The most common reason to bring a new SEO company onboard is to review an existing campaign that’s not performing and to develop a strategy to improve it.

That all starts with an SEO audit. We’re not talking about simply running a piece of software over your website and giving you an automated report. Although we do use software including SEMrush and Screaming Frog to crawl your site to uncover problems affecting its performance.

The real value of an SEO review is having someone who knows the right questions to ask and an experienced pair of eyes to interpret the answers. The goal is to uncover issues that are holding your website rankings back and provide a foundation for a better SEO campaign.

There are over 200 ranking factors that contribute to successful SEO campaigns. Our SEO audit doesn’t delve into each one individually, nor could it because only Google knows for sure what these individual factors are. Instead, we have a step by step process that usually starts with a problem.

Set objectives for your SEO campaign 

What’s your problem? It could be something along the lines of, “our competitor is on page one and we’re not” or “our rankings were doing really well and now they’ve dropped”. Ultimately, you’ll have a business objective such as increasing traffic or sales, improving brand awareness or reputation. Discovering what your problem is allows us to set objectives for your SEO campaign.

Keyword research

Like many aspects of SEO, keyword research should not be something that you set at the start of a campaign and then forget about. The idea behind step 2 of the review is to evaluate whether the keywords you are currently targeting are the correct ones. For example, you may be chasing keywords that are simply too competitive, there could be less competitive long-tail keywords to target.

Competitor review

Competition is relative to your choice of target keywords. Competing against a High St brand for popular products is going to be harder than competing in niche categories. Knowing who you are competing against will allow you to find appropriate keyword opportunities as well as content ideas and sources for links.

Technical audit

We use industry tools such as Screaming Frog to crawl your website to identify technical issues. These issues range from indexing and slow loading problems to checking that page titles and headings are optimised. We also review URL conventions and site architecture. We highlight the most important changes, ones that have the greatest impact on your search results.

On-page SEO

Here we are looking out for low-quality and poorly optimised pages. By low quality we mean pages with not enough content (thin content), Google prefers a topic to be covered thoroughly on one page than on a series of shorter separate pages that target individual keywords. Content that has been copied from other websites is a big no-no, duplicate content i.e. the same content on different pages will also harm your site.

Page optimisation refers to ensuring that the main keywords you are targeting exist in page titles, meta descriptions and the page copy.

Content analysis

The way people read online differs from the way they read a book or a newspaper so your content needs to reflect this and make it easier for people to understand. A well laid out page has short introductions, small paragraphs, plenty of subheaders and images to guide the reader.

Combining the keyword analysis and the competitor review in steps 2 & 3 we analyse each of your pages compared to competing pages. Your content needs to be better than competing pages if you want to rank above them. By better, it needs to answer your visitors’ questions, avoid any fluff but still be comprehensive. We’ll proofread for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors too.

Focus on your customers

When Google first started out they wrote 10 things they know to be true. The first of these was “focus on the user and all else will follow” a lot has changed at Google since but the user experience is still key. Google Analytics tells us a lot about the user experience so we delve into the data to review how people are engaging with your website including comparing bounce rates, dwell times and goal completions to industry standards

Analyse your backlinks

We use Ahrefs to analyse your backlink profile. This enables us to discover spammy backlinks that could harm performance as well as informing future link building work. As with many aspects of the SEO audit process, backlink analysis should be done with reference to your competitors. A healthy link profile is built consistently over time and has an even distribution of links relevant to your industry and location. We’ll look for any trends including the authority of the site linking to you as well as your competitors to help inform your link building strategy.

An SEO audit is an SEO person’s best friend, they provide the bedrock for your SEO strategy. We always carry out an SEO review of this kind when we start working with new clients and review them once per quarter.

Do you have any questions about an SEO audit for your website?

Schema markup and rich snippets

Schema markup is a type of code that can be added to web pages to help search engines get a better understanding of what’s on the page. This creates rich snippets in your meta descriptions which help them stand out in search results. This is especially helpful to make things like reviews stand out which can differentiate you from your competitors.

Promotion, link building and ongoing SEO strategy

So you have a nice new website. Before we press the launch button we need to decide how we are going to promote it. That includes thinking about the relationships that you can leverage to promote your website as well as plans for social media and link outreach.

As    Local SEO relates to searches such as:

• Pizza near me
• Electrician near me
• Lawyer in Bristol
• SEO agency Bristol

Stats released in 2022 show that 28% of these types of local searches lead to a purchase.

While Google accounts for the majority of these searches, people also look for local services in directories such as Yell and Yelp as well as on Apple Maps and Bing. As more and more searches are made from mobile devices local SEO is increasingly important. 

For many small and medium-sized businesses, local SEO is incredibly important, with the majority of sales coming from people within 10 miles of their business. Which means that if your business relies on delivering products or services to customers in your local area then you need local SEO. 

What is Local SEO?

When you do a local Google search you are presented with three types of results, the paid results, organic results and Google Maps. The Google Maps results give you the top 3 results matching your search, try searching for “pub near me” and you’ll see what I mean (at the time of writing that pub will, unfortunately, be closed due to Coronavirus but you get the picture).

