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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.

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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.

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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.

 

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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.

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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

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