Published: 02/01/2025
Written by: Ryan Walsh

Table of contents:

• What is an SEO strategy?
• Why it’s essential to choose the right SEO keywords
• Who’s currently on the first page of Google, and how did they get there?
• Make it better, make it 10x better
• Why content marketing must cut the mustard
• We discuss why backlinks are still an essential aspect of SEO.
• Why is it necessary to improve and update your content marketing?

Introduction

As we all know, businesses of all shapes and sizes want to get on page one of Google.

It stands to reason that being ranked in the top 3 of Google for super competitive keywords can often transform your business.

It can be that competitive advantage that businesses globally seek and strive for.

Yet, those valuable things don’t come easy with anything in life.

Therefore, it’s very important to develop an effective SEO strategy. Regardless of the size of the business, a marketing plan should be in place from the outset.

What exactly is an SEO strategy?

The main aim of both organic and local SEO is to improve the business’s visibility.

This means that improving technical SEO, link building, and publishing high-quality content marketing can improve the website’s visibility so that it appears higher on Google.

First things first, which keywords are you optimising the website for?

 

Keyword research

Often, when a business first approaches an SEO agency to help gain more sales, the first part of improving the company’s organic search engine optimisation is keyword research.

There are plenty of tools to help with this. Some really good SEO tools that we strongly recommend are Moz Pro and Google Search Console, which are free and easy to set up.

 

What are long tail keywords?

So, if your website is brand new, has just been designed, or you’re just getting started in improving your organic or local search engine optimisation, the best way to start and kick things off is to go after long-tail keywords.

Long tail keywords are longer, slightly more wordy sentences describing a business’s services or products.

Now, they might also be deemed as more conversational searches.

So, we mean by this that you might ask Google, “Find me a local plumber that offers emergency callouts.”

Now, if a marketing agency gets you onto the first page of Google for this keyword, it won’t drive as many customers as a short-tail keyword, yet it can help generate more sales.

So, many digital marketing agencies optimise the website in the short term for as many long-tail keywords as possible.

This can help generate more sales in a shorter time frame than it would take to generate sales by targeting short-tail keywords.

In our industry, a short-tail keyword would be “SEO Cardiff.” These are more competitive and challenging to rank on the first page of Google and, therefore, involve much more work.

However, with long-tail keywords, you can improve your SEO quickly.

 

Who’s currently on page one of Google?

So, it’s all good to use various SEO tools to analyse which keywords you should optimise the website for, but there’s so much more to search engine optimisation than just carrying out keyword research.

There’s also website design, technical SEO, link building, and on-page SEO.

So, it’s essential to work out who’s on the first page of Google for the keywords you want to rank for.

Then, it’s simply a matter of examining that work to see how it achieved that first-page position.

Is it because the website offers a good U.X, that’s user experience?

Is it because they have invested in blisteringly fast Seo?

When you analyse the backlink profile, is it because they have hundreds of quality links?

Or is it a mixture of all of these?

Well, this should help you create your SEO strategy. For example, let’s say businesses with powerful backlinks occupy the top 3 positions on Google.

Therefore, your business’s SEO strategy should focus on building or earning links.

Create very high-quality content marketing.

Regardless of your company’s business sector, what’s really important is that you create high-quality content marketing.
It should always aim to be a bit better than what’s currently ranking in the number 1 spot because if the work is half-baked, it will not rank high on Google.

So, do create super high-quality content marketing.

The work should be of very high quality if it is to rank high on Google.

 

Google E-EAT

Before you or anybody in your business starts creating and writing content marketing, they should understand Google E-EAT well.
For those who don’t know, Google’s algorithms now crawl and index content marketing, and they want to determine the author’s level of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Now, we have written a blog post explaining more about what Google E-EAT is all about. It’s a significant update, so we highly recommend reading more about that critical change made by Google before you write a long blog post.
So, do get a good understanding of how Google E-EAT works. This way, you can better optimise your business’s content marketing.

 

Backlinks

There’s a lot of mention of businesses buying backlinks; we strongly recommend against this.

Buying links is a surefire way for a business to incur a big fat Google penalty later.

The penalty we are talking about, in particular, is the Google Penguin penalty. It needs to be avoided, as it can result in a website being de-indexed by Google.

This means the website can be removed from Google because of building low-quality backlinks.

On-page SEO

Improving the on-page SEO is crucial, as this can clearly signal to both Googlebot and Google’s algorithm what the page is about.
For example, if the alt text, the internal links, the content marketing, the URL extension, and the page titles all signal that the page is about a Siemens coffee machine, then this helps Google understand the page.

Therefore, Google’s algorithm will know what the product or page is about, place the page in its index, and rank it according to how strong the business’s search engine optimisation is.

Internal linking

On our website, you will see that we cover every SEO topic under the sun.

This can range from talking about technical SEO to why backlinks are essential.

These topics often overlap. For example, if we are talking about mobile SEO, we will often discuss UX and why it’s important that the mobile website be fast.

Because these topics overlap, we can internally link, which helps a shopper or website visitor visit other pages and read more about that topic.

