SEO agency

Search engine optimisation (SEO) refers to various activities that aim to help a website to rank in higher positions in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant users. This increases the visibility of the website to a relevant audience, driving more traffic and resulting in more conversions.

An SEO strategy contains several different elements, including technical SEO, on-page SEO, content creation and optimisation and off-page SEO.

SEO is important because it makes a website more visible to the intended audience who are searching for products, services or relevant information.

Achieving and maintaining a high position in search engine results for certain search terms can drive more online traffic and give more opportunities to convert visitors into customers or clients.

Effective SEO doesn’t only send more traffic, it focuses on sending the right traffic, so that organic website visitors are more likely to convert or be assisted in their buyer journey to return and convert at a later date.

SEO can also result in an excellent return on investment, as organic search success can be long-term and grow even more over time.

SEO is a complex and ever-evolving discipline, which requires a broad range of skills and a lot of time to be efficient in. Building an in-house team with the right skillset may be an option but doesn’t suit all businesses.

Having an experienced SEO agency on board means you can:

• Save money – vs recruiting an in-house team with the same skill and experience levels
• Save time – vs managing an in-house team or tackling SEO yourself
• Pay one agency fee for the skills and experience across multiple SEO areas e.g. technical SEO, content marketing, digital PR and data analysis
• Have the benefit of specialist experience in SEO in relation to your sector/market
• Ensure that your SEO strategy takes the latest industry developments and trends into account and evolves as needed

The specific results to expect from a good SEO company will depend on your own business objectives, as the SEO strategy will be developed to support these, through tailored SEO activity that meets the needs of your target audience and takes into the account your current online market position and competitors.

Over time, you should start to see the volume and quality of organic traffic increasing, with more conversions as a result. Other benefits can include increased brand awareness.

The metrics to determine success when it comes to your SEO activity will be determined as part of the SEO strategy, and reporting on performance and progress is part of the service offered by your SEO agency.

There are many different factors that can affect the length of time it takes to see tangible results from SEO, such as:

• The website’s age, history and existing level of authority
• The competitiveness of the sector and your chosen keyword strategy
• Your SEO budget i.e. the amount of agency resource that you can utilise for your business

If you have a brand new website with no history, no backlinks and very little content as a starting point, this can mean that results take longer to achieve.

If you have an existing website which has previously received a search engine penalty or has many major technical fixes needed, this can also have a big impact on the timeline of results.

For most SEO campaigns, it usually takes between four to six months for results to start, but there is no hard and fast rule, and there are often incremental signs of growth before this.

With SEO, although minor fluctuations along the way are to be expected, organic growth tends to build over time, as the site gains quality, relevance and search engine authority.

SEO is a long-term marketing strategy and although some results can sometimes be seen in the first few months of activity, the true value of SEO is generally seen over a longer period of time.

Search engines are highly sophisticated and can’t be fooled by websites that don’t have the user-focused quality needed to rank well over a sustained period of time.

Search engines are always evolving, and your SEO strategy needs to also change over time in order to improve and maintain performance.

At No Brainer, we ensure that our SEO services are always user-focused, so that the websites we work on primarily meet the needs of their target audience above everything else.

Search engines also want to deliver the most useful, accurate and reliable results for users, which is why having a user-first approach makes SEO more effective.

We take user intent into account when conducting extensive keyword research and we incorporate user experience (UX) and conversion rate optimisation (CRO) elements into our SEO strategies and recommendations, to provide a smoother and more intuitive user journeys towards conversion.

We also constantly monitor performance and ensure that we’re maximising every element of the strategy to achieve the best possible results and ROI.

We forecast SEO results by using various kinds of data to make informed predictions about future organic performance.

This is likely to include data such as current monthly organic traffic figures, conversion rates and seasonality, combined with the impact that we expect the forthcoming SEO activity to have – e.g. increased traffic levels and the value we predict this will bring to the business.

The SEO forecast will depend on your specific objectives, starting point and the amount of resource allocated to SEO.

An effective SEO strategy can increase online sales, because it targets the users that are most likely to convert, as shown by the keywords and type of searches that they utilise.

SEO is for the whole buyer journey, so will also look to attract people higher up the funnel, but ultimately a website that meets the needs of their customer at all stages of the process is more likely to drive increased sales and then bring people back for more. 

SEO reporting is a vital part of what we do. Not only does it help track performance and inform stakeholders of SEO campaign progress, it also helps to highlight when a SEO strategy needs to be adjusted.

We set up a reporting schedule that works best for each individual client. That is often monthly but can be at whatever interval is required.

We ensure that our reports include SEO metrics that are meaningful to your business and always tie back to the campaign objectives.

At No Brainer, we’ve worked very successfully with in-house SEO teams with many of our clients. We want to be an extension of your own team and work hard on building good relationships and communicating clearly with in-house staff, ensuring we’re all on the same page and working towards united goals.

As an agency with a rich history in PR, we’re ideally placed to incorporate the many benefits that digital PR brings into our clients’ SEO strategies.

While PR is a very different strategy, there are many ways in which these two marketing channels can benefit each other.

Some of the many benefits that digital PR brings to an SEO strategy include:

• Building high-quality backlinks to the website that help increase authority with search engines
• Increasing brand awareness and credibility
• Sending highly relevant referral traffic that is likely to convert

It works both ways. SEO can also help with digital PR by building the brand’s visibility online to reinforce credibility and reputation, along with a well-optimised website providing the perfect platform for journalists and editors to find out more about a particular story or dataset that you want to gain coverage for.