Written by: Ryan Walsh

Introduction

Our experts have poured their vast SEO knowledge into this article to help your business rank higher on Google.
We will provide you with our top tips and advice to help you get more shoppers onto your website.

We have broken down the on-site and off-page process into these simple and easy-to-follow steps:
1) Conduct an audit
2) Make sure your business is targeting the right keywords
3) If your business is getting out of the starting blocks, optimise for longtail keywords
4) Create high-quality content marketing
5) Always write content marketing with Google E-E-A-T in mind
6) Learn about LSI keywords
7) Why are relevant and up-to-date statistics important
8) Make sure you get your on-page SEO right
9) Use internal links
10) Return to old pieces of content marketing and improve them if the visitor numbers are low
11) Hire SEO experts to help get your business ranked higher

Conduct an SEO audit.

An SEO audit is akin to an MOT for your company website; it identifies areas that need improvement or are underperforming. This can help improve the website’s overall performance, fixing areas such as duplicated pages, for example, and enhancing the website’s overall SEO quality.

Here’s what a good SEO audit should include:

 

Keyword research

A company should conduct keyword research; various tools are available to assist with this process. What these tools enable is for the business to identify which words and phrases they should improve on-page SEO for, to attract more shoppers to the website.

For example, if you sell bathroom suites, optimising the H1 tag for “bathroom suites next day delivery” could potentially bring you thousands more shoppers every month.

 

Backlink profile

It’s essential to ensure your links are of top quality and white-hat. Any SEO audit should look at the quality of your business’s backlinks.

 

Core Web Vitals

Core web vitals are all about your web developers making the website faster and loading it more smoothly. A slow website, where some elements don’t load quickly, could increase the bounce rate.

 

Indexing and crawl issues

It is sometimes the case that critical pages, or even the entire blog section, cannot be crawled. If these blog posts, for example, can’t get crawled, this means that Googlebot can’t crawl them, and therefore those blog posts won’t appear in Google’s results.

 

Site architecture

You need to consider the layout of the website pages to ensure they are as simple as possible, allowing shoppers to find the right products easily. For example, your best-selling products should be prominently displayed at the top of the menu, allowing shoppers to easily and quickly locate and access them.

 

Page speed

Your business needs to pay for fast and reliable hosting.

Purchase the fastest website hosting that your business can afford.

 

Duplicate content

Remove any duplicate content; sometimes it’s best to keep the page live, but remove the duplicated content for marketing purposes. If your website contains a lot of copied text, we recommend consulting with an agency for guidance on the best course of action.

 

Target long tail keywords

If your website’s new, think about optimising for long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are generally thought to be keywords that are in excess of 3 words. The keywords should still be relevant to your business; however, longer tail keywords, such as “low-cost e-bikes”, would be an example of a long tail keyword. The short version would obviously be just e-bikes.

The benefit of optimising your website for long-tail keywords is that people will still search for those terms, even if they have a low search volume. However, because they have significantly less search volume than the main keywords, many businesses won’t be optimising their website for those keywords. This means less competition, making it easier to rank for those terms and, therefore, easier to get the company on the first page of Google for those specific terms.

 

Content marketing needs to be detailed, long-form, and comprehensive.

When you look at the businesses and pages that rank high on Google, they usually offer “long form content marketing”-this means they provide a longer, more in-depth answer to the question. Often, similar questions are also addressed to provide the visitor with a more in-depth answer.

This helps the shopper, as they don’t have to go to another business to have their next question answered. However, from an SEO perspective, what happens is that dwell time can significantly increase, meaning the visitor spends longer reading the page.

Instead of just for a second, they may spend a few minutes reading the page. This means the dwell time increases, resulting in shoppers spending longer on the page. Because the average shopper is sticking around a bit longer than they would on other pages, which don’t offer such a detailed answer, the Google algorithm notices that the page has a high dwell time.

Pages with high dwell times tend to rank a lot higher. Additionally, to achieve that high dwell time, you typically need to write long-form content marketing that keeps the shopper on the page for longer.

 

Here are some of the ways that you can increase the pages’ dwell time:

– Write long-form content marketing
– Embed a YouTube video with a presenter explaining the benefits of that product or service
– Answer supplementary questions
– Write using a conversational style, with a lot of questions and an answer style of writing
Create a flow diagram or another type of diagram to exemplify what “Google E-EAT means”

 

 

Always keep EEAT in mind when writing content marketing

When Google algorithms evaluate your writing content, they use something called EEAT to determine if it’s well-written or if it falls on the other end of the spectrum, spam.

Therefore, businesses that are on page one will have a high Google EEAT score.

