SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a common term with business owners nowadays. Most people will be aware that it involves expanding the reach of your website so that more of your target audience will see it in the organic rankings of search engines like Google.

As a search engine optimisation (SEO) agency, Black and White Boy speak to a lot of businesses across Newcastle Upon Tyne and further afield, both nationally and internationally.

But there are a lot of myths built up around how to do SEO effectively, and a lot of them are based on old practices used years ago by those who were trying to hack the algorithm.

Other business owners think they only need to put a website live on the internet, then just sit back, relax, and wait for a flood of traffic from buyers with credit cards in hand eager to purchase. Sadly, you couldn’t be further from the truth.

Key Takeaways

• Ongoing SEO Support is Crucial: The importance of continuous SEO support, rather than seeing SEO as a one-time setup. This is essential for adapting to the ever-changing digital landscape and ensuring long-term success.
• Search Engines are Dynamic: Search engines frequently update their algorithms, which can significantly impact website rankings. This underscores the need for constant vigilance and adjustments in SEO strategies.
• Adaptability is Key: being adaptable in SEO practices to keep up with the evolving algorithms of search engines. This adaptability ensures that a website remains competitive and visible.
• Open Dialogue is Essential: Encourage an open and ongoing dialogue between SEO experts and clients. Communication is crucial for staying aligned on goals, reporting progress, and making timely adjustments to SEO strategies.
• Commitment to Sustainability: Commitment to the sustainability of website rankings through proactive monitoring and strategic updates. This reassures potential clients of the long-term value you provide.
• Expertise in Algorithm Updates: Expertise in understanding and responding to search engine algorithm updates, positioning your service as an invaluable asset in navigating the complexities of SEO.

Getting Your Brand Noticed Online.

SEO is not a set-and-forget type of deal. Getting a website online is only the first entry on your SEO to-do list. While customers may indeed want to deal with you or buy your goods on the Internet, the truth is, with billions of websites online already and hundreds of thousands being added every day, the search engines are crammed full of competitors just like you, plotting their way to the top slot.

So the question is, how do you get yourself noticed in the search engines so customers can find you at the top of the search results?

As a business owner, one of the first things you need to do is to change your conventional mindset about who your competition is. It’s no longer the guy down the road or in a neighbouring city, as has been the case for brick-and-mortar businesses. Online, It is the 10 organic positions as well as the map listings and ads that appear on the first page of Google for any given search term.

As the old SEO industry joke goes, “Where’s the best place to hide a dead body… On the second page of Google”. LOL!

You see, Google’s first page of search results has limited space, typically featuring only 10 organic listings and sometimes map listings for geo-location-based search queries. As you move up the rankings, the competition becomes increasingly fierce. To secure a spot on the first page and have a chance at attracting significant traffic, your website needs to be competitive with the other top-ranking sites targeting the same keywords and audience.

So you may be asking, how do you get my website to appear high up in the search engines? well, the quick and easy answer is to use Black And White Boy to set up some PPC advertising campaigns to get immediate traffic to your site :).

But on this page specifically, we are talking about organic traffic, this is the free traffic listing in the Search engines index, otherwise known as the SERPs or Search Engine Ranking Pages.

Comprehensive Technical Audit.

We carry out a comprehensive assessment of your website to determine why it is not performing and what needs to be done to ensure it complies with what Google and the other search engines want. To do that you need to first understand what the search engine’s prime objective is. Their main purpose is to provide a great user experience, in this case, it means to return the best, most relevant, and authoritative content for any given search query.

For us to achieve the above in its most basic form, SEO can be broken down into two main areas, on-page, which covers everything that appears physically on the site, and off-page, which accounts for everything external to the site but may still influence its performance.

On-Page SEO

To give you an idea of how advanced the search engines have become, it is said that Google considers more than 200 individual ranking factors to determine the quality of any given site. Thus, the on-site assessment we provide is very extensive and thorough: Many important ranking factors can indeed be investigated quickly on the Internet, but the practical implementation requires an experienced eye and knowledge of how search engines work, web-based protocols, server programming languages, as well as many other technical aspects.

On-page website optimisation is a key factor for any successful website, As a Newcastle SEO agency, Black And White Boy cover all those requirements on two primary levels, the first being the structure and the code upon which a site is built, this is important so it can be crawled efficiently by the “robots” the search engines dispatch to crawl your site so it can assess the quality of the website itself.

