What is SEO?
SEO or (search engine optimisation) is the process where you work on your website to gain free or organic rankings in search engines, mainly Google. These are the results you see when you do a Google search though be careful to not confuse them with the paid adverts (usual say paid or sponsored listings around them). Organic free rankings tend to appear below paid listings.
The action to get your website to appear in the free listings is called SEO and requires certain tasks to be performed on your website. Big companies have entire departments working on their websites SEO such is the importance of it all. This doesn’t mean smaller companies can’t benefit from performing SEO on their website.
Search Engine Basics
This one is a little hard to cover in great detail as there are many aspects to SEO that all add up to have an effect on your websites free search engine rankings. So here we shall cover the basics.
Is It Worth Doing?
Yes, very much so. After all it’s FREE traffic and FREE business. Yes it might take hard work and some cost to get good free rankings but when you do your website is being seen 24 hours a day by people looking for exactly what you provide. When you consider tens of thousands of people search each hour on Google then yes it’s worth it. Industries like insurance have millions of people a month searching on Google. This is all potential free traffic for your business.
Should I Hire Someone?
Question is can you afford to? Lets just start with letting you know that Dorset Tech’s SEO service starts from just £99 per month. OK back to the question, well if you don’t know the basics of SEO or have the time then yes hiring someone is a good alternative. The cost for this does depend on your industry. An SEO company won’t work on insurance sites for £99 a month due to the competitiveness of the industry. There is a vast difference in prices too between companies, ask to see results too. The time it takes to learn SEO you can be working on your business so if you can afford you’re always best hiring someone.
How Long Does It Take?
This all depends on the industry. If you work in insurance or finance then it can take longer and cost more too. If you are a local sandwich shop just wanting to target your area then it can be a lot quicker to get free rankings as well as cheaper too.
What Are The Fundamentals of SEO?
A well coded site with good clean design and plenty of fresh content that’s regularly updated is a good basis for SEO. Essentially Google needs to know what your website is about, product or service wise, so then it can rank you accordingly.
What To Avoid
If you try too hard then Google may penalise you. Cramming loads of keywords into your text may alert Google that you’re using black hat SEO techniques which are frowned upon by Google. Having loads of keywords in your metatags will also harm your chances of a good ranking. A slow website will also work against you so have a fats clean site designed. Avoid using header tags everywhere as this looks awful. Pop ups are not ideal too so avoid these.
How To Choose What Keywords To Target
Before you start any SEO you need to decide on what keywords you want to target for the free rankings. This is essential in making sure any budget you spend is going in the right places. If you are a local only company then target local keywords, so if you sell local insurance target “insurance broker Poole” rather then “insurance broker”. There are free tools that shop how many terms a phrase has been searched in Google and this helps decide which ones to target. Dorset Tech can help you find the best keyword phrases for your SEO as part of our affordable SEO services.
Is it Expensive?
This all depends on the industry you are in and how far in the UK you offer your services. Finance and insurance companies spend thousands a month on SEO as they know getting a good free ranking will pay for itself in days in terms of new business. If you want to target keywords like “secured loans” or “home insurance” expect to pay hundreds a week and it can take months to get anywhere. If you are a local store selling inflatable spas then “inflatable spas Dorset” will be a lot easier and cheaper to get free rankings for. Fact is the price will depend on the industry you are in and the keywords you want to target. Don’t target generic phrases if you only work local.
When it comes to creating a strategy to achieve the free rankings in Google, one of the decisions you need to make is which keywords to go for. Keyword research should always be the first task you perform and one of the decisions you make is should you target national rankings for example “carpet fitters” or local rankings like “Dorset carpet fitters”.
You can easily spend hundreds or thousands of pounds on trying to gain free rankings but if the keywords are not suitable it’s money wasted. If your business can not physically provide the product or service to the area the person searching is in then it’s a waste of your time and money and not to mention frustrating seeing potential business pass you by.
The decision of whether to target national or local keywords is quite an easy one but to decide you need to consider the following 3 aspects of your business to decide which way to go. Making correct decisions now will save you wasting money further down the line in the future.
Budget
Chances are you will be paying someone to do your SEO for you. If not then you might be having a go yourself if you have some basic knowledge, in which case time is money so you don’t want to be wasting your time performing tasks for SEO on keywords not suitable. Either way making the wrong decision at this stage will be lost money.
