SEO: The Facts

There could be many reasons your website may not be ranking on Google. Common issues include lack of keyword optimisation, speed or load time issues, lack of quality backlinks, or technical problems like indexing errors. New websites take time to rank, and if competitors are investing in SEO this can make ranking harder. Regular SEO improvements and monitoring are key to better visibility.

A sudden drop in rankings can be alarming, but it’s not uncommon. Google’s algorithms are continually evolving, with frequent updates designed to improve the quality of search results. These updates can sometimes impact your website’s position, especially if your site isn’t fully compliant with Google’s latest guidelines.

Other factors that may cause a drop include:

– Recent changes to your website’s content or structure
– Links from low-quality or spammy websites
– Competitors ramping up their SEO efforts
– Technical issues such as slow loading speeds or poor mobile compatibility

If your website’s rankings have fallen, don’t panic. Our team can conduct a full SEO audit to identify the root cause and implement a tailored recovery plan. From addressing penalties to improving on-page and off-page elements, we’ll get your site back on track.

SEO is a long-term strategy that requires patience and persistence. Typically, you’ll start noticing results within 2-3 months, with significant improvements becoming evident after 6-12 months. Factors that influence the timeline include:

• The competitiveness of your industry and keywords
• The quality of your website’s existing content and structure
• The scope of your SEO campaign

At Alloy Marketing, we use only white-hat techniques, ensuring that our work delivers lasting benefits. While some providers may promise quick fixes, these often come with risks of penalties and poor long-term performance.

W3C validation is a code check that looks for accessibility and performance issues that can negatively impact user experience and the ability of search engines to crawl a website.

On-page optimisation in SEO refers to things that happen directly on the website to improve search performance. This includes technical improvements to meta titles and descriptions, headers, content, keywords, and image metadata. It also involves site speed monitoring and fixes, mobile optimisation, and user experience auditing to ensure your site performs at its best wherever your visitors come from.

There are several strands to this:
• Optimising file sizes for loading speed
• Correct naming of files and captions for accessibility
• Keyword-optimising alt text to communicate the subject of the image to search engines
• Image optimisation is an important part of SEO since poor optimisation can let the site down on several fronts simultaneously.

Enterprise SEO means optimising large websites with many pages, usually for corporations, charities or online stores with hundreds of products. It requires a skilled and planned approach with regular, long-term investment. We have had the pleasure of working on a number of enterprise SEO projects, including for websites with thousands of pieces of content and stores with many thousands of products. We would be delighted to help with your project. Please get in touch for more information.

Both SEO and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising have their advantages. PPC delivers immediate results by placing your website at the top of search results through paid ads. However, these benefits stop as soon as you stop paying for ads. In contrast, SEO provides long-term, sustainable growth by improving your organic rankings. While results take longer to materialise, the return on investment is often higher.

For the best outcomes, we recommend integrating SEO with strategic PPC campaigns. This approach allows you to gain quick wins while building a solid foundation for ongoing success.

Both are important, but neither is better as they both have their own advantages. SEO offers longer-term, cost-effective results. With steady investment, your rankings will stay high, and your website will get more traffic.

PPC provides immediate visibility and targeted traffic through paid ads, we often liken it to turning on a tap for leads. SEO is ideal for sustainable growth, but PPC provides an immediate boost, especially in competitive markets. The ideal approach is to run PPC and SEO campaigns simultaneously, which gives your business maximum exposure to potential new leads.

Best practices for on-page SEO include:
• Avoiding keyword spamming. Needlessly filling the page up with keywords is bad for visitors, and Google won’t respond well to it either.
• Optimising meta content – Use well-researched, relevant keywords in well-written meta content.
• Using correct headers – Arranging content with clear headings in the correct order benefits both Google and your visitors.
• Optimising content – No list of on-page SEO best practices would be complete without mentioning the importance of keyword optimising the content itself!
• Load speed – Ensure fast load times for better user experience and search performance. Poor load teams mean that visitors drop off very quickly.
• Mobile-optimisation – Most of your traffic will likely be from mobiles, so these visitors need to have the best experience possible.
• Image metadata – Using keywords in image metadata is useful for both search visibility and accessibility.

The Importance of Link Quality

Not all links are the same. Each inbound link to your site carries a different level of trust and respect from Google. Google constantly evaluates your website for keyword relevance and valuable content, and it does the same for the sites that link to you. If a reputable website links to you, that link holds more value. Conversely, links from low-quality or spammy sites are devalued or may not count at all. Monitoring the number of links to your website helps you identify fluctuations and address any issues. One high-value link from a renowned site can offer more benefits than numerous links from lesser-quality websites.

SEO KPI Definitions

• External Backlinks (Majestic SEO): The total backlinks to your website, based on MajesticSEO’s Historic Index. This reflects changes when gaining or losing links, and updates when MajesticSEO refreshes their index.
• External Backlinks (Moz): The total backlinks to your website as determined by Moz’s Site Explorer tool.
• Citation Flow: A metric from Majestic SEO that assesses a website based on the number of times a URL or domain is cited by external pages.
• Trust Flow: Another Majestic SEO metric predicting trust based on the credibility of external websites linking to you.
• Domain Authority: Moz’s prediction of a website’s search engine ranking potential, combining various metrics into a single score.
• MozRank: Reflects a page’s importance on the internet based on the number and quality of links pointing to it.
• MozTrust: Moz’s score for link trust, highlighting the quality and trustworthiness of linking sources.

