AT ALBION, WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY…

It goes without saying that your small business’s website needs to rank at the top of Google for your brand’s name – so those who have heard your name can come to find the information they are looking for. However, it is high search rankings and strong visibility in Google’s organic search results for the keyword searches that relate to your actual products and services that really matter when the game is to generate traffic and sales from your online market.

Fortunately, attracting increasing volumes of highly targeted online traffic is one of Albion’s specialities. Our consistent results illustrate this and so do our customer testimonials and case studies. However, Search Engine Optimisation involves lots more than just optimising the content and metadata of your web pages for each of your product’s target keywords phrases. It also involves a great number of clever tactics that ensure that Google is given everything it needs in order to reward your pages with top rankings. After all, pushing your competitors out of view and kicking the ladder from beneath you, once you are at the top, is the way to achieve the initial growth that gets you much closer to where the big money is.

The set of methods Albion’s SEO experts use to acquire high rankings that attract larger and larger volumes of natural search traffic are always changing. This is due to Google’s constantly evolving nature. The problem that most small businesses and start-ups face is that most digital marketing agencies don’t employ specialist SEO staff and if they do, they hide those experts behind a wall of inexperienced “account managers”. If you have worked with other agencies, this may be one of your biggest concerns – and one reason you may be tempted to learn all about how Google really works yourself.

If you have spent a couple of years studying which ranking factors Google gives the most weight to and how to go about exploiting these elements produce the best results, you will be aware of the most successful methods that include areas of technical SEO, content marketing and link building. These cornerstones of achieving high rankings work alongside Google’s RankBrain AI to reward not the best sites, but those who are optimised by those who know how to give Google exactly what it needs to reward your site with top rankings.

As part of all of Albion’s on-site SEO campaigns, we include a range of practices such as removing duplicate content caused by product tag pages and date archives, that do nothing but dilute Google’s index of your content. We sidestep keyword cannibalisation where two or more pages are optimised for similar keyword phrases that cause your pages to compete against each other and “share” the ranking power between them and drop their position. We also make use of savvy internal linking methods that pass maximum ranking power on to your most important product and service pages that should pull in all those potential online customers you are currently missing.

When the once-only work of optimising your site is completed we design an ongoing content marketing and link building campaign to boost your rankings (each incoming link acting as a “vote” for your page). It is this link building that is undoubtedly the most difficult but most powerful way to achieve top rankings for phrases your market are searching for. But if you want to do that in-house, we can show you exactly how to attract powerful links from other relevant, trusted sites.

Achieving top positions in Google won’t bring your small business any extra visits if your pages are optimised for keyword phrases that few people search for. So we always do valuable keyword research in order to ensure both your and our team enjoys a full understanding of the most lucrative target keywords to optimise your pages for. During this process, we also uncover the all-important “modifier” and “qualifier” keywords. These can be weaved into your pages in order to allow them to qualify to rank highly for a whole range of search queries your market uses when searching for products and services you offer.

For example, by including variations of this page’s target keyword phrase “small business marketing” in the heading, subheadings, metadata and content of this page, it not only has a chance of ranking for that “head” term, but also a whole range of others. So by including words like “digital”, “services”, “agency” and other qualifier keywords, we are able to gain higher positions in Google’s results for a much larger number of relevant search queries. Unfortunately, many digital marketing agencies only have a basic understanding of how Google’s search algorithm works so their clients don’t reach their true potential online.

Identifying these less-obvious keywords can help you rank for your main target phrases and also the larger number of “long-tail” search queries people use. This can be a real eye-opener for those who haven’t previously had their pages optimised by specialist SEO consultants. They soon realise how much traffic from potential customers they have been missing out on – due to lack of keyword research and effective webpage optimisation.