Eh up, me Duck! SEO consultants extraordinaire, Grow Traffic, has arrived in South Yorkshire and it’s bloomin’ lovely! Sheffield, with its digital credentials, was the obvious choice for us to set up doing friendly SEO and with Rotherham, Doncaster, Worksop, and Barnsley right on the doorstep we are in the centre of a thriving region.
So put down your snooker cue, grab a pint of Pale Rider, gi’or wi thesen, and read on to see what SEO actually is and why you need it for your business.
Why bring a business to Sheffield?
Sheffield is like no other city I have ever been to. It has an amazingly tight community, a strong sense of identity and fiercely proud locals. It’s quirky, yet traditional. It attracts the most interesting people who move here for work, university, or love, and never leave.
I first came to Sheffield in 2005 when I started University. I remember arriving off the Parkway and being excited by all the building work I could see around the train station. Sure, it wasn’t the prettiest view, but to me, it meant the city was on the up! Someone had decided it was worth their attention and was putting their faith and money into it. It was growing.
Since then, the boom in Sheffield has been remarkable. It has always been known for its music scene (Jarvis Cocker, Arctic Monkeys, Human League, Def Leopard…I could go on and on) but the real ale business has been growing rapidly (there are 57 breweries across the region, according to this report). It is fast becoming known for its creative and digital agencies too, with companies like Skybet, Plusnet and WANDisco choosing to grow their businesses in the steel city.
The number of SMEs in Sheffield is huge. If you’ve ever been, you don’t need me to tell you how big. Just wander down London Road, Ecclesall Road, or around the Winter Gardens and you will struggle to see the same sort of business twice. Last year, there was over 3600 new business registered in the Sheffield region.
It is an exciting place to be and it still feels on the up. Where better to expand an SEO consultancy business?
But enough about my love affair with Sheffield-lets get down to brass tax. What is SEO?
What is SEO Consultancy?
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. Simply put, getting websites to the top of search engines. The way this is done changes fairly regularly as Google tighten up the way they make the search engine algorithms work. (There are, of course, other search engines available. But in the UK, they currently have over 89% of the market share.)
For example, once upon a time, SEO was all about cramming copy on a website with a keyword as many times as possible. Now, Google wants content on websites that is useful to the reader. An SEO consultant keeps abreast of all these frequent changes and advises you on what content should be on your website, how it should look and what the back-end functionality should be like.
SEO isn’t an exact science though. A lot of it will depend on what your competitors are doing. If they are rising through the ranks, your page will, inevitably, drop. That is why it is so important to keep an eye on how your websites are performing so you can keep adding content and making your pages Google friendly.
Even more helpfully, Google often updates or tinker with their algorithm and doesn’t make it public. The only way most SEO agents find out about it is when their webpages suddenly drop unexpectedly.
Do I need SEO for my business?
If the eyes are the window to the soul, a website is a window to a business. How many of us will check out a shop, or hairdressers, or restaurant online before we go and visit it? I am guilty of even googling a restaurant to see if it serves food whilst sitting outside it. And if a business doesn’t have a website we start to wonder why not. What is wrong with it?
These days, a website is the best way to drive sales, whether you sell anything online or not. If people don’t know about your business, how are they going to visit you?
And for people to find your website, it needs to be on the first 2 pages of Google. Evidence shows most people don’t keep trawling through search engines to find what they are looking for if it isn’t in the first couple of pages. They just start looking for something else.
Having said all that, social media is just as important. And choosing the right social media platform is vital. For example, you wouldn’t advertise your fun, quirky gift shop on LinkedIn and not Facebook. It’s not the right audience. A really good SEO consultant will manage your social media for you too, to ensure you are engaging with the right type of customers.
What should I look for in an SEO consultant?
A really good SEO consultant will grow your website organically. This means they don’t just spend all your cash on paid backlinks (links to your website from others) or Google Ads, but they generate useful content that people actually want to read. That way, you get more people on your website, and it pushes you up the search engines. What’s more, from a customer’s perspective, they are much more likely to think of you when they are ready to make a purchase. Organic SEO means the growth of your website is more sustainable too, meaning you won’t have to keep ploughing money into your SEO campaign to retain the top spot.
We can’t speak for other SEO agencies, but at GrowTraffic, we spend a good chunk of time initially examining your website’s activity and the activity of your competitors. That way, our plan of action is informed and we can be confident it will have an impact. The beauty of small SEO consultancies, like GrowTraffic, is that we are agile enough to change tack quickly if we see what we are doing suddenly stops working.
The last thing you need to look for in an SEO consultant is someone you have
faith in and like. You are trusting your business to these people. Your SEO consultant should be excited to talk about your business and brimming over with ideas that don’t seem routine to them.
Ask yourself-do I believe they are looking after my best interests? If you aren’t sure, look elsewhere.
Give us a call
We are ready to talk to you about how to grow your business online, be it through blogging, website optimisation, link building, or social media management (or all of the above!)
Give us a call at 0161 706 0012, email info@growtraffic.co.uk, or fill out the form on our website and we will get back to you.
