How can we get our brand mentioned more often by the LLM’s?

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Introduction

LLM’s simply stands for “large language models”, these are used by the large AI companies such as ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Businesses globally are seeing the number of organic visitor numbers gradually to decline largely due to Google’s AI Overviews.

The reason for this is twofold, the rise of zero click searches as well as people using LLM’s rather than say relying on Google’s organic results to find an answer to a query.

 

What exactly are AI mentions?

AI generated responses are generated when you ask an AI programme such as ChatGPT a question.

To help the user feel more confident with the information, often the AI generated response will cite its sources that allowed it to form that answer, also known as a reference.

These references can be linked or unlinked depending on the AI platform that the shopper is using at that time.

 

Can you explain why AI mentions are important?

If organic traffic to a website is decreasing, there was often a good reason for this. For example, it could be that a product is simply less in demand in the marketplace, possibly because of seasonal demand.

However, retailers are often aware of these seasonal buying habits and can explain that. Instead the reason why so many businesses organic traffic is decreasing is people are using AI platforms such as Perplexity, ChatGPT and Google’s AI mode more than ever before.

Therefore retailers and businesses in general want to ensure there “plugging the gap” so to speak as to why they are losing organic traffic.

Often this is because shoppers are now using query fan out, and AI programmes to find websites that they want to buy from. Often this comes after a long conversation with an AI programme so that the shopper can refine the results, obtaining the exact product or service they want.

Because the results from AI programmes are conversational, chatty and friendly they can be very persuasive.

Therefore, because a shopper has asked a series of questions regarding say “the best e-bikes on the market”, then once your business gets mentioned as a source, this provides a brilliant marketing opportunity for you to make a sale.

Your business could secure a shopper who has been through a long conversation with AI programme to then be directed towards your business.

 

The conversation could go something like this:

– Find me the best e-bike below £2500.00
– The style of the bike needs to be a full suspension bike, can you change the results?
– I now need a list of bikes with U.K dealerships so that I can buy spare parts at a later date

As you can see, this is a shopper who knows what they want, they therefore have “strong purchase intent”. They are therefore going to be the shoppers that businesses want to attract, this is why businesses want to be cited as a citation or source of information that AI programmes provide.

 

Content marketing on-page and off-page

Let us return to our example earlier about a shopper who wants to buy an e-bike.

The LLM will most likely favour a page that’s written by an authoritative source that answers that exact question.

For example, The Guardian newspaper may have written an editorial piece citing best 10 e-bikes in the U.K for 2025.

This would go some way to answering the shoppers question about finding a quality e-bike.

Therefore, the Guardian may well be cited as a source.
Alternatively, your business may have published a blog post that has attracted a lot of links and is a really good quality piece of content marketing.

In this case your content marketing may well be given the direct source.

 

Relevant and helpful

Your business is much more likely to be cited as a source or as a citation if the content marketing is helpful.

If the content marketing answers the exact question the shopper has asked, therefore will most likely satisfy the question that the shopper has.

Therefore, do write helpful content marketing, yet also we would recommend writing the work in the style of an FAQ.

The reason being it might say a H3 title tag that answers the shopper’s question further down the page. Therefore if the written work is written using an FAQ style of writing it is much more likely to be cited as a citation as Googlebot and the LLMS can better understand the written work and its meaning.

News article, social media posts or high-quality websites

We always advise businesses that if they want to rank high organically in Google’s organic results in the LLM’s you have to make your brand a celebrity.

You have to think like a celebrity.

You want to get your name out there, listed on the best websites.

This then improves your business’s authoritativeness, plus, it also shows your brand as a thought leader, a respected brand. For example, if your mentioned on a leading pod cast, mentioned in a well-known newspaper, plus also linked to by a relevant, high quality websites, this all improves your businesses authoritativeness.

 

Make sure the work can be read (crawled and indexed)

This advice is true whether you’re optimising for Google’s organic results or AI platforms such as ChatGPT.

The work needs to be read, it needs to be crawled and indexed. Your web designers or appointed SEO agency can check this.

Some of the checks involve making sure none of the pages are blocked by say Googlebot because of robots.txt is blocking the page from getting indexed.

Make sure your XML sitemap is kept up to date.

 

How we can help

If you run a business in Bristol and you need to generate more sales we can help. We can help your company to improve your organic and local SEO. We can produce content marketing that has very high Google E-EAT score, this will increase your companies chances of being cited within the LLM’s and Google AI.

 

10 of our most effective SEO techniques to help your business increase its organic traffic in 2025

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SEO techniques

2025’s Most Powerful SEO Techniques for Organic Traffic

 

 

2025’s most effective SEO techniques and methods that help you improve your organic traffic

 

Many businesses worldwide are heavily dependent on their organic search engine optimisation efforts to attract new visitors and shoppers.

Businesses are therefore constantly looking for ways to improve their search rankings.

We can help you to improve your SEO strategies to make them more robust, more effective and bring about winning results

These tips were written in 2025, so you can be confident that you are receiving the most up-to-date advice.

 

On-page SEO techniques

Regardless of your industry, whether you are selling one product, or if you have thousands of different product lines. Usually, we start by improving the business’s on-page search engine optimisation first.

This process begins with keyword research, followed by an examination of your on-page SEO.

We often asked such questions as:

  • How are the page titles written? Could they be improved?
  • How well written is the meta description at improving the CTR?
  • How was the alt text written?
  • Is the content marketing high quality?
  • How has the H1 to page H6 tag been written?
  • How effective are the CTAs? That means call to action.

These are some of the questions that an SEO consultant would ask.

 

Google E-EAT

 

Before we jump into offering you some top-quality advice on how to start rising your business higher and higher within Google rankings, we need to cover some advice regarding Google E-EAT.

Google E-EAT stands for expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

You must bear this in mind when writing your businesses content marketing.

The reason you need to keep this in mind is that if your business has a high Google E-EAT score, your website can simply rank higher.

Therefore, it’s all about offering quality advice, obtaining the best links in the world, improving trustworthiness through gaining positive business reviews, and much more.

Keyword optimisation and why you need to avoid keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing remains a common problem, particularly among web designers, who may mistakenly believe it’s an effective strategy to keep mentioning the same keywords repeatedly.

However, this is an ineffective method; it can be highly damaging to a business’s organic SEO it could lead to a Google penalty being received.

Instead, when writing content marketing you must always think about the customer, offering them top-quality advice and ensuring they stay on your website for as long as possible. This is what is known as improving dwell times.

It’s essential to retain customers for as long as possible and to keep dwell times as high as possible.

Consider your website a bit like a shop, let’s say a large department store. When you’re running a shop, you want to attract as many shoppers as possible to keep your business generating more sales.

Consider this when optimising your website; you most certainly don’t want the bounce rate to be high.

 

Importance of Keywords

What are keywords?

Google needs to gain a good understanding of what the page is about.

Google also need to understand what the entire company website is about.

Therefore, if you have a good page structure and good on-page SEO, utilising keywords in the right way can send a crystal-clear message to

Google about what exactly that page is about.

For example, if you’re selling luxury handbags, you can simply add the brand to the title of that page. You can then carefully write the content marketing and product descriptions so that you optimise the page for the handbags you’re selling.

Therefore, keywords optimisation is all about optimising the page, so that you rank higher on Google for that product or service which you offer.

Google uses the “Googlebot”, which is essentially a bot; its primary function is to crawl and index the web.

Additionally, it communicates with Google’s algorithm, directly informing it what that page’s blog post is about plus how strong the on-page SEO is.

 

For example, does the page have a good Google E-EAT score?

Therefore, it’s all about making that page relevant. How can you make it more suitable for the customer’s purchasing needs?

However, being relevant is only one part of the equation.

Once you’ve made the page relevant and you’ve added high-quality content marketing, you then need to improve the authority of that page.

For example, you build some more links? Can you get your business mentioned more? Can you gain some more high-quality business reviews?

 

What exactly are long-tail keywords?

Even though you’re in 2025, some SEO strategies remain timeless, unchanged; one of those is optimising your website for “long-tail keywords”, which are perhaps more critical than ever.

As the level of competition intensifies in most industries, it becomes increasingly challenging for new companies to appear on the first page of Google.co.uk.

However, it might be entirely possible using long-tail keywords.
For those who are unfamiliar, long-tail keywords are, they are simply keywords that form a longer search string.

