SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a process which aims to increase organic metrics on websites such as keyword rankings, users and conversions. But can agencies guarantee these metrics? Can you guarantee rankings with SEO?
SEO cannot guarantee rankings for your website. However, a solid strategy along with help from an expert SEO specialist can place your website in the best possible chance to rank on SERPs. This plan should include keyword research and mapping, quality content and technical tasks.
Read on to find out more about how SEO can help your website’s organic rankings.
There is a high likelihood that creating and implementing an SEO strategy will boost your website’s keyword rankings, organic traffic and conversion rate. However, there is no guarantee that you will achieve the rankings you desire. There are many factors that go into how well your website ranks on search engines including:
Different industries have different levels of competition depending on how niche they are and the topics discussed. This can make it difficult to produce content that is unique. In highly competitive niches, it is also more likely to see fluctuations in rankings when algorithm updates are released. Search engines are constantly looking for the best possible content on sites to rank higher to provide a better experience for users. As such, your website may rank very highly for a month and then completely drop off the next.
Choosing the correct keywords can have a huge impact on your website’s ranking positions. The keywords must be relevant to your industry, and the intent of the search query needs to match the services/products you offer. Each key page on your site needs at least one keyword assigned to it and it should be included in the content.
As above, how competitive your business’ niche is can affect how difficult it is to rank for keywords. This is where you need to balance keyword volume and keyword difficulty. Having a mixture of high volume and low volume keywords (with lower difficulty) can help your business to target more relevant queries, potentially reaching some users your competitors haven’t tapped into.
Learn more about keywords and related best practices in our blog, How to Avoid Keyword Stuffing – Keyword Best Practices.
Google continually updates and changes their search algorithms so it can provide the most useful content for users. This is one of the biggest reasons why SEO does not guarantee ranking success. SEO experts can research the updates and adapt your strategy, however sometimes it can take weeks or even months for the information on the update to be released. This can sometimes result in ranking drops that take a while to recover.
SEO is a long term process that has the potential to increase your keyword rankings and bring more organic traffic to your website. This is not guaranteed, however, there are some tried and tested ways to maintain these rankings once they have been gained.
Working with an expert SEO specialist will take away the time and energy needed to create a solid strategy. You will need to spend some time explaining your business, industry and niche to the specialist. However, they will take control of monitoring your rankings, producing content and handling any technical issues that arise.
Your SEO specialist can also update your strategy to align with any algorithm updates throughout the month. You can then catch up with them to see how your website is performing via a monthly report.
Content is key when it comes to SEO. Once appropriate keywords have been chosen for each key page on your website, content should be optimised to target these keywords. Creating a blog content strategy is another way to target different types of queries that users ask online. Blog content should be well written, structured with headers and provide unique content while answering the main query. Regularly updating your blog page should help to bring in new users each month and proves to Google that your business is still active.
SEO experts can identify and find a solution for most technical issues on your website. Where they are not able to resolve this issue themselves, they can liaise with a web developer or technical support. They will continually monitor your website to check for any problems that may impact user experience or rankings such as the site speed being too slow, caching issues or pages not displaying correctly.
Learn more about technical SEO in our blog, What is a Technical SEO Audit & Why is it Important?
Once your website has started ranking for your chosen keywords and is bringing in a good amount of organic traffic, the next step is to build your domain authority. This should naturally build as you add high quality content onto your website, however you can also start to gain backlinks from other websites. If these sites have a higher domain authority than your website, Google may boost your rankings because a respected site has identified your site as helpful for their users. We have an in depth blog available on link building so you can learn more about why it’s important.
There are tools available to help you track your keyword rankings on Google such as SEMrush or Ahrefs. However, most of these tools can be costly if you want to access the necessary features. You can check manually if you don’t have the budget by simply typing the keyword into search engines but this is a lot more time consuming. Using one of the tools gives you quick and easy access to all of the keywords you have mapped to your key service pages. Read our blog on how to track keyword rankings if you want to learn more.
Alternatively, you can work with an SEO agency who more than likely has the tools available to monitor your keyword rankings. They can then produce a monthly report to show you the results and discuss a plan for how they intended to improve the rankings.
At Wildcat, we understand that there is no such thing as guaranteed rankings, which is why we are transparent from the initial consultation. Instead, we work with you to create a quality SEO strategy that puts your website in the best possible position to rank in your industry. Find out how we can help your business punch above its weight by contacting one of our experts.
Senior SEO Executive
