SEO Folkestone
If you're a local business looking for SEO Services in Folkestone we have you covered!
Does your business need more visibility? Do you want to take it to the next level? Everyday people are searching for your services in Folkestone and surrounding areas.
SEO services in Folkestone
Are you tired of constantly having to go out hunting for new clients in Folkestone and surrounding areas?
Have you tried a multitude of marketing tactics but you can’t find one that works consistently?
SEO has stood the test of time. It is a long term investment with long term results! If you’ve landed on this page its most likely because you’ve typed into Google ‘SEO Folksetone‘!
We can do the exact same thing for your busniess. We can target your ideal keywords that attract your ideal clients.
What is SEO in marketing?
These three little letters have a lot of power. They can mean the difference between your business failing or prospering – which is why SEO in Folkestone is so important to businesses trading there. So it’s extremely important for business owners from all sectors and sizes of companies to understand what they mean, and why they have such an impact on your bottom line. The acronym SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. And this is incredibly important because it represents your online visibility and how your business is found by customers. Making certain improvements to your site should be an ongoing, iterative process. You can make certain changes to your site that make your pages more visible on search engines, most notably Google. This complements and underscores every other piece of marketing you do. Think about it – even if you’re creating visibility with print ads and trade shows, what’s the first thing people do if you’ve caught their interest? They search for your business online. If it’s hard to find, this means that you are potentially missing out on huge sales opportunities. Business these days is truly global. That means that you can widen your reach online to audiences you may not have considered before – but they have to be able to find your site. SEO is the formula that will ensure your site is ranked well in search engine results and generates the traffic, the conversions and the sales that you need.
What is local SEO marketing?
Local SEO is an incredibly powerful tool for companies that operate across different locations or smaller businesses that serve the community around them. It’s a very effective method of promoting your services and products to the right customers, at the right times. This naturally results in an uplift in conversion rates, and thus a higher return on your investment.
Google states that 46% of all searches they process have a ‘local intent’. This means there are people in your area looking for you – they just have to find you. While you may struggle to rank for very broad keywords where there is global competition (for example, the phrase ‘hairdressing salon’ would be very hard to rank highly for) when people search for ‘best hairdresser in [your town]’ or ‘hairdressers near me’, not only do you have a much greater chance of your website being seen but there is also a strong intent to purchase there as well. Businesses in Folkestone should include this optimisation as a part of their marketing strategy. If your site is well formatted and you can make a well timed offer, the chances of scoring a sale with local SEO marketing are much higher.
How does local SEO work?
Local search queries surface in text-based searches, through things like Google Maps and through voice assistants. Search engines understand from the context of the search that the user is looking for products or services in a specific geographical area. This has led them to arrange content in the Search Engine Results Page in such a way that preference is given to content local to the user performing the search so it better suits their needs. There is a block of three business listings laid out immediately in the search result, and you should be aiming for a place here. It also pulls through relevant snippets of information – things such as opening times, reviews and images from your business. These come from your profile information on the Google My Business tool. This part of SEO marketing is becoming more and more important as Google aims to complete more queries within its own results page.
Why use local SEO?
For location based businesses, local SEO can have a transformative impact on business. The most important factor to bear in mind is the relevance contained when a user does a location based search. They are not just aimlessly browsing. They are in the market for a product or solution near to them, and if you can draw them in, show them what they’re looking for and maybe even follow it up with a relevant offer, the chances of making a sale massively increase. People go to the internet as a default now to find what they need in the local area. Research shows that a massive 78% of local mobile searches result in an offline purchase being made. The reason for these impressive results is all down to one thing – timing. Presenting the right offer, to the right person, at the right time is the magic formula for successful marketing. And whereas previously, that may have been a shot in the dark, local SEO gives you the information to show up when someone needs you. This is the ideal time to connect with a new customer. Local directory marketing – things like Foursquare and Yelp – are only one example of local SEO marketing for businesses in Folkestone, but they boast a much higher conversion rate than traditional advertising. And as mobile internet use is growing year on year in the UK, this is a trend that is only set to continue. It’s a highly cost effective method of marketing due to being very targeted, so it makes your marketing budget go further too – a must for any business.
