Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of attracting qualified visitors to your site via the organic search channel. We’ve been practicing SEO since the early 2000’s and have worked with many of New Zealand’s largest brands and websites.
These are some of the areas where we can really help…
Keyword Research & Intent Mapping
At the heart of any SEO program is a sound understanding of the keywords, topics and entities that make up your market. To make this information really valuable we like to map this to consumer intent so we can develop content that meets the needs of consumers at different stages of the journey to purchase.
Information Architecture & Content Strategy
A thorough understanding of keywords and entities in your market will also inform IA and content strategy for your website. IA is important because it helps Google understand the content on your site and determines how your website intersects with searcher intent throughout the buying cycle.
Indexation & Crawl OptimiZation
If you have a very large and deep website with complex faceted navigation, such as a marketplace or ecommerce site with 1000’s of products, the first job is to ensure that Google can effectively crawl and index all the important pages.
Page Performance & Core Web Vitals
What is good for users is good for Google, and this is why Google is placing more and more emphasis on site performance as a ranking factor. This doesn’t just mean page load speed, but also UX measures such as Final Delay Input (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
Competitor Analysis & Forensic SEO
In our experience one of the fastest ways to grow your organic visibility to see what is working for the top performing sites in your industry and do that, but better. We love diving in and analyzing competitor performance, to see what is working and how they are doing it.
Brand SEARCH Optimziation
In SEO we tend to spend a lot of time focused on non-brand keywords, those big category terms that define a market. That’s great, but often the low hanging fruit is actually to optimize your visibility for brand terms. Are you dominating the search results for your brand? Or are competitors or other industry sites capturing traffic that should be yours?
JavaScript SEO
Modern JavaScript frameworks like Node, React, Angular and Vue are great for developing awesome interactive user experiences for the web. Unfortunately, unless you are careful, they can also make it much harder for Google to crawl and index your site. The old SEO advice was to avoid JS. The new advice is to use JS properly so you can create beautiful web experiences that also work for Google.
Mobile SEO
Google is moving more and more to a mobile first index, which means your site will be ranked on the content of your mobile site and not the desktop version. If you havn’t started with a mobile first design, then you have a variety of ways to implement a mobile version of your site. We can help make sure that your mobile site is working for Google.
Ecommerce SEO
Ecommerce SEO might be our favorite thing to work on. All the key principles are the same for any SEO project, but for an ecommerce site there are often additional challenges such as product and review markup, complex navigation, and image optimization. Not to mention the stakes are very clear and ROI is easily measured.
Schema & Semantic Markup
The web is largely unstructured data. Schema and semantic markup is a way to structure data on your site in a way that that is machine readable and allows Google to incorporate this data directly into the SERPs. Product Offers, Reviews, FAQs, How-to’s and Business data are examples of information that can be marked up to enhance your presence in the search results.
Frequently Asked Questions about SEO
What does SEO stand for?
In the common use case, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, ie. optimizing your site and content for search engines. We actually prefer a slightly different interpretation, “Search Experience Optimization”. In this interpretation the focus is on optimizing your site and content for the searcher’s experience. It is s subtle difference, but one that reflects the variety of search modes these days, the variety of search result types (news, video, images, local, featured snippets etc) and puts the user at the center of the equation which we think Google would also prefer!
How to SEO WordPress
WordPress is by far the most popular website platform, or CMS, in the world. So it is unsurprising that so many people have questions about how to optimize WordPress for search. This a big question, but the short pithy answer is to make sure your site runs fast as measured by Google’s core web vitals metrics in Google Search Central. We usually use WP Rocket (for caching) and Imagify (for image optimization) plugins to help improve WordPress performance. In addition to performance you want to make sure you have proper XML sitemaps, proper use of page titles and meta descriptions, and of course great content. For the typical on-page optimizations we like the RankMath SEO plugin. We will almost certainly blog more about this.
How much does SEO cost?
Organic search traffic from Google is free in the sense that your don’t pay for the clicks, but it does cost in time and/or money to improve your site and promote your content such that your get more rankings, better visibility and more organic search traffic. The only reasonable answer to the question of how much it will cost is “it depends”.
The costs of SEO vary a great deal depending on the size and nature of your website and the industry you are in. Some niche B2B markets are not especially competitive online and so you might be able to rank well and get all the traffic your need with a fairly small and simple website. But if you are in a very competitive industry with aggressive competitors, and your website is large and complex then the the costs will be much greater. If you’d like an indicative quote please get in touch.
What are the best SEO Tools?
There are a wide range of SEO tools which are all useful in different ways and in different situations. We love the following tools and use them in our everyday work:
* Screaming Frog – Desktop crawler
* Log File Analyzer – Deep analysis of your web server logs
* Sitebulb – Web crawler/auditor
* URL Profiler – Swiss army knife of analysis features
* SEMRush – Keyword research, rank tracking, competitive analysis and much more
* Ahrefs – Keyword research, rank tracking, competitive content analysis
* DataforSEO – Programmatic access to search engine results amongst other things
* Buzzstream – Digital PR and outreach workflow
* Google Search Central – Free tool showing how Google views your site
* Google Analytics – Free analytics! You’re using this already right?