Search Engine Optimisation

Whether we’re looking for a new car or a plumber, we join the millions and millions of others turning to search engines like Google several times a day to help solve our problems. Unlike other forms of marketing that interrupt people, SEO makes your website highly visible to users when they’re actively looking for products and services like yours. If your website is not there, then those users are heading straight to your competitors instead.

Whether you’re looking to increase sales, leads, donations, applications, sign-ups or downloads, the goal of SEO is to help grow your organisation. With SEO, there is no expiry date and the benefits compound over time, to the point where you eventually get traffic and leads for free.

However, you can’t buy those top positions, they have to be earned. It’s not enough to just create a website that search engines can crawl and understand. The best and most sustainable way to achieve this is investing in actually being the best. It’s providing a better user experience with a website that looks great, is easy-to-navigate, quick-to-load and mobile-friendly. It’s publishing high-quality, useful content that users actually read, bookmark and share. It’s about getting five-star reviews and recommendations for what you actually sell and do. It’s being talked about on social media, in industry forums, on blogs, covered in magazines and newspapers. It's about building trust and credibility which are earned and built over time, just like in real life.

This means SEO takes a lot of work and you have to be patient, but thankfully the results will continue to be felt years later, which is what makes SEO an investment.

However, this long-term mindset isn’t for every organisation. If you are looking for a return on investment immediately, you may find that you get frustrated and end up pulling the plug early on. For more immediate, short-term wins, there are other ways, such as PPC and paid social advertising. The downside of pay per click is that when you stop spending your ads instantly disappear.

Another common roadblock to investing in SEO is that businesses don’t match their SEO goals with their budget. If you invest on the low end of the price spectrum, you’ll be employing a low-level skillset or only have a small number of man-hours. As mentioned, with SEO the more you put in, the more you stand to get out. Moving from position #97 to #32 isn’t going to do anything to your bottom line.

If you are going to invest in SEO, you should do it properly. View any outrageously cheap offer or guarantee with caution. You also have to be careful about hiring-in just any help as a lot of people lie about what they’ve done. They'll eventually get caught out, but you'll be out of pocket and they may also end up hurting your website rather than helping.

To build a business case for SEO, we recommend collecting average monthly search volumes from Google Keyword Planner and using this CTR study by AWR to build forecasts. Then look at existing conversion data in Google Analytics and AdWords. Note that this will only represent a window on investing in SEO and will not account for any new revenue opportunities generated.

Not at all. Although we are based in London, we have clients as far away as Australia.

Our clients that are based in other UK cities don't notice any difference at all. Our teams travel to them, let them know when they are next in their area and will make time to meet them whenever they're in London.

The only drawback to not being based in the same country as us is that rather than meeting in-person, discussions and training usually happen in the form of video meetings. For anything else, we're always just a phone call away and available on Slack, Skype, Whatsapp or email.

We have had to become accustomed to working with clients across different timezones and we've found that it doesn't take long to find a rhythm that works well.

Every project is assigned an SEO director and we handpick the finest quality specialists from our extensive network of copywriters, web designers, videographers, ecommerce developers, illustrators, photographers, technical SEOs, content marketers and many more.

Unlike other London SEO agencies that outsource everything, including the planning and management, we plan and administer each step – from the initial analysis of your needs to the final execution.

We go that extra mile to produce excellence and perfection in every project that we deliver.

It is super-hard. But small companies have a lot of advantages, especially online.

It’s a lot easier for them to shift, adapt and move quickly compared to bigger organisations. Especially when something shifts in the ecosystem, such as new trends or when something significantly changes – they can act really swiftly, almost immediately, in search.

We see this all the time with larger businesses, where they have lots of really cool ideas that they want to implement, however it takes one or two years for them to deliver those ideas. Whether that’s down to other priorities, various teams and sign-offs, etc. With smaller companies, however, the same idea can be delivered in the next few weeks.

For example, we see this in our industry with small SEO tools. They often release features that Google Search Console doesn’t have – and that may be for policy reasons, legal reasons or it is built into the platform years later. This gives these SEO tool providers a little bit of a head start and a chance to grow a relevant user base, even in a market where Google is the dominant corporation.