Secondly, and most importantly, we cater to the readers who will browse your site. The key here is to fill the site’s pages with knowledge and value so visitors can find the information they are looking for and answer the questions they have when they browse.

Therefore, the site needs to provide quality, authoritative content that provides accurate information with exceptional value. This information doesn’t have to be just in words; it can also be in the form of “rich media,” which includes images, videos, and audio.

Through our ongoing testing and up-to-date knowledge of the search engines, the team at Black and White Boy is an expert in understanding what the search engines are looking for and the quality signals they covet. Therefore, we know the tweaks and amendments we need to make to your site that will help it rank better, have a greater online presence, and appear in all the main search terms for your target audience.

In-Depth Assessment

We offer a comprehensive and professional on-page optimisation service where we analyse the key on-page triggers and assess if they are good or bad for your site. this is a manual process we carry out for all sites and encompasses all on-page factors of a website, including keyword usage, latent semantic indexing (LSI), keyword usage, density, internal linking, links out to other sites, as well as site and page structure, use of headers, tags, categories, etc.

After detailed keyword research, we focus our attention on your website in order to increase the relevance and indexability of your online property, the process of which includes:

• Sufficient and relevant content availability and uniqueness?
• Keywords in sufficient quantity and in the correct places in the source code?
• Relationship between source code and relevant content (e.g. is there too much javascript?)
• Is your source code valid and semantically correct?
• Is the metadata properly implemented?
• Is the loading time within recommended guidelines, and can it be reduced further?
• Are there negative ranking factors? (Spam, Keyword stuffing, hidden text, cloaking, etc.)
• Is there any internal linking included on the site to ensure efficient flow through the site? Is the menu also user-friendly?
• Is the content updated regularly?
• Google Health Check: 404 handling, robots.txt, .htaccess, sitemaps, etc.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is related to all the off-site elements of a website. This has primarily to do with link building—the links pointing to your site from other assets on the web—and the networking of your site across the internet.

Off-page audits are just as important as the on-page SEO audits we carry out on sites, as links pointing to your site are a crucial determining factor for your site’s online success or failure, as the search engines often use these as “votes” against which your site can be evaluated for popularity and authority within your sector, industry, or subject matter. Therefore, this is an important pillar of any search engine optimisation audit.

• When carrying out a website audit, some of the off-page factors we consider are:
• The number of backlinks pointing to your domain?
• The quality links do you have pointing to your site?
• Are the links in the optimal density of branded, naked URLs and keyword-type links?
• Where are the links coming from, Are they good or bad sources?
• Are the links purchased or rented? If this is obvious or apparent,?
• Are the links from related sites? Are they contextual and relevant?
• How old are the links?
• What type of link are they, follow, no-follow, images, directory, etc?
• From which IPs are they linked?
• Are social media links, such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. pointed to your site?

Our off-page SEO audits are very important and can identify issues with your website which can explain some of the reasons why your site is having trouble ranking with the search engines, or at least whether it is fully optimised or not especially if your SEO has previously been handled by someone who doesn’t understand the complexities of Search engine optimisation.

We can help sculpt your link profile to ensure that it is fully relevant as all links are NOT created equally, the objective is to connect with relevant authoritative sites within your industry to help reflect your online presence and authority within your industry too alongside or ahead of your competitors.

We do this through a manual process and painstakingly reaching out to the most authoritative properties within yours and associated industries, writing the best articles within your industry and publishing that content on your site which results in obtaining optimal inbound links from the right channels and in turn gives the search engines what they want which is high-quality signals.

Furthermore, we can arrange for the necessary social accounts to be assigned to you and have them work in tandem with your site, leveraging the power of services such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google My Business.

All off-page SEO work carried out is documented and monitored on an ongoing basis to ensure the link profile is optimised.

Delighted With The Results?

The practical implementation of our suggested improvements results in increased visibility of your site on the internet. Depending on the sector and its competitiveness, it is not unusual for your site to significantly increase in the search engines and ensure the ultimate competitive advantage over your competition.

As SEO experts, we provide ongoing support to ensure the sustainability of your rankings going forward. As search engines are a fluid entity and can change their algorithm daily, it is therefore imperative that as with any search engine optimisation, your site is kept up-to-date and a dialogue between the two parties is maintained.