Video for SEO in 2023: Predictions | Tao Digital Marketing
Video is becoming more prominent in search and will be a channel that needs to be part of a successful SEO campaign next year and beyond.
With Google Search Console recently adding it in as a separate section within the platform, we see this as a sign from Google to show the power and importance of video for the future of the search engine.
We’ve already seen some of our own pages on the Tao Digital website start to rank higher once we embed a video, and we expect this will only continue. We’ve already included this in our marketing strategy for 2023 by planning accompanying videos to be included as part of our overall content strategy.
So, what do other agency owners and SEOs think? We decided to ask them and have rounded up their thoughts below!
Matt Tomkin, Our Founder and Director
Video is definitely going to help with a website’s overall organic search visibility. It’s important to optimise the description on Youtube along with adding the relevant schema markup to the web page it is published on.
By adding video to your content you are giving another option for visitors to digest your content and I think Google sees this as a user benefit.
Don’t let Google tell you they don’t use user metrics as a ranking factor! Why wouldn’t they? Give your visitor more ways to digest your content and you’ll be ahead of 99% of the other websites online.
The format is less important than the content. Your rankings won’t improve just because you’ve got a video on a landing page.
If, however, you can use that video to add value to the page (think video case studies, testimonials, research launch etc. – video needs to work for the part of the sales funnel the landing page is intended for) and that video is exclusive to that page (duplicate content is duplicate content) then it’s going to separate your landing page and content from the majority of your competitors’ webpages.
When it comes to Google Search Console adding video as a separate section, I’ve been following this closely. My prediction for the future of SEO/video content is that we’ll start to see fewer featured snippets in position 0, and instead, more videos. This makes sense because people are wanting videos instead of reading long-form content now.
In order for your business to benefit from this, I’d suggest creating videos for your most popular blogs. If you’re getting search volume for the blog, have a video for it too. If you’re in position 0, definitely have a video for it. Upload this to Youtube and make sure it’s also SEO-optimised. This way, whichever way Google decides to go, you’re covered.
I think Google will continue to develop ways of highlighting video content within search, especially for current and trending topics, with many people digesting information through the medium of video. We see this with the rise in popularity of TikTok which has spurred other social platforms to follow suit, such as Facebook and Instagram with Reels, and YouTube with Shorts.
Brands that do not utilise video marketing, whether it be in short form clips or longer-length videos, will be missing out on traffic potential, whether that’s from Google search directly or from social media.
Jamie Coles, Freelance Journalist, Press Officer and Video Producer
It’s really interesting that Google Search Console is adding video search to its platform. The importance for video search seems to be growing as we see video results bumped to the top of Google results.
From the point of view of SEO, I think we’ll all end up subtitling or transcribing our videos to improve the searchability of our videos thanks to the additional keywords. This will mean a rise of SRT (subtitle format) tools, which, as a video producer, I’d be grateful for.
We’ll also see a rise in AI transcribing tools and – hopefully – a bit of a step up in their accuracy because, right now, they’re more hassle than they’re worth. The positive side of these transcripts or subtitles is that they make videos more accessible.
We’ll also see a further trend in attention-grabbing thumbnails, probably with better optimised text as AI OCR tools begin recognising thumbnail text for search, too.
Beyond that we’ll likely see more video content better embedded higher up on a lot of web pages, and web pages better optimised for video embedding, as the Google search bots and results seem to be favouring video.
Conclusion
Although it’s impossible to predict the future, it is apparent that many SEOs are predicting similar themes – the power of video improving rankings, video being used to enhance existing content and transcription software developing further. These are likely to be key elements throughout 2023.
If you’re looking to use video as part of your SEO strategy, get in touch with us today.
Having a Google My Business Profile is a great way to get in front of new customers and help towards local SEO.
In this guide, we’ll be answering some of the most frequently asked questions about Google My Business, with step-by-step instructions for some of the more in-depth questions. Keep reading to find out more.
What is Google My Business?
Google My Business is essentially a business profile that appears on the side of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when someone searches for your businesses or your services in their area.
It’s essentially a brief overview of your business, including, but not limited to:
Business name
Address
Primary and secondary categories (your service offering – we’ll touch on this later)
Photos of the team/business/service offering
Location on Google Maps, sometimes an external shot of the business taken from Maps
Opening hours
Contact details
Website
Reviews
Q&A from users
Why is Google My Business important?
Google My Business is incredibly important – every business should have one as it helps potential new customers/clients find your business. For example, if you’re a coffee shop owner and a local types ‘coffee shops near me’ into Google, you will appear based on the location you have listed. These customers may never have come across you otherwise.
It also helps you to understand how your customers are finding/contacting you. Through looking at the analytics you can find out what keywords people search to find you, as well as getting insights on calls, reviews, bookings and more to understand how you connect with customers.
Does Google My Business help SEO?
Yes, it can help with SEO, particularly local SEO. Making sure your information is up to date and that you post regularly is highly likely to be a ranking factor that can help Google to understand your business offerings (Google would never give away its true ranking factors or we’d all be fighting for number one).
It’s important to make sure you optimise your listing as much as possible – we’ll touch on this later.
Is Google My Business free?
Yes, Google My Business, or Google Business Profile, is completely free! The ultimate aim of Google is to make it easy to use and help people to find the local businesses they are looking for. By listing your business, you’re helping people looking for your services and of course, Google – hence why it’s completely free.
Interestingly, as we write this in November 2022, Google has filed a lawsuit against a company who allegedly charged people for setting up GMB profiles. According to Search Engine Land, the company “threatened business owners that if they failed to pay (typically $99), their Business listings would be deactivated or marked as “permanently closed” and their positive reviews would be hidden – resulting in lost visibility and revenue.”
Do I have a Google My Business account already?
If you’re buying out a business or starting out as a Marketing Exec, you may be wondering whether the business already has an account. The simple way to tell is to Google the business – if the profile comes up, the business has one. This will be a case of claiming the listing, which we’ll touch on later.
If not, it’s time to set your profile up.
How to set up Google My Business
Here is our simple guide
Google My Business is incredibly easy to set up. The first step is to go onto Google, make sure you are logged into a Gmail account (or a Gmail-connected email address) and click the dots in the top right corner. From there, you’ll find an option to click ‘Business Profile’.
Then, you’ll see the page below. Click ‘manage now’.
You will then be taken to the next page. As you’ll be setting up a brand new account, click ‘Add your business to Google’.
You can then enter your business name and business category. The frustrating part of adding a business category is that there is no drop down menu, instead you start typing and then can only pick from a selection available.
For us, we typed in ‘Digital Marketing’ and this didn’t appear, however ‘Marketing Agency’ did as you can see below – it’s a case of guessing the terms Google may file your business under until you find an exact or close match to how you would describe your business.
To help with this, Vicki Mace, Digital Marketing Consultant from Insight Digital Copy, advises that you look at what your competitors have as their primary category. Do a search for a primary keyword, see what businesses appear and identify what category they belong to.
She suggests that you can further validate this by asking the following questions:
Would this category be the best fit for the services/products you offer?
Do people search for this service? In comparison to other categories, how popular is it?
Further on in the process you can add up to nine other business categories. Be mindful only to add categories related to your business – Google will suspend anyone adding irrelevant categories just to show up for more terms.
After you have entered your category, you will then be asked if you want to add a location. If you are mobile or based at your home address, you may want to avoid this for security purposes and only give it when you receive an enquiry. In this instance, you are classed as a ‘Service Area Business’ (SAB).
If you click no, you will be taken to a page that allows you to list multiple service areas, as below.
If you click yes, you will be taken to a page where you can enter the address of your business premises. You will then be asked if you offer deliveries/home or office visits, as well as how far you are willing to go. This helps to extend your location reach. You can always change these at a later date too.
You will then be prompted to add your contact details.
In order to stop fake listings and to ‘help maintain the integrity of all profiles’, Google then has to verify that you own the business by giving you a code. They will ask whether you want to receive the code via email, phone call or by post, just select whichever is your preference. You will be asked to verify using more than one method most of the time.
If you don’t want to verify immediately or can’t get the access code immediately (e.g. if you’re a Marketing Exec and need a Manager to send you the code), you can select ‘Verify Later’ – your profile won’t be visible until you verify, but you can still progress with the listing in the meantime.
After this, you have the option to add secondary categories and your opening hours. You will also be asked if you want to accept messages through Google – you will be notified of any messages via email.
