

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
SEO is how people optimise websites so that they perform online to achieve desired goals. Despite being shortened to just three letters, search engine optimisation – or search engine optimization for those who prefer American spellings – is a term that encompasses a whole lot.
Even an 18,000-word guide, which this is, could barely scrape the surface when it comes to this complex, fluid topic. Despite that, we’ll attempt to cover as much as possible and look at the key pillar concepts which help define a term that’s created an industry and transformed businesses.
Despite being so fundamental to online success, a lot of people glaze over when any mention of search engines, optimising etc. However, if you make money online, or enjoy a significant portion of your revenue from e-commerce sales, then your SEO education must be of a high standard. Further to that, it needs to constantly evolve, almost as many times as Google’s algorithm does a year (which is estimated to be around 150 times!).
So if you’re wondering “How does SEO work?” then this piece of content is for you because we’ll be covering:
-
What optimising for search engines is.
-
The two main strategies people use to improve search performance (spoiler: only one is the right strategy).
-
The importance of having enough relevant content on your site.
-
Intent, and why it is vital to attract attention from people searching relevant queries.
-
The different types of optimisation work that a digital marketing agency can carry out on your behalf.
At Embryo, we offer a free 30-minute SEO consultation. In it, we will show you how your website is performing on Google, and provide you with a level of insight that would usually cost £1000s of pounds.
Call us on 0161 327 2635 or email our team at info@embryodigital.co.uk.
Want To Improve Your Rankings?
If you do, speak to our team and organise a FREE 30-minute call with one of our digital marketing experts.


What Is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (or, as we’ve established, SEO) is the term that describes all the ways that an individual, group, business, or anyone who wants to be found online for something, can tweak their websites to improve the performance of their websites on search engines.
Major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing spend their days – among other things – scanning new web pages, crawling them to understand their contents, and indexing them for the right thing.
Think of it like a librarian sorting books in the correct sections – fiction and non-fiction – and genres.
The search engine crawlers, or spiders as they’re often called, have a busy job of crawling BILLIONS of new web pages every single day. Once they understand what the pages, blogs, and other types of content are about, they then have to decide which search query or queries that page fits under. The final task is to decide – based on dozens of ranking factors – which of these pages deserves to be at the top of page one for the given keywords.
Nine times out of 10, the results that are the top of page one will receive the organic search traffic that comes its way.
You can see why so many people work so hard to essentially impress search engine algorithms. If they rank top, it’s the nearest guarantee to online success you’re going to get.


If the Shoe Fits: A Basic Example of How SEO Works
Let’s run through a quick example to set the scene. Imagine you own a shoe shop and you want to increase the number of sales you make online. The natural next step is to be found for shoe-related keywords such as “black shoes for men”, “school shoes for girls”, and “what is the best shoe for runners?”.
The shoe shop would then – either in-house or by hiring an external search marketing agency – optimise their website in a variety of ways to ensure that they are found on page one of Google for the shoe-related keywords that matter to them.
That, in the broadest, most top-level sense, is what SEO is: Getting your website in front of people that are going to engage with your website, blogs, or pages.
Now, there’s a huge caveat here, and that is that the practice of enhancing your search engine rankings requires months of commitment, hard work, and holistic approaches that complement each other. Working on one aspect, e.g. link building, is not enough. That investment in links needs to be complemented by including relevant keywords throughout the website, ensuring your site’s Core Web Vitals are good, and a clear SEO strategy that defines what you intend to do over a period of time.
Given Google’s secrecy, there are no guarantees when it comes to ranking, it’s more about following (a lot) of best practices. These practices are relatively little in isolation but when added together they have a transformational quality – provided people have enough patience in the process.
To borrow a quote from Sir Dave Brailsford, the man behind Team GB’s Olympic cycling success, optimising your site for leading search engines is about “Incremental marginal gains”, all of which add up.
It might seem like a daunting thing to try and achieve but internet users type literally trillions of key terms every day. This qualified traffic which is, as you read this, going to your competitors if you’re not at least attempting to rank on page one for 80-90% of the keywords that matter to you, has a variety of different intentions behind them. These intentions, which we’ll touch on in more detail soon, are varied but almost always come from a user wanting to buy or learn about a product or service.
Add to this the fact that content in search results is constantly changing to provide the most seamless user experience possible, and the need to invest in internet marketing strategies is just emphasised further. Think about it, when was the last time you searched for a question on Google and didn’t have to click on a page to get your answer. Google’s page 0 answers (those which don’t require you to click anywhere) are just one of many features that are all skewed to make the user’s life more enjoyable.
Get In Touch With Embryo For A Free SEO Report!
We'll send you a bespoke report that examines how well your business is performing online.
The 3 Pillars Of SEO
Any good house is built on sturdy foundations, and the same goes for search engine marketing, without the following pillars, the search rankings and increased online visibility simply won’t come. These pillars aren’t necessarily tangible practices or techniques, they are more conceptual. To get these strong pillars a lot of different work has to be carried out but it is essential to ensuring long-term success on search engines. It can feel odd to hear words such as relevance and trust when discussing something as technical as optimising websites and search engine traffic. However, they are essential to search engine guidelines because they all relate to the fact that search engines care about providing their users with the best possible experience. Therefore, every result for a search listing needs to carry an air of authority, be relevant to the keyword that’s been typed, and be from a source or website that can be trusted.
Ready To Get Going?
A 40 strong team of digital marketing experts are ready and waiting to transform your business.


