success.

Without it, well, Googlebot, plus Google’s algorithm might not even know what the page is about.

So, optimise your H1-H6 tags, write a nice meta description, and add internal links. There’s so much work that’s normally needed here.

The reason being, some websites have a ton of AI text, some have duplication issues, some have text that even stops Googlebot from indexing the work in the first place.

Therefore, all of this work needs to be completed if you want to rank on page one of Google.

How do we improve our off-page SEO

Google’s ranking algorithm was first named “PageRank”.

Now PageRank mostly used backlinks to decipher how important a page was.

Now this is important to remember, because even though we are many decades on from PageRank, well Google’s algorithm still uses backlinks to determine how important a page is.

Therefore, if you want to improve your ranking, you have to gain backlinks.

Links are often described “votes of confidence”.

Therefore, the more links you get, well the more authoritative the website becomes.

The higher you rank in Google.

However, if you think of backlinks as the fuel to your SEO success, well your not going anywhere with that petrol without an engine.

And content marketing is the engine.

Therefore, for that engine to run perfectly, you need fuel and an engine, this is the same with your business’s links and content marketing.

Technical SEO is another critical component of your SEO soup that needs to be thrown in with the rest of the ingredients.

Now what is technical SEO?

Well, its things such as, making sure the website can get “crawled and indexed”- that’s super important as without Googlebot doing its job, well your not going to appear anywhere on Google!

Then there’s the mobile design, that’s important to get right, so it works on shinny I-phone or Android devices.

Then there’s loading times, if you bought the cheapest hosting you could find, you may then find that your websites super slow.

This will hold the SEO performance back.

Then there’s schema, where you can basically high-light key information on the page.

For example, if you’re a local business, you may want to mark-up your companies NAP, this then tells Google super clearly, this is the companies name, address and phone number.

How can Ryan Christoper Walsh marketing help?

Well, we can complete all of the above work on your behalf.

Let’s face it your busy running your business.

You want to be dealing with building backlinks and writing 2000-word articles!

So why not us do this work for you?

Ryan Christoper Walsh is an SEO agency owner with over 10 years’ experience.

For a free quote, why not give us a ring?

2026/03/07 2026/03/07

What is generative engine optimization & how does it work?

By Sarah Jones|Categories: Uncategorized|Tags: |Comments Off on What is generative engine optimization & how does it work?

Tell more about Generative Engine Optimisation- what is it? How does it work?

We know about search engine optimisation, aka SEO, it’s something that businesses understand that they need. It doesn’t matter if you are a sole trader, or run a huge global business, SEO has become a fundamental part of a business’s marketing efforts.

But what is GEO, what is this latest digital type of marketing?

Well, go and get a nice cup of tea and we will explain more.

In this article we will be discussing the following:

What exactly is generative engine optimisation
What is the main difference between GEO and SEO
How exactly do generative AI systems, such as Google AI Overview work exactly?
Tell me more about the benefits of using GEO
How can our business better optimise our content for the LLM’s

Tell me more about generative engine optimisation

There are now so many new AI platforms out there it’s hard to keep up with the changes.

You have Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot just to name a view. How these AI driver search engines work is very different from how

Google presents organic results.

Therefore, have a nice sip on that tea, let us talk more about generative engine optimisation.

How Google works:

When we think about how the traditional search engines work, they for decades have completed the same process.

That is crawling, indexing and then ranking websites in the organic search results.

Now, this meant to some extent that the shopper, or person wanting to find an answer to query, what they had to do was sift and wade through the information to find an answer.

One the many reasons we believe AI Overviews in Google plus also leading AI platforms like ChatGPT are becoming so popular, is because right in front of your eyes you gain a answer straightaway to your query.

No “pogo-sticking” from page to page, no jumping through different business websites to get the answer you want.

The answer is there right Infront you.

Multiple data points are used

When you want to gain answer from a friend down the pub, is it better to get just one answer, or all your friends tell you what they think.

A lot of people therefore like to gain multiple perspectives to a question; this allows them to make more informed decision.

Again, what is great about the AI platforms is most of them, when “synthesising” a answer to a question, what they do, is they pull an answer from multiple data points.

For example, the answer might come from Bloomberg, come from also say The Guardian and also the Financial Times website.

What this means that the synthesised answer, is an answer that’s come multiple different websites.

Tell me more about the difference between GEO and SEO

In regards to SEO, web pages are ranked according to relevance and quality. The 200 plus ranking factors can often be placed into one of the

Google EEAT guidance. Now GEO is totally different, in real time you’re getting an AI generated response, which is most summarized information that’s been rehashed from the training data that was fed to the LLM in first place.

Authority vs Keywords

We are SEO experts, so what we would say is one of the main differences between SEO and Geo is that SEO is more reliant on keywords.

