To give you a bit of background about who we are, VerriBerri are a 10x award winning SEO agency in the UK. We work hard to boost the visibility of our client’s websites and optimise them for the Google algorithms. As a result of our hard work, the brands we work with are able to grow and flourish. We have a passion for seeing companies excel and we love taking on new projects as we go.
SEO can be difficult at the best of times without having to understand all the jargon and intricacies that come with it. On top of this, we then have to battle with the constant changes to the algorithm meaning we’re always evolving our tactics. It’s for these two reasons that we always recommend outsourcing this task to an SEO agency in the UK. Not only will it save you a whole lot of stress in the future but, it’s often a lot more cost-efficient. Time is often something that no business owner has to spare. Having to constantly retrain your staff is time-consuming. At least by bringing a specialist team into the mix, you won’t have to waste time or money on research.
Why Does SEO Exist and How Does it Work?
In case you haven’t heard of the term SEO before, allow me to explain the basics of what it is. Essentially, Google want to ensure the best service for their customers. In order to do so, they need to make sure they’re giving them the right information when they’re asked for it. The way they know how useful your content is, is through some guidelines they’ve set; also known as the Google algorithm. This includes both on-site and off-site factors which we will discuss more later.
When publishing a website, Google first send out robots known as ‘crawlers’ to index your site. They come along with an almost checklist of things they’re looking for. These are the on-site and off-site factors we mentioned just now. The more tick boxes you satisfy, the more your SEO value increases. As such, you’re going to rank better when people search for anything relating to your business. This is important for visibility reasons. Unless people are exposed to your URL, nobody is going to know who you are. SEO is a great way to boost your brand recognition and in turn, your sales too!
What Does an SEO Agency in the UK do?
Unfortunately for those of you looking to cut costs, there are no crash courses that can teach you everything you need to know. If you’re wanting to improve your SEO (which every company should) you’ll need to enlist some help.
Unless it wasn’t quite obvious, an SEO agency works on optimising your website based on what search engines like Google expect of you. We’re basically dedicated to getting your ranking as high as possible.
How Do You Improve Your SEO?
As I teased earlier, there are things you can do both on your website and outside of your URL that affect how you rank. These are better known as on-site and off-site factors. Let’s take a look further into what you need to keep an eye out on:
On-Site
On the whole, the things you can do on your website to boost your SEO value include things such as content creation and back-end optimisation. On the surface, this may seem quite simple. However, when you delve deeper, you’ll quickly see there is more than meets the eye.
Content creation is one of the simplest areas to understand so, we’ll start here. The term ‘content’ encompasses a range of things from landing pages to blogs. These take a long time to write up and need to follow a certain set of criteria. The reason content boosts your SEO is because it works as an indicator to Google. To keep things basic; if you’ve mentioned a certain topic in your blog a few times, for instance ‘SEO agency in the UK’, Google can gather more information on what you do. These are known as keywords. When people then search for said term, Google can be confident that your website can answer their question. Hence, they’ll bump your website higher on the search engine results page (SERP.)
Now, Google can be picky. When writing any content, there are of course guidelines to follow. The content you’re writing needs to score well when assessing the readability. If your content is hard to understand or too jumbled, people are going to click off your website quickly. This hurts your SEO. To avoid this, you need to keep 80% of your sentences below 20 words. In addition, you also need to include formatting techniques such as headings. Your keyword should also feature several times throughout. 5-6 times is the recommended limit.
Back-end optimisation is where things quickly become even more difficult. Seeing that mobile’s now account for a large number of searches, Google favours websites that are full optimised for this type of viewing. No matter how established you are, nobody likes a website that won’t load. People are impatient and if your website takes a long time to show, they’re going to click off. This will increase your bounce rate as well.
As well as this, you can also improve your value by compressing image sizes and including things alt-tags and meta-descriptions.
Off-Site
This area of search engine optimisation is complex. Both social media and high-quality back-linking are techniques that will contribute to your EAT. This is an anagram used by Google to indicate whether you are experts in your industry, authoritative and trustworthy.
As an SEO agency in the UK, we know that reputation counts. Therefore, if a trusted company is willing to boast about you, you must have attributes of EAT. If other people are confident in your business, this instils confidence in Google. As a result, your SEO will improve.
Building up a good following on your social media shows that you’re experts in your industry. If lots of people are following your account and engaging with your content, Google will have more faith in you.
Contact the Team
As we touched on earlier, it’s not advised that you attempt SEO on your own. As an SEO agency in the UK, we often have companies approach us having damaged their own ranking. Usually this is due to them attempting SEO themselves but being ill informed. To discuss the work we do in more detail, why not give us a call? You can do so by clicking here!