There are so many well-written articles online, that talk about the various areas of search engine optimisation., ranging from how to build do-follow backlinks, through to how a “well-written meta description” can help to improve a business’s click through rate (CTR).

However, we think, that it is something of a rarity to have an article which helps the business at the very start the seo journey, that’s to say that doesn’t talk about all of the different ways to optimise a website in isolation of one another, but simply talks about how a business can even begin start to climb the ranks on Google. Do believe us when we say this, regardless of what type of business you run, if you’re a start-up business, with a new website, well the process of climbing Google’s ranks, also commonly referred to as the SERP’s, well it can be a long one, so order the espresso machine now!

That’s because, if you’ve got a brand-new website, and the main way that you wish to promote your company is using what’s referred to as “organic SEO”, then you have to also be realistic.

So, what do we mean when we use the word “realistic” well, when you first send your website for indexing, the website is unlikely to surface on page 1 of Google, it’s much more likely to enter on page 11 of Google’s SERP’s, and that’s when the uphill struggle begins to get your business to climb the ranks.

You therefore have to be realistic of whether a business has the marketing budget to move a website from say page 10 of Google, where it might first surface in the SERP’s, to where it needs to be, as it’s a long road, and often many businesses with strong seo need to beaten.

But here’s the thing, that a lot of businesses forget, sometimes to even get on page 10 needs a lot of work because the competition might be truly massive.

Let’s say for example you are an online retailer of running trainers, that is you don’t manufacturer the trainers yourself you simply retail shoes which are made by many different brands. Yet here’s the thing, there are thousands of stockists that retail this same brand of trainer, so how are you going to get your business onto the first page of Google for that brand of trainer?

Well, the simple answer is it’s not going to be easy, in reality it’s likely to be extremely difficult to get on the first page of Google’s organic results, that’s because when your website is first indexed by Googlebot, well its likely to surface on a low-page, perhaps page 11, therefore often a lot of work is needed to push the page up the ranks.

This is especially so when you factor in what many agencies refer to as “Google’s Sandbox Period”.

So within this article, what we’re going to cover is when we as an seo company are presented with a brand-new website, that either we’ve created or another web developer has, we are going to start a look at the factors (ranking factors) that we going to look for, to even start the SEO process.

Now for some businesses we know that it’s realistically going to take sometimes over six months, or it might take over 12 months the business to even get on the first page of Google’s results, so we know that the foundations must be solid right from the start of the process of optimisation, and now we’re going to talk about here in some detail some of the factors that our SEO consultants look for to make sure that we get a good foundation, so that from that foundation we can build the rest of the SEO up from.

Therefore, rather than writing a rather long-winded article on say how to write anchor text, this article is going to instead explore the process that our team uses to start planning on how we start going about to implement seo for our clients, and some of the tasks that we complete.

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Keywords

Now this is something that your marketing company is likely to mention a lot at the start of the process, that is keywords, and why great deals of time should be spent working out which ones you are going to target.

Therefore, our teams often start by making a nice cup of tea, and then start quickly thinking of keywords to optimise the website for, and this needs to be deliberated over and thought about for a great deal of time. The keywords shouldn’t be so difficult its next to impossible to deliver on with the marketing budget that’s presented, neither should the targets be set that they are so easy, that the keywords have no search volume, and therefore present no value to the customer.

So therefore, we often crank up the coffee machine to its strongest setting (double-espresso mode), then we sit down with our marketing team, and start thinking about which keywords to target for our new client.

Now the inexperienced will simply comment that you should go after the most obvious keywords, so for example if you sell car waxes and polishes, you should simply optimise the whole website the “car wax”- however as any good seo company will note, it’s not often as simple and straightforward as this, and we shall explain why.

Why you must evaluate how hard it is to target a keyword or group of keywords

You might be a new business, that manufacturing your own car waxes say in Cardiff, and you want to sell these directly to the customer via your website.

So far, so good, SO it would seem logical just to optimise the website for car waxes, however what you might quickly find is that the competition for this is very strong, especially if you are implementing Global SEO. Not only will there likely to be hundreds of competitors, the seo is likely to be completed to a very high standard, for example they may have been investing in organic SEO, through a respected agency, which delivers quality work might have done so for the last six years let’s say. So, the point we are trying to make is this, the up hill struggle, the volume of work needed to go after that keyword, to the point where you reach page one on Google, well to put it rather bluntly, the business may not have the financial reserves for it.

They may therefore run out of marketing budget, because the competition have been investing for longer, and may have deeper pockets.

So, what you have to be realistic about is can you beat that standard set by your direct competitors?

Be sensible, set achievable goals, as otherwise the marketing strategy is set to fail.

