Which SEO metrics should our business be following?

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Introduction

You may have invested in a rather fancy website for your business, yet despite this investment your phone may still not be ringing.

If this sounds familiar, then you may want to start considering investing in SEO services. Yet, before you start ringing around all the various agencies, we would highly recommend setting up a Google Analytics account first.

The reason is that the wealth of information that is offered from a Google Analytics account will allow you to understand how well your website’ seo is doing right now, and also how your investment in SEO is going each month.

What is Google Analytics and Google Search Console?

Google Analytics and Google Search Console both link to your website, this is in order to provide you with tons of useful data.

Such data could be as simple as how many organic visits your website is getting every month, or it could be used to gain more complicated information, such as how many backlinks are attached to your website.

Whether your business is the sole user of your Google Analytics account, or your seo company also has access, it’s extremely useful information for your business to have.

Why some seo reports are not worth your time

Simply put, some seo businesses try and baffle their clients with loads of graphs and figures. Sure, the information may well be accurate, but what the agency may well be doing is switching your attention away from the really important stats.

So, as to finding the information you really need, well that can be like finding a needle in a haystack within some seo agencies reports.

Here at our online marketing agency we only report on the most important areas, some which we are going to highlight further on within this article. Such areas that are worth your business following are:

 

·        Bounce rates

·        Organic traffic

·        Backlinks

·        How long the average person is spending on your website

So, we leave out the stuff that is simply not worth reporting on.  

 

Your websites rankings

If you’ve hired an seo company, well most of the time you will want that marketing company to improve where your website ranks.

As everybody knows, the higher up Google your website is, well, the more likely it is to get people clicking and visiting your businesses website.

So, a lot of businesses use Google Search Console in order to work out where their business ranks.

Organic traffic

Don’t get deterred by this rather confusing term, organic listings are simply the links that make up most of the results.

So, whether you’re looking for a new sofa, or a new car online, the majority of the results will be organic business listings.

This means from a business perspective, it makes really good sense for business to climb the organic listings.

And if you employ an agency that has really clever set of seo consultants, like us, well you should ask them to optimise your Google My Business account as well.

Coupled to this you may wish to pay for PPC. Yet, for the purposes of this article we are concentrating on organic traffic, as often a business owner will want to know how much traffic is coming from organic sources.

Bounce rate

Imagine for a second you were launching a new brand store, and that brand retailed designer shoes.

And you are standing rather proud within your new store, that’s right in the heart of a busy city.

Yet, on the opening day, when your expecting your store to be flooded with customers, instead a lot of people are popping their heads in, and then turning around and leaving the store straightaway.

Well, as the business owner you would be asking your yourself some serious questions, like what’s wrong with the store’s décor, is the range of shoes that bad and also have you got the location of the business, right?

Well, if your business has a sky-high bounce rate, well you should be asking yourself some questions as well.

That’s because a sky-high bounce rate means that people are landing on your website, then leaving straightaway.

So, you can see that by having a sky-high bounce rate, its kind of like running a store and having people leave straightaway.

Its well worth asking your digital marketing agency for help and advice if your website has a high bounce rate.

Backlinks

Backlinks are a really important part of the SEO process, this means that some digital marketing agencies believe that they are the most important ranking signal there is.

Now, its really important that either your business, or your appointed marketing agency keeps a good eye on how your business is building its backlinks.

The reason you must keep an eye on the backlinks your business is building is because your website may accumulate spam links.

Low quality backlinks or spam backlinks can mean that your website incurs a Google Penalty, such as a Google Penguin penalty.

This can mean that a websites rankings can drop, and sometimes substantially. It can also sometimes be rather costly to start paying some seo agencies to rectify such problems.

How long the average person is spending on your website

Imagine just for a second that you’re back running your designer shoe shop. Now if the average customer spent about five minutes walking around the shop, that’s whether they purchased an item or not, you could gather that they are interested in what your business has to offer.

On the other hand, if the average visitor steps into the shop, and leaves in less than sixty seconds, well this could mean that something is wrong with your shop.

Well, again, if people are leaving your businesses website after a short amount of time, well this can also mean that something is wrong with the website. And this is why, if the average visitor is spending very little time on your website, well it could need some drastic improvements need to be carried out by a respected white hat digital marketing agency (like us).

