SEO

Why Small Businesses Need To Carry Out SEO Too.

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why small businesses need to carry out seo too

why small businesses need to carry out seo too

In a digital age where people are always looking to save money and time. Their search for a product, service or an event will usually begin online.

If you own a small business, the chances are your business won’t be as well known or have the same kind of reputation as a big business. This means you need your website to be appearing right at the top of search results, preferably 1st.

Even with a fraction of the budget available to a large business. A small business can still outrank big well-known websites and steal that coveted number 1 ranking.

 

SEO in a Nutshell

If you know what SEO is, feel free to scroll down. If not, the concept is pretty simple and the chances are you’ve read about it or thought about it and just not realised that it was SEO.

In a nutshell: SEO is a strategy which consists of multiple techniques which all work together to optimise your website for search engines. Making it easier for your target audience to find.

 

How Can SEO Benefit Small Businesses?

Ideally every business wants to show up number one on the first page of results, and if done correctly SEO will help you reach that goal.

A study carried out by Chikita found that only 6% of people click through to the second page of results. This emphasises just how important it is to get your website showing up on the first page of search results.

The more traffic your website gets, the more leads you’ll generate which in turn will hopefully lead to more sales.

If carried out properly, SEO can even help small businesses rank above big websites. And competitors which you may think it’s impossible to beat.

Gardening Delights topiary

Example:

One of our clients, a web based business called Gardening Delights, who specialise in selling sustainable and eco-friendly products, has a range of topiary animals and shapes. Despite topiary not being their speciality, they keywords used on their website and the websites reputation allows them to rank 1st in Google for terms such as ‘topiary frames’, above Amazon and website who specialise in topiary products.

As well as helping you to rank higher in search engines, carrying out SEO will help you improve your website on a whole.

As well as helping you to rank higher, carrying out SEO will improve your website on a whole.

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Part of your SEO will no doubt include editing your websites copy to include keywords and keyphrases you want to rank for. It will also include fixing any technical issues on your website, such as creating redirects.

Both of the above will benefit anyone visiting your website. As your website will provide them with a better user journey, and will also contain information they’ll be looking for.

 

Contact Us

Are you a small business based in Burntwood, Lichfield, Cannock, Staffordshire or the West Midlands? Are you struggling to get found in search engines? If so, give us a call on 01543 387 047 or if you’d prefer, drop us an email at contact@themarketingpeople.com. Let’s talk about how our monthly SEO contracts could help your business rank higher in search engines. In the meantime, why not check out more of our SEO blogs?

41 SEO Terms You Need To Know

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41 seo terms you need to know

41 seo terms you need to know

Is one of your goals for the year ahead to learn and understand more about SEO? Or perhaps you’ve forgotten what a few acronyms or words mean.

If so, take a look at our new and improved SEO Jargon Buster!

301 Redirect

– If your website moves domains or people can access your website from various URLs, a 301 redirect is carried out to ensure that people aren’t greeted with a 301 error, they are taken to a page on the new website.

404 Error

– This message normally appears when a web page no longer exists or has moved to a different URL. The error can be resolved by using a 404 redirect which will send users to another page.

Algorithm

– This is a formula or process a search engine, program or computer follows to solve a problem and come up with a result. In SEO terms, search engines use algorithms to decide where a page should rank in search results.

Alt text

– This is used to describe an image, for example an image of a red ball would have the alt text ‘red ball’. Alt text will show up in place of an image if it can’t be viewed. Alt text can also help with SEO.

Analytics

– In SEO terms, this is a collection of data showing how users interact with a website. For example, what search terms they used to read the website, how long they spent on the website and which pages they viewed.

Anchor Text

 – This is the clickable text in a hyperlink; “Find out about our marketing consultancy services.” ‘Marketing consultancy’ is the anchor text.

Authority links

– These are links from an authoritative website, such as BBC, Gov.uk etc.

Backlink

– This is a link coming into a website from an external website. An example of this might be someone might link to your website on their blog.

Black Hat SEO

– These are SEO techniques which don’t comply with best practice guideless. Black hat SEO techniques trick search engines into giving a website a higher page ranking than it deserves, quite often these techniques can backfire and damage search rankings.

Bounce Rate –

A ‘bounce’ in website terms is when someone visits your website and leaves before visiting another page, so the bounce rate is the percentage of people who only visiting one page on your website.

Canonical URL

– This is the ‘correct’ URL for a page and is used when there are multiple ways to get to a page.