We could end up writing 3,000 words just on Google E-EAT itself, but what needs to be known is that EEAT stands for experience, expertise, and authoritativeness.

 

What exactly are LSI keywords?

For those that don’t know, LSI stands for latent semantic indexing. LSI keywords are phrases and words that are “semantically” connected to the main keyword you are optimising your company website for. For example, if you sell e-bikes, a relevant LSI keyword might be ‘electric mountain bikes,’ as this is semantically connected to the primary keyword.

 

Add up to data statistics.

For knowledgeable marketing consultants, it is well known that Google’s algorithm still has its strong foundations from the Google PageRank days. This means that many marketing consultants know how Google’s algorithm works is somewhat like writing a dissertation.

Just as a university lecturer when marking your dissertation, they like to see where you gathered your information and sources from, so does Google. Therefore, when writing a long piece of content marketing, such as on your company blog, you will often have read many articles, blog posts, and newspaper stories to help you have an informed idea about what you are writing about.

Therefore, it is likely to have many sources; thus, cite them in the content marketing, such as the blog post where those statistics and data came from. Write it using anchor text, and then use an outbound link. This will then be crawled and indexed by the Googlebot, and Google’s algorithm will know where you’ve gathered your statistics, facts, and data from.

It is essential to ensure that the information is well-researched, up-to-date, and that you have gathered your data from reliable sources, such as the Office for National Statistics in the United Kingdom.

Be sure to use anchor text for the statistics, then include an outbound link to the page where you found the relevant statistic.

This will also help boost the authority and trustworthiness of the page. You may recall that we previously discussed Google E-EAT in great detail. Therefore, one way to improve your E-EAT score is to use outbound links and link to relevant pages and blog posts where you have gathered that information.

 

Reliable

When the Googlebot crawls and indexes the link to read your sources, it determines the reliability of the information.

For example, if you’re getting your facts from the ONS, which is the Office for National Statistics, then this information will be viewed as reliable by Googlebot and Google’s algorithm.

However, if the information comes from a spammy page, it could damage your SEO, as you have relied on spammy information.
Therefore, when citing your sources, ensure that you use relevant statistics and information from highly reliable sources that are readable by the Googlebot.

 

Use up-to-date facts

Now, our SEO agency is one of the best in the business; however, we’d like to share a top tip with you.

That top tip is that if you get a page to rank high on Google, say in the top four positions, then to keep the page ranking high, you have to keep the information up to date.

If you’re writing about the best kitchen blenders in 2021 and we are in 2025, then obviously that page is out of date. It will most likely not rank on the first page of Google; therefore, you must keep the page up to date.

That means your copywriters also have a lot of work on their hands; however, if you want your page or piece of content marketing to stay on the first page, you must ensure that the information remains up-to-date.

In our experience, embedding YouTube videos can significantly improve a business’s SEO.

When you add a YouTube video, you could have a member of staff explaining the benefits of owning that product.

For example, you could be selling supercars and walking people around the car for, say, 7 minutes in a YouTube Video. What this does is that

Googlebot reads the title of the embedded YouTube video, and let’s say it’s about a Mercedes SLR car. Then, Google’s algorithm and Googlebot know that the page and the video are about that model car.

Additionally, visitors to the page can, instead of reading a block of text, say 1000 words, watch a YouTube video.

What this does is massively increase the dwell time of the page, which means that a page with a very high dwell time is perfect for the business’s search engine optimisation.

So, really, it doesn’t matter what you sell, whether it’s plants for the garden or luxury gold-plated smartphones. If you can embed a YouTube video and keep the shopper on the website for longer, this can sometimes massively increase the dwell time of the page. Talk to any reputable top SEO agency, and they will tell you that a page with high dwell times and good quality incoming backlinks stands the highest chance of ranking high in Google’s organic SERPs, and these are very important ranking factors.

 

Social media and videos

When your business has a YouTube channel, as we mentioned earlier, you can embed it on a page to help explain to shoppers the benefits of purchasing a product or service from your business.

Additionally, you can utilise that video on social media platforms like Facebook, X, and Instagram. This can help attract shoppers to your website after they have watched a video showcasing the benefits of purchasing the item.

Can you please create a flow diagram to explain how a business can improve its on-page SEO

 

On-page SEO

If your business is serious about improving its organic SEO and gaining more shoppers from Google.co.uk, then your on-page SEO must be superb. On-page optimisation must be done exceptionally well; white-hat methods must be used. To achieve a high standard of on-page SEO, we recommend hiring professionals for this work, such as the hardworking team here at Walsh & Partners.