On-page SEO. Let Google Know what your page is about.
When you get to the level of optimising each of your website pages by ensuring they have accurate content that contains relevant keywords and phrases, you’re practising on-page SEO. The term refers to everything you can do within your own site to improve it’s visibility. This is a tactic to help them earn a higher ranking and to generate more traffic to your site from search engines. When we talk about on-page, we mean both the content of a page, and also it’s HTML source code as well. When both of these factors are taken into account, you can really make strides in improving your visibility. This is a technique usually used alongside off-page SEO, which is all the actions you can take outside of your own website to improve it’s ranking. On-page SEO is always shifting over the years, as search engines alter their ranking criteria. So it’s important to work with experts in the field that understand the latest algorithms and how they can be applied to your business.
Keyword research. The most important step of SEO.
You’ll already be aware of keywords as the things customers put into a search engine when they’re looking to find some information or a product or service. Ensuring that the pages of your site contain highly relevant keywords means that your pages will be found in the organic search engine results. Keyword research is the route to finding out what prospective customers are actually searching for. You then need to weave these into the content of your page and within the titles. The best bet is to integrate these keywords into the beginning of your text, as search engines assume the content at the top is the most important. The art is in making the content read naturally and making sure that they really are the right fit. If you just write a list of keywords at the bottom of your page, without properly integrating them into the text of the page, then you risk being penalised and de-ranked if this is picked up by search engines.
LSI keywords: These keywords tend to be words and phrases that search engines understand to be indirectly related to a topic. So if you’re a local garage then words like ‘engine’, ‘tyres’ ‘gearbox’ and ‘horsepower’ may be considered LSI keywords. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and it’s a natural language processing technique. Search volumes via voice assistant are increasing each year, so natural language becomes more important. Usually, the words a potential customer might use to search for your product or service are not the same as those that your page has been indexed using. The diversity of language, local phrases and synonyms are all issues that muddy the waters. LSI is a system that uses a mathematical formula to understand the relationships between different words and phrases. This helps search engines to define the context of a page as well as it’s content, and so serve up more relevant results for searchers.Tools like looking at autocomplete results can help you to understand what people are typing in or speaking around a topic of interest, as can looking at what other keywords top-ranked pages are using.
Link Building. How to rank high on Google.
No website is an island. The internet operates as a vast, interconnected web and so Google and other search engines also take into account linking while determining your page rank. Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to pages on your own – and the more authoritative they are seen as by Google the better. For example, a link from Gov.uk or the BBC website would be extremely valuable. There are three kinds of links to concentrate on:
- Internal links – Sometimes referred to as ‘deep links’ these are links that connect one page on your site to another. You might see this especially if you run a company blog, where articles are produced which link off to specific products or service pages mentioned in the text.
- Outbound links – These are links which point from your website to other relevant sites.This can help boost your overall standing with search engines, so it’s worth pointing to quality, credible sources where relevant.
- Inbound links – This refers to the links that point from other sites to your own, and they are extremely valuable. They give search engines an idea of how valid your site is as a source of information. A single, strategically placed link from a highly-ranked site can make the difference between your site appearing on the first page of search engine results or being buried and generating little traffic.
Link Building is hugely important because it tells search engines that your page has valuable content and will be useful to search engine users. It’s quite an art to get right, as the criteria used is always shifting. The focus is very much on quality and relevancy. Get these two factors right and the difference it makes to your bottom line could be fundamental. More visibility = more traffic = more sales.