CAPTCHA – Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans Apart

– A ‘test’ which is used to determine whether a user is a computer or a human.

You often see these when you try to create an account or leave a comment on a website. You will then be shown a box with a random selection of letters, a word or numbers. A human can fill out a CAPTCHA form (usually!), however a computer program that may be trying to spam the website would struggle.

CMS – Content Management System

– A system, such as WordPress and Concrete5, which allows website owners to manage copy and pages on their website, without the need for them to understand or know how to code a website.

Conversion

– When a user or customer does what you want them to do. If you have a call to action on your website, such as download a brochure, the conversion is when a user downloads the brochure.

CPC – Cost Per Click

– In a Pay Per Click advertising model, this is the cost to the advertiser each time someone clicks on one of their adverts.

Ecommerce

– Buying or selling products or services on the internet.

Grey Hat SEO –

There are search engine optimisation techniques which bend best practice results, rather than completely breaking them.

Hits

– This is a request for something on a web page to load, such as the page itself or an image. Hits are not a good indication of how much traffic your website has had, since each image counts as a ‘hit’. So if you had a website with 10 images and it was loaded twice, you’d see 20 hits.

HTML – HyperText Markup Language –

This is a ‘language’ used to tells browsers how a website should look and how to display it.

Link Building

– One way of improving your website’s SEO is to increase the number of links coming in to your website, so you may carry out link building. This can be done by writing guest blog posts for other websites or commenting on other websites.

Linking C-Blocks

– This refers to IP addresses and is used by search engines to determine whether websites linking to each other are related. For example, if websites on the same server are linking to each other, the links are not natural and will probably have been set up by the same person.

Long Tail Keyphrases

– Long tail keyphrases are made up of a few words. It’s much easier to try and get a higher ranking for a long tail keyphrase than it is a short tail keyphrase.

Meta Title

– Brief description of the page which shows up in search engines and at the top of browsers.

Meta Description – Tells search engines what the page is about and will show up in search results, which means it needs to be interesting and informative to get people to click on it.

Meta Keywords

– They were used to list keywords used on the page.Meta keywords are no longer used and can harm your search rankings.

Onsite SEO

– Any search engine optimisation work which is carried out on your website which will improve its SEO. This can be things such as making sure pages all have meta descriptions, using keywords in your copy and alt text.

Offsite SEO

– Any SEO work which is not carried out on your website, which will improve your website’s SEO. This can include gaining backlinks from other websites and directory listings.

Online Directory

– Like an online Yellow Pages, examples include Dmoz and Yell.com. Submitting your business and website to high quality directories, such as Dmoz and Yahoo Directory can help with SEO.

Pagerank (also known as PR)

– How relevant a search engine considers your page to be in relation to keywords searched.

Pageview – This is the number of times a page has been viewed, however this doesn’t show how many people have viewed your website as the same person could view the page more than once.

PPC – Pay Per Click

– An advertising pricing model, where the advertiser will pay for each click their advert receives, regardless of whether the person who clicks on it purchases or converts.

Reciprocal Link

– When two websites link to each other, they are using reciprocal links. This used to be a good method of link building, however it has very little benefit nowadays.

RSS Feed – Really Simple Syndication

– RSS feeds are used to ensure that anyone who subscribes to your blog or website, is sent your latest blog post or content. You can choose to send the entire blog post or just a small snippet of it to the RSS feeder, to encourage people to view it directly from your website.

SE – Search Engine

– Examples; Google, Yahoo, Bing.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

– A strategy used to improve a websites search engine rankings and making it easier to find. The better a website’s SEO is, the higher the rankings are, which can result in more traffic.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing

– This is a marketing strategy which simply uses search engines to promote a business. SEM usually uses paid advertisements, such as Google AdWords.

SERP – Search Engine Results Page

– When a user types something into a search engine, they will be shown a results page which lists web pages which are relevant to the keywords used in the search.

Unique Visitor –

This is how many unique visitors your website has had. You might have had 20 visits but only 4 unique visitors. This can show you how many people have returned to your website.

URL– Uniform Resource Locator

– This is address used to find a website or document on the internet, for example www.google.com.

White Hat

– These are search engine optimisation techniques which are within best practice guides and rightfully earn a website a page ranking, rather than tricking a search engine into giving it a higher page ranking. This is the right way to go about search engine optimisation.

