Technical SEO is the process of improving a website to help search engines to discover, understand and rank its content. Creating strategic content hierarchies, using structured data to contextualise content, and optimising code for speed and performance can all help a website move up the rankings within Google. Achieving higher rankings in turn leads to increased traffic, conversions and revenue – ultimately helping businesses to thrive online.
At Varn, we have many years of experience helping clients across a range of industries and sectors to grow traffic, conversions and revenue from organic search. We typically begin by conducting a thorough and bespoke audit of a client’s website, delving into the data and code to discover how search engines have chosen to categorise, understand and value existing web content. At the same time, our Technical SEO team will interrogate the performance of online competitors to build a picture of the challenges and opportunities present in the wider search landscape.
We use these insights to create an ongoing technical strategy, focused on the individual client’s priority products or services, target market and industry position. Each strategy is unique and targeted to the requirements of the client, and Varn can go on to help implement the strategy alongside the client’s inhouse team over a period of months, in order to grow rankings and traffic.
We have a dedicated Innovation Team who are researching and developing tailored solutions and search strategies to adapt for SearchGPT, a new AI-powered search engine. Find out more about how we can help you to optimise for SearchGPT and AI-powered search as search behaviour evolves.
Keyword research is one of the cornerstones of a successful search strategy. Varn can investigate the keyword landscape around relevant topics, taking into account your most important target markets and audiences, and use this to develop a data-led content and Information Architecture strategy.
Data analysis is at the heart of most of the technical SEO work we do at Varn. Time and again we have found that interrogating performance data is the key to identifying new SEO opportunities, understanding why a specific piece of content isn’t performing, and working out how to get ahead of the competition. Whether you need help creating an easy-to-comprehend SEO dashboard, or diving deep into your website numbers, we can help.
The days when Google results consisted of a simple list of ten blue links are long gone. Today, you will find Search Engine Results Pages packed with reviews, maps, videos, imagery, Q&As and even recipes. Varn can help to identify and achieve impactful ‘rich results’ ranking opportunities, securing you greater SERP real estate which can in turn translate to more clicks, increased traffic, and ultimately more enquiries, conversions or sales.
The way a website is coded is incredibly important for SEO. A small error in the code could mean that search engines are simply unable to find or comprehend your content – which will make it impossible for this content to appear in search results. On the other hand, optimised code can provide search engines with a range of useful contextual information to help your site achieve your SEO goals. We can offer SEO code reviews as part of our bespoke SEO audits, within ongoing site health checks, or at the stage of launching/migrating your website.
Moving your site to a new platform, domain or design can be a complicated and daunting process. Often SEO gets forgotten in the lead up to go-live, which can result in a significant drop in traffic when search engines are suddenly unable to find the content they had previously ranked. We can help protect your SEO traffic during your migration by mapping, redirecting and protecting your existing content.
Varn can provide content, Information Architecture, coding and technical advice in the run-up to the launch of a new website. We recommend considering SEO as early as possible in the design and planning process to ensure that organic search best practices are seamlessly woven into your site rather than tacked-on after launch.
For many organisations, local SEO is increasingly important – whether that means ensuring your branches display in Google Maps results, you are at the top of the organic listings for a ‘service + location’ search like ‘seo bristol‘ or helping prospective customers around the world to find content specific to their language and location. We can help implement coding best practices that will help search engines understand and rank your local content.
Whilst many businesses conduct their technical SEO activities in-house, the expertise, time and technical resources required to really excel in organic search optimisation means that this is not always a practical solution. The role of a Technical SEO agency is therefore to provide strategic and expert advice and hands-on support, keeping abreast of both the organic search landscape and their client’s specific industries, as well as their business needs. At Varn, our primary focus is creating clear SEO strategies for our clients based on a thorough review of their websites and wider market. We can then supplement this work by helping our clients to implement the recommendations within their SEO strategy, working closely to identify which items can be taken care of in-house and which should be actioned by our team of technical search optimisation experts.
Two thirds of all online experiences begin with a search engine, according to research by BrightEdge. This means that for many organisations, search engines are the primary channel by which traffic is driven to their website; As such it is easy to see that SEO should be a key cornerstone of any digital marketing strategy. Happily, many of the best-practices inherent to good Technical SEO also reflect excellent UX optimisation, meaning that improving your site’s organic search presence often goes hand-in-hand with creating a better user experience and enhancing your wider digital marketing strategy.
Analysing the impact of search engine optimisation can be difficult, but ultimately needs to be informed by an organisation’s strategic goals and digital KPIs. Ecommerce companies primarily aiming at online sales will have different goals to B2B lead-generation organisations, for example. These end goals should have been fed into your SEO strategy from the planning stage, which will make it easier to review the success of your organic search activities. Generally, when we consider SEO success we begin by looking at how rankings have changed over time for the relevant business-critical primary keywords. This in turn feeds into important SERP metrics such as impressions and clicks, which should naturally grow as rankings improve, and will translate to increased organic search traffic reaching your website. Finally, growing organic search traffic from highly-relevant keywords leads to improvements for key performance indicators such as sign-ups or purchases. We recommend benchmarking, monitoring and analysing the metrics associated with these different phases throughout your SEO strategy implementation, allowing for actionable insights to be fed back into the strategy on an ongoing basis.
Search engine optimisation is a long-term marketing tactic which can take many months to have an impact. However, once higher levels of organic search traffic have been achieved, it is relatively easy to maintain these with ongoing site health management. Thorough research and analysis of available data is needed to feed into a sensible strategy, which then translates into incremental website improvements over time. It can take some time for Google to become aware of changes like these, and for content to move up the SERP rankings. Then, once key landing pages near the top of page 1 in SERPs, we generally see a decisive increase in website traffic and associated KPIs. In general, we expect to see traffic improvements between 6 and 12 months after we start working with clients.
Local SEO is a specific expertise under the umbrella of SEO and increasing website visibility for the right searchers, but it is only concerned with businesses that have a physical location and serve a geographical area around that place. It will therefore help you become more visible in search engines within your local area, or for multiple individual office locations. For example, instead of targeting a national keyword such as ‘SEO Agency’ (which would take longer and be much more competitive), it would be better in our case to target ‘SEO Agency Bristol’ which still gets a good number of searches per month and will be achievable in a much shorter space of time than the equivalent national search term. As a specialist Local SEO agency we can get you ranking on Google Maps or in the organic results in only a few months.
Keep up to date with the latest search marketing news, insights, algorithm changes and research
