SEO challenges solved by Varn

If you are responsible for planning or managing an on-going search marketing strategy or new website project, you need to assess your starting position. A full audit of your current website’s capabilities in search is essential, so you can understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your site and what improvements need to be made before you invest in any marketing campaigns.

Often companies want to manage their SEO/digital marketing in house, but it can be difficult for the senior team to have the required experience of search marketing and to understand what is required and what good looks like. Internal teams can be running under optimised SEO campaigns or new website projects and marketing campaigns are underutilised.

You must make sure that your keyword strategy is targeted at the correct users and not just driving traffic for traffics sake. Understanding a searcher’s intent behind the keywords they use in search engines will empower your business to deliver the right content at the right time.

Internal page linking is a massively under-utilised SEO technique, especially for larger website. Not only is it used within a page to direct people straight to other pages of interest without having to use the main navigation, but it also gives SEO weighting to your most important content. It is important that each page includes enough internal links to achieve these two aims but too many links can be detrimental, as this dilutes the SEO importance of each link.

When people type your company or brand name into a search engine it is usually because they find this the easiest way to get to your website or to find out more about you. Whatever the reason, it is imperative that you control the top 10 of the Google search results. One negative listing is enough to stop a proportion of searchers from clicking though to your website.

If you have content gaps then you are losing out on enquiries and sales. When content is successfully aligned to what your audience is searching for you will gain higher page rankings, win more click-throughs and massively increase interactions with your target market.

Most successful businesses start with a business case outlining the why, what, how and who. Online businesses are no different. Whether you want to launch a new product, service or brand or extend into divergent markets, the online marketplace will probably make up some, if not most, of your target audience. You need to know the potential size of this audience, where they are, how they connect and use search to find products and services and what competitors there are also targeting them.

There is nothing more frustrating than Googling your product or sector and your competition ranks ahead of you. It is vital to make sure you spend time to understand why your competitor is ranking ahead of you in a search. What’s giving them the edge?

Do you need a brand new website or will some small smart technical tweaks do the job?