This simply means that instead of the question being short, such as ‘a local plumber,’ an example longtail keywords will be ‘Can you find me a local heating engineer in the city of…’

As you can see, this is a longer keyword; therefore, SEO companies refer to these as “long-tail keywords”.

 

Seo content strategy: why it’s essential to have a content marketing strategy?

Is your business just about selling products or services?

Most business websites are not just about selling products or services; that’s because a website is a place to offer helpful product or service advice to your customers as well. To demonstrate why you are one of the best in the business, you offer quality advice to customers; therefore, you prioritise providing excellent customer service by writing informative guides regarding the products or service that you sell.

These pages, which offer helpful advice, can rank much higher on Google.co.uk because they provide valuable, useful, and well-written content marketing.

The websites that offer the best quality advice, often the most helpful advice, and go the extra mile to assist their customers tend to rank higher on Google. This is simply because the page offers a better U.X, that means “user experience”. Therefore the page is more valuable and helpful to the customer; this means that the customer is more likely to stay, read the articles, and may be more likely to buy a product from you.

Global brands from around the world spend millions every year creating helpful content for marketing to help improve dwell times for theier website.

The results are driven by commercial reasons, specifically to address their questions shoppers often ask and enable shoppers to find the product or services that best suits their needs.

 

 

 

Let’s start with the crawling and indexation page

The page must be crawled and indexed for it to appear in Google search results.

As we mentioned earlier in this article, Google uses a Googlebot to crawl and index the web.

Googlebot’s job is to roam the Internet and find new pages; therefore, if you want a page to appear on Google.co.uk, for example, and you want it to appear on the first page of Google, then you need the page to be crawled and indexed.

We highly recommend using Google Search Console to check for any indexation issues.

For example, you should ask the question, is this something preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing that page?

If so, it might need the help of your web designers, as well as web developers and a technical SEO expert, to determine why the company does not index that page.

Don’t worry, sometimes it’s not complicated to fix an indexation issue; sometimes it’s just a matter of accidentally leaving no-index pages at the bottom of a WordPress page. However, simply deselecting the box can sometimes then allow the page to be crawled and indexed.

However, sometimes it’s a much more complex issue, which might prompt the web developers to work out why that page can’t get indexed.

 

Page titles and meta descriptions

It’s essential to get your page titles optimised correctly, because this summarises what the whole page is about.

Therefore, this sends a crystal-clear message to Google about what that page is about and what you are selling.

Because of this, the shoppers can quickly make a snap decision whether that page answers that query or not.

For example, if the page title matches the exact question that the customer has asked Google, they will know that the page will then be relevant to their query.

However, as the page title doesn’t address the exact question, the bounce rate increases.

This is the same as the meta description; it needs to be written to improve the business’s click-through rate (CTR).

If you can write the meta description in a way that encourages shoppers to click on your business, you will improve the click-through rate.

Let’s say you sell quality headphones. Write something along the lines of’ “We sell noise-cancelling headphones, mention a particular brand, and perhaps mention free next-day delivery” all within the meta description to improve the CTR.

Because that brand of headphones is so popular, customers will spot the mention of the brand, also that you mentioned next day delivery, which might cause them to click on the meta title and meta description rather than the competitors website.

For those unfamiliar, WordPress is a content management system that allows you to add a free plugins. Once you add the plugin such as

Yoast SEO, setting the meta title and meta description becomes a piece of cake.

This makes it easy to add meta descriptions and titles, and to change them as well.

 

Header Tags: What Are Header Tags?

Do add header tags from H1 through to H6, which allows you to structure your content marketing a lot better.

To mark the title using these header tags, this allows the author of the page to communicate to Google exactly what that page is about.

For example, if you were to write six titles about mountain bikes, it’s clear to Google what a particular page is about

Therefore, it’s all about making it simple for the customer to find the section of the page that they want to read more about. It’s also about making it crystal clear to Google what a particular page is about in terms of its sales focus.

 

Alt text

Make sure to take the time to add pictures to your content marketing.

This could include graphs; alternatively, it can be pictures of your products or infographics.

It’s also essential to make your content marketing more interesting. Ensure that you also add alt text; so that this simply describes what the picture is about.

Therefore, if the picture shows a picture of, let’s say, a Ford Sierra Cosworth, and is then labelled accordingly with alt text, this tells Google what that particular picture shows.

For example, if somebody is looking for an article, or let’s say “How to do apply car care products such as car waxes to a classic Ford Sierra Cosworth”, if all of your pictures are labelled as Ford Sierra Cosworth’s within the alt text, this is another obvious signal to Google bot the page is all about selling car care products that particular car.

 

How should I write the alt text?

Simply describe what exactly a picture is.

Many of the world’s best SEO minds now believe that, thanks to sophisticated AI technology, Google will already have a clear understanding of what that picture shows.

However, by the author confirming what is in the picture and carefully writing the alt text, this can help to send a clear message about what that particular page is about.

 

 

Enhancing User Experience (UX)

A business does need to consider how to improve their user experience (U.X) carefully

Just as you walk into a restaurant or store, you often get a sense of the atmosphere, whether it’s a good shopping experience or whether the shop offers a pleasant buying experience. Often, if the store offers a pleasant shopping experience, you will want to stick around longer, browsing more items in the Department store.

People often return to a store because of a positive experience. For example, they might have liked the shop, the sales assistant, or the way the products were displayed on the shop floor.

Now you should adopt this philosophy when you are optimising your company website.

Consider the user experience (U.X); can it be enhanced?

Its important to improve your businesses user experience?

How can you improve the website to increase dwell times?

This is so that shoppers want to visit more product pages and stay around for longer, browsing the items you have for sale.

What are some ways that you can improve your business’s U.X?

You should also work on making the website faster, nobody likes waiting longer than they have to!

Improve the websites navigation, this is so you can make it simple for customers to get to the right product page as quick as possible.

Make it simple for the customer, so when they’re shopping on a smartphone, to get to the products or services that they wish to with a minimum number of clicks

 

Make the text simple to read

In content marketing, consider page layout, such as using drop-down menus to explain the benefits of a product or service.

 

Page speed

You know when you’re driving along the motorway and often see how impatient cars can get if you’re driving a bit slowly. Usually, they will overtake at pace.

This is also true for a company website; shoppers expect the website to load quickly, almost instantly. People are becoming more impatient; therefore, it is also necessary to consider this when designing and improving the user experience of your company website, make sure the website is fast.

If the website is therefore slow, the bounce rate will increase, which will impact other user experience signals such as dwell time.

 

Mobile-Friendliness & Easy Navigation

Mobile-friendly design

Having a good website designed will be crucial to your business’s success, so don’t hire a web design agency just because they’re the cheapest.

Hire a web design agency, which can design an excellent website for your business.

The website both desktop and mobile should be well designed. This is to get your SEO off to a flying start, they should therefore think carefully in particular about the mobile design, and how to offer a good U.X to the shopper and make the website simple to use.

.
For example, in terms of the mobile design, think about the following

How can you make a fast?

How can you make it simple to use?

How can you improve the navigation, for example, by using a burger menu?

Do some split testing, also commonly referred to as A/B testing. Think about whether you can improve the dwell time.

Constantly think about the user experience and how you can improve your website.

How can you reduce the bounce rate on mobile?

 

Building High-Quality Backlinks

Quality backlinks are needed for your business’s SEO success

Contrary to what some people might say, backlinks are still an essential part of the search engine optimisation (SEO) process.

They are essential for many reasons; backlinks can give your website more authority (Google E-EAT). Another reason is that they can bring in traffic by having people click on links and visit your website.

 

Anchor text

One way to improve your website’s SEO is to ensure that Google reads the anchor text.

Anchor text leads to your website, allowing Google to gain a much better understanding of the products and services that are being sold on that page.

For example, if all of the anchor text leading to your website is related to “diamond-encrusted dog collars”- then it’s clear that that’s the product that you sell because this is written into a lot of the anchor text.

However, do remember that the anchor text needs to be written in a white hat way as well.

How many quality backlinks you have can mean the difference between your website appearing on page 7 of Google and your business ranking high on the first page of Google.

The high-quality backlinks are therefore crucial to your business’s success.

 

Blogging

Blogging involves writing many quality blog posts regularly to promote the products or services that your business sells.

