In simple terms, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a catch-all term to describe the tactics used to improve the visibility of your business (a website) in the search results. By visibility, we are mostly referring to Google rankings, but there are other ways to improve visibility, local SEO for example (see tab below). If you are a plumber in Roscommon for example, it’s hugely important to your business that when someone searches for “plumber in roscommon” that they see your website in the results, preferably right at the top. Achieving this, that’s SEO, because there’s no luck involved, it doesn’t happen by chance.
SEO services provided may produce excellent results to one business, and be a complete disaster for another, because there are so many factors outside of your control, most notably, the competition. That’s why we perform competitor analysis before we do anything else, you need to know what they rank for. Next, an SEO audit of your website, to find out what you’re doing right, and more importantly, what you’re getting wrong. This SEO report identifies the keywords and search terms you need to rank for, and whether you do rank for them or not.
Then it’s time to get to work, optimising the website content you have, and creating the content you need. We do this in order of priority; how important is the keyword to your business goals, how difficult is it to rank for, how long will the SEO copywriting take etc. This requires extensive keyword research in some cases. As part of our SEO Services contract we include professional software for this, including Moz Pro, click here to learn more…
When you search for something online, using Google or one of the other search engines, there is so much that’s going on behind the scenes. The search engine results page, or SERP, that you see is made up of thousands of calculations; the search algorithm (a computer program) wants to show you the best results available. Delivering SEO Services is the art of creating the best result possible, and telling Google that you have the best result.
But how do the search engines decide what the best result is? Well, we call them ranking factors, and there are estimated to be around 200 of them. Some are really important, links for example, others are not so important, image SEO for example. Some ranking factors relate to the text on the page; keywords in the title and other headings. Some ranking factors relate to technical SEO; do your pages have the correct meta tags. And then there is off-page SEO and link building. Other websites place a link on their page that leads to yours, more on this below.
Check out this recent client and how well they’re doing in the search results…
There are SEO best practices, elements that every page, post etc. every URL must have; Google even tells us what some of them are…
The image above shows the search result for FutureProof Digital, you have complete control over what is displayed in the search result; the title, description and the URL, they should all contain the keywords you are targeting. Technical SEO also relates to the sitemap that you submit to Google Search Console and the files (robots.txt, and .htaccess) that tell Google what to crawl. Some of this can be pretty complicated and it always pays to employ SEO services when you first launch your website.
I know, from many years of experience working with clients, regular small business owners, that writing content for a website is hard. They have been immersed in what they do for most of their lives, experts in their field, but ask them to write it down, and that’s a problem. A huge part of the SEO services that we provide is in the area of copywriting, because it’s so important, and yet, the area that business owners struggle with the most.
When we talk about SEO, the most important ranking factor is high quality content. Yes, the keywords need to be in headings, and tags, but what’s most important is answering the searchers question, meeting their need, or offering the product they want. That’s what search engine optimization is really all about.
Link building is becoming a practice all on its own, outside of SEO services, a digital public relations of sorts. Right now most businesses pay no attention to the number and quality of links pointing to their website, but that’s changing. As it gets harder and harder to rank for more and more search terms businesses are turning to link building for the extra push.
When Larry Page, one of the Google founders, designed the first modern search engine links were at the heart of the algorithm. Google treats links like votes, one website saying that another website is good. The more votes you have the better, and if that vote comes from a website that already has lots of votes itself, that’s a super vote. For example a link from bbc.com or The Washington Post website is extremely valuable, because they have a very high domain authority score, 95/100, this means they have lots of links, almost 200 million in fact.
But what does all this mean for your business? Well, start small, link building takes time. First add as many links as you can to as many websites as you can; social media platforms, directory websites, local news websites, anywhere you can think of. Links accumulate naturally over time, if you produce great content. Also consider guest blogging. Write articles for websites in your field with higher DA than your website, and place a link in them. There are other techniques that we can discuss as part of your SEO package.
FutureProof Digital is predominantly a WordPress company, so we know about WordPress SEO. In fact, one of the reasons we use WordPress are the SEO capabilities, it’s way out ahead of platforms like Wix, SquareSpace or Shopify. We install SEO software on every WordPress website we deliver, it streamlines and automates the SEO workflow, adding tags and code in the background that benefit your rankings.
We use SiteGround as our web hosting provider, they are very much focused on hosting WordPress websites. They provide a number of extra features that you won’t see from other providers. CDN, or content delivery network, stores a copy of your website in various locations around the world, so that the one closest to the user is shown to the user, reducing load time. Speed is vital to SEO, and must be focused on as part of any SEO services project…
The share of your traffic that comes from a mobile device gets larger each year, and as that happens the time it takes for your website to load becomes more and more important. Depending on the size of your website there are a number of methods and software solutions to speed up your website. In most cases it’s media, images and video that slow your site down. Store video off-site, YouTube for example, and compress images file size. FutureProof Digital can take care of all this for you.
There are two main reasons why site speed is so important, and why it’s one of the first things we focus on as part of our SEO services. The first, it is now a direct ranking factor in its own right, Google measures it, and it affects your rankings. Second, if your web pages load slow then users are more likely to click away, back to the search results. This is called bounce rate, and it also affects your search rankings.
SEO Services are not complete without Local SEO. Most of our clients are SMEs; small, local businesses, and the focus of their digital marketing is on their town or city. Over the past number of years search results have become more and more personalised. What you see might be different from the person standing next to you, and will certainly be different 100km away. That’s why the search results in YOUR area need to be targeted for your business keywords.
A large part of this is your Google business profile. The Google My Business platform powers the business listings on Google Maps, and three of these listings are displayed on almost every results page these days. You need to be one of those three listings !! Reviews are a vital component of this. Facebook reviews are great, TripAdvisor and all the others, but the real power of a review comes from Google My Business. You should send all of your customers there to leave a review.
