How Walsh & Partners can help

You may have just received your website back from the website designers and are really happy with the finished design. With your colleagues’ help, you can improve on-page SEO yourself.

You’re already aware that off-page SEO is a crucial factor for your company’s visibility on the first page of Google’s SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). This is a key aspect that you can’t afford to overlook.

So, this article will help you understand how to start improving your business off-page SEO.

What’s the main difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO?

The difference is that you are improving the SEO on your main pages or blog posts with on-page search engine optimisation. You are improving elements such as:

• Page titles
• Meta descriptions
• Alt text
• Internal linking
• Anchor text and much, much more

So, this is the on-page SEO, and then there’s the off-page SEO, which is all the work you do to optimise your company website off-page. So, an example of this is:

•  Building good quality do-follow and no-follow backlinks
•  Building business citations
•  Getting good customer reviews
•  Promoting your business on social media
•  Getting brand mentions to improve your semantic SEO
•  Obtaining a Google Business account

Quality links are often the key to unlocking your business’s presence on a Google page. Understanding and utilizing backlinks effectively can significantly boost your search engine rankings.

So, when you Google “running trainers”, global brands and well-known retailers often appear on the first page. There’s a reason: your well-known companies usually have firm, white-hat backlink profiles. They might sometimes have more than 30k links.

This is not to deter a small business from competing with global and large companies. However, good SEO agencies will know you must have strong backlinks to appear on page one of Google.co.uk or Google.com.

So, if an SEO consultant turns around and says in an e-mail, “Sorry, we can’t get your business onto the first page with the marketing budget that’s been put forward,” they are not being difficult. Often, they look at the competitor’s backlink profile, using, say, Moz Link Explorer, and they see that a huge amount of link building might be needed.

If global brands spend 1 million a year with their digital marketing agencies to rank as “running trainers,” then it would be massively unrealistic for a local business to try and compete with a marketing budget of 1,000 pounds a month.

It’s important to remember that building backlinks is a time-consuming process. Therefore, it’s crucial to work with a marketing agency that sets realistic expectations for what can be achieved with a limited marketing budget.

 

Good quality content marketing is critical.

So, you might think, hang on a second here, that content marketing, such as evergreen content marketing published on your website, is on-page search engine optimisation, and you would be right.
However, to improve your off-page SEO, you need well-written, high-quality content marketing on your website written by somebody who understands Google E-EAT.

So, what do we mean by that?

 

Earning backlinks

Other businesses or bloggers often link to your website to obtain good-quality, relevant, white-hat backlinks because the reader recognises that the author has published some good-quality work.

For example, an oil filter manufacturer may link to a classic car blog where an enthusiast has mentioned how to change an oil filter on a scarce type of car. This means that the manufacturer has seen that the author has made a brilliant blog post with an embedded YouTube video explaining how to change the oil on that particular classic car.

Then, the manufacturer may link to that website, so the blogger has earned a link.

 

Are backlinks still important?

You bet.

Links are still among the most important ranking factors, if not the most important. Since Google invented the search engine, it has used an algorithm called PageRank. Now, an essential component of that algorithm is backlinks. That’s when deciding where a business should rank in the search engine results. Fast-forward to 2024, and links are still essential to Google’s algorithm.

However, Google’s algorithm has become much more complex, with more moving parts. There are now over 200 ranking factors, such as alt text and do-follow backlinks.

Backlinks are still considered one of the most important ranking factors. So, in a nutshell, the businesses that are placed in the top 3 results in Google’s organic results are the businesses that generally have the best quality backlinks. And they don’t just have one or two; sometimes, these businesses have hundreds of good-quality links.

 

Why backlinks are now considered more important than ever: expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness; now, the part that we are most interested in is the authority aspect; that’s because if you have a lot of relevant, quality, white hat backlinks, you can massively improve your business authority, and therefore, you will be improving this aspect of Google E-EAT, and therefore you can improve your businesses organic search engine optimisation as a direct result of this.

 

How to Improve Off-Page SEO

 

How can our business obtain good-quality backlinks?

Different SEO agencies will recommend other methods. However, our process has stayed the same for over ten years because it works.

That is, write top-quality green content marketing that aims to be better than your direct competitors in every single way. It may take a very long period, but it will start attracting backlinks. If the work is deemed helpful to thousands of readers and businesses, they will eventually link to your company website.

Therefore, this is how you earn backlinks: You write high-quality content marketing that attracts high-quality backlinks.

We strongly recommend that your business create a Facebook Business Page, Instagram, and LinkedIn account. You should also promote your business’s blog posts and new services or products that your company is retailing. This can help draw in more traffic, create better brand awareness, and help more shoppers find your company.

Does your business want to improve its local SEO?

The vast majority of the accounts we work on improve a business’s local SEO. Two factors are key to improving a business’s local SEO: creating a Google Business account and building a lot of business citations.

Now, these are both off-page elements and here are some top tips when building business citations for your business:

Make sure the business citations are consistent

Make sure you update your business citations or NAP information if it changes

Keep opening hours up to date, especially on Google Business

 

Be a guest speaker

So, sometimes, a way to improve your company’s search engine optimisation is through attending conferences and being a guest speaker.

Now, this is good from a networking perspective, but it is also perfect because the following can happen:
People talk about your business online / social media

So, somebody may write a blog post for their business, saying, for example, “We visited the Moz conference in 2024,” and mention a speaker they found really interesting. For example, a digital marketing agency, Cardiff, may have been talking about A—I and how RankBrain changed SEO substantially.

Now, you may have listened to the speaker, and because they taught you something new, you may mention that speaker and the company they work for in your blog post. This often occurs in the SEO world simply because a marketing agency may mention another company with a guest speaker at an event. Because that company is based in another country, they may not be considered competition because the digital marketing agency may not work there. So, they may promote them by mentioning the company, linking, or just mentioning a brand name, which improves the company’s semantic SEO.

Also, there’s social media; if you speak at a conference, there might be a lot of discussion about your company as a speaker at the presentation. This is all good for SEO, as Google’s algorithm will pick up mentions of your business, and Googlebot will be able to crawl and index any new links that have been built.

 

How our SEO business can help you

So, we don’t just build quality links; we offer the whole hog; what we mean by this is we can help your business improve its digital marketing by enhancing the following:

• We improve local SEO by setting up a Google Business account plus building business citations
• We can improve your business content marketing
• We can help to build backlinks
• We can improve technical SEO
• We can set up a Google Search Console account
• We can set up a Google Analytics account

How much do your SEO services cost?

At a minimum, our monthly organic SEO services cost £500 PCM. Yet the price depends on how much competition your business faces, i.e. how good your direct competitors’ SEO is. Therefore, if you work in a highly competitive business sector, such as solicitors, the level of SEO is high, as these businesses often heavily invest in this type of marketing. However, if you are a local golf club, the level of competition is much lower, so our monthly fee is much lower to reflect this.