SEO Agency in Birmingham

This is a common question posed to our SEO teams and also our PPC teams. The reality is that both are highly effective marketing channels which offer significant returns and increase your sales income. However, your specific requirements tend to dictate whether SEO or PPC is best for you or indeed both.

As a rule a rule of thumb we would always advocate a holistic Marketing Strategy with PPC, SEO and Social Media as a foundation. However, the urgency of a return or swift demonstration of potential performance often leads to a choice of one or the other.

If you'd like to have an open discussion on the best solutions and strategies for you, please contact us and our digital specialists can discuss how we'll get maximum performance quickly.

SEO is a marketing channel like no other, in that you can clearly see how you stack up against your competition for your main keywords or services. What's maybe not as clearly visible for you is how you stack up against the long-tail keywords (i.e. variations on users search queries that you wouldn't necessary think of typing or less common).  This is great news for evaluating the competition and how you sit within the market place.

This showcases the level of investment and the level time required to compete and dominate within your specific Market.

As a rule of thumb, some SEO activities can be picked up within days or weeks and see significant ranking improvements, other take 3-6months to register with search engines.

We have a fantastic track record of accelerating clients into the desired top spots on Google within a short period. For more information and our team to review the competitiveness of your Market place, please contact usfor a chat.

SEO is a term for a service with multiple sub service sets, which are crudely broken down below. Each of these specific sub services have their own fee structures and are more often than not delivered as a bespoke package by our SEO team to capitalise on the aspect of each that will have the most impact for you. For more information please speak toour SEO team.

1. Technical SEO- this is effectively the optimisation of the site, all the clever tech aspects of how website present information to Search Engines like Google and how they operate. This includes all the Titles, Meta data & Header Architecture sitting behind what your customer see on the page itself that Search Engines use to evaluate your ranking positions.
2. Onsite SEO Content- This is the quality and optimisation of the Content of each and every page on your website and how this is used by Search Engines to drive your rankings against primary, secondary and tertiary keyword targets. I.e. If you have a page about Chocolate Truffles Gifts, this page from every angle is optimised to showcase this to Google and visually engage your audience, for maximum rankings and conversions.
3. Outreach SEO- This in short is how you engage across the internet with relevant websites. The better and broader this engagement across the internet, the more credit Search Engines give and thus improve your rankings. I.e. If you are an Architect and you have an article written by our SEO content writers which we place with www.countryliving.com, a highly respected and highly relevant site to your industry, then Google will provide significant kudos and improve your rankings.
4. Local & International SEO- this is in effective showcasing to Google your operating geographics, via citations with local and international areas. This includes everything from local newspaper directories to Google My business.

Absolutely, the term link building doesn't get used so much anymore due to the older days of mass link building on poor quality sites, but it is now replaced by terms such as Digital PR, Outreach, Blogger Outreach etc. These new terms are a polite way of saying High Quality or Medium Quality link building which specialists have sought out as highly beneficial to have articles or links to your site from, which Google will reward highly.

Our SEO team specialise in Outreach/Digital PR, which means we can either take articles you have already, seek out high quality placements for the articles across the internet and place them for you, or we can write these articles as well.

The majority of our clients ask us to write and place their Outreach Articles. Our team are happy to explain this in more depth and talk about packages that suit your budgets. Contact Us.

Yes and No, it depends on your instructions. Some clients use third party developers and some have in house developers that will make changes.

As we come across lot sorts of website platforms, our SEO specialists are quite at home updating your site content, but we are also very happy to work with your developers.

Our SEO team are thorough in recording the activities and tasks they are undertaking, mainly as we work to clear and agreed SEO work schedules, but also as it allows clients to see the amazing work we do.

In addition, we provide monthly SEO reports showcasing performance and key metrics. If more frequency or bespoke reports are required the team will gladly assist. For more information please contact us.

Contract lengths for SEO vary, but SEO often requires significant investment of time from our teams at the front end, including research, audits, quick wins, along with developing relationships with your Team, your Developers and your 3rd Party service providers. As such rather than stack this charge we spread this across a minimum term of 6-12 months, so that you are not paying a higher amount at the beginning, thereafter we accelerate rapidly and utilise this time period and subsequent terms to improve your rankings.

In addition, we always outline to clients, that albeit you will see some impressive initial improvements (subject to competition), the main momentum will start to establish towards the month 4-6 month mark and hence the 6-month minimum terms. For more information please contact us.

Inbound and Outbound links are crucial SEO factors in how search engines evaluate how relevant your website is for specific user search terms. Therefore, the better your Inbound and Outbound SEO link profiles are the better you rank on Google and other search engines.

Inbound links are links from 3rd party websites to your website. These links are highly important as they increase your site authority with search engines. The more links you have, from other sites with high site authorities themselves the higher the recognition and regard Google and other search engines have for your site. This results in ranking increases and increased trust. Also Google and other search engines are acute recognising the relevance of the sites linking to you, so if you get a link from Disney World and you are a Travel Agency, this would carry significant ‘welly’. So quality and relevance is an absolute must for Inbound Links and why our SEO team carefully select them.