For example, perhaps the website doesn’t load properly on smartphones, or perhaps the shopping cart has some sort of glitch, well, if people are leaving quickly, this may well be an indication that something is wrong.

And as you can imagine, if the search engines notice that the average user isn’t spending very long on your website, well the algorithm may take this as a negative signal.

So, for example, your website may show at the top for “designer shoes”, yet visitors may well be spending less than 30 seconds on your website.

Yet, Google’s algorithm may notice that on a competitor’s website, the average visitor is spending over two minutes on your competitor’s website.

This may mean that the algorithm over time may decide that your website should drop down, and the competitors website move up.

But do remember a website doesn’t often move up or down off the back of just one ranking signal, that’s because there are over 200, so often an agency is optimising multiple signals.

Number of visitors

The number of visitors that your website gets is obviously an important metric to follow in your businesses Google Analytics account.

Use your businesses Google Analytics account to monitor visitor numbers, plus use this information in conjunction with how long the average visitor is spending on your website, bounce rates and many other important seo metrics.

How are people getting to your website, organic, direct, social?

It’s all well and good looking at how many visitors your website is getting, but most seo companies will also want to split that information down further into organic traffic, and direct traffic, that’s because you will want to obtain a good idea as to how people are finding your business.

How our agency can help:                                            

Our online marketing agency can help your business to improve its seo, so why not give us a ring today?

 

Google’s quality guidelines- here’s what you need to know

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Introduction

Whether you’re a small business owner, or someone that works within digital marketing, it’s important to keep your online marketing knowledge up to scratch.

As most of us already know, when it comes to Google’s algorithm, things don’t stay the same for very long at all.

That’s to say the seo methods that you may have used for a long time, well they may simply become outdated. So, this means that most of us will spend ample amounts of time reading seo news websites for help and advice.

And sometimes this also means taking advice from respected seo agencies websites. Yet, we pose this question to you- why not obtain advice straight from the horse’s mouth?

What we mean by this, is if Google was to publish a document which provided us with some insight into how they rate a company’s website, well that would be a pretty useful document to read, right?

You’re not wrong!

That is why countless seo consultants will be spending many hours studying “Google’s quality guidelines”.

This is a document published by Google that was issued to quality assessors. Yet, as you can imagine is also pretty useful to us SEO’s.

You can follow the link to read the PDF format of this document.

What can us SEO’s learn from this document?

Well, one thing is for sure, you need to stick the kettle on before you start having a read. That’s because there is useful pieces of advice, yet as you would expect it’s quite a lengthy document, and one which provides many examples.

Now, that you have a coffee firmly planted into your mitts, let’s start understanding why this document was created in the first place.

This document has been created for Google’s team of quality assessors. Which are kind of like judges of how good a websites content marketing actually is.

Yet, you have to remember that the “judges” verdicts will not have any direct impact on that particular websites rankings.

As you would expect there are simply far too many websites out there for an assessor to sit down and manually review every single one.

Yet, with that said, it is our opinion that Google uses these assessors to evaluate various websites so that they can further fine tune their own algorithm. So you got it, its kind of like testing how good their own algorithm is.

Which kind of makes sense, that’s because if the algorithm now has AI technology (RankBrain), and is now making judgements on its own, well you would naturally want to keep it in check every now and then.

So, as you can imagine, somewhere at Google HQ will presumably be set of boffins which will be comparing what the algorithm calculated a websites quality score to be, and what the bunch of assessors thought.

And yes, you got it, when there’s enough data to say that the algorithm needs to be enhanced an update could possibly be rolled-out.

All interesting stuff.

How does Google measure the quality of a website?

It has been stated that Google ranks the quality of content marketing on a five-tier scale. The scale therefore reads as follows, lowest, low, medium, high and also the highest.

Sounds rather simple, right?

Well it does, but how Google, or should we say the quality assessors arrive at this verdict is rather complex.

For example, the document references “E-A-T” countless times throughout the entire document. This acronym stands for “Expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Now even though the document cites many examples throughout the long winded article, as you can imagine Google’s not going to state exactly how the algorithm works.

