Why Essex businesses choose Mosaic for SEO 

SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of optimising a website to show high on search engines for the keywords/search terms people are using to find products/services/businesses like yours.

Google and other search engines rank content based on various factors, but the overall goal of the search engine is to show the most relevant and authoritative results for users' searches, so SEO is all about giving these search engines the right signals for them to rank your site highly.

A keyword in SEO is simply a word or phrase that people search for, and subsequently something you want to rank for in organic search.

For example, if you were an agency selling SEO services, then a keyword people would search for that you would want to rank for could be “SEO Services in Essex” for example.

There are multiple types of search results your website can be displayed in. Organic search results are the standard non-paid results you see when searching. Paid results are adverts where you pay per click, this is a faster way of ranking in theory but has additional associated costs which can add up. If you are interested in having engaging and optimised adverts built that show at the top of Google search results, then have a look at our Advertising service. Image results are images from your site that the search engine has deemed relevant to the query. While ranking for images may initially seem impractical, around 15% of the 1 billion daily searches on Google is an image search. FAQ results are answers to your immediate search query and are a useful way to have a question answered as a searcher and to gain more traffic from the unique engagement as a company owner. Knowledge Panel results are specifically for companies for the most part and can be tailored to show all your company information in a simple and digestible way which makes it simple for a searcher to find and contact you once set up correctly. Map results are perfect for local businesses with a physical location, as your company listing and a map pin are shown in the search engine and users can quickly contact you. Video results are videos which have been indexed in search, this requires a special video sitemap but again is a unique way to get traffic that the average business may not even think of. Shopping results show products and their relevant information with the option to buy from the search page itself, perfect for leveraging the search intent and interest the user has at that moment. As a business, not all of the types of results may be relevant, but if they are then it is absolutely worth investing time in getting these set up.

Organic traffic is traffic that comes through organic (non-paid) search results, as opposed to direct, social or paid traffic.

Direct traffic is traffic that went directly to your site.

Social traffic is traffic that comes from social media sources, ie Facebook or Twitter.

Paid traffic is traffic that comes from paid sources, such as Google Ads.

Yes, investing in SEO is a great way to gain additional traffic and improve conversions on your site/landing pages.

Ranking highly for the terms people are searching for allows for a very low-cost method of gaining lots of interested users to your website and viewing your product/service.

SEO has a wide variety of benefits, which can be broken down into aspects that benefit usability and aspects that benefit your bottom line.

The usability benefits come from the work done to improve how the page ranks, such as adding alt text to images, which benefits people with sight issues who require the use of a screen reader. General changes to the meta title, description and page content also help to match the searcher's intent, which improves the conversion rate.

You also have the traffic benefits of ranking for high-traffic keywords, as, unlike PPC advertising, once you rank for this term, the ranking (to an extent) sticks, and is virtually free, so if you ranked for a term that got 10,000 monthly searches and had a cost per click of £1, then ranking #1 organically for this keyword, in theory, saves you £10,000/month.

SEO has a wide variety of benefits, which can be broken down into aspects that benefit usability and aspects that benefit your bottom line.

The usability benefits come from the work done to improve how the page ranks, such as adding alt text to images, which benefits people with sight issues who require the use of a screen reader. General changes to the meta title, description and page content also help to match the searcher's intent, which improves the conversion rate.

You also have the traffic benefits of ranking for high-traffic keywords, as, unlike PPC advertising, once you rank for this term, the ranking (to an extent) sticks, and is virtually free, so if you ranked for a term that got 10,000 monthly searches and had a cost per click of £1, then ranking #1 organically for this keyword, in theory, saves you £10,000/month.

While SEO can be summed up as the process of optimising your website for the terms people are going to be searching for, actually getting results in SEO requires you to make sure your page is as relevant and authoritative as possible.

Google employs more than 200 ranking factors. These allow search engines to rank websites based on their relevancy and authority.

