Knowing what to ask your SEO agency is a vital first step in choosing whom to work with. Some important questions that you should consider are:

• How can your SEO services help our business grow and succeed?
• What is your method for undertaking SEO tasks?
• What tools are you using to perform different SEO activities?
• Can you supply case studies of how you have helped other companies increase their ranking?
• Can you provide us with any reports and if so, how frequently?
• What information or level of access will you need from my business?
• Will I need to sign a contract?

As costs for SEO work vary depending on what SEO work your website needs, there is no definitive answer. Every website is different and needs different SEO work, so the price very much depends on how well optimised your website is currently. A new website will be likely to need more SEO work than an older, more established one. Every SEO agency will quote differing prices and whilst some SEO agencies offer set SEO packages with fixed monthly costs, this does not work for all companies. For example, you may not need all the services that you will be paying for. For that reason, Falcon Digital recommends undertaking an SEO audit of your website before having any SEO work carried out. This allow you to see all the SEO work that needs undertaking, as well as allow you to set a budget and define a monthly cost.

What exactly is duplicate content? It is when two or more pieces of content are either identical or very similar. It is just like plagiarising someone else’s work. Although it is often is unavoidable, we need to make it is unique to your business.

Broadly, there are two types of duplicate content. Firstly, internal duplicate content is when one domain name has the same content repeated across different internal URLs. Externally duplicated content, on the other hand, is when the search engines find the same content on different domains.

Although Google states that there is no SEO penalty for duplicate content, it does confuse search engines. When challenged with identical content appearing on different domains, search engines are required to choose which version should rank higher. Even if you are the originator of the content and are fully optimised, your site may not rank above the duplicate content. Search engines seldom display multiple versions of the same content in search results. Therefore, should you have duplicate content on your website, or if your content has been duplicated elsewhere, it will effect your visibility and your engagement rates.

As a SEO agency, Falcon Digital will find any duplicate content on your site and suggest new ways of re-creating it so that it no longer counts as duplicated.

A backlink is when someone links to your website via a different online platform or web page and there are several ways backlinks will improve your off-page SEO ranking. By being used as a sign of validity to search engines, they allow Google, for example, to discover new content when it revisits and re-scans websites. They can also increase your referral traffic.

If other websites that rank highly for relevant keywords can be linked to your website, this is akin to a vote of confidence to search engines that your content is both reliable and valuable. Search engine bots will re-crawl and scan webpages to determine that they are presenting the most up-to-date information to searchers. When scanning web pages that have links to other pages, it helps them find new content that may also be relevant and informative.

Referral traffic is vital and relates to number of people who enter your website via a backlink from a different website which then helps search engines determine how useful others have found the information on your website. With backlinks on pages with high traffic levels, the more likely your referral traffic will increase.

The greater the number of backlinks you have pointing to your website, the higher your site will rank in search engine results pages.

Working with an SEO agency such as Falcon Digital, your business will have access to a team of experts each with different skill sets that will help you to fully optimise your website. SEO encompasses many diverse aspects of digital marketing. For example, you may need a copywriter to help improve the content on your site and/or a web developer who will ensure the structure of your website is both strong and faultless.

A key area that you should expect from any legitimate SEO agency is a full SEO audit of your current website which will assist your chosen SEO agency to fully appreciate how well your website is already optimised and highlight alternative areas that can be improved.

Falcon Digital undertakes thorough research into both your site and your competitors. Competitor analysis allows us to devise strong strategies that will help you begin to rank higher than your competitors.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is an online marketing strategy with the goal of improving the visibility of your website in search engine results pages, (SERPs). The higher your website ranks, the more organic traffic that will be driven to your website. The more traffic driven to your site, the greater the sales and leads for your business.

If you offer a service that is based in a specific geographical area, you need to optimise your business for local searches. Local SEO assists in promoting your business to customers that are local to where you are based. To appear in local search results, search engines will gather information about your business from various locations. Quality local content that you have created such as your social profiles and citations can all help improve your local SEO.

One of the first ways to improve your local SEO is by generating and optimising your Google My Business account. A Google My Business account allows you to set your location and, if correctly optimised, will help to boost your visibility and engagement levels. An optimised Google My Business account will encourage your customers to leave reviews, which in turn helps Google know that you are a legitimate business.

Further improvements to your local SEO can be made by creating a location page or section on your website. As you would expect, this should include your business address, and a Google map pinning your location embedded into it. Local SEO also includes making sure that your name, address and phone number is located in the HTML text of your website. Then, when your website is crawled, Google’s bots can gather this information for search results. Clearly, it is vital that you ensure your contact information is the same and consistent across all your platforms.

Getting your website to rank at the top of page 1 on Google is not immediate due to the many variables that go into effective SEO work. For example, creating quality, relevant content is an on-going process. Even the effects of tasks that can be completed relatively quickly such as re-sizing images to increase page speed can take a while to see. Your website is unique, so the SEO work it will need is also unique. Much may also depend on the budget you have to complete the SEO work.

Certain SEO ranking factors such as domain age and domain authority cannot be physically changed. Search engines are inclined to favour those websites that have existed for longer than newer websites as they are considered to be more reputable and provide reliable information to search queries.

With brand new websites, it can take up to six months for it to start ranking and increasing engagements. However, that only happens with on-going SEO work from a dedicated SEO agency such as Falcon. As you cannot fully optimise your website in one go, you cannot expect your website to rank highly straight away and the effect can take months, even years.

Landing pages are utilised to specifically target keywords and phrases. The creation of landing pages that contain content rich with keywords relating to your business helps increase your search engine results page ranking. They aim to take people who click on them directly to a page with the information they are searching for. Fully optimised landing pages, where your keywords are mentioned enough, are a great way of getting web pages to organically rank higher.

The greater the number of landing pages you have that are fully optimised with relevant keywords, the greater the organic traffic driven to your site from search engine results pages. Each landing page should have a different keyword/phrase which opens your website to more avenues and search terms.

Another ranking factor for websites is the number of positive engagements and visitors the site enjoys. If your website starts to have more people visiting because you have created more landing pages, search engines will interpret your site as containing relevant and knowledgeable information and will raise your website’s rank.