How we engage with the online world is changing. Web search engine platforms such as Google and Yahoo! hold considerable influence, with our buying and browsing decisions increasingly dictated by how businesses and brands are positioned on the world’s most popular search engines. Google searches are now the most popular way of discovering businesses and brands, and Google rankings are now recognised as a key indicator of a brand’s credibility.
SEO Belfast: How Can SEO Promote Small and Medium-Sized Businesses in Belfast?
But how do small businesses and less prominent brands hope to compete in a market dominated by huge brands and established businesses? The answer lies in a practice known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – a series of tactics and strategies which allow a business to position itself on the first page of Google. Fortunately for small and medium-sized businesses, search engine optimisation allows businesses to increase sales and their overall market share using marketing efforts that are relatively affordable compared to other strategies.
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ProfileTree – Expert SEO Specialists with a Local Flavour Serving Businesses in Belfast, Northern Ireland
We are an SEO 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 Belfast 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 Belfast 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 Definition
For the benefit of our readers, we have broken this definition down into three points, which we hope can explain SEO in short:
- Traffic Quantity: This is essentially the number of people clicking through to your site through organic results on search engine result pages (SERPs). More traffic means more sales for your business.
- Traffic Quality: Traffic Quality is all about bringing relevant web users to your business. By ensuring that your website responds to relevant search queries, you can enhance the quality (i.e., relevance) of your visitors, significantly improving sales and lead generation.
- Organic results: These are the results that really matter in the world’s leading search engines. Essentially, organic traffic is any result that isn’t a ‘paid’ ad.
Search Engine Algorithms
Search Engine Optimisation efforts target all available search types, including web search terms, image search, video search, news search and more. The inner workings of SEO are highly complex and subject to constant change with updated algorithms, standards, and technologies. Search engines use online bots known as ‘spiders’ to systematically ‘crawl’ the web, indexing every single page in the online world. By following this process, search engines, including Google allow web users to browse more effectively.
Understanding this process often hinges on how well a business understands basic SEO features.
SEO Belfast: Metrics That Matter
Knowing what to expect from SEO is crucial. First, it helps you understand how to choose the right SEO partner. It allows you to ask the right questions while discussing the project setup and to analyse reports and results later. Additionally, digital marketing deals with a lot of numbers and analytics that may sometimes be misleading. So, it’s important to differentiate between the ‘good sign’ numbers and those that matter the most.
SEO Belfast Metric #1: Metrics That Tie Back Directly to Revenue
SEO Belfast: Start It from the Bottom
The golden rule to looking at SEO reports is to start with the bottom line and work your way backwards. The reason why this is the best way to read your reports is that you focus on what truly matters – return on investment. For example, if you’re a retailer, this would be the number of conversions or the ‘new user monthly recurring revenue’. Then you’ll be able to follow those conversions and identify where they came from and how long it took them to convert. This helps you identify what your most important channels are. If you know that most users come from organic search, then organic would be the metric you’d be focused on measuring.
SEO Belfast: Where Do You Lose Customers?
Furthermore, starting from the bottom up helps you find out where you lose your customers. So, if you have no conversions and no new signups for a newsletter, even though you have a lot of traffic to the website. Then, the website probably lacks engagement or calls to action. Or the visitors are irrelevant to the target buyers. In other words, you’ll know which problem to fix. Remember that the customer journey is a funnel. It goes with awareness, interest, consideration, decision, and action. Your web design should follow that journey.
SEO Belfast: Spend Time and Resources Wisely
Focusing on the metrics that tie back to revenue can greatly impact where you spend your time and resources. To effectively evaluate your content based on revenue, consider making a spreadsheet that tracks all your top-converting posts. Even if those posts aren’t the ones that bring in the most traffic for your site, those are the posts you’ll want to focus your attention on when it’s time to refresh that content when it becomes outdated — since those posts have proven most valuable to your business’s bottom line.
SEO Belfast Metric #2: Brand-Based Keywords
The big brands measure their ‘digital market share’ through brand-based keywords. As the name implies, brand-based keywords are keywords that include the name of your brand. It is a metric which is usually ignored; however, it has many implications for the business. Many businesses start SEO with the goal of growing their brand awareness. So, this is a great indicator of brand awareness. Additionally, it is a good sign for retaining customers or customer loyalty. Consumers want to buy from companies they trust — and familiarity is a powerful factor when it comes to developing trust with your prospects.
SEO Belfast Metric #3: Click-Through Rate
Two-thirds of Google search queries end up with no clicks at all. That’s because Google shows the answer to the query on Google’s search results page itself. So, the user never clicks on any website because they already found the piece of information they were looking for. It has become increasingly difficult to achieve high click-through rates. Yet, if you see a lot of people searching for your target keywords, but your CTR isn’t growing, then that means something is off.
