Introduction

If you’re learning about SEO right now, well, you’ve probably already noticed that on most digital marketing agencies websites, in their blog posts “backlinks” are mentioned.

Yet, you might be scratching your head, thinking, well what are backlinks? Well, you’ve come to the right place, as in this article, we are going to talk about what backlinks are, and are they still important?

So, what are backlinks?

In a nutshell, backlinks are simply a link between one website and another, so for example, let’s say you are looking to purchase a new car, so you use a car comparison tool to find the cheapest price, you then have a list of dealers who stock that make and model car.

Then, when you start to click on the car dealer’s logo, you are taken directly to their website to see if you wish to make a purchase, this is an example of following a backlink.

So, now we know what a backlink is, but how do they improve a businesses seo, how are they obtained, and what does “do-follow” mean?

Well, hold your horses for just a second, and we will come to all of those points later.

So, why are backlinks important to the SEO process?

Well, let’s say you run a plumbing business, and in your area, for simplicities sake, let’s say there are 100 businesses, all of which are paying for seo.

So, if their paying an SEO agency every single month their going to want to be ranked on the first page of Google, so how does Google’s algorithm decide on which companies are put on the first page of the organic results, and which ones are say all the way back on page 10?

How does Google make such a decision?

Well, it boils down to how strong a businesses “ranking factors” are, and if you don’t know what this means, what it simply mean is that there are over 200 different areas of SEO to improve, and not to improve just once, and that’s it job done, no, if your serious about SEO, you need to keeping improving these, as otherwise another business might beat you.

So this is why SEO is a non-stop process, its about improving your companies organic seo as best you can, using white hat methods, and not stopping even when you reach the top, as otherwise another business might take that as direct opportunity to overtake you.

So, you often need a first class seo agency, then they need to get to work on improving your “ranking factors”- and what happens to be one of the most important ranking factors there is?

So, why are backlinks such an important ranking factor?

There are over 200 ranking factors, yet not all of these are worth the same.

So, what we mean by this is some ranking factors, such as backlinks can really help to improve your organic seo. However, here’s the main thing you must remember, not all links are worth the same.

So, there are backlinks which are super high-quality, that will send “link-equity” to a page, and which come from a relevant website, so by relevant we mean, if you run a car dealership for example, a relevant link would be from another automotive website.

But the links must be quality!

So quality links, they can help to improve your search engine optimisation, and as Googlebot indexes them, and notices that your website has really high-quality links, built in a white hat way, and the backlinks are relevant, this can help to really improve your SEO.

However, there are also masses of agencies which don’t do a good job, and what do we mean by this?

Well, so many businesses, or indeed who they hire to do their SEO for them on their behalf, if they build spam of low-quality links then these will not help to improve your seo, but what there actually doing is damaging your search engine optimisation.

So, a word to the wise, only build top-quality links.

So, you’ve mentioned that there are over 200 ranking factors, how important are backlinks?

A lot of agencies, do think that backlinks are still considered one of the most important ranking factors. Ever since Google’s PageRank, a lot of seo businesses have understood that backlinks are important, but only if their quality and built using white hat methods, in accordance with Google’s WebMaster Guidelines.

So, how important?

Well, many people think in the top 3 ranking factors.

Do quality backlinks mean that you will also be helping to improve your businesses Trustworthiness as part of Google’s EAT guidelines

Those that know a thing about SEO will know this, and that is Google also weigh’s up how good a company’s website is, using it EAT guidelines. So, you may read various SEO articles about Google’s E-A-T guidelines.

So, in a nutshell, your businesses website needs to show expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

And one way you can improve your “trustworthiness”, as part of Google’s EAT guidelines, is to build quality backlinks.

That’s because when you have a lot of quality backlinks, coming from relevant websites, this can improve your seo.

So, for example, lets say you run a solicitors practice, and one lawyers website lets say has one hundred links from quality websites, these include winning various business awards, links from training the business has undertaken, and links from various law websites, so this business has a lot of quality backlinks.

This is obviously a clear signal that the business is trusted by these other companies, as they’ve won awards, they have undertaken training, they have links from other law websites. So, they have been linked to because other companies have wanted to mention them as a business, and because the websites linking are quality themselves, this is a clear indicator, because there a hundred quality links, that is business is connected, via a backlink to other quality company websites.

So, now when you compare this with another company, that has no backlinks at all, so there’s not another business that links to it, well, you can see why Google may favour the first business that has 100 quality links instead, as business number one had links from quality and relevant websites.  

So backlinks are still important, but how do you earn them?

Earning backlinks is not easy, its no walk in the park, that’s because to earn a link, you need to give a quality business a reason to want to link.

So, the best reason is simply because your business offers useful information, so lets take the example once again of running a solicitors practice. If your lawyers were to dedicate time every single month to offering quality advice on your website, via say your blog, and this covers lets say commonly asked questions, or something that’s newsworthy in your area of business, or just covers something that clearly shows you have a lot of expertise, then another company may link to you.

You might find that even another law practice links to you, and you might think, well why would they do that?

Well, they may have covered the same topic, and found your perspective interesting, so have quoted your work, and offered a link.

So, for example, you may have written an article, “how to cope when going through a divorce”- that might have received a lot of backlinks from other law firms, because they have read it, and think that its good quality work.

If your business needs help to improve its SEO, they why not call us?

Introduction

Some businesses here in Bristol fork out for all different types of marketing, from the costs associated with print advertising, through to running say radio commercials. They may not invest in search engine optimisation, simply because they don’t understand that form of advertising.

Normally therefore a lot of business owners will have invested in a type of marketing that they are familiar with, they may have therefore paid for that type of marketing for a very long time, as they believe that form of advertising is “tried and tested”.

So, for example, the business might have invested in sponsoring a local rugby club for many years for example in The South West of England.

Therefore, what can sometimes put a lot of business owners off investing in search engine optimisation, is they simply don’t have a clue about what SEO is. They don’t therefore know if they will get a return.

Or if they do have a vague understanding of how organic SEO works, what can put them off completely from paying is that some agencies will state it will take six months or even longer in certain cases to see any results.

Businesses therefore normally want to see results straightaway, and therefore are sometimes deterred from investing in this form of marketing. After all, if you pay for your let’s say plumbing business to appear on the side of the rugby pitch for an important game, you will check to see if the banner advertising in there on the day, so you know exactly where your marketing spend has gone.

However, as an established SEO agency in Bristol, we will now explain why so many businesses pay us to improve their SEO every month. We will also explain that its true, organic seo is a slow process, especially if you’re a new business, or operating in a highly competitive business sector.

However, many clients invest in us every month, and have done so for years, why?

Because quite simply put, it doesn’t matter if you’re a sole-trader builder, or a leading solicitor’s practice in the South West, people will want your services, and they often turn to Google’s organic results to find local businesses.

So, if you’re in a bit of rush, here’s in a nutshell why so many businesses in Bristol hire us to improve their organic search engine optimisation:

–        We can improve where your company ranks in Google’s organic SERP’s

–        We only ever will use white hat methods

–        Our SEO methods comply with Google’s WebMaster Guidelines

–        We only work with businesses that acknowledge that SEO is a long-term process, and quality work takes time

–        We deliver, many businesses which pay for our seo services have done so for a long time.

First things first, what is SEO?

S.E.O (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of improving a business’s “ranking factors”- there are hundreds of ranking factors to improve. So, an example of one type of ranking factor would be backlinks.

Now, you or lets say your appointed SEO agencies have to constantly work on improving these ranking factors, because if other businesses have stronger ranking factors that you, then they will simply rank above yours.

So, Google’s SERP’s that’s the organic results, these are ranked on how strong your businesses ranking factors are. If you have the 3rd strongest, then you will rank 3rd, obviously your business also has to be relevant to the query, so for example if someone is looking for a set of aluminium ladders, you have to make your website’s SEO relevant to ladders.

Here’s the key question, can you afford not to pay for SEO in Bristol?

So, here’s the really important question that you do have to ask, that is, if you have strong competitors in say Bristol, and you know that a lot of these businesses are paying various SEO agencies for help improving their organic seo, and it looks like they gaining business online because of this, because there ranked say 1st on Google, well you have to question can you afford not to invest in this form of marketing?

As otherwise, if you don’t invest, that’s to say if you don’t find a quality SEO agency to help improve your companies seo, then you might be handing you competitors a massive advantage, as they could be securing more business than you, from being ranked on the first page?

It does all come down to which company you choose

However, a word of warning, you do have to find a quality company that will implement your SEO.

There are so many rogue businesses out there that simply focus on making a profit, rather than implementing quality seo work.

There are many businesses in the South-West of England, as well as further afield, which have hired the wrong agencies, freelancers or somebody to work on improving the SEO. Sometimes the seo work is done so poorly, that the business will then it hit by a penalty.

Why would you say it’s particularly important to invest here in Bristol?

We think at this agency, that it’s so important for Bristol businesses, whether they are a huge conglomerate company, or small business, that they should invest in quality SEO, because Bristol is a hugely competitive place to do business.

To give you an example of what you mean, it doesn’t matter if your scaffolder, plumber, solicitor dentist or let’s say you run a used car dealership, there is so much competition in Bristol, so again, it’s the same question, can afford not to invest in this form of marketing?

A continuous process

Before you invest in organic SEO, you have to acknowledge the fact that SEO often needs continuous work, therefore it’s not the type of marketing that can be stopped and started. If you were to stop, then you may drop back down the ranks.

When done right, many businesses benefit from being on the first page

Let’s say for example that you run a used car dealership in South West England, and your business is on the first page of Google’s organic results, for all the keywords that associated with selling used cars, plus also you are advertising your servicing centre where you also service cars.

If your business is the first page of Google for say “car dealerships Bristol”, then this will benefit a business, so when it’s done right, and that that is you hire a well-known and respected seo company like Pack Digital, you can really have a strong marketing to support your business.

How our SEO agency can help your company in The South West:

We currently work with a number of different businesses which are based here in Bristol, England if you would like a quote for SEO, then why not give our business a ring?

Introduction

So, you’ve just asked your web designers to set your new company website live, your more than happy with the design.

It’s just a few weeks have not passed, and you have the fancy offices in Bristol’s harbour side, you’ve got the staff, you’ve paid for the website, its just, well, the phones not ringing- its in matter of fact, well super-quiet.

So you go onto Google, you need a “local SEO agency”- as you know that search engine optimisation, if the work is good quality, can take your business onto page 1 of Google.

Its just after visiting a few agencies that are located in various locations across the glorious South West of England, well, after coming out of agencies in Bristol, and also many located in Bath, they’ve all said the same thing, that is, it takes longer to optimise, that’s improve the search engine optimisation for brand new websites, we will now explain why that is so.

What do we mean by brand-new website?