Therefore, the page is crawled and its indexed, and what this does, it uses keywords to understand what the page is about. Technical SEO also helps with this.

However, GEO is more about pulling answers into its training data, where it has selected the information because it believes that page is authoritative content marketing.

For example, if you want to gain information about the UK financial economy, the LLM’s might be trained to pull data from The Bank of England’s own website for example.

Because the training data and the LLM’s have deemed that as the most authoritative place to go and obtain information relating to the economy.

Different way of measuring performance

There is totally different way of measuring performance that the marketing managers will need to get customised to.

The main difference is with SEO you are focused on the businesses rankings, organic traffic, and conversions.

However, with GEO the goal posts are totally different, for example, now businesses are how often the LLM’s are reference the content through a citation. Then how much traffic comes via those citations, its not therefore a matter of rankings any more, when it comes to GEO optimisation.

Continuous improvement, machine learning, custom built systems

What you have to appreciate is that the LLM’s are custom built systems. They all have their own type of architecture and some are set to incorporate machine learning.

For example, when you ask a question such as how high is the Eiffel tower, when does the restaurant one? If you receive a satisfactory answer, you may press the thumbs button, to symbolise that your happy with that answer that has been provided.

This satisfory response gets fed back to the LLM’s.

However, for example if you were to ask another question, and thousands upon thousands of shoppers are dissatisfied with the response, then the machine learning model is likely to modify the results. Then measure how satisfied the shopper is with the new answers, so that the LLM’s are now constantly learning.

What are the advantages of optimising our content for GEO?

The advantages are absolutely massive.

However, getting there is extremely hard.

The advantages are, when somebody is asking a question about the products or the services that your selling, your business time and time again could be quoted as the answer.

A clear citation then could take those shoppers to your store.
Instead of like with Google organic results, where you’re competing with 10 other organic links, often the LLM’s such as ChatGPT often quote a lot less businesses.

This means less competition.

This means that if you get it right, you could be funnelling potentially tens of thousands of shoppers to your website.

However, because less citations are shown, this means that it’s hard to get your business shown there.

Quality content marketing is still key

What is abundantly clear is this, a business stands no chance of appearing in GEO results or SEO unless you have really high-quality content marketing.

The LLM’s through their training data, plus, also the search engines such as Google, have hundreds of thousands or millions of pages that they could select for displaying in the SERP’s or the LLM’s.

So why should they choose your work?

The answer is, therefore the content marketing needs to be very high quality.

Therefore, whether you are optimising for GEO or for SEO, what you have to think about is Google EEAT.

How can you show in your written work, you have experience and expertise in terms of what you are talking about?

How can you then improve the authority of that page?

How can you demonstrate that the work is trustworthy?

When you do this, and you produce very high-quality content marketing, which offers a far superior answer than the competition, then you can rank higher in Google’s serps.

Also, you are more likely to be displayed as answer in the LLMs if you constantly writing good quality content marketing, such as what you are reading here.

What constitutes as high quality content marketing?

Better than the competition

In this article, we discussing GEO, however, here’s something that our marketing agency has done for many years.

That is, look at the question that you want to write about in Google’s Organic Serp’s.

Then ask yourself how can you make your work even better?

How can you write a better article than the competition have written?

Then you have to add the following on-page SEO factors, now these are good for both GEO and SEO.

That is, ad structured data.

Add structured data to your website

Take the time to add structured data, this will help the search engines, and GEO to understand what you are writing about.

Content distribution

If you are regularly reader to our blog, you will know that we have been blogging about semantic SEO for many years.

There is good reason for this, as it can help improve the businesses organic rankings, and the GEO.

Therefore, in terms of the semantic SEO, get your business mentioned on high quality websites.

This could mean the following:

Business mentions, so brand mentions
Gain high quality links
Also NAP mentions.
Google EEAT

In this article we talk about Google EEAT, the reason is, if you get this right, your website will rank higher organically.

However, because its ranking higher organically, then its more likely to be cited by Google AI Overviews.

Also many of the worlds leading SEO experts, what they say is, if your website is ranking high organically, then this text, such as blog post is more likely to be read by the LLM’s.

If your website is read by the LLM’s, then it’s more likely to be cited as an answer.

Improve brand authority and also semantic web

Its also important to improve your businesses brand authority, now we do fully appreciate that this is easier said than done.

However, what we have read at this agency, is that businesses which have say more backlinks, cited as a brand more often, these are the websites more authority.

And as any top SEO consultant from around the whole world will tell you, for ages now to improve your businesses organic SEO you needed backlinks.

Google when first was invented, by the great Larry Page, they created PageRank.

Now this meant that to rank higher organically, a business needed a number of quality links.

However now in 2026, its still thought that backlinks are very important. The reason for this simple, backlinks improves the authority of website, they said more link equity through to the domain, if the inbound links are high quality backlinks.

