The SEO Agency Melbourne Marketers Trust to Focus on Performance

All the time, we see clients stuck with using their web development house to run SEO campaigns with big expectations. While there are some agencies that do both well, they’re few and far between.

Are you working with a real SEO specialist?

Here’s what you get with our SEO services:

• Great performance that focuses on outcomes
• A team that is ready to help no matter what your tech stack looks like
• Customer service so refreshing it makes you say “aaaah”
• To see how we work together, we can start with as little as two months commitment
• Our SEO Melbourne specialists are based right here
• Drop in to see your SEO team any time you’re in the city

Every Melbourne search engine optimisation team has the intent to deliver on all the above, but not all deliver. At Webfirm, we do.

Back in the good old days (The ’90’s FYI), SEO was a simpler game. Getting sites to rank on the newly minted Google search engine could sometimes be as simple as setting the meta keywords tag to your desired outcome. But times have changed, and we’ve moved along with them.

You might have noticed that the websites with the most blog posts tend to be doing the best on Google. That’s not always because those posts directly pull in the traffic. In 2020, building topical relevance for your site is critically important to get noticed by Google and ranked for your SEO.

How we get your site ranking

• Best of breed site architecture and content strategy
• The expertise of a team that is working in SEO day in, day out
• Staying focused on a strategy that’s free of vanity metrics
• A thorough understanding of the local SEO factors at play in Melbourne
• Leverage the experience we have working with SEO clients all around Australia

Whether it’s Natural Language Processing (NLP), Schema or the latest broad algorithm update, something really big always seems to be going down in SEO.

Getting into newer strategies at the forefront of the industry is great, but what about all that “traditional” SEO work that still needs to get done to adhere with best practice? If we can’t get that done efficiently, the costs for you to run SEO start to outweigh the benefits. For us, that’s where automation comes in.

• Tools and processes to automate work so that we are just checking and optimising, not always writing from scratch.
• Task automation: Our experts build tools for commonly performed SEO tasks, instead of doing the same thing over and over again.
• Efficient reporting: Our reporting mechanisms are built to save us time, while still getting you the insight that you expect – leaving more time to focus on improving your SEO results.
• Continuous learning: The whole team keep across the latest Google developments as they relate to the search result pages so that you don’t have to.
• We’re Melbourne natives: We keep in the loop with the SEO Melbourne community so we know what new innovations are rolling out in market.

Why trust your site to an SEO team that is not in the loop or spread themselves too thin across other marketing channels? You should be working with an SEO specialist.

Without a Search Engine Optimisation Strategy, your SEO can get stuck in a rut of fixing errors and perceived problems for the sake of it.

To get the biggest bang for your buck, every part of your SEO Strategy should be aligned with your overall business objectives.

• Location-specific: Getting found higher on the search results, more often, in Melbourne or whichever geographical area you are targeting
• Amongst competitors: We need to place your business amongst your competitors, not on search results where no one is looking
• Humans & Bots: Your site needs to be crawlable and have a structure that works for both users and search engines.
• Content In-House: You need a content marketing strategy rolled out by the same team working on your SEO to get the maximum impact from your top-notch content
• Authority Building: If your site’s authority is a challenge for you, we have contacts in Melbourne who can help.

The search results are constantly changing, but there is a definite theme developing that we can build a strategy around. Crawlability, structure, content, authority.

Your site might look great for users, but to search engines, it might be a very different story.

Our strategic technical SEO approach comprises three main components to answer three very important questions. How does your technical SEO stack up to your competitors? Is there anything in your technical implementation stopping you from ranking or ranking as highly as you could? Are there any potential future risks we need to address now before they become a problem down the line?

All websites will inevitably have some technical errors. We’ve developed a solid understanding of when they matter, and when we should focus on other things.

• We know your CMS: In Melbourne, sites are usually built with one of a few key CMSs. While we specialise in WordPress SEO, we have worked across all the main content management systems.
• We know what impacts: We built our SEO agency around technical, so we understand what makes an impact and what doesn’t.
• We know Melbourne: Melbourne’s local SEO competitiveness is quite variable – but there are technical elements to cover that can support your efforts.
• We know users: A healthy website from a technical SEO standpoint will often also help your users convert more.