The content marketing should be well-written, and remember to improve each pages Google E-EAT score. This will help the page rank higher in Google’s SERP’s.

Blogging, therefore, involves writing content marketing, which can help improve your business’s search engine optimisation in many ways.

The page itself can act as a landing page, helping to bring new organic visitors that you can then direct to product or service pages.

It also helps improve the website’s relevance.

For example, if you regularly blog about luxury breaks in the south of France, you will be clear to Google for example that you run a hotel chain In that area of France. You are therefore making your website more relevant for people looking to book a break in that area.

 

SEO strategy 2025:

Frequently Asked Questions: What would you say moves the needle the most when improving a business’s SEO?

You can’t concentrate on just one or two areas; you need to adopt a more comprehensive marketing strategy.

For example, need to focus on on-page SEO, technical SEO, content marketing, link building, and improving the user experience.

This means, therefore, that you need to develop a marketing strategy that focuses on building more links, creating high-quality content, and enhancing your local SEO, among other things.

When writing content marketing, how long should the articles be?

If you’re looking for ways to improve your business’s organic traffic, one of the best ways is to publish high-quality, well-written content marketing.

We recommend writing long-form content marketing, which typically has a high word count, ranging from around 3000-4000words.

This will be a lengthy article; therefore, you need to keep the reader engaged and on the page.

One way to achieve this is by incorporating diagrams, pictures, and graphics, which can help improve the page’s dwell time.

Additionally, as we mentioned earlier, consider how you will utilise page titles and how you will organise the page using various H1 to H6 titles.

Think about how you can write content marketing better than the competition. For example, see which businesses are ranking on the first page, then see if you can create a better answer.

Link building is key to your business’s SEO success

For example, your business could be publishing content marketing and writing excellent articles daily, but you might not be getting any organic traffic.

Therefore, if you want to increase the number of organic visitors significantly, you need to consider how to build high-quality backlinks.

You also need to consider “link velocity”, so it’s not just about building a large number of backlinks quickly over a weekend.

No quality backlinks have to be built slowly, over a very long timeframe, even many consecutive years.

However, over time, this proves to the search engines that your business has strong backlinks, and your website becomes more authoritative.

As a result, it becomes more important, allowing you to start ranking higher on Google.

 

How long does it take to increase the number of organic visitors significantly?

As with anything related to organic search engine optimisation, you must be patient and take your time to ensure that you implement high-quality work.

The description we always use is that you need to deliver quality work in a drip-fed manner, and then monitor the results over a long timeframe. Use a high-quality SEO tools to monitor how much organic traffic your website is receiving; for example, we highly recommend using Google Analytics.

If you are, therefore, looking for results in a matter of days or weeks, then you should not invest in search engine optimisation.

Instead, focus on delivering high-quality work that surpasses the competition and regularly monitor the results.

We wouldn’t recommend expecting to see excellent results in a short timeframe.

However, if you’re using the right marketing strategy, you should start to see a positive uplift in organic traffic when you keep applying quality work over a long timeframe.

Once this uplift begins, it’s a matter of either improving it or simply sustaining the amount of organic visitors that your website receives.

This means continuing to do what you’re doing right; therefore, the content marketing link-building strategy you’re using, if it is working.

Make sure to keep using it.

 

Can we assist your business?

If your business wants to improve its organic traffic, attract more visitors, and ultimately increase sales, we have the solution.

We have a brilliant success rate of working with businesses in Bristol. We would be delighted to review your businesses website, as we have some of the most highly experienced SEO consultants in this area.

Therefore, if you run a business in the city of Bristol, or if you may be located in the town of Bath, we can help you to improve your SEO.

Contact us today for a no-obligation.

 

 

 

 

Search engine ranking factors: What Are They?

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Subject: Organic SEO

Author: Digital Tailors Bristol

Date: 15/07/2025

 

 

When some businesses attempt to improve their search engine optimisation, the business owner may read numerous SEO articles, such as those on Moz for example.

This is where you will often read that Google algorithms take into account over 200 distinct and separate ranking factors in order to calculate how strong a businesses SEO is.

However, before you think, ‘Our business doesn’t have the time to improve over 200 ranking factors,’ there is some good news.

Most businesses don’t have to concentrate on optimising all 200 signals; often, you can focus on the more important ones.

That’s unless your business is in a hypercompetitive niche, such as a solicitor’s practice within the magic circle.

In hyper-competitive business sectors, such as large solicitor practices, you may have to pull every lever to improve your business’s SEO.

For most businesses, however, we would say that the vast majority can concentrate on optimising the main ranking factors.

For example, you may want to focus on:
– Writing high-quality content marketing
– Building quality links
– Improving your technical SEO
 

When you do this, you can start to see your business lift Google’s organic rankings.

What are the leading search engine ranking factors your agency thinks of as the most important?

 In terms of content marketing quality, we believe that the most critical ranking factor Google considers is the quality of the content marketing.

Google uses E-EAT to determine whether a page is of high quality or not.

For example, if the content marketing is high quality, has a very high Google EEAT score.

Therefore this normally means the page is written by an expert. It is likely to rank much higher within the Google organic search engine results pages (SERP’s).

We would say the most important ranking factor is content marketing.

 

What makes content marketing high quality?

The length of the article.

There has been considerable research into this matter, and many leading SEO consultants widely believe that pages with a much higher word count tend to rank higher on Google.

Therefore, pages that offer more helpful information, typically due to a much higher word count, and tend to rank higher in Google’s organic results.

However, there is no point in having 10,000 words of utter mumbo-jumbo; the written work must be of high quality, and you must dispense valuable and helpful advice.

Google has rolled out a significant and vital update, called the “Google Helpful Content Update”.

Essentially, if the content marketing is of high quality (Google EEAT), it will rank higher in Google results.

Additionally, if the article offers helpful advice it will also rank higher in the SERPs.

 

Google E-EAT

If each piece of content marketing can demonstrate that the author has a lot of experience in terms of what they are talking about, then this written work can rank higher in Google’s organic results.

The work should demonstrate real-life experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

This is what the SEO experts across the world referred to as ‘Google E-EAT’.

Therefore, if you can demonstrate that you know your stuff and they truly understand what you’re talking about, this will shine through in your content marketing and help you rank higher.

 

Referencing

If you attended university, you would most likely have written a dissertation?

When writing a dissertation, you will most likely cite many different sources.

You may have been asked to use the Harvard referencing system?

Its important to know that Google’s original algorithm, when Google first created by Larry Page, was called “Google PageRank”. This first algorithm revolved around using backlinks to dephicer how important a page was.

The idea was that backlinks were a type of reference, referencing the way you researched your information.

This is exactly like when writing a university dissertation; you can’t just write 10,000 words of waffle. You often need to support your argument by citing the work of others, typically using the Harvard referencing system.

Now, you should utilise this for your content marketing, as citing other quality sources and researching information can help Google rank your page higher because it shows you have researched what you are talking about.

For example, throughout this article, you will likely see many outbound links.

The reason is so that we can highlight some of the places where you found high-quality information to write this article.

This, therefore, shows Google that the article has been adequately researched.

Good on-page SEO

A page could have a massive amount of text, this means that sometimes it becomes challenging for Google bots to understand what the page is about.

However, if you use the following on-page SEO methods, you are sending an obvious signal to Google about what that page is about.

For example you could use:

  • Page title
  • H1 through to H6 tags
  • Alt text
  • Anchor text
  • Meta title and meta description

All of these can send a clear signal to Google about what that page is about.

Therefore, use good page structure and ensure that the content marketing is logically laid out using H1 through to H6 titles.

It is beneficial for readers as well using page titles, such as H1-H6, as they can skip the sections of content marketing that they are not interested in.

 

Unique, not duplicated

The text should be unique; it should not be duplicated in anyway.

What we mean by this is say that you were to say copy the text from another company, this can act to the detriment of your business’s SEO.

 

You have to be the best.

Put yourself in Google’s shoes for just a second.

Its job is to serve the best possible answer to any query.

Therefore, regardless of the products or services being offered, the shopper expects a very relevant page to appear on first page, in regards to what the shopper wants to buy.,

Now think of it from Google’s perspective,Google has millions, if not billions, of pages that it can choose to place on the first page.

 

Why should you choose your company?

