Technical SEO

Given that Google acknowledges that there are more than 200 factors used to determine where your website should rank against your competition, there are many different elements which feed into successfully optimising a website for organic search. These include keyword modelling, content hierarchies and Information Architecture, mobile optimisation, site speed, internal linking and anchor text, imagery optimisation, page structure, canonicalisation, content markup and structured data, CTR optimisation, URL structure, and more. However, during the decades that the Varn team have been honing our SEO skills, we have found that the most important element for Technical SEO is developing a clear and balanced overarching and holistic strategy which takes into account available resources, prioritises clear wins, and focuses on the specific industry and competitor environment of the website at hand.

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.