SEO

There is no overnight success to search engine optimisation.

You need more than keywords stuffed into your website copy. And there’s no point being number one in search results if those eyeballs don’t make a tangible difference to your business (i.e. £££). With this in mind, you need an SEO agency that understands these principles.

What is SEO?

Almost 70% of SERP (search engine results page) clicks come from the first five results on a page, and an estimated 80% skip the paid search results to find an organic listing instead. If you’re not getting seen on the likes of Google and Bing, you’re not getting clicks. And if you’re not getting clicks, you’re losing customers to competitors.

If you work in an industry saturated by big-budget competition, SEO can be a great way to stand out. Rather than going toe-to-toe in a bidding war on sponsored ads you can work smart – by beating them in organic results.

To increase your visibility, your website must be optimised on several levels. Fundamentally this means making improvements to your website’s performance and content that will make it more appealing to users. SEO encompasses a huge range of techniques that are designed to help your website rank higher in SERPs, but there are three pillars everyone subscribes to: technical, on-page and off-page optimisation. These provide a holistic approach to making those improvements.

Bespoke SEO Strategy

ActiveWin’s Manchester-based SEO team invests time in understanding the nuances of our clients’ businesses so that we are well placed to build an SEO strategy for growth and profitability.

Any marketing strategy must be sustainable. When it comes to SEO, this means a combination of hard work, innovation, repetition and a certain amount of risk-taking. This harmonious mix is applied in a unique way for your SEO needs, using our strategy plan below.

Audit & Goal Setting – Whether you’ve never considered SEO or you’ve been doing it well, we’ll evaluate your position and identify opportunities that will get you results. This informs our goal setting and KPIs, which we agree from the get-go so that everything that follows is driven by what matters to your business.

Competitor Analysis – It’s vital to know who is ranking for your desired keywords. At ActiveWin we don’t just take a peek, we deep dive into their SEO playbook. By dissecting their rankings, their keywords, their backlinks, and their optimisations, we can find out how you make their audience your own.

Identify Audience Profile – You know your audience best so we leverage your expertise to lock onto your ideal audience and establish customer journeys. Carefully crafted, these journeys don’t provide leads they provide lifers: customers who engage and convert time and time again.

Keyword Planning – Finding intent-driven keywords to attract the right people to your website requires time-intensive research. ActiveWin’s SEO team has the tools and techniques for smart and efficient analysis of all combinations that deliver high returns and low competition.

Written SEO Strategy – With research banked we’ll create a written SEO strategy that links everything back to your goals. This is laid out in a consumable format so we can guide you through it in plain language. That way, as we navigate shifts in the digital landscape, we can work together to evolve for sustainable growth.

Technical SEO Review – As we’ve mentioned, it’s not all about content. Site speed and usability is also now crucial for SERP ranking with Google. We’ll investigate and advise on proactive steps to improve from image optimisation, to reducing unused JS or CSS (code), to removing pointless redirects, to improving security and limiting caching.

Website Optimisation – Our SEO optimisations will sharpen content, titles, URLs, and internal links to send a flare up to search engines and deliver an optimised user experience. This is SEO that works for both the search engine crawlers and the humans.

Reporting – No confusing reports. We have agreed the KPIs and you’ll get meaningful data with actionable insights at regular intervals. You’ll never be in the dark wondering whether SEO is working for you ever again.

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) – New rankings will mean more clicks – we’ll be on hand to make sure you capitalise on these new site visitors by fine-tuning landing pages for conversion. Again: traffic means nothing if there’s no business value.

Link Building – Our SEO team will expand a white hat link-building game plan that boosts authority and rankings, leveraging high value content to attract links that matter. We’ll either guide your team or source content on your behalf – either way, your backlink profile is about to go next-level.

ActiveWin is a Manchester based SEO agency focused on providing successful services nationally and internationally. If you believe SEO can help your business reach its goals and see ActiveWin as a compatible partner, we offer a seamless onboarding experience through our suite of services.

Our team has worked across a variety of industries – including the hyper-competitive igaming and fintech sectors – and know exactly what it takes to get results. What underpins success and longevity in any marketing partnership is clear communication and proactive collaboration. You’ll find that we are set up to enable this from day one.

What’s in an SEO Audit?

The word ‘audit’ often strikes fear into people. The fact is, a good audit will uncover some dirty secrets. A good business takes these as learning opportunities and moves forward better off for having discovered them.

SEO audits mustbe in-depth because a half-baked audit will lead to unresolved issues that undermine your entire strategy. Clients have chosen ActiveWin as their SEO agency because our process is comprehensive and lays the foundation for SEO marketing success.

Some of the elements we include in our audit service (and the actionable insights we provide) include:

Page speed – we evaluate why your site is hitting low scores in Core Web Vitals and Lighthouse and advise necessary changes.

Mobile optimisation – user experience is a contributing factor to your ranking. With strict metrics to evaluate, we score your website on how mobile-friendly it is and offer usability improvements.

Schema – using structured markup provides search engines like Google with additional value and context. We highlight areas where a structured schema can be added for SERP gains.

Site structure – search engine indexing and human nature both rely on an intuitive hierarchical site structure. We check if yours is user (and bot) friendly.

Sitemap optimisation – a sitemap really does do what it says: when a search engine starts looking around your site it needs some guidance on how to find things. We produce highly performant sitemaps regularly and will get yours Google-ready.

Internal linking – search engines expect page relativity to be clear. If your link architecture is messy, it’s costing you. This stage of the audit is an ongoing job comprising of analysis and improvement cycles based on priority areas.