Why should you choose your particular piece of content marketing?

Let’s say that you’re writing about car waxes.

Why should Google place that page at the top of the search results?

Which business currently occupies that position on Google right now?

Is your page better? Does it offer better quality information? Why should it rank higher than the current business?

These are the sorts of questions that the top SEO agencies ask. That is how they can supply a better answer. How can we offer a comprehensive answer to the customer?

 

Mobile friendly

For many people, the only way they purchase goods and services is on their smartphone.

People appreciate the convenience of purchasing items directly from their smartphones.

This means that your company website needs to be mobile-friendly.

Additionally, your SEO company should also focus on enhancing the user experience. They should make your mobile website version simple to use.

 

 

Backlinks

That is undoubtedly the case; if your business has a large number of high-quality backlinks, this can have a significant impact on your business’s SEO performance.

 

Domain authority

Domain authority is simply a score that is assigned to your whole website by an SEO tool such as Moz.It’s calculated by the strength and quality of your business’s backlinks.

 

How fast is your website?
 

You may be shopping around for a website hosting service.

However, we wouldn’t recommend just going for the cheapest price, that’s because how fast your website hosting is now affects your business’s SEO performance.

Therefore for your business to rank at the top organically, especially those businesses that rank at the top on mobile devices, they will have fast website.

 

We hope this article has been helpful.

Digital Tailors is an established SEO agency situated at the heart of Bristol.

We work with businesses of all sizes.

We work with a wide range of businesses, situated throughout Bath as well as throughout Bristol.

Why link building is still essential (we explain how to do it properly)

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Author: Digital Tailors
Date: 11/07/2025
10 minute Read

 

If we were asked for our opinion, we would have to say that link building is the area where many businesses go wrong. We would even go so far as to say it’s one of the areas that many agencies also get wrong when implementing SEO.

Because of this, many people say that link building is no longer effective. Therefore, at this moment in time, you might be a little confused, perplexed and disoriented as to which areas of your digital marketing you should be working on?

However, as always, our team of Digital Tailors is here to help you to improve your organic search engine optimisation.

 

A quick history lesson

When Google was founded, Larry Page and Sergey Brin created its first algorithm, known as “PageRank”.

The reason we are going back in time is simple: Google’s original algorithm, PageRank, was highly reliant on backlinks as a way to decipher how to rank websites.

For those interested, it is said that the inspiration for PageRank was based on how someone might write and create a dissertation.

When you are at university, and you write a dissertation, you often have to cite your sources, perhaps using the Harvard referencing system.

This demonstrates that the work has been thoroughly researched and carefully compiled. Now, this allows you to begin to gain insight into how Google’s page rank works and the logic behind it.

That’s because back links are similar to referencing, just as you would if you were to referencing system when writing a dissertation.

 

Votes of confidence

Even since those very early days, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google, we can begin to understand the inner workings behind how Google’s algorithm worked.

What, put, the more links, the better the page ranked during the time Google was using PageRank. However, don’t take that concept quite literally today.

The reason is that more is better when it comes to link building in 2025.

Its now about link quality

Now, it’s more about quality. Building the right links, considering link velocity slowly building links, and establishing an excellent backlink profile can significantly help improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation.

 

Gaming the system

In 2009, Google removed PageRank scores from its Webmaster Tools. We believe, and many other SEO agencies also think the same, as the businesses got carried away with building more and more back links. Business got obsessed, thinkin that more is better!

This becomes somewhat of an obsession, with actual pages being set up to send links to other websites. These were often referred to “link farms”.

Link farms and other highly black-hat, spammy link-building methods are intended solely to increase the number of backlinks sent to another business.

Therefore this is a black hat method of SEO and shouldn’t be used.

However, this does not benefit the shopper who wants to find an answer to their query, it’s merely a method to try and manipulate search engine results, such as on Google, into ranking the page higher than it deserves to be.

We believe that around this time in 2009, when Google made the conscious decision to remove Page Rank from Webmaster Tools, marked the beginning of Google’s message to focus less on link quantity and more on quality.

Therefore an emphasis was made to concentrate on other performance metrics, such lowering bounce rates, and focus on writing high-quality content marketing for example.

 

Links as votes

As you read various blog posts, trying to decipher the best way to build backlinks, you often see many statements made stating ‘links are like votes of confidence”. Another is that backlinks are “the currency of the Internet”.

The reason why links in particular are described as votes is quite simple: if you gain powerful links from the right websites, it’s just like a vote. Just as a politician looks for votes to win power, a website seeks to gain powerful links to occupy the number one position on Google.

However, we have to return to our previous point and say that many businesses do not understand how to build links, even though link building, as a discipline, has been around for years.

Many businesses falsely believe that even in 2025, Google still uses its PageRank -it doesn’t the algorithm is now much more sophisticated.
The truth is that things have evolved; the Google algorithm has undergone significant improvements.

For quite a long while prior to Penguin update, businesses were been frustrated by their ranking, often appearing say fifth on the first page of Google, only to be surpassed by numerous competitors using spam, black-hat methods, and purchasing backlinks in bulk. This is why Google introduced the penguin update.

There can be nothing more frustrating than a company that is following the rules and Google Webmaster guidelines, only to be overtaken by a multitude of businesses that are buying spam backlinks.

However the Penguin update changed all this. Now spam links do not work, and will harm your companies marketing.

 

 

Enter the Google Penguin update.

This was a very significant change to Google’s algorithm. Basically, without going into great detail, Google Penguin update became an integral part of the algorithm. It was essentially a filter, a spam filter; website owners with good-quality links would be rewarded for their efforts.

On the other hand, businesses that didn’t white-hat methods would be penalised. What could actually happen is that the website vanishes into thin air, well not literally disappearing altogether, but still being de-indexed, which means it’s taken entirely out of Google results.

 

 

Are backlinks still important today?

As one of the most experienced SEO experts in this area, we can confidently say that, without a doubt, high-quality backlinks still make a significant difference. Even though we are entering a period of artificial intelligence, where it is likely to have a substantial impact on search engine results pages ranking, a business still needs backlinks to decipher whether it has authoritative backlinks or perhaps they have spammy backlinks.

Ahrefs ran an experiment in 2021, where the company deliberately disavowed backlinks assigned to specific pages. The results were conclusive, proving that organic traffic sharply dropped, which indicates that good-quality backlinks are necessary to improve your organic search engine optimisation.

 

Stood the test of time

The truth is that various marketing companies, such as ours, have spent a considerable amount of time writing updates, blog posts, and creating evergreen content marketing that offers various SEO advice.

For example, since Google’s PageRank reigns supreme right through today in 2025, your marketing businesses are writing endlessly about search engine optimisation in order to rank highly for marketing keywords.

However, some aspects of SEO have stood the test of time, including good quality content and good quality links.

Naturally, SEO is hard work; it’s massively time-consuming, and if you want the advice of some of the best minds working in SEO, the time can be expensive.

Therefore, businesses have naturally wanted to cut corners.

The point we are trying to make here is quite simple: businesses that follow Google Webmaster Guidelines, whether in 2009 or 2025, will rank well in organic search results if the work is done to a good standard.

Therefore, don’t cut corners, do white hat SEO.

Spam, link penalties, and websites being de-indexed

As a customer, might have shopped around various agencies in order to gain an understanding of different prices that SEO agencys can charge.

What you might have become aware of is that the prices can vary massively, in terms of what one agency charges compared to another in their monthly retainer.

And you might be scratching your head, thinking how these prices vary so much?

Although paying a lot for SEO is no guarantee that it will result in quality work, it can sometimes reveal that the agency needs to cover a significant portion of staff wages to do the job correctly.

If an agency is offering a very low price, which is totally out of whack with all the other quotes, you do have to ask the question on the cutting call: ‘Should we use them?’ Are you using black hat methods? Are you using spam link-building methods?

As you are now aware of the Google Penguin update, you will also be mindful that businesses can get de-indexed.

This means, therefore, that if Google detects that you are building a large number of spam links, the website will be removed entirely from Google’s index.

It can take a very long time to recover rankings; personal experience shows that websites can sometimes take years to recover where they once ranked if they get hit by a penalty.

So, although things might seem to be moving at a snail’s pace, if the agency doing things the right way, then it’s worth waiting for the results to be reaped at a later date.