You will be prompted to add a business description, which can be 750 characters (not words) max. You can skip this step, however we highly recommend you add this as it will help for SEO purposes. Be sure to include keywords, including those listed as your primary and secondary categories, but avoid keyword stuffing. It has to look natural.
This also needs to be unique content in order to be effective. Avoid copying and pasting from your website.
Finally, you’ll be asked to add some photos to the listing. If you provide a service, Amy Toman, a Google Product Expert, recommends showing staff providing that service (e.g. if you’re a plumbing company, don’t show boilers, show a member of staff fixing one). She also suggests that cover images should show either a storefront or humans. Use as many unique photos as possible – they’re more indicative of a business than stock images.
After this, once you’ve verified the business with the code, your listing will be live.
If you ever want to change details in the future, such as your categories or address, simply go onto your Business Profile, click the edit pen and you should have the option to change your details.
Verifying your Business Profile by Post
In order to avoid new fake listings, Google will send a postcard with a code on it to your address. This will also happen if you have an existing listing but change the address to a different one. Simply wait for the postcard to arrive, let your team know to keep an eye out for it and enter the code once it has arrived to validate the listing.
If you’re a Service Area Business, Elizabeth Rule, Local SEO Analyst Sterling Sky & GBP Gold Product Expert, suggests verifying your GBP listing to the address your business is officially registered at. After you verify the GBP listing, you can clear the address field so the address is not visible to the public on maps or search.
How to verify your Google My Business location without a postcard
As great as verifying by postcard is in terms of avoiding spam listings, there are a couple of issues with this – it can take five to seven days to arrive, and also if it gets lost in the post or the wrong person receives it, it can be difficult (if not impossible) to request a second one.
If, for whatever reason, you are unable to verify your location without a postcard, there are several alternatives:
Phone call/email based on the contact details you provided when setting up your account. Be wary of having an automated answering machine on your phone line as this will be an automated call that cannot ‘press three to be connected to a member of the team’. You will be given a five digit code that you will need to enter into your GMB profile.
Connecting your Google Search Console account to your Google My Business account, which can give you permission to immediately verify the listing – however this may not work for all industries.
In some industries, you may be able to verify via a video call with Google themselves, or submit a video walkthrough of the business meeting Google’s specifications (e.g. show the storefront or other employees working with you).
If none of the above steps are available or fail to work, you can submit a ticket to Google and request for them to manually verify your account. You may be asked to send photos of the business along with other evidence.
How to Claim a Google My Business profile
two factors must be in place first
There are many reasons you may want to claim an existing Business Profile listing, for example if you’re buying a business out, or perhaps taking over from a previous marketing manager.
In order for you to claim a listing, two factors must be in place first:
The existing listing must already be verified by its current owner
The current owner must add you as a manager first (if they do not know how to do this, you can send them Google’s official guidance here)
There is a difference between managing and owning (claiming) a business profile. Both have slightly different levels of permissions. Below is official guidance from Google on the difference:
After being added as a manager
Once you have been added as a manager, it can take up to seven days to be given manager capabilities within GMB.
In order to claim the profile, Google the name of the business and you should see a button saying ‘Claim/Own this Business?’, or type it in here and click ‘Request Access’ then fill in the form. The current owner will be then notified and can grant you permission to claim/own the profile.
If the current owner doesn’t respond within three days, Google may give you the option to claim the profile yourself. In this instance, open the original email confirmation from Google stating that you requested access. Then follow the on screen instructions to verify.
How to edit Google My Business
You can only edit the Business Profile listing if you are a manager or owner. To edit, navigate to the top right of the page again on Google, click on your profile picture and click ‘Business Profile’. You will then see the name of your business and a pencil button, click this to edit.
You will then be taken to a page where you can edit every element of your business, from your name through to categories, description and contact information.
Can I change my Google My Business name?
Yes, you can. Just navigate to the editing page as above, click the pencil icon next to your name and change it.
How to optimise Google Business Profile
There are many ways to optimise your business profile. The main factor to bear in mind is to make sure you fill in as many details as you can and keep it updated constantly.
Other factors to bear in mind:
Photos: Add photos on a regular basis, especially of the team whenever you get updated headshots or team members join/leave. Add photos of any new service or product offerings, too. This helps to show consistency to Google which can help you to appear above other profiles who haven’t updated for quite a while.
Create regular posts: Senior SEO Manager Abby Leigh Curtis recommends that you should post whenever you have events to promote, offers/deals you want to advertise, featured products, business updates (e.g. new hours or services), or even blogs. You should always include high-quality images to accompany your posts.
However, one of the only downsides of Google Posts is that you can only choose from a dropdown for the CTA button:
Use a local phone number: This can help to further verify that you’re a local business and is an easy way to encourage customers to call you.
Add videos: Video is becoming increasingly important to Google, especially as they added video as a separate section within the Google Search Console platform. We see this as a sign from Google to show the power and importance of video for the future of the search engine. Keep them under 30 seconds long to make sure that the file size isn’t too large.
Encourage reviews: Profiles with the most reviews tend to appear higher up when someone searches for your services. Ask your customers to give you reviews – this can really help you out (if they are positive, of course!).
Essentially, it’s all about keeping your profile up to date, giving as much information about your business as possible and keeping the positive reviews coming in.
How to Create a Post on Google Business Profile
In order to create a post on your Google Business Profile, simply make sure you’re logged in, Google the business name and scroll down a little. You should just see a large button allowing you to add a post.
Posts do have to be submitted manually, rather than scheduled – there is no way to schedule a post directly within Business Profile Manager, however there are various scheduling tools out there that can help with this.
How to rank higher on Google My Business
Ranking higher ties hand in hand with the optimisation tips we gave above. It’s all about keeping your information up to date, for example updating your hours during bank holidays or the festive period (Google often sends emails to prompt you to do this).
It’s also worth responding to your Google reviews and questions to show that you’re active, even if it’s just to say thank you.
Your website’s position in the SERP also determines how high up you will show in the listings, so general SEO for your website ties into this and is very important for more competitive search terms.
We like to use Brightlocal to help with building efforts. Brightlocal describe themselves as an ‘all-in-one local SEO, citations and reviews platform’. Within the software you can build citations (linking to your GBP) that can help with your rankings. Depending on the level of membership you have, it can also integrate with your social media profiles and Google Analytics.
My Google Business Profile got Suspended. What now?
Google may suspend Business Profiles that go against their guidelines. Breaching the guidelines includes, but is not limited to:
Promoting fraudulent or illegal activities
Low-quality content, e.g. misspelling or gibberish
Content containing swearing/offensive language
Focusing on special promotions, e.g. saying that everything is on sale or constantly saying that your products are 50% off
There are two types of suspensions: a soft suspension, where your listing is live but not verified (so you can’t manage and update it), and a hard suspension, where your listing doesn’t show up at all.
In October 2022 there was a major bug in the GBP system where hundreds of business owners had their Business Profiles suspended for no reason. Elizabeth Rule gives the following advice:
As we have seen recently with the suspension bug in GBP that there is not much, or anything, a business owner can do to prevent a suspension. There are things you can do to set yourself up for success to get the profile reinstated as quickly as possible if it does get suspended.
Here are some tips for Service Area Businesses to safeguard themselves in case they run into suspension issues:
Verify your service area GBP to an address you have business proof for. This proof can be utility bills in the business name, insurance certificates, business registration etc. You will need to have this proof if the profile is ever suspended or disabled. Even though your address is not visible, you need to provide proof to the address you verified the listing at to get reinstated.
Service Area Businesses should never use a virtual or shared space office to verify a listing. This is a clear violation of Google Guidelines as confirmed by Google in 2020.
Do not verify a GBP listing to an employee’s home. You may be able to get the listing live, but without valid business proof at the address you will never be able to get the listing reinstated if it gets suspended or disabled. Plus, if the employee ever leaves you have a listing verified to an address that you now have no connection to at all.
If you have multiple listings for the same business, make sure the service areas do not overlap. Even though the service area you add to the listing does not impact rankings, if you have two SAB listings with the same service area, Google considers this a violation of guidelines and one or both listings can be suspended.
Do not show your address if you are a pure Service Area Business. Even if the competition does or you think you can get away with it, if you ever need to contact support, they probably won’t help you if they notice you are an SAB with no signage that has the address showing.
Always make sure you have supporting documentation available in case of suspension; having it ready to submit with a reinstatement can cut down on the time your listing is offline.
