SEO

TL;DR - Lower your CPA and strengthen your online visibility by making organic traffic your highest revenue driving channel.

Ensuring your website gets to the top of Google can be a tricky and challenging nut to crack. There’s a lot to consider – from the keywords your site is optimised for, to how relevant your pages are for each user search and how healthy your website is from the inside out. We want it to be glowing, and living its best life.

On top of all that, there’s the additional challenge of staying ahead of Google’s algorithm updates and ensuring your website maintains consistent visibility in the SERPs (we’re talking Rich Snippets and People Also Ask concertinas, as well as those coveted second-fourth place ranking positions). Added to that, it’s important to gain links from authoritative sources, send all the right signals to Google and put a detailed strategy in place that can be easily measured against. There’s a lot to consider and everything works together to get the end result. But just how do we achieve everything on this list?

Backlinking & Outreach

Building backlinks to your website helps to inform Google how authoritative your site is. The more root domains, the better. While it’s important to grow the number of backlinks, value and relevance also plays a big part. In this case, quality and quantity are equal partners.

Think of building links as starting conversations on the web. The more people who talk about you and link back to your site, the better. However, the association should be relevant to your content – for example, the NHS linking back to a health supplement provider. If your backlinks aren’t relevant or they come from low quality domains, Google will consider these conversations like gossip or spam, and you’ll be penalised for being talked down. Nobody likes a gossip, not even Google.

Technical SEO

Technical housekeeping is an important factor when it comes to ranking well on the SERPs. Keeping on top of crawler issues, ensuring redirects are healthy and your site speed is within Google’s guidelines are just a few of the tasks you’ll see hurtling towards you. You also need to stay on top of optimising click-through opportunities by writing well optimised meta data.

There are various tools to help you understand the health of your website. Screaming Frog will crawl your web pages and flag up any broken links, server issues or problems with secure protocol. Moz (an affectionate cousin to Google, the kind you look forward to seeing at Christmas) will break down the urgency of each red flag, and help you to prioritise your technical work. Google has a host of SEO software designed to support you in meeting new and changing criteria for healthy ranking positions.

Strategy & Auditing

Setting a thorough SEO strategy at the outset of your campaign is key to achieving your overall goals and smart KPIs. Gaining steady organic ranking positions can take time to achieve, so it is important your tactics and technical objectives are strong to begin with.

Thinking about your brand and what you want to achieve long term is the best place to start. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Drive traffic to a particular page? Generate leads? Sell goods online? Once you’ve ascertained this, you’ll need to consider just how quickly you want to achieve these goals, and how realistic your preferred growth will be from an SEO perspective. Outline your plans and measure your results regularly to stay on track.

Content Development

Writing well is important, but what’s more important is getting the balance between writing for crawlers and writing for the end user. Google is all about authoritative content that will be enjoyed, shared and clicked on again and again. To get the balance right, it is important to research your audience and carry out a thorough keyword research piece.

Think about the types of content your audience will enjoy reading and if your message will be portrayed well using the type of content you have chosen. Videos, infographics, articles, service pages – there’s a lot of ground to cover. And your web pages must be well optimised for search and user behaviour. Pleasing bots is only half the battle.