The difference between do-follow and no-follow backlinks

You might have read various blog posts where authors discuss domain authority and how a website passes through something called “link juice”?

Now, this is where things can get a bit complicated, but please bear with us; we will keep things as simple as possible.

Different websites have different DA scores, which stands for “domain authority”.

This is not a score assigned to the website by Google, but rather a metric created by various SEO tools to indicate the website’s authority. It was first created by Moz we believe.

Therefore, it’s a score out of 100, based on the strength of companies’ backlinks.

Now that brings us nicely to the point about do-follow and no-follow backlinks.

Quite simply put, it’s only do-follow backlinks that will send the link equity, commonly referred to as link juice, through to a connected page.

Therefore, if a page has a lot of link equity flowing to it from websites with a very high domain authority score, this can raise the page’s authority.

As a result, the connected page, having many backlinks itself, can rank higher within Google’s organic results.

This is why businesses fight so fiercely to get high quality back links which have a high domain authority score.

Quite simply put, in our experience, as one of the most experienced SEO agencies in this area of Bristol, we would say that all websites ranking in the top three positions on Google will normally have strong backlink profiles.

How content marketing and link building work hand in glove

When you’re first setting up a business and trying to improve your search engine optimisation, you might think, ‘ Why am I spending an endless amount of hours writing blog posts? ‘

Single blog posts might take you over 10 hours to write and research.

Therefore, you might be scratching your head and asking, ‘Why should we give away so much free advice?’

The answer is simple: without good, well-written, and well-researched content marketing, the page stands no chance whatsoever of ranking on the first page of Google results.

Therefore, well-written content marketing is critical to the business’s search engine optimisation efforts.

The content marketing needs to have the following three qualities?
Be relevant.

Google needs to understand the products and services that you’re selling. What is your website relevant for? Are you a solicitors practice, what are you selling? Lawnmowers? Content marketing helps define your website’s terms of relevance, specifying the keywords for which you want to improve your websites relevancy for.

 

Helping the customer

Google would have absolutely no way of knowing dwell times, bounce rates, or how many pages have been viewed by the average customer on your company website, without publishing a lot of quality content marketing on your company website.

Content marketing, therefore, allows the search engines, such as Google, to understand how customers are engaging with your work. Are they interested in the work? If so, they are likely to spend a considerable amount of time on the page, which positively impacts the dwell time.

Suppose the shopper is disinterested and immediately recognises that the page is of no use to them.

In that case, the bounce rate will likely be extremely high, which can negatively impact the business’s organic search engine optimisation. If you have a sustained high bounce rate this can damage your SEO efforts.

Customer engagement is, therefore, a critical metric that Google analyses.

Link-worthy content

Another reason why businesses’ content marketing needs to be top-notch is that it gives a reason for other companies not to want to link to you.

Let’s say, for example, that you manufacture high-quality running trainers.

Lets say a business conducts in-depth market research, which details, for instance, how many runners have developed foot injuries because they have bought the wrong footwear that is ill-fitting.

This market research could be cited by many e-commerce businesses that sell and running trainers. Some may want to link back to recent findings because they found it very interesting read.

They may want to highlight the research to show to their own customers why they need trainers to be properly fitted and calibrated to their feet.

Therefore as you can see content marketing serves many different purposes.

If the content marketing is of good quality, then it can serve as link-worthy content, meaning that you can obtain backlinks without even asking anybody to link to your business.

 

Link velocity and why it’s important to take things slow

As a director of the business, you may be frustrated and somewhat annoyed that your appointed search engine optimisation company is not delivering results quickly enough.

Now, this could become a problem because the methods they are using are could be ineffective?

However, it’s perfectly possible that doing things the right way, yet, it’s taking longer than you have anticipated.

The thing is with search engine optimisation, everything has to be done properly. Listen carefully.

This means copywriters need to research carefully and consider the type of original content marketing they are writing.

You also have to think about “link velocity”; you don’t want to build a ton of spam links too fast.

If you build backlinks too quickly, these links can get indexed in quick succession by Google, which can then raise eyebrows. The algorithm starts to think that you could be buying links? Are you engaging in spammy link-building methods?

Therefore, you need to build links slowly, think about link velocity, and build links with a slow pace.

Toxic backlinks, we often say that we live in a world where more is perceived as better.

Those who might think that a large plate of food is better than having a smaller plate, as it’s perceived that the bigger plate offers better value for money.

However, sitting down with a nutritionist, they will tell you it’s better to have small plates with more nutritious and fresh ingredients on the plate than a mass of chips!

Think of this concept when you’re engaging in link building; you don’t want a massive number of backlinks if they’re of poor quality.

They have two adverse effects on the backlinks.

If they are run-of-the-mill backlinks, they could dilute your backlink profile, ultimately not helping you and not causing any significant problems, except perhaps diluting the effectiveness of more valuable backlinks.

Many toxic backlinks need to be avoided like the plague.

Too many of these toxic links on your website and you’re going to get a big fat Google penalty, which can mean your website disappears into the fresh air on Google. By that we mean de-indexed.

Is it all about backlinks?

The answer to that question is no, for search engine optimisation to be highly effective, helping to draw in more customers for you need to take a rounded marketing strategy.

The central pillars are technical SEO, content marketing and link building. However, there are over 200 various ranking factors that Google uses to assess and calculate the strength of your business’s search engine optimisation.

This is why SEO agencies are always in demand; they must continually strengthen these various ranking factors. It’s like spinning plates – as soon as they focus on one area, they need to go back and start working on the other regions, strengthening them.

 

FAQ regarding backlinks:

Will artificial intelligence replace the need for building backlinks?

In our view, artificial intelligence is often massively misunderstood. A lot of it’s based on large language models (LLM’s), which is simply similar to how the algorithms works now. For example, Google’s bot reads the Internet by “crawling and indexing” links.

Then, Google possesses the knowledge to have an in-depth understanding of entities via Google Knowledge Vault.

This is similar to how artificial intelligence works; it reads most of the Internet.

Then, using large language models, it possesses massive amounts of knowledge that it can answer any question you ask of it.

However, there will always be a need to determine which businesses are more authoritative, which pages are more important, and therefore, which are more trusted in terms of the information they offer.

Therefore, we believe that backlink building is here to stay; it’s a surefire way of discerning which pages are of high quality and which ones are not.

How does our digital marketing agency nestled in the city of Bristol build backlinks?

We like to build backlinks in two different ways: through competitor backlink analysis, as well as earning backlinks.

The most effective way to build links is through high-quality content marketing. Therefore, what should happen then is that other businesses should want to link to you on their own accord, because they believe the information is of high quality and will be of interest to their readers.

Competitor backlink research involves using various backlink research tools. You can then obtain a comprehensive list of your direct competitors’ backlinks.

The purpose here is to replicate links; it’s similar to creating the same links leading to your website to enhance your business’s backlink profile.

Why choose our agency in Bristol?
Quite simply put, just as you would want to employ a highly experienced tradesperson, we are one of the most highly experienced SEO agencies operating in Bristol.
With over 10 years of experience, we know which SEO methods are effective and which ones are not.
Monthly retainer staff for just £ 1,000 PCM. Do contact us today for further information.
Meta title
Is backlink building still important? And how should we do it?
There is considerable confusion surrounding the notion that AI will replace the need to build links. We explain why link building remains essential, even in the era of artificial intelligence.

How can we improve on-page SEO to boost our local SEO?

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Date: 08/07/2025
Subject: Local SEO

 

When any local business, regardless of industry, wants to improve its SEO, it’s judged on three main criteria.

Proximity

The first is “proximity”: how far is the shopper from your business premises?

Prominence

Next is “prominence,” which, in terms of local SEO, refers to the number of positive reviews your business has accumulated. This mostly refers to your Google Business account, yet positive reviews on Trust Pilot are still important.

It also includes the quality of your business’s backlink profile.

Relevance

Then there’s “relevance”. For example does your businesses content marketing—such as your product pages—match what the customer is

actually looking to buy?
If you sell say fishing rods, how have you made the pages relevant for each product that you sell.

How to improve on-page SEO for local businesses

Let’s go over those three areas in a bit more detail:

Relevance

Does the page you match what the searcher is looking for?

Part of the SEO process—and the magic, if you like—is making sure your website is as relevant as possible to the services you offer.