So you have to be sensible about what your marketing budget can achieve, also you should weigh up with your chosen seo agency, if you were to go after that keyword, so for example car wax, have you got the budget to ensure that you can pursue that until it reaches the first page? For example, if the agency estimates that it will take them 10 months, to get the keyword “car wax” on the first page, have you got as a business the financial resources to do this? As when the website is climbing Google’s SERP’s lets say from page 10 to page 8 to page 6, the website may not be generating any income via its organic serps, so have you got the ability to keep paying while improvements are made?

Because here is the nuts and bolts of the situation, you might have a group of companies in the organic results, on the first page, which have invested over 1 million each making sure that their website is a leading resource in selling all manner of car accessories.

So if another company thinks that it can get on the first page for say 10,000 pounds, then is this likely to be unrealistic, and probably won’t be achievable , as going after a keyword, such as “car waxes”, may well be too competitive and the company may run out of its marketing budget before it is even sold its first tin of wax!

Don’t pick a keyword that has a huge amount of competition

What you don’t want to do, is to pick a keyword that has a huge amount of competition, and that you don’t have the marketing budget to rival. If you were to do this, you are simply biting off more than you can chew and by that we mean that you might be up against businesses, which have heavily invested in SEO for prolonged periods of time, they might have done this for over 10 years, they might have paid a really good respected agency like ours, so the work is of a really good standard as well. So to say that you can beat there seo efforts quickly, often will not happen.

What exactly are long tail keywords and why do businesses target these?

If you are just starting your company say here in South Wales, you have two think about ways where you can get more organic visitors to your company website, but, not to go after words and phrases that are too difficult, and are going to take too long to achieve, or require too much investment, which we have covered in great detail above.

So, for example, let’s say that you sell used cars, yet your business is based in a really large city, and within that area there are thousands of other car dealers. Some are established names, and will therefore be extremely hard to beat.

You will have to think about with your marketing agency which keywords should be the priority, in terms of targeting and which ones are simply too difficult to achieve in the short term.

So, for example, you might find that targeting used cars, or car dealerships is simply too difficult, even if the city name is mentioned within the search query.

So, you may go after what agencies refer to as “long-tail keywords” instead, that is queries which are a bit longer, have a much lesser search volume on Google, (Google Search Console) but are still worth targeting, quite simply because they can bring in organic visitors, which the marketing agency might deem to have purchasing intent. Which means, that although the volume of visitors is likely to be less, these shoppers still are shopping for the products and the services that you sell.

So for example, you might add car brand + used cars, you might add car brand plus car dealerships or you might go for a much longer tail keywords such as “used-car dealers that offer hire purchase agreements.

Now, although these might have a much lesser search volume, they are still worth going after as they might help to draw in customers.

Now, you might well be thinking, why go after keywords which have a lower search volume and a simple answer to that question is, they are often easier to get the business to rank for, and by that we mean that for a more competitive term, such as car dealers, it might take over a year to get the business to rank for that term, however for a term such as car dealers plus a brand of calm that is mentioned, it might take much less time it might take for example 6 months.

 

What is content marketing?

So, you will see how we’ve talked about keywords, that’s prior to us mentioning content marketing, and that’s with good reason, that’s because your agency should have picked which keywords that they are going to target before the start writing any text.

Now, you might not know what content marketing is, well, quite simply put its mostly the written work that is added to your website, but it could also include infographics, which you might have also added as well as let’s say a YouTube video which you might have embedded into the page.

So, what’s a good example of content marketing?

Well, exactly what you are reading at the moment, that is it should be written text, which offers useful advice, which is written by an expert.

Now, because our company has over 10 years’ experience, we believe this renders us as experts, we also aim to offer the most useful SEO advice that we can.

So, the point that we are trying to make is this, you shouldn’t just focus solely on trying to improve your company’s SEO, what you should do is aim to offer advice, now this might seem counterintuitive, if your business is charging for advice.

So, for example let’s say that you are an architect, a solicitor or let’s say a mortgage adviser, you might be thinking why would we give away free advice on our company website, when we charge by the hour?

Well, here’s the thing, if you want your business to rank on the first page of Google, for let’s say mortgage adviser plus the name of the city which you are based, you are going to have to prove that your company website is the most relevant for that query, that offers the best advice, that it is a place where people who want mortgage advice go to.

Now it is very unlikely, if not impossible that the business is going to rank on Google’s first page, unless it has well written text.

So, for example is going to need to offer information about your business and a lot of businesses give away useful advice for free, because not only will it help the company’s customers but they are also wanting to make their website relevant and also the source for good quality information.

So, you might be thinking well, how will Google know if I add good quality content marketing?

Well, the simple answer is this Google’s algorithm, will use “Googlebot” to “crawl and index” the work, it will then use Google’s Knowledge Graph, to see how factual the written information is, it will also use AI, that is artificial intelligence, and also computer learning, to manage how engaged a shopper is with the website.

So, by this we mean, how high is the bounce rate, and also is the website the last one the shopper clicks on, also how long does the average shopper spend on the website.

