The definitive guide to SEO (search engine optimisation)
Every business wants to be seen by their target audience online. Only a few years ago this wasn’t so complex to achieve. The playing field has changed dramatically.
A huge spike in the complexity of the SEO process itself, and a phenomenal rise in competition across all industries, means the once straightforward process has become one of the biggest challenges facing businesses worldwide.
The rise in streaming, online shopping and social media means we now spend more time on the internet than ever before, and competition online climbs with it, year on year. A well built, user-friendly website with a clear customer journey was once a cool extra. Today a solid online presence is a necessity.
What is SEO?
When we talk about SEO we mean results in search engines that are NOT paid advertisements: the blue links on a results page, images, answer boxes and business information on maps.
The purpose of SEO is to appear at or near the top of a search results page. It sounds simple, but it’s an intricate, multifaceted task involving specialist knowledge that can take years to learn. That’s why many UK brands hire an SEO agency.
What does an SEO agency do?
An SEO agency works with you to get you more customers and increase your rank on Google and other search engines, using specialists with years of experience.
When choosing an agency, get to know the team that will work for you. These people will be in charge of your brand’s visibility, so ask about their experience and credentials. SEO is a fast-paced, ever-changing industry that moves with technology, legal developments and advances in artificial intelligence. It’s less about how long an agency has existed or how many awards it collected years ago, and more about how up to date they are.
And because organic SEO is not paid advertising, make sure you are only paying for the agency’s time. There should be no hidden media costs between you and your SEO agency, now or in the future.
Why do you need SEO?
Ranking on Google is now a genuine challenge in almost every niche. The businesses that treat search as a channel to be worked, with strategy, content and patience, are the ones that own their local results. The ones that don’t simply hand those customers to their competitors.
Our fundamental SEO services
Think of Local Territory as your SEO Swiss army knife. Our services are designed to support your goals of driving new business and increasing your visibility:
- On-page SEO: identifying and working on the key terms for your business, to drive targeted, intent-driven traffic that’s ready to do business.
- Technical SEO: building and maintaining a user and search-engine friendly website: mobile responsiveness, page speed, click depth, structured data and more.
- Off-page SEO (digital PR): targeted, completely white-hat link building campaigns. No shady shortcuts that lead to penalties.
- Answer engine optimisation: the newest front. Making sure AI assistants and Google’s AI Overviews recommend your business. Read about our AI SEO service.
If your customers come from the area around you, start with our local SEO services, that’s where the highest-intent traffic lives.
The three signals local rankings actually turn on
Google has been unusually open about what drives local results, and it comes down to three factors that interact rather than three boxes to tick.
Relevance is how well your business matches what was searched. This is the one you have most control over: your primary category, your service list, the pages on your site and the words they use. A business listed under a vague category and a site with one page covering nine services is failing on relevance no matter how good it is.
Distance is how far you are from the searcher, or from the area named in the search. You cannot change your address, but you can change which areas you credibly serve, and whether you have anything specific to say about them. This is why a genuine page per area beats a list of town names.
Prominence is how well known and well regarded you are. Reviews, mentions in local press and directories, links from real sites, and the general weight of evidence that you are a going concern. This is the slowest of the three to build and the hardest for a competitor to copy, which is exactly why it is worth building.
What a good SEO agency actually does month to month
The honest version is that most months are unglamorous. The first month or two is diagnosis and cleanup: fixing the technical problems, correcting the profile, sorting out inconsistent details across directories, and finding the pages that should exist but do not. That phase often produces the fastest visible movement, because you are removing brakes rather than adding power.
After that it settles into a rhythm of content, prominence and measurement. New pages for the services and areas worth winning, work to earn genuine mentions and links, review generation, and monthly analysis of what moved and what did not. The work that produces results in month nine was done in month four.
How to tell a good agency from a bad one
The tells are consistent. A good agency will ask what a customer is worth to you before it talks about keywords, will tell you when something has not worked, and will report from your own Google Analytics and Search Console rather than a branded dashboard you cannot verify. It will also tell you if it is not the right fit.
The warning signs are equally consistent: guaranteed rankings, which nobody can offer; a fixed price quoted before anyone has looked at your site; monthly reports that only ever contain good news; and any refusal to explain what was actually done. If you cannot get a straight answer about where your money went, that is the answer.
