Branding is often regarded as nothing more than having a good logo and a catchy tagline, however, nothing could be further from the truth, especially when it comes to SEO. Effective branding can have a positive impact on your SEO and ranking, just as poor branding can have a negative impact.

With Google increasingly seeking to base their search engine results on user experience, it is no longer just enough to focus on the technical elements of SEO. By these, we mean things like anchor text, meta tags and keyword density, which are measured by crawlers and algorithms, and not real people.

You also need to think about the way in which your website appeals to those who visit. For example, do they stay on the website for some time, do they click through to other pages, or are they just there fleetingly and clicking away almost immediately?

These are important to consider because it is data like this that allows Google to measure how good or bad your website is with regards to user experience. While there are specific actions you can take to improve this such as increasing page load speed, and adding more interesting content, you can also impact them by improving the branding of your website. Read More

Business owners often wonder where most SEO activities take place. Is it on the website or off the website? Whilst much of the SEO work undertaken to improve a websites’ Google rankings happens away from the website such as external link building, internal linking and social citations, a lot is done on the actual website itself. Whilst the off-page optimisation is extremely important and very influential if done correctly, the on-page SEO activity is also vital to a website’s ranking – especially in competitive industries.

If you were wondering what the most important on-page factor is, then who better to ask than Google themselves. They are quite clear that the content on a website is the number one element when it comes to rankings. This makes sense when you understand why Google exists, and more importantly how they continue to thrive.

Google live or die depending on whether the people using their search engine are satisfied or not, by the results which Google display for any given search term. If the list of websites which appear for any given search term are sites which the user can then visit and find both relevant and interesting content, that user is happy with Google’s service and likely to use them again. Read More

There is a plethora of paid tools and software which can help with your SEO strategy, and no doubt each of them has it merits. However, there is a free tool, which means it is often overlooked or given the credit it deserves.

That tool is the Google Search Console, and it has several excellent features which can give your SEO efforts a significant helping hand in terms of being able to see how your website is seen by Google.

Google Search console isn’t one tool but is instead a collection of tools which provide information relating to search traffic, crawling data, and search engine appearance. You may have heard of it being called one of its previous names which were Google Webmaster Central, and more recently Google Webmaster Tools.

To start using Google Search Console there are a few steps you need to complete which include opening a Google account if you do not already have one, and then verifying your account which can be done in several ways, including using SEO plugins such as Yoast. Read More