 

If you need help improving your search rankings or making your website more SEO friendly, we can help. Check out our SEO blogs for more useful info, or get in touch with us to find out more and let’s have a chat about your website’s SEO and what we can do for you. You can call us on 01543 387 047 or email us on contact@themarketingpeople.com

10 Tips To Help You Create High Quality, SEO Friendly Content.

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10 tips to help you create high quality content

10 tips to help you create high quality content

Creating high quality content is vital to keep attracting readers and bringing them back, which in turn will help your SEO efforts.

Last week we wrote a blog post about why high quality content is so important to SEO, this week we’re going to help you create that high quality content by sharing 10 must remember tips with you.

 

Creating high quality content is vital and will help your SEO efforts.

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Attention grabbing title.

Convince people to read your blog post with an intriguing or interesting title which they can’t say no to, such as “How to create a great email marketing campaign”.
Help your blog post rank higher by including keywords in the title

 

Keywords;

Use keywords throughout your blog post and title, the most important ones should be used in your title and opening paragraph.

Don’t over use keywords as it won’t read right and search engines may pick up on it and punish you for ‘keyword stuffing’, which is the art of ramming so many keywords into a sentence it doesn’t make sense.

 

Interesting and relevant;

People are reading your blog post to gain some knowledge or information, something useful that they can take away and apply, so make sure you provide them with that.

Writing content for the sake of putting a blog post out is no good; ensure that you have a great topic which people will want to read about.

 

Call to action;

If you’re trying to encourage people to download your latest ebook or take advantage of your hat sale, just say it! Include a strong call to action and a link to where you want them to go and tell them what you want them to do.

 

Personality and engagement;

No one wants to read a boring blog post, so allow your personality to shine through; make it interesting and engage readers by relating to everyday situations, make a joke or two and get readers thinking.

This will make your post much more interesting to read and might make your information easier to remember.

 

Don’t beat around the bush;

You’re readers are just as busy as you are so be concise; straight to the point and fill your blog post full of helpful and interesting content.

 

Break it up;

If your blog post is going to be lengthy, bullet points and sub headers are your best friends. Break the post up into easy to manage chunks for your readers so they aren’t too overwhelmed by a huge wall of text.

 

Links;

If you’ve written about the same or a similar topic before, include a link back to it. This will benefit your reader and you as search engines will look more favourably upon on a blog post which has links that are relevant.

 

Tags;

Most blogging platforms will allow you to apply tags to your post, which enable it to get found easier. Your tags can be keywords or key phrases you’ve used in your article.

 

Get it checked;

Before your post goes live ask a friend or a co-worker to check it over first to ensure it makes sense and there are no spelling or grammatical errors.

After your blog post has gone live, remember to share it with friends and followers on social media or via email.

 

You can find more useful advice on how to maintain the best SEO in our blogs. Or if you need a helping hand to get you started, or run it for you, we can help. Call us today on 01543 495752 to see what we could do for your SEO.

Why High Quality Content is King of SEO

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why high quality content is king of seo

why high quality content is king of seo

There is no magic formula when it comes to SEO but one of the best ways to improve your rankings and attract readers and inbound links is creating high quality content.

It’s important to keep in mind that you are writing for people and not the search engines. Search engines are just the way people will discover your content.

Thankfully for anyone who wants to find anything useful on the internet, search engines are incredibly intelligent. And are aware of what is natural content and what is spam content rammed with keywords and sentences that barely make sense.

 

Why people love great content.

Its common sense really. People love reading helpful and interesting content. So if your content answers a question for them or provides them with useful and usable information, they’ll be willing to share it with their friends or like minded people.

This in turn sends more visitors to your website and could create inbound links.

 

Why search engines love great content.

Search engines love content that’s written for people and not for search engines. They’ll know if you’re writing content solely for them.

For example, if you own a pet grooming salon and write a blog post about the importance of regularly grooming pets. But you try to fit the keyword ‘pet grooming’ into each sentence five times it won’t make sense to a person. Search engines will pick up on this and see that you are ‘keyword stuffing’ and will punish your website’s ranking in search results.

If you sit down and write your blog post without thinking too much about keywords, the chances are you will add all the keywords you wanted to anyway. Then it won’t look unnatural. Any keywords you missed out can then be added in after your original draft.

If your content attracts inbound links search engines will pick up on this and see your blog post as useful. As worth reading and worth sharing which will have a positive effect on SEO.

On a side note, search engines like website’s which are updated regularly. So if your blog is part of your website each time you post a new blog post, search engines will think the website is being updated.

