Transcript

(00:00)

Hey guys Ben here from Session Media, and in this video, I’m gonna walk you through how we managed to rank our website position number two for the highly competitive term ‘SEO Agency’. For the last year or so, we’ve been doing a bit of a push on trying to rank for ‘SEO Agency,’ which is one of our commercially focused keywords. If you go incognito and do it from across the country, we can see we are currently here in the paid listings. We’ve also got a nice little localised set if you are around the Surrey area and we are ranking just above that in ‘SEO Agency’. This is from a local perspective, but also if we go on to national rankings like Ahrefs, for example, we can see here that set has currently positioned us at number two and ranking for this keyword is something that works really nicely for us from a bottom-line perspective.

(00:49)

We have around 5,400 people per month looking for ‘SEO Agencies’ via search engines; that is for just that term alone. It’s around 30 pounds CPC. For example, if we were gonna bid on it through Google ads, which we do as you saw on the last screen. And finally, we are in position two, so we’re getting a good amount of traffic. So this is one of our commercial terms that ties into getting a good flow of inbound leads for people that are looking for our services. But how did we get here? In this video, I’m gonna go through the three-step process we went through. Step one is all around a technical foundation; this is something that’s very often overlooked within search engine marketing. We see this in a lot of the B2B websites we audit, especially in B2B websites that have been built in page builders. Page builders are great and they’re easy to put together.

(01:43)

They require very little technical knowledge on behalf of the agency and they can be completed quite quickly, which is why it’s quite common to utilise. The issue is that it really bloats the code out, even though they can still pass on some of the call vitals. What we have found is that a lot of the websites ranking on page one, don’t have any of the ‘bloating’ code behind the page. So just to prove a point we built out our website, you can see on the screen here in a completely custom build WebPress theme and it is as light as it possibly can be. We also built out the exact same website with a slight variation, in a popular landing page builder called ‘Beaver Builder’.

(02:32)

If we scroll down and go to ‘inspect’ we can look at how lightweight the code is. We can see here that just on this one section, ‘Results you can rely on’. All this is code from here that is associated with that one bit. This is what we call ‘nesting’ and it’s a lot of code just for that one little area. Actually the code then sort of comes down to the next bit. There’s a lot of code. All of that is just for this one little section. Whereas if we go and look at our website here and go down to the same section and select ‘inspect’.

(03:19)

The only bit which is associated with this section, is this little div here, section classes, and this little bit of code here showing ‘results you can rely on’. It is so lightweight, as we’ve got this one little line here versus all of this stuff, which is put in for every single different line to cover  different divs and different sections you have created within landing page builders. And you can defer that code and you can speed up in the face of it. But what we found is the quality of code does seem to make a big difference, especially as deciding factors in competitive niches. If you’re a B2B site and you can build your website cleanly and you can optimise the code, to be as light as possible and best practice within that area, then we found it’s really helped us rank in a competitive niche.

(04:07)

We also did a big experiment where we looked at the site speed just off the basis of the initial builds. You can see here that we have the GTmetrix score of A on the custom build website versus a GTmetrix score of C on the ‘Beaver Builder’ website. You can manipulate the beaver builder ones by deferring and all the things you can do with the HTTP requests, but I won’t go too much into those, but it just shows the quality of the two different sites. So once we have set our technical foundation, we moved on to look at the On-Page and with the On-Page, there’s two sections. One is what Google likes and one is what the user likes. What the user likes is always more important, but there’s always OnPage optimisation from a technical sense, which you need to look at and also play around with.

(04:54)

What you can see here is in one of our On-Page tools has us at number three here for ‘SEO Agency’. We are probably around the optimisation level they require, and won’t go too much into all the different elements this is made up of, but it can cover everything from content length, different variations of keyword, and keyword density. That’s one of the things that people say a lot is, that you need to have your keyword on the page multiple times. If we scroll down, we’ve only got ‘SEO Agency’ featured once on the page and here it recommends having it between 8 and 22 times. We’ve tried it out with one and because we’ve gone the opposite way that everyone else is going by stuffing, we seem to have been performing quite well.

(05:40)

Because we’re not, repeating the same phrase for the sake of it. We’re using natural language, which Google seems to be liking. On-Page optimisations is more about testing best practice than following it. If we head over to our page and go to the SEO page, we can see that we’ve done a few things. For example, this may look like a <h2>, but we spoke with our developer and we implemented this ‘SEO Agency’ bit as a <h1> again, bit sneaky, but it really offers a better user experience. If the ‘SEO Agency’ exact match isn’t bigger than the rest of the page, the user will notice everything else on the page, Search Engine Optimisation and the stats you’ve got here, some of the clients we’ve worked with the fact that it’s not about traffic.

(06:25)

We’ve won some of the SEO awards; The Drum Award and UK Search Award and just all these social cues, which make people believe that we know what we’re doing because we do. But that’s what the on-page is for; providing information of what you do, offering credentials, credibility. Further down the page, we actually go into what we do; the Technical SEO, the On-Page, the link building, which I’ll get into in a second and the tracking and reporting. Further down we have a couple of testimonials in case studies, we then move on to the things we actually care about. The fact that we are not just an agency that looks for rankings and traffic, but we’re ROI focused. We have a very fast turnaround time, and the communication for us is that we are half consultancy, half implementation partners.

(07:13)

Communication and education consistently is something that we take very seriously. Additional testimonial case studies, our results for software clients, other B2B fashion clients, more traditional clients in the manufacturing space. We then have a link to the case studies, followed by our frequently asked questions; which covers what is asked the most when we first have a chat, through to objection handling and how to get in touch. Additional information is below from the blog, whether it’s our podcast or our information collection. This gets really good engagement from a user journey, and people, as well as Google, are liking it. We seem to have hit both the user and optimised it quite nicely for the Google bot as well,

(08:04)

or any other bot that comes along. The final one and the bit where we really put a lot of focus on as an agency is one of our tools, which is Ahrefs. We can see here that our estimated traffic is around $20,000 if we were spending on Google ads, and one of the reasons we’re able to rank highly for ‘SEO Agency’ is because we have been building up a lot of trust with Google, through building backlinks and referring domains like this. For example, we can see that we have lots of good links with high authority from the likes of Social Media Today, Smart Insights, Unbounce and Marketing Profs, and what we’ve done is to create content, which they think is worth sharing.

(08:56)

If we go to Social Media Today, they’ve hosted one of our infographics, which we created and it links back to our site. We’ve created this and it really ties into what people in industry care about, so we have got picked up a lot and so internally link it to all the pages of the SEO page, PPC agency page, and everything else. This has created a really nice outreach and creative link builder pieces, which has really worked over the time. Now I’m getting towards the end of the 10 minutes, which is how long I have for a video ad, so I’ll keep it short. In summary we looked at the technical, we looked at the On-Page and looked at the link building, all of which have allowed us to rank in a highly competitive niche. Iif you guys are looking to do the same, then feel free to reach out, no strings attached. We can have a chat about it. Have a great day, speak to you soon.