What Is White Hat And Black Hat SEO?
Ever since this type of marketing became prominent in the early to late 00s all sorts of techniques have been used to try and satisfy/beat (depending on your perspective) the search algorithms over the years. Now, while some come from an honest place of genuinely wanting to rank to offer the best product, service, or answer to a query, others, while still trying to achieve the same goal, opted to use cheap tricks and nefarious tactics.
These two approaches have now been split into two terms – White Hat SEO techniques, and Black Hat SEO techniques.
If White Hat SEO practices wielded lightsabers and wore Jedi robes, Black Hat SEO wear white helmets, carry blasters and march to The Imperial March. In between that, there are Grey Hat practices, which are techniques that may not technically be bad, are a little dodgy and should also be avoided if long-term success is the goal.
Understanding both the difference and the importance of opting for one technique over the other is essential to maintain the visibility, authority, and performance of your website.
Always, always opt for WHITE HAT SEO practices.
White Hat work is harder and takes longer, but it’s authentic, real, and the only way you’re going to become a dominant online force in your industry. Black Hat stuff may look and sound alluring but it’s the SEO version of a get-rich-quick scheme. Schemes which, if history teaches us anything, never really work.


What Is White Hat SEO?
As we mentioned, White Hat is good, and the option you want to go down. It covers dozens of ethical, legitimate ways of ranking highly and will help you remain visible and keep those hard-earned rankings, even after Google rolls out updates.
In short it:
-
Follows the guidelines and rules set out by search engines themselves.
-
Emphasises winning over the user, as opposed to the algorithm.
-
Is a long-term approach that has a truly lasting effect on a website.
There are instances where sites that are whiter than white will still be punished, but, like Google’s John Mueller explains, this isn’t to punish nefarious activity:
“If “the algorithms” flag the issues (basically just some software that runs at Google), or just don’t find the site as relevant in search anymore (basically changes in how Google does ranking in search), then it’s more a matter of improving the site, usually on a broader level. It’s like when a radio station no longer plays your music because it’s no longer considered great: you don’t just change the drum samples, you kinda need to rethink what you’re creating overall.
“It can also happen that a site’s time/usefulness has just passed. If you have an old-school-phone games website and nobody runs those devices anymore, no amount of tweaking of text on the pages will fix that. Spotting the change in the wind before it’s too late is a bit of an art, as is moving on in a way that lets you re-use some of your work.”
It’s important to understand that despite this, White Hat SEO strategies are still absolutely the way to go. With that in mind, here is a handful you can use on your website.
6 White Hat SEO Techniques
-
Fast loading speeds: Getting your website to load, jump from page to page, and function quickly is one of the best ways of being seen as worthy in the eyes of ranking algorithms. Having a site that loads quickly keeps users happy when they’re on your site. If it’s slow, laggy, and not optimised, users get frustrated and leave. If you think that Google’s main priority is user experience, it’s easy to see why fast sites rank better.
-
Relevant, authoritative inbound links: Backlinks are so explicit in the way they tell Google “This site is legitimate, reward it”. Working to manually build backlinks from sites with high domain authority takes time, and isn’t particularly fun but it’s priceless.
-
Refined code: Messy, bloated code means it takes longer for crawlers and spiders to understand the context of your site and index it. Ensure your code – be it on the backend or in places such as the URL structure
-
Keywords that are relevant to the content: This may sound obvious and 99% of people reading this will understand the need for this. Doing an ounce of keyword research is going to help the relevance and authority of your content 10 fold. Pick one target keyword and disperse that at the correct points around your content (not too much, not too little). Further, pick 3-5 supplementary keywords that you can use to support that target word. Beyond that, you can focus on the ontology of your piece, we’ll be touching on this later.
-
Quality, long-form content: Creating lots of content circles back to our idea about White Hat SEO techniques taking longer and being more difficult. Yes, it might take a day or two to write two, three, or even four thousand words for an important service page. But by doing so you’re giving yourself the best chance of succeeding because you’re offering out more knowledge, answering more questions, and generally just proving that you’re worthy of a good ranking. Some may worry that content for users which exceeds a high word count will put them off reading it. However, it’s important to understand that Google can cherry-pick answers from any point on a web page to answer any query (you only have to look at the ‘People Also Ask’ section for proof).
-
Metadata rich in target keywords: One of the easiest things you can do to improve your site, yet it’s so often ignored. Making sure that alt text is on images, meta titles and descriptions are filled out correctly – and include your target keyword – and page titles are relevant to what you’re writing about are all easy-to-fix things.


