Whether you are opening a local car dealership or you will planning on setting up an e-commerce business that will retail millions of pounds worth of electrical goods every single month, you are likely to want to invest in SEO.

Now as most business owners know, organic SEO is very different from PPC, that is pay per click.

With pay per click, the soon as you set up a budget, your business can instantly appear on the first page of.

However, with organic SEO it takes a lot longer, that’s because you need to beat your competitors, for your SEO to be deemed worthy of ranking on the first page you need to have very strong SEO.

So for example to rank on the first page in the ninth position you need to have the ninth strongest SEO for that particular term stop

so when you consider for example there might be 2000 other businesses which retail fridge freezers, for you to rank ninth you have a huge amount of other businesses that you need to beat.

That’s the say your businesses on-site SEO and the off-site SEO need to be very strong view to be deemed ninth and to rank on the first page and to beat all them other thousands of businesses.

And as you can imagine there will be some businesses, such as electrical retailers which may have been retailing electrical goods online the say the last 10 years, they may have been paying a digital marketing agency to improve their SEO during that time, so you nutshell, a business that is just starting up and investing in organic SEO might have a huge mountain to climb.

In this article we are going to look at what organic SEO is, how it can be improved and also why it is a slow process often

How search engines work in terms of “crawling”, “indexing”, and also ranking company websites

 

• Google Algorithm Update
• PageRank
• White hat
• Google Webmaster guidelines
• Googlebot & Crawling
• Organic ranking
• Technical SEO
• Link Building
• Mobile-first indexing
• AMP
• What is RankBrain?
• Reviews
• HTML  
• CSS  
• JavaScript

It doesn’t matter if you’ve just started a brand-new business selling scented candles, or you’re an online business that sells rare classic cars- there’s often something that unites most new businesses.

That is most businesses now rely on their website to help the business to generate more sales and enquiries- so this is why organic online marketing is really important.

So as a new business, you may well be eager to improve your organic SEO yourself, or hire a local SEO agency to do this work for you. As what’s often the case is the business may well be low on funds to start- so often the business owners, or some of their employees will try and improve the companies seo themselves.

However, this often proves very time consuming, so this is when a local marketing agency is often hired.

For example, a local agency may offer to improve your businesses search engine optimisation on a rolling monthly basis. They may therefore work on improving your company’s:

·        Content marketing

·        Link building

·        Onsite SEO

·        Offsite seo, such as business citations

·        Setting up a Google My Business profile

·        Making sure that your business has social media accounts

·        Making sure that the backlinks are high-quality

They are just some of the tasks that your marketing agency should do, however its worth bearing in mind that Googlebot will monitor over 200 ranking factors, so often the agency will work on different tasks every month.

In either case we have listed some things that you may want to think about if your thinking about improving your businesses SEO.

So, if your about to launch a new business right here in Cardiff, South Wales then we think this blog post will help you.

#1 All work must be white hat

The SEO work must be white hat, many businesses, especially start-up businesses may opt low cost SEO, yet if the work may not be white hat, so if it’s not quality, then your business may incur what SEO agencies call an “algorithmic penalty”.

All work must follow “Google’s Webmaster Guidelines”, or if your business is optimising for another search engine then your business, or your appointed agency, must follow the guidelines that are issued.

Why must the work be white hat?

Well, there are two main types of penalties, manual penalties and algorithmic penalties, both mean that your website could drop in terms of where the business ranks.

So, this is a common mistake made by a lot of business owners, that’s to say the business has just started, and you obviously want to get orders start flowing and sell your products or your services.

However, organic SEO cannot be rushed, that’s because in order for a business to rank higher than your competitors, your businesses must be deemed to have stronger SEO.

Now when you consider there are over 200 ranking signals, or as some agencies call them “ranking factors”- these range from backlinks through to say a H1 title, then there’s often a lot of work to do.

But here’s the real point that we are getting at, you may have some competitors that have been working on improving their SEO for let’s say the last eight years, so this means that the agency may well have been diligently building backlinks every single month, so a business that tries to overtake a business that has been improving their SEO for many years, and tries to overtake those businesses in a few weeks or months is sometimes not being realistic.

This is when some businesses then try to cut corners, to speed up the SEO process, however often this is when the business will incur a penalty. And businesses that incurs a penalty, such as a Google Penguin penalty, well it can often take a very long time to recover from such a penalty.

