We are Embryo Digital, a Manchester SEO and digital marketing agency with several years of experience in search engine optimisation. Manchester is our home, but we service many companies across the United Kingdom. Our search consultants have brought greater web traffic and paying customers to our clients’ websites with strategic online marketing tactics (SEO, PPC, content marketing, social media, and other channels).
Whether it’s improving rankings through earned link building, working on your global SEO strategy, producing engaging content, keyword research, conversion rate optimisation (CRO), working on local SEO strategies, running our well-renowned site audit, or building a pay per click (PPC) campaign, our experienced account managers know how to rank businesses well in many different industries.
If an SEO consultant posts a piece of long-form content and no-one is around, does it still make a sound? We’d argue no, especially when the ultimate goal is conversation, consideration and conversion. A site’s web pages may scream expertise, style, and that the business is the best out there, but if it doesn’t rank well on Google, then it’s (almost) digitally invisible. In fact, first page search results garner ninety-five percent of all website traffic, so organic SEO success (and to get on page one) is a must.
With Google’s search algorithm reportedly changes up to five hundred times a year (but probably more). Major updates such as Google Panda and Google Penguin prioritise ‘white hat’, higher-quality sites over those worked on by shortcut-taking marketing companies. Using keyword stuffing, low-quality content and off-page tactics like poor-quality links doesn’t work. It’s imperative you have an SEO campaign in place that takes all of these factors into account – otherwise page one success will not happen.
At Embryo, we’ve seen the success that our strategies have had, improving our clients’ website traffic, leads and conversions. We know how to give a website that edge over competitors, with the right mix of content, site structure/taxonomy, and link building strategies. Our SEO experts strip your site down to its core, find those defining keywords and ensure your site improves its profile on all devices – now that mobile SEO performance is paramount to Google since early 2019.
From SEO analysis to web development, social media marketing to voice search tactics, building links and other off-page SEO strategies, the range of skills in this hungry, problem-solving digital marketing agency is varied, and comes from experienced and creative minds. Whether it’s mundane, yet crucial tasks such as periodic technical health checks for things such as crawl anomalies, or innovative strategies such as aiding clients to increase Google reviews to help with local SEO tactics (which we have seen have real ranking boosts for clients), we ensure our client’s website becomes a success.
What we are trying to say is that our strategies combine the boring but highly necessary repetitive tasks, with the fun, innovative, creative work that all websites need to reach an ever-greater audience. Unlike some Manchester SEO agencies (and marketing/search-led development teams in other cities, too), we understand the value of the ‘boring stuff’ and how it underpins any creative work that we do.
The goal of any good SEO is to draw visitors into an attractive and efficient website by building a strong foundation of authority and credibility. If you have a beautiful website with a clean, fast and enjoyable user experience, that’s great. But you need people to find it. That’s why good SEO focusses on becoming easily discoverable by building trust in search engines.
There’s a lot that goes into becoming credible and authoritative in search. Trust is gained over time through techniques such as having quality backlink profiles, positive user behaviour, and optimized content and on-page elements. By finding authority on search, your site will rank well. That means that users are more likely to trust your brand from the moment they come into contact with it.
It takes patience, commitment and hard work, but the fact is that establishing credibility and trust with Google and other search engines will do more for you than most other digital optimization. If you want your SEO to reach its maximum potential, then it’s about playing the long-game.
Then we report. We analyse KPIs and ROIs to ensure you’re gaining traffic, organically rank well, and see real SEO results. Whether content marketing, search marketing, link building, or social advertising is key to your online success, we will have recorded each and every action that we have made, so that there is an identifiable log of actions that create success, alongside our monthly reports which report upon ranking and visitor improvements.
While monthly SEO reports are the norm for digital marketing agencies in Manchester – and we of course create and provide these – it is our in-house workflow management system that can often provide our clients with much more beneficial information about what work is being done, why, and when. Transparency and communication are at the heart of this digital agency’s marketing services.
We are a results-getting, energetic, innovative, nimble, yet experienced search-led digital marketing agency based in Manchester. We specialise in lead generation from channels such as organic search, web design, pay per click strategies, social media and high quality content creation. We utilise the talent and experience within our agency to improve your web presence and online business. Many say it, but communication and transparency are paramount to our business and a driver of our own success.
If your website has been lost among the competition, or you don’t understand why your site ranks where it does – and you’re wondering how you’ll ever be found, then let us show you how we can win you more business.
