There are a number of different things that affect your SEO. The websites that have the best visibility or ranking within search engines are the ones that pay close attention to each one, allowing them to compete with other businesses in their market

What affects my SEO?

The way Google ranks websites has changed over the years. It used to be that pages with the most use of a search term would rank highest for that search term. This led to a tidal wave of content that was designed to cheat the system, but that provided no meaningful information for users. That is no longer the case. Google is looking to find out how credible and relevant you are with regards to a user’s search term. This ultimately leads to a more satisfying user experience and cements Google as the world’s number one search engine.

Here are the different ways Google measures a website’s relevance and credibility

• A Functioning and Accessible Website with Security

Now this might seem obvious, but there are an incredible number of businesses that have half finished, badly constructed or non functional websites. In fact, 36% of small businesses don’t have a website at all,and they’re really missing a huge opportunity to connect with new customers and clients. Google will also look to see whether your website is secure. That means you will require a Secure Sockets Layer certificate (SSL). This certificate secures the interaction between your website and the user, meaning that their communications and payment information remain confidential.

• High Page Speed (Desktop & Mobile)

Another way Google will analyse your website is by checking the time that it takes to load on both a desktop, and mobile devices. This means that you need to ensure that your website has been optimised to make it as small as possible. Websites that contain very large images, videos and other high memory data will load slower, and that will hurt them with Google. It is also now essential to have a ‘lite’ and mobile friendly version of your website. If you opt to only have a desktop version, your site will load very slowly on mobile, and you will be penalised for that. Slow loading times also affect your ‘bounce rate’ (the percentage of people who enter your website, but exit very quickly). This also negatively affects your SEO, as Google will assess that you’re not providing a good service with reliable content.

• Your Website’s Age, URL and Domain Authority

Statistics shows that websites with a domain newer than 3 years-old will always have a momentous task on their hands when it comes to ranking on the first page of Google. However, it may be possible to rank very quickly, if you’re a smaller local business, and there is little competition, or your competition is not paying attention to their digital needs. If the keywords that you want to rank for are in your URL, for instance, if you have a place name or your service, I.E ‘www.manchesterplumbers.com’, you need to pay special attention to your content and ensure it is of a high quality and relevant. Google has a penalisation for exact match keywords in URLs on sites that don’t have content to match. The domain authority of your site dictates how high your rank in the search results and you will improve that with a combination of great content and off-site SEO practices.

• Optimisation of your Content

Optimising your content will help Google understand what your site is about and which search terms to rank it for. They do this by scanning the keywords on your website. The keywords essentially provide a synopsis of your website to Google, and then use all the other SEO factors to test your site against your competitors. If your keywords are deemed not to be relevant with regards to the products or service that you provide, you will be penalised. Particularly, if you’re running an e-commerce site, it is very important to ensure that all of your content is original and completely unplagiarised, and that your products have a unique product description. Duplicated content is scanned by Google,and you will be deemed to have low quality content if there are multiple instances of the same content found.

• Technical SEO

Aside from the optimisation of your content, there are also small technical parts of your site that Google looks to in order to find which topics your content relates to, and it cross-references this information with your content text. It will pay special attention to keyword phrases in titles and headers on your web pages, meta descriptions (The small description of a webpage that appears in Google’s search results) and Image alt tags (A small description of the image that appears when a mouse hovers over it). It’s important that these areas feature your keywords and then the content also features the same keywords.

• Customer Experience

Another area Google will also study is how customers interact with your website. It takes into account the bounce rate (How many users immediately leave your site after entering), the Click through-rate (How many users enter your website after it appears in the search results) and the dwell-time (How long visitors stay on your website after entering). It will combine these factors to assess how well you’re catering to your users, and if you’re deemed to be credible and relevant. The great thing is, if you follow the above steps, this one will take care of itself.

• Links

One of the biggest changes in how Google assesses websites is how links to your website from other websites affects the way your page ranks. In the old system, the more links to your website the better, and it was fairly easy to cheat the system by posting a link on any old other website that you could find. However, Google is now using domain authority to split good links and bad links apart. Your website is going to need off-site links, but they need to be from sources with high domain authority. Liinks from sites with low domain authority will have a negative impact, as you’re deemed to be associated with sites that are a poor quality source. An easy way to get good links is by having your business listed on the most used business directories, this is one method that is essential for small businesses in the modern era.

• Correct Business Information

Finally, it is critical that all of the information about your business online is correct and up to date. This means everything from Google my Business, Yelp, Facebook, Foursquare and anywhere else that has information about your business. If your business has inconsistent information that varies between sources or people submit a lot of corrections for your listings, this will negatively impact your SEO. Google will deem that you are not providing credible and reliable information sources to its users, and will subsequently penalise you for this.

How can Alpha SEO – Full Service SEO Help?

Alpha SEO has the benefit of spending over 15 years in the Search Engine Optimisation industry, and has been able to assist over 40,000 small to medium businesses reach the first page of Google. Their constant innovation means that they have developed technology at a world class level, and their expert dedicated staff allows their clients to relax and focus on other aspects of their business.

Alpha SEO can take care of all of your onsite and offsite optimization requirements and they use artificial intelligence to make the required changes at an almost instant rate. With their future forward approach, you will also be equipped to handle whatever the future of SEO throws at you.

What is Alpha SEO?

How many Keywords does the Alpha SEO Base Package Include?

They target 7 keywords. This consists of one Geographical location of the client and seven additional keywords.

What makes Alpha SEO a Full-service SEO?

They do onsite edits and adjustments, offsite link building, website submissions, and we write content. They also provide full reporting, an excellent dashboard to see the details in a transparent way, and Partner support.

Can I get a Custom quote or do a bigger program?

Absolutely, they offer custom quotes where we audit the site and provide a cost. Often this is for national quotes or multi-location businesses, like a franchise.

To supplement their base program, they offer Add-ons. These Add-ons can be ordered with the initial order or at any time during the program.

What are Add-ons?

Add-ons are simply a way of building the program to cover what your business needs.  This can include an additional Geography, and an additional set of 7 Keywords, and more power to the existing program.

The Alpha SEO Base Package includes:

• All-in-one white label SEO dashboard
• 1 keyword topic and 1 target location (Location of Business)
• 7 target keywords
• 1 piece of content writing or guest blogging (every 6 months)
• 10+ backlinks every month
• 5 website pages of on-page optimization
• Website audit and SEO issues fixes
• Google My Business listing advanced optimization as required
• Website goal conversion tracking [Google Analytics]
• SEO KPI dashboard and metrics
• Website uptime monitoring and reporting
• Weekly website SEO health check via crawler audit
• Weekly and Monthly SEO status reports