SEO Belfast: Long Tail Keywords
Use long tail keywords to answer long-form queries related to your industry. It’s much easier to rank for long-tail keywords than for short keywords because fewer websites compete for high rankings in the result pages of Google. The longer and more specific your search terms are, the easier it is to rank for them. The Internet is huge, so it is not hard to find an audience for your niche. Long-tail keywords get less search traffic, but will usually have a higher conversion value, as they are more specific. They allow you to gradually get more traffic to your site and be found by new and motivated audiences. Hence, it’s a great strategy to increase your click-through rate.
SEO Belfast: Use a Strong Meta Description to Improve Click-Through Rate
A page’s meta description tag is displayed as part of the search snippet in a search engine results page (SERP) and is meant to give the user an idea of the content that exists within the page and how it relates to their search query. Although Google announced that meta descriptions don’t affect your ranking, your meta description plays a big role in improving your click-through rate. When you create content for your website, make sure that the meta description encourages users to click on the link to get the full benefits. This is critical for optimising your SEO strategy.
SEO Belfast Metric #4: User Behaviour Metrics
These metrics shouldn’t be the first ones you look at, but they’re still important to understand your SEO performance and find out your weaknesses and strengths. One of the main user behaviour metrics is bounce rate and dwell time. They matter to Google, and they also matter to optimise the user experience of your website.
SEO Belfast: Bounce Rate and Dwell Time
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A rising bounce rate is a sure sign that your homepage is boring or off-putting. It is a red flag that you must re-design your home page to make it more engaging and direct your visitors to take action or to navigate further. Similarly, dwell time is the amount of time a user takes to analyse a web page before clicking back to search results. If a web page has a low dwell time, it likely means the page didn’t match the user’s search intent. You might be targeting the wrong keyword or there could be a problem with your content.
SEO Belfast: Pages Per Session
Pages per session is the average number of pages a person views in each session. It is also important to help you understand your customers and their journey on your website better. To make it easy, if you sell iPhones, and a visitor lands on ‘What is an iPhone’ page, it is highly unlikely that they will convert straight away. You need to encourage them to go to another page, and another page after that, to be able to grab their attention and ultimately convert them. So, you need to pick those pages carefully and embed them through your content accordingly. You won’t be able to do unless you analyse the customer’s behaviour on your website.
SEO Belfast Metric #5: Highlight Metrics (Rankings, Traffic, and Backlinks)
Rankings, traffic, and domain authority are good to keep an eye on daily in order to mitigate if those numbers are falling behind. So, they are not the most important metrics, but it is good to see how you’re performing against competitors. Backlinks play a huge part in your website’s domain authority and its overall SEO performance. As much as possible, link to your own blogs and service pages through any content you create. Internal linking is the part of backlinking you have control over, so make the most out of it.
SEO Belfast: External Backlinking
This is really the game changer to your SEO performance. If you can get other websites, especially those with high domain authority within your industry, to link to your website, that will make a great impact. This is one of the most challenging, yet most rewarding SEO tasks. Reaching out to other websites to exchange links, or for an incentive in return works great for SEO but it requires patience and investing effort to reach out to businesses. You also need to invest in your own website so that other businesses find it beneficial for them to exchange backlinks, too.
SEO Belfast: How to Choose the Right SEO Agency for Your Business
SEO Belfast Agency: Take Time
A professional SEO firm will want to take time to genuinely understand your business, your online presence, your goals, your social channels, your content and more. Companies, often from outside Northern Ireland, offering a ‘one size fits all’ solution after a quick meeting are unlikely to achieve lasting outcomes. Also, be careful of overpromising. Like all good things, good SEO results take time. Search engines take time to understand the changes made to your website, especially if it’s a new website.
SEO Belfast Agency: Plan to Win
You probably understand now, after tackling SEO metrics, that ‘More traffic’ isn’t enough! More traffic from where? Are they likely to convert? Where can they begin a journey to become a customer? Does your content start a relationship or show them the door? Expert planning helps create the brand ambassadors of the future. A simple ‘more traffic’ goal means wasted traffic and wasted sales. You’ll win with a broader view designed specifically for your business.
SEO Belfast Agency: Think Bigger
Understanding how customers, including customer segments, can engage with your brand online – and offline – is the secret to building a community of loyal buyers who draw in other people to your business. This clear, effective ‘big picture’ view means SEO can then drive the right traffic to the right location for the right results. Our ProfileTree specialists take a step back to lay the RIGHT foundations for great SEO. Ultimately, SEO isn’t a product. A professional SEO firm in Belfast, 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 word.
SEO Belfast Agency: Stay in Front
In short, a good SEO agency won’t tell you to quit while you’re ahead! It can be tempting to see SEO as a ‘fix and forget’ investment. But customer behaviour – such as using smart speakers to search – can change fast. Businesses that stay ahead of change can profit from digital change while competitors are catching up.