We work with and are trusted by small and large businesses including SMEs and international brands alike. We ‘do’ reputation management for blue chips, and search engine optimisation for SMEs – and vice versa. Whilst many in the industry over-promise and under-deliver, our transparent, clear focus on producing content that earns links, with well-thought out technical search strategies means that no matter the size of your company, our methods work.
Our team is full of innovation and great thinkers, which leads to much ingenuity, no matter the size of the client that they are working with. Sustainable growth of an online campaign for any size of client comes from both the monotonous, arduous tasks, combined with inspirational ideas and leaps of faith. The difference in service to our clients big or small is not quality-based, but merely the amount of time each client pays for.
Monitoring the goals that we set and reporting upon their progress is paramount to all of our customer relationships, as are the statistics and milestones we report upon. Because of this, Embryo has become a leading Manchester SEO agency, albeit a stringent and insistent agency, especially when it comes to web content and practicing wholesome search marketing tactics.
1. Research. To create the most potent search engine optimisation campaign, we first run our 159-point SEO audit with each point manually checked. Running concurrently to this audit, we will be identifying keywords and key phrases (along with search volume), and looking through Google Analytics data to thoroughly identify the existing and potential search audience.
If we haven’t already done so at proposal stage, we will run an EmbryoGraph, which compares the current site statistics (such as number of links, amount of pages indexed, domain authority) to the competition. Search competition usually comes in two forms – the competitors that rank well in Google searches for the keywords that you wish to rank for, and the competitors that you compete with in other sales channels.
As well as auditing, keyword research, and competitor analysis, we check search engine results pages for various ontological-related key phrases to create a holistic helicopter view of the industry.
No matter if you want us to run an SEO campaign in Manchester, the north west, or the UK, our research work will be very similar (and thorough). If good, solid on-site, off-site, and industry research is done, then this creates a great platform for SEO techniques to work better from the off.
2. Technical SEO. Improving how a website is traversed by Google, how fast it loads, and how understandable each page is in and out of the context of a site menu system, is at the heart of technical SEO, or ‘on-site optimisation’ work. This work is boring, tiring, and frankly, not much fun, but is crucial to the success of a website, especially if, as in most cases, many wrongs are being corrected. A few HTML or metadata changes on a page template can have a dramatic effect on how Google robots are able to understand what the theme of a web page really is. Multiply this by several hundred pages, and rankings and visitors can soon rise.
Working from our aforementioned audit, our SEO team ensure that all online ranking factors are fixed including checking things like broken links, mobile responsiveness, conversion tracking, local SEO factors, among regular checks for the number of pages indexed, and inbound links.
3. Content Writing. Show us a site with excellently-written, long form content on every page, and we’ll show you amazing rankings in Google SERPs. Content and SEO go hand in hand – and to us are one and the same. We are often met with widely-open mouths when we suggest the addition of “two thousand words to the homepage”. But as clients get braver about search marketing techniques, take on our suggestions, and start to rank for phrases that they never thought would gain them business from search rankings, they are usually the party pressing us to add long form content to service and product pages, too.
Content helps in so many ways, and especially content of great length that is interlinked with various key pages in the site – especially if the links are within paragraphs of text, rather than just menu options, or a link above or underneath a paragraph that is describing it. Long tail phrases are much more likely to find your site if it has well-written content that explains various aspects of your service or products. Pages with greater amounts of content are also much more likely to be linked to, or shared on social media platforms.
4. Earning and Building Links. Even those who barely know who the best Manchester SEO agencies are have heard of link building and its largely negative connotations. Building links has a bad reputation for one main reason – the shortcuts that thousands of website owners and search engine optimisation companies deployed over a number of years. Link spamming does still go on to this day, but it is much less prevalent than it once was. We consider attaining new links as a digital PR process, usually encouraging website and blog owners to link to a quality content ‘asset’ on our client’s site.
We consider citations as part of a wholesome link building campaign, and ensure that citation listings happen near the beginning of any SEO work, unless they already exist. “Name, Address, Phone” (NAP) consistency and brand mentions are an ever-increasing Google ranking factor (and other search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo), so this part of link building is crucial to get right.
The tool suite at our SEO agency has seen many changes in the past few years. We always like to stay ahead of the curve, using free and paid search tools to manage and monitor things such as backlink portfolios, changes in search queries, organic visibility – and plenty more.