If you are hiring someone then your budget will play a part in your keyword choices. For example if you have a budget of £300 a month and want to rank well for a highly competitive and lucrative keyword such as “loan quotes” that’s not going to happen. Companies spend thousands a week on attaining rankings for these keywords such is the traffic and income they can bring in. So your £300 a month will simply not compete with the large companies. They have people literally working day after day going for the same keywords you have chosen.
Good keyword research will show you how competitive phrases are and it will always be easier to go for local phrases such as “loan broker Dorset” rather then “loan brokers”. Choose wisely based on your budget otherwise you will simply see it wasted away and have no search engine ranking results to show for it, or at the very least you will be on the 3rd or 4th page probably more so will never see the traffic.
Products
Deciding if you should go for national or local SEO rankings should mainly be based on the fact can you deliver nationwide or provide your service nationwide or just to local customers. For example, if you are a plumber you will only cover a certain area and people in Leeds won’t search for a plumber in Dorset. Google will display listings near you anyway for companies close to the searcher but you still have to rank for the generic national keyword “plumber” which isn’t going to happen unless you have thousands a month spare. Far easier to rank for “plumbers in Dorset” and also more relevant if you only service the Dorset area.
Can you deliver your product nationwide and still make a profit after costs? Is your product in demand nationwide? Answering these questions will tell you if you should go for national or local rankings. If you are a hotel then obviously you will go for local rankings as people will search for the area they want the hotel in like “Dorset Hotels” so if you are in the hospitality industry you should stick to local SEO. Always remember unless you are very niche in what you provide most towns and cities will have a business like yours. So always stick to the area you can provide for in your keywords, don’t try go to far for example if you are dentist in Leeds you won’t want to rank for dentists in Bradford as people will prefer to keep it local and not travel far, especially when there is no need and what they are after is right on their doorstep, stick to gaining rankings for people in Leeds searching for dentists in Leeds.
Delivery
Can you deliver what you offer nationwide? If it’s a large item and costs to deliver are substantial meaning little profit should you target local rankings? Is there a demand nationwide for your product or service? You also need to consider how competitive your industry is, for example if you are a loan broker even if you can offer what you do nationwide it will always be near impossible to rank for generic loan keywords unless you spend thousands a week.
A car repair garage for example will only ever get customers from the area it’s located in, unless it’s a specialist such as vintage or marque models. Fact is trying to rank for local keywords will be cheaper and come with a higher chance of success in attaining the free rankings.
You might have spent thousands on your new website and it works perfectly with smooth transactions and providing an excellent visitor experience but are you missing out on traffic due to your hosting being limited. As much as you try offer a great experience there are many factors out of your hands and one of the main ones is your hosting. Below we explain some reasons your sites performance could be being hampered by issues not under your control due to your hosting.
Site Speed:
If your hosting provider is cheap and you went for the cheapest option or didn’t really do any research then it could be harming your websites performance. Your hosting could be slowing down your website and also providing a poor experience for your site visitors. Maybe your hosting is a reseller of a 3rd party company in which case they might not even be aware fully of the technical aspects of the hosting they provide to you. Nothing frustrates a site visitor more then a slow loading website and you can be sure they will quickly leave and visit the next website.
Google also factors in site speed as a major reason to not rank your website high in the free search engine listings. So, if your site is slow then you won’t achieve 1st page rankings, potentially losing out on thousands of free visitors and potential customers.
Hosting Downtime:
The only thing worse then a slow loading site is a site that won’t load at all. Instant loss of custom. Your buyers will simply go elsewhere straight away and your reputation will be damaged as a result. What’s more Google will also flag your site as unreliable and as a result you could be penalised and your natural and free SEO rankings will be harmed. Your site will soon drop down the search engine rankings to a position people won’t find you at all.
Hosting should be guaranteed at least 99.99% uptime or even 100%. Make sure you shop around to find companies that provide this guarantee.
Database Connection:
If your website uses or relies on a database, such as a shopping site then any issues with your hosting’s ability to interact with a database will quickly become apparent. If you have thousands of products and there are other websites on the same hosting with the same any technical issues will soon start top hamper your website.
You can upgrade to a private and not shared hosting to stop this but always speak to the hosting provider to make sure first. Most reputable hosting companies nowadays can cope with databases including large ones. If you are on shared hosting and another website suddenly has a huge increase in traffic then this could affect your websites performance.
Shared Hosting:
Unless you have stated otherwise then chances are your website will be hosted along with hundreds of other websites all on the same server. This can be ok if your website is a small info based site but should your site require a function to be performed then this is when you could see the effects of a shared hosting platform.
