SEO in Manchester is set to change with our Layout Composer.
SEO Manchester
SEO Manchester is a phrase SEO agencies use to present their services for SEO in Manchester. A good number of these feel achieving a rank for this is the make-or-break of online business and are yet to explore the technical issues apparent in a lot of the websites they’re working on. The truth is, by building websites properly, without shortcuts, we’re almost certain that the lovely programmers at Google will respect the code enough to organically rank you higher.
SEO services starts with a well-built website and good code is essential for high Google ranking. So here goes Manchester – let’s see how we get on.
The SEO Industry explained.
What is SEO?
SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimisation is simply the process of optimising web pages to improve search engine rankings for organic search. Google is the biggest and most advanced search engine in the world, analysing and indexing thousands of web pages every minute. Google considers factors like ‘keyword density’ and ‘backlinks’ to calculate the relevance and authority of any given web page. Based on these calculations, pages are ranked and this is the order in which we see our search results. Sound simple enough? Aaaah… but the clever programmers at Google use top-secret algorithms to calculate your search success. This strictly confidential formula changes according to current trends, seasons and search locations. No business in the world has access to this intricate formula, so SEO can be somewhat a mystery and is not an exact science. Due to this, we’ve seen a definite rise in backhanded and unethical tactics used to achieve high rankings. We’ve also noticed a surge in the number of Manchester SEO Agencies who charge clients thousands and promote SEO as an ‘expert’ service of theirs – whilst we know the only experts guaranteed to meet Google’s criteria… are Google.
SEO should be easy, so away with the industry arrogance.
Industry Change
Imagine you’re selling carrots and want to market your business using a Manchester SEO Agency. You get yourself on a search engine and search for SEO Manchester and assume that whoever is at the top of the Manchester SEO rankings is the best. Unbeknownst to you though, they mightn’t really appreciate code, schemas, nor the intricacies of building a true SEO friendly website and this means that any work carried out for you won’t achieve its maximum potential and you’ll be left paying for work for longer before you see any reward.
We’re trying to change the way our industry thinks about search and set a level playing field of Manchester SEO agencies who only work on the highest quality websites. As it stands, getting our client sites to rank for whatever search terms we define is getting a little too easy for us and we need a challenge. With SEO agencies all over Manchester settling for websites that aren’t built the way they should be, they’re unwittingly stifling the seo industries progression and hurting businesses across the region. We’re here to set the winds of change.
Why choose Unbranded Manchester?
The SEO Manchester Sales Pitch
Unfortunately, we aren’t in the position to blindly accept your website as being good enough to work on with SEO. Not necessarily from a content point of view but from a technical aspect. Has your site been built properly? Is it up to scratch? Will it respond well to SEO or an SEO Audit? If it won’t, we’ll strongly advise you not to waste your time until you get the core issues sorted. Obviously, as we’re clearly talking about how we got this page ranking for SEO Manchester, we’re more than capable of solving this for you.
We love what we do and perform best when we’re challenged within the industry. So, for this very reason, we want to educate agencies that rank for SEO Manchester, especially those who are unknowingly working with badly built websites for SEO and in turn delivering weak results. Our search engine friendly Layout Composer has changed the game for building high quality websites that organically rank without the need for extraneous link building or other remedial patchwork like seo content.
How are our SEO prices so competitive?
Our SEO Manchester Service Offer
We only carry out SEO on well-built websites, using best practice tactics. Upon making an enquiry with us we’ll carry out an seo audit on your site. If we think it’s up to scratch we’ll be happy to work with you and your business needs. Cards on the table – we have incredibly high standards when it comes to SEO performance. If your site fails our seo audit, we’ll advise you to carry out a migration into our platform.
Once we’ve established that your site is good enough, our SEO prices are better than competitive, especially when compared to Manchester SEO agency quotes we’ve seen floating around. In case we haven’t made it clear already, by focussing on the build of your website before carrying out any seo work, we’ll address the core seo issues that are hurting your SEO performance. As we’ve already mentioned the SEO agency services we provide aren’t extreme and don’t require months of digital marketing. Instead, we tend to find we achieve real, tangible results in as little as 12 weeks. You can’t get better than that when trying to rank highly in search results can you?
Why Is Our Search Engine Optimisation Approach Better?
Knowledge is power. We believe in the importance of understanding an industry before trying to manipulate your position in it. So, we’ve developed an extensive research and discovery process which gives us insight into our client’s market. We analyse competitors, opportunities and gaps within your industry, then use our experience in user engagement, content and web development to create something new, exciting and most importantly – fit for purpose.
Why are our SEO results disruptive?
Hint: It's down to the quality of your website build.