So, by brand new, what we typically mean is that you’ve just registered a brand-new domain name, a domain name that hasn’t been used in the past, hasn’t got any SEO history.

Google’s EAT

Okay so let’s begin in explaining why if you’re thinking of launching a brand-new business venture in Bristol, why it takes longer to optimise a brand-new website.

One of the reasons is something built into Google’s algorithm, that is “Google’s EAT”, which in a nutshell means Google rewards businesses which are experts at what they do, they show expertise, authoritativeness in their business sector, and can be trusted.

So, just as a business say that’s located on the high-street in Clifton, Bristol takes a long time to build up loyalty from its customers, because the business delivers a high-quality service, so does a website.

That’s to say if you were to have a website designed say in Bristol, its brand-new, well, its also going to take a long time normally for Google to recognise it as a quality website, it often will need a lot of SEO work, and this is worth bearing in mind when hiring SEO agencies, as its not a fast process, in matter of fact it’s very slow.

Google’s Algorithm will only ever reward quality work

So, you’ve started in business in Bristol, and you ask your web designers to get your website indexed on Google.

Googlebot indexes the website, then you ask the web developers to set you up a Google Search Console account, and within the week, you learn for an important keyword, you rank 90th on Google.

Its then that it hits you, how much work is needed, a huge amount of SEO work. So, with that in mind, should you cut corners? No, absolutely not, don’t do anything other than top-quality work, why?

Well, if you hire SEO agencies which are rubbish, or you do the work yourself, and its low-quality there are countless Google Penalties which you could get, you could get for example a backlink penalty, such as a Google Penguin penalty, which could mean that Google decides to “de-index” the website, as you haven’t followed Google’s WebMaster Guidelines, or let’s say the SEO consultant or agency you’ve hired has followed Google’s WebMaster Guidelines.

Some agencies are simply better than others

So, hiring Bristol SEO companies is not like hiring a painter and decorator, or a plumber, that’s because when you hire say a plumber, you may just want the central heating system fixed, which is either fixed or remains broken.

So, its either one or the other, obviously the plumber will fix it otherwise they don’t get paid, however SEO agencies are different, the quality of the work can vary so massively, that one agency might be one of the best in the country at what they do, they sky-rocket your organic traffic, then reduce the websites bounce rate on Google Analytics, they also manage to increase your average position on Google Search Console.

However, on the other hand, there might be hundreds of good seo companies out there, and we are one of them, however there are a ton of bad apples as well, and what happens when you hire the wrong agency- well one word, penalties.

Googlebot

So, let’s say you hire an agency and they write evergreen content marketing, now, the business may write a brilliant 10,000-word article, it’s really useful to your shoppers, yet even though that might cost a lot to produce, its going to take time to earn quality backlinks.

So, what do we mean by that, well, lets say you run a business, your based in central Bristol, and have a premises in Aztec West Bristol, you sell electric cars, and you hire seo businesses to write evergreen content marketing, which answers commonly asked questions, that people have when they are buying an electric vehicle in Bristol.

Yet, even though the written work is high-quality, it has a low bounce rate, it has high time on site on Google Analytics, and its starting earn quality backlinks, which Googlebot has indexed, and which have recognised as quality do-follow backlinks, it may still take a lot of time to keep earning backlinks, which are quality.

This is why organic seo is a slow process, that’s because backlinks are just one “ranking factor” which Googlebot indexes, and which Google’s algorithm takes into account, so as you can imagine, if it takes a long time to earn backlinks, you still have to optimise the hundreds of other ranking factors as well.

So whichever SEO business that you hire in Bristol, there’s often a lot of work to do.

You do have to understand Google’s WebMaster Guidelines

All search engine optimisation work that you do, should be top-quality and also white hat, it should follow Google’s SEO rules, that is “Google’s Webmaster Guidelines”.

Some businesses will simply have very large marketing budgets, so its important to be realistic

Okay so let’s say you run an independent business, its based in Cabot Circus Bristol, yet you also have an office in Fishpond’s area, if you have said ten staff, yet you want your business to rank higher on Google than a national business which has thousands of staff, you do have to be realistic as to what can be achieved with a low marketing budget.

A lot of marketing agencies believe there’s a Google Sandbox Period

A lot of marketing companies, in Bristol, and in Bath also, believe that some websites will incur what’s called a Google Sandbox period, that’s a length of time where its harder to optimise the website.

Therefore, some agencies believe that this can be another reason why its often harder to optimise brand new websites.

Why you shouldn’t cut any corners

When various businesses in Bristol have fixed overheads, that’s to say they may have a shop in a busy area of the city centre, or let’s say rented offices in Cabot Circus, or Aztec West in Bristol, then the business will have a lot of costs. This is why, especially for start-up businesses, they want to get their website onto first page of Google, in the organic SERP’s as soon as possible.

And this makes perfect sense, as it doesn’t matter if you run a large solicitors practice, or you simply run a shop that sells, say running trainers, you will want to generate as much business as possible, and you want your company to be easily found online. Yet, what we would say is this, don’t cut any corners.

Even though, you may run say a start-up business, and you need to get the business up and running as soon as possible, and to generate more sales, we would never ever recommend cutting corners when it comes to your businesses organic seo. Google’s algorithm is so very clever at detecting spam, or low-quality seo, and as soon as Googlebot indexes rubbish seo, well, the business may well be deemed as breaking Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and the business then may well be subject to an algorithmic penalty- such as a Google Penguin penalty, or the business may incur a Google manual penalty- which as a business, you most definitely do not want.

It takes a long time to catch up with the competition

Okay, so here’s something that some businessowners struggle sometimes to understand, that’s to say, they make the mistake of thinking organic seo works in the same way as PPC, in that as soon as they start paying an agency in Bristol, to work on the companies seo, that they should overnight appear in the organic results on Google- this is not how it works.

However organic seo, well, it doesn’t work like that, it takes normally huge amounts of time, sometimes even years for some businesses to get onto the first page.

 Want to hire us?

If you are looking for “local SEO companies” why not give us a ring?

Introduction

This is a question that is asked with increasing regularity at our agency, that is clients are wondering whether backlinks are still important?

Ever since the days of Google’s PageRank, a lot of businesses have recognised that backlinks are an important part of their SEO strategy.

Also, if a client was to ask for a breakdown of work that’s been completed that month, they might note that a large proportion of the time has been spent either writing content marketing, or analysing the backlinks that have been built.

It is therefore natural for business owners to wonder whether backlinks are still important, and whether time should be spent on this area of SEO.

First things first, what are backlinks?

Okay, so we do realise that a lot of the readers who are currently reading through this SEO article, might not have a jar of glue about what backlinks are.

So, without further ado, let us explain a little bit about what backlinks are, and why they are so important to the SEO process.

A lot of businesses will know that where your business ranks on Google is dependent on Google’s algorithm.

So, how does Google decide where to rank say a solicitors practice that’s based in say Clifton Bristol?

Well, Google will rank the business based on how strong that companies “ranking factors” are.

Now if you’re wondering, what “ranking factors” actually are, well, there are over 200 different ranking factors which are calculated to work out how strong your businesses organic SEO actually is.

So, here’s some examples of ranking factors that you may have heard of:

-Backlinks

-Content marketing

-Anchor text

However, to further complicate things, not all of these ranking factors are weighted the same, for example it is widely considered among a huge amount of digital marketing agencies that backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors, where a meta title is less important, so not all are worth the same.

So there you go, backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors, that’s if they are quality and relevant to your company, however this article is all about whether they are still important? So we will answer that now…

Not all backlinks are equal

Before we explain whether backlinks are still important, we have to address this point, which is really important, and that is not all backlinks are equal.

So, before you start building backlinks for your business here in Bristol, England, what you have to realise as a business owner, or a marketing manager here in Bristol, is that building backlinks is all dependent on whether they are quality and relevant or not. If they are quality they can help, however if there not, then they could damage your SEO.

How should the backlinks be built?

Okay so here’s the million-dollar question, “how should backlinks be built”, well, here at our agency we don’t think you should go out looking for backlinks, instead they should be “earnt”.

What we mean by it?

Quite simply put, we think that backlinks should be earnt by the business, therefore your company should offer top-quality and also useful advice.

So, whether you sell car waxes online and you offer advice on how to take care of your car’s paintwork, or you sell chocolate cookies online, and you explain why your chocolate is superior to other brands, you need to offer good quality advice.

It is more than likely that this advice might well be useful to someone, and if it is, and they might link to you, but remember you only need “relevant” and “high-quality links”.

Some backlinks can therefore help your SEO

Therefore, it’s worth recapping on this point one more time, “do-follow” and “no-follow” backlinks, which are relevant, high-quality and built using white hat seo methods, can actually help your SEO.

However, some backlinks can actually damage your SEO

On the other hand, “spam links”, that is links which are low-quality and not relevant, can actually damage your SEO, and could even result in a link penalty!

This is something you most definitely do not want!

Quality backlinks we think are still important

So, if you were to come to our SEO agency, and asked one of our SEO consultants, “do we still think that backlinks are still important”?

We would say yes, but that would be conditional.

We would say that it depends on the quality of the link, because quality links can help.

How our digital marketing agency can help:

Whether your business is based overlooking Bristol Harbour, or you are based in the rather stylish Clifton area of Bristol, or perhaps you are based in Aztec West? Our agency can help you.

Whether you’re a small business owner, that needs help to improve your SEO, or you need a brand-new WordPress website, or you simply want to invest in PPC, we can help.

Introduction

It’s a question that agencies up and down the land will get asked on a regular basis, that is, is it possible to get onto the first page of Google’s organic results quickly?

Sometimes, when a business is just starting up, they might have written a rather ambitious business plan, which may have speculated on how many sales can be made through the website. However, often businesses don’t anticipate how long the organic SEO process will take, neither do a lot of businesses understand Google’s Sandbox period.

However here is the thing, a lot of businesses think that seo is a piece of cake, and to get onto the first page of Google in organic results is a quick process, when in matter of fact, its often not.

So, is all well and good a business owner thinking that they can achieve something within a set amount of time, and the sales will start rolling in, but you have to also be realistic, that’s to if you’re up against competitors which have spent millions on their online advertising, you do have to sit down and ponder can you really go up against these companies?

For example, you should ask these sort of questions:

–        How strong is your direct competitors SEO

–        Realistically how long have they been working on their SEO

–        Has the business the marketing budget to go up against their competitors

So, it all boils down to this, the strength of the competition

Here’s the thing, and this a point that a lot of businesses need to appreciate, with seo how fast you can see results is all down to this how strong your competitors. If there seo is super-weak, well you can push forwards, and get your website on the first page without much bother.

If the keywords are competitive, for example, “plumbers in (name of city”- then there’s likely to be hundreds of plumbers in a city, so you’ve to put it frankly, often got a lot of work to do.