Black Hat SEO Techniques
Black Hat SEO methods came out largely due to people’s impatience to perform well online. Whether it was digital marketing agencies looking for a quick win for their clients, or businesses looking to earn a quick, donning the Black Hat looked like a very attractive prospect.
For a while, while search engines were still in their infancy, a lot of these rogue tactics went by unnoticed but as internet users soared, the algorithms got smarter. They continue to get more and more intelligent, something we’ll be looking at later on. So while keyword stuffing and poor quality content got you some way, it didn’t last.
Now, as this writer types, a list of Black Hat practices is firmly established and Google etc have made it very clear what they are:
-
Focus on quick wins that get swiftly punished.
-
Are focused on hoodwinking users and algorithms to try and cheat the system.
-
Violate the guidelines laid out by search engine companies.
The consequences of continually putting resources into these irregular tactics are severe and are certainly not worth the benefits that they purport to have. After all, search engines have no legal right to index every page that gets published, yes your site is on the web, but it doesn’t have to be on Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Fines and site-wide shutdowns are just two penalties that can happen if you stick with Black Hat, along with a load of angry potential customers, a sky-high bounce rate, and a bunch of lost conversions from a market you wanted to dominate.
What are some Black Hat SEO techniques that will get you punished?
To avoid you and your lovingly-crafted website being penalised because you unwittingly dabbled in some unwise tactics, we’ve listed 5 of the main SEO Black Hat techniques. These should be avoided at all costs, no matter how easy they may seem to implement, or how great the benefits seem to be.
-
Creating bad content for users: One of the worst things you can do is just be lazy and create rubbish content. It sounds obvious but the number of websites that either don’t bother to invest their resources in content or just rip it off other websites are more common than you’d think. Yes, it may have worked a few years ago but you simply cannot slip past the net anymore, you’ll be found out.
-
Keyword stuffing: This is a common term for when webmasters will stuff their target keyword into the content in such a way that it looks unnatural. Keyword frequency needs to be relative to the length of the piece and not be crowbarred in. Years ago, a popular tactic was to write the target keyword a dozen or so times and simply change the font to the colour of the background!
-
Stuffing keywords into metadata: A natural progression from overusing terms and phrases in content is to do so in the metadata. You have to start thinking about the lexicon of words around your target keyword when creating metadata. Sure, put it here and there but jamming it in at every possible opportunity is deemed amateurish these days.
-
Cloaking content: A slightly more concept technique but one that gets used a lot. Content cloaking involves a site showing crawlers one thing – some source code that says this page is about X – and showing a user another, a video about Y. The so-called benefit of this is that the site begins to rank for more keywords, at least that was the theory. Now, if you’re seeing to be engaging in this kind of tactic
-
Link farming: Ah, link farming. One of the most common Black Hat techniques. Essentially it involves getting your page’s URL on a website that, very often, has absolutely nothing to do with your site. Link farms sound good but in fact, they don’t provide a lot of traffic because they are coming from sites that themselves just host links and have no visitors. A quick scan by a Google spider will quickly eradicate these links and you’ll soon see your numbers plummet.
SEO Links
Linking is an effective tool to achieve a variety of online goals, as we’ll look at. Links are how websites tell spiders and crawlers what a particular blog or page is within the context of the rest of the website. Links also provide webmasters with an opportunity to show that they understand the topics they are writing about by linking to pages that are relevant to their content.
Links provide context and in the terms of backlinks act as a sort of popularity vote. Before we look at link building, let’s look at the two main types of links you can have on your site.
It's Simple. Improve Your Rankings, Improve Your Revenue.
Speak to our team today to discover how we can transform your SEO.


