Pay Per Click (PPC) & SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

PPC (Pay Per Click)

Let us deal with PPC (pay per click) first because it will be short, and it is easy to understand. PPC or Pay Per Click marketing is basically paid adverts that appear on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) just before, or after the Organic rankings. They are identified by the little green square with ‘ad’ in it. This is Googles main business focus because it makes them a ton of money – the one with the highest budget is often the most viable. While SEO is a slow burn, Adwords can get you some traffic immediately- that is if you have the budget.

Quite often in the SEO field Adwords is considered as the ‘easy’ branch of digital marketing because almost anyone can set up a basic campaign with Google’s guidance. It does however, take a true magician to get it right and make the most of every cent out of your budget. We have a magician. It takes a lot of skill and  know how to optimize an ad campaign properly. To automate the budget so you are always on top. We can even change the budgets based on the weather on a particular day and re target your previous web viewers with specifically targeted adverts to maximize your conversions and viability. Thankfully we have an adwords magician to get the most out of your budget. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is known as a digital marketing ‘dark art’ due to its complexity, dynamic ambiguous nature and the fact that it is open to abuse. Finding a good SEO or SEO agency is a little bit like buying the ‘wonder-cure’  from a confidence man that actually works; continuing the metaphor – being an SEO in this climate is a bit like the wild west. We all like to bad-mouth each other. The issue is that there are no ‘rules’ as such and we all have different ways of skinning the proverbial cat. What we aim to do is match (or fool) the Google Rankbrain algorithm so that your website is more visible for ‘keywords’ or ‘Key Phrases’. In very basic terms, we do this with ‘Content’ and ‘links. Before discussing that, we have to understand what Google wants from your website. 

Google is the world’s largest search engine, and maybe will be for our lifetimes, so we our focus is always on Google. ‘Google’ is so popular that it is now a verb. Google’s goal is to give their customers the best, most relevant and helpful result they can. That means the ‘result’ must be genuine, valuable, informative and provide an answer as quickly & easily as possible. This is a keystone idea when thinking about SEO. For example, a 2 day old website, with very ‘thin text’ (not much writing) that doesn’t have any links pointing to it will not rank well compared to a 10 year old, well established website that has lots of information and lots of websites linking to said ‘content’. Wikipedia is the perfect example of a trusted and informative website with lots of authority. 

Content

‘Content’ simply refers to what is on the page; often words. There is a saying in the SEO world: ‘Content is King’. There are lots, and lots of different ‘on-page’ ranking factors that effect the websites rankings, but the written content is by far the most important. When you search for something in Google, you are asking Google to give you websites that have the answer to your question, or are most reliant for the words you are typing. We call what you are searching ‘keywords’.

 We use sophisticated systems that can give us information on how many people search a certain key term and also how competitive they are so that we can build a page around those key words. For example, our page ‘SEO Edinburgh‘ is rather blatantly focusing on the phrase ‘SEO Edinburgh’ which is searched roughly 200 times per month. We have put this key phrase (and similar phrases) multiple times in the content, the & (large text/large titles), the URL and the Meta Data. When Google reads this page it will know what to rank it for. What you can’t do is put hundreds of instances of one key word because Google will never rank you; as long as you focus on writing entertaining, well written, informative and niche content with an keyword focus, you’ll be fine. Also, if your content and website are well build, you’re more likely to get links/linked mentions.

Links

Links, or Backlinks are links from one website to another. Google sees this as if you’re website is making friends and connecting in the real world and fellow webmasters; if your website is popular Google will consider your website as having more ‘authority’. The more authority your website has, the more likely it is to rank. You can’t get any old link though. They have to be from other ‘authoritative’ websites that are relevant to your own website. For example, If you have a website about a local football club, a link from Glamour Magazine will not be as valuable as a link from Fifa. You can find out more information about links in our recent blog post. We also offer a link building service separate to our SEO services.

Other Ranking Factors