Picture your competitors as a row of sumo wrestlers that are in front of you, and you have to  wrestle each one out of the way to get the endpoint, well that’s exactly what good seo agencies must do, they must beat the standard of each business above them on Google, until your business has risen to a satisfactory position.

So, for example, a plumber is not ranked 3rd on Google by chance, its got there because that plumbers website is deemed the most relevant and has the 3rd strongest “ranking factors”.

These ranking factors, which Googlebot reads, then are sent to “Google’s algorithm” which are what are used to work out how strong that particular companies seo is, so if your ranked say 3rd, well, you have most likely often taken over hundreds of other businesses to get there.

So, it’s not just a matter of investing a little bit into SEO, and thinking that’s enough to get you onto the first page, because often it’s not. Instead, a detailed evaluation needs to take place, to work out how strong your competitors seo is.

How Google’s algorithm works

So, in order to give you a bit of insight into how Google’s algorithm works- you have to appreciate that all company websites are constantly being re-evaluated to decide on where they should rank on a regular basis, through a process called “crawling and indexing” by Googlebot and Google’s algorithm.

This is to see where businesses should be ranked, so for example, a business on Monday might be number one, but by Friday, Google’s algorithm might have decided that two other businesses have stronger seo, so that business is moved to 3rd.

So, the point that we are trying to make is this, businesses regularly reshuffle where they are ranked.

What are ranking factors?

Google ranks a business based on how strong the businesses ranking factors are, and there are well over 200 the needs to be calculated.

So, in a nutshell, the businesses that are most relevant to a query, and have the strongest ranking factors are the companies that are ranked on first page.

Remember that quality is the name of the game

Quality is always the name of the game with SEO, so don’t invest in substandard work. If an agency is offering super low prices, be inquisitive as to why, as if seo work is done properly it needs a lot of time, by experienced staff, which don’t come cheap, so be wary of businesses that offer low prices.

With that said, you can still have businesses that charge an arm and a leg, that still don’t cut the mustard, so pick an agency on price, instead you need a business that offers quality.

Don’t expect results overnight, it can take many months to see results depending on the level of your competition

If you’re going to the contact in your SEO agency every day for an update, then this is a waste of time, that’s because often you have to to wait many months to see results, that’s if you pick the right business.

The point you’re trying to make is you can’t expect to start to seeing results overnight

Don’t rush, it will not work

Don’t rush the SEO work neither, some businesses that are just starting out for example in business, go like a bull at a gate and start adding a lot of SEO all at once , this approach doesn’t work, you need to focus on sustained marketing strategy, then implements quality work. Don’t ever substitute quantity for quality, as this most definitely will not work.

So, whether its building quality, do-follow backlinks, writing a 30,000 word piece of ever green content marketing, or simply writing a meta description, make sure all of the work is white hat.

The work must be absolutely focused on quality

It’s well worth overemphasising this point once again, it’s not so much about quantity of work, it’s all about the quality of the work that you implement. So, before you do any SEO work at all, make sure you understand Google’s WebMaster Guidelines, and everything about implementing white hat seo.

Also you must be realistic

This is the most important thing business owners must realise, that is you must be realistic about what you can achieve with a limited marketing budget.

It might be David and Goliath situation, between your business, and a conglomerate that your business is in direct competition with, that’s to say, they may have invested millions, and you only have a few hundred spend each month, so again you have got to be realistic about what you can achieve in that situation and not think an SEO agency can pull a rabbit out of a hat.

Good SEO agencies, like ours, will say no, that’s not possible on that marketing budget.

Backlinks can take a long time to build

Backlinks are widely considered as one of the most important SEO ranking factors.

However, again it all boils down to the “quality” of the links, so to build quality links (you should only ever build quality) well this takes a huge amount of time.

Evergreen content marketing can take a long time to create

Writing quality evergreen content marketing, which has a low “bounce rate”, which is useful and which follows “Google’s WebMaster rules”, well, can be very time intensive, and again could take many months to see results.

The on-site SEO must also be to a very good standard

All of the on-site SEO, from writing the meta titles, right through to writing the anchor text within a blog post must be to a very good “white hat” standard.

With organic SEO you have to take a long-term marketing strategy

Here’s another top-tip, we would say that if you can only afford the SEO budget for say a few months, then you have to seriously consider whether you should invest at all, that’s because it takes such a long time to see results from SEO normally, you might run out of marketing budget.

How our team can help

We have worked with many businesses here in Bristol, ranging from international businesses, to businesses that operate in the professional business sectors, we would be eager to talk to you about how we can improve your businesses organic SEO.

Introduction

So it’s a dreary Monday morning, you’ve just rocked up at work, and you look at your list of tasks that you need to duly complete throughout the day ahead.

First thing on the list to do, the bosses have asked you to write a piece of content marketing for the company website, this is when you let out a deep sigh into your mornings coffee, as you know it’s not going to be a straightforward task- but here’s why you should turn that frown upside down my friend.

Every business, has a lot of people that have expertise on the products or services that you manufacture or sell, and guess what, often people need expertise when you are buying something.

So, yes, you’re a clever clogs, and now’s your time to show off a bit, show that you know your stuff. So, no its not about writing a thousand words, sending off to the marketing department for them to pick your masterpiece apart- no, that’s the wrong attitude, instead you know what is what, so make sure you use that knowledge to help the companies customers.

So if you match the two, and help your customers solve a problem that they might be having, whether that’s the benefits of purchasing a certain television, or explaining what goes into making your scented candles smell so blooming good, often customers will be over the moon you’ve helped them.

If you aim to answer these pressing questions your customers have, and always aim to be better than your competition, then hey presto you got it you could be improving your organic SEO, not such a drag is it?

First things first, what’s content marketing?

So, so many businesses think it’s just a written article that is added to the news section of your company website, and it’s a couple of hundred words and that’s it, yet anything could be further from the truth. Its not just written text, the same as a car is not just a vehicle of transport.

Sure, a car can just be a box on wheels, non inspiring, a lump of unreliable metal, just the same way content marketing can be 10,000 words that can send you to sleep, make you face-plant the keyboard and wake up several hours later with post-it stuck to your head, and a few missed calls.

But who wants to be like that?

No, you want to be the hyper car of cars, the best, the inspiring head turning automobile that when you jump into the driving seat, you feel good about yourself, so now translate that to written text?

That’s to say, aim to be the best, write stuff that’s interesting to your customers, don’t settle for being average, so if you take nothing else from reading this informative article, take this nugget of advice, make the work useful and interesting, and if its not, don’t publish it.

If its not quality, if its written work on par with the same vigour that rubbish car was built, well its going to act like a dead weight and pull the website down.

Instead it needs to be well written, and help your customers solve the problem

Why bother writing content marketing?

Well that’s not the attitude to take for a start!

We are only joking, we fully understand why a lot of businesses think why should they spend hours upon hours writing hundreds if not thousands of words of text, while drinking too much coffee during the process.

The simple answer is this, your website is not just about selling products or a service, because if it was then how would Google know rank a website? How would Google distinguish your business, that sells the same product as one million other companies?

Well, how it does it is by seeing how “relevant” your website is to the query, plus, how strong your companies ranking factors are.

Now don’t get bogged down by search engine ranking factors for just now, it will all get confusing, leave that to us here at Pack Digital, your rather brilliant seo agency in Bristol. Instead, if your writing the content marketing, well, just focus on writing the best answer you can to that question.

You need to stand out, as an expert in your field, to do this you need to answer questions that your customers commonly have.

But what are the advantages of improving a business’s organic SEO?

Well, it’s kind of like saying what are the benefits of feeling fitter and healthier through exercising better eating, it’s hard to say unless you go on that journey yourself.

And no, were not saying if you improve your SEO, you can get six-pack overnight, it doesn’t work like that obviously!

But what we are saying is this, as your business starts to gain traction and your company starts to move towards the first page of Google’s organic results, you can start to begin to get more visitors.

Now, obviously this does depend on how good the agency is you hire, but if you get more organic visitors, that are the right sort of shoppers, well this can help to increase sales. Yet, a word to the wise, the work must be quality, for this you often need a respected agency.

I haven’t got much spare time; can this work be completed ultra quickly?

No, most definitely not, this is the attitude that a lot of really low-quality SEO agencies take and businesses that think that’s the whole SEO process is a walk in the park, it’s not.

You often hear people thinking that SEO is so simple that they can do it themselves, yet then after a year or two down the line, they then still looking for an agency to help, that’s because seo is not simple.

Offering advice via your website, through content marketing for your customers, in a way which your customers will find helpful, well that’s not that easy.

Plus, when you think that there are well over 200 other SEO ranking factors as well, it’s safe to say that SEO is most certainly a complex area of marketing, that can’t be underestimated.

Why are you saying in needs to be written by an expert?

Okay, so this is a huge mistake that so many businesses make, that’s to say some businesses think that they can gets articles written for a few quid by a freelance copywriter, or that they can bash out 1000 words afterwork.

This again is the SEO work which is likely to damage your SEO and not enhance it, instead time needs to be spent on real high-quality work

Why should I even bother giving away free advice?

So, this is a question that we get asked a lot, especially by businesses to get paid by the hour to dispense advice, such as a solicitor, they often ask, why go to all this trouble to give away free advice?

Ultimately, to offer paid for advice by the hour, for example let’s say you’re a lawyer, you need people to first find your business online, that’s so they contact you, so to improve your organic seo, sometimes you need to give away free advice in the form content marketing.

So for example, lets say somebody is going through a divorce, there likely to research which company they want to go with, and this might mean that they read over 10 articles before they pick up the phone and say this is the business for me, so you can begin to see why free advice via content marketing is sometimes offered by some companies.

So a word to the wise, be careful you choose

If you pay a stupidly low price for SEO, well, guess what you often get what you pay for!

Now, we would like to think that a lot of business owners are worldly wise enough to know that if they pay say a few hundred pounds a month, then what can they really expect back in return, well not a huge amount!

Especially when on the first page you might be up against many multi-million-pound businesses with very large marketing budgets, so you have to be realistic, if you are going to throw your hat into the ring and take on the competition, you have to make sure you have a realistic marketing budget.

Why we think it’s worth partnering with a local agency

Now it’s all well and good picking an agency that’s in another country, but the whole point of organic   SEO is that the agency must understand your business and what you offer, and sometimes this can’t be done over the phone.

Instead, it often happens naturally through meetings with the business, walking around say their warehouses, or even going out with them for a drink on social nights.

You can then start to get an idea of the culture within the company, where they want to take the business, where there currently positioned, and more about the products and the services that they offer.

Now don’t get us wrong, were not saying that after a few meetings, you’re going to become an expert about what that business can offer, what we are trying to get at is, you need to spend time with the business to understand the company some more, so can this really be achieved if you were to pick a marketing agency that is overseas? Possibly through a lot of travelling maybe.

