Introduction

SEO can feel like an ineffective gym routine sometimes. You’re doing all right motions, writing content, reading blog posts for advice, asking customers for Google reviews, but nothing.

This is a bit like going to the gym, having ambitions to look like Rocky Balboa, but ending up feeling more like Mr Blobby.

So, how can you improve on this?

How can you, as the modern saying goes, “move the needle”?

Don’t worry yourself, we have the perfect formula, the secret sauce, the way to help you reach the top of Google rather than wanting to throw the towel in.

But it does involve a lot of work, so don’t get lazy- let’s get fitness crazy.

 

Trust

Trust goes a long way; it’s like when you meet someone in business for the first time, you get that “gut feeling” of whether you like them or not.

So, our first and overarching point to every bit of advice we dispense here is about trust.

You have to make your content marketing trustworthy (the “T” in Google EEAT)

The links you build have to be from a trusted source

The advice you dispense throughout your website, yep, you guessed it, needs to be reliable and trustworthy.

So, there’s a common thread here, we would ask you to sow that with us, that is, make your work matter. Don’t ask someone to just throw

1,000 words on a page, build 10 links by Friday or start a debate on social media just for the sake of it.
Instead, be trustworthy, dispense quality advice, and show you’re the best at what you do.

 

Keywords- what are they, why do they matter to SEO

When something’s super complicated, it’s best to break it down into its parts.

Let’s look at Google and its rather marvellous algorithmic formula. How does it work?

Well, keywords are integral to Google’s algorithm; they need to be processed through a process called “crawling and indexing”.

So, let us show you why keywords are important. Imagine you’re living in a rather swanky, upmarket, affluent suburb.

It’s nice area to live, people say hello to each other on windy walks, the coffee is massively overpriced at the local coffee shop, and people buy bread that’s close to a monthly mortgage payment- it’s an affluent area, just what people want.

Great, but say a brand-new shop opens on the high street, it has “minimalist signage”, the shop window doesn’t give much clue what’s going on inside.

So apart from curious locals, you may not have a blooming clue what’s being sold in the shop as you walk past it after work! Is it fancy shoes they retail, insurance, a consultancy, or something else?

So, this is the same as a poorly designed and optimised website (long-winded example, we got there in the end).

A minimalist website, a website with hardly any words, no on-page SEO, how will Googlebot decipher what you sell?

You might be a funky minimalist architect’s practice that wants to be all “edgy” and use different advertising techniques, but guess what: if the content marketing and on-page SEO don’t convey what you’re all about, Google will choose a business that matches the search query better.

 

Google needs on-page SEO

This is the golden rule, the item if you like that will really move the needle, that’s having blooming superb on-page SEO and site structure.

We are the masters at this, well, I have been personally improving on page elements for 11 years now.
So, you have to optimise the titles, meta descriptions, main content, alt text, add outbound links much more and make sure you keep things white hat!

Google needs quality content, content so good it can cross-check the facts with Google’s Knowledge Vault.

We won’t talk about the semantic web here too much, but it’s important and well worth a read about if you have a spare moment. If you dispense quality advice and truly know what you’re talking about, you will naturally write “entities” into your work.

These are like facts, figures, people, places, things- Google knows how these topics of conversation overlap. How they fit into the broader picture of life, for example, if you’re talking about say employment contracts, you’re probably in the field of employment law.

 

Keyword Research

You should carry out keyword research. If you’re a local business that sells, say, a few products or services, this shouldn’t take too long.

However, tools such as Ahrefs and Moz open your eyes to how customers describe your business’s products. Remember, they are on a “buying journey”- at the start, they may think they just want a simple “loft conversion”, then after further research they may want a “Dorma loft conversion”, then after using keyword research tools they want a “Dorma loft conversion with a walk-out balcony so I can drink espressos at height and be the envy of my neighbours”.

Okay, the last keyword was a slight exaggeration; however, in-depth keyword research is key so head on over the Ahrefs and sign-up. We have no affiliation or sponsorship deal with Ahrefs, however they one of the best SEO tools on the market and have been around for a longtime.

Therefore you can’t appreciate the buying journey unless you start as a buyer with no knowledge of the products or services you’re selling.

For example, you might start off reading this article, “How do I move the needle on improving my SEO”, then you might think, well, stuff that, that’s time consuming, and search Google for “the largest SEO agency in my area”- it’s still a buying journey, and one we marketers must appreciate it so we write and produce the right content.

It’s then a process of matching these questions to helpful content marketing that answers the questions comprehensively, this is called “matching search intent”- all that means is answering questions that your shoppers ask.

In return for making their lives a bit easier, you could end up making more sales.

 

Keyword research is, therefore, the first step.

Because without it, well, how do you know how to construct the website page layout, or how the H1 tags should be written, what keywords to place in the meta descriptions, what questions content marketing should address?
So, if you haven’t done keyword research, do it. There are some tools, such as Moz Pro, that offer a limited time to try them out.