One way to avoid this is to have your own hosting, using your own dedicated hosting and server. These aren’t really expensive though not as cheap as shared hosting. If you share hosting with a spamming website then this could cause real trouble for your website also. Ask your hosting company if you are on shared hosting, chances are you are.
SSL:
One thing to check is if you swap hosting that they have an SSL in place for your site, last thing you want is for your site visitors to get the dreaded this site is not secure pop or the SSL is out of date. This doesn’t happen often but always be safer rather then sorry and make sure by testing your website once you are on your new hosting.
What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are the part of your websites code that inform Googles search bot crawler on what your website is about and the products or services you provide. The information is not visible to people viewing your website, but it can be seen by search engines and search engine crawlers, sometimes called spiders. Meta tags are part of your HTML code that only search engines can see.
Meta tags are used to describe each separate page on your website. So, you can have unique meta tags on each page describing different things. This data can be used to decide where to rank your website in the free search engine listings. Usually search engines use meta tags to display the info as a snippet in the search engine results (often called SERPS). See an example below.
What you choose to enter in the meta tags could be used to be displayed when people search for your products or services. There are 2 tags, the title tag and description tag. We shall go further into these a little later. Each page of your website should have it’s own unique metatags, so you don’t get any duplicate tag alerts.
If you use WordPress, then adding meta tags is easy using the plugin Yoast SEO. You simply go on each page in your admin and add the meta tags. The Yoast SEO plugin also alerts you when your title or description meta tag is too long as nothing looks worse then a search engine result description that cut’s off mid-sentence as the one you entered is too long using too many characters.
Most other website build platforms will have an option to add your own meta tags on each page as part of its admin so you can easily add your own. Always remember to keep them unique and use them to describe the product or service for that page.
Meta Description Tag
This is used to describe the page to searchers as they look through the search engine results after searching using the search box. Usually the short descriptions displayed for each listing and website is the meta description. Always keep this to around 160 characters in length, any more you risk your result showing a cut off word or mid-sentence cut off. It’s important to get this right so it reads well and describes your product or service clearly, including any vital information that the searcher might be interested in which will entice them to click your link and not anyone else’s.
Think of it as a short sales pitch and a chance to grab your potential customers attention, like an advert. If you have a product cheaper than anyone else include this, or maybe a sale on or special deal. Include anything that means people should use your business and not anyone else’s. Do not include the same information in the first sentence that you have in your title tag as in the search results they could appear underneath each other so you get replicated information.
Meta Title Tag
Always use a unique title tag on every page, again describing what that pages product or service is. Google usually displays the first 50-60 characters of a sentence for the title tag so always keep it shorter than 60 characters in total. The title tag is usually bold too so stands out more so make sure you use relevant information. If it’s a product page, then you use the product name in the title and maybe price if you are competitive when compared to your competitors. Things like free delivery, 0% finance, sales, deals etc should all be included in the title tag if you can.
Make sure it reads well too and makes sense don’t just include keywords crammed in, it represents your website and business and is the first thing people will see when searching Google so make sure it looks professional. Your title meta tag is displayed at the top of browsers too so it’s important to get this right.
Don’t use all capital letters and don’t over do it with keywords. Try keep the title tag to what the page is about, so if your page sells green teddies then your title tag could be about buying green teddies online with free delivery etc. Put your important keywords at the start of the title tag too so it’s at the beginning of the sentence. Try not to create spam text and always remember to create well written descriptions and paragraphs.
Make sure your title tag and description tag work well together and compliment each other. Try not to repeat in the first sentence of your description tag the same information you have in your title tag as this will appear underneath each other in the results.
When you first embark on an SEO programme the tasks and factors involved can be quite daunting. So many details that require your attention. Don’t do this but do that etc. You’ve probably read many conflicting articles or websites each one proclaiming to be the oracle when it comes to SEO. There’s 2 different types of SEO – Onsite and offsite, both require different things. Below we will break it down and make it simple to understand, we won’t go into too much detail but will give you a broad scope of what each strategy requires.
On-site
Basically this is what you do on your website to make it SEO ready. Such things as text content, metatags, site speed, navigation and sitemaps are all classed as onsite SEO. So for example including your chosen keywords or phrases within the text content of your website is onsite SEO. Making sure the metatags (the coding that search engines read) are all optimised to include keywords and descriptions about what you provide. These should be unique to each page as well. Alt tags are the tags that describe an Image, these can be added in the websites code and should be used to include keywords.