Indexing – having an accurate and clear sitemap and logical internal linking are vital for search engines to crawl and index your site and display it on SERPs. We detail optimisation steps and investigate whether a robots.txt file will be useful.

Security – in Google’s EEAT acronym, the T is for ‘trust’. Data security is a hot topic in the online world and showing that you value users’ security by taking extra measures on your site will improve your SEO results. Whether it’s SSL certificates you need or anything else, we pinpoint the necessary upgrades.

SEO Timelines

Leading the way in organic search can do a lot for your business:

Build brand reputation

Improve website UX (user experience)

Establish your brand as an authority in its space

Generate more intent-driven clicks

Support other marketing functions

But patience is vital in the SEO game. There’s no guaranteed timeframe on how long it will take an SEO strategy to work (although it helps if it’s well-executed). Typically, you can expect to notice impactful results from 4 months onwards. Factors to consider include how old your website is, how well maintained it has been, the strength of your competition, and the quality of your content.

If an SEO agency promises you instant results, run a mile.

Months 1-4 should be all about diagnosis, strategy and fixing. From month 4 you’ll start to see steady results and gathering momentum. From one year in, your business should be starting to control ranking space and from there it is all about evolving with the search engine algorithms to stay on top.

How Much Does SEO Cost?

If you have read this far you understand that search engine optimisation is complex. You also have a grasp of what harnessing the complexities of SEO can do for your business.

It’s a worthy investment in your digital capabilities but you should be certain that anyone you choose as an SEO partner is providing bang for your buck.

ActiveWin is a SEO agency based in Manchester, so our rates are lower than many areas of the UK. With fees starting at £1200 per month the payoff on this investment could truly be a game-changer.

How does SEO work?

SEO helps search engines like Google and Bing use ‘robots’, ‘bots’, ‘spiders’, or ‘crawlers’ to scan pages on websites to determine which pages on the internet best answer a query from a user.

The search engines collect and categorise this information, ready to serve it up on the SERPs.

Ranking factors allow the search engines to decide how results appear.

Each search engine has its proprietary algorithm, with Google having the largest share of searches around the world.

Google, in particular, uses E-E-A-T, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. They want the most relevant results to appear from trusted sources which have shown expertise through their online content.

ActiveWin specialises in optimising site content with these factors in mind. If you’d like to collaborate with our award-winning SEO team, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Why is SEO marketing important for digital conversion?

Organic search is often the best source of digital leads for companies that rank well for relevant terms.

It also serves as a trust indicator for searchers who see an organic listing at the top of a page along with a paid ad or inclusion on a featured snippet or knowledge panel.

Related: 5 Tips for sports marketing.

How Can ActiveWin’s SEO Team Help My Website And Online Presence?

Our SEO consultants in Manchester can help your business to leverage your organic SEO to generate more leads and conversions through tried and tested SEO and conversion rate optimisation techniques.

If you’re on the hunt for a collaborative, innovative and experienced SEO company that can improve your visibility in the search engines, boost your brand awareness, and improve your bottom line, ActiveWin is the SEO agency for you. 

How does SEO marketing support PPC?

It’s a well-known strategy for brands to bid on competitor names and products, which seeks to grab clicks from searchers.

However, this strategy can backfire at times, because a user might deem it as trying to deceive them.

When a searcher sees a PPC listing along with a high-ranking organic result, they feel confident that the click will bring them to the site they intended to visit.

But a brand needs to be at the top of the SERP to gain this trust factor; which is why SEO marketing is so important. SERP visibility can have a dramatic impact on conversion for PPC and SEO.

Why does Link Building Help SEO Strategies?

It’s no secret that Google’s algorithm prefers high-quality links to your site as a sign of your expertise and trustworthiness.

On the flip side, you will do plenty of damage to your rankings by having a bundle of links from spammy sites.

Link building involves a tremendous amount of work and know-how to be effective. Considering the link algorithms of most search engines are a mystery, it requires constant maintenance.

Another area that many site owners overlook is the power of an excellent internal linking strategy.

Again, it requires extensive knowledge on knowing what to link to and the anchor text to use.

Where Does Content Marketing Fit in with SEO?

The process of creating credible, informative content is quite labour-intensive. Stuffing pages with keywords without much thought about the quality or the purpose it will serve.

Work with content specialists to improve SEO-effectiveness of your existing copy, without black-hat tricks like keyword stuffing or filler content.

Algorithms are sophisticated enough to tell if a page is full of keywords or are genuinely looking to provide the best information with the user intent in mind.

What is Technical SEO Marketing?

The term ‘technical SEO’ strikes fear into the hearts of some marketers, but we don’t see it that way.

Technical SEO is the process of optimising page set-up to make it easier for search engines to understand your site. It helps Google bots to access, crawl, interpret, and index site content quicker.

Technical SEO marketing includes the setup of your page URLs, titles, meta information, alt files, and keyword structure. Successful technical SEO requires experience and expertise, and it lays the foundation for excellent SEO results.

iGaming SEO

ActiveWin have benefited from over a decade of working closely with brands in the highly competitive gambling and iGaming sectors. It’s a saturated market and complex compliance legislation and government restrictions make this a tricky industry to win in.

Without experience specific to iGaming SEO or gambling SEO, trying to crack the online casino or sportsbook market can feel like an impossible task.

Our Manchester SEO agency is highly regarded in the iGaming industry having navigated multiple brands to success in organic rankings and measurable return on investment. We achieve this through a mix of link building, technical SEO, digital PR, content creation and on-page SEO – all tailored by data-driven insights specific to each iGaming brand.