SEO Services

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. The objective of SEO is to enhance your website in order for it to rank as highly as possible for key terms on search engines such as Google and Bing. These search engines send bots to “crawl” sites on the internet to find out how relevant your content is for their users. 

Search engines want to provide as good a customer experience as possible for searches on their site. Therefore, if you’re providing an excellent content package for a given search term, you should rank highly on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

However, you may think that you have great content, but is it so great in the eyes of Google? The algorithm that search engines use to determine how highly a page should rank for a given search term is highly sophisticated. On the other hand, it is still a computer algorithm, and follows a set of guiding rules and principles to determine the outcome. If you are aware of these principles and use them to create content, you will have a better chance at ranking and getting organic traffic to your site. 

It’s worth mentioning that these rules all relate to the user experience in some way. However, these factors are constantly being altered and added to, making SEO an ever-changing science.

For example, the concept of EAT (Expertise, authority or trustworthiness) is a relatively new ranking factor, which had a massive impact on the rankings of many big websites caught unaware. EAT, in simple terms, dictates that only those with the authority and expertise should be able to write about a certain topic. For instance, a non-medical professional writing about the health impacts of COVID-19 will now find it very hard to rank on Google. This, I can think we all agree, is a good thing!

Most good SEO companies use retainers while others bill by the hour for their work. The cost depends on the time it takes to do the work, type and complexity of the website, goals your business has and the experience of the SEO experts involved in the project.

Generally, prices start at £1,000 GBP per month which includes an SEO package tailored for small businesses just starting out. Mid-sized, established businesses can expect to pay £5,000+ per month. Whereas companies working in highly competitive niches with big organic traffic growth goals should expect to pay £10,000+ per month for SEO services.

One of the best ways to understand how to SEO your site is to commission an SEO audit. These audits look at your site from both an on-page and a technical SEO viewpoint, and, if done properly, will provide you with actionable steps to improve your SEO every step of the way. Luckily for you, we’re giving away free SEO audits so you can learn how to improve your site for free! Just get in touch to request one via our contact page.

If you’re not looking for an audit, then here are some key points to think about: Content is king. Having high-quality and relevant content for your chosen niche has got to be the most important factor in the rankability for your site. However, not far behind is how all of the pages housing this content link together – in other words, the website structure.

Website structure is central to the way search engines crawl your website and how much importance these search engine bots place on a given page. In addition, structuring your website properly makes it easy for bots to understand what type of content is on each page. These bots are ultimately what provide search engines with the data to determine your search ranking, so it’s important to make life easy for them. It’s best to think of the Google Bot like a hotel inspector; make sure they have a smooth ride as this will likely net you a higher score.

For example, imagine you have an eCommerce store selling shoes. If under the category “flat-shoes,” you have a product called “Stiletto Heels,” Google is going to have a hard time understanding what this product is, as for other similar stores stilettos are always found under “high-heeled shoes.” 

If you get great content for your site and structure it in a way that makes sense to both users and search engine bots, then you will be well on your way to having a solid SEO foundation.

There are several ways that you can improve SEO, but the essence of all of them is to enhance the user experience in the eyes of Google and other search engines. The outcome for them is to provide better search results for their users. The outcome for you is better search rankings and therefore greater amounts of traffic coming through these search engines to your site.

Google uses several ranking factors to determine how well optimized your page and wider site is. Some typical ranking factors include:

• Amount of content (copy)
• Readability
• Image Optimization
• Page Load Speed
• Website Structure
• Number of inlinks
• Number of backlinks
• Expertise, authority and trustworthiness of the author (EAT)

If you’re looking for examples or a benchmark for how good your page has to be to rank for a specific keyword search term, simply perform a Google search for the term you want to rank for. Take a look at the top five search results and see how well these pages do from the perspective of user experience. A good place to start is simply writing more relevant, high-quality content than your competitors. 

Yes and no. SEO at its heart is simple – optimize a website or a certain page to cater as best it can for a particular search query. For example, if someone was to search for the term “buy white trainers,” it would be pretty obvious what the top search results are likely to display – the opportunity to buy white trainers! However, how you rank above other competitors all serving this term in similar ways is the tricky part! Especially given that a search term such as this is likely to have a lot of competition.

However, as with most disciplines, doing the basics well is 80% of the battle, and you don’t have to be an SEO whizz to do the basics. I’m talking about outwriting your competitors in terms of high-quality content, making sure that your page is appropriately titled, ensuring that your content is easy to read, writing enticing relevant meta titles and meta descriptions. All that good stuff!

Doing this for long-tail keywords, i.e., highly relevant keywords to your website with relatively low search volumes and low competition, will more than likely get you ranking. However, if you’re competing for short tail keywords, more general terms with high search volumes and lots of competition, then you’re going to struggle with just the basics alone. 

In addition, identifying keywords that you are capable of ranking for can also be tricky without the knowledge and access to expensive marketing tools that professionals use every single day. It’s like trying to compete with one arm tied behind your back. At Fat Fish Marketing, we can help provide you with the expert knowledge to do both the basics and the more advanced elements of SEO to a professional level. What’s more, we can help you identify search terms that you’re going to be able to rank for very quickly, and provide access to premium marketing reports powered by the likes of SEMrush. 

SEO can be broken down into many different types depending on the type of website is being applied to – such as eCommerce SEO or B2B SEO – and depending on the nature of the SEO you’re performing – including technical SEO, international SEO and local SEO. However, all types of SEO tasks can be broken down into two distinct types: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO relates to all aspects of SEO that you are performing on your own website. Here are some examples that this can relate to:

• Improving page speed
• Writing content
• Adding Schema
• Internally linking between pages
• Writing meta titles and descriptions

Off-page SEO, you may have guessed already, relates to SEO that you perform off-site from your own website, yet still contributes to its ability to rank on SERPs. This includes the following:

• Having active social pages
• Having a Google My Business page
• Submitting your sitemaps to search engines
• Backlinks from other websites and the calibre of these backlinks
• Mentions of your business on other websites and the sentiment of these mentions

Remember, Google doesn’t just crawl your website to determine how high it should rank. It takes into account what other websites are saying about you, and listens to those with the highest authority more than others. Imagine if you were applying for a job and your prospective employer did some following up to see who you claimed to be. Imagine if reputable experts spoke highly of you in your chosen field, this would stand you in good stead to be hired. Now imagine if the only people that spoke well about you were untrustworthy charlatans, and everything reputable people said was negative. You can apply this logic to the world of off-page SEO.