Now let’s look at each one individually, if you were to walk into a shop and you see that it does in stock what you want, are likely to leave straightaway, and make your way to the exit, this is the same for a company website, and this means that is likely to have a high bounce rate, which can sometimes be negative to the businesses search engine optimisation.

Equally, if you are the last clicked website for that query, then is likely that you have satisfied what the shopper wanted.

So, for example if somebody is looking to purchase a tennis racket, and the visits 10 websites, but you are the 10th website that they have clicked on, and they click no more businesses, then is likely that they’ve made a purchase from you or found what they were looking for, because they haven’t gone to any other retailers, so as a business you should aim to be the last business they visit, as this is an indicator that sale might have been made.

Speed

it’s important that no matter what your business sells, whether it be chocolate brownies to be delivered by post, we sell car insurance, we your business sells classic cars, it’s important that your website is fast.

If the website is not quick to load, then this likely that you are going to have a high bounce rate, as you have to put yourself in your customers shoes, if they can’t purchase will be what quickly, and they are likely to leave your business for another company.

Engagement

It’s difficult to monitor engagement, with the website this brand-new, it is likely that your business will be say on page 10 of Google. This basically means that nobody is going to find your business easily, this means being that lowdown on Google is likely to mean that there is no engagement.

However, as you start to get engagement, you should monitor whether the bounce rate is high is low, you should see how long somebody spending on your website and how many pages that they visit.

On page search engine optimisation.

there are a lot of things that you can do to improve the businesses on page SEO, however you must make sure that they are white hat.

Your agency may therefore improve the page, by adding well written the meta titles met and meta descriptions, it might improve how fast your website is, it might also use internal links in between the content marketing that you write.

Are many ways to improve the on-site SEO, this should be done by a white hat agency.

Backlinks

the final chapter that we would like to talk about backlinks, they are arguably thought by many digital marketing agencies to be one of the most important ranking factors.

You may have noticed that at the start of this article we were talking about that Google takes into account well over 200 different ranking factors. Yet what you need to remember is, as a business, was an agency optimising a website, is that these ranking factors are all weighted differently.

For example, you might rewrite every meta description on an e-commerce website, and that might mean rewriting over 1000 product descriptions, which is obviously a lot of work, yet once you’ve done this, you may notice with the search engine optimisation. tools that you use that the organic traffic does increase by that much.

However, on the other hand, if you were to have incoming thousands of really good quality relevant backlinks which is being can built using white hat methods throughout the whole process, and this might severely jump where your business ranks on Google.

The point we are trying to make therefore is that some ranking factors are worth a lot more than some others, where some may make no difference whatsoever to weigh your business ranks, others can have a dramatic effect, yes regardless of this, time must be taken to make sure that you do this the right way, and the right way is using white hat methods.

The road is long, do not rush it

as a business owner, or a manager within a marketing team, you’re going to want to get your business is high on Google as possible, and you may want to do this in a short period of time, however he is the truth of the matter, and that is it is often a very slow journey.

Regardless of what a pushy sales executive might tell you at some companies, that it can be a fast process, trust us when we say it is often not a quick process by any stretch of the imagination.

Often the process is slow, and how fast you move forward depends on quality of the SEO as well as how strong your competitors are.

Picture this just for a second, imagine your competitors SEO like you would a brick wall, they have had the time to slowly build their wall is tall and the strong as they possibly can, therefore making it hard for any competitor like yourself to scale it.

You therefore need to keep this in mind, the businesses which turnover millions per year or doing well through the SEO not going to want new companies to infiltrate onto the first page and to take their advantage away from the. This is why SEO is often a long journey, requires patience and an agency with great skill in order to do the work.

Therefore, the wall that you need to scale is often vast and quite daunting, yet there are no shortcuts, you will find companies that are willing to bulldoze their way through, the algorithms are now so clever that Google uses that there are no ways to accelerate the process, if methods are used which are not condoned, that’s the say they are not approved by Google, then it’s more than likely that the algorithm or a manual penalty will be applied on the website.

This simply means that the website can be fully removed or demoted on Google, this is the last thing you want, as it can mean that your business is fully removed in some instances.

Therefore, what is needed is an agency which has a huge skill set and understands Google’s algorithm, and fully explains the challenges that lay ahead, they should honestly and accurately tell you how much of a challenge it will be, and which have your competitors pose the biggest problem in terms of trying to overtake them online.

Organic SEO is therefore not for every business, as often they will not have the financial resources to pay for this type of digital marketing, however for those that do, the partner with the right agencies, which offer top quality work can see the fruit from their labour.

Here is a door, we are very much about offering really good quality work, we don’t believe in cutting corners, and have some of the most talented SEO professionals in Cardiff working for us.

If you therefore would like a quote for web design organic SEO then why not give our business today.