Outbound links are links from your website to 3rd party websites. This means if someone is reading say your web page about ‘cookie policies’ and you have provided a link to Google’s own policies page, then this might lead readers away from your site, albeit due to the relevance and importance of the content on the 3rd party page. Naturally you hope the reader swiftly returns to your site pleased to have had additional content and either trusting your content or appreciating your content further. Google and search engines use these outbound links to develop an overview of whom your ‘choosing to engage with’ and depending on the relevance, authority, trust and credibility the search engine’s places on those 3rd party sites, the more recognition to you’ll gain. In addition, the more you can back up your content’s context with supportive or relevant 3rd party outbound links the better. Our SEO teams are highly experienced in knowing when and whom to link to.

Internal links or Internal Link structure/architecture, is the way you link your website together, whether that’s your navigation bars, footer links, on page buttons and links within written passages. Google and search engines use this information in multiple ways, as it showcases which pages maybe the most important pages as they are continually referred or users are encouraged to visit with call to actions, like buttons. Most website inherently have most internal links pointing to their homepage, tier 1 and tier 2 pages, such as categories or main service pages, or contact and about us pages. There is a bit of SEO science to link structure and what is referred to as anchor text, for more information please contact our SEO team.

In addition, internal links encourage visitors to your site to browse and read new sections of the site. This improves their engagement on the site which as you probably guessed is evaluated by the search engines for how relevant you are for whatever that user was originally looking for, as well as impressing visitors with good content and achieve your desired outcome, be that leads, sales, or return engagement.

You’ll hear various metrics used in SEO, most are not official metrics as such, more impressions of good and bad as 3rd party industry bodies attempt to replicate the complex and constantly changing Google algorithms. Some are more common that others and even those are shrouded in mystery to some degree to how they calculate the metrics. The most commonly used is DA or Domain Authority which is used by Moz to assess the a website’s overall authority. As a guide, but certainly not an absolute, if two competitor websites one with a 10DA score from Moz and one with a 40DA score were to compete for the same keyword, the website with the DA would typically be expected to dominate the top rank position in the search pages on Google. However, there are many factors that need to be considered, but improving your DA is normally part of your SEO strategy.

Page Authority is largely the same, only looks specifically at a page. So again tentatively speaking if two websites of equal DAs competed and had two similar specific pages about Brownie Recipes, then the page with the higher PA would rank higher. Not an absolute but a guideline, so improving the PA score for target services or pages will normally improve ranking positions.

For more specific detail talk with our SEO team.

Google and other search engines review everything and anything whether on your website or offsite. In terms of onsite they review the information on your pages, but also the coding of the pages, which contain addition information about the page and the contents that are not visible to general users visiting the pages. Naturally the better this information the better for improving your relevance and rankings.
Firstly, your URL is important, so if I wanted to rank for brownie recipes, then the URL would read something like www.test.com/brownie-recipes , which tells Google the page is possibly about brownies, and other coding information like the Title Tag would also be added, maybe ‘30 Minute Brownie Recipe’. This includes a brief summary description called a meta-description, maybe ‘Test.com have an amazing range of home cooking recipes, this is a 30minute Brownie recipe you can try’. Naturally the extent to which these are optimised effects the how relevant you are for specific searches.

White Hat – are practices that result in positive outcomes in line with Google and other search engine’s best practice guidelines. Website’s that abide by White Hat practices for their SEO strategies and activities will have a more robust foundation to their rankings.

Black Hat – SEO practices that are not in line with best practice guidelines, are normally considered to be cheating tactics, designed to trick Google or other search engines to believe you are more relevant than you really are.

In some cases, Black Hat tactics do actually work. However, Google and search engines learn and they learn fast, so typically it will not be long until the tactics are ineffective and in many cases cause notable damage to the websites rankings. To give examples, website have overnight had first page rankings vanish as Google updates their algorithms, which could take significant time and resource to repair and recover.

Therefore professional SEO agencies will always build strategies based on White Hat practices. We are one of those agencies that abides by White Hat Practices and Best Practice Guidelines. For more information please talk with our Birmingham SEO team.

Interestingly in SEO we refer to keywords, but in reality we should refer to key-phrases as most users type multiple words into Google when searching the internet. For example, ‘Chinese takeaway’.

A long-tail keyword is keyword (or key-phrase) with more than three words. This means the variations are many, making it hard to optimise your website for every single variation. In this case the long-tail for Chinese takeaway could be ‘Chinese takeway near Birmingham train station’, or ‘Chinese and Cantonese Takeaway restaurant’, or ‘best Chinese takeaway in Birmingham’, or ‘best rated Chinese take-out in Birmingham’.

Long tail are very useful in SEO, as they offer Google and search engines more information. In these examples above, the user mentioned Birmingham and near station’, so if a Chinese restaurants website happened to have directions to their restaurant on the site that read ‘near station’ and had Birmingham in the address, then they might show for this search more others that did not.

Optimising Long-tail Keywords and understanding your audiences vast array of keywords is paramount to successful SEO.

There are multiple reasons a blog is useful on your website beyond user experience. The main one is it allows regular fresh content to be added to your website which increases the volume of your site and typically increases the use of all sorts of relevant keywords and variations. This helps Google build a picture of how relevant your site is for keywords users are search for.

Users typically trigger 404 error messages when a website page has been altered, moved or deleted, in effect the page content is expected to be there and is not. These errors can normally be swiftly dealt with by your web developer or SEO team.