In Simon’s article ‘Do You Even SEO, Bro?’, we explained the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), and presented our findings from our recent interactions with businesses in the property, legal and built-environment sectors. We also highlighted how poor SEO efforts can negatively affect these industries.
In this article, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the state of SEO, as well as Strawberry Forge’s own SEO methods that we apply to our clients’ websites.
Fasten your seat belts, folks. This is going to be an interesting ride, for sure.
Where to Start
For me, getting your website SEO and SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) right from the off, combined with regular SEO reviews are the only ways to grow your online presence in line with growing your business.
As a trusted agency or consultant, it should be your position to fully understand your client’s current state of SEO play before you come up with any form of strategy or campaign for them.
When we take on a new client at Strawberry Forge, we audit that client’s website pages and organic keyword rankings so we have a good handle on what’s going on. If they have a keyword strategy or an organic growth strategy, we review both in tandem before we delve into the mechanics of our client’s offering.
Mainstream Methods
Low hanging fruit is a term often put into practice by going after the keywords that offer the least resistance and evidently the quick wins for your client.
Quality keyword research often identifies lower competition keyword terms valued by your client, and introducing these terms into an organic growth strategy can yield phenomenal results.
One of the things we do at Strawberry Forge is often missed by clients. You see this very frequently in the paid-advertising world; clients and agencies only tend to bid for Decision-based keyword terms and miss out the earlier Awareness and Consideration stages.
We look beyond the decision-based terms by understanding the real reasons why a prospective customer interacts with our clients. What questions are these potential customers trying to solve? What issue or problem do they have? We then isolate the earlier stage terms valued by our client and incorporate them into our own strategy.
Strawberry Forge Style
Writing engaging content that captivates your audience is what it’s all about, right? When we write articles for our own Strawberry Forge marketing, one of the routes we often go down is to produce a high impact, long format, shit-hot content without focusing too heavily on the pre-researched keyword targeting.
We publish the article — or in this case, a collection of articles — then share them with our audience to get maximum exposure. When you publish articles, they take some time to be picked up and crawled by Google, which causes their rankings to jump all over the place (much like Tim does when we deliver excellent results for clients). We re-visit our articles 2 or 3 months down the line, review what keyword terms they are ranking for, then capitalise on the good points and optimise the articles from there.
Our Solutions to Common Problems
Even in a digital world, I regularly see companies that haven’t reviewed their SEO, that don’t have current website traffic figures, or even know where the lion’s share of their website traffic is coming from, which is often historic blog articles or website service pages.
A particular case of recent springs to mind. A client had been creating shorter 500-word blog articles for a good length of time, and their online presence was good, as results from regular content creation compound over time. During one of our monthly SEO reviews, we found they had two articles which were ranking for high search volume keywords which generate over half of their organic website traffic.
When we brought this to the attention of our client, it turned out the Principal Solicitor had written the articles because they were early-stage questions often raised by her clients, which is absolutely bang-on in the world of marketing. You need to focus on your clients’ needs if you want to get top results.
Capitalising on a strong ranking is a great way to further results. Our Strawberry Forge approach to this situation was to leverage the good performing articles further.
Firstly, by adding to the overall word count — as the articles had a high bounce rate due to their short length — the articles started to achieve better results, as they clearly hit on highly personable and emotive questions for prospective clients. Expanding on the intricacies of the question as well as the solution to the problem was well-received by readers.
We then added more conversion touchpoints such as CTAs (Call to Action) and links to other related articles or offers so the readers can either enquire directly or engage with further material.
Using Our Shit-Hot Methods
Quite honestly, I don’t understand why more marketing agencies don’t take the same route we do when it comes to SEO. That’s their loss, though, and ultimately, it means your business and our agency can achieve much better results in the long-run, as we focus on your clients’ needs.
If you want to set your business on a path that will lead to a higher quality and quantity of prospective clients dropping into your inbox, we at Strawberry Forge are on hand to get the job done.
For a more detailed demonstration of the services we offer, you can book a digital workshop session with us, too.