Supporting documentation should provide a consistent story for the business (meaning the title and address, whether it shows or not). This could be insurance statements, a photo of the building with the logo of the business, your company registration number or similar. All should be from authoritative bodies, so usually not invoices.
Once you have submitted your evidence, it takes around three working days for Google to review and clear your request.
What are labels in Google My Business?
Labels in GBP are just for internal organisational purposes – outsiders can’t see them and they don’t help with rankings. They must be 50 characters or less.
The main reason you would use labels is if you have multiple different locations within GBP and want to quickly search for a profile. For example, if you’ve got coffee shops in Bolton, Manchester and Wigan all under the same name, you may want to just label them as these locations so that you can quickly search for them. It’s mainly for internal purposes.
How to add a Label into Google Business Profile
First, make sure you’re signed into Google, navigate to the Business Profile section and click ‘See Your Profile’. You’ll then be taken to the SERP with a summary of your profile. Click the three dots above the summary and select ‘Business Profile Settings’.
Then click ‘Advanced Settings’.
You can then add labels onto your profile.
How to delete a Google My Business listing
There are multiple reasons you may want to delete a Business Profile, for example if you are selling the business, rebranding, or perhaps the listing is an accidental duplicate. You can also leave the listing live but mark it as permanently closed.
It’s worth noting that the removal of a Business Profile is permanent. If you want to manage the profile again you’ll need to re-verify it again using the steps mentioned earlier on.
You don’t have to actually manage a business to remove it. Simply Google the name of your business/the business you want to remove, suggest an edit and click ‘Close or remove’, then follow the instructions on screen. This is where you would mark as permanently closed if the business is shutting down.
How to add Social Media to my Google My Business
There is no way to directly add your social media profiles to your Business Profile, however if they’re linked to on your website, Google may add them in this way.
If people are using the knowledge graph schema to add social profiles etc. on their websites this should pick up the social profiles much easier and show them in the “knowledge” panel for the brand/company. Rank Math’s helpful guide can assist you with this.
What are Attributes for Google My Business?
‘Attributes’ are various additional details that you can add to your profile in order to help potential customers further, for example detailing whether you offer outdoor dining or free WiFi. This can help you show up for more search terms, e.g. ‘Restaurants with free WiFi in Bolton’.
You can directly add these in, however many also come from your reviews, e.g. if your customers mention that you’re vegan friendly, this may appear as an attribute on your profile.
How to add Attributes to Google My Business
Navigate to Business Profile Manager and select Edit Profile, then Business Information. Select ‘More’ at the top.
Below is an example from one of our clients who owns a physical shop. You can see that they have detailed the sort of crowd that shops there, accessibility details, if the business is woman-owned, what sort of payments they accept etc.
Can you call the Google My Business team for support?
Google removed phone numbers from their support pages in 2019, so unfortunately there’s no way to call them directly now.
For support queries it’s best to go directly through their support page. From there you can select which profile you need help with, what the issue is and your contact options.
Whether you’re a small business trying to optimise your site for organic traffic, or you’re already a well-established business with a large website, it can be difficult knowing where to start with an SEO audit.
In this guide, we’ll explain the factors to consider before starting an SEO audit, allowing business owners, directors and more to understand how the process should work.
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is the process of outlining and establishing any problems or errors which could impact organic traffic, potentially preventing your site from ranking highly on search engines like Google or Bing.
Why would you invest in an SEO audit?
Two of the main reasons why you should be investing in SEO audit services are because a well-optimised website will perform much better in organic search, and because search engines also change their algorithms on a regular basis.
If you don’t keep your SEO up to date, you could be missing out on a significant amount of search engine traffic, as well as any attention from potential customers.
What tools will you need before conducting an SEO audit?
In order to conduct an SEO audit, there are a few tools you’ll need. These include:
SEO software: These include software such as Ahrefs, Moz Pro, Screaming Frog and SEMrush, which will crawl your site to determine its general health. They will also look for inefficiencies that are dragging down your site’s organic performance.
Google Search Console: There are many ways to use this tool for SEO auditing, including finding issues and/or opportunities in respect to keywords, organic click-through rates, technical fixes and submitting any pages for indexing that you have newly optimised.
Google Analytics: The whole point of SEO is to improve traffic to your site, and so you will need analytics to measure the impact of your actions. This will also help you to prioritise pages which are dropping off.
7 factors to consider before starting an SEO audit
Before getting started on a SEO audit, it’s important that you understand the factors that need to be evaluated.
Research competitors
An SEO audit should only be conducted after your competitors have been thoroughly researched. You should be looking at how they attract organic traffic for different keywords.You can conduct competitor analysis by finding their keywords, estimating monthly search traffic, their domain authority, inbound links and estimating the value of search traffic.
Compare these numbers side by side with yours to find the gaps between yourself and the competition. This will help you find areas that require improvement on your own site.
Crawling and indexing
An SEO analysis is not complete without checking for any crawling and indexing issues. Crawling refers to how search engines skim and understand your content, and indexing is the storing and organisation of this information by search engines.Understanding how crawling and indexing works could help you to optimise your site for better results. You can use Google Search Console to check your site has been crawled and indexed.
Website accessibility
Every SEO checklist should include ensuring that a website isn’t disadvantaged by issues of accessibility. Website visitors may run into several issues when accessing specific pages, such as 404 errors or low loading speeds.You can use Google Search Console for basic insights into your website accessibility, but make sure that you take note of each error that arises.
Ease of use of your website falls under the category of accessibility, so make sure that the structure of your website is easy to navigate for visitors.
Keyword analysisAlthough you may have already looked at a few keywords whilst conducting a competitor analysis, keyword analysis should really be a key focus of your auditing process.
You should be using software such as Google adWords and Ahrefs to look at keywords and examine the capabilities, popularity and total visits for specific terms.
On-page SEO reviewOn-page SEO refers to everything on-site, such as content, headings and meta tags to target keywords. It can also include adding alt-attributes to images, creating internal links and designing a responsive design for desktop and mobile devices.
All of the above will send signals to search engines and users that your site serves a purpose, is functional and up to date. It is key to have these elements in line so you stand out in a crowded market.
Website link analysisUnderstanding how your website connects with other authority sites is essential, as it immensely affects your optimisation efforts.
An in depth link analysis should not only focus on your internal links, but your external ones too. Internal links direct visitors to different pages on your website, whereas external links, or backlinks, lead users from another site to your site.
Backlinks carry a lot of weight, so you should ensure that they are adding value.
Content evaluationContent evaluation is the process of examining a website’s content for factors which can either boost or deter organic traffic. You should be evaluating your content from the perspective of a search engine, and user.
Content evaluation will help you to detect duplicate content that has been used, such as in titles, introductions or keywords. This is vital for creating a useful strategy in your SEO audit.
What to consider during an SEO audit
Once you’ve actually started your SEO audit, there are a few things you should review and consider. These include:
Load time: Site speed is crucial in providing good user experience. If a website is too slow, it can negatively impact overall SEO performance.
Security: A HTTPS encryption on your site can play an important role in how Google ranks your site, as it will show your website is trustworthy and secure.
Site structure: Another crucial aspect of user experience is an easy-to-navigate site structure. Navigation is helpful for site visitors looking for information on your website, as well as providing a path for search engine crawlers to find new content for indexing.
Mobile readiness: If your website doesn’t have a mobile friendly design or version, it makes it difficult to access content and links in mobile view. It may also load slowly for mobile site visitors, causing your search rankings to take a hit.
If you are considering an SEO audit, or are actively working on one but could use some support, our team can help. Our SEO auditing services are fully tailored to your website and needs.
Alternatively, get in touch with us if you think you’d benefit from some consultancy from our expert Technical SEO team.
Technical SEO Audits: How do they Work?
A fully functional, user-friendly website is one of the most important elements of a healthy business; but, just having a website is simply not enough, it must rank well on search engine result pages too.
This is where a technical SEO audit can help. With rapid changes in the industry, it is vital your website is the best it can be.
What is a technical SEO audit?
A technical SEO audit is a process that examines various technical elements of a website to ensure they are following the best search operation practices.
A technical audit is an imperative part of site maintenance, and it will check if a site is optimised properly for search engines including Google, Bing and Yahoo.
This includes making sure there are no issues related to crawlability or indexation that could prevent search engines from allowing your site to appear on result pages.
Is a Technical SEO Audit different to an SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit is simply just a type of SEO audit, except it focuses on the issue related to your website that happens behind the scenes. It is work done on the website besides from the content that is displayed.