Therefore, it just stands to reason that in the new era of GEO optimisation, that the AI platforms such as Perplexity are going to take answers cited from the first page of Google.

Even if you run a marketing company, and yoru thinking there’s no coloration between the first page Google results, and the AI results, well what about Google AI Overviews?

Its widely thought that if you rank highly organically, Google will cite your business more often in Google AI overviews.

Good technical SEO is more important than ever

It used to be the case that web designers and SEO agencies around the globe, were just checking to see if Googlebot could crawl and index the page.

Because the reason is, businesses, plus their appointed SEO experts, often they were only asked to optimise just for Google.

So, they were just focused on whether Googlebot could crawl and index that page.

However, times have changed, the LLMs now need to read the work, therefore its important to make sure that the AI models can easily crawl and index your businesses content marketing.

The technical SEO needs to be set up right, for this we would recommend hiring an agency.

They need to make the following:

The website is mobile friendly
Implemented SLL
The website has a clear site structure
The GEO bots can crawl the page
That the website hosting is reliable, and doesn’t go off often
Make sure that there’s an XML site map
Have a read of the robot.txt to insure there’s nothing stopping the page from getting indexed
Optimise the website so it fast
Mobile friendliness to ensure that the mobile version of the website can also get crawled and indexed
Internal links should be added, so that the bots can crawl the website.

How can we better optimise our website for ChatGPT?

Gain brand mentions:

What especially important for optimising for ChatGPT is gaining mentions, that’s brand mentions on high quality websites.

If your brand is regularly quoted on high authority websites, which relevant to your business niche, then your business will often be cited more ChatGPT.

Therefore for example, if you run a business say selling e-bikes, if your regularly cited by the top bike magazines, then your business is going to be cited more by the LLMS.

Relevancy

The websites, we believe that are more focused on selling a particularly product or service, do better in ChatGPT.

This means the businesses which are more focused on say product line, such as selling Jacuzzis online, these will be cited more often.

However the content marketing needs to answer commonly asked question, it needs to addresses the questions your customer frequently asks.

Therefore, if the content is relevant, then your business more likely to be cited.

This is why our top SEO business always says that if you optimise for Google organic results, and focus on improving your businesses Google EEAT score, you can also at the same time increase your businesses chances of being cited more in the LLMS, such as ChatGPT.

Domain authority

If you were to have a chat, with the best GEO agencies in the world, they will say to optimise for ChatGPT you have to also focus on improving your business domain authority.

To do that it’s the same as traditional SEO, meaning more quality backlinks.

Conversational tone, plus don’t use AI copy

If you want to increase how often your business is cited in the LLM’s, you often have to write using a conversational tone.

We always at this agency, describe this as offering advice to the reader, as if you were talking to a real person in a shop.

Now you must use a conversational tone.

However, don’t use AI text, it’s far better that you write this text yourself. Remember the guidance of Google EEAT, that is, the work should show that you’re an expert in terms of what you are talking about.

Whether your talking about luxury aftershave, or perhaps the best hyper car on the market right now, you have to show you’re an expert on what you’re writing about.

Keep your written work up-to-date

Whether its training data, that’s been used to train the LLMS, such as ChatGPT.

Or perhaps it’s a blog post to offer an in-depth answer to query that your customer regularly asks, that you want to rank high for within

Google’s organic SERPs.

Its important to keep your content marketing up to date, the reason is both ChatGPT and Google want to cite an up-to-date answer to a question.

2026/03/06 2026/03/06

AI SEO Explained: How UK Brands Can Optimise for AI Search

By Sarah Jones|Categories: Uncategorized|Tags: |Comments Off on AI SEO Explained: How UK Brands Can Optimise for AI Search

All you need to know about AI SEO: How UK companies can appear in AI Search

It’s something of a buzzword at the moment, a topic of hot conversation if you like- that is, how can a business appear in AI search.

After all, every man and his dog is now using, for example, ChatGPT, so businesses will naturally want to appear there to flog more goods.

But how do you do that?

Well, organic SEO is still important. Therefore, ranking for that list of blue links is still important.

However, as you will know, more businesses are appearing as citations in Google AI Overviews in ChatGPT in Perplexity.

Therefore, if you don’t appear there, well, you could be missing out on a lot of sales. So don’t get left behind, let’s jump on the bandwagon, and let’s make your business more visible on AI search.

LLMs can extract your knowledge.

So, perhaps the most important concept to grasp is that the LLMs, which stand for large language models, are trained on text.

This text is a test that appears on company websites.

But what is AI SEO?

Well, with organic SEO, let’s say you’ve just written a brilliant article and you want to close your MacBook and have a glass of wine.

But before you do, remember to send the article to Google for manual indexing.