How Google works
Google uses the keywords that you construct your site around as part of it’s algorithm to determine the content and relevancy and to match it to incoming queries from search users. It’s automated programming – called ‘spiders’, ‘bots’ or ‘crawlers’ trawls websites to determine the order of each page in results. This is referred to as your ‘page rank’. What ranking you get depends on the following:
- The location and the frequency keywords appear within your web page
- How long your page has existed – a higher value is attached to pages with a longer history
- How many other web pages link to the page – these are called ‘backlinks’.
Out of these three factors, the third is given the most weighting, because it helps to determine the validity of the information the page contains. For this reason, creating high quality content is essential for persuading other sites to link to yours.
How Long Does SEO Take?
How long your SEO strategy takes to show results can vary depending on your sector and the amends you make. However, you should generally expect to see a return anywhere from four to six months from implementation. This doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story, as a lot of results continue to improve over time and have a cumulative effect. It may take up to a year to really see the impact – and if you have the right strategy in place, your results should improve over time.
Is social media important for SEO?
Social media is an important collection of channels for almost every business. Although social media does not directly impact SEO, what it can do is boost organic traffic through search engines. Social signals will not directly help to increase page rankings, but they can make your SEO activities a lot more effective. For that reason, social postings and channels should be taken into consideration as part of your overall strategy. It can be said that social media is a correlation – but not a causation – of better page ranking. Shares and likes will not give you more visibility in the results page, but it does help to create a community of links pointing to your site, generating additional traffic, earning backlinks and enhancing the reputation of your business. If you’re looking for an SEO strategy in Folkestone, getting the right support to deliver it can increase your traffic and your profitability.
Common questions
How much does SEO cost?
SEO is a long-term strategy so therefore requires a consistent investment. SEO is done every single month until you have beaten your competitors in and around your local area and you have reached your targets. Because of this SEO is priced monthly. Prices range from £450 per month to £1600 per month. This can either be done on a month-by-month cancel anytime plan or it can be done in a 12-month contract at a discounted price.
How do you price SEO and what do I get for that price?
The cost of SEO is based on multiple factors. The first is competitor analysis. Analysing you current competitors and working out what it would take to beat them would largely decide on which package you will need. If the keywords you want to target are high competition it may take more high-quality backlinks and more high-quality content writing to beat them! On the other hand, if the keywords are low competition it may not require as many backlinks or as in-depth high-quality content.
The second is, how many keywords do you want to target? Each package has a different number of keyword’s if you want to target 20+ then either the gold or platinum would be your best option. If you only want to 5 to 20 local keywords them the lower tier packages might be more suitable.
Lastly and arguably one of the most important aspects for you, is what kind of return on investment (ROI) will you be getting. We would only ever take on an SEO client if the ROI was worth it. We can show you a rough calculation to give you an idea of how much an SEO campaign should return you to make sure both parties are happy with the potential outcome.
What kind of websites do you work on for SEO?
We only work with WordPress websites. If you do not know what your website was built on, then we can find out for you. If your website is not currently built with WordPress, we can rebuild it onto WordPress at a fee.
Having said that if your website is built on/with something else and you have a developer already we are happy to work alongside you developer throughout the SEO campaign.
What are the different SEO packages you offer?
We offer 4 different SEO packages; each package is designed to cater for different businesses with different goals. The packages also make it clear and easy for you the customer to know what you are getting for the different price points.
Our 4 packages are:
Basic – For low competition local businesses
Bronze – Designed for small businesses looking to target more keywords
Silver – This package is designed for small/medium sized businesses
Gold – This is the best value, it suits most businesses and most situations
Platinum – If you have got stiff competition or you just want to dominate as fast as possible this is the one for you.
Build brand awareness, build Authority and Generate Leads
Are You ready To Take The Next Step?
What happens after you submit a contact form?
Step 1
We will arrange a quick discovery call to find out more about what you’re looking for.
Step 2
We will have a second call to understand your business goals and what you hope to achieve from your website.
Step 3
We send you a proposal and quote.
Step 4
If we’re both happy with everything we get going with the project!
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