 

Apply keywords on-page but sparingly.

Ever been eating with someone who goes a bit mad with the condiments?

Too much salt ruins the dish.

Well, adding too many keywords on-page will ruin the business’s SEO. It will lead to “over-optimisation” issues, even Google penalties being whacked on the website. In this case, you could turn up at an agency with all the money in the world, but if organic traffic has tanked because you’ve gone crazy adding keywords everywhere (Google Panda Penalty), well, you may have crashed and burned the whole thing before you’ve had time to soar like an eagle.
Soar like an eagle: you must do this; you need to optimise the page using white-hat best practices.

 

Don’t go keyword crazy.

Just gently and naturally inform the reader and Googlebot what the page is about. The best SEOs in the world have this down to an art form, and with 11 years of experience in this sector, let me dispense some solid advice to you now:

Keywords need to be naturally written into the work.
Here’s what I do: I write the on-page SEO and content marketing as if I am talking to a real person. A shop assistant dispensing advice to a customer, if you worked in a department store, someone wanted to buy a rather fancy retro toaster, would you as the sales person start talking to them by saying “hi, retro toaster, Smeg toaster, nice white toaster below £50”- then answer their query?”

No, you wouldn’t, you would scare the customer- they might even run away, I would run away.
And that’s what you do when you “over-optimise” a page: you’re scaring Googlebot. It just wants to provide good advice to the reader, not repetitive, robotic advice.

 

Page relevance and being relevant

So, you’re armed with your list of keywords; now it’s time to apply them to the page using white hat techniques.

So, a good SEO consultant, a really good one, won’t just think of adding keywords; they will consider keyword density. They will apply the keywords to the URL slugs, title tags, and alt text, but do so correctly.

 

Outbound links

We will labour the point of why inbound links are particularly important in SEO a bit later; however, what a lot of people forget is to add the odd outbound link into their blog posts every now and then.

Now, here’s why outbound links are worth doing: Google or Google’s algorithm has its roots in a referencing system like you might have used at university.

Just as a lecturer at university would like to mull over your list of sources, to see if they’re reliable, so does Google.
Google’s algorithm likes the odd outbound link thrown into the content marketing. Google also likes to mull over whether the source is credible and reliable.

 

Crawl budget

If you know a thing or two about AI, you will know that running those data centres is a massively energy-hungry process.

Therefore, even the biggest and best names emanating from Silicon Valley don’t have unlimited processing power.

Therefore, when designing your website, consider offering plenty of useful information while preserving your “crawl budget”.
Googlebot constantly scours web pages for new information.

This is a massively energy-consuming process; therefore, Google assigns a “crawl budget” to each website.

An important website, one like the BBC that gets hundreds of thousands of visits per day, will have a massive, sky-high crawl budget assigned to it.

However, a small business in Cardiff says that, when selling a service, the crawl budget is lower.
So, when Googlebot decides to swing by and crawl and index your company website, make sure you’re using your website’s crawl budget to your full advantage.

To do that, preserve your crawl budget with a “robot.txt” file, which basically says to Google: crawl and index this, but don’t bother indexing that, since that’s the login page and customers won’t want to read it.
Other ways to preserve your business’s crawl budget:

 

Content thin

If you have content-thin pages that offer practically no advice, well, it’s time for some improvement work on those pages.

A lot of businesses have these; it’s often because they hired a rather lazy SEO or copywriter in the past.

Often, they thought slapping 250 words of gibberish on the page was enough to shoot to the top of Google.

Often it didn’t work; if it did, it was for longtail keywords no one would enter into Google anyhow, so it was as useful as a chocolate teapot!

Therefore, address thin content pages; they are lowering the website’s overall quality score and wasting your crawl budget.

 

Duplicate content

Duplicate content, this can either be externally copied or internally copied; in either case, it’s not going to do your SEO any good.

Ideally, in a perfect world, you would want to dispense your best advice, be original, and ensure that every URL on your website has unique text or copy on that page. Now, this means no duplication: each URL slug or extension is unique and so should the advice be on the page. If this is not the case, we would recommend getting on the phone with a local agency and sorting out your business’s duplication issues.

 

Be engaging and page engagement

Your content marketing and your whole SEO effort need to be built around user engagement metrics.

For example, what’s the CTR, how long are shoppers spending on a page (dwell times), and how many pages are they visiting?

These are what are called “engagement metrics”, basically, how many visitors are you obtaining?

Then how long can you hold their interest?

 

Gaining backlinks (even in 2026, it’s massively important)

Backlinks are what truly move the needle, because now in 2026 back and back in time to the early days of SEO when Google used “PageRank” to rank websites, backlinks were the main way of deciphering how important a website was.

Therefore, you need links, but links from reputable sources, that’s high-quality businesses and brands, and charities, or say, award companies.

The links (backlinks) a business needs must come from websites with high DA scores. For example, think of Forbes: you want links from websites with a high domain authority score, as this can pass tons of link juice.