 

Our hardworking team will work on the following to improve your on-page SEO:

 

Title tags

Try not to waffle too much when writing your title tags; keep the description succinct and clearly describe the product or service being sold on that page.

Try to be as exact as possible, so write the brand, the type of product and even if necessary, other details such as “2018 Mercedes SLR, with less than 10,000 on the clock”

That allows the Googlebot and Google’s fantastic algorithm to understand what the page is selling.

 

Keywords

Use a top-quality keyword tool, such as Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic, Screaming Frog, or SEMrush.

There are numerous excellent SEO tools on the market.

If you were to come to our marketing agency and ask, ‘What SEO tool do you like the most?’

Our hardworking team prefers to use Moz Pro, as we think it’s really effective.

Page Speed

Sit down with your web design team, and think about how you can make your company website faster.

This might mean switching to a faster hosting service?

 

Internal linking

Use internal links to help direct shoppers to other pages they may be interested in reading. For example, if you’ve just sold a nice shirt to a shopper, why not suggest using an internal link in the product description to a set of matching cuff links?

 

Schema markup

Googlebot can crawl and index schema markup, and because schema is a type of structured language, Google can understand the schema markup more clearly. Therefore, your business can utilise structured data to, for example, prominently display your business’s NAP information. This can help to improve the business’s local search engine optimisation.

 

Meta descriptions

Ensure that every page and blog post has a well-written meta title and a meta description. You can use free WordPress plugins, such as WP

Yoast, which is a fantastic plugin that allows you to add meta descriptions to your pages. This can sometimes help improve the CTR, meaning that a well-written meta description can enhance it.

 

Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most crucial factors in SEO ranking.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter if you run a solicitor’s practice, a suit hire business for weddings, or, for example, you are a builder; to rank right at the top of Google and be placed number 1, you usually need the best links.

If you are in a vast city, where you have a considerable number of competitors biting at your heels to take your work, businesses in large cities that rank number 1 on Google will have powerful backlinks.

This means that companies ranked in the 1st position on Google’s organic search engine results pages have the strongest backlink profiles.

They may have links from the BBC, connections to the Welsh Assembly, and affiliations with a major brand like Nike.

This means that in the company’s backlink profile, they may have strong backlinks and powerful do-follow links.

Therefore, when we analyse a competitor’s backlinks, we do the following

1) We use Moz Pro
2) We look at the competitors’ backlinks
3) We move the powerful backlinks with a strong DA score into a Microsoft Excel document
4) We then do a process of outreach to see if we can build powerful links for our clients
5) We then sometimes write a top-quality piece of content marketing with a very high Google E-EAT score, and we place that on the website in return for a powerful backlink.

 

Use your Google Analytics to identify which pages need improvement.
A lot of businesses, including SEO companies, should log in to their

 

You need to add content marketing regularly.

For a business to stay on the first page of Google, it needs to add new and high-quality content consistently.

Let’s give you an example of what we mean. You may visit a top solicitor’s website and wonder why they update their blog section every few days. This section of the website is also referred to as the article section.

You may be wondering why I keep adding so many blog posts.

The answer is simple: when Googlebot crawls and indexes new content regularly, perhaps every few days, it shows that the business is committed to adding new articles and information.

This is beneficial for the shopper, as they don’t want to read outdated information, guides, articles, or blog posts that are no longer accurate.

Instead, shoppers want the most up-to-date information. For example, if they are about to buy a high-value e-bike, they want to read about models that are currently for sale. They don’t want to read an old blog post, where the bikes might not even be for sale.

 

Therefore, included as part of Google’s algorithm is something called “QDF,” which stands for “query deserves freshness.” This means that

Google prioritises giving shoppers access to up-to-date blog posts and pages. This is why businesses which regularly add new pages and keep existing pages up to date are likely to rank higher on Google.

You need to build new backlinks regularly

Backlinks are a massive part of search engine optimisation.

Regardless of which city you live in, if you want to get your business high on Google, especially in the first position on Google, then you need top-quality backlinks.

You need good backlinks, plus you need to build new links regularly. The reason new links need to be constructed so often is that backlinks sometimes get deleted. For example, your business could have a strong backlink, one with a DA (domain authority) score of over 90.

These backlinks could be from the BBC News; it’s a powerful backlink. And because of this backlink, your business may appear on the first page of search results. However, if the backlink is deleted because the page is removed, then you lose the SEO value associated with it. This is why marketing agencies are always busy building links.

The reason is that as you build new links, old ones get deleted.

Fix any pages which can’t be indexed.

Sometimes, you can hire the best web designers in the city, who design a fantastic website for your business.