Our main SEO tools are SEMRush and Ahrefs.com, two of the heavyweights that help with a successful SEO strategy. We are also users of the excellent Screaming Frog (as do many leading SEO agencies) to help conduct client audits.
Other tools that we use from time to time include Batch Speed which allows us to test multiple domain names at the same time, using Google’s Page Speed checker. Batch Speed checks a set of websites for both desktop and mobile browser scores – and as any good search engine optimisation agency will know, making a mobile site, mobile-friendly is of ever-increasing importance. We of course use the Google Search Console on a daily basis when looking at things such as increased visibility, linking sites, links pointing to a site with nofollow attributes, and checking everything is OK with an XML sitemap file.
We help to produce our local SEO services by using the excellent Bright Local as part of our work around adding location elements to a site to increase performance on Google Maps in particular. We do occasionally use the Whitespark Local Citation Finder tool when working on improving local search.
When it comes to spending time looking at things such as external link analysis, organic traffic, link equity, a quick top 10 organic search result export, branded key terms – or preparing to start organic backlink generation/acquisition for a targeted outreach campaign for a new client, then it has to be Ahrefs that is our go-to, due to it’s simple-to-use interface across several disciplines (namely links and organic traffic reporting).
When checking for general site issues and errors, such as incorrect use of heading tags, core term focus keywords (for a particular page), ensuring image formats are kept to our own internal standards, ensuring no silly mistakes such as non-visible text is shown – essentially, anything leaning towards the more technical parts of SEO, then we use SEMRush. It is probably open in a browser at all times by each of our search team, such is its usefulness.
Some common SEO tools that we are not fans of include Moz, HARO, and Muck Rack, despite our friends at several other Manchester SEO agencies swearing by their effectiveness.
One of the best things about hiring an agency is that you don’t need to worry about the recruitment process. A good SEO agency can start improving your online presence and visibility with full efficiency from day one. This is what they do, after all.
Everybody knows how laborious, frustrating and time-consuming good recruitment can be. You need to know exactly what you’re looking for and interview carefully to ensure you don’t make any bad hires. The perfect employee rarely falls into your lap, and when you’re trying to build an entire team the process can easily take months – and that’s just to hire the team, let alone train them.
And you will be hiring an entire team. The days of one-man SEO are pretty much over. An effective and impactful SEO campaign requires a range of skills and specialisms to tick all the boxes and deliver results. Putting a well-managed and fully-functioning team together is a huge investment – not just of money, but of time and resources too.
Hiring a full team of talent is always going to be a struggle, and this is where most businesses trying to implement in-house SEO end up failing. Recruiting and retaining marketing talent for an in-house SEO team can be difficult because the majority of this talent tend to prefer going down the agency route anyway. Career-wise, being able to work on a range of different clients and campaigns is more valuable and provides a richer experience. This makes forming a long-term and well-oiled in-house team incredibly difficult.
And this is before we even talk about training your team up. A lot of businesses who choose the in-house route do so because they want an SEO team perfectly suited to their needs as a business, rather than the more general approach they (wrongly) think they’ll get from an agency. But training an entire team of new talent to the point that they understand the needs of your business, its objectives, its branding and messaging, its tone, infrastructure and more? Well, that’s going to take a lot of time, even when you’ve laboriously built a team of talent that you’re happy with.
Hiring an SEO agency, on the other hand, means hiring a team of career professionals and specialists with all the skills, experience and talent needed to bring success to your campaign. Going in-house means you have to build a team around the skills your brand needs, but agencies tend to consist of larger teams. This means that they’re able to assess your needs and match you with the services and talent they have on offer and ready to work from day one.
Building an in-house SEO team is going to cost time and resources, but it can also cost a lot of money too. Recruitment costs can often be high (and even higher when employing specialists), and this team is going to be salaried. That’s not even to mention the wide range of tools you’ll need to secure to support your team and facilitate their success.
But why is hiring an SEO agency more cost-effective? A lot of people initially balk at the costs of hiring a reliable and trusted SEO and digital marketing agency. But the fact is that you’re often going to be getting a more streamlined and focused service from an agency compared to an in-house team – especially a newly built in-house team. You’re getting more bang for your buck when teaming up with a good SEO agency, essentially.
This is because agencies employ a wide range of fully-trained and experienced people with a wide range of skills and talents. Their job is to simply match the specialisms at their disposal with your campaign to produce the best results possible. Need a full technical SEO makeover or a dedicated and extensive long form content marketing campaign? Agencies have these skills ready to be deployed from day one of your campaign.