Working with Mosaic, we can ensure that your website is seen as relevant and authoritative and passes all of the ranking factors with flying colours, and any time those factors change or are updated, we will be on top of implementing any of the new changes/requirements.

SEO can be broken down into 3 types, all of which are hugely important for your site's rankings:

On-Page SEO - Any tasks that take place on your site, such as optimising the text, and site content.

Off-Page SEO - Any SEO tasks that take place off the site, such as building backlinks, social signals and reputation management.

Technical SEO - While similar to On-Page SEO in that it takes place on the site, this type of SEO is more about optimising the technical factors on your website, such as page load times and metadata.

In truth, it very much depends on a wide variety of factors. Gone are the days when you could launch a website and have it rank within a matter of weeks. It is impossible to launch a website overnight and expect it to rank for relevant search queries. Google ranks websites that have established authority over time, so it takes time for websites to rank organically.

The best answer will take between six months and one year. However, this depends on how much budget you can apportion to monthly SEO, what the competition is doing, and what other people are doing in the same area.

Having both SEO and PPC allows you to leverage the benefits of both while minimising the drawbacks of either.

The main issue with SEO is that it takes time to see results, whereas PPC results are virtually instant (as you are essentially paying for the ranking) so you can use PPC ads to rank highly while the SEO is being worked on.

Ads can be quite expensive, especially for high competition terms, so in the long term, when the SEO is getting results, you are then saving money that would be spent on Ads, which can then be reinvested in your other marketing efforts or used to advertise for different keywords, giving your brand a wider spread on search engines.

Social media shares are not considered SEO ranking factors. However, if your content is shared more on social media than usual, it can generate social signals that show your posts are valuable to your target audience.

Although social media does not directly affect your search engine rankings it can indirectly impact and help build your brand.

Duplicate content is a common problem. Many SEO novices are confused about what duplicate content means. Duplicate content, in simple terms, is content that is duplicated between two or more websites and two or three internal pages.

Content can refer to written content, title tags and meta descriptions or H1 tags.

Duplicating content from other sites is a bad idea, regardless of whether it's a direct competitor. Duplicate descriptions, paragraphs, entire sections of text, duplicate H1 tags across multiple web pages, and URL issues such as non-www and www versions of the same page are all things to be aware of. To ensure that a page is clickable by users and Google, pay attention to every detail.

You can't go wrong if you don't copy large portions of content from other pages or sites.

There are a wide variety of reasons that your rankings could have dropped.

Verify that noindex tags have not been accidentally added to your website. Sometimes, developers accidentally add noindex tags to a website when they move it from a test environment into production. They forget to delete them. These will cause your website not to be indexed if they are left in place.

Google Search Console will show you if your site has been removed from the SERPs because of malware so always be sure to look there too. Google may decide that your site is potentially harmful to users. This happens most often if the site has been hacked.

If you or a previous SEO agency working on your site performed low-quality/spammy SEO, then you may have a manual action from Google, again this is viewable within your search console and will usually give you an insight into what the issue is.

Google might have released a core update which has helped other websites gain traffic and rank higher than yours.

Your competitors may be using a more aggressive search engine optimisation strategy than you, which could explain why your organic visibility has been surpassed. They're now in some of your top rankings. To understand the areas where you can improve, it is a good idea to analyse your competitors' strategies.

Working with Mosaic, we can review all aspects of your site to find out what the cause of your traffic drop was, and then remedy it to help get your rankings and traffic back on track!

While the vast majority of people use Google as their main search engine, other search engines still get a lot of traffic and naturally have lower competition. Bing, for example, still gets 900 million searches a day, which could be potential searches for your business!

Even if the focus is on Google, there are many. many variables that can change which results show, with the main ones being whether they searched on desktop vs mobile, location and whether they are using google.com or google.co.uk. The differences can be quite massive, especially for local searches, so it can be useful to see how your SEO in Essex is performing, compared to your SEO globally or in the UK.