At Webfirm we’ve been working in WordPress SEO for years. We’ve developed a clear idea of our ideal plugin stack (hint: it’s not many!) and have a great track record of unpicking underperforming WordPress campaigns and getting them back on track.

Take a look at the landing page set you have for your SEO. It is as in depth as it could be in terms of content? Yes? You’re wrong. Content depth is one of the most important elements to focus on with every campaign.

You want to be ranking not just higher in the search results, but also on more search result pages.

• The team here will take a look at your data and advise on the opportunities you are missing
• We have a content team in the agency who can help you cover the gap
• Our Melbourne-based specialists then work with your content to optimise for new keywords
• You’ll usually find that you are then more topically relevant for your old keywords and they too will improve

Already have an agency? We understand sometimes you can be nervous about looping in someone new. Rest assured we can look at your campaign without alerting your existing agency – and if we think they’re doing a good job, we’ll tell you.

Without reporting, it’s impossible for you to understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to your SEO campaign so it’s something we take seriously.

Building a good report takes time though, so we check in with you to make sure we have the balance right between reporting and SEO campaign execution depending on your budget.

• Our rank tracking can show you where you are ranking for keywords, even in different suburbs of Melbourne, for example.
• We focus on the right user behaviour on your website, and conversions, so we tag up the site to push all the relevant information through to Google Analytics using Tag Manager.
• Using custom tools at our disposal, we can project performance based on trend and previous years seasonality, giving us realistic and growth-oriented KPIs to work towards
• We report on your technical SEO progress
• Because our team puts a focus on keeping in the loop with what’s happening in the algorithm, we take the opportunity when reporting to keep you in the loop, too.

Although our exact reporting methodology is different for all clients, we again get consistently positive feedback that the reporting is timely, useful and with a focus on business outcomes.

For every campaign, we start with reporting. Without reporting, it’s impossible for you to understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to your SEO campaign so it’s something we take seriously.

Building a good report takes time though, so we check in with you to make sure we have the balance right between reporting and SEO campaign execution depending on your budget.

• Our rank tracking can show you where you are ranking for keywords, even in different suburbs of Melbourne, for example.
• We focus on the right user behaviour on your website, and conversions, so we tag up the site to push all the relevant information through to Google Analytics using Tag Manager.
• Using custom tools at our disposal, we can project performance based on trend and previous years seasonality, giving us realistic and growth oriented KPIs to work towards
• We report on your technical SEO progress
• Because our team puts a focus on keeping in the loop with what’s happening in the algorithm, we take the opportunity when reporting to keep you in the loop, too.

Although our exact reporting methodology is different for all clients, we again get consistently positive feedback that the reporting is timely, useful and with a focus on business outcomes.

Protecting your business profits from risk means protecting the drivers of your online business from risk too – that’s where maintenance comes in. Ranking really well already? Our specialists can run a strategy where we play defence instead.

Our team assess each business on a case by case basis to determine what plan of attack will work for them.

• An aggressive content expansion focused campaign
• A local SEO campaign focused on Melbourne or your location
• An incremental improvement campaign focused on optimising what you have
• A tactical agency-style campaign working on item by item

SEO Maintenance You Can Rely on…

Our customers tell us they love that we are always flexible to provide the style of SEO support they need for their situation.

If you’re trying to figure out what kind of SEO you need, think about your competitors and your customers.

Who do you want to be ranking against – who are those competitors? And who do you want to be finding you – who are the customers?

• If they’re all in your part of Melbourne (or whichever city you’re in) – you’re going to be looking at a Local SEO campaign. For these campaigns we focus on local citations, local landing pages, and your Google My Business page in particular.
• If they’re scattered all over the city, you might be looking at a city-based campaign; broader than a local campaign, but you’re not trying to fight over the whole country. Your GMB and citations are still important, but we need to get your whole site into shape and starting thinking about content.
• When you’re trying to reach people all over Australia, a national campaign is the go. Site crawlability, site structure, content and links should be the focus.
• Our Enterprise campaigns, usually for very large websites, focus on automation and making important technical changes that affect many pages on the site at once, as well as the content.
• And we do have experience working on International campaigns too. Are you looking to expand internationally? There are lots of considerations.