We specialise in clients with high-value products or services and we care first and foremost about making money for our clients. Don’t get us wrong, we appreciate the power of web design as much as the next person, but we know there is much more to online success. The success of our SEO Manchester page is only partially due to our meticulous research, discovery and content writing processes. As one of the few consistently successful SEO agencies Manchester we find that our search engine optimisation work ranks sites higher than your traditional SEO campaign.
Development first SEO
Focus on the build and then the polish.
A crucial factor in our success was down our expert web developers who created our industry-leading search engine friendly “Layout Composer”. The Layout Composer rapidly builds seo / search engine friendly websites to brand using a modular system based upon the principles of “Atomic Web Design”.
It was originally created as a tool to allow clients to make simple website changes without affecting the design. But, we quickly realised that it did something even better – it built pages with high quality, near-perfect code and organically ranked our websites on the 1st page of Google within just a few weeks. We achieved this without the requirement of additional digital marketing, or stretched out seo campaign.
At Unbranded Manchester, our attention to detail and (borderline obsessive) desire to do things the right way, has resulted in a web development tool that could change the way we treat SEO in Manchester for good.
Our SEO Results
Check out what Unbranded Manchester SEO has achieved for our clients.
832+
Rank Google page 1
Built using our Layout Composer, pages organically rank high for popular keyword searches
12 week
Turnaround
With quality coding & content, we often see great results in less than 12 weeks
98%
Customer Retention
Our team of experts work tirelessly to keep our client’s requirements front of mind
SEO Manchester
What are the best SEO strategies?
On-page SEO
Onpage SEO covers both keywords along with the internal linking within the content you’ve produced. It’s important to work to find the best keywords with the most value to your business and use these to help boost your website’s rankings. FYI. It might not be worth just going for the keywords with the highest volumes as this may be the result of a generic search as opposed to a tailored search where someone is ready to buy. I.e. if you sell SEO, is it worth ranking just for SEO, or would it be better to rank for SEO Manchester, or SEO Agency Manchester?
The difference may seem minor and counterintuitive, as you’d assume a high number of people seeing your website would be better than fewer, the psychology behind the search phrase tells a different story. You’ll usually find the longer a keyword search, the more likely someone is to stop and buy when they find what they’re looking for. Generic searches are usually for gathering information only
Off-page SEO
You’ll hear a lot of SEO Agencies in Manchester droning on about the importance of off page SEO like link building or a digital marketing seo campaign. Yes, it’s important, but it’s not the be all and end all of an SEO campaign. Instead, it’s the exact opposite. Google really doesn’t like the whole off page SEO tactics used by your typical SEO agency.
In simple terms, typical off page SEO is getting people to link back to your site. You can either pay for these or you can reach out to bloggers and ask them to write an article, or post one you’ve already written onto their site – the article will of course have a link back to your website. The idea behind this is to get Google to look at your site and say “Hey, loads of people are linking to this site, their content must be really good, let’s rank them higher”. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. As time goes on and Google improves its algorithm, its working less and less.
Technical SEO
Everything you’ve already read on this page revolves around Technical SEO. It is everything we specialise in and why we pride ourselves on being the leading technical SEO agency in Manchester. We’ve proven for over a year that a well built website will rank higher on Google than a traditionally, badly built, heavily back-linked website.
How Hard Is SEO?
Our SEO Experiment
If you check search trends for SEO Manchester, you’ll see it’s a very competitive term with a heck of a lot of searches each month! Ranking for this was not going to be an easy feat for any Manchester SEO Agency. The results below show you how fast our layout composer has worked and continues to work in improving our rank for the search term “SEO Manchester“. The work has been a little more difficult to achieve given the nature of the search term, compared to most of our clients who typically see disruptive results in as little as ~4 weeks. Check out our results below to see how the Layout Composer has worked for us:
Updated Rank Report
We’ll update this weekly until we’re happy with the results. So far, we’re still not happy.
Week 0 / Rank : Not Listed
Week 1 / Rank : 86
Week 2 / Rank : 47
Week 3 / Rank : 17
Week 4 / Rank : 2 (Getting there)
Week 5 / Rank : 15 – Dropped after experimenting on the site to try and grab number 1 without additional backlinks — eek.
Week 6 : Rank : 11 – Climbing
Week 7 / Rank : 1 – Winner winner! Point proven.
Week 7 -24 / Rank : 1 – Still here!
Week 48 / Rank : 2 – Noooooo!
Week 49 : We’re playing with schema markup for star ratings and faq snippets on search results.