Otherwise this document would be in the hands of all those SEO agencies that want to cut corners, and fool Google’s algorithm.

Yet, with that said it does provide us with some pearls of wisdom, like for example the E.A.T model makes us believe that Google’s algorithm is possibly giving more weight to articles when it knows a bit more about the author.

This then had our cogs turning, and this had us thinking could the expertise of the author be further enhanced via entity building?

For example, if Google’s algorithm knew more about the author, could this mean the website would rank more highly? We think that this a ranking signal that could increase in terms of its importance.

For example, if someone was an expert on a subject, say SEO for example, would the algorithm increase the ranking of that page if the algorithm could validate the knowledge of the author somehow? For example, the author may have listed a long career working in SEO on a linkedin page, or even has a separate website that details the authors extensive career history for example.

Exciting possibilities this document alludes to.

The other attributes being authoritativeness, and trustworthiness- well we could only guess that at this current time your conventional forms of backlinking to a website would indicate this.

So, for example, a website with 100 backlinks from other trusted websites would mean that page could also be deemed as a high authority and trustworthy page.

Focus more on the “beneficial purpose”

Okay, so it will come as no surprise when we say the quality of a business’s content marketing matters.

This notion is as old as the hills. Yet what is confirmed is the author must place their focus and energy on making the content marketing valuable to the user.

This makes sense, as most seo agencies now know that if your create content marketing for pure seo benefit, well that work is then set-up to fail.

To conclude

The document doesn’t really inform us of any new insights that would drastically change how most white hat agencies implement their work.

Yet, for us we think the document does provide somewhat of a glimpse into the not too distant future.

What we mean is we think pages will become ranked more heavily on how authoritative that author is, and their knowledge inline with what is known about the entities described.

Which basically means we can see a future with less reliance on backlinks as the primary ranking factor, and more on how much does the author know about what they are talking about?

Will behavioural signals then become even more important as the voting factor as to who gets to the top spot? Well we think so.

 

Will obtaining positive business reviews improve my businesses SEO?

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Introduction

There are now so many businesses that are solely reliant on digital marketing in order to generate their sales.

Whether the business in question uses social media, organic seo or PPC to increase the volume of sales, most businesses now acknowledge the power of this marketing process.

This means that many business owners are also convinced that is the way to go is to invest in online marketing.

But enough of the hard sell, what we are really getting at is the point that business owners will now do all they can to have edge over their direct competitors.

A frequent question we regularly get asked at our agency is this, will more business reviews assist our companies seo?

In a nutshell the answer to this question is a rather straightforward one, that is yes, positive reviews can help to improve a company’s seo.

However, before you start obtaining reviews in a rather frantic manner, there’s a few words of wisdom we would like to offer you first.

#1 Don’t fake your businesses reviews

You may well be a start-up business, and as such you want to drum up business as fast as you can.

Naturally you want to standout from the competition, yet they all have tons of positive reviews, and your business has, umm none.

So what’s the answer? Does grabbing a cup of coffee and then writing a bunch of business reviews yourself sound like a good idea?

Well it shouldn’t! And here’s why, fake reviews will be picked up by Google’s algorithm. Also note that the other major search engines have algorithms built in such a way to prevent spam, and to prevent people trying to fool the algorithm.

So those ten reviews you’ve written yourself at the local coffee shop, well they could mean the website receives a penalty. They could also mean that the Google My Business listing never shows up for words that are related to your business.

So if you’ve glazed over, and lost what we were talking about, here’s the much shorter version- don’t fake your businesses reviews!

#2 Encourage your customers to leave reviews on your companies Google My Business account

Now when we use the word “encourage”, we don’t mean pay your customers, or offer them anything for free if they were good enough to leave you a review.

Sure, some other seo agencies may advocate this, but we don’t, we only use the best seo practices, which are commonly referred to as “white hat” seo.

We think the best way to obtain reviews is this method, its rather simple, that’s when you know you have a happy customer, why not just ask them if they would be willing to leave a business review.

Now, its at this point the customer may ask where’s the best place to leave the review, and if you get asked this, well it’s a golden opportunity to say Google My Business.