The SEO process never really comes to a stop

This is a huge mistake many businesses make, they think that they can pick an agency, sky-rocket to the top, and then drop the agency.

However, it doesn’t work like this, instead you need to form a long-lasting relationship with a good quality SEO agency like ours, that’s because the competition is always aiming to improve their SEO to be stronger than yours, so you can be overtaken within a week.

Aim to be the very best

Who wants to be mediocre?

Let’s be honest we don’t go into business to be second rate, do we?

So, aim to be the best.

Introduction

It doesn’t matter if your business sells classic cars or your business sells cosmetic items such as lipstick online, it’s more than likely that your website has a blog.

So, for those that do not know what a blog is, it simply a part of the company’s website where the business can publish written work and articles that are likely to be of interest to the company’s customers.

So, for example the classic car company might write an article about how to improve the body work on the car by using certain polishes and waxes.

The article might be written so that it offers advice on how to apply wax and polishes to certain classic cars in order to improve the car’s appearance.

On the other hand, you might run a very large cosmetic business, and you are now in the process of launching a brand-new line of cosmetics, that is a range of new lipsticks and you therefore want to write a blog post about the new range of lipsticks and the different shades and colours that they come in, and also the differentiating factors that differentiate your lipstick from other lipstick brands, for example you might use natural ingredients for example.

So, this will give you a good idea about what a blog is often used for and it is therefore the part of a website where a article is published and it is then moved down when a new article is placed on the site so sometimes some companies they may have hundreds of articles and they are often sorted by displaying the newest article on the first page.

Now, as a business owner you might be thinking why do so many businesses invest so much of their time into writing these articles, as some of the articles can be really long for example some might have over 10,000 words, so why do businesses invest so much time?

Well businesses invest so much time into writing these articles because quite simply put if they are done right and that is in a white hat way then these articles can help to improve the businesses organic SEO.

First things first, what is “content marketing”, and how is it used to improve a company’s SEO?

Let’s say that your business sells stoves, that’s to say your business sells wood burning stoves, now if they customer is to buy a wood-burning stove online then they are likely to have many different questions.

For example they might want to know if the stove can burn coal or if it just burns would, what is the seat outputs, also they might want to know how to look after their stove in terms of how often they should have cleaned or the chimney cleaned so therefore a customer is likely to have a lot of questions, and obviously answering these questions when you sell your wood-burning stoves might mean that the page starts to look rather cluttered, in that the pages full of text, so instead a lot of businesses hire a agency which instead will write the blog posts so that the information is useful to your customers but also so that it can help to improve your businesses SCO if it is done in a white hat way.

Why is it so important that it is well written?

It’s crucial that the work is well written, what we mean by well written is that your company customers must find the work useful.

Now, what do we mean by useful?

Well, often when somebody is buying a product, or they are buying a service, they will have a lot of different questions that they will have, before they make the purchase, therefore if you can offer useful advice via a your company website that helps answer some of these questions then this might mean that people spend longer on your website so that the lowest the bounce rate, other website might link to the work because they find it useful and also you are helping your company website to become more relevant because you are talking about what you are selling.

So what we mean by this is if you are selling stoves and you keep writing high quality articles about stoves and answering the various questions that customers often have about stoves then your website is obviously going to become more relevant to stove enquiries.

However, as a white hat agency, we would say that you must invest in white hat and top quality SEO.

Why does the algorithm only reward high-quality well written content marketing?

So let’s say that you run a company and is let’s say that your business sells men’s shoes online, what you have to think about is all the different retailers that your business is competing with, that’s the say there are likely to be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of retailers that retail men’s shoes, so what you have to ask yourself is what makes your business work policing on the first page?

That’s to say there are only 10 businesses normally which are ever listed on the first page in the organic section, so what we mean by the organic section is the main bulk of the businesses that are listed will be listed in the organic results.

Now, to get your business listed in the organic results, on the first page, your business must be deemed relevant for that query.

So, what do we even mean by this, well let’s say that you sell UPVC double glazing in your city, you to be on the first page for UPVC doors plus the name of your city your company website must be deemed the most relevant or one of the most relevant for UPVC doors in that city, of course you will still be competing with other businesses because in the organic results there are normally 10 the businesses listed.

However, what you have to think about is there are normally hundreds of other companies that offer UPVC doors and windows in a major capital city or a large city so you hat to get your business on the first page, and to do this you must make your website relevant to the Queen which is you he the sea doors plus the name of your city and part of the process to do this is often to add white hat and high-quality content marketing.

Introduction

Backlinks are as old as the hills, okay, well not that old in reality- but they were part of Google’s magic formula for as far back as the invention of Google’s “PageRank”.

Now when it comes to SEO, well that’s old, meaning that it’s not a newly fangled update, such as Google’s more recent update named Google RankBrain for example.

Backlinks therefore an established part of how Google and some other search engines decide on where a business should be ranked. Don’t get us wrong however, backlinks are not the only ingredient that Google uses to work out how good your SEO recipe is, nope, Googles algorithm is now thought to take into account a whooping 200 ranking factors when working out where to rank a site- see us seo agencies do have our work cut out for us.

In this article we are a dive headfirst into explaining exactly what backlinks are, why they are important, and why you have to know what you’re doing when you are building links.

Okay, sock it to me, what exactly are these backlinks?

Well quite simply put they help people to navigate around the Internet, so for example if you have ever been on the website, clicked a link, then gone to another company’s website in a jiffy, this is simply called following a backlink.

So, for example you might be wanting to make yourself a rather tasty pizza, an authentic home-made woodfired pizza, so you simply find the number one result on Google for “woodfired pizza recipe” and off you go into the garden to cook yourself an authentic slice of Italy.

Now as you flick through the list of ingredients, you’re presented with a link, where the person who wrote the informative article has bought all of their various items from, for example from an online supermarket.

If the author was super helpful, they might have even provided a link to every single ingredient such as the flour they purchased, and this would obviously help you save time if you’re buying them ingredients online. So, click, click and click there you have it the tomato sauce, the cheese they used and that all important peperoni is now sitting in your basket, all because someone’s provided you with a link, and made it super simple for you to order the goods you need. Its just now you’ve discovered that there’s no pizza coming tonight, as you have to wait for a delivery slot!

So, this is what is meant by “following a link”, which is all well and good, but you might now be sitting there in your office chair with a cup of coffee thinking, well, what is this got to do the SEO, well hold your horses and we shall explain all.

Why are backlinks so important?

Okay, so imagine you are at a party, and everybody is asked to raise their hands to the person they like the most, now somebody who has the most show of hands in the room, is obviously the most popular, and is probably the one with the biggest ego to match as well.

Egos aside, that is a vote of who is the most popular, and this could be the same when it comes to implementing SEO, the website has the most show of hands, but in this case backlinks, could have the strongest SEO.

Yet, notice how we use the wording “could have”, because as with all things SEO related, it’s not that simple, it’s not just about having the most.

More, more and more of backlinks is not always better, it has to be balanced out with, are they quality links?

So, it boils down to this, the backlinks leading to your business must be “relevant”, they have to be built in a “white hat” way and also be “top-quality”.

So sure, you might have 20,000 backlinks pointing to your site’s homepage, but if they are complete garbage, then this can actually drag you website down or actually get it penalised, so yes you got it, it could actually damage the whole businesses SEO. Remember this, rubbish links = poor performance.

Yet, there’s another website which only has just 100 links in total, all pointing at the homepage, but every single one is from a real high quality source, and that website could be the one that ranks number one, simply because it has quality on its side.

Quality trumps everything else.

It’s therefore all about quality.

So, in terms the pecking order, how important are backlinks? Are they the most important ranking factor?

So one of the founders of Google is named Larry Page, and part of their original formula they used to decipher where a business should rank, was simply called Google’s PageRank, which looked at backlinks as part of the formula to work out which companies should rank where.

Now don’t get us wrong, things have moved on massively since the days of PageRank, in matter of fact the algorithm now is thought to take into account over 200 different ranking factors, so it is extremely complex. So, this is why you shouldn’t just ring around a few Bristol seo companies, and award your well earned wonga to someone who’s the cheapest, nope, don’t do that.

Instead, you need someone or an agency full of SEO minds who can offer top quality work, but keeps on top of the changes, as seo is a fast moving business sector, if the grass is growing under the feet of your agency, well its time to swap them for someone else.

So, if you were to barge your way into a few digital marketing agencies about the great city of Bristol, and you decided to shout at the top of your voice at the front door, “what you think are the most important ranking factors then”- then they are likely to yell back you, “backlinks” they might show you to the exit swiftly after, but if they say backlinks well, this would be correct, as they are one of the most important ranking factors.

However, it all comes down to how they are built, because if they are quality, well they could push you up the ranks, if they’re not quality, well they could push you back down.

A word on Google’s updates

If you were to mention various Google’s updates, that have been rolled-out over the years, such as the “Penguin update”, then this might get some agency owners quaking in their boots.

However, if you do SEO right, we always think you have nothing to worry about, but there’s always some agencies that want to cut corners, they want to sit like a nodding dog in front of their clients saying that everything is possible, when in reality it is not.

Then, once an update is rolled out to penalise poor SEO practice, these are the websites to get punished by being removed from Google.

So, a word to the wise, there have been many Google updates, which we could reel off until we are absolutely blue in the face, but just take this as good advice, if SEO is not done right, then this can mean that your website is removed from Google’, so don’t cut any corners, do it the right way.

Okay so what’s the right way?

Now you are asking the right questions! That is show off your expertise, it doesn’t matter if you’re an accountant, solicitor or hairdresser you will have a huge amount of knowledge, or at least you should have about your industry, now it boils down to this, are you able to convey that knowledge better than your competitors on your website?

So, for example, let’s say somebody needs some legal advice, but before they pick a practice, they are going to have read a few good blog posts that you have written first.

Now, this advice might be so good, if it is written in a straightforward manner that is, and if it really useful, then guess what?

It’s likely that other people will want a link to the work- and there you have it, if the work’s top quality, and it’s been written by somebody that knows what they’re talking about, and follows all the SEO rules, then you can start to have incoming backlinks.

However, we have to return to this point one more time, that’s before we finish, and that is if you buy links or you build rubbish links, then your business is likely to vanish from Google, thats because you have incurred a penalty.

Introduction

If your business is actively investing in online marketing at the moment, then you are bound to have heard of “content marketing” by now, right?

More to the point, your bound to have heard that businesses require “high-quality content marketing” in order to improve the company’s online marketing, that’s a sentence often that’s repeated time and time again by various agencies.