Week 50 : We’ve got the FAQ snippets working and have rolled out a solution to all of our clients
Week 51 : Dropped in ranking but we’ll address this later
Please remember, we’re using this page to see if we can rank for the region’s most competitive search term. It’s an ongoing experiment that is going to rise and drop as we keep improving our build quality. If it wins us new business in the meantime – winner-winner-chicken-dinner – if it doesn’t, it’s not the end of the world, we’re going to continue to retrospectively apply our learnings to client sites.
Next Steps?
Start your journey with us today
What does our SEO Audit usually pull out as not good enough?
A typical seo audit from Unbranded Manchester consists of looking over a number of SEO related issues we commonly find when inheriting a website that has been worked on by another manchester seo agency.
The first question we ask is, what seo strategies or seo strategy was your seo agency using?
Link Building
A number of seo agencies will claim to be carrying out link building for you, but in order to save costs their seo strategy will consist of buying cheap backlinks from unscrupulous seo directories. Such seo backlinks can actually do your organic seo ranking more harm than good, as the low quality of the referring website will only hurt your overall seo kudos. If this was the case, we’ll look to undo their seo work by marking the referring seo backlinks as unwanted.
Another link building tactic some agencies use is listing directory overload. Yes, some listing directories will work wonders for your SEO, but, too many irrelevant directories will tell search engines that your seo strategy is a little too spammy and fake, thus doing you more harm. Again, in this instance we’d look to undo the work of your previous manchester seo agency.
Keyword Research and Keyword Optimisation
We’ll have a look at the keyword research seo strategy that was undertaken by taking a look at the copy on your website. We often find that the seo strategy undertaken by your typical seo agency is to insert as many keywords, or search terms, into the copy to the point where it no longer makes sense. The theory behind keyword research and optimisation is that Google search results will see the keyword from your keyword research in your seo content and assume that your page is talking about the topic at hand and then rank you highly in organic search results.
However, the problem here is that Google and search engines alike have algorithms built around natural language processing, which decides whether your seo content is written in real english or whether its just seo jargon built from a keyword research report put in for the sake of page optimisation.
If it finds that it’s the latter, your content will be punished instead of being promoted undoing the on page optimisation work you’ve paid for and not generating you the results you expected.
Alt tag seo optimisation
All images have the ability to include an alt tag for screen readers to use when they’re looking at the website. However, they seo strategy your seo manchester agency may have taken is to try to manipulate search engine results by keyword stuffing into the alt tag. Google search is pretty smart and it picks up on these dodgy seo tactics quite succinctly so, again, you’re not going to see yourself shooting up the google search engine results with this in place.
Instead, you want to take stick to the rules and only accurately describe the content of the images with alt tags. We’d recommend removing any seo work that has taken place to stuff alt tags.
Structured Data
Structured data is great for se page optimisation as it tells Google what your content and website is about in a universal format. From organisation schemas to frequently asked questions and product reviews, schemas are the easiest way to get featured in rich snippets on organic search. In general, the more featured snippets you have the more organic traffic you can expect.
We’ll take a good look at your implementation of structured data and ensure that its meets the standardised criteria. We’ve seen that a lot agencies include structured data optimisation in their seo services, which is a great thing as its relatively easy to do. We’ll just make sure they’ve been implemented it correctly and not off the back of a catchall seo plugin, which won’t accurately reflect your business for the best results.
Technical SEO
This is where we excel. To date we haven’t found a single site that works to improve your conversion rate, whilst being accessible to those with visual impairments or other disabilities to working quickly on every device at every signal strength AND being built with the correct HTML5 markup. It’s a bit of a minefield when you let a non technical seo executive try to install plugin after seo plugin into your site in an effort to improve the metrics. Our solutions are custom built to work with our layout composer and are fully configurable to work with every type of business we deal with. (And when they aren’t a part of our specification, we build them in!! Thats the joy of actually being able to code your own solutions vs being reliant on third party plugins).
Plugin Overload
Your typical seo team consists of content writers carrying out what they believe to be great seo campaigns. However, they usually don’t have a single idea of the code behind the site or how to implement seo services into your website. So, what do they do? They reach for plugins and install them one after the other onto their site.
We have a simple rule when carrying out an seo audit on your site. Did your previous seo team shoehorn in millions of plugins, or did they code custom solutions. If its the former, we carry out the following steps:
- Are there more than 15 plugins? Yes? We have a problem
- Are the plugins built by reputable developers or shady freelancers?
- Are the plugins reviewed highly?
- Are they kept up to date?
- Do they pass our code inspection audit? (no global vars, no namespacing etc)
We tend recommend a major cull on over 80% of sites we see going through our audit. To date, the record number of plugins on a single site we’ve seen is a whopping 65!
