AN SEO AGENCY YOU CAN TRUST

SEO can sometimes be confusing; full of hearsay, buzzwords, and misinformation.

But really it’s quite simple. Search Engine Optimisation is all about making your website as relevant, trustworthy and user-friendly for your customers as possible. If you can do this,  Google will rank your site higher than your competition.

Why are Google organic rankings so important?

They generate a greater volume of traffic from potential customers when they are proactively searching for your product or service. As against pushing your ads out in front of people, those searching in Google will be far more likely to have the intent to buy. You can get an idea of how valuable these rankings are, by learning how much it costs to appear at the top of the rankings, using Google’s PPC Adwords.

Strategy Plus is one of Birmingham’s most experienced SEO agencies, having established an office in the city in 2003. However our fascination for Google’s algorithm first started, when we developed our first website, in 1997!

Why is SEO more than just rankings?

Most SEO agencies won’t tell you this, but since Google changed the placing of its adverts in 2016, organic traffic has suffered from a drop in Click Through Rate. Google has removed the ads from the right-hand side (because they weren’t generating them money) and added more ads at the very top of the page. To give an example, Wayfair noted a 25% drop in organic traffic.

Although organic rankings continue to obtain the majority of search engine traffic, it shows us that we need to create a more holistic strategy, to gain maximum quality traffic through to your site. We need to fully understand how your customers behave online and what other websites they use, to find content relevant to your products or service.

The importance of SEO since Google’s changes

Well to be quite honest, Google’s continued changes have reduced the importance of SEO, if all you do is concentrate on Google rankings alone. However, if you practice SEO correctly, you would be targeting other relevant websites with high trust value and quality traffic to gain inbound links. If your SEO agency does this well, you will not only get good Google rankings because of the inbound “link equity”, but great traffic from referral sources (as defined in Google analytics).

What does an SEO Agency do?

This can depend on you and your in-house capabilities, if you have non, then the agency will do everything from technical SEO, content creation, link building, analysis and management. However if you are great at creating your own content and have an in house web developer with a good understanding of SEO, the we can be used for strategy, analysis, link building and ongoing management.

Every project is different, from the websites being worked on, to the competition and the goals of the website. for instance the strategy for a local retailer would be very different to that of an eCommerce business.

What makes the best SEO Agency?

We like to think when choosing an agency you should be looking for three simple but essential factors:

Transparency – Before the project starts and after research has taken place, there needs to be a clear understanding of the search terms you would like to be found for, the strategy and complete access to all statistics available. Don’t just rely on the reports provided, have a guided look through all the tools such as Google search console, analytics and the agency’s chosen software such as MOZ, Serpstat, SEMRush etc.

Flexibility – Don’t get tied into a fixed term contract with a fixed monthly price, everything can change, whether it’s your business, your competition or Google’s algorithm. There’s no reason for an agency to demand more than 3 months notice of any changes with the agreement. SEO should be a long term partnership, not just a service.

Experience – Because SEO isn’t taught in school or University, everything has to be learnt in the real world. This isn’t helped by the fact Google doesn’t tell anyone how their algorithm actually works. SEO practitioners are left to their own devices to learn from testing again and again and……

Nothing beats experience.

Organic search engine traffic accounted for 73 percent of all traffic to business services websites

(Search Engine Land)

We have helped hundreds of Midlands’ businesses, of all sizes, get consistent traffic from those searching in Search Engines since 1997. Google’s algorithms have changed over the years and continue to do so, check out how we cover all bases below…

Keyword and competitor research

Before starting any SEO campaign, we conduct market, competitor and keyword research. This enables us to see how your potential customers behave online and how we can get your website in front of them. We can find out how your competitors are succeeding and where we can get ahead of them. We will target search terms that are not only searched a significant number of times every month, but are relevant and have buyer intent.

On-site SEO

To improve your website’s rankings in Google your site needs to be seen as relevant and user-friendly. After identifying the search terms people use, we focus on:

• Ensuring your site performs well on mobile and desktop devices, by improving the Google Page Insights score.
• Improving the site structure and internal link structure
• Check Google Search Console to ensure Google is crawling your site correctly
• Optimising page titles, meta descriptions, headings and image tags

Off-site SEO

As well as being useful and relevant, your business needs to be seen as trustworthy. Google measures trust in many ways, inbound links from trusted and relevant websites is a big factor.

• Ensuring your site is featured on Google My Business and constantly listed trusted local directories
• Obtaining links from your existing connections
• Adding your business to industry-specific directories
• Carrying out outreach on your behalf to build relationships with sought-after relevant, trusted websites and obtain inbound links and traffic
• Sharing your business content on social media and social bookmarking sites to increase the chance of your sites content being found and linked to

Content Marketing

Content is central to SEO, without the most relevant and complete content, Google will not serve your web page to it’s users. Not only this, but other webistes won’t link to you either, proving Google’s decision. For this reason, we focus on:

• Improve the most popular current content
• Writing blog articles on a regular basis to answer the queries we know customers are asking
• Producing videos, infographics and other forms of visual content, as Google likes to see a variety of content and will keep users on your page for longer
• Publishing content via social media and bookmarking channels to increase exposure and credibility
• Ensuring traffic to your website converts into leads and sales

Monthly reporting and analysis

Unlike many SEO companies we provide essential data on real KPI’s, not only rankings, but actual leads/sales generated from SEO.  That’s why we produce monthly reports outlining:

• Measuring organic and referral traffic to your site
• Highlighting changes to rankings
• Website conversions from both organic and referral traffic
• Making suggestions for future online marketing improvements