Well, things are different with the LLMs; there’s not normally a tool where you can send your brand-new blog post for indexing.

Therefore, this basically means you still have to ensure it can be read and indexed, but often you can’t instruct, for example, an LLM to index the work.

However, you can help the LLMs

The LLMs basically want to extract a sentence or some facts from your website to answer a question.

Therefore, the leading and best SEO companies in the world are among the best, because one of the best ways of getting your business cited in the LLMs is to, for example, have a good page structure.

This means doing the following:

Good on-page SEO
Write in clear sentences
Write in a way that the information could be mentioned in a citation
Make sure that all the information is accurate

Authoritative

Now, this is where there are massive cross-overs and similarities with organic SEO. Now, talk to any of the best of the best marketing agencies, and they will tell you that to improve a business’s organic SEO, you must understand Google EEAT.

Now, a key part of Google EEAT is “authorativeness”

Which boils down to two main factors: how often your business gets cited by quality websites.

The other is the number of quality backlinks the business has.

Now cited means that the brand name is mentioned in a newspaper article.

Because of the semantic web, Google has a really good understanding of who is an expert in their business niche.

Now, how LLMs such as ChatGPT decide who to cite may vary from LLM to LLM.

However, it’s widely thought that if you can prove that your business is an authority, that you truly are an expert in your business sector, this is the work that gets cited by the LLMS.

Therefore, leading SEO consultants believe the following is important when improving a business’s authority:

That is:

More backlinks
More mentions
A higher ranking on Google may mean that your work is cited more often by the LLM.
Social media may have some influence.
How often does your name appear on other websites, such as if you’re an SEO expert, how often does your name come up on other leading SEO websites?

Must be structured right and offer clear answers

At this agency, we have always written in a conversational tone.

Which means our content marketing has always been structured with headings and an FAQ-style format.

Now we believe that this is the best way forward when optimising for the LLMs/

It just stands to reason that Googlebot often wants to crawl and index a page and read the on-page SEO clues, to decipher what that page is selling or offering advice on.

Therefore, there’s no reason whatsoever why the LLMS would not do the same.

Therefore, SEO best practices are important, such as:

Adding H1 -H6 titles
Writing alt text
Using bold text on some titles that are not header tags
Adding internal links
Adding anchor text that’s descriptive and describes the link
Etc etc

Just be as clear as possible.

This is one of the problems that sometimes occurs, and I most definitely do this from time to time.

That is to waffle a bit; now this means that content marketing can go off-topic.

However, many leading agencies, including ourselves, now believe it’s better to stay on topic and also to improve the authority of the website and the pages.

The reason is that if the work is high quality, you’re making it abundantly clear what your business is selling, what you’re good at, and that you know that area.

So, for example, if you retail fine-quality watches, make sure the website offers the best possible advice.

If you’re answering key questions that your customers are asking you, such as “How to spot a fake Rolex Watch” – then if the advice is really good, you’re optimising for the LLMs and organic SEO all at the same time.

Therefore, you’re basically killing two birds with one stone.

However, you then have to show that you are an authority, that other businesses and blogs respect your knowledge and like the advice.

Therefore, again, a good social media following, a lot of backlinks, and a lot of mentions improve the semantic SEO.

Topical authority

Here’s another strong prediction our business has: businesses that are going to get cited more in LLMs, such as ChatGPT, will be those that are more focused on selling a few product lines rather than many.

The reason is that, for example, let’s return to our example of a retailer of luxury watches: if they offer advice and repeatedly publish work on, say, used Rolex watches, then they are an expert in that area.

However, we believe that e-commerce retailers that sell a huge selection of items will struggle in AI search.

For example, a retailer might sell men’s suits, footwear, watches, and aftershave. Now, this is more of a broad brush; the advice is going to be more general, so we don’t think these businesses are going to surface as answers as regularly as a laser-focused business that’s only selling one product line.

Structured data

Time and time again, various SEO agencies are stating that it’s important to add schema markup to your work.

This could be an article schema, an FAQ schema, or a schema to mark up your company’s NAP information.

However, it just makes perfect sense to add more schema, because this helps your organic SEO and the LLMS understand what the page is about.

Show that you are an expert in your business sector

This is another really important point; again, this has strong overlaps with organic SEO.

Google EEAT says that in your business’s content marketing, you should show that you have experience and expertise in the products and services that you are selling.

Therefore, if you publish just one blog post or an occasional article, this is usually not enough to demonstrate to the LLMS and Google’s algorithm that you are an expert in your business sector.

Normally, you have to blog and add advice over a long period; it’s only then that the LLMS start to crawl and read more and more of your work. Then, like Google’s algorithm, they can start to see that due to the number of articles, you are an expert in your business sector.