However, if, say, some of the main pages on the website can’t get indexed by Googlebot, then they won’t appear in Google’s search engine results pages. This could be because, for example, a web designer has written the code for that page, and the code includes a “no-index” instruction for Googlebot.

Sometimes this is written into the page when the web designers are constructing the page.

However, unless the index code is removed, that page won’t appear in Google’s results.

Therefore, make sure there are no technical SEO issues, such as pages that cannot be indexed on your website.

If some pages can’t be indexed, then work with web designers and an SEO agency to resolve these issues.

Make sure you keep your CMS plugins up to date.

It’s essential that if you have a WordPress website, you keep your WordPress plugins up to date.

The reason for this is that if a WordPress website doesn’t keep its plugins up to date, it’s possible that the website will not function properly.

This means Googlebot won’t be able to crawl and index the website because it will have gone offline.

Therefore, this means that shoppers will also be unable to use the website, which in turn affects Google’s rankings and sometimes causes the website to drop quickly in Google’s search results.

This is why a business needs to keep its WordPress plugins up to date.

 

Improve dwell times

The businesses which rank 1st, 2nd and 3rd on Google will have a combination of good backlinks, good content marketing and also they offer good UX. This means that these pages have high dwell time and low bounce rate. To achieve this, the pages must be well-designed and have excellent SEO.

To improve dwell times, content marketing must be well-written and engaging.

Also, for any page to rank high in Google’s organic results, the page needs to have a high Google E-EAT score.

This means it must be both well-written and well-researched. An expert on that product or service must also write it.

If it’s clear that the author has no clue about the product or service they are writing about, then the bounce rate will be high.

 

Reduce bounce rate

Use Google Analytics to identify which pages on your company website have a high bounce rate.

Then work with your web designers and the on-page SEO staff to improve the page, allowing you to lower the bounce rate.

What you find is that the pages that rank right at the top of Google have a very low bounce rate. The reason is that they will be very well designed so that they answer the shopper’s query. They will have been constantly refined, sometimes using split testing, to further reduce the bounce rate.

 

Remove toxic links

If your website contains a large number of toxic links, also known as spammy links, these can significantly hinder your SEO.

What this means is that if a business has a lot of spam links, it often stands little to no chance of that page being ranked on the first page of Google. The reason is that spam links can damage your search engine optimisation, which can result in your business moving down Google’s rankings.

Therefore, spam links can harm your ranking, and high-quality backlinks can improve it.

However, if your business has spam links, also known as toxic links, then your SEO agency will need to address this situation. Sometimes, an agency will disavow the links; however, you will need to contact an SEO company for help and advice on how to fix any toxic links your business may have.

 

Have a good website designed.

There’s no point in paying, say, in excess of a thousand pounds per month for SEO services if the web design is subpar.

Sometimes businesses have websites designed that are basic and somewhat unappealing.

Sometimes, for example, they are so basic that they don’t say much about the business, and even the products are described using one line of text.

This is not ideal; therefore, before any company begins improving SEO, the web design must be of high quality.

U.X

The UX of a website is massively important; the website must be fast, simple to use, and also help customers find the right product very easily.

 

Smartphone

What you need to consider is how well your company website performs on both smartphones, such as Apple iPhones, and desktops.

What you have to consider is the following:

– The UX of the website
– How fast the company website is
– What is the bounce rate like?
– How high is the dwell time?
– What is the CTR?

For example, you can enhance the design to make the main menu more user-friendly. This may mean that the main menu is less cluttered, and also that shoppers can find the right product with the minimum number of clicks. This can help keep the shopper on your website for longer, increasing dwell times. Additionally, because shoppers reach the right page with much greater ease, they are more likely to buy from you.

This is why, in the United Kingdom, numerous UX web design companies can conduct split testing to gradually improve the design of your e-commerce website or brochure website, ultimately generating more sales.

 

Check the health of your business’s backlinks regularly

What is really important, mainly because there’s something called “negative SEO”, is that your business uses a backlink checking tool such as

Majestic to check the health of your business’s backlinks.

Essentially, if your business has too many spam links, these are sometimes referred to by SEO agencies as “toxic links.” What can happen is that your business can sometimes substantially move down Google’s rankings.

Additionally, if your business has too many toxic links, it can be instantly penalised by Google.

Businesses most definitely want to avoid a link penalty, as a link penalty, if it’s an algorithmic penalty for building spam links, can result in the business being removed entirely from Google’s organic search engine results.

This means that a business can be ranked at the top of Google one moment, but then, due to accumulating spam links, it can receive a manual or algorithm penalty. Both of these types of penalties, called link penalties, essentially mean that the business is removed from

Google because the agency or the company has not adhered to and followed Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, which essentially means following white-hat SEO practices.