So here’s our number one top tip, whether you are implementing SEO inhouse, or you are employing a marketing agency here in Cardiff, do remember that all work must be white hat.

#2 Read about the “Googles” Sandbox Period”

So, you’ve got your business premises sorted, you’ve hired a website designer, and your happy with how your businesses CMS website looks, so now its time to find a local SEO company?

And your SEO agency should be able to improve where your business ranks straightaway, right?

Well, no- that’s often organic SEO is a slow process, yet what can further slow the process down is if you have a new website.

A lot of SEO companies will say that a new website will take a lot longer to improve its SEO, and this is often due to the Sandbox period.

But what does “sandbox period”- well, a lot of marketing experts will tell you that a new website will take longer to optimise because its like a blank canvass, that’s to say there are no backlinks, there are no meta titles, meta descriptions, alt text, blog posts or business citations, that’s because the website will be brand-new, there will be no SEO work that’s been added to that site, that’s of course the domain name has not been used before by another business?

But let’s just say for simplicity that the domain name has never been used before, well that domain name will have no SEO applied to that website, so if this is the case, then Googlebot will not have been able to indexed any work, which means that Google’s algorithm will not know how strong the businesses seo is.

But there’s something else worth thinking about as well, that is that most SEO consultants believe that new websites are also harder optimise, that’s because many SEO agencies, ours included believe that new websites are placed in a Sandbox, this simply means optimising these websites is harder because progress is slower.

#3 Content marketing

Your business should invest in quality content marketing. Whether you are planning on opening a construction business here in Cardiff, South Wales or lets say a business that sells men’s clothing online, you should invest in quality content marketing.

The reason is Googlebot will index your company’s content marketing, if the work is of good quality then this can help to improve your businesses seo, that’s to say, if you run say a construction business here in Cardiff, and you blog regularly about attic conversions, then your business is likely to appear higher for attic conversions, yet with said, that work must be of high-quality.

It’s fair to say that quality content marketing can improve your website’s seo, yet if the work is low-quality, so for example duplicated, then this could trigger a penalty, such as a Google Panda penalty.

#4 Quality backlinks

Your business will often need quality backlinks, however the backlinks must all be high quality. If the backlinks are not high quality, then your business could incur a penalty, such as a Google Penguin penalty.

Some businesses that are just setting up may have a go at link building themselves, however, we would strongly recommend that you leave link building to an agency or company that knows how to build relevant, high-quality backlinks in a white hat way.

If the business does not build backlinks in the right way, the business may incur a manual action penalty or an algorithmic penalty, this means that the business could drop down the ranks.

Why do we say businesses often need backlinks to improve their SEO?

Well its with good reason, that’s because backlinks are widely regarded by many digital marketing agencies to be one of the most important ranking signals, or ranking factors.

Now when you consider that there are over 200 ranking factors which Google’s algorithm will measure, you can start to see why its important that an agency builds high-quality backlinks for your business. However, all link building must be white hat, plus it must follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

#5 The design must be good

There is no point in spending a lot of money on organic SEO, if your company’s website does not have a good design.

So, let’s say your business sells clothing, so you sell men’s winter jackets for example, yet your website sells over 400 types of winter jackets.

But there’s no way to sort by style, for example ski jackets or wax jackets, so sometimes a shopper will not be willing to sort through over 400 winter jackets to find the jacket that they want.

So, this is often why an SEO company will work with a web design company, so that your website improves its design, which can help to also improve your businesses SEO.

If the design of the website is poor, for example you sell thousands of different cars, but you can not sort by engine size, fuel type or mileage then the business may incur a high bounce rate, many agencies believe that a high bounce rate can mean the businesses seo will be negatively affected, which could mean the business drops in terms of where it ranks.

#6 Onsite SEO

Your business should improve its onsite seo, for example, meta titles, meta descriptions and anchor text.

So for example your marketing agency may improve the following as one the first things they do to improve your company’s website:

·        Meta titles

·        Meta descriptions

·        Alt tags

·        H1-H6 tags

·        Ensure that each page can be indexed

·        Add blog posts

How our white hat SEO company can help:

We are a white hat SEO company in Cardiff, if you would like a quote for SEO, then why not call us?