However, again, blogging and adding articles are only one part of the equation; you still have to show that other businesses and customers like this work. Therefore, this often means gaining backlinks with high DA scores, as well as, for example, having a lot of mentions and likes on social media for the work you have published.

Again, just like backlinks, it’s important to get brand mentions to improve your business’s semantic SEO.

2026/03/03 2026/03/03

How Many Backlinks Does It Take to Rank on Page 1?

By Sarah Jones|Categories: Uncategorized|Tags: |Comments Off on How Many Backlinks Does It Take to Rank on Page 1?

Can you tell me how many backlinks are needed to a get business on page 1 of Google?

Building backlinks can be massively time consuming, therefore naturally the link builder will want to know how many backlinks they need to build.

However, lets answer this question right at the top of the article, that is there’s no fixed number of backlinks a business can build to get on page one of Google.f

This means that there is no magic set number.

The reason being is that there are so many other factors to consider.

In SEO we call these factors, ranking factors, and in matter of fact there are over 200 ranking factors to consider.

Therefore, you could be building backlinks until your blue in the face, however, you have to work on improving the other SEO areas as well.

Why competitor backlink analysis is like comparing apples with pears

When you use a quality backlink checking tool, you can have a look at what backlinks your direct competitors have been building.

If they have been busy bees, then they might have built a ton of backlinks.

However, here’s why comparing your businesses backlinks with your direct competitors is a bit like comparing apples with pears.

The reason is, often businesses have a few or many really good backlinks. These might pass a lot of link equity, and are like the jewel’s if you like in the crown. Meaning that these are the many links that are giving that business so much domain authority.

However, here is the slight dilemma, that is, sometimes these links can’t be replicated.

If you run a restaurant, and it’s been voted the best restaurant in the whole country for what you do, you might gain a backlink from a national newspaper.

However, you direct competitor that’s just down the road, who also owns a restaurant doing the same kind of food can’t easily replicate that link. Because, well, the link has been given on the basis of a food award.

This is why comparing competitor’s backlink profiles is a bit like comparing apples with pears- as sometimes, you see that your direct competitors have good links, however replicating them is difficult.

Naturally built

Therefore, if you approach backlink building, from a mere mathematical perspective, often this approach to link building just doesn’t work.

The reason is, well you might say our direct competitors have 100 backlinks, I need 101 and I will then outrank them.

It really honestly does not work like that, and we shall explain why.

The reason that we think that is quite simple, that is the best backlinks come when you build a natural backlink profile.

Now what this means is, rather than just trying to replicate the same links most of your competitors have, the best links come from publishing superior quality content marketing.

Google EEAT and standing out by being better

Therefore, we would highly recommend having a good read of Google’s Helpful Content update as well as having a good read of Google EEAT advice.

Now what that will tell you is, if you offer top quality superior advice, and you answer that question better than any other business on the planet, then Google will rank that page highly in the SERP’s.

Now if you answer the question really well, then you can rank higher than the competition.

Perhaps if you have answered the question really, really well, then you might rank in the top 5 globally for that question.

Now, as perhaps millions of people might find that page super useful, they will naturally want to link to you.

For example, imagine you offer some DIY advice, which paint brushes and varnishes should be used on floorboards to achieve a transparent finish.

Imagine how many DIY websites, bloggers, interior design websites might link to you. Then rather than just replicating the competitor’s same links, well, you’ve potentially opened the flood gates for a lot of relevant websites to want to naturally link to you, therefore, if the content marketing is really helpful you can earn links this way.

Quality is far better than quantity

Think of it like this, you can stuff yourself on pizza and garlic bread and feel rather bloated!

Yet at the same time, a short period after you can feel hungry.

The reason being is that food offers no nutrients, its just empty calories, that are going to expand your waist line!

Now building backlinks, can do the exact same thing- that is you can have a backlink profile as long as your arm, but if there not quality links, then this could actually be harming your businesses organic SEO.

Therefore, think of quality links, the same way you would think about quality food. You want to obtain quality links; therefore, quality is far better than quantity.

How do I earn quality backlinks?

The best way to earn quality backlinks is to gather your most experienced and knowledgably staff all in one room.

Then put the kettle on, work with your SEO agency to come up with a “content calendar”.

What this will do is set out for the months ahead, what you are going to be writing about.

Then you want your staff, who have the most experience and expertise in that area to help write the content marketing.

Pour their knowledge and expertise into the work, just the same way you pour a large glass of wine on Friday evening!

This means, work with the person that’s the expert on that product, and incorporate their knowledge into the article.

This will then improve the Google EEAT score of the work, because Googlebot when indexing it will instantly know that the person who has published the work, knows what they are talking about.

Plus, think about how you can improve the Google EEAT score for that page, so if that person is say an expert on employment law, then do get their opinion and incorporate that into the employment law article.

Link diversity

Now, it is possible with link building too have too much of a good thing.