Now, this is where it gets hard if your business sells many different product lines. If you stock say over 1,000 different products, this is it gets harder to get every product line to rank high on page one of Google.

 

Distance/Proximity

Whether it’s the local organic search results or Google Map listings, where your business appears is based on the geographic areas you’ve optimised your website for. In Google Business, it’s based on the shopper’s actual location at the moment in time. For example, are they five miles away or 500 miles away?

Google usually only wants to show businesses that are close to the shopper- that’s if its clear they want to buy a product / service locally.

 

Prominence

If you have a lot of positive reviews—for example, on Trustpilot or your Google Business account—this can improve your prominence.

Many leading SEO consultants also believe prominence comes mainly from your backlink profile.

If you have a lot of good positive reviews on your Google Business profile, you’re more likely to be prominently placed in the Google Business results.

That’s all well and good, but how do you actually go about improving local SEO?

For Google Business optimisation, a key ranking factor is how close the shopper is to your company.

However, with organic SEO, there are over 200 different ranking factors Google takes into account.

And when it comes to Google Business, it’s not just about where the shopper is—it’s also about other factors, like how many positive Google reviews your business has, how many good backlinks, how often you have kept the profile updated.

 

How to optimise local landing pages

You want to create landing pages—often called main pages—that clearly outline the different services and products you offer.

Good On-Page SEO

This is definitely not just about ticking boxes with SEO tools. I’d recommend avoiding any tools that oversimplify the process—like ones that just use a traffic light system (red, amber, green). In my opinion, that’s way too simplistic.

Instead, you need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and give them high-quality, helpful information that’s valuable to them. Basically content marketing that helps them to make a buying decision, that answer there queries regarding that product or service.

Here’s an example of how you can help the customer while improving your on-page SEO:

Write really helpful product descriptions

Use a well written page title that sets out what the page is about

Write a strong meta title and meta descriptions, which can boost your CTR

Make sure your pages aren’t thin on content; the page should give enough information to help the customer make a buying decision

Make sure your pages load quickly, so customers aren’t kept waiting

Provide clear contact options so people can get in touch easily

Meta descriptions and meta titles

Meta descriptions aren’t a Google ranking factor—Google doesn’t use them to determine the strength of your SEO.

However, they do let customers know exactly what the page is about, grab their attention, and encourage them to visit your page.

For example, if you write within your meta description “We sell e-bikes under £2000” and that shows up in Google’s search results, it will immediately catch the attention of customers looking to spend that amount on a new bike, improving your click-through rate (CTR).

 

Time Poor

Our SEO agency would argue that people are more “time-poor” than ever today. You need to factor this into your SEO strategy.

 

What does this mean?

When you want to improve a business’s on-page SEO, think about how you can get your message across as quickly and clearly as possible.

Start with the meta description and quickly get across the positives of the page in just a few seconds.

Use bullet points so customers can quickly decide if your product is right for them.

Focus on quickly highlighting the benefits, using strong product descriptions, embedded YouTube videos with staff members explaining the benefits of that product, and try to reduce your bounce rate.

This is a key factor many SEO companies talk about: people are short on time and often buy products or services on the go—on the bus, train, or while out and about. Therefore think about how you can make your company website faster, but also more simple to use. This will improve the shoppers user experience, which will help to reduce bounce rate and improve conversions.

So, how can you convince someone in just a few seconds that your product is better?

Again, this comes back to a well-written meta description.

It’s all about improving your website’s visibility and getting it to rank higher in organic search.
Make sure that you have consistent Name, Address, Phone (NAP) Information

 

Does NAP Consistency Still Matter?

Earlier, we talked about proximity, where businesses is often selected based on how close they are to the searcher.

The way Google’s algorithm determines if your business is truly local is by checking your NAP information.

Some people think we’re now in the era of AI and citations don’t matter—but we disagree.

We believe business citations—your name, address, and phone number listed consistently across the internet—are still essential for improving your business’s local SEO.

 

The need for clarity

What can sometimes happen is that a business has strong search engine optimisation.

However, for whatever reason, the business may change its address and not update its NAP information, for example, on its Google Business account. This means the company website may say they based at new address, yet the companies Google Business profile may say it’s the old address, causing confusion to customers and Google.

Therefore what can sometimes happen is that changing an address, then having conflicting business citations, can cause the SEO to falter.
That’s because Googlebot and Google’s algorithms won’t know where you’re based—are you at your new or old address?

Use Schema Markup

 

Many businesses use schema markup to markup information, such as product reviews.

What this can do is help your business stand out more and grab shoppers attention in the search engine results pages by displaying your business as a featured snippet.

For example, you might have received 700 reviews for a particular product, and your customers are happy with that product, giving it an average rating of 4.8 out of five star rating.

This is an excellent product rating, so you may want to stand out as a featured snippet on the search engine pages, or “SERPs” for short.
One way to do this is by adding schema markup, which can be completed in just a matter of seconds.

Content marketing is an essential part of organic and local SEO.

As we have already mentioned, landing pages and main pages are essential parts of the search engine optimisation process. They are primarily used to make your website more relevant to the product or service you are selling. For example, if you’re writing hundreds of guides on bikes, it’s crystal clear to Google that your business sells bicycles and electric bikes.

Content marketing helps customers make buying decisions, for example, by answering any questions they may have. It also helps search engines understand more about the products and services your company offers. That’s because, regularly, the Googlebot crawls and indexes your main pages and determines how relevant your website is when deciding where to rank your business in the search engine results pages.
For example, if you have written in-depth guides about bikes, then this can help your website to rank higher for keywords related to e-bikes.

 

Internal links should be added within your website.

For example, a blog post might be written to promote a product or a service on your company website.
Therefore, if you are not using a blog post and internal link to a main product page, you could be missing out on an opportunity to generate more sales.

Technical SEO

It’s also important, regardless of whether you’re optimising your website to improve your local or national SEO, to take some time to improve your websites technical SEO.

This can mean:

  • Fixing broken links
  • Fixing indexation issues
  • Improving page speed

Sometimes, a business—whether it’s a brochure site or an e-commerce website—can encounter technical issues. For example, the XML sitemap might be incorrectly written.

The XML sitemap may indicate that certain pages are not to be indexed- when actually they should be. This can mean that those pages will never appear in Google’s results, which means that unless the technical SEO issue is fixed, the page will never appear.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are essentially about how quickly your company’s website loads.

Remember that we discussed earlier how people are time-poor and impatient.

This means that if a business has a slow website, it can massively increase the business’s bounce rate.

What you will find, especially in large businesses such as e-commerce companies, is that they work on improving the site speed of their company website a lot.

You should work on this also, as having a faster company website can mean that your company in Bristol ranks higher on Google.

 

Keyword Stuffing

Why you shouldn’t keyword stuff your businesses content marketing

If your business sells fireworks, you might think it’s a good idea to keep repeatedly mentioning this keyword “fireworks”—like a dripping tap within your content marketing.

However, it’s not a good idea, it’s most likely going to end up with a Google penalty being applied to the website.
Google’s algorithms are very sophisticated; they recognise when a business mentions a keyword excessively.

This can lead to what is called over-optimisation issues.

We like to think of search engine optimisation a bit like tuning up an engine.
Just like when an engine’s power can be compromised if you tune it incorrectly, especially if it’s stressed too much. This can mean it will overheat and potentially blow up!

This is similar to your business’s search engine optimisation, in the sense that you can basically ruin your SEO efforts—and this can most definitely be achieved if you keyword stuff.

Instead of obsessively mentioning the keywords you want to rank for, you should naturally include them within your sentences.

Write your content to help the customer, as if you are doing your very best to assist them in their buying journey.

Imagine, therefore, when you’re writing content marketing, that you’re having a conversation with a real customer in your shop.

Consequently, it should be written naturally, as if you’re having a real-life conversation.

 

Utilise titles and FAQ-style content marketing

You may have noticed that we write content marketing using short and sharp sentences.

We also combine this with using a lot of page titles, which allows the reader to take a breather, and also to skip to the section where they want to read more of.

This can help reduce bounce rates and increase dwell times, which also helps Google’s algorithm better understand what the content marketing is about.

For example, suppose you split a 3,000-word piece of content marketing into sections using page titles and questions; this can help a shopper to skip to the sections of the page they want to read more about.
In that case, this can help Google better understand more precisely what the page is about.

