Introduction

Whether you a multi-national PLC company with thousands of staff, or you’re a start-up restaurant, that’s opened its first premises here in the rather great city of Cardiff, you most probably want to know a thing of two about how to improve your onsite seo.

Afterall, it doesn’t matter if you run a restaurant, and need more diners, or you run a business that makes a product, and then exports it across the entire globe, you’re going to need more often than not a good website.

A website which doesn’t just advertise the products, or the services you offer, but also rises to the top of Google’s SERP’s- all this means is this, you want your company to rank high on Google for relevant terms.

So for example, if you manufacturer and retail directly to public, vacuum hoovers, well, your going to want to be on the first page of Google for this, if you sell craft coffee, and you sell this not to the public, but the trader, well, your going to want to find various seo agencies which can optimise the website for say “trade coffee suppliers”- as you want to sell in bulk, so you might be thinking, well, what’s the point that we are trying to make here?

Well, it’s a simple one, whatever you sell, you need to hire a good seo agency, or to do this work yourself, but often an agency is hired, then you need to make sure through offsite seo, and onsite seo, that the “ranking factors” are improved, that they are made stronger, so that your business, whether its in Cardiff, or in another part of Wales, that your website can climb the ranks, so it can get on the first page of Google in the SERP’s, and so that you can generate more business.

What are internal links?

Okay, so lets say your having a cup of tea with your marketing company, and you’ve hired them to improve your seo, but here’s the thing, do you think that there’s just a few leavers that the agency can pull to improve your search engine optimisation?

Nope, there’s hundreds.

And because each “ranking factor” which Google includes in its algorithm, is complex, that’s why agencies like ours split each ranking factor normally into its own blog post, because each one, out of the hundreds needs its own blog post, and to be explained fully, as there’s a right way to implementing organic seo and there’s a right way.

 

Why are internal links important?

Well, as you might have gathered, seo companies, do spend a lot of time, carrying out keyword research, then with this, they then start to optimise the companies onsite seo, this normally means drinking a lot of coffee, as often, as part of the work thousands, and thousands, and thousands of words need to be written, as part of writing the companies content marketing, now with that said, normally the written work, well it will sometimes overlap.

So, lets give you an example, lets say that you sell bikes, you sell mountain bikes, electric bikes, and you sell fold-up bikes, ideal for when you hop on say a train, now if your writing an article, let’s say reviewing 10 new mountain bikes, that have been launched in 2021, well, one of those bikes might just be electric, and it might have been a model of bike that you’ve already reviewed, lets say on a blog post 3 months ago.

So, what you can do, is in your latest blog post, you could link to it, now this is called an “internal links”.

And you’re probably thinking, well why? If I have the shopper on the website, and there happy drinking a cup of tea, reading our review of the top 10 mountain bikes of 2021, well, why offer a link to another part of the website, that has a long review, and say a review via you talking on YouTube, of a electric bike?

Well, for two reasons really, here’s the first, GoogleBot, that’s like a piece of automated code, which Google uses, it’s job is to “crawl and index” the web, now, what does that even mean?

Well, most companies websites don’t stay the same for long, a lot of the time, they hire seo agencies, like ours to do work, on a monthly basis, so this means adding new work, improving the onsite seo, and much more. So, how does Google, and its algorithm, well, how does it know about this new work? How will Google’s algorithm know lets say that for a lawyer we work for, that we have just added a new job post, that details exactly the solicitor that we are requiring in the Cardiff area, and we’ve just added that new blog post, and we’ve also added it the “vacancies” section of the website, how will Google know we’ve added this?

Well, via Googlebot, that’s because Googlebot uses links, whether they be external backlinks, or internal backlinks, to follow the link, to see if its new work, if it is, it works out whether the work is quality, in that whether it should be added to Google’s index or not, also, if the works quality, what does Google’s algorithm make of it? Is it so good, that it enhances the seo, so that the business should move up Google’s ranks? Or is the work rubbish quality, it’s been written by a low-quality agency, and it doesn’t follow white hat methods, so should Google’s algorithm move the website down?

What exactly is Googlebot?

GoogleBot is therefore a bot, that’s used by Google, its purpose is to discover new work. So, for example, lets say you run a car dealership, and you’ve started stocking a new brand of car, you want to make sure, that when someone is on Google, and there looking for that brand locally, that your business appears in the SERP’s as a retailer of that brand of car, so your hire seo companies to do this for you.

Now part of the work that they might do, is to add meta titles, meta descriptions, to add new content marketing, for example in the form of a review of that car, with an embedded YouTube video, of a car sales person walking around the car, telling the listener of the benefits of owning that car, and then to help improve the organic seo a bit more, the digital marketing agency has written up more details, such as the MPG of the car, its safety features and also the optional extras such as alloy wheels.

So, the whole point of this work, that the seo company is doing, is to get the company to rank locally on Google for that car brand, and to make it clear the car dealership stocks that car.

So, lets say on a cold winter’s day, lets say on a Monday morning the boss of the car dealership says yes, that’s good work, add it to the website, so how will Google know you’ve done this SEO work?

Well, it may take a while, but sooner or later, its likely Googlebot will “crawl and index” the work, now how is that done, well its done by following backlinks, whether they are internal backlinks, or external backlinks, and to follow them, so that the page can be indexed, the seo work, that the agency has done can be evaluated by Google’s algorithm, simply meaning, how good are the ranking factors for that page? For example, does the page have good quality do-follow backlinks? For example, the car manufacturer may well have appointed your car dealership in Cardiff, as say the only authorised dealer in the area, that’s to say, the manufacturer may have stated your company on their international website, provided a do-follow backlink, from the car manufacturers site to yours, which may well be a really high-quality link, which may well be picked up by Google’s algorithm and therefore this can improve your companies seo.    

Why would a company want to lower its bounce rate?

Lets say that you hire an agency and they manage to get 10,000 organic visitors to your websites- that’s great right? Well, not if the bounce rate in Google Analytics is 99%, which simply means that percentage is leaving the businesses website, after visiting the first page.

Why would a company, want to improve its time on site?

Okay, so let’s say you run a department store, on a high street in say Cardiff, yet you notice, that shoppers spend on average less that 60 seconds in the store, you would wonder why right? Well, this is no different when you hire a marketing company, they should aim to keep shoppers on your e-commerce website for as long as possible.

What are engagement metrics?

Engagement metrics are bounce rates and many other signals, your seo companies, should aim to improve these.

Why must we follow Google’s WebMaster Guidelines?

It doesn’t matter whether you hire an agency to help build just backlinks, or you hire a copywriter, or the whole SEO team at one of the U.K’s largest digital marketing agencies- what the agency must do, always is follow Google’s WebMaster Guidelines, the work must therefore be top-quality.

Can be helpful to your customers

An internal link on your company’s website can be useful, for example let’s say that you sell chocolate, you may well be talking in a blog post about the luxury organic chocolate you now sell, so you may link from the blog post to that page.

Why good website design and organic SEO go hand in hand

You might wish to hire a company that has web designers and seo consultants which are working for the same company, that’s why so many businesses in Wales hire us, as we have link builders, seo experts, website designers all under one roof.