That’s whether they are talking about written content that’s used on a blog post, like this, or when you are sat looking at your seo consultant in a meeting. Often content marketing and the requirement for it to be quality often therefore crops up in conversation if you were to hire a marketing company.

Yet, even though this sentence is repeated as regularly as clock-work by some agencies, what does it really mean?

What does high-quality content marketing mean?

As after all “quality” is a rather vague description, its used to describe everything from chocolate to luxury cars these days, so let’s in this article dive straight into what we think quality content marketing is and why the standard of written work on your website needs to be kept really high in order to be rewarded with higher placement on Google.

What does Google’s EAT (Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness) mean?

Well, thankfully gone are the days where a company can write just a few hundred words, then hope that a business will then in turn rank higher on Google, as trust us, this approach doesn’t work.

Therefore, inexpensive seo, well, often that’s thing of the past also, as to get meaningful results, talent is needed, and not just skill, no a great deal of time are needed to analyse, draft, monitor and improve work, and then make other improvements. So, in order to produce quality written work, the first thing that’s needed is expertise, and this means not hiring a company that hasn’t a clue what they are talking about, or have no inclination of carrying out the required research.

This is for good reason, its not just about Googlebot crawling and indexing a piece of work, and thinking, well that’s a new piece of written work that’s been added, this means the business should move up, it doesn’t work like that at all, its more complicated, the work needs to satisfy some of the following criteria:

-Be well written

-Address a question that your customers have

-Be written and published in accordance to Google’s WebMaster Guidelines

-Be white hat

– Provide an answer with sufficient detail and not be “content thin”

-Be written by an expert

-Have links to sources of the information, that’s an outbound link, with white hat anchor text added to the page.

The work needs to be indexable, sure, but then Google’s algorithm, Google’s Knowledge Vault and Google’s Knowledge Graph all combine in their efforts to work out if the written work is quality or not.

So, lets provide a rather brief example, let’s say that you sell electric used cars online, well, what you should do is spend time answering questions that your customers commonly ask you, to write this up into content marketing, to make the work useful and also interesting.

So, for example, they may ask you

–        How much range does each electric car have?

–        How long does it take to charge each car?

–        Can the battery within the car be replaced?

There’s no point in writing say 600 odd words, in the effort of just trying to improve your businesses organic seo, by mentioning electric cars a few times, this won’t work. It wont answer the exact question, so instead the work must have an exact purpose, and answer that question the best way that you can.

Offer quality advice

Instead, what’s needed is for quality advice to be offered, so for example, you may write an article stating the different electric range of each car that you sell for example, as this is likely to be useful to someone that wants to buy that particular car.

Here’s the thing, whenever your business, or your appointed agency is writing content marketing, the whole focus should be on making it “useful” for your customers, don’t just focus on trying to improve your search engine optimisation in isolation, this won’t work, Google’s algorithm is way to sophisticated for this.

What’s needed is quality work, where the customer is put at the centre of the work, if you hire say a rather rubbish agency, and they use outdated methods, such as “keyword stuffing”-well, the business is then on a one way street, that’s a one way road to getting a penalty, such as an algorithmic penalty, this can sometimes take some businesses a very long time to recover from.

So, what does EAT stand for, and why does Google use this?

Well, have you ever read a whole article, and not found it useful? Well, this is annoying right?

As if you wanted to say fix a leaking tap within your house, you will want the answer right in front of you from a business, in order to do this work, not a business advertising its plumbing supplies by repeatedly mentioning “cheap taps” over and over again, that’s not good quality work, its spam.

So, instead the written work on your site should be useful, it should be written by an expert, and the site should be a quality source of advice.

So, for example, where one rubbish seo company may write 500 words which keeps plugging the phrase “quality taps”- instead, a firm which has hired a quality agency may write helpful articles on how to repair a leaking tap, this might offer such good advice, on how to fix leaking taps, and it may attract quality backlinks, it may also have a low bounce rate, which means the businesses seo improves.

So, always write quality advice.

Write for people and not search engines

Okay, granted, no one goes into business to provide free information, as it wouldn’t be a commercial business for very long if you were just offering everything for free. However, with that said, here’s the bit a lot of business owners struggle to get their heads around, that is, by giving away free advice, in the form of content marketing, what your actually doing is making your website more relevant and if its done right, that’s a major if, as so many agencies and companies get it wrong, if its done correctly then this can help to draw in more organic visitors.

So, that’s right, if its done right, that line graph within your Google Analytics account, well, it might start to go up.

So why offer free advice?

So, stick with us on this one, let’s say for example, that you’re a baker, you specialise in making the tastiest chocolate cookies, there so good in matter of fact that people pay you a monthly fee, to get cookies delivered every single week to their door in Bristol.

Now, why would a baker provide recipes on their website for how to make cookies for free? As this is what the business sells, it’s the companies bread and butter, that’s to sell cookies, so why would they then write say 1000 words on how to make cookies, add this to their WordPress blog, and offer the information for free?

Well, the answers rather simple, it makes your website more relevant for “cookies”- it may attract incoming good-quality white hat backlinks, it may increase your time on site, meaning shoppers spend longer on the site, it could, if done right help to improve your organic seo.

As some businesses don’t invest in PPC, there whole way of marketing the business may well be via organic seo, so, in order to get on the first page, that’s on Google, well its often not easy, you have to be a relevant high-quality site, and one way is to offer quality written information.

So, by improving your companies organic seo, in the right way, this could help you to sell more cookies.

So, content marketing, this can help to improve your businesses seo, if done write, but here’s the thing, so many companies, as well as also we have to say many marketing companies get wrong.

Either the works written in a complete and utter rush, it’s what us SEO’s call “content thin”-which really means it doesn’t offer much useful information at all, it’s just sloppy text that’s been written with no care, which doesn’t help answer a question, its just written to make it sound like someone knows what there on about, yet in reality, it may well be written by a copywriter who’s focus is just on hitting a 700 word target. This doesn’t work!

So, what’s our top-tip?

Well, that’s simple to answer, that is, write text that will help your customers, aim to over top-quality advice and because of this, if the work is of a good standard, well-researched, answers the question in-depth, then this may help to improve your companies seo.

Do note, that whether it’s writing a brand-new blog post for your company website, or any other form of SEO, whatever work you are working on, the work should follow Google’s WebMaster Guidelines.

Before you even start writing, think of this

Okay, so it’s far too easy for any agency to say to a business, we will write 3 blog posts every month for our set fee, well that’s all well and good- but are they going to be any use?

Here’s the thing, when it comes to content marketing, “quality” should trump everything, don’t aim for quantity, when the focus should be on quality.

Now with this in mind, you might start your seo tasks on a Monday morning let’s say, now it would be all too easy to walk into work, start up the coffee machine, check your lists of tasks to do, see that you have to write 3,000 words that day, and start typing something up without much thought- will this help to improve your company’s SEO? Well, we would say its very unlikely to, it’s rather like throwing darts at a board, well your bind-folded!

So, what’s the solution?

Well, you have to grab a cup of coffee, or indeed a cup of nice sweet tea, then you have to do some thinking, and that’s because we recommend not just starting to write a piece of content marketing, because you have to quickly write 3,000 words on that day. Writing to hit a word count, that doesn’t help improve seo, as the work likely to be rather poorly written.

Nope, you have to stick your customers shoes on for a second, not literally, you know what we mean, you have to think about the sorts of common questions your customers have.

So, for example, let’s say you sell various electrical items, like fridges, TVs, and audio equipment as well as kettles.

However, your business sells T. V’s the most, yet because you sell LED, LCD and QLED TV’s well, customers get confused as to what the different T.V’s offer, so for example, what are the advantages of owning say a LED television?

Now, what you need to do, is have your companies TV expert work with your marketing team, or indeed your SEO company, so they can start to write rather handy guides, and if the articles are well written, well they could offer the following:

-Reduce a page’s bounce rate

-Increase the time a shopper spends on your site

-Help to improve sales, if you offer good advice to your customers

What questions do your customers often have

So, well your enjoying sipping on that rather nice espresso, here’s the things you need to think about, that is what questions that your customers often have?

Now, the marketing department might not have the answers to this, so you might need to involve other staff from right across the business, for example staff from the online web chat, where customers ask questions online, before they decide on whether there making a purchase or not.

Now once you have this information, the web chat team at your company may say to you that they often get asked about which TV has the longest warranty, now with this information, you might add a piece of what is called “evergreen content marketing”.

This work can explain which TV brands offer the longest warranties, you may find that this written work, therefore answers a lot of the questions that you get asked about TV’s, and may help to increase sales.

What is the competition doing to answer these questions?

So, before you jump head first and start writing a rather mammoth 10,000-word article, you need to see what your direct competitors are doing first.

So, for example, lets say that your company sells bikes, you might want to see what the top three businesses on Google are that are selling bikes, and what they are doing to improve their SEO, for example, you may find that they are writing long articles, which explain everything from how to fix a puncture on a bike, to which electric bikes they think are best, through to which bike is the lightest for carrying on and off trains.

Now, you might want to see is the advice good quality?

Is it likely to be useful to your customers?

How many words have been written?  

Make sure that you do your research

So, now at this stage, well your coffee is likely to have run out for one or gone cold, yet, from that initial caffeine boost, your likely to now know exactly what you will be writing about in terms of topic, and also how well your direct competitors have done on writing about a similar question.

Now, this might have filled your head with ideas, on how you can make the work even better, which is good, because one of the things that we always say here at this seo company is, aim to write much better content marketing than what the competition have already written.

Now do keep this in mind, Google likes facts, well, to be exact its “Googlebot” that will crawl and index the page- it will notice the facts, then the algorithm will use this to check the fact with Google’s “Knowledge Graph”.

So, let’s say your writing about a famous electric car, and you cite something about the company, this might be in “Google’s Knowledge Vault”, and “Google’s Knowledge Graph”, so you got it, if the facts are accurate, then this can help to make the work be rendered as higher quality, and  more reliable which is what Google wants.

However, don’t make your work just all about facts and figures, as this is likely to be a very dull read indeed write it for humans, not search engines- so only use facts when you think the reader will be interested to read about them, don’t aim to put a statistic in every single sentence, as its likely to break the flow for the reader.

Aim to be the best

Okay, so here’s the thing, whatever business you run, large or small, local, national or international, your likely to be up against a lot of competition, hundreds, thousands if not millions of other businesses.

So, for example, let’s say that your plumber, and your based in a really large city, like Bristol, there are thousands of other plumbers, and a lot of them will want to also be ranked on the very first page of Google, in order to do that, they are likely to be improving their SEO also.

They are likely to be writing content marketing about similar topics, that’s because they’re in the same industry as you, that’s the plumbing business, so they are likely to be talking about same things as well.

So, when you’re writing the text for your website, it can’t just be mediocre, average, then written in a rush and then added to the website, no this will work.

