Strong SEO helps Shropshire businesses outperform the country
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is about competitive advantage. It’s about attracting more business than your competitors. It’s about making money. And because it’s a digital discipline, SEO makes Shropshire businesses as strong as their competitors inside the M25. It makes Whitchurch as central as Westminster. It puts Bridgnorth on a level with Belgravia. If your focus is international, SEO can make Wellington as prominent as Warsaw.
What does SEO do for a Shropshire business?
SEO is the vanguard of your promotional strategy. It turns a beautiful website into an effective one. There’s no point investing time and money into a spectacular website design if poor SEO means that nobody finds it. With the nation’s economy drifting relentlessly south, Shropshire companies have to use every tool at their disposal to draw business back.
- SEO is your business magnet. If web design is the styling that tells you if you like a car, SEO is the engine that makes sure the car gets you from A to B. It’s the substance underneath the style. SEO brings the audience to your website.
- SEO is the business leveller. In most aspects of business, companies in Shropshire suffer against competitors in the South-East. Strong SEO makes us even more prominent than businesses in the beautiful south.
- SEO promotes you to the rest of the Shropshire business community. We tend to forget the web’s local relevance because it’s so famous as the worldwide web. If you make your money closer to home, local SEO puts you in front of the local audience. It positions you before national and international competitors.
How does an SEO project work?
You’ll find more details of SEO projects on our main SEO page but there are five main project components. Whether you’re in Shropshire or Sri Lanka, the process is similar:
- Keyword research: identify the terms that relate to your business that people are searching for.
- On-page optimisation of your existing pages: tailor your existing pages so they rank better for relevant keywords.
- Creation of support pages: add new pages or blog posts that signal the importance of your main pages and capture traffic from more keywords.
- Drive traffic to your website: use social media, links or advertising to start a flow of traffic to your site.
- Monitor and develop: SEO is a moving target. Competitors react when you knock them off the #1 spot. Regular reviews keep you at the top.
What results can a Shropshire business get from SEO?
A SME in Telford can have just as strong an online presence as a multinational in the City of London.
In theory.
In practice, businesses with a large customer base or trendy product generate traffic and take the benefits that come with it. That just means that Shropshire businesses have to pick their fights. Don’t try to rank for “Fortnite PS4” because you’ll struggle to beat Amazon, Sony et al.
We’ve been enormously successful getting local business to the top of the rankings in the areas that matter to them. For example, we ranked higher everyone including Wikipedia for a worldwide standard on fuel cleanliness. Our work on this project was effective enough to keep the page high in the rankings to this day:
We generated a featured snippet for a distributor of generator controls. Featured snippets are something of a mixed blessing but, if somebody’s going to get one, you want it to be you:
We didn’t just generate a featured snippet for a product, we also out-ranked the product’s own manufacturer. And that manufacturer is no minnow. Parker Hannifin is one of the world’s biggest producers of fuel filtration products:
And don’t forget – you found this page, didn’t you?
What comes after SEO?
SEO isn’t the end of the story. Successful SEO gets people to your website. You’ve got them off the digital M54 and into digital Dawley. Now you’ve got to convince them you’re their ideal partner.
Digital marketing has to take a back seat to pure marketing at this point. Digital marketing is just one part of Promotion, the 4th of the 4 P’s of marketing. If you haven’t got your Product, Price and Place right (or even other aspects of Promotion), your web traffic will evaporate.
It’ll have nothing to do with your website. You’ll be asking too much money (or too little to establish credibility). You’ll be offering a self-assembly product when your audience wants it built for them. You’ll be pushing them to local partners when they want to deal with you.
There are hundreds of reasons why your website audience might fail to interact with your website. Very few of them have to do with the website itself. Forbes Baxter Associates isn’t just a digital agency. We’re a marketing agency. We can help. Check your marketing strategy and lead generation processes if you want a successful website.
Forbes Baxter Associates: SEO for Shropshire
You can contact or meet with us at the Telford Campus of Wolverhampton University, just off Junction 4 of the M54. We’re surprisingly friendly.