SEO: Our Methodology

We use a 5 stage process when we are optimising sites to perform well in natural search results, here as an overview of the stages we go through:

Stage 1 – Site Architecture Review
This is the most critical stage of any optimisation project. There are plenty of excellent web design agencies in the UK but most of them do not understand search engine optimisation and they will readily admit that. With this in mind, most web sites are structured poorly in relation to how efficiently a search engine can navigate through each page and collate information from them. Without the right structure, search engines find it hard to extract the information they need to rank understand which words and phrases relate directly to your products and services.

Each client site under goes a 25 point review to ascertain exactly how we need to modify the site structure and content. After our review, we can either produce a report for your in-house design team or agency to follow in order to correct the structure of
the site or we can implement the changes on your behalf.

Stage 2 – Keyword and Audience Research
We perform detailed keyword research in order to understand exactly what your online audience is searching for. This will result in a list of primary keywords that relate to your products and services. We then set about assigning primary keywords to pages that carry content around that theme and then ensure that all secondary keywords are contained within the body of these pages. This is because we want to ensure that the most relevant page for each phrase performs best within the search engines.

For example: If you managed a recruitment portal, you would want your IT Jobs page to appear highest in Google when a user searched for programmers jobs, as opposed to your home page because users want to land on a page that immediately discusses the topic they were searching for.

Stage 3 – Content Optimisation & Structure Enhancement
Armed with the research and architecture knowledge from stages 1 and 2, we now proceed to implement content and architecture optimisation changes, ensuring all primary and secondary keywords are included in the content, sub sections and sections of the site.

We optimise content on pages by looking at 3 main factors. How many times each phrase occurs, what the overall density of these phrases are in comparison to other words and how early or late on in each area of the site, these phrases are used (prominece).

We analyse each section of a page, for instance, page title, keywords, description, body text etc. and compare the placement of each phrase to the top 10 performing sites within Google for that phrase.

For example, if we were optimising a site for the phrase IT Jobs, we would search for that phrase in Google and then check the 1st page of results to understand exactly how these sites were acheiving their results. We can then take the best work from each of these sites and move this work on further by adding our knowledge to your sites content layout. This will then ensure that we are working in a way that Google likes and will see month on month improvements in rankings as we repeat this process each month.

Stage 4 – Launching Enhancements
After we have implemented the optimisation changes, usually on a test server, we pass the work over to you for review and authorisation. This is just a check to ensure that all content is still relevant to your products and services; after all, you know your products a lot better than we do. Once this has been signed off, we then set the new changes live on your site and depending on how often the search engines are visiting your site, we will either wait for the changes to be found or notify the search engines of changes through our advanced submission techniques.

Most sites will usually see improved rankings within 10 days of us setting these new changes live.

Stage 5 – Monthly review and measurement meetings
Once we have launched the optimised site, we will visit you every month with detailed statistical analysis of ever aspect of the sites performance. Ranging from number of referrals from each search engines and most popular search terms through to total number of pages listed in each search engine and total number of links pointing to your site. During this time we will also be pproaching website owners with content related to but not competing with yours and will generate large numbers of reciprocal links with sites who have similar themed content. This is a crucial part of the optimisation process and we will carry this process out for the duration of our work together.