SEO Belfast: How Can Hiring ProfileTree as an SEO Agency Help Your Business
You probably have seen social posts and ads, and more, offering an ‘SEO review’ for your business, and – we hope – you realised that SEO is essential to drive potential customers to your business. Why? Because quality traffic brought to your online ‘shop front’ is the lifeblood of keeping your sales team supplied with great leads.
But what happens next? Taking an SEO review and then approaching the next step in the wrong could be a huge missed opportunity. That’s because if SEO, connected carefully to your business strategies, isn’t being treated as an ongoing process, your business will be missing out on the competitive benefits of being seen and staying seen, ahead of others in your market as changes happen.
Your Choice for SEO Belfast Services
ProfileTree is a Belfast-based professional SEO agency, offering a comprehensive range of services designed to position your brand in the most important of places. We have built our own brand by combining local SEO and international SEO strategy as part of a wider content marketing plan. We’ve brought our content to millions of viewers in Northern Ireland and beyond. Our approach to quality content and user experience has paid dividends, with our brand positioning alongside some of the most prominent SEO specialists in Belfast and beyond.
SEO Belfast: Full Digital Agency Services
At ProfileTree, we offer more than just SEO services. We are a full digital agency specialising in content marketing strategy, web design and video production, driving campaigns that generate real results for our clients. Whilst we have been praised for our role as an SEO agency in Belfast, our comprehensive range of marketing services has been recognised by some of the most prominent awarding bodies in the UK. Indeed, ProfileTree was recognised with the Best Content Marketing Award at the Irish Content Marketing Awards, adding to a collection of trophies that highlight our industry-leading expertise.
Why Choose ProfileTree for SEO Belfast Services?
We know there are almost too many options for SEO services in Belfast. How are we different? We use the right methods in our business every day. We call it Tried and Tested SEO. We do it with four of our internal brands: Connolly Cove, Learning Mole, Amazing Food and Drinks, and Amazing Cars and Drives. 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 Belfast: Local Experience
We know how to help local companies with HIGH-PERFORMING SEO in Belfast because we built our own local business, over many years, on search engine optimisation and content marketing. And we use the methods we’ll show you in our own business every day. This means we don’t just help your business be seen, but also help you make sure you are found online by the right target customers and that they can explore, engage, and convert to help your business grow.
SEO Belfast: Our Recommendations to Improve Your SEO Performance
SEO Belfast: Have an SEO Strategy
It is very important to create an SEO strategy with KPIs and objectives in mind. An SEO Strategy can be based on a business plan as SEO will be trying to push the objectives of the business. This can lead to more website traffic and, depending on the type of website, lead to more sales and customers.
SEO Belfast: Strategy In Line With Business Objectives
Think of your objectives as a business. By answering these questions, you’ll be strategic with your SEO objectives so they can be in line with your business objectives:
- What is the most profitable aspect of your business?
- What is the least profitable aspect of your business?
- Where do you usually lose clients?
- Do you have loyal customers?
- How do they feel about your brand?
- What is your growth plan focused on? Increasing the number of your customers, increasing the amount of money each customer spends? Increasing the number of re-purchases and brand loyalty? Expanding to a different location?
- Who are your competitors?
- How are they using their website to grow their business?
Answering these questions will help you set up KPIs for your SEO efforts and define what success means to you as a business.
SEO Belfast: Don’t Believe the Hype
Companies offering fast results and easy traffic could be glossing over two things….1, That great, lasting search engine optimisation takes time and, 2, That quality traffic designed to fit into a customer journey built around conversions is the goal for actual ROI. That’s why remember that growing your traffic is a KPI, but not an end goal. When you bring people to your website, the goal is to build a relationship with them. You want them to consider your brand in the future. You want them to purchase a product or get in touch with you asking for a service. That’s the only way you can see a real return on investment from your SEO.
SEO Belfast: Make It a Team Effort
Involve your team in understanding the keywords (we’ll work on the research for you) you’ll be targeting, talk to colleagues about targeting and content ideas, and make your digital world a living, breathing part of your business. If your team doesn’t understand SEO, a lot of opportunities could be missed for ranking in search engines. For example, in-house, our own web designers and web developers know about SEO. This is due to different web builds not being ideal for SEO.
SEO Belfast: Keep in Touch
There’s a phrase in running training that “nothing keeps working”, this means the moment you achieve the right results is exactly the time to start planning to maintain that performance instead of waiting for the results curve to drop. We LOVE working ahead of time with clients for changes like voice search to help their company start to enjoy the benefits of inevitable change long before their competitors start to react.
SEO Belfast: Ready to Book a Free SEO Audit?
Fill out 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 Belfast. 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 Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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