 

Why content is better than link building.

It’s helpful to have your website or blog listed in big directories. Such as Dmoz and Yell as they will help you get found. Getting an inbound link from a guest blog post you wrote or from someone praising your work will also help you out.

If you’re spending hours creating listings on barely used directories on the tenth page of Google’s search results. It’s going to have very little affect, if any at all.

A great piece of content which gets shared a handful of times is better than a link on an unknown directory. Which may never send anyone back to your website.

 

How often should I blog?

HubSpot carried out some research where they found that businesses which blogged 16-20 times a month received over two times more traffic that those who blogged four times or less during the same time period.

While it would be nice to have the time to blog five times a week, it’s not always possible.

Here at The Marketing People we recommend blogging once or twice a week. Then if you have the time and the stories, then blog more.

Having the stories is vital. There’s no point in putting out one really high quality blog post and then four rubbish ones just because you were trying to blog five times during the week.

 

There’s no point in putting out 1 high quality blog post and then 4 rubbish ones.

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Writing copy can be hard at the best of times, so feel free to browse the rest of our blogging category for inspiration on what to write about, and how to write about it.

If you’re struggling for the time or resources to blog but know it’s something you and your business should be doing, get in touch with us to find out how we could manage your blog for you. Call us on 01543 387 047 and have a chat with us about what we can do or email us at contact@themarketingpeople.com.

The SEO Advantages of blogging – Part 2

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the seo advantages of blogging part 2

the seo advantages of blogging part 2

Last Thursday we wrote about the direct benefit of a blog from an SEO point of view, so we’re now going to talk about the indirect SEO advantages of blogging.

Indirect benefits – These rely on some form of interaction from a reader.

Good content will keep people coming back to both your blog and the website, which will encourage them to use your company.

Good content will keep people coming back to your website, and encourage them to use your company.

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You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘content is king’ before, while that’s certainly true, putting one good post out every three months probably isn’t going to help you all that much. The amount of new posts you create is also important, no pressure.

Hubspot carried out a study, which found businesses with blogs that posts five times during a seven day period, would receive 6.9 times more organic traffic than a business which didn’t blog at all, so the amount of posts really is important.

Linking to useful content on other websites can also increase your page ranking.
For example, if you decide to link to an article you consider really helpful, a search engine will ‘think’ you’re being helpful and will boost your page rankings.

The same goes for a website linking back to your website, a search engine will perceive your website as useful because people want to share it, again boosting your page rankings.

The person whose website you link to may decide to return the favour and link back to you, sending some of their readers your way.

We hope our two part post on the SEO advantages has been useful.
If you have any questions or queries, don’t hesitate to drop us a comment.

Do you or your company blog? Do you blog solely for SEO purposes? Let us know.

If you’re wondering what on earth SEO is, check out our SEO Jargon Buster.

 

You can find more useful advice on how to maintain the best SEO in our blogs. Or if you need a helping hand to get you started, or run it for you, we can help. Call us today on 01543 495752 to see what we could do for your SEO.

SEO Jargon Buster

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seo jargon buster

seo jargon buster

The acronyms and words used when talking about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can sometimes be confusing. We put a list together, which is in no way exhaustive, which contains the words we feel are most important to understand.

Since this post, we have completed a more up to date version of our SEO jargon buster, which includes far more terms, which you can find here.

 

301 redirect: This is a page which appears when the website at the URL searched for, has permanently moved to another URL. It will usually contain information about where the website has moved to.

Algorithms: The formula or procedure a search engine goes through to determine where a page should rank in the search results.

Alt text: Alternative text – Used to describe an image. If the image cannot be viewed, the alt text will show up instead. It can also help with search engine optimisation as search engines can ‘see’ the alt text, whereas they cannot differentiate from one image to the next.

Analytics: A collection of data containing information about the way the website is used, such as hits or total time spent on the website.

Black hat: These are search engine optimisation techniques which go against best practice guidelines and attempt to trick a search engine into giving your page a higher page rank.

CAPTCHA: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans Apart – This is a ‘test’ to tell humans and computers apart, mostly used for stopping bots or automated programs from spamming a website.
You will often see this when you try to create an account on a website, a box containing random letters, numbers or words will appear. It’s easy for a human to read them and type them out again, but it’s much harder for a program to do.

CMS: Content Management System – A program such as WordPress or Tumblr, which allows the creation of content without needing to do any of the coding side of content creation.

