SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

On-Page Search Engine Optimisation

• Speed Optimisation – every second counts to Google and Bing. As part of our packages, we benchmark desktop and mobile web speeds, run a full audit, and create a task list of improvements that will impact positively on your site speed and rankings.
• Mobile-friendliness – user experience on mobile is a strong ranking factor. Google’s index is now mobile-first, so usability on mobile is a major influence on rankings. All sites we build are naturally mobile-focused, but for sites we inherit, we have an audit process used to identify mobile improvements, both technically and from a site user’s perspective.

• Code quality – the cleanliness of the code and ease of access to the search engines is an important ranking factor. Our in-house developers will analyse the code, stripping out unnecessary clutter and re-coding aspects as and where required.
• Security – a secure site is a credible site and is one of Google’s primary ranking factors. We have a range of security improvement solutions ranging from security certificates to the implementation of security software and back-up plans.
• org markup – this explains your content to Google in a format it can easily understand and is a big assistance to Google and is invaluable at helping you rank at the top of SERPs.

Off-page Search Engine Optimisation

Off-page SEO is another major ranking factor and a significant part of the SEO strategy we will deliver for you at Piranha. In summary, it is SEO activity away from your site that we conduct on third party websites that can influence Google’s perception of your content and website.

• Inbound link building – this is one of our primary off-page SEO tools. It is the process of building links to your content (such as a page on SEO in Preston, or Commercial Photography in Lancashire) from a relevant and authoritative site such as a site discussing the best SEO and Digital marketing agencies in Preston, Lancashire, and the Northwest of the UK. The SEO community think of in-bound links as ‘votes’. The more links we build, the more credibility votes your site gets. This tells Google that your site, its content, and the author is credible, trustworthy, and relevant. This is why link building to create a credible backlink profile is one of the main pillars of SEO that we undertake here at our Preston, Lancashire HQ for our nationwide clients.
• Link authority research and management – this is all part of our link building and off-site SEO strategy. We know that creating and earning inbound links from highly authoritative sites is more valuable than earning links on websites with a lower domain authority score. The search engines also prefer links to be earned from authoritative and relevant sites, usually from the same industry, covering the same subject matter or from review and news sites that provide credible industry information. Here at Piranha, we have a list of over 3,000 credible websites and website owners that we work with on providing newsworthy information more likely to create the respected inbound link. Google and Bing also manage to look at the relevance of the content surrounding your link; the more relevant the more weight the link will have.

• Anchor text strategy – a process also important in the SEO/ link building world. Following our key word research and site mapping, we create an anchor text strategy for our link building. You will see this in all the examples of link building we have done for our clients. For example, a client based in Preston or Lancashire just looking for local business will have Preston and Lancashire included in the relevant anchor text (the text that contains the links that people click on to visit the linking website). This is an important SEO signal because it helps Google better understand the context of each link and its relevance to the page content.
• Social signals – also helps our SEO activity, and we provide a full social media marketing Sharing targeted content on social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and the general social buzz around your content is a signal to Google that the content is useful and engaging. A mention of your brand or company name is another positive signal to Google, even without a link back to your website (either follow or no follow). Google’s algorithms understand that someone is talking about your business when they use your brand name. To find out more about our social media management solutions, visit our social media section of our website.
• Trust signal creation and management – recent research carried out by the team here at Piranha identified trust as the most important factor when consumers engage with websites. It follows then that Google and Bing, as well as the majority of the other search engines, have also identified trust as a significant SEO ranking factor. Trust signals indicate to the search engines that you, your brand, your products, and your content is engaging, useful and trusted by your customers. Trust signals are things like reviews, positive mentions in relevant forums, comments on your blog posts that you have submitted and so on; in summary, any positive activity by your users around your products, brand, or content is seen as a positive trust signal and can include your sites ranking and SEO performance.

Why is SEO Important to Companies like Google and Bing?

The search engines don’t directly make money from the organic listings so you might wonder why SEO is so important to them. This is because the organic listings are their product that enables them to generate advertising revenue from activities such as Google Ads.  The better the product is for the end user, the more people use it, the more traffic is generated, the more advertisers want to advertise, the more the ad rates rise and the greater the revenue for the search engines. If you think of the organic listings in the same way a magazine invests in its content or a TV station invests in its output to increase audience levels as a leverage for selling ads, then it’s the same for the search engines. Search engines therefore see SEO as important in helping to deliver high quality and relevant content. Therefore, much of the guidance from Google and Bing is around quality and their algorithms are created to help deliver the best and most relevant search results.

Why is SEO Important to Website Owners?

Website owners stand to gain the most from SEO (search engine optimisation). When a search engine such as Google shows your content to the search engine users in the organic part of a SERP (Search Engine Results Page), you do not pay for the ranking or the traffic that comes from it. Your traffic is ultimately free. Organic SEO traffic is also more sustainable traffic as it is not dependent on the availability of your Google Ads or Bing Ads budget.

It is also important to remember that it is not a straight line between where you rank on the search engines and the amount of traffic your site receives. According to MOZ, on average, the first page of Google (traditionally seen as the top 10 results) receives 71% of traffic for a typical search phrase. Page 2 (11-20) of the search results can deliver as low as 6% with the remaining 1,000’s of pages of search results fighting over the remaining 2-20% of available traffic. Therefore, SEO is critical to site owners who need to attract high volumes of quality organic search traffic to reach the required sales levels or online sales enquiries.

