Indexation
The first pillar of good SEO practice.
Your site needs to be indexable by search engines. That sounds simple enough, but in reality, it’s a nuanced process with an unclear priority to the untrained, and longstanding issues that appear over time.
The first month of working with Salience involves a discovery audit, in which we identify issues with the indexability of your site. After the discovery period, we can get to work on improving your indexability as fast as we can.
Log File Analysis
Looking into how search engines interact with your server can give invaluable clues as to how to improve that interaction and, overall, improve the crawl efficiency of your site.
The existence of a crawl budget has been argued, but whatever the answer, helping search engines better access your site is a good thing for your search performance.
Duplicate Content
It’s easy to dismiss the point of duplicate content, yet our auditing team encounter duplicate content issues across nearly every site.
The solution can sit in both technical – canonicals & redirects – or in a more manual process of rewriting pages, CTAs and other information. Either way, fixing this will have noticeable and lasting effects on your visibility.
Structured Data
Easy to implement. Rarely implemented.
As Google’s core algorithm looks to quickly identify quality factors to meet its ever-shifting criteria, structured data such as Schema gives search engines critical aspects of the page without them having to search for it.
Foreign Language
We’re not an international SEO agency, but UK-based sites with foreign language pages can greatly benefit with a little TLC from structured data, proper href lang setup and the core principles of good SEO – indexation, content & links.
Foreign language is part of our discovery where applicable and looks to identify quick wins abroad.
The list goes on
From sitemaps to pagination and robots.txt files, our discovery process will highlight what needs changing, and what order to do it in. We set the foundations in place, then build upon them one step at a time. Isn’t that how all great structures work?
Get Your Content Right
The second pillar of quality SEO for your site.
Enhanced Copy for SEO
The act of chasing specific keywords with targeted copy is giving way to a broader focus on keyword clusters and semantic relevance. That doesn’t necessarily mean that SEO Copy – tucked below the fold in 8px font for no one but bots to read – isn’t relevant anymore, it means there’s a better way.
Our enhanced copy process tackles your priority pages, typically category, subcategory and educational pages by building rich copy experiences that can be read, easily, by robots and humans.
Copy, when done well, can improve conversion and enhanced copy aims to further serve search intent – the holy grail for future-proof SEO – for a cluster of search terms, using educational content, questions and prepositions and broader information about the target page.
Internal Links
If customers are the lifeblood of your site, internal links are the veins. Put aside the creepy metaphor for a second and consider this: They help humans navigate to the most important pages for their stage in the user journey, and help robots figure out which pages on your site are most important.
The difficulty comes when you have hundreds of important pages. What goes where? Using our agile methodology, we work through your category and subcategory pages in priority order to ensure all your sites’ veins are pointing to the right places.
Consideration & Awareness Content
Enhanced copy applies mostly to pages at the purchase end of the funnel, it’s important to create content that sits across all points of the customer journey.
TL;DR You can check out our approach to this type of content in content marketing.
Consideration Content
One of the biggest opportunity for near market organic traffic is by tackling educational content around your niche. We create shoppable resource hubs to answer all the questions someone might have about you and your offering to expand your organic reach, revenue and market share.
Awareness Content
Two of the biggest misconceptions about awareness content today:
- People want to read your company blog.
- Blogs are a place to push your products in a salesy tone.
We create selfless content platforms that engage new audiences and generate backlinks.
Link Building Isn't A Dirty Word
The third pillar of quality SEO for your site.
You just have to do it right…
In the years since blackhat SEO was condemned to the lowest of SERPS, some people are averse to the phrase.
But while link networks, comment spam and the old methods of getting links are redundant, the need for links still exists. What is the new method? Digital PR.
we create digital campaigns that are grounded in data, tell stories and look great, but the purpose is always to gain high-quality links.
Keeping everything above board.
Link Profile Analysis
Link manipulation is still a regular occurrence in modern search marketing. That’s why it’s important to consistently monitor and review your link profile.
We are a certified partner of Link Research Tools and use it to prioritise high, medium and low risks, making analysis of the entire link profile more manageable.
We monitor client link profiles on a monthly basis for spikes and a more thorough quarterly check.
We use our time efficiently for the most effective outcome.
Disavow Management
Future-proofing your site against potential link spam issues.
