How many times do you ‘Google’ something every day? Probably more than twice. Google has become the global human directory on everything from cat memes to scientific research and everything in between. But what does that mean for you as a local business in Bangor? Have you considered how to make your business show up on that first page of Google search results? No matter what the nature of your business is, someone out there is googling the topic. Your goal is to work your way to the top of the search results. In this piece, we’ve created an SEO glossary that would help you navigate the world of SEO and understand every term, especially while choosing an SEO agency.
Are You Looking for ‘SEO Bangor’?
ProfileTree – Expert SEO Specialists with a Local Flavour Serving Businesses in Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland
We are a self-made, family run agency based in Belfast and Monaghan. We’ve established ourselves in the Northern Irish market since 2010. We’ve grown the team, collected awards, and helped local and international businesses with their SEO performance. We’ve also helped hundreds of small and medium sized businesses with free SEO training through programmes funded by Northern Ireland’s Councils over the course of three years. Investing in SEO for your business in Bangor means making sure your new SEO partnership is built on proven methods. We’re SEO specialists AND a leading content marketing agency, meaning we can help that you’re not just seen but that the right traffic for you works hard for your business.
SEO Bangor Explained
Search Engine Optimisation is one of the most in-demand services in the field of digital marketing. But how do we describe SEO? According to Moz, SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. You may ask yourself, “What do I need to know about SEO?”.
SEO Bangor: Your SEO Glossary
SEO Bangor Glossary #1: Google algorithm
Google Algorithm is a set of rules used by Google to rank matching results when a user performs a search. Any search engine’s goal is to offer its users the smoothest experience while answering their queries accurately. Therefore, users trust Google and the reason why it is the most successful search engine in the world is: Google answers your questions accurately. This is no coincidence. Google developed the best tools to rank the most relevant results based on your search query. Thanks to Google algorithm, no matter what you’re searching for, it is impossible to find the top results completely irrelevant to what you’re looking for.
SEO Bangor Glossary #2: Crawler
To be able to rank your website among the top results, your website needs to be outstanding to impress Google’s Crawler. A crawler is an internet program designed to browse the internet systematically. Crawlers are most used as a means for search engines to discover and process pages for indexing and showing them in the search results. So, a crawler is a ‘reader’ of your website, only it is not human.
SEO Bangor Glossary #3: Robots.txt
While we’re talking about crawlers and Google algorithm, it’s good to define ‘Robots.txt’. A robots.txt is a text file that resides in the root directory of your website. It gives search engines crawlers instructions onto which pages they can crawl and index, during the crawling and indexing process. This ensures that search engines can correctly access your website.
SEO Bangor Glossary #4: Core Web Vitals
Metrics that are part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. User experience is a huge umbrella. Every little detail, or what marketers call a touchpoint, affects the user experience. If you have an online store. The way you categorise your products is user experience. Product shots and zoom in and out features are user experience. Content on the product description is user experience. What Google focuses on primarily though is loading performance, interactivity and responsiveness, visual stability, mobile friendliness, HTTPS (page security), and intrusive dialogues (annoying pop-up messages). Each aspect of those can be optimised by expert web developers.
Technical SEO
Core web vitals are another word for technical SEO. Google evaluates those aspects of your website to make sure that the websites they recommend offer the best experience to Google users. There are free tools out there that rate your website based on these factors. In most cases, you will need a team of developers and designers to update your website and improve its technical performance.
SEO Bangor Glossary #5: Page Speed
Page speed is the amount of time it takes for a web page to load. The ideal speed for a page to load for Google is three seconds or less. PageSpeed Insights is a tool offered by Google that can evaluate your website’s loading speed for free. It will also highlight the key issues to resolve if the website is slow. Every site is different, however, here are some general guidelines:
Optimise Your Site’s Code
Code plays a large role in the performance of your site, especially when it comes to loading time. Be sure to remove irrelevant characters, commas, spaces, and other unnecessary items for quicker load times.
Allow for Compression
Sometimes, users don’t have the connection required to optimally load your web page as-is. With a compression-enabling application, your page can automatically reduce file sizes to load quicker in these instances.