This cuts out the costs and time of hiring and training a team for yourself, just to get things off the ground. Building the perfect team isn’t easy, and it certainly isn’t cheap. SEO also exists in a mercurial and fast-changing landscape – it’s difficult to predict and snags and unexpected turns should be, well, expected. Your campaign will have surprises along the way.
Why is this a problem and what does it have to do with the costs of hiring an agency for your SEO? A lot of businesses who opt for the in-house route end up building a bloated team, or a small team that can’t guarantee to meet every problem your campaign comes across. This means that most businesses rely on hiring specialist agencies alongside the in-house team anyway in order to provide the broadest skillset and tools for your campaign. This can become incredibly expensive, believe us.
Hiring a dedicated SEO agency, on the other hand, means bypassing recruitment, training and salaries in favour of a retainer that will be used to meet your needs as efficiently and effectively as possible. A broad range of skills and experience ready to deliver results. When your campaign hits a hitch, an agency will simply reassess and delegate your resources as needed.
It’s also important to note one of the biggest hidden costs of building an in-house team – the various (and expensive) tools your team will need to do the job. SEO is technical and in-depth, and it’s crucial that SEOs have everything they need to vault over problems and roadblocks, and to even simply perform the most basic tasks.
For effective and impactful SEO, you’re going to need a range of different tools. These costs might seem negligible at the time, but they will soon rack up and take a chunk of your resources each month. For a lot of businesses new to SEO and attempting to build their own team, these costs can come as a bit of a surprise.
An agency, on the other hand, comes with all these tools already at their disposal. They employ their team full time and work on a range of different campaigns constantly, so the tools are used every single day – and you don’t need to consider these costs. It’s part of what you pay for when you hire an agency. Agencies come with the best tools already bought and paid for.
In a way, yes. After all, a team you have built and employed specifically for your business works on your campaign each and every day. This certainly provides a level of insight that can be hard to match. But this doesn’t mean that a good SEO agency can’t provide everything you need.
There’s an idea that agencies are impersonal, providing a ‘one size fits all’ approach to their clients. And for some of the… less recommended agencies, this can be true. But a good agency will become a valued partner, integrating with your business and providing a seamless service with full communication.
For example, here at Embryo Digital, we pride ourselves on the relationships we’ve built with our clients. With full transparency, good communications, and a commitment to delivering results, we’ve run hugely successful campaigns for clients across a wide range of sectors and industries. The good thing about SEO is that the longer you work on it and the more patience and effort you give it, the better and stronger your results become.
When working alongside a trusted and reliable agency, this also means that as time goes on, your relationship and partnership is only going to strengthen too. For Embryo, we aim to become a simple extension of your business that basically feels like an in-house team anyway – that’s the goal.
Yes, it’s true that agencies work on a wide range of different campaigns at the same time – but this is actually one of the greatest advantages agencies have over in-house built teams. In-house SEO teams tend to suffer from what we call tunnel vision – a tendency to become so enveloped and focused on their business and its needs that they lose a valuable outside perspective.
This can become a problem. SEO is, after all, incredibly fast moving and is always changing. While the principles of good SEO always remain the same, the subtleties of its execution require professionals who stay on top and keep industry news and updates at the forefront of their mind. A good SEO agency will already be fully committed to this – their success depends on it.
That’s because SEO agencies don’t just do work for one business – they work on campaigns for businesses of all sizes across a range of different industries and sectors. This gives agencies a wide and broader experience, building insight and understanding that they can bring to your SEO. In-house teams can become a little bogged down by the goings on of your business and their ultra-focus on your needs can actually become a detriment.
Hiring an agency means partnering with those on the cutting edge of the industry. SEO agencies need to stay up to date with the latest industry trends, techniques and technologies and they bring this to your campaign. Here at Embryo, for example, we’re constantly keeping our finger on the pulse of the industry and blogging our thoughts and insights when it comes to SEO. Most in-house teams lack this wider perspective.
While building your own in-house team means you have completely unfettered communications and benefit from a team that is fully embedded with the goings on of your company, agencies bring their own benefits. If you want a cutting edge approach, broad experience and insight, and a more full skillset, then you can’t beat hiring a top-performing SEO agency.
As we touched on above, a lot of businesses who opt to create in-house SEO teams try to build a small and lean team of specialists. Unfortunately, SEO and digital marketing is so broad and far-reaching that the only winning formula is one that includes a wide range of different skills and talents – something that small in-house teams often lack.