Backlink Building: How Does a Link Building Strategy Help?
In SEO, link building is arguably one of the most effective, proven ways of establishing authority, trust, and relevance. All of which, as you’ll remember from the start, are the three key pillars of SEO. The practice of achieving links is often called link building and can be done organically or payments can be made to buy links from other sites. The former – the organic approach – is the one that is deemed a more important ranking factor as it’s proof that work has been done to earn that link.
Simply put, link building is the practice of getting hyperlinks to go from someone else’s website to yours. When scanning your page, search engines will scan the links between the two and reward the website that has achieved the backlink because they’ve demonstrated that their work is a quality piece that is worthy of a citation.
Despite advances in algorithms, links remain one of the best ways for indexers to decide what sites are serious, and which aren’t. Sites that have lots of legitimate backlinks are known to have lots of link juice.
Link Building helps your SEO because it allows your work to be spread across different websites and be shared by users who feel that others would benefit from this content. In Google’s eyes, there is no better metrics than that, as proven in their statement about the practice:
“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.”
It was Google who we all have to thank for bringing in the concept of link building, and here’s why. Back in the early ’00s, the early search engines would decide on rankings based solely on the content in front of them, no context beyond that mattered one jot. Then Google invented the PageRank algorithm. What this did was judge the content based on, well, the content, but also the number of links that were sending users to that page. This added another layer of authority to pages and forced businesses, people, and digital marketing agencies to focus more on quality and those aforementioned White Hat practices.


How To Link Build
So hopefully you’ve been convinced of the need to invest additional resources into link building practices. Now comes the hard part, getting the links.
Luckily, you won’t be the first to do this and there is now a well established link-building process in place that 99% of people follow and are successful with. It’s safe to say that we’ll be promoting White Hat link building practices, not Black Hat techniques. It means it takes longer but it’ll be authentic which is the only way to achieve search success that you can still reap the benefits from in 2 years.
Your first step when it comes to link building is to decide which link you want to promote. It could be that you want to boost the authority of a key service page that brings in lots of revenue. Or, you might have a blog written that details some news about your business that you want people to read. Once you’ve decided on the links you want to promote, it’s time to start looking at where these links would be well received.
Below are some things to keep in mind when looking for publications to outreach to.
What To Look For
Our Content And SEO Strategies Are A Match Made in Heaven.
Book a free 30-minute call with our sales team to find out why.