The text content of your site is one of the main aspects of onsite SEO. You should have plenty of descriptive text on each page describing what you provide. URL’s can also be onsite SEO with keywords in your URL file path, for example if you sell green wellies an SEO URL would be yoursite.co.uk/green-wellies.
Always remember thought to do your keyword research before and make sure you are optimising your website to target the right keywords which are relevant, likely to be searched by people for what you provide and more importantly they have search volume. There’s no point doing onsite SEO for keywords or phrases that only get searched 5 times a month. If you are unsure on how to do this we can help.
Including H1 and H2 header tags with keywords is a big plus for onsite SEO as well. Maybe as a title for a paragraph of text or tagline on your homepage. Another big aspect is making sure your site is mobile friendly too and fully responsive. This now more then ever is vitally important especially for Google to rank you high.
Internal linking is also a factor, making sure there is a clear cut navigation journey for your site visitors and also search engine spiders, these are the bots that come and take a virtual picture of your site and its content and decide where to rank you for what keywords. Also make sure you have no broken links too as this will work against you.
Off-site
This is the more labour intensive process for ranking your website high in search engine results but it’s also vital. However, you must also always make sure you have fully optimised your website with onsite SEO before starting any offsite SEO strategy. So, it’s always onsite SEO first THEN offsite SEO afterwards.
One main aspect of offsite SEO is link building. So, getting other websites to link back to you, ideally with your keyword as the clickable link. However, don’t just go out and get links from any resource. Always try get good quality websites to link to you, ideally those that rank high itself and even better if they are in the same industry as your website.
If your inbound link is from a trusted website then that sends trust points to your website so to speak. If your links come from poor websites then again your website will be adversely affected. Link building should be a steady long term part of your offsite SEO. Don’t rush out and get 50 links a day as this may be classed as spam by Google. Avoid paying for links too as usually they are from untrustworthy sources.
Writing blogs to publish on 3rd party sites is a good way to get inbound links. Also posting on social media and getting other social media accounts to post or Tweet about your website with a link back is also a good strategy. Guest posts on other websites is a good natural way to increase inbound links back to your website.
Reviews can also be a good way to get inbound links so maybe look to incorporate this into your offsite SEO strategy.
So, you have your new website ready or being built, next stage is to bring traffic to the new site. But where do you start, well besides PPC there is SEO (search engine optimisation). This is the process where you gain placements or free rankings in the organic listings in Googles search results, totally free by the way. Well the traffic is free the process to gain these free rankings usually requires hiring an SEO consultant or company.
The first part of a well thought out SEO strategy is to decide what keywords you want your website to place high for in search results when people type in these phrases. It is vital to get this right as you could waste money on keywords that only bring in poor quality and irrelevant traffic or low volumes of traffic. You want to rank high for keywords that get searched the most, yet you also need to be realistic. If your budget for SEO is £200 a month you will never rank number 1 for keywords such as “loans” or insurance”, large companies spend thousands a month targeting those phrases. So, you need to find a balance between choosing keywords not too competitive, are relevant to your business and also have search volume making the keywords worth ranking for.
Also be ware if you are hiring an SEO firm of being offered recommendations of keywords that are too long, we call these “longtail” and whilst some can bring in traffic and be easier to rank for some could be being suggested to you by companies as they are easy to rank for but will bring in little to no traffic. Phrases 4 or 5 words long might be easy to rank for but might also have little search volume. At best try keep it to 3 words maximum in a phrase.
Also try choose keywords relevant to your business, for example if you offer life insurance don’t target the word “insurance”. Or if you offer a certain car makes parts then target “ford car parts” rather then “car parts”. A good way to get ideas and suggestions for keywords as well as to see how many times it’s being searched in Google is to use the Google Adwords keyword Planner tool. This allows you to put in a few keywords and then see suggestions related to these keywords and also search volume. Or if you already have a list of keywords and phrases simply copy and paste these in and see the search volume per month. From there you can choose which keywords to target for your SEO strategy. Remember though your budget for SEO might play a part so always choose keywords which are first and foremost relevant to your business and secondly not too competitive, so stick to 2 or 3 worded phrases, singular keywords are notoriously harder to gain any rankings for.
A free ranking for your chosen keyword phrases can bring in hundreds and thousands of visitors a year and always remember this is free traffic. It’s also free advertising 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So well worth putting the effort into. Just make sure you do your keyword research beforehand and select the right keywords and phrases for your business.