SEO isn’t just one thing. If you hire ace technical SEO specialists to streamline and fix your website, they might not be able to handle your content marketing needs. If you hire talented content writers to boost your website, what happens when you need them to build links? And if you recruit great link builders, they might not be able to promote your site sufficiently through different channels like social media and paid advertising.
Any modern SEO campaign requires a multi-faceted approach to not only deliver the greatest results, but to even simply make the most of the hard SEO work that’s being done. SEO requires content marketing, social media marketing, paid advertising, thorough web development and design, and more to have the best impact possible. Building an in-house SEO team with all these skills is both incredibly difficult and expensive – which is why it is very rarely done.
On the other hand, a dedicated SEO and digital marketing agency will come equipped with a team of talented professionals skilled in all things needed for a successful campaign. Here at Embryo, for example, our team consists of specialist content writers, SEOs, PPC and social media advertisers, web developers and more. While small in-house teams can get a lot done, there are always going to be gaps in their knowledge and talents.
Over time, the needs of a campaign can shift and change. While you might start off needing a full website makeover and audit, there will come a time when focus needs to shift towards content marketing and filling your website with quality content to capitalise on this work and boost your results. When your website is covered in fantastic, user-driven content, you’ll want to start promoting this through the avenues of pay per click and social media advertising. You’ll probably reach a point where your current website can’t support everything you want to do, and you’ll need a full rework – or even a new website built from scratch fitting all your requirements.
The good news is that decent SEO agencies come prepared with everything you need for a range of different possibilities and outcomes. Which means that their services can change alongside your changing needs, adapting to provide you with exactly what you need from month to month. This is the kind of broad reach that in-house teams simply can’t match.
As we just touched on, SEO agencies are able to adapt their services to meet your needs and deliver results, giving them a flexibility that in-house teams struggle to achieve thanks to a more broad range of skillsets. But there’s another big way in which agencies offer a more flexible and varied approach compared to in-house teams – scalability.
Scaling an in-house team – either up or down – is entirely achievable, but is very expensive, difficult and time-consuming. An agency will allow you to scale your retainer as and when you need. You don’t want to become stuck with services you don’t need, or to become restricted and choked because you’re not getting everything you need.
What happens when you’ve got a campaign you need to ramp up and push with everything you’ve got? A small in-house SEO team will struggle to provide the manpower you need and manage the situation. You might end up with an overworked and stressed team trying desperately to provide everything you need – and that’s when mistakes happen and standards slip.
Alternatively, what if you find yourself needing to scale back? Businesses live in a fast-moving landscape and, unfortunately, problems can arise. You might find yourself needing to cut back due to budgetary constraints. Even temporarily, this can be difficult to achieve with an in-house team – especially if you know that you’ll need to resume full capacity at some point in the future.
The alternative is to partner with an agency and benefit from a completely scalable range of services. If you need to change your budget out of necessity, an SEO agency will be able to accommodate you. If you need to cut back, just lower your retainer with the knowledge that you can increase it again when needed. If you need to double down and invest heavily for a period of time, just increase your retainer to meet your needs – your agency will thank you for it and be more than happy to deliver what you need.
There are a lot of business owners who shy away from hiring an SEO agency because of a matter of trust. An in-house team offers full accountability and unfettered communications, it’s true – and, unfortunately, there are some less recommendable SEO agencies out there that give the rest of us a bad name. Some businesses have a bad experience with an agency and opt to avoid them in future – but you might be missing out on all the great benefits of working with an agency.
It can be difficult to know if you can trust an agency – a lot of it comes down to reputation and experience. It’s also true that, most of the time, you get what you pay for – if an agency’s prices seem a little too good to be true, then the likelihood is that they probably are.
What are the hallmarks of a great agency you can trust? Well, a lot of it comes down to communication and transparency. If all an agency is offering is one single, barebone monthly report to keep you up to date, it’s hard to track what you’re getting for your money. On the other hand, an agency that keeps in touch throughout the month, takes on feedback and works alongside you will quickly feel like just an extension of your own business.
For example, here at Embryo we make sure that we create strong bonds and build our relationships with our clients, never keeping them in the dark and offering full transparency when it comes to what we’re doing for them. This has allowed us to make our clients incredibly happy, and we’ve grown a reputation for being trustworthy and reliable – you know what you’re getting for your money when you work with Embryo.