It’s really important to maintain focus on your target market and not get distracted by things that don’t matter! That’s why agreeing on a campaign type is so important.

The modern approach to website content has to be with your competitors in mind. It’s a constant battle of one-upmanship; your content needs to address everything your competitors are talking about, and then find that incremental value that makes it king.

Depending on your industry, we understand that sometimes creating interesting content can be a challenge. Our content team are well versed in the challenge and take a couple of angles depending on the challenge at hand.

One strategy we recommend is thinking about the problem you are solving, rather than the solution you are providing. We call this “going up the funnel”.

Anyway, we can get into all that when we talk.

Search-Driven Content Strategy

When we get into the content strategy phase of your campaign, the first thing we will do is try and map the topics and keywords from your keyword research into existing content on your site, or to new proposed content if it doesn’t exist. After we prioritise it, we can build an SEO-driven content roadmap for your business.

For eCommerce sites, beyond making sure your category pages and product pages are content rich enough to generate traffic, we start looking at summary blog posts, new product announcements, and this vs that posts for example.

On-Site Optimisation & Website Content

It’s very common for a web design company to build you a site that is both very thin on content, and not well optimised for SEO. Part of your content strategy may involve going back to these pre-existing pages and fixing them up, expanding them, and interlinking them to get them to rank.

Our team is big on understanding the intent behind each keyword and optimising your content to match that intent.

One of the biggest SEO mistakes we see from working with clients is trying to write commercial intent content for an informational intent keyword or the other way around. Wait, what does that mean? Stop trying to jump straight into bed with your customers if they are still researching around their problem.

The team have built automated keyword categorisation tools with marketing nous behind them so we can quickly understand the likely intent behind each search query. This is where content marketing and SEO really overlap, and having a team working on both can really help. One strategy needs to inform the other.

Is Your Business Getting This Wrong? We Can Help.

It’s really common for businesses of all sizes to under-think their SEO content, and just write a number of pages that aim to convert visitors to customers straight away. But it’s critical to remember that the internet is primarily an information resource. If you’re providing information, it will grate with people to get sold to without being informed.

The solutions to these problems are relatively straightforward but do require some thought into your content strategy and content plan.

To get results, you will need an agency to help!

Businesses worldwide struggle with content asset creation, but it doesn’t need to be that hard!

Getting something that’s on-brand, SEO optimised, looks and reads fantastic can seem daunting but with the help of a team with creativity, research, planning and access to great people even small businesses can afford to create amazing content.

Content So Good It Can Get Links

The holy grail of content marketing is that elusive piece that is so good, people link to it.

Our analysis has shown that your standard page content (like the one that your web developer likely built for you) is unlikely to get links, but blog pieces of a more informational nature are. This is why new content asset creation is so important; those highly linkable pages are unlikely to have been built when your site first got made!

What if we told you there was a mathematical way to tell you if your page is well optimized enough? It’s true! The rise of correlational SEO tools, based on the theory that Google is showing us exactly what it likes, mean that we can form a view quickly on how much more optimization is needed.

The reports generated by these tools are easily generated and we can show you, even before we start working together, what improvements could be made to your pages.

Getting into the Optimization

A great feature of these tools is that you can monitor your optimisation level over time. Once we start tweaking things, we can watch the impact both on the search result pages and in the optimisation score.

Search Engine Optimisation is not just about on-page optimisation, but it’s a great place to start as it’s something really readily controlled and the impacts can sometimes be seen overnight.

Links are a huge part of SEO, and getting quality (emphasis on quality – not quantity) links is critical. These links are getting harder and harder to find and achieve. We will work with you to understand where you sit in terms of your backlink profile, and what we would recommend in terms of cost vs effort to address this.

Sometimes, we’ve seen big traffic improvements from actually disavowing (telling Google we don’t trust) links you already have, so keeping an open mind is important. Gone are the days when buying lots of links will get the job done for you. If your digital agency are still doing this, we recommend asking them to articulate the strategy to you in more detail – or ask us to take a look. You could be putting yourself at risk of a penalty.