Dan from our tech team answers 2 of the most popular questions we receive from potential clients considering SEO.

These are 2 questions that we hear most of the time from potential clients and website owners considering SEO for their business.

Website owners often ask us if they can conduct search engine optimisation themselves or do they really need an agency like us?

The short answer is, sure you can run your own search engine optimisation, but like many things in life, this can be time-consuming, especially when you need to go through the learning curve of what works and what doesn’t work.

For that reason, many businesses tend to outsource their search engine optimisation to companies just like us who are specialists in the field.

This frees up their time and allows them to get on running their own business.

Search Engine Optimisation (often abbreviated to SEO) has become more and more complex over the last few years especially with Google updating their algorithms on a consistent regular basis.

It is more important than ever to make sure that any search engine optimisation conducted on your website is done properly,

There are many different ranking signals used by search engines, And whilst Google has never officially listed all of the signals that they use (they keep this a closely guarded secret), from our experience on working on hundreds of websites over the years, we have been able to identify the most important ones.

Whilst every website is different, generally speaking, the following are super important.

Content Quality

You should provide high-quality original informative content that provides value to people visiting your website.

• Google now rewards websites which provide better quality content.
• Our blog around SEO topics is just here and provides some great ideas.

We recommend that you write engaging blog content yourself rather than use AI (like chat GPT) to create it, this is more rank-worthy than anything AI created and is going to be unique to your business.

This allows you to get your tone of voice across to the reader more easily and more directly and shows your knowledge of the industry.

Link building

The number and quality of links pointing back to your site still remain an important ranking signal, we reach out to third-party blog owners and also list you with local directories.

This is a great way to improve your brand search online, and generate the potential of traffic and leads through to your website, whilst providing a powerful ranking signal back to Google.

We’ve put some thoughts down about Citations in a specific SEO Citations blog that you may find useful just here.

Mobile Friendliness

This is of course important with around 70% of traffic now coming from mobile devices.

Page Speed and Load Speed

This is super important, for both desktop and mobile devices.

Websites that load in sub one second are generally given better exposure by Google.

User experience

This is really important too, this means your website should provide easy navigation, a clean layout and help to keep visitors engaged with your site, reducing the bounce rate and keeping the time on the page as high as possible.

Keywords

Back in the day, it was possible to trick search engines by keyword stuffing, this was the tactic of adding the same keyword hundreds of times to your website.

Simply speaking Google spots this a mile away now and could potentially penalise you for engaging in this kind of practice, so you should make sure that you use a strategic placement of relevant keywords.

This includes Titles, Headers, Meta Descriptions and generally using important keywords throughout the website in the content to help Google understand the relevance of your page to the Google search queries.

Domain Authority

DA remains a ranking signal, this is usually built up over time through having quality content and good link building and plays a significant role in better rankings.

The reality is this can be one of the most difficult things to improve but websites with a better domain authority generally get more traffic and exposure from Google.

There are some great tools out there to measure and monitor your domain authority and rankings and our blog just here helps to showcase some of them for you.

Content Relevance

This is key, so the content on the website must be relevant to the user’s Google search, matching user intent and providing useful information on the topic searched is essential.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves things like Site Maps, Structured Data, Header Tags, Meta Descriptions, and making sure that the site is indexed and crawled by search engines.

It is important to include appropriate header tags and internal linking within the site. You can find out more about technical SEO on our specific technical SEO page just here.

SSL certificates

Websites with SSL are preferred for obvious reasons, so make sure that you speak to your hosting or domain name provider and ensure you have an SSL applied to your website.

Internal linking

Internal Linking is important because it can aid navigation and indexing and help customers find more fantastic content across your website.

Content Length

Our experience shows that Content length is important and longer content does tend to rank better, but this is generally because it provides more comprehensive information on a topic, however, quality of content is also important so you should never sacrifice the quality of content just to create longer content if that makes sense.

Local SEO

Local SEO practices help local businesses get found locally, such as a Google My Business listing, and NAP consistency (which stands for name address and phone number) so make sure these are consistent across the Internet, especially across local directory listings.
Our Local SEO blog has some great ideas too, which is just here.

There are over 200 ranking signals used by search engines and as we said before search engine optimisation has definitely become more complex over time.

Going back just 10 or 15 years ago, it was relatively easy to rank a website and often new websites would rank well for low-competition keywords within a matter of months.

Whilst there are still some easy SEO wins out there to be had, typically those websites that invest in search engine optimisation will see better results and more exposure in the search engine results pages.

Hopefully, this provides some useful information and if you are looking to undertake search engine optimisation yourself there are certainly some clues and pointers in this useful blog which you can swipe and deploy for your business.

If you would like to engage the services of a professional SEO agency like us, feel free to schedule a consultation call with a member of the team, we would be happy to conduct a thorough technical audit of your website and either point you in the right direction or recommend the most appropriate plan to help you get found in the search engines. You can find out more about us here.

SeoNI has been helping businesses across Belfast get found online and generate more leads and enquiries through the use of effective search engine optimisation for many years, we are now part of a wider business which means we have access to over 40 digital marketing experts on hand to help you get found online. You can get in touch with us here.