Digital agency tactics that boost your rankings

These digital agency tactics will provide you with insider knowledge to rising through the search ranks. Of course, like any digital strategy, there are no quick fixes. Getting to number one is awesome but staying there can prove to be difficult, not to mention time-consuming. In this blog, we’ll provide our top tips for making your way to the top.

With over 20-years of experience in the creative industry, we’ve seen our fair share of websites. You’d be surprised how many businesses expect their websites to run and maintain themselves. Wouldn’t it be great, if you could programme your website to automatically keep up with your business? Well…it would, but we’d be out of work.

The truth is that the need for a digital agency exists for a reason. Making sure your website can keep up with the fast-moving pace of your business does require a human touch. Yes, there is automation software available and it can do a lot, but without human maintenance, you’re taking a risk.

Here are our top tips for making your way up the search rankings…

1. The marriage of SEO and content marketing

As mentioned in our 5 ways to take your website to the next level blog, this partnership is key! It’s amazing how many people view their SEO and content marketing as separate strategies. When you think about it, they can’t work as effectively without each other.

Content marketing is the process of creating compelling content that drives website traffic and leads/sales. It could in the form of blog writing, images, videos, white papers or anything else that’s relevant to you.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. You can think of this as the signpost that tells search engines where your content is and what it’s about. After all, why spend time producing your amazing content if no one will ever find it? You have to shout above the rest and tell Google “Hello! I’m here! Send them my way.”

Of course, deciphering which is more important leads us to a chicken and egg situation. Does great content come first and is it then optimised for search engines? Or, should you create your content with search engines in mind? If you searched the answer to this, you’ll find a mixture of opinions. At Vocal we believe in the best of both worlds when it comes to pleasing Google and your human audience. By keeping the overall goal in mind (i.e. to be found by your audience) that will inform your content.

2. Consistency, consistency, consistency!

Our next digital agency tactic is to ensure everything you publish is consistent. If you’re familiar with social media algorithms, you’ll know that consistency is key. Search engines are no different in this respect. The importance of consistent posting cannot be underestimated.

If you have chosen to adopt a blog strategy to drive more traffic, devising a content calendar can be useful. This will help you to stay on track and assign accountability within your team. A content calendar can also make your end of month analytics less time-consuming. You can simply match your data back to when you published your content.

It’s important to be realistic when establishing your content strategy. Do you have the time and resources to be consistent? If not, don’t start. It’s worse to get to the top and then fall drastically back through the rankings. If you know you won’t be able to keep up, it might be time to look at an outsourced solution.

3. Do your research

The first stage of a search boosting project within a digital agency is research. This will take many forms and could include:

1. Consumer research
2. Competitor research
3. Industry research
4. Keyword research

By this stage, internally, you should have already done 1, 2 and 3 but 4 might be new to you. Keyword research refers to investigating popular search engine terms. What is your audience physically typing in the search bar when they’re looking for your services?There is a multitude of free software that allows you to see this data. Before you create any content, this should be your first port of call. It makes sense when you think about it. If you don’t know the search terms, your SEO efforts might go to waste. The content you’re producing might not even be necessary and your efforts could be better spent elsewhere.

When performing a keyword search, you need to look at a variety of factors, including:

• The search volume of the keywords and trends

Is there anything you can jump on reactively?

• How competitive is the search traffic?

If you’re writing blog content, this will help you determine the required length of the piece. The more people who are also optimising their content for that keyword, the more competitive it will be. Think about how you can make your content different from your competitors and more useful to your audience.

• Where will the keywords make the most sense on your website?

When producing content for SEO, you don’t want to just cram in your keywords for the sake of it. They have to make sense.

This is what some Marketers used to do before search engines grew wise to the fact. It’s now referred to as black hat SEO.

You need to think about the keyword and what the content will look like. Then, decide if it would be better placed as a page in your main menu or as a blog.

4. Amplify to be heard

This next tactic is crucial to any digital agency to ensure they’re squeezing every last drop from the content.

You’ve written an amazing, thought-provoking piece of content. You have optimized it in line with SEO best practise and published it on your website. Now, you wait for the traffic to start pouring in, right? Wrong! Now is no time to relax. It’s time to ramp up the traction and amplify.