Technical SEO is what enables search engines, like Google, to perform indexing and crawling of websites in search of new content.
When should you perform a technical SEO audit?
Ideally, you should have a technical SEO audit when a new site is made, or when you are thinking of investing in more online marketing. Once a site is live and an initial audit has been completed and actioned, you should look to have a mini audit completed every 4 to 6 months, depending on the size of the website.
If you aren’t regularly checking your website’s health, you could put yourself at risk of losing traffic to your competitors. Google also keeps updating its algorithms every year, so it’s important you stay informed about the current trends.
By performing a few technical SEO audits a year, you can figure out what is and isn’t working for your site, as well as identifying areas which need improvement.
What is on-site SEO?
On-site SEO is the practice of optimising elements on your website in order to rank higher and earn more relevant search traffic.
It can include:
Optimising your titles and metadata
Formatting your text properly (use of heading tags, H1/H2/H3, correctly)
Checking your content for uniqueness, grammar and formatting
Updating content regularly
Identifying broken links and internal linking opportunities
Checking your images for accurate descriptions and ALT-text
How do you know if your website requires a technical SEO audit?
There are a few different key signs that your site needs a technical SEO audit:
Your search rankings have fallen: If your Google visits have dried up and you can’t figure out why, it’s best to find out sooner rather than later. Just moving from the first page to the second on Google, can result in a loss of thousands of visits per week. It’s likely that this will result in a loss in leads, which can affect your sales.
You’ve launched a new website and want to check it is built correctly: If you’ve just had your site redesigned, but you aren’t sure how well it has been built, now is a good time for a technical SEO audit. Using an experienced team will mean issues can be discovered early on and the problems can be solved.
You aren’t 100% sure you’ve caught everything: Many marketers are good at finding keywords, tweaking content and ordering citations, but it can be difficult to see other issues with the naked eye. In that case, it’s best to have a technical SEO audit to look for well hidden problems.
What can you expect from an SEO audit?
Once you’ve outlined the reasons why you may need a technical SEO audit, there are a few different problems which you may discover during an audit.
Internal or external links that don’t have a valid destination
Links to pages that can’t be crawled
Page resources that incorrectly redirect away from your site
Different forms of duplicate content
Special characters that cant be read or indexed properly
Hidden files or access issues
Missing titles, metas and heading tags
Incorrect formatting in text or images
This is by no means an exhaustive list, and there may be other issues that arise.
However, when you look at the issues above, you may begin to understand how they can cause damage to visibility, marketing and inbound lead generation.
What do you need before an SEO audit is completed?
There isn’t much that you’d need to provide before having an SEO audit. In order for a technical audit to run smoothly, you would likely need to provide:
Website admin access
Google Search Console access
Any analytics access that you already have
Any previous, relevant site data
A brief overview of your site, its purpose and functionality
An explanation as to what you want to achieve from a technical audit
How is a technical SEO audit conducted?
Follow the steps below to find out how to conduct a technical SEO audit:
Start by crawling your website. Every technical SEO should start by crawling your website. This will help you find errors such as broken links, poor images, page title issues and missing text.
Review sitemaps. The sitemap of your website is extremely important as it can inform the search engines about your website structure. It is essential to have a sitemap for getting your SEO strategy correct.
Check the browsable versions of your website. You should be ensuring that the browsable versions of your site are actually browsable. If you have different versions of your website, this can result in mixed signals being sent to the search engine. The crawlers will be confused about which site is the correct one. The technical SEO audit should make sure that only one version of your website is browsable.
Check internal links. Logical hierarchy in your website can massively help your search rankings, which is why you should be checking internal and external links. Web pages can also be moved or deleted, causing broken links, so it’s worth checking this too.
Test the site’s speed. Your site’s speed is an extremely important parameter when it comes to technical SEO. People don’t like waiting for pages to load, and the longer it takes, the more likely that the visitors might bounce.
Do a backlink audit. Backlinks are vital for the success of your website, so it’s no surprise that they are part of a technical SEO audit. They show search engines how valuable your content is for the user.
Re-crawl your website.
Once the issues in the technical SEO audit have been outlined, you can re-crawl your website. This will ensure the changes you’ve made are being taken into account straight away.
What tools are used in a technical SEO audit?
Online SEO tools are used in a technical audit to allow a site to be crawled, data to be collected and categorised, missing areas to be flagged and statistics to be created.
A technical SEO audit on a site can be performed using a range of online SEO tools, such as:
Google Search Console
Screaming Frog
Ahrefs
Moz
SEMrush
Key elements of technical SEO auditing
Tracking the issues you find will help you outline some of the key elements to focus on.
Some of these elements may include:
Making sure your content is visible
Ensuring your analytics is set up
Checking for canonicalisation
Checking for mobile friendliness
Scanning your site for 404s
Checking your sitemap is visible
Checking for suspicious backlinks
Security issues
Checking for schema markup
Why is technical SEO important?
Technical SEO is important because it essentially ensures that your website is user friendly, easy to use and free of any technical issues that prevent it from being ranked by search engines.
You should be implementing technical SEO into your strategy in order to attract organic traffic and turn that traffic into customers.
Technical SEO can be difficult to understand and implement. That’s why the team at Tao Digital are here – we can perform a technical SEO audit for you, and run through the findings in an easy-to-understand format.
From there, we can work on implementing key changes to your website to ensure that it is performing at its best.
If you’re looking to improve your website from a technical perspective, but are intimidated by the thought of uncovering all of your site’s issues, don’t be!
With the right professional help, you’ll soon be rising past your competitors and attracting more traffic.
In this guide, we’ll explain the in’s and out’s of an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) audit, allowing business owners, directors, marketing managers and more to understand the steps necessary to optimising a website.
An SEO Audit is the process of outlining and analysing potential problems or errors that will most impact organic performance, potentially preventing your site from ranking highly on search engines such as Google and Bing.
There are a few key parts which make up an SEO audit, including:
Checking your site for for on-page SEO problems
Analysing the strength of current on-site, off-site and core technical elements
Ensuring your site is being correctly crawled, indexed and rendered by Google
Verifying that your site has good user experience (UX)
Why would you need an SEO Audit?
One of the most important reasons to utilise SEO audit services is the fact that search engines change their algorithms on a regular basis.
It is vital that you keep your SEO strategy up to date, otherwise, you could be missing out on a significant amount of search engine traffic, as well as attention from potential customers.
Below are several reasons why an SEO audit would be necessary for your business online:
Webmaster guidelines: Popular webmaster tools from search engines are continually changing, so you need to make sure you’re compliant.
Algorithm changes: As we’ve mentioned, search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to provide better search results. You need to be aware of these changes so you can update your site content accordingly.
Outdated content: You may have content on your site that is outdated. It’s important to provide fresh content to search engines to give them a reason to come back.
Damaging elements: There may be some technical elements to your site that are actively harming your organic rankings. Core issues, such as broken links, duplicate content, unoptimised pages and poor site speed, can have significant negative impact.
What is an SEO audit tool?
SEO audit tools are used to make the work of Search Engine Optimisation much easier – auditors do not need to spend valuable time doing manual checks on every web page, as the tools help you to identify the problems on your website and categorise them for further, crucial analysis.
Many SEO audit tools can examine your sites health, recognising technical issues and critical errors such as broken links and redirects, which can harm your sites rankings.
Most Technical SEO agencies will utilise SEO auditing tools to allow them to spend more time analysing, proposing and fixing core site issues, which is what will bring businesses the most value.
What does an SEO Audit include?
While SEO audits may vary slightly, each one should analyse basic technical SEO elements such as sitemaps, server errors and metadata.
Some audits may also include indexation, optimisation and accessibility. Every SEO audit should include technical and on-page audits.
An SEO audit varies depending on website size, quality and issues found; the core elements of data gathering and analysis typically takes around 6 weeks.
During this time, a Technical SEO expert will be analysing and uncovering technical issues and opportunities on your website.
During an audit, there may be a few low-hanging opportunities to be discovered and acted on. This gives you the opportunity to recover visibility whilst the remainder of the audit is being carried out.
After the audit has been completed, you will receive a full comprehensive report of your site’s health, which is fully customised to you and your specific situation. Further actions can then be decided upon, depending on how severe the issues are found to be.
How are SEO Audit results analysed?
Analysing your SEO results can take some time, and there are many factors involved.
A technical SEO expert will run through an audit once complete, categorising key issues in terms of priority, current harm to the site, difficulty of repair and time required.