These 3 results are named the “3 pack” or the “Snack Pack”. And the best thing about them is they come in above the organic listings so if you’re in there people are going to click on your business.

How do you get in the Google “3 pack”?

The starting point for local SEO is to claim your Google Business Profile. You could do this yourself but stats show that 56% of businesses haven’t claimed their listing. And that is the easier part so why not trust Next Customer Please to do your local SEO for you? 

Here’s what we do.

Keyword research for local SEO

To find out what local search terms people use to search for your business. For example, if you wanted to find Next Customer Please you might search for, SEO Bristol, digital marketing near me or SEO agency Bristol.

Google My Business, Bing Places, and Apple Maps Listings

Google Business Profile is starting point for local search but Bing Places and Apple Maps are also important. The key is to ensure that all of the business details are consistent. 

Local Citations

Local citations are online mentions of your name, address and phone number (NAP). We ensure that you are registered with all of the important web directories including Yell, Scoot, Yelp and Thomson Local. We also make sure your social media profiles are accurate. We’ll weed out any inaccurate citations by carrying out a citation audit.

On-Page SEO

This includes reviewing keywords in all of the on-page elements such as H1, title tags, URLs and meta descriptions as well as adding relevant schema markup. 

Local Link Building 

Links to quality local sites are as important to local SEO as links are to the rest of your website. They are essentially a vote of confidence from businesses in your area saying that you are what you say what you are.

Reviews

People trust reviews and so does Google. Gaining reviews for the work you have delivered proves that you run a credible and trustworthy business. Google reviews should be your first port of call as well as Facebook, Yelp and industry-specific social platforms such as TripAdvisor.

These are the main areas we focus on. There are other factors that influence your local SEO rankings including social engagement and how people interact with your website. 

If you would like to find out more or discuss how local SEO could benefit your business, please get in touch. 

Technical SEO focuses on making your website faster, easier to crawl, more understandable to search engines and simple for visitors to use. Just like a car with a broken engine, it doesn’t matter how much fuel (content & backlinks) you put in a poorly optimised website, it’s going to chug along at best until you fix it.

Ultimately, you want your website to perform well in search results, get more visitors and convert more enquiries into customers. In order to do that your site and important web pages will need: 

Easy to understand

Search engines use algorithms to judge which content should be shown first, if they see the same content repeated, it’s confusing (at best) so they don’t like it and will effectively penalise your site by returning other sites above yours.

There can be technical reasons why your website CMS is producing duplicate content, in which case we can tell search engines which is the original using something known as canonical URLs.

Another method used for helping search engines understand your website better is by implementing structured data. This allows us to give search engines details about your business including your address, opening hours, product prices, reviews etc in a fixed format (prescribed by Schema.org) which avoids any misunderstanding. 

It is then possible for search engines to display this structured data in the SERPs (search engine results pages) using rich snippets which draw people’s attention to these details and make them more likely to click through to your website.

Internal linking also makes your site easier to understand. You should link to pages in a way that makes logical sense to visitors so that they can easily navigate around. This will please search engines too. We can make doubly sure that search engines can find all of your content by providing a list of pages and posts in an XML sitemap. 

Safe and secure

Privacy is a big issue on the web, every time we search the web we are potentially giving away sensitive data about ourselves. To stop fraudsters snooping on our data websites should use a secure way of transmitting data called HTTPS. Secure sites that implement HTTPS will rank above ones that don’t so we need to make sure your site is one that does.

Should you spy on your competitors? Absolutely, keeping a close eye on your rivals SEO strategies makes sound business sense. 

Competitor analysis will give you insights into what’s working for other businesses in your industry so that you can learn from them and improve your own SEO strategy. 

An SEO competitor analysis will help you understand what works in your sector and location, discover what your competitors are doing well so that you can emulate them, and find gaps in their approach so that you can capitalise on them.

As a result, you’ll have a foundation for your SEO plan laying out the tasks you need to complete in order to beat your competition to better search positions. We’ll identify some low hanging fruit and discover what’s achievable in the short-term as well as mapping out a long-term plan to tackle more ambitious targets.

Here’s how we do an SEO competitor analysis:

• Define your main online competitors. These are the websites that are competing for the same organic keywords as you.
• Assess the competitive landscape. The outcome of this stage will tell us the relative strength of your website compared to others in your market. We can then use a tactical approach to picking the best opportunities. 
• Carry out keyword gap analysis – We are looking for keywords that your competitors rank for, which you currently don’t. We are looking for some golden nuggets i.e. relevant keywords with high search volume that are easy to rank for. If we can’t find any gold we look for silver and bronze instead.
• Find and improve on competitors best content. Since you are in the same market, any popular content that your competitors produce will appeal to your prospects too. The content we produce just has to be better. 
• Link analysis – This is a similar approach to the keyword analysis earlier, we are looking for the sources of links that your competitors have, which you currently don’t have. 

We can also delve into other valuable sources of competitor intelligence, for example, it is possible to investigate competitors’ use of Google Ads to discover insights into which keywords they are targeting. 

Get in touch with Next Customer Please to find out why your competitors are outranking you and what you can do about it.