This type of work can’t be rushed, it needs to be high quality, so that when it gets indexed it’s clear that a lot of time has been spent writing the work, researching it and making sure that it’s high quality.

As here’s the thing, let’s say that you want to be on the first page, and your business specialises in installing boilers, you might be writing articles about boilers, and plumbing as well as central heating systems and that’s exactly what the competition is doing as well, you or your agency have to figure out how can you make the work better than the competition.

It’s not just about quantity, for example they are writing one article a week, so you are going to write more, as that’s not going to work neither, its not about quantity it’s always about quality.

Instead, you should aim to be the best at what you do, that means offering the best advice.

Cite your sources

It’s all well and good, being an expert at what you do, for example you might be an electrician, and your writing articles to help improve your businesses organic SEO, however often what is needed is facts and figures also.

So, for example, you might cite a reference, about how many homes in the UK have an outdated fuse box, and why this needs to be updated.

Now this statistic might have come from a respected newspaper, so you might wish to cite this number in your article, you might want to add an outbound link, and to add anchor text, as this shows that the article has been researched, as it has relevant backlinks that are added to it.

So, if you are writing an article, you might want to add relevant facts.

Bring in all the expertise that your company has to offer

Here’s the thing, a business that is located in Bristol, might have huge amounts of expertise in say the design team, the customer service teams, and let’s say the sales team, but sometimes this talent is not used.

This means that sometimes the marketing company is writing the content marketing or is done in-house, without consulting with the various teams, however their knowledge might be invaluable.

Introduction

To someone that hasn’t got a clue about search engine optimisation, well, they may just evaluate a company website on how it looks. That’s to say they may find the homepage impressive; it may have a slider for example which automatically changes, updating the customer on a special offer.

There might be YouTube videos embedded into the page, introducing the company, stating a bit more about its brand, and generally, the design may well be good, from a customer’s perspective.

However, sometimes there can be a ton of glitches which are much less obvious, for example, the page may well be very slow to load, that’s to say a Google Page Speed test might show you that on mobile, well the websites very slow, which causing a high bounce rate.

Then you may spot that certain product pages have broken links, that some pages can’t be indexed by Googlebot, that there’s also a mass of duplication problems, for example you find that nearly all of your product pages have duplicated content, which will render that page as a low-quality page, for more on this, you need to read about the Google Panda updates, and why Google’s algorithm is built to demote work that’s copied.

For example, let’s say you sell coffee machines, you have over 300 models, and every product description is duplicated, well, this isn’t going to help your companies seo one bit.

So, what is “technical SEO”? Well, as you might already know, especially if you’ve invested in search engine optimisation for sometime now, that is that Google, and other search engines use a lot of “ranking factors” to work out where a business should be ranked.

This means, its not based on one thing, or a few things, nope, if its Google you are optimising your company website for, to rank higher, then you must know that there’s hundreds of ranking factors, and some of these are what are called “technical” ranking factors.

Now, because some websites are so vast, for example, an e-commerce website that sells lets say shoes, well, there might be over 1000 product lines, the websites likely to be vast, and therefore a large seo agency might be needed, now because there’s so much work to do, sometimes at some agencies, say in Bristol, you might have people working at the agency that have set seo roles, for example, to build backlinks, a copywriter to write the content marketing, a social media person, and you might have a technical seo person, and there job is to make sure the technical aspects of the seo are improved.

So, without further ado, lets talk about some of them now.

Google’s algorithm

Okay, for your company, whether it’s based in the centre of Bristol, or you own a business is somewhere else in The South West of England, if you want your company to appear in Google’s results, which we as an seo agency refer to as the SERP’s, then the page or the post needs to be indexed, this means for this to happen Googlebot needs to be able to index the page, this means that you should work with your seo company to make sure each page can be “indexed” and to make sure that Googlebot can then crawl and index the page.

Googlebot

Googlebot needs to be able to crawl your website, for it to appear in Google’s results (SERP’s), your seo company should therefore see if there is any technical problems with your website, stopping it from getting indexed, there could be many reasons for this, some as simple as the “no-index” tab being left on, when you didn’t want it switched on for example.

Are all pages working?

So you’ve just had a brand-new e-commerce site built, it sells over 100 products, yet when you click around the site, you see that various links do not work, in matter of fact, you get a lot of “404 page errors” now this is not ideal for your seo, and not ideal for your customers, as when they click on a product, they don’t want to see a 404 page error, so this should be part of the technical seo work, to make sure that you don’t have any page errors.

Sitemap

Your chosen seo companies should help to create a sitemap.

Works correctly on mobile phones

So many company websites don’t work correctly on smartphones or on tablets, common problems can be main menus that are difficult to use, not being responsive, slow and many more problems, your agency should carry out testing, to make sure that they make your mobile version of your website easy to use.

Test all buttons

Let’s say on an e-commerce website, let’s say a company that is owned and run in Bristol, that sells coffee here in the U.K and globally.

Let’s say in total there are over 1000 internal backlinks, which are in the footer of the website, on the main pages, in the main menu and more, such as in the links in blog posts, your agency should check for broken links, and that all of the anchor text is written in a “white hat way”, following Google’s WebMaster Guidelines.

Test on different operating systems

Does your company website work correctly on smartphones? Or does it take a real long time to load, if so, then this is an seo issue.

Is there are duplication problems?

Let’s say that you’ve just launched a brand-new company, right in the heart of Bristol, you’ve designed and manufactured your own electric bike as well as selling hundreds of other electric bikes, and your company premises is near the harbourside in wonderful Bristol, yet there’s a problem.

That is although you signed-off the website in terms of that you were happy with the design, that the web design company had created, now handing it over to a local seo company, well, you’ve noticed there are literally thousands of words which are duplicated, which have been taken from the bike manufacturers website, which now cause Google Panda issues, the website also appears spammy, as it has so much copied text, so, you guessed it, what we are trying to get at, as part of the technical seo work, that your agency does, you should make sure that you get rid of duplicated content marketing.

Instead the written work should be original, it should be well-written, and every bit of it must follow “Google’s WebMaster Guidelines”, in that it must be white hat, it must be top quality.

Okay, we bet if your business has invested in a website, well then you’ve probably grabbed a cup of coffee by now, and have started to do a bit of research into SEO? We thought so, after all, not investing time into SEO, well, its kind of like having a car, that has a broken engine, and just leaving it in the garage to gather dust!

Now regardless of where the SEO company that is offering the information you are reading is based, they are bound to have talked about content marketing? We thought so, its an essential part of the SEO process, without it, well, not much is going to happen.

Now after a bit of further research, and sipping on that spiced cinnamon latte, well, you may have started to piece together more about what content marketing is all about.

But here’s the thing, so many businesses sometimes swiftly jump to the wrong conclusion, thinking that it’s just written text, however in this article will explain it a lot more than that. Its not just written text that’s quickly written after a few cups of coffee, as we will explain, if the work is substandard, well Google’s almighty algorithm doesn’t like spam, hastily put together junk content marketing, nope, in matter of fact, its likely to pull your rankings down, and not up!

So, what is content marketing? Sock it to me!

It’s about “engagement signals”- for example how long the people are spending out of their busy day reading the work, it’s about incoming backlinks, and if the quality of those links, it’s about us how much expertise is shown in the article, for example does the person know what they are talking about and can back this up with actual research (links to statistics for example), it’s about answering the questions that are often asked within the subject, it’s also about seeing if somebody bounces off (bounce rate, see Google Analytics for this) that page or stays on the website for more information, so as you can see it a lot more than just written text.

Its about generating quality work, its about measuring that work, to see if its doing its job, its about refining the work to make it better- so, as you can see, to do such work, and on a regular basis, it requires a lot of time, which is something that a lot of business owners in the wonderful areas of Bath, England, and yes, in Bristol do not have, that’s why they get on the dog and bone, that’s phone, and say Pack Digital, we hear you’re the experts when it comes to all things SEO related, give us a price.

Okay, first things first, what exactly is content marketing?

Content marketing, if it is done right, is all about analysing questions that your customers have, and offering advice for those questions, so that your business becomes more relevant for the products and services that you are selling. So, for example, if you own a business in Bristol, and sells luxury coffee online, you may want to blog about different roast coffee that you sell, the taste, what makes it different, for example that you go to huge lengths to source organic coffee, so you might want to hire seo agencies to promote your business in selling organic coffee.

It is not therefore just about writing 1000 odd words, and then going on a lunch break thinking it’s job done, because it’s much more than that, instead a great deal of time used to be placed in writing the work so that is quality and it is useful. So that when Googlebot indexes the work, and the algorithm evaluates how well its written, that you as a business, in Bristol, prove that you’re the expert in selling a product or a service, so you become more relevant, so overtime, as the seo companies do their work, you should, if its done right, move up the ranks, and notice how we say done right! The work should be top-quality and white hat, you should therefore only hire in Bristol, England a respected and quality focused seo agency.

Now, you might be struggling your shoulders thinking well, how does Google’s algorithm know if it’s 500 words are of quality written work, or if its 500 words of complete gibberish that is been written after an espresso or two and then the authors just dashed out in Bristol to grab his or her lunch, so the work’s been rushed.

Well quite simply put, it boils down to this, is the work useful, and by this we mean have to put on your customers shoes for a second, and thought about the questions that they will ask? Have you then spent the time to write quality work, which satisfies Google’s WebMaster Rules, is the work white hat? Is it an interesting read? Have you spent time, using Google Analytics, to make sure the work is getting a high number of organic visitors? Have you made sure the bounce rate is low?

So let’s give you an example, let’s say that you sell televisions, now not everybody that comes to the companies website is going to know all there is about televisions, as there are now so many different variations there’s LED TV’s, 4k televisions, curved televisions, large LCD TV’s and also QLED TV’s and 4K Ultra TV’s there are also many different features, such as voice activated TVs, and HD ready and as well.

So often somebody doesn’t want to just purchase a new TV, they need advice as well, the businesses that offers clear advice is likely to keep the shopper on the website for longer (reduce the bounce rate) they may therefore be more inclined to purchase from you because you’ve offered such good customer service, as you’ve heavily invested, in what SEO’s call “ever-green content marketing” which purpose is to offer advice, to help customers, so they may well then, because you’ve offered such good advice, will then purchase from you.

So, this is where content marketing can help, it’s your businesses opportunity to convey your knowledge, your expertise and to offer this advice to the customer, whether its about TV’s, coffee or a new sofa, aim to offer the best advice.

Now if this advice is good quality, there is likely to retain the shopper for longer which can help to reduce the bounce rate which could help improve your businesses SEO.

Gone are the days of writing 500 words, then placing this on your blog and then dashing out to grab a sandwich as you believe that’s the SEO done for the month!