It would then be down to the business to decide how to proceed, but if you are considering analysing and working through an SEO audit yourself, following a checklist can help you to run through your SEO audit and ensure that you are working towards optimising your site efficiently.
For technical optimisation, you should be:
Actively working to fix high-risk issues
Working through any redirects
Working on issues found through Robots.txt files and the site map
Removing or altering any harmful, pages, links and content
Optimising core SEO elements in the back-end of your site
Setting up any missed analytics
Adding in missed elements, such as page schema
For on-page optimisation, you should be:
Researching top performing keywords
Creating a content plan including these keywords
Optimising titles, meta descriptions and headings
Writing original, long form, well optimised and well researched content
Adding internal links
Making your content easy to scan
For off-page optimisation, you should be:
Evaluating your backlinks
Looking at your competitors backlinks
Improving your internal linking
Fixing broken links
Finding link building opportunities
Posting your content on social media, if relevant
Generating backlinks with guest blogs
Depending on the results of an SEO audit, there may be a lot of work to be done. The work on core, on-site technical issues should come first, as without a technically sound website, your future marketing efforts, no matter the scale, will have far less of an impact.
Further work on content production, links and PR will all be backed up by a well-optimised, technically-sound, fast, high performing website.
Google will be far more likely to rank content on a site that ticks all boxes when it comes to technical SEO, and link building and PR efforts will be easier when you have a great site to showcase.
Whether you choose to analyse and work on the issues found within an SEO audit yourself, then move forward with on-site and off-site work, or enlist the help of an SEO agency, the initial auditing services are vital to the progress and success of your business online.
Four Proven Tips to Optimise Images for your Website
Undoubtedly, images offer tremendous benefits. A great user experience, high engagement, and brand exposure are a few of them. That is why almost every content creator tries to incorporate them into content strategies.
Though they transform a text-heavy write-up into a visually appealing piece, they require search engine optimisation.
Inability to optimise images can have a poor impact on SEO. Since image searching is in full bloom, competitors are working hard to bring their sites to the top. Therefore, image optimisation needs no compromise.
But before discussing the tips and tricks, let’s try to understand what is image optimisation:
What is Image Optimisation?
Optimising images refers to delivering the best quality with minimum image size. To achieve this goal, we change various elements like image title, file format, dimensions, etc.
When the image size is small, it brings less burden to the site, enabling it to load fast. A fast-loading website provides a great user experience and increases conversions. Besides this, well-optimised images are easier to crawl and help in boosting the SEO rank.
Thus, to boost the business in the digital landscape, every marketer should learn about image optimisation. This article will share some valuable tactics to help you out.
Never Forget to Add Context to the Images
SEO experts always try their best to let search engines understand their images. Thankfully, adding context to the images is not difficult. Here are a few useful ways:
Use Titles and Captions
Since the attention span of visitors is low, adding titles increases the probability of converting them. In some browsers, titles appear when the visitor hovers over the image. It should be short and specific.
For instance, if you use an image of a Palm Tree, a good title is “Palm Tree,” whereas just “Tree” can refer to a broad category.
Likewise, captions appear below or above an image. They are the short description of the image. You can use keywords at the start of the caption but try to make them brief and catchy.
For example, “best sites for stock images” is a good caption. But “cheap and reliable websites to get high-quality stock photos” look unnecessarily lengthy.
Alt Text
It is the text that appears in place of an image when the internet is working slowly. Thus, users get to know which image will appear. Likewise, as the name suggests, it is an alternative to an image and appears in front of people using screen readers.
For creating a compelling alt text, incorporate keywords smartly. If you stuff multiple keywords, it will sound spammy, and search engines won’t understand the context of the image.
For example, a “Chocolate walnut brownie topped with white chocolate glaze” is a good alt text that makes sense. However, brownie glazed white walnut chocolate is inappropriate.
Structured Data
Structured data is a pre-defined format through which we tell Google about the page contents. It provides rich results for the images, which also enhances the consumer experience.
If we don’t back up the images with structured data, they won’t provide us any SEO benefits. They will just enhance the visual appearance of the page.
Always Submit an Image Sitemap
An image sitemap is a map that describes all images of your site. It includes an image URL, short description, alt text, licence, title, etc. The purpose of this map is to enable search engines to understand the purpose of each image. In this way, they will find it easier to index your site.
Luckily, WordPress users can enjoy this feature for free. They don’t need to create a separate map for images as the platform automatically saves all their images in the main sitemap.
Also, those already having a main sitemap don’t need to create an image sitemap separately. You can easily add information to your existing sitemap.
But make sure to add accurate detail to each image. Otherwise, you won’t get any SEO benefits as search engines cannot match the information with the image.
Use High-Quality and Royalty-Free Images
Finding images for your site is not difficult. Start searching, and you will find billions of options. But every image is not the right choice for your site. You firstly need to see the copyrights and licence of the image.
Stock images are available on several sites, but people only prefer reliable sources as they provide customisable and high-quality assets. These pictures portray a positive image of the site besides providing context to the search engines.
Additionally, paid stock photos are a better option than free ones. Since they are not overused, they leave a positive impression on the visitors. Many new and established businesses use paid stock photos and provide a great user experience.
Consider the Right File Format and Image Compression
Try to understand the purpose of each file format. You can use JPEG when you want a drastic reduction in file size. However, consider PNG if the quality is your first concern in comparison to file size. If you are using animation, GIFs are the best option.
Once you have chosen the file format, thinking about compression should be your next step. Adding pictures without compression will take a lot of space and increase the loading time. Thus, the user experience will spoil. No one wants to do it, so compressing images is essential.
Try to understand the two types of compression before proceeding:
Lossy Compression
It is a type of compression in which you compromise the image quality to decrease the image size. Thankfully, the quality compression is negligible. WordPress users can automatically get this feature for JPEG files.
Lossless Compression
Here you don’t compromise on the image’s quality, but you cannot significantly reduce the file size. The reduction of file size in lossless compression is just 5%. In some cases, marketers want to keep the premium quality of the images. Therefore, they opt for lossless compression.
Final Words
Image optimisation can let you achieve your SEO goals. If done correctly, it can help you compete well with your rivals.
Tips like providing context to the images, choosing the correct format, and providing an image sitemap are helpful. Likewise, using the best quality images and considering the correct form of compression is essential.
Following all these tips can let you optimise your website images without increasing the loading time. Add them to your SEO strategy today!
Ruler Analytics: ‘How SEO became our best acquisition channel’
Laura Caveney, Head of Marketing at Ruler Analytics, has over six years of experience in digital marketing, working across digital content and SEO. She has worked in a variety of sectors, from the charity sector to the travel industry. Laura settled into Ruler in 2020 mid-pandemic to support the marketing team build on their current marketing strategy.
Here, she explains how SEO has become their best acquisition channel over the past couple of years.
Thank you for taking the time to chat with us! We love seeing examples of SEO becoming the best acquisition channel for businesses. Tell us why you decided to make this your main focus?
When I first joined Ruler, we were getting the majority of our inbound leads via partner referrals. While it was fantastic to have this resource and strong relationships with our agency partners, content and SEO felt like a huge opportunity to improve results.
The first job was assessing what we currently had and what was missing. Ruler had a small number of really high intent, middle-of-the-funnel blogs that were working well to drive demo enquiries.
When we looked over the content we had and compared it to the marketing funnel, we found we were missing content from the top and from bottom of the funnel. We know that many marketers aren’t aware of attribution or that it could be a solution to their problem. As such, there was a huge untapped opportunity there with keywords we could use to kickstart customer journeys.
Conversely, at the bottom of the funnel, we wanted to support current customers as well as those in the decision-making stage of the process to fully understand what Ruler was capable of and why it’s a better product than our competitors.
While we knew building our SEO would take a lot of time and effort, it was clear even just from the handful of blogs we already had driving demos, that it would be worth it.
How long have you been focusing on this?
Organic search has always been a priority for us and we have been making small waves of improvement incrementally. But, we really saw a shift after we realigned our strategy in January 2021. That’s where we found our feet in terms of content and SEO and started seeing amazing results.
Now, we regularly assess our content and our strategy and shift to ensure that organic traffic grows month on month.
Talk us through your strategy over the years. Has anything shifted through trial and testing?
When I first joined Ruler, the aim of the game was to just write more content. We got through a lot of blogs, and while traffic went up, there wasn’t a huge shift in traffic.