Sometimes with a small company, it also makes sense to be active in areas that are just not interesting to large companies. Where the smaller organisation has the ability to focus on a smaller segment of the market and do something really unique there, the larger company may decide that it’s too much work to set up for only a couple of million pounds or concerned that they may get distracted from their day-to-day. With a small company, a couple of million can make a real difference.

This means that small companies have the ability to focus on these small areas and do something really unique, especially online. Over the last few years, we’ve particularly seen this around sustainable and environmental products and services, such as sustainable venue finding for events across a particular city versus these huge venue finding platforms that cover all venues across entire countries to recycled sunglasses made from plastics taken out of the ocean for the environmentally conscious versus huge stores like Sunglasses Hut.

We find if these smaller businesses pick up, maybe a larger company will do something similar a couple of years down the line, but they have that headway at least, to move ahead of all these big companies during that time and dominate those topics through great products, content and relevant PR and links.

So yes, small companies can compete. Although large organisations have a lot of power, talent, a strong brand and resources, they can’t move as quickly and may not satisfy users' intent in specific areas as well as smaller businesses.

With 301 redirects, you are essentially combining multiple websites into one. With rel canonicals, you are able to leave the old websites where they are while focusing on the new one. Leaving the websites where they are might make sense if you want to keep them live for other reasons than SEO.

If you are purely thinking about SEO and you just want to combine and clean everything, we would suggest redirecting and implementing a proper merger between those websites, including using the change site feature in Google Search Console. However, if you want to keep the other websites alive for whatever reason then using the rel canonical tags is a good approach.

Not necessarily. Some important topics can have low search volumes resulting in low traffic. That doesn't mean the content is bad.

Ultimately, search engine algorithms are looking for value, not page views. A metric like page views can be a useful way to find low-quality content, but a human should always look over it before removing it.

The impact of most Google algorithm updates have been to reward those websites that focus on high-quality, fresh content, written by experts and published on websites with authority and that users trust.

This is not only important to consider when creating or updating content for a specific page, but also thinking about how the entire website is being presented to search engines. If there is a ton of content across the website that is thin, out-of-date, with no purpose, not relevant or it may just not be any good at all, then that's how the organisation is being presented to the search engines and evaluated. Every page in Google's index counts toward your site's overall quality score.

If this is the case, there are multiple ways to handle it:

1) BOOST THE CONTENT ON THOSE PAGES

Update to improve the content to satisfy search intent for the targeted terms better, add interesting stats, link to supporting content, add visuals and videos, remove clutter and/or fix broken links.

2) REMOVE THOSE PAGES AND GET THEM OUT OF THE INDEX

Either 301 redirect the existing URLs to relevant pages or apply a 410 header to those pages to quicken the process of having that content removed from the index (on that point, check for links from other websites pointing to the page or social shares - the longer the page has been around, the more likely it is to have legacy links or social shares).

We typically encourage clients to serve fewer, better pages over many weak ones. This is not just for SEO. It's for users and SEO. This helps you maintain quality indexation, makes it easier for you to ensure your pages are significantly different and not competing for the same terms in the rankings, and we don't waste any crawl budget.

There are many different ways to make websites nowadays, and luckily most of these technologies work well in search as long as you do the research first to thoroughly understand the language, framework or platform you plan to use as well as understand the fundamentals of SEO.

The technology you choose depends on the expertise you have within the team. If you are only a small organisation, it's probably more important to find a technology that works well for you and the people that you are working with, who can help you get things set up and support you with solving the hurdles that come with any new website that you roll out.

For more experienced teams, there are some really exciting, innovative and dynamic new technologies out there and others being developed. If you can, we would recommend starting with building a brief and doing your research. Whenever we are planning a new website or app for clients, we always start with research to see if there is anything new or whether a platform that we have previously disregarded has been updated with better features.

Choosing a technology for your website also really depends on what the website will be about and do. If it needs to be interactive, then we would recommend looking into more modern formats, maybe even a JavaScript framework. If you just want to get on with writing content and you don't have time to figure out all of the technical details, then using a popular CMS like WordPress could probably be a good approach. With a popular CMS, if you run into issues, chances are someone else has had the same problem so you'll be able to easily find a solution online. There are also SEO plugins for WordPress to help with onsite optimisation.

Whatever technology you decide to go with, it's important to keep SEO front of mind when designing the website, the user experience or planning out the content.