 

FAQ on On-page SEO:

What can improve a business’s on-page SEO the most?

We would say that well-written content marketing with a very high Google E-EAT score is key; that is, well-written content marketing will significantly improve your business’s search engine optimisation.

Therefore, don’t write too many blog posts that contain thin content. Instead, focus your time and effort on writing better quality content marketing, perhaps less frequently.

 

Contact Us Today for a free quote

If you would like a free quotation, why not give us a ring?
We specialise in organic and local SEO for Bristol based businesses.

 

Link building for SEO: A beginner’s guide

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Link Building to Improve Your SEO: A Beginner’s Guide

For over 10 years, we’ve been diligently working to help businesses improve their search engine optimisation. This article will focus on link building, which is a cornerstone of any business’s organic or local SEO. In the business world, regardless of the size of the company, you will often need to build high-quality links (do-follow and no-follow).

This guide will therefore walk you through the process and provide our expert knowledge in a clear and easy-to-understand way.
Shoppers and new businesses will often choose to link to your company because you might rank high on Google. Perhaps even you rank number 1.

Therefore, often you will be regarded by customers as the best at what you do.

However, what many businesses will realise is that once you have got your business onto the first page of Google, you will often need to be a very busy bee building backlinks.

 

Experienced link builders

We’ve been helping businesses for over 10 years, enabling them to generate more sales through search engine optimisation. Now, one of the time-consuming aspects is improving a business’s SEO to build backlinks. It can, in our experience, consume a significant portion of a client’s marketing budget, as it’s one of the most time-consuming aspects of improving a business’s SEO.

However, neglecting this aspect of improving your SEO often means that your company will not rank at the top.

Therefore, link building is something that must be done; however, it must be done to a high standard.

 

Our table of contents

  • The basics of link building
  • How can we build quality and authoritative company backlinks
  • Which backlinks make a difference to a business’s search engine optimisation
  • Why it’s essential to have a link-building strategy in place
  • What are some of the best link-building tools that you use (we highly recommend Moz Pro)
  • Why do many people hire Digital Tailors in South West England

The basics of link building

We understand that you may not fully understand how Google’s algorithm works.

Some of the most skilled marketing companies globally do not precisely understand how Google’s algorithm works. The reason is that the exact inner workings of Google’s algorithm are a closely guarded secret.

However, what might make it easier to understand is that Google uses an algorithm that is constantly being perfected, improved, and worked on to make it better. Therefore, the point we are trying to make here is simple: focus on quality. When enhancing your business’s SEO, always focus on quality.

For example, consider a retro computer games console for a moment. In your day, the Nintendo 64 was the bees’ knees. Fast-forward to today, and the gaming console is more powerful and significantly improved.

This is the same when it comes to Google’s algorithm.

Back in the day, we had Google PageRank; however, now, in 2025, we are starting to see AI being used to sort the results, just as gaming consoles have evolved, so has Google’s algorithm.

Back in the day, Google’s PageRank algorithm was a very early iteration of Google’s algorithm; it was like the Nintendo 64 – in its time.

However, the algorithm has evolved in terms of its operation.

To understand the importance of link building, we must revisit the early days, specifically the introduction of PageRank. In layperson’s terms, what happened then was that other websites linking to your company website were seen as a “vote of confidence”. A link was, therefore, like a thumbs-up, approval of your business; the more you obtained, the higher your business ranked.

Therefore, the more links you obtain, the more powerful your website is in terms of SEO.

However, many businesses attempted to manipulate SEO by purchasing links and spam links for as little as a few pounds.

Therefore, the algorithm could be somewhat manipulated; thus, Google requires a clampdown on businesses using spam, low-quality and purchased links.

This is when Google rolled out the Almighty Google Penguin algorithm update. Many businesses have disappeared overnight from Google because they have built spammy links.

The reason businesses would receive a link penalty is if they participated in purchasing low-quality links; they would then incur an algorithm penalty or a manual penalty from Google.

Why are backlinks an essential part of the SEO process?

First of all, you have to put yourself into Google’s shoes for a second

Google is presented with millions of new pages published every day, which have to be crawled and indexed.

Businesses globally are publishing content marketing at a rapid rate.

For the survival of some businesses, they must rank at the top of search engines like Google or Bing. Therefore, companies often have to produce and publish a large amount of content marketing.

Therefore, the company may have a dedicated team of content marketing writers, also known as copywriters, who produce content daily.

Businesses understand that they need to publish content marketing if they want to improve their Google rankings.

An essential aspect to remember is that good-quality content marketing can help you obtain good-quality backlinks.
Google’s algorithm works by taking into account various ranking factors.

Sometimes these are also referred to as Google ranking signals. Now, what is regarded as one of the primary ways Google uses to determine the quality of a business’s organic SEO is calculating the actual strength of a business’s backlinks.

Let’s summarise this neatly in one single paragraph: if your website has a long list of high-quality backlinks linking to you, you are most likely to rank on the first page of Google.

Businesses that have purchased rubbish links, links bought for a few quid, are likely to languish on page 10 of Google or worse, receive a Google Penguin link penalty.

 

Okay, enough of the suspense, how to go about building back?

You may read several articles that discuss how to improve your website’s authority and why it’s essential to review the authority of your company website. For example, a company’s backlink strength is calculated using a DA or “domain authority” score.

The reason is simple: a website, a business that has backlinks from respected other businesses, gains more authority.

Therefore, if a website has a high volume of quality links, it will likely have a high DA score.

But, hold your horses, don’t even though the back link is!

This explains clearly what backlinks are:

A link is simply a connection (a link) from one website to another; when you click on some text, called the “anchor text”, you are transported to the other website- this is called following a link.

The reason links are added is pretty straightforward: businesses often collaborate closely with other companies, such as suppliers. Therefore, if you make a product that includes a quality part or component, you may link to that supplier’s website.

For example, when you’re about to go on holiday, you book your flights on an airline’s website. Y
Once you finish making your booking, the website asks, ‘Would you also like to hire a car?’

They click the anchor text that says ‘Hire a Car’ and are directed to a local car hire company in the destination country.

This link is offered to help the customer, as they can now book a car much more simply after booking their flight on the airline’s website.
And therefore, the car hire website benefits from the incoming link because the airline has linked to it. Thus, when link building is done right, in a “white hat” way, it can help both the customer and the business’s SEO.

How do you go about building backlinks?

There are many ways to build links; you could choose to add a link, ask for a link, or request a backlink.

Here’s a snapshot of how you can build links; however, we would only recommend “earning links”.

 

You can build links in the following ways:

– Buying links
– Earning links
– Completing broken link building
– PR
– Outreach

 

What’s the hardest way to obtain a back?

We would say that the most challenging part is earning a backlink, but really, earning backlinks is the best way to obtain them.

Why was this so? Why do you only recommend earning backlinks?

The answer is quite simple; other methods of link building could be viewed as spam. It could be considered that you purchased the links, which is frowned upon. This could attract a Google penalty, and it could damage your search engine optimisation because it may be perceived as an attempt to manipulate your SEO by buying backlinks.

However, what you want to do is to link.

For example, suppose your business offers an excellent piece of content marketing that is both helpful and enables customers to solve a problem. In that case, you are likely to get linked to by other businesses.

The content marketing could range from how-to guides related to car repair to topics involving offering legal advice.

Other companies might want to choose the link because you have conducted market research; for example, you might have cited statistics that the company found interesting and related to their blog posts, so they cited your business as a source of those statistics.

There’s also a wide range of reasons why others want to link to your business.

This, therefore, involves writing content marketing, which is of excellent quality, just like the article that you are reading here.

Business directory links

It can be beneficial, especially if your focus is on improving your business’s local search engine optimisation to build some local backlinks.

These are often referred to as business directory links, and they can be easily obtained from sources such as the Yellow Pages.

However, we recommend building business citations, just enough to reinforce your company’s name, address and phone number. The number of citations you have, for example, NAP links from sources like Thomson Local, will help reinforce your company’s name, address, and phone number. Again, you need a considerable number of this type of link and NAP citations.

 

 

Outreach and asking for links

This often involves a lot of emails and perhaps phone conversations with other websites which are related to the website. For example, it could be a blog you have written about a particular brand of car, and how to change the oil of that car.

You might be a manufacturer of high-performance oil filters.