Now what we mean by that is, let’s say you use a backlink checking tool, you see that you have a good quality backlink that has just linked to say the homepage on the website.

Now you might think, that’s good, lets reach out and contact the website that’s linked to you, and see if we can get some more, then some more, and some more links from he same business.

However, this is a flawed strategy.

The reason why it’s a flawed strategy is simply because you’re going to then obtain far too many links all from one place.

Ideally, the best backlink profiles, a business can get is when you have quality links, from websites with high DA score, but from a wide range of different businesses.

Therefore, you have say 100 links, but all of those links come from say 100 different websites.

Don’t buy or use spam links

Our top recommendation to you, would be never, ever buy links.

Spam links are a total false economy, waste of time, and even mean that the website obtains a Google penalty.

This means that Google doesn’t link businesses which build spam links, what can happen is that the business is removed from the index.

Which means that the website can disappear, it could be ranked say 3rd, then because the SEO company has built so many spam links, it then gets removed.

This means that its de-indexed because of say a Google Penguin penalty.

Then it can be a very long road to recovery.

In matter of fact the business may never sometimes get back on page one of Google, because of it building spam links.

It damages Google’s trust in that business.

So, this is why you have to choose your SEO agencies wisely!

Backlinks are not everything!

As we mentioned right at the top of this article, backlinks are not everything!

There are a lot of other ranking factors which Google uses to work out which businesses should be ranked on page 1.
Content quality is key.

Therefore, if your website has a lot of content thin, duplicated pages, or AI written text, well this means that even if you have been building a ton of links, if the content marketing is low quality, often you will never rank on page 1.

How do I find quality links to build?

The best way to gain links is to earn them.

This is why even the biggest brands in the whole world, why they still spend millions on creating content marketing.

Whether this be blog posts, infographics, on embedded video.

What the businesses want is to offer helpful advice.

Whether that’s why a particular running trainer is the best in the world, or someone sat at a desk explaining why they are the best solicitor in that area.

This can help create links, because your suppliers, other businesses, people who have found the work useful and helpful can then link to it.
So therefore, by being super helpful, you can gain links.

Does link building ever come to an end?

No, not really.

Links are always being deleted, plus, the competitors are always building brand new links.

So, in that respect it’s a bit like building sand castles when the tide is coming in!

Therefore, this is why it’s a balance between competitor backlink building, however, we think at this SEO agency that more emphasis should be placed on creating high quality, helpful content marketing.

This work should have a super high Google EEAT score, which can then help to raise that page in Google’s SERP’s.

When you do this, quite simply more people will read the work.

The more people that read you work, some of them might have their own blogs, business websites and choose to mention your work.

Why is my website ranking lower if I have better links?

This comes back to the point that we made a little earlier on.

That is Google’s algorithm doesn’t just use backlinks in isolation to work out where a business should rank in the SERP’s.

It uses over 200 various ranking factors, backlinks, sure they are important, the right ones are really valuable.

However, the rest of the ranking factors must also be improved.

How much should we pay for link building?

Here at Ryan C Walsh, we offer fixed-priced monthly packages. As part of this work, we can help to improve your backlinks.

How can Ryan C Walsh help?

We are one of the best most experienced SEO companies in Wales, for a quote why not call us?

2026/02/28 2026/02/28

How can we gain more local customers by using SEO?

By Sarah Jones|Categories: Uncategorized|Tags: |Comments Off on How can we gain more local customers by using SEO?

Introduction

Okay, so we appreciate that its 2026, SEO has been around for, well donkey’s years.

However, each and every year brand new businesses will be set-up.

They may pay for a fancy website, thinking that will be the golden ticket to business success.

But what happens when the phone doesn’t ring?

What happens when the showroom is looking, well a bit quite?

Well this is where local SEO can help.

Google Business + Google’s Organic Results + Google AI Overviews = Business success

For businesses to be more visible, well you have to pop up when people want your products or services.

Therefore, the power of search engine optimisation really lies with the fact that your business can appear, when people want to buy your products or services.

This is where our team can come in, we can help your business to magically appear in the map results, the organic results. Plus, if really work our magic, then its possible that a business even gets cited in the Google AI Overview results as well.

What Is Local SEO?

Sock it to me, what is local SEO, how can it help my business in 2026?

Okay, so lets start with a slight negative, then balance that out with a positive point.

The negative is, for any business, solicitor, dentist or dog walking service to appear number 1 the organic results is now harder than ever.

Why is that so?

Its harder than ever simply because, your up against competitors who know SEO works for there business. They will have been working ultra hard to maintain their position, plus they will have a flying start, because well, they might have been investing in the process for many, many years prior to 2026.

This means that there ranking factors, such as there backlink profile is much stronger.

