SEO Agency in Manchester

While the basics of SEO are easy to learn, mastering SEO on every level can be complicated – and incredibly time consuming for just one person. Google is now much smarter, and with the increase in digital efforts across many organisations, ranking well organically can be difficult. However, SEO has now become an essential piece in any digital marketing jigsaw. With over 8.5 billion searches on Google per day, its safe to say that no matter who your audience is, they will be searching on Google. An SEO agency’s success relies on keeping on top of Google’s many tricks, trends and regular changes to its algorithms, ranking factors and results, and will have a team of technical and creative marketers with the experience and skills required to stay on top.

SEO costs can vary and are often impacted by factors such as the market you are in, how fast you want to achieve your objectives, and the level of competition you are up against. Most Manchester SEO agencies work on a retainer basis – most likely starting from a few hundred pounds per month – and will undertake content and technical SEO work continuously to keep improving your results.

SEO isn’t an overnight fix. There are many factors that can influence the rate at which your organic rankings improve, such as the quality of content on your website and how technically sound your website performs, to more uncontrollable factors such as the level and type of keywords you are competing for. Depending on the competitiveness of your market and level of SEO activity you implement, SEO can take months to see impactful results and ROIs. But SEO’s successes are long-term too – and in the long term will most likely cost you far less than using paid advertising to maintain the same goals.

When researching keywords, it’s easy to look at volume and try go after the most searched keywords. But keyword intent is much more important. If your business is aimed at more of a B2B market, you want to avoid going down the common pitfalls of targeting generic terms that the B2C market would search for. For example, you sell bar stools for restaurants, then going after the broad term ‘bar stools’ means competition will be high and the vast majority of searches will be those looking to buy for their home. Adding additional terms that make your content more specific to the right niche – say, ‘restaurant’ or ‘venue’ or ‘bulk’ – will see you find the right audience, even if the search traffic is far less than for the broader term.

Gone are the days of being able to stuff your target keywords into hidden text elements across your website. Google has come a long way and its algorithms are now a lot smarter at picking up those trying to ‘manipulate’ the system. We like to break SEO down into three major components: onsite optimisation, i.e the content on your site; technical SEO i.e. is your site responsive, does it have any major indexing issues, etc.; and Offsite Optimisation, i.e. what other sites refer back to your website, often referred to as backlinks.