You might write a rather comprehensive article explaining how to change oil filters for a particular range of cars. Then you could write a high-quality piece of content marketing, which could be well-placed on another company’s website. Because you’re helping other businesses, readers and customers of our company will be interested in what you have to say as you dispense your knowledge about oil filters and related products.

Therefore, in return for your efforts in writing a detailed piece of content marketing on how to change the oil in their car, you can request a do-follow backlink from the publisher.

This is what is called a win-win situation; you’ve offered a high-quality piece of content marketing that the other company knows its audience will want to read.

Your efforts in writing, spanning approximately 2000 words, in dispensing your knowledge, you can then ask for a link back to, say, the homepage of your website.

 

What does link prospecting mean?

If you were to join an SEO agency as part of the team, they would likely have one or more link builders working for them. Because link building is such a critical part of the search engine optimisation process, as part of a large marketing agency, there will be a team of link builders.

However, their job is to analyse competitors’ backlink profiles, which can sometimes contain many thousands of links that they need to review line by line diligently, using, for example, Ahrefs’ backlink checking tool.

This is hard and tedious work because not all of those backlinks can be replicated.

However, some of them can be replicated, which means that they can contact those businesses with the ambition and aim of building a similar backing for their clients or the marketing company’s website. The purpose of this work is, therefore, simple: competitors are ranking higher than them because they have better backlinks; consequently, you can try to replicate some of those links.

It’s then simply a matter of seeing if you can replicate those links and whether you can also obtain high-quality links for your client, with the ambition of thereby ranking higher.

 

What is the skyscraper technique?

We think that this method is often overhyped in SEO and could lead to a possible waste of your time if you were to pursue it.

Essentially, the skyscraper link-building technique is defined as a page with numerous backlinks. However, the content marketing might have become outdated and stale, therefore offering obsolete advice.

Then, this technique dictates that you need to create a better piece of content marketing.

Then, after you have published a better article, you can contact all the websites that are linking to the other piece of content marketing and say, ‘Look at this; isn’t it better?’ Why don’t you link to me instead?

We believe that this technique is likely to fall on deaf ears, as businesses often don’t want to link to other companies solely because they have received an email telling them to do so.

What is far better is to link to or participate in outreach when a business wants a particular topic or subject covered.

 

Broken link building

Again, we believe this is another link-building method that is slightly overhyped and likely won’t yield the results that warrant investing a lot of time into it.

This method essentially means finding a page that receives a large number of links, but the page is no longer online, possibly due to a page error.

This, therefore, means that the link is broken because a piece of content marketing has been removed.

Therefore, the suggestion is that you then contact the company and ask them to link to your page, because the other link is broken.

We would place too much time and effort into this type of link building; for us, it is time-intensive compared to the benefits that it could potentially bring.

 

HARO and journalist requests –

Just as a journalist is doing a live broadcast, they often want to bring in an expert for their opinion live on air.
This is also true for content marketing, where, in exchange for your contributions to the article, you can often request a backlink in return.

 

Unlinked mention

Now, in our opinion, this is a compelling way to build backlinks.

Often scattered throughout the Internet, there will be many mentions of your brand and your company name.

Therefore, this presents an opportunity for you to contact those businesses and request that the brand mention be converted into a link back to your company website.

This gives you an example, let’s say that you run a restaurant and you were awarded a particularly prestigious award for your food.

Then, once you have been awarded this award, you can look at which bloggers and other companies have mentioned the Gold award you have won.

Then ask those companies to offer a link back to your website.

 

Should we purchase backlinks?

So, there’s an unequivocal answer to that question: you shouldn’t purchase backlinks.

The only reason businesses purchase a link or links is to try to fool Google’s algorithm, attempting to deceive Google’s algorithm into thinking that your search engine optimisation is stronger than it is

Therefore, businesses might try to cut corners and purchase backlinks.

You might think that’s a good idea, trying to buy, say, a hundred links, which might seem like a good idea, but it’s not.

However, buying links can cause a Google algorithmic penalty, which means that, in the flick of a switch, your website disappears from Google.

The reason this happens is simple: Google knows the websites that are selling links, often referred to as “link farms”.

Therefore, if you have a large number of links pointing to your website that originate from these link farms, which charge for links, it’s apparent that you have engaged in spam and low-quality link building.

This, therefore, means that if you have a lot of spammy links, your website will be removed from Google.

This is because a link penalty could have been applied to your website.

 

Why do you advocate for earning links as the best way of obtaining backlinks?

If you create quality content marketing, it can work for your business in two different ways.

Content marketing helps to make a website relevant.
For example, if you are writing content marketing about, say, “motorbikes,” you are already making your website relevant for relevant keywords about motorbikes.

There are also second benefits to this work, which, if helpful blog posts, helps people solve a problem. This can help a company accumulate backlinks.

What you often have to appreciate is that businesses that rank in the first position on Google may have a relatively high number of backlinks.

For example, it’s not uncommon for an excellent page to have over 1000 backlinks; therefore, this needs to be understood if you’re trying to rank higher than the current page on Google. The reason is quite simple: if you want to rank higher than that business on page one, you need better backlinks.

If you are competing with a page that has 1000 quality links, then it will be very hard to overtake that page.

Therefore, you do have to pick your fights

What is meant by that is that the competition has powerful backlinks; you have to be serious about whether you can compete with them.
With search engine optimisation, you have to be mindful of your time.

 

Which backlinks can genuinely make a significant impact?

Different types of backlinks will affect businesses’ search optimisation differently.

For example, a single back link from the BBC News could jump you up seven pages on Google.

Let us provide you with another example: suppose you run a solicitors’ practice, and there is a widely respected news website that thousands of solicitors in the United Kingdom enjoy reading and gaining news from. This is therefore a primary source for news in your particular industry.

Now, one single link from a website like that can often have a dramatic impact on a business’s organic search engine optimisation.
However, finding such links is akin to finding a needle in a haystack and is a challenging task.

 

Google E-EAT

If you’re thinking about starting work on improving your business’s search engine optimisation, you must begin by reading about Google’s E-EAT update. This stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Essentially, this is what Google quality evaluators are looking for when assessing the quality of businesses’ search optimisation.
How authoritative is your website?
The primary way to enhance a business’s authority is to gain backlinks. As we mentioned right at the start of this article, backlinks are still widely regarded as one of the most important ranking signals.

 

How do backlink tools calculate the value of a link?

Backlink building tools such as Ahrefs are used to measure a link’s domain rating (DR) or domain authority (DA).

 

Anchor text

For those unfamiliar with anchor text, it is simply the clickable text that follows a link. Now the anchor text is branded, for example, it could just mention your company name.

It can also be anchor text, which says ‘click here’.

Yet the anchor text can also be written descriptively; for example, it might mention Nike running trainers.

The descriptive anchor text indicates to search engines what the link is for.

However, just like building spam links, you can also damage your company’s SEO by over-optimising the anchor text, which can result in a link penalty in itself.

For example, your business often needs to rank highly on Google for, say, one main keyword.
Therefore, if you mention that keyword in the hundreds of anchor texts, this will result in a link penalty.

 

Placement of the link

Bill Slawski stated in 2010, after studying a Google patent, that the patent essentially explains the likelihood of a particular link being clicked on. For example, a link that’s more likely to be clicked on will often transfer more link authority. Therefore, the location of the link on the page determines its importance.

For example, if your link is positioned high on the page and in a main paragraph, it will pass more link equity.

However, links in the footer are generally considered less effective; therefore, a link that is prominently placed in the opening paragraph is likely to be clicked on more, receive more attention from readers, and thus is expected to pass and transfer authority to the linking page.

Competitor backlink research is essential for any article on backlink building, as it would be incomplete without discussing competitor backlink research.

We briefly discussed this earlier, but it is worth examining in more depth now.

Most marketing agencies find that the most effective way to build brand backlinks for a business is to conduct competitor backlink research.

This means identifying your main competitors and then examining their backlink profile to determine where they have obtained their links from.

SEO agencies globally utilise this method to build backlinks for their clients.

It can be very effective, the reason being that it identifies already established websites that are on the first page of Google; therefore, simply replicating those links can significantly boost your business SEO

Visit one of the top Bristol SEO agencies.

If your business is located in the South West, contact us. We are the SEO experts in Bristol.