SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the practice of optimising a website with the aim of increasing visibility, traffic and results from the organic search channel. Increasing visibility in an SEO context means achieving higher rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), which in turn means that more people searching for queries relevant to your products and services will click through to your website. By delivering an SEO strategy to improve your website and growing organic traffic as a result, the channel has the potential to help you achieve business KPIs whether that's to grow revenue, generate leads or acquire new customers.

SEO has many elements to it, which can be categorised under the three core SEO pillars: technical SEO, content strategy and linkbuilding. Technical SEO is always the best place to start, since content optimisation and linkbuilding efforts will almost always be undermined by a website that performs poorly from a technical SEO perspective, but once a website is technically sound, the real opportunity to scale organic performance will typically reside within improving content, which in turn will enable external links to be created into web pages, which heightens their authority in the eyes of search engines.

Technical SEO focuses on areas such as site speed, mobile friendliness and crawlability to ensure search engines can easily ingest and index the pages it contains.

Content Optimisation improves existing content and determines what new content should be created in order to meet the needs of your audience and outperform the competition

Link building is the process of securing links into content from websites that are relevant to your sector or audience, either from a content topic or user journey stage perspective

The use of search engines to find content and discover information has become a constant feature in everyday life. The way consumers make decisions about the products they buy, the services they employ, the holidays they go on and how they spend their leisure time (amongst many others) is heavily influenced by the answers they find in search engine results pages. As such, the brands that are providing the best answers and delivering the best content have the opportunity to be highly visible to their target audience and influence the decisions they make.

The last 20 years has seen the top of the SERPs increasingly allocated towards advertising, however, organic results still account for over 50% of all of the clicks that take place, which represents a huge traffic opportunity for brands that deploy an effective SEO strategy. Additionally, as clicks on organic listings are free, all of the investment that you make in expert SEO guidance, technical SEO, content strategy and production and link building will go towards improving your SEO performance - you won't have to continue to pay advertising costs to a third party as you do with something like Google Ads. For brands that have paid search advertising as part of their marketing mix, improved SEO also has the potential to improve PPC performance, as improved content and landing page experience can lead to higher Quality Score, which in turn can lower the cost per click that you will pay for your traffic.

We follow a three step process when delivering our SEO services:

1 - SEO Auditing
We always start with a comprehensive assessment of your website to find areas of opportunity covering technical SEO setup, on-page SEO, keyword performance, backlink profile and organic traffic analysis, amongst many other elements. Additionally we deliver a content audit (although this can also be done at a later stage) – this involves analysing both yours and your competitors’ content to uncover content optimisation and creation opportunities, informing content strategy and planning.

2 - SEO Planning & Prioritisation
With the findings of our auditing phase to hand, we pull together a prioritised SEO action plan with items ordered by impact and time to complete; this ensures that any critical issues uncovered in the SEO audit are addressed first, followed by other required tasks in turn. As well as setting out the tasks that need to be completed, during this phase we will also establish the resources available in both the client and third-party teams; this enables us to confirm ownership of tasks and tailor our ongoing focus areas accordingly.

3 - SEO Delivery & Reporting
Once the prioritised plan is confirmed we move into the delivery phase, during which we work through the agreed deliverables. Reporting will be established at this stage to enable us to track the impact of the actions taken and monitor organic traffic performance; reports are entirely flexible and can be built in line with business needs, goals and KPIs. As well as working through the technical SEO, content optimisation and link building opportunities in the plan, ongoing website health checks will be undertaken as part of our monthly retainer to address any issues as they arise.

At Mentor Digital we boast an in-house Digital Marketing team offering expertise in SEO, paid digital media (paid search, paid social, display and video) and analytics, all working from our offices in central Bristol. Our team is led by Dan Watt, an ex-Google UK Strategist who has led digital marketing teams for 14 of the 18 years he has worked in the industry and has provided services across a wide range of sectors, business types and budgets. As well as our digital marketing expertise, our Bristol office also houses our teams of Front End and Back End Developers, Project Managers and Creatives who are on hand to help deliver website improvements as required, which also gives our SEO team a greater understanding of how to implement the technical improvements they recommend. The clients we work with benefit from:

17 years of SEO expertise
We have a team of SEO experts who have worked across a multitude of websites of all types, sizes, and complexity over many years working in the digital marketing industry; we have a track record of consistently achieving fantastic SEO performance for our clients.

Constant involvement from senior SEO experts
As a medium-sized Bristol digital agency we pride ourselves by the fact that our clients enjoy consistent involvement from our most senior SEO and digital marketing experts - none of our clients are left feeling like a small fish in a big pond as can be the case elsewhere.

Best in class account management and servicing
All clients are allocated an Account Manager who will help with the day-to-day running of our operation, which enables our SEO Strategists and SEO Managers to get on with what they do best - delivering impactful changes that improve SEO performance. We pride ourselves on the service levels that we deliver to our clients, reflected in the fact we have many client relationships spanning 5+ years and counting.

Highly competitive pricing
As a Bristol SEO agency we are able to offer the best of both worlds: best in class digital marketing talent from both highly experienced practitioners who've relocated to Bristol from London, combined with the best up and coming talent from a city regarded as one of the leading UK hubs for digital technologies, all offered at very competitive day rates. Clients that agree to a retainer of 6 months or more can unlock day rates from as low as £750, which is under the Bristol market rate and significantly lower than London rates.