A lot of link juice or link equity from high DA websites, well, that’s going to catapult your website up Google ranks.

And why are backlinks still important in 2026?

Well, if we are discussing organic search engine optimisation, then backlinks are still widely considered top of the tree—the most important ranking factor out of about 200 different signals. Therefore, if you want to be the best, ranked right at the top of Google, well, this normally means earning a ton of links.

 

Content marketing and being helpful

A key aspect of ranking high on Google is improving these aspects of your company website:

– Being helpful

– Being considered an expert in your business niche – Then, offering so much useful information, your website retains interest for a long period (improved dwell times)

You must publish useful work that has a high Google EEAT score.

This means don’t be afraid to add your own perspective; this could actually be what gets that piece of work to rank high on Google.

Google uses a framework called Google EEAT for some time, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

The long and short of it is this: write at least one blooming good blog post a month. Not superficial rubbish, but something in-depth, original perspective, something so blooming good it really knocks the socks off the reader and this can also help you to earn links.

 

What about if I want to improve our local SEO?

Lets say you’re a local business, so how do you go about “moving the needle” and improving your local search engine optimisation?

Content marketing but optimised for your city

So, lets say you are a start-up business.

You need more sales and leads, right?

Well, often businesses quickly learn that they need to invest in some sort of digital marketing.

However, what they might find for some businesses is the haven’t got heaps of money to spend on around the clock PPC or Google Adwords spend.

So what’s the solution?

Well, for many businesses the solution comes in the form of local search engine optimisation. This doesn’t mean that the business wants to be driving to the four corners of the U.K- for many businesses that’s simply not cost effective, and not an option.

Therefore, businesses often just want to serve customers in a set geographic location, such as one city or one town.

To do this, to get laser focused on getting more leads in say one city like Cardiff, in Wales, well you need to invest in local SEO. This means yet again, the same as national SEO that you need to place a lot of effort into writing your content marketing.

However, there is a slight difference, that difference comes in the form of your content marketing should answer questions that your customers ask you at your local business.

So for example, lets say you run a local business that roasts coffee, bags it sells it to the general public and also to commercial coffee shops as well.

Therefore, you might serve business say with a 10 mile radius of your industrial unit. Therefore you start to write content marketing such as talking about one week the various bistros, restaurants and café owners that you supply.

For example, the blog post could be titled, “Here’s what local top restaurant owners locally think of blend”.
It therefore products, but also frames it in a local way talking and discussing the product with other local business owners.

 

Google Business optimisation

Okay, so this parts super important if you run a local business.

So, you will want to gain positive reviews, make sure that the NAP information is correct and that your business is in the right business category.

Plus, what’s really important is that you don’t forget to add the URL.

Don’t be afraid to ask for business reviews

So, you might have a whole load of lovely customers flooding into your business every single day. Let’s say you’re example, you’re a hair stylist, and people love you transform their hair from a mass of split-ends to looking shiny and sleek.

So, why not get all those customers that are now happy with their new barnet designs, to get onto your businesses Google Business account.
This is so that they can add the positive reviews, which if done correctly can massively help improve your local SEO.

 

Build local links

Local backlinks are they key to rising up Google’s organic business results.

However, the links today must be, well really good.

There’s no point in having a ton of rubbish links, or any rubbish links for that matter, as that will just damage the businesses search engine optimisation.

So, therefore you need quality links, from local business, which have a super high DA score.

 

NAP information

Make sure that say on the contact page, plus in the footer, that written in plain text so Googlebot can read it is your companies NAP information.

NAP just stands for name, address and phone number.

It’s just what Googlebot plus Google’s algorithm reads in order to work out, well where your business is based.

Keep on top of your NAP information

Okay, so this is a really top tip of ours, that is make sure you keep on top of your businesses NAP information.

NAP stands for name, address and phone number of the business.

So, if you change from one address to the another, here’s what you should do:

– Update your Google Business account with the new NAP information
– Update your website’s NAP information
– Update all of your business citations NAP information
– Have a Google to see where your business’s NAP information is mentioned, such as for example on Wales Online news, and ask for the NAP information to be updated.

 

Why not hire one of the best in the business?

So, we don’t like to blow our own trumpet, but come on, we are a marketing company after all!

That is Walsh & Partners is owned by Ryan Walsh, we have over 10 years experience of getting businesses to be placed higher on Google.

Is this process cheap?

No

Is this process a quick fix?

No

However, for businesses that want to standout in their city, they hire us. As they appreciate that for some businesses, the main way, or sometimes the sole way they gain new customers is via their SEO.

SEO is therefore not just another way of marketing the business, sometimes it’s the sole way that the business advertises what it does.

 

With 10 years experience doing this, well, we’ve now got it down to a fine art.

Therefore if you want to hire one of the best agencies in the whole of Cardiff, do give Ryan and the team a quick call today.