What do we mean when we say ‘amplify’? You want to make sure the time you spent crafting your awesome content doesn’t go to waste. So, don’t just leave it sitting in one place. Yes, people will find it organically. They will search the keywords you chose when they need the product or service you provide. But why wait for that? Get your content in front of your audience where you know they hang out. You could:

• Share your blog across your social media channels.
• Upload your content to a content amplification website.
• Develop some contacts in local news publications and ask them to publish it.
• Reach out to some external publications or businesses whose audience will benefit from your content.

It’s all about being in the right place at the right time.

5. It never ends!

Once you have done all of the above, guess what? It’s time to start all over again. This goes back to our point about consistency and being realistic with your strategy. Establish how long these activities will take you and then decide whether some extra support is needed.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to simply write, optimise, amplify and repeat. If you’re really serious about disrupting those organic search results, you need to get analytical.

After your content has had time to gain traction, it’s time to take a look at the data. Something like Google Analytics will tell you which blogs harvested the most traffic and which didn’t perform. You can also see where the traffic came from to analyse the effectiveness of your amplification strategy.

Let’s take a look at an example

Pretend that you’re a company selling t-shirts. Your keyword research might suggest that you need content for:

• Men’s t-shirts
• Men’s white t-shirts
• White t-shirts for men
• T-shirts for men.

Do you see how all these keywords are very similar and that your content is likely to be repetitive? You might have already produced different blogs for each phrase, but one does better than the other. Then, it’s time to produce a ‘super blog’. If you work in a digital agency, this is where your superhero skills come into play.

Not really, but it’s fun to imagine ourselves in the cape!

Creating a super blog essentially means amalgamating all these blogs together. It’s advisable to keep the content that is attracting the most traffic and inserter weave the others. It might be painful to delete the other stand-alone blogs that you worked so hard on. But they will do more good for you in collaboration with the others. Think of it like four amazing singers coming together to form a super band and dominate the charts. You’re doing the same thing to dominate and disrupt the search results.

It’s also important to remember that while all the tactics you know now work, search engines are constantly updating. Their algorithms change all the time. Your best piece of content today could require major reconstruction in the future. It’s okay, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t produce content. It just means that you need to stay up to date. It’s part of the role of a digital agency to stay bang on trend.

Need help from a digital agency?

We hope this blog has helped you to generate some ideas about how to implement these digital agency tactics. But we understand that you’re busy and you might not have the time to be consistent with these strategies in-house. If you need support, we’re here to help. At Vocal, we provide a multitude of services to help you rise through the ranks, including:

• SEO friendly blogs to help you be found.
• Ongoing SEO support and tactical services.
• Website services to help your site work better for your business.
• Design services to help your brand stand out.

Whatever it is that your business needs, we’ve got you covered.

Why choose Vocal?

Vocal is a small, full service creative agency with a big heart. Our team has worked together for 10-years and we’re not afraid to speak up and push the boundaries.

As part of the wider Hudson Group, we have worked with hundreds of businesses, globally. Our Group houses eight B2B companies so we understand the importance of ROI. This drives the Vocal Team to create stunning and thought-provoking content that converts.

Vocal helps your business to be both seen and heard. We’re not afraid to be the loudest in the room. As our regional saying goes, “shy bairns get nowt”.

Our team offer a range of diverse skills and expertise. It’s this that allows us to offer more than a standard digital agency. We work together and use our varying skills to deliver a well-rounded solution. We’re ready to help you spread your message to the right people.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a 2-person start-up or a fully-fledged 200 strong agency. Our experience has seen us work on contracts ranging from £5k to the hundreds of millions. There’s really no such thing as being too small to be heard!

There’s no time like the present, so let’s get started…

Step 1: Say Hello

Our team are ready and waiting to take on your project. Get in touch with a member of the team. They’ll ask you about your aims and search result ambitions. We want to visualize your goals and help you achieve them.

Step 2: Brainstorming and proposal

Once we understand your project, we’ll start the researching phase. This is where our team go away and investigate with all our might. Armed with an innovative idea, we’ll come back to you with our proposal.

Step 3: The outcomes

Based on our 20+ years of experience, we’ll predict the likely outcomes of your project. Like we said, you didn’t come here looking for cute and fluffy ideas. You came here for an agency to help your business excel.

Step 4: Quote

Once the proposal is agreed upon, we’ll provide a quote for our digital services. Then, it’s time for the fun part – starting your project and delivering results.