Types of Content That Can Acquire Backlinks
When creating content for the sites that you hope will happily accept your work and give you juicy backlinks as a result, it’s important to be as altruistic as possible. Treat the backlink that you want to earn as an afterthought, especially when writing the content, work as hard as possible to create the best guest blog or infographic. If you provide quality work, the site receiving it is going to be far more inclined to give you an impactful backlink because what you’ve created benefits them.
Getting into that mindset when attempting backlink marketing campaigns will not only secure links now, it will help create a reputation for quality. Ultimately, you want people to come to you asking for content for their site (that’s the dream, at least).
-
Guest posting: Creating blogs for other people’s websites is the bread and butter of backlinks. Hundreds of sites – across more industries than you can count – are essentially guest blog platforms that accept content from people in return for backlinks. These guest blogs aren’t easy though and many places will have strict guidelines which need to be followed before they post your work. Expect to be writing 1000, 1500, even 2000 words of valuable content to achieve just one backlink. Our advice when it comes to guest posting is to do your research and find publications that have guidelines that align with your industry/expertise. It’s a bit of a commitment to guest post and write thousands of words so make sure the place you’re sending it to is going to provide the right link context for you.
-
Leveraging business directories listing websites: Years ago, the Yellow Pages was the SEO of the day. Now, while no one has a directory sent to them, sites like the Yellow Pages very much exist. These directories have high DRs and are ideal to get links to your site from. These sites constantly accept submissions and all that you need to do is fill out a small profile detailing who you are and what you do. Another good thing about business directories is that you can ask to be listed in specific areas. So if you’re a Manchester SEO agency you can ask to be listed in the northwest section of the listings.
-
Outreaching to sites that accept guest blog posts and building relationships: This isn’t a way to link build specifically, it’s more a part of the process. Building relationships with the people that decide if you’re content is worthy for their website is a great way of cementing long-term backlinks.
-
Offering valuable comments on forums and blogs: Good forums and blogs are out there! While some are spammy and complete nonsense there are genuinely insightful areas out there where users look to help one another. The golden rule for this type of link building is to point them to links that are relevant to what the blog or thread is about. With that link must come a thorough, genuinely insightful comment. Think authenticity and be prepared to offer advice.
-
Creating infographics: Reading thousands of words on a topic is good, being able to interpret everything about that topic by looking at an infographic is better. Spending time to collate data and build eye-catching infographics not only provide a visual element to a website but can be shared and distributed amongst thousands of people, potentially.
-
Providing quotes for newspaper articles: Publications and magazines are hungry for content, especially in an online world. The need to fill virtual column inches never ceases – this is something you can leverage to your benefit. Keep an eye out on #journorequests and follow publications that are relevant to your industry. Outreach to journalists, build relationships with them and soon enough they’ll come to you asking for comments on something. Your price? Just a bunch of links to your site – it’s a win-win!
The Importance of Quality Links
SEO Keywords
You’ll have heard the term keyword more than two dozen up until this point of the page, and for good reason. SEO keywords are the centre of the digital marketing universe.
Everything in the world of organic and paid marketing revolves around keywords. They are because they are what users use to buy, find, sell, and learn about goods and services online. Everything starts with a keyword or key term. Therefore, choosing which ones are important to you is serious business.
Keywords aren’t simply words that people use when talking, the clue is in the name. They are key terms that hint at something or describe a product or service. The terms or phrases come in all shapes and sizes, some can be one or two words: “Apple”, “Window Cleaning”, “USB Lead”. Or they can be longer-question based phrases that are six, seven, eight words long: “What are the best running trainers for women?”, “How to reset an iPhone 8”, or “Shared working space near me in Manchester”. All of them are classed as keywords.
Billions of these terms will be searched by different people every single day and it’s your (or our) job to optimise your website so that you are found for those keywords. Essentially, you want to try and speak the same language as your target audience.
Keywords can be ranked numerous ways, for example, you could order them on:
-
The search volume in your country.
-
Keyword difficulty (i.e. how hard it would be to rank in the top 10 for that term).
-
The cost per click for that keyword if you decided to opt for a paid route.
-
The global search volume if you want to target international markets.
-
The traffic potential.
Think of keywords as the cable between you and your target audience. For websites that are run by businesses, it’s easy to see why the idea of ranking for a dozen or so keywords that are being searched by an audience willing to invest money in services/products you offer, is so tempting. Further, both an exact keyword, and those that are one or two words out from being exactly right, provide us with clues as to what audiences are both wanting, and wanting to find out about. They also act as a focal point from which a blogger, business, or whoever else fancies it, can aim their content toward.
Get In Touch Today For a FREE SEO Report Worth Hundreds Of Pounds
See how your website performs against your competitors' sites.
Types of Search Terms