Use Smaller Images
That crystal-clear quality is great but using smaller images can work wonders for improving page speed. It’s important to find a balance between image quality and image size.
SEO Bangor Glossary #6: Mobile-first Indexing
Mobile first indexing is an important definition to highlight because it’ll show you the weight of optimising your website for mobile devices. Google’s shift to using the mobile version of content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the crawler primarily used the desktop version of a page’s content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query. But now that more than 60% of search queries are done through a mobile device, Google switched to indexing mobile first. For you as a business, this means that your website needs to perform well on mobile – just as well as it is performing on the desktop. Google dedicates tools to score your website’s ‘mobile friendliness’ such as PageSpeed Insights.
SEO Bangor Glossary #7: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web tracking tool offered by Google to analyse how visitors interact with your website. Google Analytics is a powerful data collecting tools that helps you make the right decisions to grow your website. It can help with decisions related to SEO, Ad targeting, your client’s lifecycle from acquisition to retention. It can also help with predicting the behaviour of your customers. As far as SEO is concerned, the tool gives insights regarding the pages of your website that are gaining a relative number of visitors and your best-performing pages. This can help you strategise on what kind of content to invest in and how you allocate your efforts accordingly.
SEO Bangor Glossary #8: Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that take no further action after landing on a website, like clicking through to another page, leaving a comment, or adding an item to their cart. They navigate away from the website after visiting only one page. This is an important key performance indicator of how engaging the page is. If people are leaving your homepage without taking any action, for instance, then you could be targeting the wrong audience. Or, your homepage could be boring, irrelevant, or has no calls to action to direct the visitor on where to go next.
SEO Bangor Glossary #9: Search Intent
Keywords
Keywords are words and phrases that people type into search engines to find what they’re looking for. In part two of this glossary, we will tackle the different types of keywords and their definitions. However, search intent is what we should highlight here because it is often overlooked by companies and even SEO agencies. Search intent is the reason behind a search. Always inclined to focus on winning keywords instead of topics.
User Intent
Whenever you’re targeting a keyword or creating content to target a keyword, don’t forget to think of the search intent. If someone is searching for ‘birthday cake near me’, they don’t want a recipe. They want to buy a cake. So, it’s a great keyword for bakeries. But did you think it is also a great keyword for gift shops, event planners, and fancy-night-out restaurants? Someone searching for ‘birthday cakes’ obviously has a birthday, and their real intent is to make someone’s day. So, they must also be looking for gifts or birthday themes, or ideas to spend the night out. These are all missed opportunities if you don’t think of the user’s search intent.
SEO Bangor Glossary #10: Dwell Time
Dwell time is the amount of time between clicking one of the search results and heading back to them. If a web page has a low dwell time, it likely means the page didn’t match the user’s search intent. This has a lot to do with the content of the page. That’s why it is advised that your page has enough content that would make people stay long enough and give them value. Some techniques like embedding videos or interactive infographs are used to increase the dwell time of each page and you should use that to your benefit as long as it is relevant to the content of the page and adds value to your audience.
SEO Bangor: How Can Hiring an SEO Agency Help Your Business
Are you searching for SEO services for your business in Bangor? Our local company specialises in helping businesses like yours to grow through services including high-performance SEO. We do things a bit differently when it comes to SEO Bangor. That’s because we believe in using tried and tested expertise. We’ve tested ourselves in our own company and with four of our internal brands: Connolly Cove, Learning Mole, Amazing Food and Drink, and Amazing Cars and Drives. We can show you or live results!
Full-Service Agency
Plus, our specialists’ know-how includes search engine optimisation as well as web development, content marketing, social media strategy and much more. In this way, we understand how SEO fits into the jigsaw of your online presence, and how to make ALL the pieces work together for real results. Find out more below and discover tips exploring how to use SEO as a sales process…
SEO as a Holistic Approach
One question: when you’ve decided that your business needs help with SEO, have you considered SEO as part of your sales process or just as something that ‘needs done’ for more traffic? It’s easy to imagine SEO – delivered through website changes or through great content (many agencies won’t want to put hard work into the latter!) – as something you do to improve traffic, then tick a box on your ‘to do’ list and move on. But this is like improving visits to a physical shop without making sure they’re the right customers and that they’ll see the right things when they walk through the door.