Why is SEO Important to SEO Agencies like Piranha Digital?

SEO is part of a bigger picture. It’s part of the digital marketing mix which in turn is part of the overall marketing mix. A broad spectrum of professional marketing tactics designed to identify and supply a consumers need profitably.

SEO is an extremely important digital marketing tool for companies like Piranha in Preston. Our clients see the tremendous value in gaining organic website traffic and rely on us to be at the top of our game and be able to deliver high quality, high value affordable SEO solutions that will deliver some of the best return on investment of any marketing solution. It’s also extremely important to us as a core business service and revenue stream. Being based in Preston, Lancashire provides great commercial opportunities on our doorstep to manage and deliver SEO campaigns but it’s also a commercial hub for working for clients on a national and international basis. Being exceptional at SEO enables us to win new digital marketing business and also retain high value SEO contracts from our core Lancashire customer base.

Why is SEO Important to the End User?

Many of us can remember the early frustrating days of using search engines when many of the websites delivered by the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) had nothing to do with our original search. I wasted time visiting multiple sites on the search engine results page looking for the information we had originally searched for – you searched for SEO Preston, or SEO Agency Lancashire only to have the results diluted by sites offering cheap holidays (or worse). SEO is therefore very important to the end user in maintaining product quality and building trust in the search engines that the results delivered are in fact the best solutions to the search term.

Which is the Best Search Engine to Use

Google has the lion’s share of UK search traffic at around 90% and dominates the search engine markets in most countries across the world. Worldwide, over 87% of all English search results carried out on desktop are on Google and on mobile this is up to 96%.

Yahoo and Bing together account for 1.5% of searches on mobile device and 8% of searches on desktop. For organic SEO it is clear that Google, in its prominent position, should be the one you focus on as it will drive more traffic than all the other search engines combined. However, when it comes to PPC, it’s about the ROI as much as it is about total traffic and especially for industrial and manufacturing companies. We have plenty of case studies showing that Bing Ads can be significantly more profitable than Google Ads with a 3x better return on investment due to the distorted share of the desktop market compared to the mobile market.

What are Google and Bing’s Ranking Factors?

Google’s (and other search engine’s) algorithms take tens of thousands of ranking signals into account when evaluating a page to determine where it should rank for a specific search request – such as SEO Agency Preston. What SEO agencies and website owners are most interested in is not so much understanding all the ranking factors (as this would be an endless task) but which ranking factors/groups of signals have the most influence on how well a piece of website content will perform and rank in a Google or Bing search.

If you can identify which ranking factors have the most influence, you can then start to understand how the search engines work and start to plan an SEO strategy based on your budget or internal resources. Your goal, like ours, is how to spend the least effort, time, and money on gaining the maximum uplift in keyword rankings, which will convert to increased website traffic and sales conversions.

SEO is a Balancing Act

Search engines including Google and Bing offer ppc-pay-per-click-management, paid advertising ( PPC )  that can provide instant results. This can be used in tandem with SEO to reap long-term, lasting benefits. Successful websites use both search optimisation techniques and PPC to dominate their target search results pages.

The Piranha team offers expert yet affordable marketing services. From half a day of work per month all the way up to comprehensive search engine optimisation, including our full range of SEO services. You can also talk to us if you have one specific area of marketing you’d like to improve upon.

Many of our web development clients also become SEO clients after enjoying the way we work and how we place a strong emphasis on communication. If you need a little more reassurance, please view our extensive portfolio and testimonials. These are all examples of online success stories for large and small businesses both regionally and across the UK.

View Our Portfolio

Blog Writing Services

At Piranha, our skilled copywriters can create that perfect blog post for you or your business. Recent research carried out indicated the optimum word count for a page appearing number one on Google was 1,400. This is a lot of words for a blog post, but it does show the importance of content volume in the successful ranking of individual pages. Most of the site owners we work with know the importance of content including volume, engagement, relevance, and uniqueness. As a rule, our media partners require unique articles from us with a minimum word count of 500. We can also often negotiate up to 3 deep links to help improve the page authority of deeper pages and the rankings of specific key words and phrases. As part of our complete solution, we schedule the creation of Guest Blog Posts with the re-engineering of the same article subject matter for inclusion on our client’s website; building up a long-term archive of interesting and engaging blog articles which improve the overall authority of our clients’ sites. These individual blog posts can also rank in their own right, driving relevant traffic and enquiries/sales into the main website. If you would like blog posts writing for your own website on a regular and scheduled basis, or if you would like us to write articles for guest blogging, please contact us and one of our team will talk through your requirements.    

Database of Blog Sites

At Piranha we currently have a live, verified, and active database of approximately 3,000 independent news sites, blog sites, and articles sites that will accept our guest blog articles (providing of course that they are professionally written, unique, cover the correct subject matter and are the right length).

Included in our database are some top-level research findings including the site’s domain authority, its page authority, spam score, traffic, and target audience/content.

For many of the sites, we have also researched the number of links we can embed successfully into the article and whether these will be ‘follow’ or ‘no follow’ links. This information is vital when we are creating our target list of sites, as we need to create a natural and relevant link profile of sites with a good spread across the higher domain authorities. These sites are regularly checked for relevance, and we can post articles individually or in groups or packages. If you would like more information about our blog posting services and the types and sectors of sites currently in our up-to-date database, please get in touch and one of our team will be happy to help.