SEO is an essential component of any digital marketing strategy, both in terms of unlocking maximum benefit from the scaling of organic traffic to a website, and in the halo effect it can have on other digital marketing channels. Consistent investment in SEO expertise has the potential to improve multiple elements of your digital performance:

Paid Search
SEO has a significant impact on the performance of paid search; web pages that are well optimised from an SEO perspective are likely to achieve the highest scores from a landing page quality perspective, which in turn will increase Quality Score and lower the cost of paid search advertising.

Social Media
A key facet of SEO is content strategy backed by keyword research, which determines the content that you need to improve or create. This effort can be put towards creating content for social media, either through the repurposing of content for consumption in social platforms or informing the content plan that is used as the basis for creating social media content.

Digital PR
Any well functioning digital marketing strategy sees SEO and Digital PR go hand in hand. The combination of a content strategy based on keyword research and web pages that are optimised with SEO in mind provide Digital PR with the content ideation and content assets required to achieve the required traction with journalists and publications to achieve the most high profile coverage possible. This in turn massively benefits SEO through the backlinks that can be generated from high authority websites as a result of Digital PR outreach.

Website Performance
The delivery of technical SEO improvements and the optimisation of website content has a huge impact on the performance of all web traffic, not just the traffic that comes via the organic SERPs. SEO work streams such as improving page speed, creating keyword research based content and optimising information architecture and content structures all have the potential to improve website performance and contribute to continuous Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) efforts to improve User Experience (UX) maximise performance.

Given the absence of advertising costs, you do not have to have huge amounts of budget available to invest in SEO. At Mentor Digital we work with clients across the entire budget spectrum, ranging from ~£1,700 per month up to >£5,000 per month. As you might expect, the greater the amount of budget available, the faster SEO improvements can be rolled out across your website, since our SEO agency services are charged for on the basis of the time it takes to deliver the work. To give an SEO strategy the best chance of success you should be prepared to invest over the medium to long term - we'd suggest a minimum of 9-12 months in the first instance.

It is extremely difficult to forecast future SEO performance, both in terms of how much performance will increase and how long it will take to improve. This is down to two main factors. Firstly the workings of Google's algorithm are never made available outside of Google HQ, and it is subject to change at any given moment, which can see organic performance increase or decrease. Secondly we have no way of knowing what the other players in a given marketplace are doing in relation to SEO - if a key competitor unbeknown to us is investing significant resources into SEO optimisation, it will of course be difficult to compete with them if our investment levels are much lower. You should be wary of any SEO agency that claims they can guarantee results or rankings in the SERPs - no one can genuinely offer such guarantees when it comes to organic search.

Despite these factors, at Mentor Digital we insist upon putting in place targets and KPIs for all of the SEO work that we deliver. Once we have completed the SEO auditing phase of our work, we will provide an estimate of how much we can grow organic traffic based upon the opportunities we have uncovered. It is important to note that improvements made in SEO can sometimes take several weeks and even months to have an impact upon organic visibility and traffic. Therefore targets and KPIs need to be set with appropriate timeframes in mind, but you can rest assured that consistent investment in SEO as a channel has the potential to significantly improve your digital marketing performance over time.

In relation to the building of new websites, we provide SEO consultancy to ensure that new sites are built in line with all SEO best practices. Our SEO team work alongside our Development team in our Bristol agency offices, and they are highly experienced in providing SEO consultancy for the websites that we build for our clients. As such we can apply these learnings and expertise to a new website build project, irrespective of whether it's being built by Mentor Digital, a third party agency or an in-house client team.

Where a given website is undergoing wholesale changes because of a new build process, such as significant changes to information architecture or the culling of large amounts of content, we are able to advise on the SEO value that resides within a soon to be legacy website, to ensure that as much authority as possible is maintained and carried over to the new website. We are also able to oversee a thorough SEO migration process for the launch of a new website, which works to mitigate as many factors as possible that present potential risks to organic traffic as a result of the changes a new website inevitably brings (more details on SEO migration below).

When building and launching a new website it is essential that great care is taken in relation to the migration from the legacy website over to the new site. Search engines thrive on consistency when indexing the pages of your website, and therefore the launching of a new site will inevitably bring some changes – and therefore some risks – in relation to how the pages on your site are viewed by a web crawler and in turn how prominently they are displayed in the search engine results pages. SEO migration is the effort that goes towards managing this process.

By delivering a thorough SEO migration process a Mentor Digital SEO consultant can work to mitigate as many of the associated risks as possible, which in turn will protect the organic rankings and traffic levels that your site receives following launch. Our SEO migration process covers six key areas of work:

Technical SEO: sitemap review, ensure Google Search Console can crawl the new site, robots.txt review, optimal implementation of redirects and mobile-friendliness testing.

On Page SEO: metadata review & improvement, URL-friendliness checks, content checks re: keyword focus, H1’s and copy and image tag optimisation.

Linking: page link volume checks, external & internal linking audits, broken link checks and resolution, no-follow links review and social media signals checks.

Site Speed: ongoing analysis of Google PageSpeed tool to monitor site speed and uncover issues, image compression auditing and server request optimisation.

Tracking: monitoring and assessment of the core Google tracking suite (Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager and Google Search Console), ad tracking and goals tracking checks.

Knowledge Panel: assessment of knowledge panel results and effort to protect these as much as possible depending on changes made to underlying content.