Disavow files ensure that certain backlinks are ignored by search engines so that your current site isn’t negatively impacted.
When compiling disavow files we never completely disavow everything. Instead, we take a measured approach, initially only removing the high-risk links and see how that affects performance.
If the needle doesn’t move as much as we’d like, we revisit the disavow and look at removing the low-quality average risk links and so on until we see improvements.
It’s calculated and precise rather than hack and slash, so the results are better.
Site Migrations
Everything above
…plus…
301s mapping, Tech specifications, Auditing, Risk Analysis
Site migrations are one of the most cost and resource-intensive actions you can take with an online business. It’s a chance to change things for the better, but in the same vein poses a significant risk to your organic revenue if shortcuts are made during the migration process.
Every one of the sections above must be considered for site migrations – that’s standard. But there are a few extra bits that need to be considering…
Tech Specifications
There will always be a ‘100% need this’ list when it comes to technical specifications for your site that change depending on what you’d like to achieve.
Before development starts, we provide a series of definite actions concerning all agencies, developers and other team members that, if followed, will put your new site in the best position for organic success once live.
Auditing
An extension of the technical specifications; we audit your new site on your development server to ensure your organic visibility is waving, not drowning when it goes live.
Risk Analysis
Development, hosting, payment providers, SEO, PPC… the list of agencies involved in a big migration goes on. As the project deadline looms completion, it’s easy to overlook certain shortcomings in favour of getting it done.
But what’s the risk to your organic revenue?
Whether you’re looking at your lowest ever visibility post-live or your highest, it’s important for stakeholders to understand revenue implications immediately after, and in the months beyond after hitting the big red button.
301 Mapping
Particularly pertinent with large e-commerce sites. Telling Google where your old site pages went seems simple enough to talk about, but can quickly turn to an incomprehensible task.
We look after your 301 mapping process so that every old page points to where it should, and every new page honours that redirect with appropriate.
Site Architecture
The architecture of your site encourages users to navigate it in a certain way and gives search engines clues about what you’re most invested in. Good site architecture can greatly improve your visibility, but also your user metrics and revenue.
Keyword Strategy
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
We work with you to improve your keyword strategy, ensuring you have clear and diverse keyword targeting across your site. This prevents search cannibalisation and means that search engines can correctly attribute visibility to keyword clusters at a subfolder and category level rather than single pages.
Navigation
Whether it’s the main CSS navigation of your site, footer navigation or otherwise, the internal links within are solid signals on your most important pages. We review and improve your navigation structure so your best pages get their best chance at success.
Category Structure
For e-commerce sites, category and subcategory pages are often the big-ticket items in search. Improving category structure enhances a search engine’s ability to assess their semantic relevance and rank everything within them accordingly.
Site Speed
A fast site is an absolute necessity if you want good ROI from digital, and yet it’s one of the first things to get hit.
Development bolt-ons, outdated code and unwieldy imagery added by blog teams. They creep up over time, subtle at first yet damning to your visibility when you notice.
Site speed slowers
The list of issues that can affect your site speed is monstrous. To name a few so you believe we’ve been around a bit:
- Javascript rendering
- Bloated CSS & image files
- Server response time
- Redirect misuse
- Unnecessary code
Our initial time with you is led by a discovery audit in which we identify the biggest issues affecting your site, of which page speed always features. We work with your developers through bite-sized actions to get the biggest improvements, fast.
Manual Penalty? Surely Not
You’re unlikely to see a manual penalty hit your Search Console inbox this side of September 2016, after real-time Penguin became part of Google’s core algorithm, but that doesn’t mean Google’s ban hammer doesn’t have a tangible effect on your visibility and revenue if it deems your online activity wanting.
Now, smaller changes are more frequently added to the core algorithm, and with the exception of some obvious offenders – interstitials, anyone? – figuring out what you did wrong can quickly turn into a whodunnit of digital marketing practices.
We use our principles of indexation, content and links to assess your site and figure out what needs tweaking and how much to tweak it before Google puts you back in their good books.
Future proofing
Depending on the scale of the problem, it’s not always a precise science, but that doesn’t mean there’s no science; Have a fast, indexable site with quality content and links to serve a searcher’s intent, wherever you appear in the search.
It sounds so simple…