The reason we recommend business reviews are left on Google My Business is this, if someone was to search for your businesses name, well your Google My Business should pop-up.

That is of course if you have one? If not, get onto your digital marketing agency, and state that you need a Google My Business account set up.

So when someone searches your businesses name the Google My Business account should pop-up.

And because the businesses information is so clear, it will be easy for that person to see how many company reviews you have, as well as the companies star rating.

So, you think the best approach is to ask for a business review?

We think that the most effective strategy to take with business reviews is to contact customers that you know were happy with the service your company offered. Why not ask them if they would be willing to leave a business review?

With that said, you must have the permission to contact the customer, and decipher whether you have the right to e-mail them to ask this. If you do have the right, then why not just ask?

Why wouldn’t it better to obtain business reviews on other websites?

We think the best business reviews are when a customer has left them without you asking. The reason being is that they often appear more genuine, than if someone has been put on the spot to right a business review.

Plus, it’s a good idea to get some business reviews on Google My Business and also other website. For example, your business may appear on various business directory websites, and your business may well be reviewed on these websites as well.

Don’t ask your customers to leave reviews at your business premises

It’s not a good idea to ask your customers to leave a review while at your businesses location.

The reason being is this, with smartphones your customers may have location data switched on.

This means if every customer was to leave a review at the same location, well it could look rather suspicious. The algorithm may suspect spam.

After all, say you run an Italian restaurant, sure your going to have some diners that decide to leave a review there and then, yet most would like to go home, then post a review.

So real reviews are normally left from multiple locations, so obtaining them all at one location may damage your businesses seo.

Does your business require help with it’s local seo?

If you would like to obtain more seo advice, then why not give us a call today?

 

How much should my business be paying for local seo?

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Introduction

If you run a small business, then there’s a pretty good chance your also paying a local seo agency to help promote your business.

Yet, this is where many business owners can also get worried over whether or not they are paying the right fee.

After all, seo is very different from other forms of marketing. That’s to say if you were to send out a request for a quote, say to ten different agencies, well they are more than likely to all come back with different costs.

The reason being is seo agencies implement their work in different ways. Also, if the agency has been around for quite a while, and is respected at implementing good quality white hat work, well the fees are normally much higher.

So, with all these prices varying so wildly, how on earth is a business owner supposed to know how much they should be paying?

Well do not fear, that’s because as always, we can offer some valuable advice that will allow you an idea of how some agencies arrive at the prices that they charge.

How established are the competition?

It’s fair to say that some businessowners do not have the foggiest idea about seo, that’s to say they think of this form of marketing as kind of like a lightbulb. This means that when they start paying for the service, bang they expect it to be switched on and working.

But seo is the total opposite to other forms of digital marketing which can appear instantly, like PPC adds for example.

The reason being is this, as you know you will have competitors that are ranked on the first page right now, and the reason being is they may have invested in organic seo for a very long time.

So, this means that the businesses ranking signals, the signals that the search engines like Google read will be strong.

So that’s right, you guessed it the backlinks will most likely be strong, the content marketing, the technical seo elements as well.

So, there you have it, expecting instant results when the competition are likely to be very strong, and have a head start is often unrealistic.

And this brings us back in a full circle to our original question, that is your seo agency should gauge how strong your competitors are from the very start. This should then dictate the level of work that is needed.

So, if your digital marketing agency plucks a figure out of the air, or states that you can opt for a series of cheap seo packages, well they might not have considered how strong the competition are.

And your marketing investment may just benefit the agency, and in all likelihood be a drop in the ocean.

Which seo elements are needed

Just as a mechanic provides a quote for what work is needed in order to fix a car, well so should your seo agency.

If you got a new website, well the whole lot is going to need work. However, if you have a strong website, yet it may just need improvements in a few key areas, well your agency should quote accordingly.

With that said, the work that is needed will dictate the price, as different seo tasks will take longer than others. For example, building backlinks takes a great deal of time, and then on the other hand some business citations can be built relatively easily.

So, in a nutshell the seo agency should run an audit on your website, see what work is needed then offer a quote.

Why do I need to pay each and every month?