You do hear some businesses state, that they are going to do the SEO in-house, and then they give the task to somebody to do that simply hasn’t a clue about SEO. That person, might think right I will write 500 words in an hour, that’s it, however it’s never as simple as that, that’s because if the work is low-quality then this is likely to damage your SEO.

Therefore writing 500 words of complete gibberish, and by gibberish we mean it’s not useful to anyone who’s interested in your products or your services, and they are likely to deem your website as a spam site and this could damage organic SEO.

Has to be quality

So let’s be clear, the work has to be quality, it has to be well written, it should be written by somebody that has expertise in that subject, or at least done a lot of research.

You should look at what questions that customers have, an aim to answer these.

Has to be useful

This brings us back to the point of the work must be useful, the work must serve a purpose, for example if you manufacturer Power Tools, you might want to offer advice on the different drill bits you sell for a cordless drill, and what difference drill bits should be used for masonry, what should be used for wood on what should be used on plastics for that drill.

This doesn’t just offer advice; it also presents the opportunity you to sell your accessories your business might sell.

Lead to reading more

Your content marketing should aim to draw in organic visitors, who read the work, and think this is really high-quality advice, and then want to visit other pages and read more.

It should therefore provide a warm welcome to your business for your shoppers, and say look, we offer really good customer service, have a look at the products and the advice that we offer on our website.

If the quality of the work is complete rubbish, then this is likely to contribute to a “high bounce rate”.

Be an expert

Let’s say your business sells electric cars, there is absolutely no point whatsoever in hiring a marketing agency that hasn’t got a clue about these types of vehicles.

You need somebody who is an expert on the subject, who can offer advice, who can answer questions your customers have.

Don’t therefore just think it’s about writing about electric cars generally, as this will not work, people who want to buy or have an interest in electric cars have questions that need answering, if they don’t get answered and quickly, this will contribute to a very high “bounce rate”, which simply means that this could actually damage the businesses organic SEO.

Analyse

Analyse the work to see if it is bringing in the organic visitor numbers that to you wanted.

Improve

Improve the work, if it is not bringing in the amount of organic visitors that you wanted.

Promote

Promote the work for example on social media.

Introduction

It’s the question on a lot of business owners lips in Bristol, from restaurants on the harbourside to hair-dressers in Clifton, how can we get on the first page of Google here in our home city of Bristol.

Well, as the rather brilliant article, written by our very own SEO boffins will tell you, in matter of fact, there’s not just one way, nope, there’s several ways.

So it back, with a nice cuppa in hand, or pop-corn, or last night’s dinner in front of you- it doesn’t matter, just have a skim read of this, and you will be pleasantly surprised that yes, our SEO knowledge, well, we believe is second to…..none.  

Well, in matter of fact… there’s loads of different ways of getting your company on the first page of Google.

You could spend money on PPC, which is as the name suggests, as each shopper clicks on your ad, you pay.

There’s Google My Business, which is free, yet you often need to do a bit of work on your listing to make it work. Often just saying yeah, we are based here in say Clifton, well that’s not enough, nope you need positive reviews, real ones, not ones your mate in the pub have written for you, well you wait at the bar, that won’t work!

There’s organic seo, which is complicated, so we’ve dedicated a huge part of this article to explaining that one, and just as well, as we are blooming good at it.

So, lets break it down, lets have a look at the different ways a business can get onto the first page of Google’s results, so it doesn’t matter if you own a bank, own a clothing line, or simply sell coffee from a shop that’s the size of a postage stamp, we will, now elaborate on how a business large, medium or small can get on the first page of Google.

Google My Business

Okay, so, a way that a local Bristolian business could get there selves on the first page of Google, is via registering for a “Google My Business” card, this doesn’t take very long at all.

All you will need to state is your companies address in the rather fine city of Bristol, the phone number, and also the business name, a few more details, such as a link to your website, opening hours, and before you’ve finished your morning latte, your all done.

Now, with that said, just because you’ve filled out a Google My Business account and verified the listing doesn’t mean you will automatically have your business on the first page of Google, nope, often the listing will need optimising, for that your going to need a rather good Bristol SEO agency, cough, that’s us!

PPC

Okay, so what’s the quickest way a business in Bristol can get itself on the first page of Google?

Well, its PPC, that’s because it doesn’t matter if you sell aluminium ladders, or you own a noodle restaurant, once you’ve set up an account, and set a budget, answered all the questions, then your business can appear on the first page, sometimes, if you want that very same day, until your budget does run out, this is why PPC, is very popular, however, a lot of businesses pay for PPC, yet also to improve their organic seo, and that’s where our agency can help, as at our marketing agency, we specialise in improving Bristol businesses organic seo.

What’s organic seo we hear you cry, well, we will explain all now.

Organic SEO is used by many companies all over Bristol, to improve where the business ranks on Google.

Now, there will be some SEO companies that really cut the mustard, so this means that they follow “Google’s Webmaster Guidelines” and they do a good job, these are the agencies, or the SEO consultants that you want working for you, as they can help to improve where your company ranks on Google.

However, we do hate to say, but its true, here in Bristol in The South West of England, and anywhere else for that matter, there are so many seo companies that are not that good, and make false promises, or don’t deliver quality work, here’s the thing, if the work isn’t top-quality, well, this means that the business could incur a penalty, so only hire a reputable company, that delivers white hat, quality work for your company.

So, in a nutshell, only invest in quality work.

If your planning on splashing out on improving your organic seo with us, do note it takes time

So, here’s the thing, a lot of businesses want to appear on the first page of Google, in the “organic” results quickly, however, here’s something all business owners need to know, it takes time, sometimes even years to see results for some Bristol companies, so if you are investing with us, you have to be patient.

It boils down to “ranking factors”- we hate to say it, your competitors might be stronger

So, here’s the thing, now we are really getting to the point- any business, whether its in Bristol or anywhere, might face businesses that have been investing in organic seo for donkeys years, so for example, lets say your main competition in Bristol have been investing for on average 8 years in improving their organic seo, a business that has just started forking-out to an SEO agency, well they cant reasonably expect to overtake those other companies quickly.

Backlinks- there important, make a note of that!

Backlinks are important, a business will often need quality, white hat do-follow and also some no-follow backlinks, which have been built in accordance with Google’s WebMaster Guidelines.

Content marketing, it takes ages to write, but can be worth it

So, you might be thinking, i have just taken on an seo agency, yet why are spending so much time writing “evergreen content marketing”and why is this? Well, quite simply put, if done write, in terms of being “white hat” and well-written, well it could, if it answers a lot of your customers frequently asked questions, could help improve your seo. However, whether its backlinks, adding a meta title, or writing a 10,000 word mammoth of a piece of content marketing, do make sure, that whichever firm you hire in Bristol, that they always follow Google’s WebMaster Guidelines.

Why not call us?

If your looking for an SEO business, that works with businesses all over The South West of England, this includes the great city of Bath and also Bristol, then why not hire us, we offer affordable prices for organic seo.

Introduction

Picture this, you run a company here in the great city of Bristol, you’ve had a company website for a long time, yet management has now decided to invest in digital marketing.

You want the whole of Bristol to know about your company, you want everyone living near Clifton Suspension Bridge, through to apartments in the centre of Bristol, through to the docklands to know what your company offers, the great service you offer, you want the phone ringing off the hook, yet when you call the first seo agency for a quote, they say they will run an audit, then they ring you back, and they say this “your websites not even indexed?- but what does that even mean?

What does not in Google’s index mean?

Well, let us explain, grab a coffee, let’s begin, imagine your in a library, every book has its space, its section, its own number, and this makes sense, as the librarian, well he or she, when a book’s returned is not going to just throw the book into a massive pile, as otherwise their work becomes much harder, someone might ask, I would like this book, and the librarian would have to point to the heap of books, and say its in their somewhere, not a good system, it’s a mess.

Well, what’s needed is organisation, a system where books have their place, they are logged in and out of system, the librarian knows if its out on loan, in the library or needs replacing as bottle of wine was accidentally spilt over it.

Now apply this logic for SEO, Google is a massive library, it knows the status of millions, if not billions of websites, are they live, are they being built, have they been improved.

So, how is this done, through a group of loyal librarians, nope, they would be exhausted after a few seconds, its done my Google’s mighty algorithm, an algorithm that’s so good, so impressive, that good SEO agencies, worth their weight in gold, well they will spend most of their waking hours either figuring out how to get a business to the top of the ranks, or working out what changes the search engine, i.e Google or Bing have introduced, so that they keep their white hat SEO knowledge up-to-date.

So, what does Google’s index mean?

Well, at this point, all you need to think of is all the businesses here in Bristol, and right around the globe, that have a website, that can be indexed are in a sort of library, there rated by Google’s algorithm.

So, what does “crawling and indexing” mean when in terms of organic SEO?

Well, let’s say you run a business, your passionate about coffee, so in Clifton, in Bristol, you run a coffee shop, and your mighty good at it, yet Bristolians, they cant get enough of your coffee, they keep banging the door “we-need-a-coffee-fix” they cry, so you’ve decided to branch-out, to hire a digital marketing agency, that’s here in the fine city of Bristol to build an e-commerce website, which sells coffee, dispatches it and gets out to customers in less than 48 hours, so the great public of Bristol, can make coffee while your coffee shop is not open.

But what does crawling and indexing mean?

Well, it simply means this, your coffee shop website, that now sells coffee online, is regularly visited by “Googlebot” its “ranking signals” are rated, no not by Google’s PageRank, nope, things are more sophisticated now, Google’s PageRank is widely thought by many SEO agencies to be replaced by over 200 ranking factors, such as backlinks, the site title, the anchor text, the internal links, the quality of the ever green content marketing.

Yet, websites are updated, there’s hundreds of SEO companies in Bristol working hard for their clients, they want their client at the top, they need to retain their clients, otherwise the company will pick another SEO company which will deliver, so things don’t stay the same for long.

This is why Googlebot may visit some Bristol businesses website a few times a day, crawling and indexing the site-map, following each backlink, to see have any SEO improvements been made?

Google’s mighty algorithm is then working out, where should the website be ranked? Is this coffee shop the business with the strongest SEO? If not, how strong is it? Is it worthy of being on page 1 for say local coffee shops, should it be on page 2.

Let’s say that you’ve hired a new seo consultant, yet, let’s say that they then go onto build the backlinks, in the wrong way, for example let’s say that they haven’t followed Google’s WebMaster Guidelines- they have built all of the backlinks incorrectly, they haven’t followed white hat methods at all!

So this means that the business, could incur what’s known as a penalty, an algorithmic or a manual penalty, that could mean that the business gets “de-indexed”- so you see, its possible to get a companies website, indexed, and this is important, so that the ranking factors can be read by Googlebot, but if the seo agencies, or let’s say the seo consultants get it wrong, or your business gets the organic seo wrong, then the business could incur a penalty, such as a Google Penguin penalty, this means then the website will be “de-indexed” sometimes, which means that the website may not longer appear in Google’s results, because the organic seo hasn’t been implemented correctly.