 
Google updates

It’s also worth noting that Google releases hundreds of algorithm updates each year.

This means that your website may not be directly affected by all of these Google updates, but your business could still be impacted. This could be because Google is rolling out a significant algorithm update aimed at reducing spam, such as pages with duplicated text or excessive AI-generated content.

Therefore, the point we are trying to make is to keep an eye on sites like Search Engine Land and Google to see if they are rolling out significant updates.

If they are rolling out an update and you notice that your business’s Google Search Console shows a decrease in your organic ranking, this could be because you need to improve some aspect of your website.

For example, if you read that Google is rolling out the “Google Helpful Content Update” and you then notice that your website’s SEO is negatively affected, this could be because you need to improve the quality of your business blog posts and pages. This could be because the pages don’t offer much helpful and valuable information.

Therefore a good quality SEO agency will look at what pages might have duplicated text, AI text, or perhaps content thin, and look to improve the quality of those pages, so that when Google rolls out its next algorithm update, such as the Google Helpful content update, that next time, you may see your organic rankings improve.

Google E-EAT

If your business wants to improve its SEO, it must definitely enhance the Google E-EAT for each page.

For example, Google’s algorithm places pages on the first page if they have good quality links, but also if the page has a high Google E-EAT score.

E-EAT stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness; therefore, the content marketing needs to be of high quality. If it is of very high quality and has a high Google E-EAT score, then these pages tend to rank higher.

For example, avoid having too many content-thin pages, as these often consist of just a few lines of text. These won’t offer helpful information to the shopper.

 

Google Helpful Content Update

When you hire an SEO agency, what you need to do is ensure that when they write blog posts for your business, they are really well-written. This means that when shoppers read the product descriptions, or, for example, a whole article, you want most readers to find that work really helpful.

The reason is that if a shopper finds the page really helpful, they often don’t go to the competition to find an answer, because your business has already answered the question.

Additionally, because the shopper is so interested in your blog post, as it’s well-written and valuable to them, the dwell time can increase.

Now, let’s give you an example: one business in its Google Analytics account may have an average dwell time of 1 minute.

Yet when you compare this to a direct competitor, which has an average dwell time of over 7 minutes in Google Analytics, it’s clear that shoppers are finding that website much more interesting and worth reading for longer. Therefore, Google’s algorithm will notice that your business is keeping the shopper’s interest for a significantly longer period. As a result, because your company can hold shoppers on your page for longer, allowing them to read and buy items, your business’s organic SEO is likely to improve.

This is simply because you can keep the dwell time higher than your direct competition, which indicates that shoppers are interested in your products and services, as evidenced by their spending much longer time on your website.

 

Google Panda

Before your business starts work on improving its search engine optimisation, what would you highly recommend to all businesses that they have some knowledge of the critical “Google Updates”- such as:

Google Penguin
Google Panda
Google Hummingbird
Google E-EAT
Google Helpful Content Update

 

 

Google Penguin

You should definitely have a good understanding of the Google Penguin update in particular.
The reason is relatively simple: many businesses, when they start trying to improve local SEO or their national organic SEO, often purchase an SEO tool.

A good-quality SEO tool, such as Moz Pro, Ahrefs, or SEMrush, can tell you how many backlinks your direct competitors have.

What you can also do with these backlink checking tools is download your competitors’ backlinks and place them into an Excel document.

What you can do is then see where your direct competitors have been building do-follow and no-follow backlinks.

However, the reason we say that a business should be aware of the Google Penguin updates is that Google link penalties have impacted many companies since the rollout of that update.

Another name for the Google Link penalties is Google Penguin penalties.

If a business builds a lot of spam links, this is when Google’s algorithm could automatically issue a Google Penguin penalty.

Businesses that have received a link penalty will sometimes see their organic rankings drop drastically. For example, you might have been on page 1 of Google, then after the link penalty, you are moved to page 7. In some circumstances, what actually happens is that the website, along with all its pages and blog posts, is completely deindexed. This means that the business is completely taken off Google because it has too many spam links.

 

How our agency can help your business rank higher on Google

We are a highly successful SEO agency.

We have over 11 years of experience helping a vast number of businesses to get themselves onto page one of Google.co.uk.

This has helped our clients gain more sales and invest in a type of marketing that’s highly effective and offered at a sensible cost.

With SEO packages starting at £ 1,000, we offer tremendous value for money to all businesses based throughout the UK. We can also work with you regardless of where you are based, anywhere across the globe.