As you might expect, it’s a question that every digital marketing agency here within Cardiff will be asked on a regular basis- that’s to say we will be asked, “how does SEO work?”.

Yet with that said- this is a question that requires a very detailed answer, so often it can’t be answered with just one or two sentences, in matter of fact, we think that this whole blog post is needed just to cover some of the basics.

So, without further ado, here’s how organic SEO works:

Question or Query

Google will want to offer you the best answer it can to any question that it get’s asked, so in order for your business to be ranked on the first page of Google, your business must offer the best answer to that query.

So, let’s break this down a little bit more, it doesn’t matter if you sell skis for a break in the Alps, or luxury cars, if you want your business to appear on the first page of Google, these are the components that your website will need to have:

 

·        Relevant– must be relevant to the query

·        Quality– the website must be optimised using white hat seo

·        Best ranking signals- for a business to be ranked on the first page, that website must have the strongest ranking signals, so for example if you’re the 10th strongest, you will rank 10th  for that query i.e “pizza restaurant near me”.

·        There are over 200 ranking factors that Google’s algorithm will use to take into account how strong your businesses seo is

·        If the seo is not white hat, then your business could incur an algorithmic or a manual penalty  

So, whether the query is “find me a local employment solicitor” or “show me local pizza delivery business”– your business should aim to be the most relevant and best at answering that query- and how will an SEO agency do this?

Well, its not one thing, its over 200, that’s because most SEO consultants now believe that there are over 200 ranking signals, which means that there’s over 200 ways that an agency could improve your website.

Here are some of the ranking factors that most SEO agencies consider to be important:

·        High-quality backlinks

·        High-quality content marketing

·        Relevant

·        EAT- Expertise, authoritative, trustworthiness  

Google’s Algorithm

Crawling and Indexing

One of the first things your marketing agency must do is to consider can your website be crawled and indexed?

And what does that mean?

Googlebot

Well, sometimes something called the “No-index” tab can be left on, or the web developer may have written code which sometimes stops GoogleBot from crawling and indexing the website, sometimes this can be for one page, or sometimes it can be for an entire website.

And what does this mean?

Well, if a “No-index” or a “do not index” code was added to a website, this means that the website will not show-up in Google’s results, so this obviously this won’t help your SEO agency that’s trying to improve your businesses seo.

So, for example you may have a website that sells men’s clothing for example, and you may hire a digital marketing company to help you sell more mens shoes.

Yet, with that said, if the mens shoes section of your website cannot be indexed, for example, there’s a no-index tab that’s left on, then this will mean that the website is unlikely to appear in Google’s results for mens shoes, so the web developer should remove the code or switch the no-index tab off.

So, one of the first checks that your seo company here in Cardiff should do, is to make sure that GoogleBot can crawl and index your website.

Then the agency may start work on improving your organic seo, and as we said at the start of this article, there are over 200+ signals, so often there’s a lot of work for your agency to be getting on with.

 

Design

Why is the design of your website important?

Well, let’s say that you need a new pair of running shoes, and you find a website, and it has say over 2000 pairs of running trainers for sale, yet sorting through these shoes well, that’s hard work, right?

And why is this such hard work?

Well quite simply because you cannot sort these running trainers by colour, by size or trainers that are in stock, or even by brand, and guess what happens?

The bounce rate for that website is very high.

 

What does “bounce rate” mean?

Well, simply put it’s the percentage of visitors that do not go on another page on your website, so for example, they see that you sell 2000 pairs of running trainers, but then notice that there’s no way of sorting these trainers, so what do they do?

Well they leave, and this means that the algorithm may spot that your business is no longer that relevant for “running trainers” and may take your business from say the 3rd spot, to say the 6th.

Onsite SEO

Your SEO agency should make sure that your businesses onsite seo is done correctly, and why do we say this?

Well, onsite seo is like what a steering wheel is to a car, its essential, so there’s no point in building loads of high-quality backlinks, that’s if your website developer or seo consultant have not got the onsite seo sorted.

So what does onsite seo mean?

Well, there’s loads of ways you can improve your company’s onsite seo, such as fixing your businesses meta titles, meta descriptions, alt tags, anchor text, H1-H6 titles, plus also improving your websites design.

Offsite SEO

Again, there are many way’s you can improve your company’s offsite seo, such as building backlinks, and also building business citations.

So, for example, you could write an article, have this published on a newspaper’s website, such as The Sunday Times, and you could obtain a backlink, and because the backlink is high-quality, this will help to improve your businesses seo.

If Google’s algorithm was to spot that your business has hundreds or thousands of really good quality backlinks, and these backlinks are relevant to your business, then this is likely to greatly improve your company’s seo.

However, the backlinks must be quality, plus they must be relevant to your company.

So for example if you run a business that sells classic cars, there’s no point in getting backlinks from your golf club, as these backlinks are not relevant, you will want backlinks from a automotive website.

Content Marketing

So, what does content marketing even mean?

Well, let’s say that you run a solicitor’s practice, and your solicitors are regularly getting asked the same questions over and over again, so your marketing agency could then write a blog post that answers these commonly asked questions.

And why would this help your business, why would you give away free advice?

Well, because your business if it improves its seo to a good standard where your business is deemed as the best business to answer questions say to do with employment law locally, your business could be ranked number one.

So, when someone is looking for an “employment solicitor in name of city” your business could be ranked number one.

If you were to ask most digital marketing agencies what is one of the most important parts of SEO, they would normally say content marketing, as its very hard to improve a business’s seo without content marketing.

Link Building

If you want to get your business onto page one of Google, then often your business will need high-quality backlinks.

And what do we mean by high-quality?

Well, lets say that your business sells performance cars, you might write a car review for a widely respected automotive magazines website, this website is a brand that’s well known, plus the information about cars, the reviews of various cars, and also the website is good quality, so this is the type of website that you should look to get a link from if you are a car dealer.

Bounce rates, time on site and improving the design of your website

It’s really important that your seo agency works on lowering your company’s bounce rate, improves time on site and also uses split testing or A/B testing to improve the design of your website.