SEO Guide

Essential Marketer is a Birmingham based digital growth agency that has SEO as its main core. We have been providing SEO in the Birmingham area for nearly 10 years.

Fantastic SEM services should be the heart of your digital marketing. Similar to project management or general business planning, SEO will help you organise:

Website Build

Initial planning for the build of your website alongside structure, menu and landing pages

Content

Ensuring your content answers and fulfils what your target audience are looking for i.e. keywords

Future Content

To continue to engage and grow your website you need to have a clear content strategy in place.

Development & Growth through Planning

Your development and growth will come from extensive digital planning, your planning starts with the question: Is SEO appropriate for your business and/or industry? Creating buyer personas will help here.

Stage 1

Will SEO generate new business? SEO is not always the right solution. For example imagine a company that sells a new product or an unusual service. They don’t benefit from SEO because people don’t know to search for a product that they don’t know exists!

Stage 2

Is page 1 of Google realistic for the available budget? This is both for the headline keyword that has 1,000’s of searches and for the long-tail keywords that are more specific.

Stage 3

Based on the number of searches and assuming various levels of success with predicted conversion rates will SEO give a return on investment that will generate profit for the business?

Planning Stage 1

Keyword Research

Over the years we have built a bespoke tool suite to ensure we can provide clients with the very best service.

One of the most innovative systems we have created is the tools to complete the initial research for clients. The most powerful element is our keyword research which you can view here.

When working with clients, we break our keyword research down into four key areas:

Google Driven Keywords

These are keywords and phrases that people type into Google when they are looking for specific products or services. These searches generally hold a high conversion rate and it is important to answer the user’s search completely.

Question Driven Keywords

These are keywords and phrases where people ask questions about your products and services. These tend to be guides and how-to’s and are structured around nurturing your audience.

Video Searches

These are keywords people type into YouTube. As YouTube is the second major search engine, it is becoming increasingly more important to cover this platform.

App Searches

Finally the Google App & Apple Store – there isn’t always a demand for your business sector but it is an avenue to explore.

Types of Research

To ensure you grow and expand your website in the correct way, two types keyword research for your website initially are necessary:

Lead Generation Content

Keyword research to build the necessary landing pages into your website. These pages should offer excellent value to the user and have call to actions for the business. Attention is paid to the user experience of the content not just the word count.

Ongoing Content

The second type of keyword research helps generate the necessary content you need in the website. It is worth remembering two important points. 1) The internet’s main job is to help people find the information they are looking for. 2) Google’s mission statement is to organise the world’s data. So your website should have some interesting and unique information that gives Google something to organise.

Business Priority Keywords

Once we have chosen all of the possible keywords, we ask you the client to go through them selecting the good ones and assigning a business priority to each one of them – see the video to the right. The keywords that can have a direct impact on the success of the business will be a high priority and other keywords could be either medium or low priority, but ultimately they will all contribute to the online success of your business.

Calls to Action

Once a client has chosen the business priority for each keyword we will update the call to actions on each keyword. Keywords that may have a big impact on the business might also be strong call to actions and likely lead to a sale. However, it may show a lesser amount of intent to purchase and therefore would be a weak call to action.

When considering the call to action it’s useful to try and picture where the customer is in the journey from research to purchase. For example if the keyword suggests they are still at the research stage this would be a weak call to action, alternatively… if the keyword suggests they are close to the purchasing stage this would be a strong call to action!

Planning Stage 2

Organise Content

We adhere to Google’s mission statement…. “to organise the world’s data”

With Google’s mission statement in mind, once we have decided what the correct keywords are… we organise these correctly into the website (so Google can organise your little bit of the world’s data easily)

Retrofit & Create

Once we know all the pages that are necessary to target all of the keywords chosen we select the pages you already have and make sure the on-page SEO is correct. Our next step is to put a plan together to create any new pages that might be needed.

The video to the right will show you how we build a website’s structure based on the selected keywords.

Now we know what the exact keywords are (there are usually more than 100) and we know that we have a website that targets them properly… we can then move into the the ‘doing stages’.