A lot of business owners recognise the need to invest in local seo, after all if a business is not listed on the first page, well it’s more than likely to be missing out on business.

So once a business decides it does require to invest in organic and local seo, a lot of business owners can quickly become perplexed by why they need to pay a monthly fee.

The reason being is most business owners would like to pay a one off fee, and that’s to say no ongoing costs.

But the reason that most seo agencies, including ours charge a monthly fee is because your competitors will be constantly looking to increase their businesses rankings as well.

So, this means that once your business is ranked number one, the competition will want to knock you off your top spot.

The reason being is rather simple, and that is the business that is ranked at the very top will normally receive the most visitors. That’s to say even the businesses that are ranked second and third normally do not receive the same amount of visitors.

So, in a nutshell, most businesses don’t just want to be listed on the first page, they want to be listed on the first page at the number one position.

This is why constant effort must be made to improve or maintain where a business ranks, and this is why most businesses pay a monthly fee.

How much does your business charge?

If you would like to obtain a no obligation quote, why not give us a ring?

Does your website deserve to be ranked on the first page?

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Introduction

There’s a common misconception when it comes to investing in SEO. That misconception revolves around the notion that as soon as a business invests in SEO, that they can start leapfrogging the competition straightaway.

Picture the scene if you would, a business owner is informed that their company sales are down for the month. In order to improve sales numbers, they turn to methods of advertising that they have previously never used before.

This is where the SEO agency now enters the equation. Swiftly after a fixed monthly fee is agreed, and within month one that the company that invests it wants to start seeing solid results- how realistic is this expectation?

How strong are your competitors?

It all boils down to this one single question, how strong are your competitors? This is an assessment that has to made when weighing up your competitors websites.

If your investing one thousand per month, and wish to see results in month one, how realistic is this up against a competitor that may have invested more each month, and for many years prior to you investing?

This has to be weighed up, and realistic expectations have to be in place. What we mean by this is it is often now a bad thing for your agency to state that a goal is not feasible.

It might not be because they want you to cut them some slack, its often because the goals have to be realistic right from the start.

It’s a brick wall that your agency is building

When investing in digital marketing we ask our clients to visualise this scenario for a second. That is that we as an agency are brick layers, and that each brick strengthens your wall.

Yet, keep in mind that the direct competitors may already have stronger walls, so to overtake the competition may take some time.

Brick by brick the marketing campaign gets stronger, and this is how rock solid digital marketing is implemented.

If things are rushed right from the start, then often this causes poor quality seo to be implemented, this is in turn can lead to penalties.

These penalties have many names, yet some of the most common are referred to as Google Panda, and the Google Penguin updates.

Quality is key, don’t cut corners

Marketing managers, business owners and share holders all want to see a business that is more profitable, and often in the shortest timeframe. This makes sense, as that’s what most businesses aim is generate a certain level of profits by a set timeframe.

However, there are some areas where a business shouldn’t cut corners for short term gain.

One of those areas is SEO. For example, a competitor may well be ranking second for a very competitive business term. They acknowledge that if they were first, for that term that profits would be a lot higher.

The temptation is to therefore blast a website with seo in an effort to overtake the competitor.  

However, for those that know a thing or two about seo, well they will know that if you implement seo that looks spammy, then this will result in the website dropping in terms of where it ranks.

You have to offer a better service

So many business owners, and even marketing managers are in the mindset that old SEO methods still work. That is they have taken the mindset that more is better.

This means they think that the more backlinks, the more content marketing and the more social media posts they have the better. This approach simply doesn’t work!

Quality is now key. If you can offer better advice, a better service, and a better overall experience for your customers, then your website will excel.

So, taking an approach that the competition are writing 3 blog posts a month, so we must now write double that amount is a flawed strategy.

Instead, you have to think of quality, and by that mean you have to offer the best service.

It takes time

So many business start-ups believe that they can get a website up and running in no time.

However, local and organic seo do take great deals of time to implement. You may well be thinking, sure, you would say that you are a digital marketing agency after all, right?

Well no, not really, that’s because it’s a well-known fact that new websites are harder to optimise.

The reason for this is the sand box period.

Need help with your business’s SEO?

If your company requires help with it’s seo, then why not give us a ring?