Should you give up? Pull down the roller shutter doors, and bow down to your competitors?

Well most definitely not.

You do need a top SEO company, that’s where we come in.

Are we cheap?

No, we most definitely are not the cheapest marketing agency out there. We leave the spam links, the AI content for some of our competitors.

We know what works, we know what doesn’t work.

Therefore, we are not cheapest, but our work is quality.

How do we appear in Google’s Business Profile results?

Less get down to the important part.

How can business magically appear in Google’s Business results.

Well, it comes down to relevance, distance and prominence.

In a nutshell, a business often needs to be close to a lot of the customer when they are asking “where’s nearest craft beer pub”.

Then there’s prominence, how many positive business reviews? Has the company got a good social media following, a lot of positive reviews.

Does the business have positive reviews on Google Business, on Trustpilot etc etc?

Is local SEO worth it?

Well, don’t get us wrong, as this article serves to illustrate, its not a cheap process.

Its also not a fast process.

If your competitors have good links, been writing quality content, plus the user experience is so blooming good there holding the shoppers interest for a long period, well you do have your work cut out.

There’s no two ways about it, it’s like competing in a heavy weight boxing competition, your going to reach the top by beating the competitors below you.

But if your competitors have been watching Rocky movies, and working out in the gym like there life depended on it, well your up against tougher competition.

And well this is the same with SEO, if a business is turnover millions, and lets say the majority of there revenue comes via digital advertising, there not going give up there top spot without a good fight.

Optimise your Google Business profile

When you’re running a small business, we appreciate that there’s a million one things to do.

Your ordering stock, you’re dealing with difficult customers, and staff that maybe not as productive as you like.

This is stressful, we get it.

So when it comes to setting up your Google Business profile, well you might think, lets put 30 minutes work and then lets get down the pub!
Hmmm

That is a flawed strategy. The reason being is simple, for some business there Google Business profile is a huge massive competitive advantage.

Its so strong that when anyone in that area is say looking for a accountant, you spring up, and you have say 47 positive reviews with customers singing your praises.

Now your competitor, or your business, if its half way down the page on Google’s results, well why would a customer choose that business?

They have to go past the Google AdWords results, past the Google Business results, then keep scrolling past the Google AI answer that might be there, then to select your business in position say 5.

Why would anyone do that?

Unless you’re standing out because of schema mark-up generating a rich snippet?
Precisely?

Often the majority of customers wont scroll past those results, therefore, you could be losing out on business. Therefore to optimise and enhance your Google My Business results, you need to do the following:

Gain positive reviews

Ask customers who are singing your praises at say your hair saloon to leave a review. If they love how their new barnet looks, then do capitalise on that, ask them to write a rather lovely review about how good Sharron is and doing a cut and blow dry.

Verify your Google Business account

If you’ve got a Google Business account that is being regularly displayed in Googles local results, well its likely to be the envy of your competitors.

Therefore, its better to verify the account, which means that you can lock people out from changing the details. For example, we have seen competitors change the opening hours, by reducing them, with the intention of costing that business sales.

NAP and opening hours

You need to add your companies NAP details. You also need to add the opening hours, and to keep them up to date. The reason being is, if the Google Business account says your open 6pm on Monday, yet you decided to regularly shut at 5pm, well you might have a frustrated customer.

Someone who has driven across Cardiff, then noticed the pet store is closed, there in the rain, he’s not a happy bunny- so he leaves a negative review! Therefore do keep your opening hours up to date.

NAP consistency is super important

A lot of SEO agencies bang on about this point, its with really good reason as it’s a common local SEO mistake.

That mistake is, that the business sometimes changes its main address, say to a unit just down the road. However, if all your Thomson Local,

Yell, Wales Online business directory listings are saying your old address, then your Google Business is saying another address, this causes what are known as conflicting business citations.

These are never a good idea. They will hold your businesses local SEO back, like trying to run in a very strong head wind.

So all NAP details must be the same.

Build local business citations

Okay, so don’t go crazy building too many business citations, you don’t need hundreds of these.

Just identify with your marketing team which are the best business directories in your business niche.

For example if you’re a dental practice in the centre of Cardiff, who are your main competitors using, to write there business citations. For example, it could be a dental website where you can write a profile about each dentist. It could be your on the Welsh Governments website for local dentists, it just be a Yellow Pages advertisement,

Whatever it is, just make sure that the NAP information is kept up to date.

Digital PR and Local Relevance

Okay, so this part is easier said than done

However, when you have Googled your main competitors, what you often see if a lot of news results about the business as well.

Whether that be on Wales Online or perhaps

Write content marketing for your local customers

The best part about owning a local business, is often the management and the owners are in the business on a day-to-day basis. This means that you get to learn the questions that your customers often ask about your products.

This means that you are best placed to advise and help the marketing agencies as to what the content marketing should be written about.