CPC: Cost Per Click – Each time a banner or advertisement is clicked on, the advertiser will be charged.

Grey hat: Search engine optimisation techniques which bend best practice rules as opposed to breaking them completely.

Hits: A request for something on a web page to load, such as the page or a graphic.
Hits are not a good indication of website traffic as things like images count for a ‘hit’. For example, if your page has six images and it’s loaded once, that would class as seven hits.

HTML: HyperText Markup Language – A language made up of a variety of tags which will determine how a website will look, such as the layout and the text colour.

Long tail: A phrase made up of keywords as opposed to search one or two keywords.
It’s much easier to have a higher ranking for long tail phrases; however this is because they’re searched for less often.

META tag: A HTML tag which contains information about what platform the website was built on and keywords which relate to the website. This information will not be displayed on the website itself.

On site SEO: This is any work carried out on a website that will help search engines find your website, such as using keywords throughout and using alt text.

Off site SEO: Links back to your website are considered recommendations by search engines, so if your page has been linked back to a search engine will think the content you have produced is high quality and useful and will therefore give you a higher page ranking.

Pagerank or PR: This is how relevant a search engine considers your page to be in relation to the keywords searched.
If you have a high page rank, then the search engine considers the page to be very relevant to the words searched. If you have a low page rank then a search engine doesn’t consider your page relevant to what has been searched.
This is why using keywords is vital for search engine optimisation.

Pageview: Quite simply, the amount of times a page has been loaded.

PPC: Pay Per Click – An advertiser will pay each time an advert or banner is clicked on which takes someone back to their website.

RSS feed: Really Simple Syndication – If an RSS Feed is set up on your blog any new posts will be sent to anyone who subscribes to your RSS Feed. New posts will show up in their RSS Reader or content aggregator.
You can send the entire post to the RSS Reader or just part of the text or a description to encourage the reader want to click through to your website to read the full post.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing – A type of internet marketing which relies on search engines to promote a company.
Search Engine Marketing is usually paid for, via things like Pay Per Click and Cost Per Click.

SEO: Search Engine Optimisation – This is improving your search engine rankings by using things such as keywords and long tail phrases throughout your website.
The better your search engine optmisation is, the higher your rankings will be, meaning more people will be visiting your website.

SE: Search Engine – Examples; Google, Yahoo, Bing.

SERP: Search Engine Results Page – The list of pages a search engine produces which are relevant to the words searched, starting with the most relevant at the top.

URL: Uniform Resource Locator – This is the address of a web page.

White hat: Search engine optimisation techniques which stick to best practice rules and don’t trick or cheat a search engine into awarding it a page ranking higher than it should be.

 

 

You can find more useful advice on how to maintain the best SEO in our blogs. Or if you need a helping hand to get you started, or run it for you, we can help. Call us today on 01543 495752 to see what we could do for your SEO.

The SEO advantages of blogging – Part 1

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the seo advantages of blogging part 1

the seo advantages of blogging part 1

 
There are many SEO advantages of blogging, (Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short).

The list of advantages is extensive and putting them all in one post wouldn’t make for light reading. This post will concentrate on the direct SEO benefits of having a company blog.

This post relies upon the blog being held on the main URL, e.g. www.domain.com/blog. If your blog isn’t part of your websites domain your blog and website will be competing against each other in search rankings and your website won’t receive any of the SEO benefits a blog can bring.

 

Direct benefits – Immediate once cached by search engines.

Keyphrases are key (no pun intended) in SEO.

Using the correct key phrases in your blog post, title and tagging it correctly will help you to rank higher in search engines.

Using correct key phrases in your blog title and tagging it correctly will help you to rank higher.

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Take note and remember that stuffing your post with keywords will have a negative effect on your page ranking as search engines will see the post as spam.

Remember to use long tail phrases, as long tail searches will return fewer searches than a shorter one. There is less competition for a long tail search, which means your page will rank higher.

Posting new content regularly can increase the ranking of the website a blog is attached to. This is because a search engine sees that blogs URL is indexed the same as the main website and ‘links’ the two together.
Search engines like website’s which are updated regularly as it in theory means that your website contains up to date and relevant information, rather than information which is two years old and may be out of date by now.

You can read part two here.

 

You can find more useful advice on how to maintain the best SEO in our blogs. Or if you need a helping hand to get you started, or run it for you, we can help. Call us today on 01543 495752 to see what we could do for your SEO.