What to do next with your website.

How to take your website to the next level.

There are two primary ways that your website helps you win new business.

The first is when it acts as a ‘brochure’ for your business – when people refer other people to your business, the first thing they do is check out your website – when you get your brand in front of people via social media, LinkedIn or other networking, your website is also the first port of call.

This approach means that your website can sit there, with occasional updates and basic maintenance, helping to convert the people who are referred to it.

The second is when it brings in new leads via organic search, paid ads or a combination of both. If you want to go down the paid ads route, this can be set up relatively quickly; however, organic search results can take time and require planning and content work on your site to get it ranking.

This approach requires more planning, time and implementation – especially if the primary focus is organic SEO.

So what are the next steps for your website?

The first step is to determine which of the two routes above is most suitable for your business.

Paid Advertising.

If you have a budget for paid ad spend, this can be a good place to start promoting your site, but it’s best to have this researched, managed, and implemented by experts.

Things to Consider When Approaching a Paid-Ads Campaign.

Your budget – not all of this will be allocated to ad spend; some of it will need to be used to cover the fees of the team managing your account.
Where you advertise – there are more options than Google Ads – where you advertise should be based around where your potential audience is – are they in Google Search, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc – this will depend on your product or service.
Your expectations – paid ads are not a magic bullet, they can get expensive, and it can be tricky to link ad spend to conversions without additional functional work on your site.

There is a classic quote about advertising:

Half my advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.

Organic Search.

If you can get this right, you can get a free funnel of leads delivered to your website every week. Ranking in the top five search results for relevant keywords brings people looking for your services to your site every day.

Search engine optimisation takes time and requires proper content planning and copywriting.

Things to consider when approaching organic SEO:

It takes at least six months of work to see results – hacky grey-hat techniques that get you results quickly always drop out of the results equally quickly.
There are no guarantees – your rankings are subject to changes in search engine algorithms and the actions of your competitors.
SEO has many moving parts, all of which must be considered – it’s not just a matter of posting a few blogs and seeing what happens.

With organic SEO, you are in it for the long haul, and results improve slowly over time. Still, when done correctly, you can achieve evergreen listings that consistently deliver new business leads.

1

Website review.

Your website is faced with an ever-changing series of benchmarks by which it is judged.

Google Algorithms change, keyword positions change, and what your competitors are doing can all change on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

To this end, whenever your site was built, a fresh review and benchmark is always a good idea.

This provides an objective overview of your website’s performance today.

What’s included in this review:

Your current keywords and ranking positions
Keyword research and missing keywords, which also leads to content gap analysis
Converting keyword research
Site speed and build quality
Site structure
Content review and search intent analysis
Service page reviews
About us page review
Schema review (for Answer Engine Optimisation)
Website alignment with business objectives review
Any other reviews that are niche to your product or service

2

Technical Optimisation.

There is little point in embarking on an organic SEO campaign if your website is not technically optimised.

Site speed benchmarks change over time, so a fast site last week may not be considered fast six months from now.

Your site must score over 90/100 in Google’s Page Speed tests.

This should be reviewed monthly, and any slippage should be addressed promptly.

3

Structure & Content optimisation.

Your site may need reorganisation or new content to start ranking.

Search engines need to understand your site to surface it in the search results.

If we’ve rebuilt an existing site for you, there’s a good chance that the current structure was maintained to avoid affecting your existing rankings. However, if you want to get more from your site, now is the time to review it again and make changes that can positively impact your SEO.

This is typically achieved by adding new content rather than removing content.

Search engines are looking for specific types of content on your site to ensure they meet the right criteria and then rank your site higher.- You don’t have the right content, you won’t rank.

Never use AI-generated content on your website – Google is looking for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust signals on your site. AI will generate a well-written waffle unless it’s used in a precise manner.

4

Design & Creative.

Your design should be professional and appropriate: people judge it in 300ms, but search engines and AI can’t see it.

There is an imbalance where people think that design converts more than content does.

Yes, your website needs to look professional and relevant to your niche, but design alone will not help your site rank higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Providing your site looks both professional and appropriate, the design can stay as it is.

5

Content generation.

Sites that rank publish laser-targeted content consistently.

Now that we have the keywords you should be ranking for, the next step is to produce content that targets these keywords.

This involves researching and writing content for your site that is written specifically to rank your service landing pages.

Here’s how this works.

Blogs, articles, insights or whatever you want to call them should not be designed to rank in their own right; they should be created to support your website’s essential landing pages.

Think about them in the same lines as a Domestique in the Tour de France – they are not there to win the race, they are there to ensure the leader wins the stage.

Broadly, this means you have:

Services pages where the visitors convert.
Content that supports these service pages – this content is relevant to the service page but does not compete with it; instead, it internally links back to it using carefully chosen anchor texts to boost the service pages’ authority.
Both the service pages and blogs must have the correct type of content to meet the search engine requirements.
All content should meet the EEAT guidelines and be obviously identifiable as written by an expert in the niche (no AI-generated waffle).

This process takes months, not weeks.

Flooding your site with too much content too quickly can also send the wrong message to the search engines, so we plan this process to roll over 3, 6 or 12 months.

6

Rinse and repeat.

We have a technically optimised site, targeted keywords, and a plan of action; now we make it happen.

SEO is an expense if it does not work and an investment if it does.

This is why we suggest that all clients approach SEO and the next steps for their website in a step-by-step manner.

A three-monthly cycle.

Steps 1–4 above are one-off jobs that need to be reviewed periodically; these, along with the previous steps (5 and 6), are rolling work that is planned and implemented over a monthly cycle.

7

Budgets.

SEO requires time and investment, but there are options available, and we can work flexibly.

Our SEO plans start at £360 per month. This is a time-based charge and allows three hours per month to work on the site.

A typical project would follow this plan:

Month One – site review and research, technical optimisation
Month Two – current content optimisation
Month Three – content generation (rinse and repeat)

How much new content do we create each month?

If we are researching and writing, two per month
If we are studying and providing outlines for you to write: four per month

The outlines we provide are detailed guides for the content; you can then use these outlines as a guide to write the content yourself.

Our minimum charge is £ 360 per month. If you require four blogs written per month, the cost would be £720 per month; eight blogs per month would be £1440, and so on.

This means you can align the quantity and speed of delivery with your budget.

Get started

Can I pick and mix?

If you don’t want to go on a monthly plan, we can provide ad-hoc SEO too.

We offer all our SEO services on an ad-hoc basis for £120 per hour.

If you’d like the occasional piece of content or some technical optimisation here and there, you can let us know what you need, and we’ll provide a cost for doing so.

If you’re looking for WordPress maintenance and general help with your site, we also offer that service.

We offer a range of support plans for WordPress sites, covering theme and plugin updates, small development tasks, and content tweaks.

You can find out more about maintenance support here.

See how well your website is doing.

Serprocket is an AI-powered SEO app that connects to your Google Search Console account and makes sense of the data for you.

It’s free to use, and you’ll see all your ranking keywords, what pages rank and how people are finding your website. All you need to use it is a Google Search Console propery for your website.

Try it Now

Want to get started?

All SEO work starts with a discussion about what you want to achieve. If you’d like to discuss the next steps for your website, please call us on 01295 266644, email us or book a meeting on the link below.

Book a meeting