Web Design and Content Done With The Customer Journey in Mind
And, of course, the moves you make with the content they do see needs to form part of a customer journey, a sales process. That’s because you wouldn’t walk up to a customer in a shop and try to close them immediately. The customer’s journey with you online is no different. So, if you’re looking for SEO companies or services in Bangor, a ‘big picture’ relationship built around sales and results will be vital.
SEO Bangor: How to Choose the Right SEO Agency for Your Business
Choose Carefully
SEO agencies covering the Bangor area who treat SEO as a ‘tick box’ service and bury their results in raw traffic won’t drive the kind of conversions we’ve described above. Your online customer journey is as import as the layout, displays and signage in your physical shop. Choose an agency who’ll leverage this.
Invest Time for Results
Time taken, with an SEO specialist, to understand your online world, your customers, and the content they’ll see is time invested in building new customer relationships that last. Our goal? Customers who go from being strangers online to being advocates for your brand online, creating a cycle of new business.
Don’t Be a stranger!
The key to staying on your toes as a business online and profiting from changes like new devices and new customer behaviour, is a great relationship with your agency too. A professional SEO company will work hard to stay ahead of changes – such as voice search – as they happen to put your business on the right side of new developments, rather than reacting to change.
Ultimately, SEO isn’t a product. A professional SEO firm covering Bangor, or anywhere in NI, will show that SEO is an ongoing way of thinking about web set-up and content and customer journey, a best practice, and a foundation for your digital world.
SEO Bangor: How to Approach SEO as a Local Business in Bangor
SEO Bangor: Think Strategic SEO
You might be thinking ‘I want more traffic to my website’. Always a good idea. But what will the visitor have searched for? What will they be expecting when they click through? What would make them convert or begin a journey to become a customer? The good news is that ProfileTree can help connect the answers to these vital questions. ‘Off the shelf’ SEO solutions can’t do this.
SEO Bangor: Consider Your Overall Digital Strategy
Asking the questions in Step One means a great start to making SEO work hard for your business. But taking a broader view of what your potential buyers see online – your website, your social media, your emails and more – is a building block to creating online visits that turn into customer relationships. Your entire digital marketing strategy needs to be in line. Ask us how to know how ProfileTree can help.
SEO Bangor: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
SEO – both SEO involving website set-up and content-based SEO – isn’t a ‘fix and forget’ process as any change in performance needs the right response to keep your website and digital presence working at its best for your business. We love building lasting relationships with our customers to drive results not just today, but to find new ways to leverage change to achieve even more results in the future.
SEO Bangor: Profit from Change
Competitors who treat online opportunities like SEO as something on their ‘to do’ list, as opposed to an ongoing process, leave the door open for your company to react to those changes in customer behaviour more quickly. ProfileTree’s SEO work is based on the latest and forthcoming changes – not on reacting to the past – putting you one step ahead. Most of all, ProfileTree built our own company on SEO and content marketing, so we understand how to incorporate great SEO into the very roots of the online presence where your customer interacts with your brand.
SEO Bangor: How Much Is SEO Services
Working with so many different businesses over the years taught us to work with different budgets and requirements. We tailor all our packages according to your needs and it doesn’t matter whether the budget you have is big or small – we work with KPIs. In other words, you set the budget, we tailor a package optimised for your requirements and within the limits of your spending. We have packages starting from 500£ per month covering SEO audit, content writing, imagery, keyword analysis, and reporting. For technical SEO and website optimisation, please contact us for an accurate budget as it varies from one website to the other.
SEO Bangor: Ready to Book a Free SEO Audit?
Fill the form and send us your questions, we will be happy to answer all of them. Please do let us know if your business is registered in Bangor. Alternatively, you can book a chat with one of our team members to audit your SEO performance and find out how we can help you grow your website traffic organically in Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland.
More services: Social Media Marketing Bangor, Content Marketing Bangor, Digital Marketing Bangor, Digital Training Bangor