You might not know this but the speed of your websites mobile version is a major part of how Google deems your site rank worthy. The free organic listing your site has is greatly affected by the user experience speed wise. Google is ever changing and the algorithm by which it ranks websites is ever changing too. Google now plays a big emphasis on the user experience om your website so if it’s not up to standard you will find your website ranking lower then you might like.
You might be thinking to yourself “but my speed is fine when I access my site on my mobile”. This may be true but chances are you will have broadband which can cope and help the site load in an acceptable time. Google however knows not everyone has broadband, some people are limited to slower speeds and Google takes this into consideration. So basically your site must be usable even to people with slow broadband.
You only have so many seconds to capture the attention of your site visitor, if your site takes 3 seconds to load then this will severely hamper this. More then half of visits are abandoned if a site takes longer then 3 seconds to load on a mobile device. Free tools such as Googles site speed test here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ give you an indication and score out of 100 of your site speed.
There are many factors that effect speed of a website, some examples can be too much JavaScript, pages not using caching, image heavy pages and slow website hosting. All these can be factors and should be included in any decent SEO strategy. An optimized website means a positive user experience which in turn leads to an action being more likely performed, be it complete a form, send an email or purchase online.
Google will always favour and rank the faster websites at the top of the free organic rankings now which is why you should pay attention to what’s going on behind the scenes of your website. Your hosting company will probably know about this as well so you can always reach out to them for advice. There are also various tools and free reports available online that can show you exactly where your website is slow and what needs amending and improving. Don’t forget to always re-check your site on Googles own speed test in the link above to see if your site speed has increased in Googles eyes.
If you’re an avid user of analytics to monitor your sites traffic you should pay attention to the stats for bounce rates. This is the action where people visit and leave your site without performing any action even a click. If you have a high bounce rate this could be an indication of a slow loading website. Whilst this article is biased towards mobile website versions it’s also highly applicable to desktop PC websites as well. Feel free to contact us if you are unsure or have any questions on testing site speed and improving matters.
All you thought you knew about SEO is about to change thanks to upcoming changes to the Google Algorithm. This is important- after all, when you look for something, how often do you go to Google? Where your website appears matter to the success of your business- high rankings mean increased traffic. For this reason, having a good SEO on your website is critical and with these Google Algorithm changes it’s important you’re not left behind.
The Google Algorithm changes could potentially affect the results for one in ten websites; while one in ten might not sound much, when you consider how many websites constitute the internet, that’s still quite a lot!
In the past, the Google Algorithm treated a search sentence as a “bag of words”. So- when you wrote a sentence or question such as “who is the greatest Prime Minister”, it would pick out “Prime” and “Minister” as more important words than “is” and “the”. Doing this eliminated context from the intention of a search sentence.
The Google Algorithm changes announcement itself gave an example of what is changing. In this instance, someone searches “Can you get medicine for someone pharmacy”.
The old algorithm picked out “medicine” and “pharmacy” and returned local results under the assumption you were looking for your local chemists.
However, with the changes, the new algorithm notices “for someone” and takes notice of the fact you’re looking to find out if you’re allowed to pick up someone else’s prescription for them.
The end result? Same search query, very different results.
Another example Google gave was “Parking on a hill with no kerb”. The old algorithm ignored the word no and returned results delivering a top suggestion involving one referencing how to park on a hill with kerbs. The Google Algorithm changes mean that it’ll include no and deliver a more relevant result.
Traditionally when SEO has been operated on a website, it’s been on the basis of the binary SEO phrasing that Google Algorithms relied on. For example, Good SEO included not involving the words described as well as others. The non-inclusion of these words means that if left unchanged, your previously high ranking may result in being overtaken by competitors.
Central to that is employing the correct SEO techniques in order to ensure you keep yourself ahead of your competitors- after all- keeping near the top of the Google Algorithm means keeping yourself on top of the rankings.
That also includes going forward. You may know that SEO is a constant process rather than just one where “once it’s set, it’s done”. You need to keep ahead of any changes and using the keywords that match these Google Algorithm changes.
Within our team at Dorset Tech, we’ve got a team of SEO Superheroes that are already ahead of the game with the Google algorithm changes and can help you to do so too. Our first class, great value SEO solutions mean that you can also stay top of the pack. Whether your website needs changes to stay on top or want the magic that’ll get you there, our team of industry experts using the very best tools and methods can help you do so.
Starting from only £25 an hour. Contact Us to find out more about how we can help.