We assessed what we had done and looked critically at what types of content we were creating and who they were aimed at. We found that a lot of our content was very top-of-the-funnel heavy. And, we were popping in demo CTAs left, right and centre and hoping they would stick.
So, we decided to split out our content strategy into three funnel stages and we defined six content pillars. We went through all of our current blogs and applied each to the relevant stage and pillar.
This exercise left us with clear gaps in our content that made it easy for us to see what was missing. From there, we researched keywords and titles that would fit the gaps that were left and got to work.
While we created huge numbers of new blogs, we also capitalised on the SEO goodness of existing content. It took a year to get through our rewrites but we’re now in a position where we can do short, snappy updates and get our content into top rankings with much less effort.
Our final focus for content in 2021 was creating data-driven pieces of content. We found highly relevant keyword opportunities and created our own data. Whether that was using the data from our product or tapping into our community, we were able to create strong, relevant statistics that other marketers would find interesting.
This helped in two ways. First, we were creating highly-optimised content that was ranking well. And second, users were landing on our data and linking back to it. As such, our domain rating increased from 55 to 69 in a year with very minimal work on backlinking.
Now, for 2022, we’re shifting again. We’ve nailed our SEO process, but now, we want to expand out into thought leadership. While our SEO content is working great at driving new inbound traffic, what we’re missing is the key to getting more people to stay.
So this year, we’re going to share more data still. Our own tests and successes as marketers, plus insights to what we’ve learned during our time in marketing. I’m excited to see where this latest shift takes us.
How have you found the process so far?
The process has been a long slog but our traffic has increased by nearly 300% from December 2020 to January 2022. And that year of hard work has put us in good stead to diversify our traffic while knowing that we can expect fairly consistent levels of organic traffic month on month.
Some months we were writing 20 blogs between just two of us and at the time, it was hard to believe that that hard work would be worth it. And while getting through that big push of content was difficult, it’s got us to a really good base of organic traffic now that we can improve on and optimise.
SEO is definitely a long-term game, but the rewards are so worth it. What advice would you give to others in a similar position in terms of timeline expectations?
Stick at it. The hard work is worth it in the end. There were times in 2020 when I felt like I couldn’t write another word. But, by getting through a big content shift like that, you just don’t know where you could end up. And just know, while it feels like all that effort is futile in the moment, in three to six months it’ll pay dividends.
Do you have any future plans for increasing SEO focuses, or perhaps focusing on other areas?
Yes, we’re looking to continue creating data that is useful and valuable. And we’ll always keep our ear to the ground. We’re very lucky to be able to use an attribution tool as part of our regular reporting.
With it, we can see the levels of traffic blogs are getting and how that’s translating into leads and sales. Even better is that we can see how organic search is informing customer journeys. Whether it’s from a first-click view of a blog or last-click conversion, we can definitively prove the impact of our content. This insight helps us understand a blog’s role in the customer journey, better plan for future content, plus tweak existing content.
It’s been particularly useful from a CRO perspective too as it shows us if a blog is getting high traffic but low conversions, or vice versa. That gives us clear actions when it comes to rewriting and updating existing content.
Ahead, we want to use this inbound traffic to develop our email offering. We love the idea of creating a community and want to use our success in dominating niche keywords to better support marketers with attribution, lead tracking and more.
19/11/2021
Matt Tomkin
The legal sector is one of the longest standing and seen as one of the most professional sectors in the UK. A number of law firms are really lucky in that their client base is relatively secure and has been for some time.
They get recommendations from other professional service providers for the services they offer and have spent numerous years building those networks to create a solid foundation for the firm to keep going.
Recently, with Covid-19 being a large driver in this, we have seen a number of law firms now looking at what other channels are available to drive revenue and visibility for their brands.
We work with a number of law firms on their SEO presence and continue to see great results from organic search visitors.
What do they need to implement internally within their business to gain from SEO as well as the component parts that have to be implemented correctly to gain the up-tick in visitors from Google, Bing, Duckduckgo or any of the other search engines?
3 core parts to SEO
There are 3 core parts to SEO, these are:
Technical SEO, Content and off-site signals.
Technical SEO for legal sites
Technical SEO is all about making sure your website is built in a way in which the search engine spiders can access the information and understand all the information in the most efficient way possible.
Top level technical considerations are things such as:
Page load speed
Mobile usability
Checks that nothing is blocking googlebot from accessing the websites pages, etc.
Then there is Core Web Vitals to consider, but this does incorporate a number of scores that we’ll discuss in further detail.
Page load speed - why is it important and how do you fix it?
In a nutshell, page speed is how fast a web page is loaded when a user visits it.
No-one likes a slow website! It’s as simple as that. Google, and the other search engines, therefore see this as a ranking factor (how they decide where your website/page sits in the search engine results) and a slower website is seen as bad for the user.
The ideal time for a website to load on mobile is between 1-2 seconds. Yes, this is fast, but studies show that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. Here is the study for further information: Think with Google.
However, with the addition of Core Web Vitals, there is now more complexity in the recommendation to “just make it load faster”. Core Web Vitals have been introduced to help website owners understand how to improve overall website experience, rather than outright speed.
For example, the content layout shift measurement is now targeting those annoying moments when you go to click something, but the page shifts as you do it and you end up on a random page; i.e. one that you didn’t want to go to.
Mobile usability: we all know why this is important, don’t we?
Everyone now uses their mobile to browse the internet! If your website doesn’t show properly on a mobile device and users are unable to read, click or even use the site at all, then this is going to affect how you rank on Google and on other search engines.
In Q1 2021, internet users on mobile devices accounted for 54% of all traffic, and this is not slowing down. People are moving away from their laptops and just using mobile devices for all things internet. Make sure they can access your site properly.
Test your website now to see if it works on all the latest devices, use Blisk to check.
Google now, and has been doing so for a few years, ranks websites using a “mobile first” ranking method. This means that if your site doesn’t work very well on mobile, it is very unlikely that the site will perform well on desktop Google searches either.
Check nothing is blocking Google or the search engine spiders
Website owners and developers can use a very tiny piece of code on the back end of a website to ask Google, amongst others, to not index an entire website, or just certain pages. This is great when you want to make sure some pages don’t show up in search for whatever reason, but we have seen examples of developers forgetting to change this to allow indexing of an entire website.
Sometimes, this happens when a new site has been built and the site is set to ‘no-index’, making sure there isn’t a duplicate. The only problem is, it gets forgotten about when the site goes live.
Believe me, this happens. We’ve seen websites disappear from Google within days due to a tiny error like this. Normally, it’s easy to sort and relatively quick to get the rankings back, but it can have permanent damage if not found quickly.
This is just one of many things that can affect how search engines get blocked or have issues with finding and indexing your website pages.
Core Web Vitals: what are they and why should you care?
Core Web Vitals is the name given by Google to a number of measurements that affect user experience and they believe every website owner should be measuring.
They will be used to help determine where a website ranks across all of Google’s tools. As of yet, we’re not sure how much of an impact this has on search results, but you can be sure they will be having some; especially in competitive sectors such as law.
They are measurements from real world data, so it is extremely important to keep a close eye on these scores within your Google Search Console portal.
Page experience is so important and should form part of your overall plan for how to attract new visitors and keep them on the site. However, if you need a push to do this, then Core Web Vitals is for you.
What are the Core Web Vital measurements?
They are split into 3 aspects that affect user experience: loading, interactivity and visual stability.
Google terms these aspects as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1. or less.
It has never been more important to measure how your website loads for your end users and to make sure that there is a budget in place to improve the way your site is built. This is why we moved into website development, to help our SEO clients’ sites load better and hit the scores where needed.
If you need any help understanding your website's speed metrics or technical issues, get in touch.
Search content for legal sites
So, you have likely heard the saying “Content is King” - this phrase does have some truth to it. The real saying however, should go “The Right Content is King” when it comes to SEO and gaining website visitors from search engines.
What we mean by this is that you can write as much content as you want but, if your goal is to get more visitors to your website via organic search, then you need to make sure it matches what Google knows the user is looking for. We call this the ‘intent of the searcher’.
Blog content that doesn’t target search is very important, but only once you have customers on your website. We’re talking about SEO in this article, so we will be concentrating on what we term ‘search content’ or ‘SEO content’.
Writing for search engines and users is an art
When you are looking for more traffic from Google or other search engines, you have to think about what they understand the intent of a search to be. We call this the search intent.
Search intent is basically what a user wants to find when they type something into the search box.
There are 3 different types of search intent as we define them.
Informational: A searcher is looking for content to help understand something or find the answer to a question.