Internal backlinks help improve the SEO in the following ways:

 

Increase time on site.

If you add internal links correctly, you will highlight pages or blog posts related to the topic you are writing about.
For example, if you sell car waxes, you may internally link them to the dashboard cleaning products on your website.

Semantic SEO

So, this topic is not discussed much anymore; it used to be a buzzword.

That is semantic web or semantic SEO.

Things, events, or people are connected.

So, imagine a celebrity might be married to another celebrity and have featured in many blockbuster films.
All these are entities, things that have occurred, an event or a person.

Google has excellent knowledge of all entities through its Google Knowledge Graph.

So, many SEO agencies globally believe content marketing needs to have a high word count and include more entities. This will show Google you have written a more comprehensive and detailed answer.

So, this brings us back to Google E-EAT, where we said that the author needs to show a tremendous amount of experience in terms of what they are talking about.

By demonstrating expertise and experience in what you are talking about, whether changing an oil filter on a car or you’re a top solicitor discussing an area of law, writing a detailed article that’s well written will have a high Google E-EAT score.

You will also most likely have written about many different entities that are connected when writing about that topic.

Google algorithm will, therefore, know that you have written a comprehensive and detailed article.

Google uses “Google Knowledge Vault” as its way of understanding entities.

So, suppose an author writes an exceptionally detailed article that covers and discusses many different entities. In that case, the article has been written by somebody with a good understanding of what they are discussing.

 

A.I content

At this moment, our SEO agency is holding back from using A. I do content marketing on our website and our client’s website.

The main reason for that, again, is Google E-EAT.

We believe that you cannot use AI to show real-life, first-hand experience of what you are talking about.

Instead, the SEO business has to work closely with the client to produce content marketing with a high Google E-EAT score.

This is important because, in written work, the author must demonstrate real-world experience regarding what they are talking about.

Whether you write an article on how to bleed a radiator or how to cook a vegan curry, it will be clear whether somebody with a lot of experience writes it in terms of what they are writing about.

For example, a top chef will recommend substitute ingredients and what to add if you want to make the dish more spicy. They may also add

YouTube videos showing them cooking the dish.

This will all improve the UX. Because the work is high quality, it’s likely to have a low bounce rate.

 

Don’t let your business content marketing become outdated

So, often, a business will put effort into writing a piece of content marketing.

It might be top-notch, possibly offering the best answer to that question on the web.

However, as time goes by, content marketing can become outdated.

The information might become outdated in terms of using obsolete statistics.

This might mean that a visitor to that page may think that the information is no longer relevant or outdated and, therefore, leave the page.

By doing this, they are increasing the page’s bounce rate.

If Google sees that the page has a high bounce rate, it generally signals to Google that the reader isn’t too interested in what that business is writing about.

For example, if a shopper lands on a page and then browses, say, 10 other product pages, it’s a clear signal to Google that the shopper is interested in the business’s products or services.

However, if a shopper lands on one page, stays there for just a few seconds, and then leaves without visiting another page, this is a clear signal to Google that the shopper is not interested in the products or services the business is selling.

In conclusion

To come up with a detailed and winning SEO strategy, we believe that you must pay particular attention to the following:

 

White hat

Every aspect of the work, whether writing the anchor text, writing the evergreen content marketing, or building backlinks, must be completed in a white-hat way.

So, we recommend learning about white hat SEO practices before improving organic SEO.

 

Google E-EAT

As we mentioned earlier, Google E-EAT is now an essential set of guidelines that should be followed to improve your company’s organic SEO.
We highly recommend that you read more about Google E-EAT and how you can improve your main pages’ Google E-EAT score.

 

Content marketing

It’s essential that your business’s content marketing is excellent, top-quality work.

If it’s not, then there isn’t much chance of getting that page on page one of Google.

The competition is fierce, and it doesn’t matter what business sector you work in.

The competition is vast, so all the written work, the articles, and the main pages must be of top quality and well-written.

These pages often need backlinks built, and the work will need to be updated and improved to ensure that the information offered is kept up to date.

 

Link building

Link building is essential to improving organic search engine optimisation in any business.

However, the best way we feel about obtaining backlinks is to earn them.

And now, probably wondering, well, how do you earn them?

Well, the simple answer is that if you push the boat out and write top-quality advice, then you’ll see in your Google Analytics account that you’re getting, let’s say, over 1,000 visitors reading that piece of work every month.

Some of these visitors might be business owners or bloggers, who may then link to the work.

For example, let’s say you’ve published an excellent piece of content marketing or conducted some market research.

Other businesses may quote the market research findings and link to that work.

So, let’s say you ask 1,000 people what they pay for their rent per month.

Estate agents may use your statistics and market research findings in a blog post they have written.

When you accumulate many quality backlinks, your business can begin to move up the ranks.

How we can help

Our SEO agency can take care of improving your business’s organic or local SEO.

Fixed-priced monthly packages start from £700.00 a month.

If you would like to learn more, please get in touch with our team today.