Website structure

Creating a website structure is no small task, but with our internal tools we can help you overcome this stage with ease. There are a number of things to consider to ensure your pages are indexed correctly, such as:

• Does Google crawl the site correctly?
• Is there a site map?
• Is there a robots.txt?
• Are the URLs correct and search engine friendly?
• Are there any permanent or temporary redirects that should or shouldn’t be in place?
• Are there external links to pages that don’t exist any more?
• Are there current URLs that have multiple occurrences?

Content writing

We help clients create high quality content to expand and entice their audience – here’s a link to Google’s guidance on how to build high quality sites. You will notice that of the 23 bullet points, 21 of them relate to the content on a site! If you tried to sum up those 21 points in one word, that one word would be… quality!

Usually the first job here is to create content for the pages that need it, not only does Google want you to give your users original high quality information they also want you to give them an experience by interlinking the content; very much like the Wikipedia content structure.

The internet is all about finding information and remember again… Google’s mission statement to organise the world’s data… so when writing content give as much information as you can and using a full vocabulary so the Google can see you’re an expert in your field.

On Page SEO

Google provides a 32 page SEO starter guide. If you check out the guide you will notice that 4 of the 6 chapters relate to on-page SEO see below:

• SEO Basics
• Improving Site Structure
• Optimising Content
• Dealing with Crawlers
• SEO for Mobile Phones
• Promotion and Analysis

The key to on-page SEO is to know what each page is being targeted for. Without a keyword plan this is almost impossible, it sounds obvious but the main job with on-page SEO is to label everything so that Google knows what everything is!

Did you know that if you have a page title that is only 20 to 30 characters long Google will change it for you because it doesn’t like to have short page titles in its search results? Meta descriptions are very rarely completed and always start with the major important points like page title, URL & H1.

Link building

Most people have heard of the Google Penguin update. The main thing to be aware of is that it’s is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This is when website owners attempt to artificially increase the ranking of a web page by manipulating the number of links pointing to that page.

Who’s Larry Page?

Very few people know the story of Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google. Many more people will have heard of Bill Gates rather than Larry Page. This is demonstrated by how many people search their names in Google each month. Bill Gates has 1,000,000 and Larry Page has 368,000 monthly worldwide searches. With not so many people knowing the story of Larry Page the concept of PageRank is also very misunderstood.

This diagram goes some way to explaining PageRank and it is probably more true today, after the Google Penguin update. Watch this video for an explanation of how link quality is passed between pages on the internet. If you would just like a summary of the objective, watch the video ‘You need to make the content on your website so good that high quality websites will link to you’.

Once you have built a site with great content, Google will expect to see links to those inner pages with the great content on – not just the home page.

Balanced Anchor Text

Links should have anchor text that mentions the brand which generally points to the home page. Other links pointing to the inner pages may mention the reason why they are linking to that page – for example the link may contain the keyword. A balance of these would show a normal and healthy back link profile. Too many links with just the brand could indicate that the site does not contain good content. Too many links with the same keyword in the anchor text of the link could indicate a manipulated back link profile.

Best Plan of Attack

A great strategy here is to analyse all of your competitors’ back links by using a tool like majestic SEO to find out all of the common sources that contain the best quality back links and emulate these so you end up with the best of the best back links. It should go without saying here that you need to emulate and improve upon the content that your competitors have, so that high quality sites will link to you also.

A key to this strategy is to align it with the initial keyword plan that showed which pages targeted which keywords.

Competitor Analysis

To identify the amount of work and competitiveness of the field you are in, we research your online competitors. Online competitors are defined by who ranks in the top 20 positions in Google for your main keywords. Areas that we evaluate when studying your competitors are:

• Website content quality, we use tools like Copyscape to check content originality
• What and how many keywords do they rank for? (This helps you to find new additional keywords)
• Where do they get their back links from?
• Look at the quality of the links
• Are they engaged in social media?
• Do they have articles that are being shared on social media? This helps give you ideas on what to write about that is engaging to potential customers