Navigational: The user knows where they want to go and uses a brand name or place to find the relevant website.
Transactional: A user is wanting to buy a product or service. This can include researching a type of product or service, and it could be that they know what they want to buy and go ahead and purchase.
A great example of an informational search would be “How long does probate take?” which is searched for an average of 6,800 times per month in the UK (and this is actually an underestimation of the actual volume!).
The person searching this is higher up in the sales funnel and we want to answer this question for them along with other relevant information surrounding the topic in the best way possible. Once we have answered all the questions this searcher has, they will likely move through the buyer funnel to the point where they will then use a more transactional search, such as “probate solicitors” which is a 1100 per month search volume; again, an underestimation.
Creating search content for each stage of the buyer journey
It is so important to create content for each stage of the buying process.
Links for legal sites
Google was the first search engine to use links to help decide where to rank a website in its search results. They worked on the basis that some links are more trustworthy than others. As an example, the BBC would be very trustworthy as they have very high editorial standards and are one of the most trusted websites and organisations in the world.
However, a website that is not trustworthy and has lower editorial standards will be discounted as a link in the eyes of Google. They need to be good, relevant and trusted links.
It is therefore important that you build inbound links to your website that are from trustworthy sources. Let’s be honest, you’re not likely to get a link from the BBC every day of the week, so we use a tool that estimates the potential domain rating of a website.
This score is out of 100 and can help build a picture of how valuable a link might be if you were to gain one to your website.
The Law Society website https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/en, as an example, has a domain rating of 84/100, meaning that having a link from this site would be great for any law firm.
The content of the page linking to you is important too. Let’s say a major newspaper uses you as a source for an article about probate law; this would be seen in the eyes of Google and the other search engines as a trusted and reliable source and would be a great link.
On the flip side of this, an article about changing the tyre on a car that contains a link back to a law firm's website would not be a relevant or trusted source.
16 Aug 2025
Matt Tomkin
As a search marketing agency, we get asked about SEO vs. PPC a lot. Of course, what we recommend completely depends on the client and their industry, and there are many things to consider before we look to recommend either channel.
In this guide, we’ve gone back to basics about what each of the processes involve (feel free to skip ahead if you’ve already got some understanding), how they can work together and the pros and cons of each.
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and PPC stands for ‘Pay Per Click’.
Search Engine Optimisation isn’t just a case of optimising your pages once and never looking at them again. Due to constantly changing search algorithms, site infrastructure updates, your competitor’s activity and much more, you constantly need to be on the ball to make your site as search engine friendly as possible. This is done through a mixture of technical SEO, content marketing and digital PR.
PPC refers to the ads that you see at the top of Google search results. As a business you will pay per every click received on your ad. It’s not a case of paying the highest, although this is a factor - rather, it’s all about the quality of your landing page experience, ad copy quality along with a whole host of other factors.
What is the difference between SEO and PPC?
There are a few differences between SEO and PPC to bear in mind:
The positioning on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
First and foremost, the most obvious difference between the two is their positioning on the SERP. The paid ads are the first results you see and are labelled as ads, as shown in the graphic above.
The organic results are shown from that point onwards and are what search engines believe to be the best match to a user’s query, starting from the best match and descending from there.
The goal for both search channels
With SEO, it’s likely that you want to boost the site's visibility in the search results, which is a great investment in the overall value of a business. There are a number of advantages to SEO, improving your keyword rankings, increasing your domain rating through gaining links, improving site traffic, bringing more site visitors that will lead to more sales and leads.
SEO is best viewed as a long term investment in your business, it can take some time and considerable investment to make major gains in organic search but the value keeps building over an extended period.
With PPC, you’re normally directing your site visitors to one page (often a particular service page you’d like to push, or a contact form we term a landing page) with the aim being to get users to take an action - ideally, buy a certain product or contact you for more information.
We wouldn't recommend starting a PPC campaign without having a very focused landing page, or set of landing pages, depending on the campaign and number of ad sets you are running.
The time frame
SEO is a long-term strategy and investment in your businesses long term lifespan.
Creating a new piece of content, whether a blog or new service page, goes live, you will need to wait till the search engines ‘index’ the page.
This can be sped up to an extent, but it completely depends on your website's authority and how important the search engines see your website. It can take 3-6 months before you start seeing traffic to the page - in fact, the average time a URL takes to hit page one is over 12 months, according to Ahrefs. On the other hand, paid ads are live immediately and can start generating results quickly when done correctly.
The sort of visitors you will bring to the site
Having managed PPC for a wide variety of clients, alongside undertaking SEO work, we have certainly noticed a difference in the sort of leads that each one will bring in.
With SEO, you’re likely to attract the sorts of visitors who may be at the top of the sales funnel. For example, if you’re a craft insurance business, many small craft businesses won’t know exactly what they need to cover them from claims - these sorts of visitors are at the top of the sales funnel.
Say for example they search a question such as: ‘What sort of insurance do I need for craft fairs?’. They may come across your piece of content, a guide to showcasing at a craft fair. After reading the guide and finding out the sort of insurance their business needs, they may request a quote from you as you have positioned yourself as an expert. (p.s. - you can also read our guide for more information on how to use Google searches to create content that answers user’s questions).
If you did want to target people who are more towards the bottom of the funnel, perhaps you want to create a highly targeted piece of content around getting a quote for insurance. SEO can target both top of funnel and bottom of funnel users, it all depends on the content produced and the competition for the terms.
With PPC you can attract visitors much further down the sales funnel who are either looking to make a purchase now or are looking for very quick results - e.g. someone who has left organising their car insurance until the last minute and is looking for a quote as soon as possible.
They may fill in forms from several of your competitors in order to see who responds first. This means that you may have to filter through more leads to see who is seriously considering buying your product or using your services.
In some instances, you may want to target further up the sales funnel, like promoting a piece of content or a guide, but typically we do see PPC being used for bottom of the funnel purposes.
How SEO and PPC work together
Although SEO and PPC do have their differences, you can seriously reap the benefits of using both together.
Getting greater target audience insights
PPC can give you invaluable data about your target audience. Once your ads have gone live, Google collects information about who is clicking on your ads, such as their age, gender, industry, job role, the area they live in, etc.
This data can help you to refine your next projects as part of ongoing SEO. For example, if you are a business coach and you see that owners of insurance businesses are clicking on your ads, you might want to create a piece of content or a service page around ‘Business Coaching for the Insurance Industry’. This can help you to continue bringing in leads through your PPC work and also attracting those leads organically too - it’s a win-win situation as you start to dominate the SERP!
Increased brand awareness
Using both together also boosts brand awareness. For example, someone might be carrying out some quick research about your industry, and once they visit your landing page from an ad they get a general idea of your offerings and who you are. They may get distracted and leave the site.
However, when that person searches again, or really does need your product this time, they will remember your name and click on your organic listing this time. Or, you could even use remarketing list search ads on Google and make sure you are there for both organic and paid ads.
Testing what works and using it in your SEO efforts
You can also test new keywords that can help with your SEO. Choose a word or phrase that you think you could potentially rank highly for and use it in your PPC ads. If you see great results, this is a sign that you should start to include this keyword in your content.
You can also review statistics such as time spent on the site and bounce rates to see what is working on your landing page and what isn’t - for example, are people getting tired of reading a huge piece of content, or is a call to action too far down? This can help you avoid the same mistake in other pieces of content across the whole site.
Does PPC affect SEO?
Not directly, but as we’ve touched on, you can use the insights to better your SEO. It can be part of your overall SEO strategy, but it’s not essential to your efforts, especially if you have a smaller budget starting out.
What are the pros and cons of SEO and PPC?
SEO: Pros
Increase traffic, leads and brand awareness
It often isn’t as costly as PPC can be
Visitors who view your site are likely to have a higher level of trust as search engines have suggested you as the best match to their query, rather than paying to get there
You can easily attract local traffic to your site by taking advantage of Google My Business and other local listings
You can become an authority figure in your industry as people search your site for information and guides
One great piece of content can consistently bring in leads - we’ve seen this with some of our client’s top performing pages
SEO: Cons
SEO takes longer to see results, so return on investment isn’t instant and needs a consistent budget
In some extremely competitive industries, SEO needs a vast amount of resources to compete. You may need to use PPC as well to generate results in the shorter term
There are no guarantees with SEO - algorithms change constantly
You can suddenly go down in rankings due to a variety of factors, such as competitor activity, the toxicity of the sites that have been linking to you, algorithms etc.