So, this is why when shopping around here in Bristol England, to hire a new say SEO business, make sure that you hire the right company, the right marketing agency, which follow’s Google’s WebMaster Guidelines.

Why is having an indexable website so important?

Well, quite simply put, GoogleBot, must be able to “crawl and index” your companies website, it must be “indexable”, as otherwise the companies website will not appear in Google’s SERP’s, which simply stands for “Google’s search engine results pages SERP’s, so basically speaking, if you have a website, that you want to improve its organic seo, well, the web designer, and the SEO agencies must make sure that the website can be indexed.

So, what is Googlebot?

So, at this point, you may well be sipping your cup of coffee, and thinking well, what is GoogleBot?

I’ve heard of Google, obviously, your thinking, but never of this Googlebot, so what is Googlebot, and what is its function?

Well, Googlebot is a very busy bot, its ultimately just code, the codes job is to regularly go over companies’ websites, to report back if SEO changes have been made, so for example, if the main site title, on your WordPress website changes from Coffee shops Clifton, to Coffee retailer in Bristol, well, you guessed it in one, Googlebot will notice the change, it will notice that the web designer or lets say the SEO agencies have changed the WordPress site title, it will then decide if the companies website should change in terms of where it ranks in the SERP’s, so for example, Google’s algorithm will think, well, this company might no longer be relevant for “Clifton Bristol Coffee Shops” its more relevant now to say retailing coffee more generally, perhaps through a WordPress e-commerce website, so, the business may well be trying to deliver coffee, rather than get customers to visit the coffee shop, so that’s right, the company will change where it is in the SERP’s.

So, that this process is a bit clearer, here’s an example of what happened to that coffee shop, once it changed it’s site title:

• Googlebot spotted the site title had changed
• It told Google’s algorithm that an important ranking factor, the site title had changed.
• Google’s algorithm then worked out that the business might not be that relevant for selling coffee in Clifton Bristol anymore, instead, its selling coffee now online, to a much wider customer base, that it wants to sell coffee all over the U.K.
• Google’s algorithm, and Google’s AI technology RankBrain, that’s Google RankBrain AI, will then workout where that business should be ranked, for example, should it now rank say 22nd for “coffee delivery companies” or “buy-coffee-online” and no longer rank for “Clifton local coffee shops” anymore? AI and Google’s mighty algorithm will work this out.

What are Google crawl errors?

So, let’s say that your web developer places code, such as a “no-index” code on a page, that can mean that it tell’s Googlebot now to crawl and index that page, so its kind of like locking a door, it cant be accessed, so, if you want that website, or that page to be indexed, to show in Google’s SERP’s, then the page needs to be indexed, it needs Googlebot to crawl and index it, without this happening, the website might be de-indexed, so it no longer appears in Google’s SERP’s anymore.

Your SEO agency, whether you hire a local SEO agency here in Bristol, in England, or anywhere else, the agency should make sure the companies website can be indexed, if you want it to appear on Google, if it cant be indexed, then the company website wont show in the SERP’s

So, I run a company here in Bristol, how often will my company website be crawled and indexed?

This does depend, for example, some company websites are crawled and indexed much more than others in Bristol, this is why when you meet your SEO consultant, and over a cup of tea, they start talking about “Google’s Crawl Budget”- and how often “GoogleBot” crawls your site, you may be thinking, well-what on earth are they talking about?

Well, here’s the thing, let’s say you own a rather fancy restaurant right here in Bristol, you’re the “bee’s knees” at what you do, yet, that website might be crawled and indexed say once a week, because lets say that the restaurant business, has let’s say 600 organic visitors every week, and you know this because your SEO agency has stated that in an SEO report, where the organic SEO information was taken from Google Analytics.

So, you get 600 visitors a week, to your restaurant business, and lets say the companies website gets crawled by GoogleBot once a week also, and you notice your website’s SERP’s flux say once a week also.

Now let’s compare this to another company in Bristol, lets say the other business is a major chain of dentists, and instead that company gets 10,000 organic visitors every week, with people travelling from all over the South West of England to use the dental practice, they come from the centre of Bath, they come from all over Bristol, it’s a very popular business, and as such the business uses a local seo company, and they invest a lot of time every month improving the organic seo, they are regularly adding top-quality content marketing, they are also working hard on building quality white hat “do-follow” backlinks, and GoogleBot crawls that company website every single day.

So, you see the difference in “Google’s Crawl Budget” for one business, the restaurant, because the SEO work carried out each month is less, it only get’s crawled once a week, with ranking flux happening, so the SERP’s change often once a week, then compare this to the major chain of dentists, where people from Bath, and all over Bristol, come to that dentists, and because the amount of SEO work is much higher, also the website has many more organic visitors, that websites crawl budget is much higher, in matter of fact, GoogleBot, crawls and indexes that site every day, so you got it, the crawl budget for Google, for that company is much higher.

Now why does this even matter? Well, it matters simply because any good SEO companies, will tell you, it matters because where businesses get “crawled and indexed” more, is sometimes because the business sector is much more competitive, there’s more seo work occurring to companies websites, so Googlebot wants to know about these changes, so that Google’s algorithm and Google’s AI, that’s artificial intelligence can work out, well, should that business rank higher in Bristol?

Where that restaurant was say be number 3 in the SERP’s for “local Italian restaurants”- because of the SEO work, it might now move up, yet the point we are trying to make is this, that business will fluctuate much more, if GoogleBot regularly indexes the site, as it may spot more changes occurring to the seo.

What does my SEO agency mean when they say we should create quality content marketing so that Google’s algorithm will reward us for such work?

Whether you run a coffee shop, or you are a major online retailer, that retails thousands of products, all of the content marketing, should be white hat, and top-quality.

So basically, Googlebot reports back to Google’s algorithm?

Yes, so let’s say that your web developer completely changes the wording on your homepage, they alter it, so that the text is different, Googlebot will notice this, it will tell Google’s Algorithm, and the business may alter where it ranks.

But what are Google ranking factors?

There are well over

What are entities?

What is Google’s Knowledge Vault?

Why it crucial to keep your website’s information up to date?

Is your companies offsite details correct?

Is your businesses NAP information correct?

Will Googlebot notice if I have conflicting NAP information?

So, how regularly should my company, here in Bristol, be adding new blog posts?

So, is this part of the reason why organic SEO is such a slow process? Because we have to wait for Googlebot to crawl and index the work?

Is there coding that Googlebot struggles to crawl?

What does my SEO company mean, when they say that the page, or the entire website is now indexed?

What does it mean that Googlebot and Google’s algorithm has issued a penalty, why is this bad news, and what does “de-indexed” mean?

Why does good web design matter?

So, will some businesses here in Bristol, England get indexed more than others?

What does Google crawl budget mean?

Why do all the various SEO agencies that I call, say that I should invest in organic seo monthly, surely it can all be done in one go?

How can your agency help?

when you visit your digital marketing agency you may hear them talk about your company website getting crawled and indexed, but what does this even mean?

Well crawling and indexing is a very important part of SCO, as this is what is used to update the search engine with what work had been carried out to your company website.

So let’s say for example that you sell coffee beans, and you decide to start selling flavoured coffee beans, that’s the say you want to start selling vanilla flavoured coffee beans.

Now this is a new product, that’s the say you have never sold this product on your company website before, so obviously you want this product to be available in the search engine so somebody can click on it and purchase the product, for that to happen that page needs to be crawled and indexed.

What does crawling and indexing mean?

Well quite simply put, most search engines use an automated bot.

This automated bot will crawl and index your website.

It will therefore discover when you have added new work, such as adding a new product such as vanilla flavoured coffee beans.

Therefore this is obviously a very important part of the SEO process, as you want the SEO work that you have applied to your company website to be noticed by the search engine, as otherwise if it is not crawled and indexed, the search engine would never know that you have applied the SEO work.

What does indexed mean?

When you publish a new piece of work on your company website, so that new piece of work could be a blog post obviously you wanted to appear in the search engine as soon as possible, for this to happen it needs to be indexed, for it to be indexed needs to be crawled and indexed first.

Index therefore means that the page can then possibly appear in the search engine

so for example let’s say you have just published your brand-new page which sells flavoured coffee beans, you want that page to be indexed as soon as possible so that it appears in the search engine.

What are bots

you may hear your SEO agency talk about box, there are many different types of bots the carry out different tasks, for example some bots are used by the search engine companies to spot changes made to your company website

other bots might carry out different tasks, for example bots are sometimes used to scrape email addresses offer website so that they can start to for a data base of email addresses for marketing purposes for example.

How do the search engines crawl and index a website?

It is widely thought by many SEO companies, that backlinks are used as the mechanism to crawl and index a website.

So for example let’s say that you sell mountain bikes, that’s the say you sell mountain bikes and you sell electric bikes and you sell bike accessories and you also sell bike helmets.

Now on the homepage on your bike website you are going to have links to all these various different pages, that the say a link to the bike accessories page, a link to the mountain bike page, a link to the electric bike page a link to the bike helmets page

Therefore the bots will use these links to crawl and index your website, for example if there is not a site map, then the bot might use your homepage to go to all the various pages on your company website.

So what pages are indexed?

All pages should be indexed, that’s the say the pages which your company wants to have appear in the search engine.

So for example if you sell mountain bikes, electric bikes, helmets, bike accessories and you want all these different pages to appear in the search engine then you should make sure that all of these pages can be indexed.

Therefore it is the SCO agency’s job to make sure that these pages can be indexed by the bots.

What type of content marketing should my company be adding to our website?

So now you know it’s important that the bots can crawl and index your company website, it’s important to start adding high quality, white hat content marketing.

The work should be high quality and white hat and it is really good quality then this can help to improve your businesses organic SEO.

So for example the bike company, might want to review various electric bikes, if this work is really good quality then this can help to improve the businesses organic SCO.

Why do the algorithms rely on bots to crawl and index a company website?

Without the bots crawling and indexing a company website the algorithm will never be able to make a calculation as to how strong your businesses SEO is.

So, for example, let’s say that your business invests heavily in “organic SEO”, this work would never get noticed if it is never crawled and indexed, therefore if it is never crawled and indexed the algorithm will have no information on how strong your businesses SEO is.

This is why it’s really important that your company website gets regularly crawled and indexed so if you have made any SEO improvements this can get noticed by the algorithm.

Then the algorithm deems the work to be high quality and white hat then this can help to improve your businesses organic SEO.

However we must stress that you should only invest in white hat SEO.

What does crawl budget mean exactly?

It is widely thought by many online marketing companies that the search engines apply a crawl budget to company websites.