Page Rank (PR)

• Calculated by: Google
• Scale: 0 – 10 (integer numbers)
• Formula: PR measures a webpage’s popularity by the quantity of links pointing to it, irrespective of link quality. It’s an outdated metric, and although widely recognised, it’s just one of many signals Google uses.

MozRank (mR)

• Calculated by: SEOmoz
• Scale: 0 – 10 (two decimal numbers)
• Formula and Analysis: Similar to Google’s PR but with key differences, like being a decimal value. It provides a clearer picture of link profile strength. High mR requires more effort to improve.

MozTrust (mT)

• Scale: 0 – 10 (two decimal numbers)
• Formula and Analysis: Focuses on the quality of links, indicating a page’s long-term strength rather than sheer volume, helping to gauge the maturity of a link profile.

Domain-Level Metrics

• Domain MozRank & MozTrust (DmR/DmT): Scores for the entire domain, not just individual pages, offering insights into overall domain authority.

Page Authority (PA)

• Scale: 0 – 100 (integer numbers)
• Calculated by: SEOmoz
• Analysis: Indicates the potential for high rankings by aggregating link metrics, though not perfectly correlated with search result positions.

Domain Authority (DA)

• Scale: 0 – 100 (integer numbers)
• Calculated by: SEOmoz
• Analysis: Useful for competitive analysis and partnership evaluations, providing a broader picture of entire domain strength.

SEO is best as an ongoing process, not a one-off project. Search engines frequently update their algorithms, and competitors continuously optimise, so regular adjustments are essential. Ongoing SEO involves content updates, link building, and performance monitoring to maintain and improve rankings. Stopping SEO can lead to a decline in visibility over time.

Google penalties can significantly impact your website’s visibility and traffic. These penalties are often the result of outdated or unethical SEO practices, such as keyword stuffing or acquiring low-quality backlinks. If you’ve received a penalty, it’s essential to address it promptly to minimise long-term damage.

At Alloy Marketing, we specialise in white-hat SEO techniques that comply with Google’s guidelines, reducing the risk of penalties. If your site has been penalised, we’ll perform a thorough analysis to identify and rectify the issues, helping you regain your rankings and rebuild your online presence.

There is no set frequency with which Google updates its algorithm. Small updates happen all the time, major updates are also fairly frequent. Google does not always make the information public. Updates can affect the ranking of a website, but generally, if a website is well-optimised and follows best-practice guidelines, any negative impact will be temporary. Our team constantly monitors and adapts to changes to ensure the sites we optimised continue to perform at their best.

We typically advise 6-8 weeks to start seeing ranking improvements. Some websites see quicker improvements, but we can’t guarantee anything. As long as you stick with your campaign,n you will start to see progress. Remember, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, and the benefits last a long time too. Anyone promising fast SEO results is likely using methods that go against Google’s guidelines.

To report on SEO performance, we generate monthly reports for your tracked keywords and overall site performance. Some of the information can be quite technical, but your account manager will be happy to discuss the results with you.

We create SEO content for websites by meticulously researching keywords to target and using them in well-written content. The content should genuinely address the concerns of the target audience and be well structured with clear headings, optimised meta content and direct calls to action.

Effective meta descriptions use the target keyword and compelling copy to encourage link clicks. The copy should relate to the intention of the person searching, making them want to visit the website to find out more. It also needs to be short and punchy as Google limits the number of characters that show in the search results.

There are many things that can be done to improve page load speed, all of which we’ll look at as part of an SEO campaign. To identify just a few; optimising image files sizes. Compressing scripts and files, caching, server optimisation and hosting upgrades. There are many more things we can do to help if your website is struggling from slow loading speeds.

Google personalises search results, so it’s common to get different results from the same search. This is why we often advise clients that Googling their own business may not be the best way to understand your website’s search performance. Google considers location, search history and your device when choosing what to show you. This is why we use specialist software that simulates different environments to create a more objective assessment of your website’s search performance.

Landing pages can be great for SEO. We can use them to target specific keywords that aren’t used elsewhere on the website. Optimised landing pages can improve your website’s search performance as the content will be specifically optimised for searches where the data tells us there is a high amount of demand.

Absolutely, we want to make sure we get the tone of voice properly matched to your brand identity, so we’ll work with you to get sign-off before publishing anything. With most clients, we find they’re really happy with the way our copywriters write and, after a while, they are happy for us to take the lead on this. It’s entirely down to your preferences.

No Google Ads doesn’t have any direct effect on SEO. Google Ads will increase the number of people that find your business on Google, but only in the sponsored links area of Google’s search results. For best results, an SEO campaign should run alongside a Google Ads campaign to ensure that a) your website can still be found when your daily ad budget runs out or when your ads are paused and b) users who don’t click ads still see your business c) your online visibility doesn’t fall behind that of your competitors.

Social media doesn’t directly help with SEO and has no effect on your website’s rankings. There are other benefits of social media that can help your online visibility though. Regular posts will increase your visibility, which can help send some extra traffic to your website. Social engagement can also boost brand awareness.

No, this is not possible and anyone promising this will use tactics that Google will ultimately penalise the website for, which will ruin its search performance. You can pay for Google Ads, which will mean your website shows at the top of search results pages for at least some of the day, but that is very different to ranking at the top of Google for organic searches.