Then it’s the SEO agencies job to think about Google EEAT, the Google Helpful Content Update and also use best white hat methods to optimise the work.

In a nutshell, if you produce work that very helpful, useful to local customers, then they will read this work for a long period.

Your local business could benefit from the following:

High dwell times
More backlinks
More customers
More organic traffic
Lower bounce rates
Your local business appearing higher for even more keywords

Its important to carry out keyword research

This may contradict our previous point, but its an important point none the less.

Although the owners of the business will know what your customers are frequently asking in regards to the products or the services you sell, its still important not take a tunnel vision.

What mean by that is some businesses make the mistake of optimising for just one or a few keywords. However after using quality keyword research tools, such as Google Search Console, Ahrefs and also Moz Pro, you will often find that customers use hundreds if not sometimes thousands of different keywords to locate the products and the services that they want.

Optimise for a wide range of keywords

Therefore, your business might sell quality coffee to wholesalers and coffee shops. Now your business website might be optimised for arabica coffee, but if you don’t optimise for organic coffee beans, then you could be potentially missing out on a lot of business.

Should we be adding structured data to our website?

You should most definitely be adding structured data, such as JSON-LD structured data to your company website. If you don’t know how to do this, then talk to your web developer. Its particularly important for local businesses to have schema to mark-up your companies NAP information.

The NAP information is often in the footer, if not the contact us page, sometimes its also in the main pages.

The NAP information just means your company name, its address plus also phone number. Its fine to write this just in plain text, and most probably Googlebot will still be able to crawl and index that NAP information and still understand it.

However, top SEO consultant know that as this information is crucial to how Google’s algorithms work, especially which businesses appear in the Google MAP results, its worth taking the time to mark-up your companies NAP information.

The NAP information should be therefore highlighted using schema. Google actually offers a free tool to highlight your companies NAP information.

Technical SEO

When you consider technical SEO, its often only mentioned when your talking about large businesses, such as e-commerce shops. However, good technical SEO is still needed as well for local business. Therefore, for your company in Cardiff we would recommend doing the following:

Robot.txt

You can use robot.txt to give instructions directly to Googlebot and the other bots. For example, requesting that the terms and conditions page on your website doesn’t get crawled.

This helps preserve your businesses crawl budget, which is very important especially in the case of a local business.

The reason is, for a local business, its more than likely that the crawl budget for the website will be low.

Therefore, you need to use your crawl budget wisely, and get Googlebot to crawl the pages you want indexed.

Fast

If you make your website fast, then you could have the advantage over your competitors local SEO.

The reason a lot of local businesses might have gone with very cheap hosting.

The hosting might therefore be very slow, therefore this could damage your businesses local SEO.

You need super fast hosting, buy the best, buy the fastest hosting your company can afford.

XML sitemap

If you have say a WordPress website, use it to add an XML site map through a plugin.

WordPress has many plugin options, such as Yoast SEO, where you can actually add an XML sitemap for free.

This then acts like a sat nav, directing Googlebot to crawl and index the pages you want.

The XML sitemap should be configured so that it automatically updates, this is important.

Say that your business add a brand-new blog post, that many of your team members have worked on. You want this to automatically add to the XML sitemap, so that the work can get crawled and indexed by Googlebot, then so that the new article can appear in Google’s results.

Smartphone

We all know how important it is that the website works on say I Phone and Android devices. Practically all website designers now will offer a mobile version of yoru website, if they don’t include this in the fee, well you most definitely need it, because roughly 50% of visitors comes via mobile phones.

Therefore you need a mobile version of your website.

However, that’s not the end of the matter, you also need to spend a long period improving the UX.

UX stands for user experience, which means basically make the website super simple to use.

When you on websites such as Amazon, there website design is so good, the user experience is excellent. What this does is offer a better user experience, which means higher dwell times, lower bounce rates.

Therefore make sure the user experience is good.

What marketing tools should we use?

For all businesses we would recommend using Google Analytics.

We would also recommend using Google Search Console.

These are both excellent tools, you can for example see how your organic traffic is increasing, or if the SEO is going wrong, how it might be decreasing!

Then there’s Google Search Console, where you can monitor where the keywords are ranking.

We would recommend using these tools, plus, for keyword research and link building do use Moz Pro.

We think that Moz Pro comes with a one week free subscription, so you can try the SEO tool before you buy.

Come to the SEO experts.

We are one of the most experienced and knowledgeable SEO agencies in the whole of Cardiff.

We have SEO experts, some of our SEO team have over 10 years’ experience. Therefore, we can help you to obtain more sales.

How can we gain more customers by using local SEO?

Our SEO agency answers how a business can gain more local customers via local SEO. We an an agency in the U.K with over 10+ years’ experience in offering organic and local SEO.

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