SEO Harrogate Services— Get Your Business to #1 in Google
SEO Harrogate
If you’re a business based in Harrogate and looking for SEO services to help grow your business further, then you’re in the right spot.
Just to quickly introduce myself:
I’m Harry, an SEO consultant who has been practicing SEO since the age of 16 and officially for the last 5 years.
How Does SEO Benefit Your Business?
Great question.
It’s actually incredibly simple to show as well.
See, I’ve carried out SEO on this very page you are reading now.
You have managed to find me by typing into Google search, something along the lines of “Harrogate SEO” or “SEO Freelancer Near Harrogate” etc. and you have found this page.
And now suddenly I can potentially generate a lead for my business that’s related to the services I offer.
In a nutshell, that’s SEO.
SEO will help to rank your website for terms that your customers might be searching for.
A Quick Example
So if you are a Dog Walker in Harrogate and you have a website.
You will want to use SEO on that site to target a keyword your potential customer might be searching for.
An example of a keyword they might type in Google: “dog walker harrogate”
Now, at the time of writing this, that specific keyword is getting 320 each and every month.
If you are #1 for that position.
You are getting a lot of potential customers that are coming across your website and are interested in the dog walking services you have to offer
And chances are they are going to want to get in touch.
To generate that same amount of traffic to your website through Google Ads.
You’re going to need to spend somewhere in the region of £200–£300 a month (and that’s if you know what you are doing when it comes to Google Ads).
With SEO though, the traffic is completely free.
Of course.
It hasn’t cost me anything to get you here (unlike pay per click) and you now might be interested in my SEO services in Harrogate.
Hopefully, that gives you an idea of what SEO is trying to achieve.
What goes into SEO?
SEO agencies and professionals use a lot of SEO jargon such as “Rank Brain”, “E.A.T” and so on.
These are all important terms within SEO but all you really need to know are the following three main components of what makes up SEO.
These are #1 Technical SEO, #2 On Page SEO and finally #3 Off Page SEO.
Everything within SEO fits into one of these three groups.
You need to ensure that you have each of them covered and accounted for in your SEO strategy otherwise your website simply isn’t going to rank #1 for your main keyword.
Ok, so let’s break each of them down.
We will use this very page you’re reading currently as an example.
#1 Technical SEO
Technical SEO is an area of SEO that aims to ensure that Google is able to effectively understand your website and ensure that it is one that will serve the user in the right way.
Here’s some of the things it is looking for:
- The website needs to be mobile friendly as more and more users are now using mobile. You can check your website is mobile friendly through Google’s specialist: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
You can see that this page passes that test too.
- The website needs to run fast. A slow loading website means a user could end up frustrated by the experience. Google has a tool called Page Speed Insights where you can test your website: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and you can see that this is a ranking factor that they are actively looking for.
You can see that this page actually has some improvements that needs to be made in that area.
- You will want to ensure that the website is secure. A quick way to do this is to look at the top of the browser you are searching on to see if it has a little lock next to it. You can see Google’s full guide to this here: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95617?hl=en-GB
When you open this page you can see that it has a little lock next to it, meaning that it is secure.
There are many, many other factors that go into technical SEO but you can see what the main aim here is. We are trying to carry out tasks on the site that Google will want to see help benefit the end user who is using the website. Just think if you were trying to make the best search engine you could, what website would you want to see rank above another one that offered the exact same information?
- Would you reward a site that offered the same information but loaded faster to serve the user information?
- Would you serve a user with a secure website or an unsecured one?
- Would you want to show a website that was easy to use and navigate on mobile over one that was awkward and frustrating to a user?
#2 On Page SEO
On Page SEO is essentially what you are consuming and reading right now.
It’s the very words that are on the screen and how the site as a whole is structured.
Using this page you’re on now as an example, you can see the main keyword that is being focused on here is “SEO Harrogate”.
This is seen through the very opening of this article.
Ok let’s break this down.
Firstly, we have the header.
- The H1 in this article is the following:
“SEO Harrogate Services — Get Your Business to #1 in Google” this is the primary header tag of the article.
The first two words have our the targeted keyword in “SEO Harrogate” this helps Google understand immediately what this page is about.
- Now let’s check the URL:
Again, you can see the keyword in bold.
This yet another indication to Google about what this page could be about.
- We can see it from the overall content:
You can see from the very first sentence that it contains our keywords: “Harrogate” and “SEO” this is a further indication that it is now likely to Google to actually rank this page for the given term.
- Images used.
You can see there a picture of Harrogate. This is a picture that is often associated with Harrogate, this is then further proof to Google that this is indeed a page about Harrogate.
This could be helped further with the use of relevant video such as the following:
As this is a video actually about Harrogate, that is pulled in from Youtube (a company that Google also owns) to give it more confidence in serving the right content to the end user.
There are a whole range of other On Page ranking factors.