The organic results aren’t as high up on the SERP
PPC: Pros
Generates almost instant results
Return on investment is very clear
Can feed into your SEO strategy and give insights that are more difficult to find through SEO
Gets you to the top of the SERP immediately, compared to months or even years of effort with SEO
Targets people who are at the bottom of the sales funnel, and so are looking to buy NOW
You can set a maximum daily budget to make sure you aren’t spending too much
PPC: Cons
Once your competitors catch onto you efforts, you could face a bidding war where essentially the price per click consistently increases
Many people don’t trust ads as much as they know businesses have paid to get there - 97% of all clicks go to organic search results.
Money can be burned up quickly if it isn’t done correctly - we’ve spoken to many business owners and marketing managers that have tried their hand and spent so much with little ROI!
You can get caught up in ‘click fraud’, a process where people or certain pieces of software constantly click on your ads to use up your money
The data can be complex to understand for those who are new to PPC
So, which is better overall?
Sorry to go for the typical SEO answer here, but really… it depends (yes, we can hear you booing over there).
If you want quick results and know how to optimise a campaign as best you can, PPC might be the best option for you.
However, if you want to put the effort into an SEO strategy over time and bring in consistent organic results, that could be a better choice.
In our honest opinion, a combination of both works really well due to the insights you can get. For the clients we do this for, we are constantly reviewing PPC campaigns to see what’s working and what isn’t, then implementing this into their content.
If you want great results that will take your business to the next level, get in touch with us today. All of our clients receive monthly video reports that prove real return on investment and growth over time.
Fleet Insurance SEO
751% increase in leads for less than £1k per month
Rapid growth for our fleet insurance broker client, all through a well researched and implemented SEO strategy.
It’s a common misunderstanding that working with a small budget for SEO means you can’t generate results.
How can you possibly make enough improvements to the site in so few hours per month?
Well, for us at Tao Digital Marketing, our work with Fleetcover goes to show that results can be achieved by focusing on the most important changes in the little time you have.
In this case study, we’ll break down how we increased leads by 751%, keywords by 259% and impressions by 535% on a budget of less than £1,000 / $1,347 per month, equating to one day’s work. That’s a small spend for SEO, but making the right changes at the right time, and focusing our efforts on the most important aspects, generated these positive results.
Objectives
Our objectives were similar to what every website ultimately wants to achieve: generate leads for the business and increase online visibility for relevant search terms.
To be a little more specific, we picked this client up in March 2019, but of course, results generally started to pick up from November 2019 as Google started to crawl the site more regularly.
Our targets/KPIs for the next 12 months were based on numbers from April-November 2019, as below:
Increase leads from 175 to 500
Install a new chat function on the site and gain 50 leads through it
Increase site clicks from 2,200 to 5,000
Increase keywords ranked for from 229 to 500
The target audience was businesses that need fleet insurance. This spans a wide range of industries, from those operating coaches and taxis through to motor trade.
Our strategy focused on technical SEO and content creation. There was one big issue, though: we didn’t build the site ourselves, nor did we have the level of access that would allow us to make any design or fundamental changes that could support SEO and lead generation. In turn, our strategy had to be heavily content-driven.
Our Strategy
1. Add a chat function
In November 2019, we added the ‘TawkTo’ chat function to the site which has helped generate leads. After analyzing when their audience was visiting the website, we found that most users were on the site late at night and on weekends.
With their team being out of the office and unable to answer any phone calls during these timeframes, we thought it would be of value to offer an online chat function to help capture inquiries so potential customers wouldn’t be put off or frustrated! This would put them at an advantage compared to their competitors who were not doing this.
We implemented the bot so it appears on the tab as a message notification, drawing people’s attention to the page even when it isn’t the active tab. So far, 330 inquiries have been made through this function.
Tweaks that support technical SEO are perhaps some of the most important changes you can make to see real results. We implemented this by:
Optimizing page titles
Creating meta descriptions that were between 100-155 characters, using keywords that naturally fit
Using the optimal image sizes that each website required
Using alt text for images
Implementing internal and external links where possible
Utilizing FAQ schema on the more frequently searched questions
Optimizing the sitemap by getting rid of URLs that wouldn’t support organic search
Using the robots.txt file to point search crawlers in the right direction
Creating 301 redirects. There were a number of outdated pages as well as 404 errors that needed to be addressed
Making usability tweaks to the design. We were very limited in what we could achieve on the site as the incumbent were not massively helpful in terms of the access they would give us. We were able to get round this in certain areas, an example being the ‘Get a Quote’ buttons. We had a feeling user metrics mattered in this competitive market, so we did our utmost to capitalise on this.
3. Optimize the “Get a Quote” form
We added heat mapping and anonymized visitor recording to the site. When we analyzed the data, it became very apparent that many people weren’t filling out the “Get a Quote” form due to it being too long — like standing at the bottom of a mountain, trying to work out the right route to the top! The original form had almost 10 questions, which overwhelmed the user and resulted in low conversion rates.
We’ve had great success using multi-step forms on other client’s sites, so we decided to create one for Fleetcover. We had all the questions needed to provide a full quotation, but split it all up into easier-to-digest tabs and user-designed icons, rather than just text.
Our new form was built creatively and had four steps, making the process easier. With this change alone, leads from the form grew from 175 before November 2019 to 1,489 over the past 12 months (751% increase).
4. Focus heavily on content creation
Service pages
Content creation is an area where we really got the chance to demonstrate creative flair alongside data analysis. We started by reviewing Fleetcover’s service pages, and fleshed out the content to make it more engaging.
Keyword research and search intent
Over time, we continued to research keywords, focusing heavily on understanding the search intent behind them, and creating detailed content and FAQs to meet the audience’s needs and Google’s understanding of those intents.
One topic we’ve been focusing on is the rise of electric vehicles and how this will grow and affect the insurance industry. As the development and popularity of these vehicles progresses, we’re going to look at how we can use this in our content strategy.
Formatting and style
Including clear, natural CTAs at the end of each piece was really important, not only to round out the articles, but also to encourage readers to use Fleetcover’s broker service.
In addition, utilizing a simple but effective tone of voice helped to meet the needs of potential consumers and give them the information they need in a straightforward way. When focusing on keywords/phrases that contain industry jargon, we always include information about what the word or phrase means for those with informational intent about a particular topic, for example ‘fleet breakdown cover’.
Results
Sales
We achieved the goal of gaining more sales, as website conversion rates jumped from 3% to 14%, and leads increased from 175 to 1,489 (751%). This massive increase (pleasantly) surprised us as we are working with a site with a domain authority of 22 in a competitive industry, so to achieve these results so quickly was a great boost for both ourselves and Fleetcover.
Fleetcover was previously spending a considerable amount on purchasing leads from other companies, whereas now they have invested into SEO, which has significantly increased the number of leads they generate. With SEO, these leads are of a higher quality than PPC leads, and are therefore more likely to use their services. There is little need for Fleetcover to purchase leads now, as the business is becoming its own profitable arm of Walmsleys Insurance Brokers.
Rankings
We’ve helped Fleetcover gain online visibility for certain keywords such as “fleet insurance brokers” (#1) and “fleet insurance quote” (#2). Their positioning for “Fleet breakdown cover” has also moved from #15 to #4, and “fleet insurance quote” has moved from #10 to #2. The main benefit of these ranking improvements is the huge increase in traffic!
We also gained top spot for the main keyword of “fleet insurance”, but this has since been taken by one of the juggernauts (excuse the pun) of the industry. We’ll be back, but for now, domain authority reigned supreme.
In April 2019, Fleetcover was only ranking for 229 keywords, and they now rank for 824, a 259% increase.
Traffic
As mentioned, we saw results beginning in November as Google crawled the site more actively and found more relevant content. Therefore, April – November 2019 is our “before” comparison for what we’ve managed to achieve over the past 12 months:
April – November 2019
Impressions: 296,000
Clicks: 2,220
November 2019 – November 2020
Impressions: 1,880,000 (up 322%)
Clicks: 6,470 (up 194%)
Thanks to more than exceeding our set KPI goals, we were shortlisted for three SEO awards this year, and Fleetcover’s CEO had only good things to say:
“For years we’ve been looking for a company to do exactly what you have done and I can honestly say in 12 years of being involved in marketing, this is the first time that any marketing company has proactively gone ahead and done something for us in this way. I’ve whinged about it for so long that it made my day when it dropped in my inbox. Really chuffed.”
