When businesses decide to focus on SEO, they generally have x3 options. They can hire dedicated staff members, they can outsource to freelancers or they can use an expert SEO agency.
SEO is multi-faceted and can be simply broken down into three areas of concern:
• Onsite SEO
• Offsite SEO
• Technical SEO
When you hire an SEO, you must ensure all three areas are being covered. It is no good having great onsite if technical issues are holding the site back or if your site is technically proficient, but your offsite SEO has damaged your reputation through incorrect practices.
Each one of these areas is also specialized. We can’t all be great at everything, that is why hiring a multi-disciplined team provide can bring all these elements together and can deliver the best results moving forwards.
Onsite SEO
Your website in St Helens may be a simple brochure website where you offer your services, or it could be an e-commerce store where you are looking to gain online sales.
In both cases, onsite SEO is a crucial part of this mix. It primarily involves your content, and we know this is a key ranking factor.
All the basics need to be covered here. Is your content unique and engaging? Have all the images been optimized? Do your images have descriptive alt text? Are your meta titles and descriptions optimized? Are your headings in a logical order?
Many websites can fail with the basics of onsite SEO through a lack of knowledge of these components or by simply overlooking the importance of these factors.
Beyond the basic elements of Onsite SEO, we also look at understanding a user’s journey through your website and their interactions with the website. This is also an often overlooked element of onsite SEO. If a user lands on a web page and bounces off straight away, do you think this sends a positive signal to Google? We would say this is not a positive signal in most cases unless you have answered their query instantly.
How about a user lands on your website, reads the content and performs further interactions on the page? From here, we can see how important it is to have a dedicated team. You will need designers, website developers and UX (User Experience) experts to work together with the SEO team to deliver positive results.
Offsite SEO
Offsite SEO is mainly concerned with building links to your website and growing your Domain Authority (DA). There is a well-known correlation between quality backlinks and the position you will attain in search engines such as Google. Although this is only one factor to consider, can your website rank with few links? Yes of course it can, if your content answers queries and topics better than compared against competitors.
By building great content, people will find this online, and over the course of time, people will naturally share and reference your content. The pages that receive these backlinks are further strengthened, and we send a positive signal to the search engines that these are high-quality pages, and part of the proof is in the backlinks a specific page receives.
In the past, people have tried to manipulate this factor by purchasing backlinks which is a very risky move. Manipulation of the search engines can have very bad consequences for your website, and this is why here at Maxweb, we only provide white hat SEO services.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO describes the work we do to ensure no technical issues are holding the site back from better placements in the search engines.
Some technical SEO elements can be found and fixed quite easily with a bit of background knowledge. Other technical aspects will need to be conducted by website developers or changes made to your server side that require more expertise.
These can include issues such as site speed, HTTP errors, mobile issues, canonical issues and duplicate content, crawl errors, theme issues and poor server performance,
It could also be dependent on the platform you use; if you use Shopify, you may face different issues compared to using platforms such as Magento, Wix, WordPress or Square Space.
Our dedicated SEO team understand the key technical issues that need to be identified on each platform and work together with the in-house development team to fix technical problems as part of our SEO service.