Essentially all On Page SEO is trying to achieve is essentially provide enough trust signals and evidence to Google that they are serving users with the right results.
If I suddenly swapped all those words for York and PPC, it would start ranking for “York PPC” instead.
#3 Off Page SEO
Basically off page SEO is exactly that.
All the factors that you don’t have direct control over on your website.
It’s mainly the result of other websites linking to your website.
A link from another website back to yours is known as a backlink.
This can be as simple as this.
Here’s my LinkedIn profile:
I am now providing a backlink to my LinkedIn profile through this webpage here.
A backlink helps to bolster the overall authority of a page.
The more backlinks you achieve, the higher authority that page can get.
Know, however, that not all backlinks are created equal — some are more authoritative than others.
For instance, if you ran a food blog and you got a link from another food blogger, that’s great but it would have much more weight from Google’s eyes if it managed to get a link from the BBC’s Good Food website.
How can you get more backlinks to your website?
There are hundreds of ways to get them check out the following video:
Putting It Altogether
So what does all this mean?
You need to be tackling all three components of SEO to have a successful SEO campaing.
You need to ensure your website is technically sound, your website has the right style and type of content and that you are getting sufficient and high quality backlinks to your site.
As a business in Harrogate, you already have a million and one things to do and this can all seem quite overwhelming — but you know you need to keep marketing your business otherwise your competitors are moving in on your market share.
That’s why you can hire an SEO Harrogate freelancer (like myself).
Google My Business
SEO doesn’t quite stop there though if your a local business.
So if you are a business that offers some sort of services within Harrogate you will also want to optimise your Google My Business profile.
What’s a Google My Business Profile?
It’s basically a profile about your business that allows you to turn up in the map pack.
So if we were to search for “Harrogate Plumber”.
You can see the following results.
This is right up at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) and as a result is generating a tonne of activity.
And of course this is where you want to be.
This practice refers to Local SEO.
We are basically trying to improve your profile as much as possible to target terms that your customer user might be thinking of.
So if you are mortgage advisor.
You want to turn up for “Harrogate Mortgage Advisor”.
What Will I Do?
I’ll work one on one with you to create a custom tailor made SEO campaign that will be most effective for your business.
See, it might be that you have a really strong area of SEO already.
It could be that you have a great technically sound website already set up, in which case you just need work on the Off Page and On Page SEO.
It wouldn’t make any sense for me to carry out ‘even’ more technical SEO because first off it would be a waste of my time and your money.
Or perhaps that you’ve got a lot of backlinks from a range of different websites, some awesome content on the site but your site is not getting found properly on Google due to some technical issues.
Again, I want to seek out the biggest opportunity for you to get the most cost effective spend.
Harrogate SEO Caste Studies
The following graphs shows the change in the organic search traffic to the target website, subsection, or URL over time.
This is a very recent client local to Harrogate that had a brand new website at the start of June and wanted some help with their SEO to get generate more leads for their website.
At the current date of writing this very page, we are now at record levels generating a range of great leads to help propel their business forward.
This is another very recent client within Harrogate that can show you what happens when technical SEO goes wrong. As you can see, they were generating high levels of organic traffic back in 2018 when suddenly a technical switch made caused them to lose all their organic traffic. We’ve just started the road to recovery.
This is an ecommerce site that I have been helping since last July in 2018 and have managed to drive more and more organic traffic (and as a consequence more and more sales) through the means of carrying out those three components of SEO. Ensuring that the site is technically sound, making sure that the site has the right On Page SEO set up and finally ensuring a structured and meansured Off Page SEO strategy is being carried out.
Of course, if you have any questions with regards to any of the SEO aspects mentioned here in this account, then by all means get in touch with me either through my email address:
seoauditservicesuk@gmail.com or through my LinkedIn profile as linked to above and here:
I will be more than happy to help you and will be more than willing to give you a free assessment of your site from an SEO point of view and where it is lacking and what can be done to improve it further.
This won’t be run through an automatic check generator either. There are plenty of them online already that you can check out yourself.
Here are some now that you can check out to run on your site.
- https://www.seoptimer.com — a good fast check but again it is somewhat limiting in it’s suggestions to really improve your site going forward.
- https://www.woorank.com — a popular site checker that you can even get a Chrome Extension for. A nice little tool.
- https://sitechecker.pro — you have to sign up for an account but it is the best of the free SEO audit sites out there.
- https://seomator.com/free-seo-audit-tool — analyses site speed, looks at your content on the site but if you want anything meaningful you have to go for the paid option.
What they won’t give you though is a definitive answer instead it would be a top line boiler answer and it would be up to you to determine the results.
Instead, I will carry out a manual review of what I think needs addressing, how you can go about doing it and what I would propose that your or we could work on going forward to get the best result for you and your website.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
And well done if you managed to get through it all.