How To Choose the Right Keywords for SEO
So you know your business, your niche, or sector and you want to reap the benefits of Google search engine traffic. But how do you go about choosing the right keywords that are going to bring said benefits?
The trick, as with most things to do with SEO, is to plan, plan, plan.
Choosing the right keywords starts with intent. Without intent, your whole strategy will be based on nothing of real merit. Sure you’ll rank for things, maybe, but you won’t bring the necessary traffic of people who want to purchase things or are interested in learning more. You need to think like the customer you’re looking to target and plan out your content around how they would go about searching for things. From their first inquisitive search right through to their final query that is solely based on wanting to buy something, your content needs to be at every stage.
As we saw earlier, understanding the keyword types and how achievable each of them will be is a vital step when it comes to choosing the right phrases. Choosing terms that have hundreds of thousands of search terms a month just isn’t going to be beneficial for you in the short to medium term at least.
When choosing the right keywords, don’t be afraid to look at the competition! After all, they’re doing something right if they are ranking ahead of you (no offence). Look at the keywords they are ranking for and target the same ones (provided they are relevant to you of course!).
Tips for selecting the best keywords
-
Pick between 5 and 30 different keywords of varying lengths, difficulties, intents, and traffic.
-
Think like your ideal customer.
-
Recognise the power of the longtail keyword.
-
Leverage keyword research tools such as Ahrefs and SISTRIX, and SEMRush.
-
Be patient once you’ve selected and targeted them, don’t expect results for the first few months.


How to Do SEO Keyword Research
Doing keyword research is a task that typically takes an hour or two – it’s not particularly intensive, the emphasis on it is more about mining data and finding those terms that will provide you with the best search visibility.
And, even better, you don’t need to be a digital marketing expert to carry it out, I mean, it helps but it’s not essential.
Step one
First off you want to brainstorm all the broad-based topics that your business or website relate to – don’t worry about them being too broad, we’ll refine them on the next step. Just write down all the services, products or topics that you think your potential customers would come to you for.
Once you have a list of these keywords you can refer to the monthly search volume to decide how important they are to your audience.
Step two
Take this list of broad topics, split them up and carry our research for each one. You’ll find that underneath the broad term will be hundreds of terms that are to do with it. For instance, under the keyword, ‘SEO’ there would be terms such as ‘content marketing for SEO’ or ‘how does SEO work?‘.
Get a list of these terms together for each of the main topics you found back in step one.
Step three
Here’s where the intent comes in. Underneath each keyword will be layers and layers of intent. It’s your job to decide what that intent is and how it relates to the buying journey. You can then target your content to satisfy that intent. The intent is so important in Google’s algorithm to the point where it surpasses things such as domain ranking and legacy authority. If you’re providing the right answer, putting out the best content for that query, you’re going to succeed. One of the best ways to decipher the intent behind a phrase is pretty simple – just Google that keyword and see what comes up.
Step four
Head to the related terms at the bottom of the search pages and check out the related terms. This added little trick is a great way of expanding the list of potential target keywords, especially if you operate in a niche sector.
Step five
Start creating your optimised, keyword-rich content that is optimised for leading search engines.
Top 9 Keyword Research Tools


How to Add SEO Keywords to a Website
There are several ways that you can add keywords to your site. Getting the right ones on each page is fundamental to search engine optimization. The main way to add keywords to a website is by including them in the main body of content. Whether you’re writing a blog post, content for a service or product page, or the homepage, you can include the necessary keywords in the bits that people will spend the bulk of their time reading.
Crucially, you shouldn’t just fill your content with that same keyword. Known as keyword stuffing, it is a Black Hat SEO tactic that’s going to cause you nothing but trouble in the long run. What you want to do is include a handful of times, relative to the length of your content. As well as that, you want to include those sub-keywords, the ones that aren’t the exact match but are relevant to it. By including this, you’re showcasing to the Google search spiders that you haven’t just spammed one keyword, you’ve created natural, authentic content.
As well as adding the keyword in the main copy, you should be looking to add those keywords into places such as the H1 tag (a necessity), as well as a couple of the H2 tags. Image metadata and page metadata are also places where keywords should be added. For images especially, adding in keywords means your page can be found via image search.
URLs are one of the many things that are scanned by spiders which is why we’d advise putting the keyword in the URL itself. For example, for “embryodigital.co.uk/seo-liverpool” – the target keyword on this page is SEO Liverpool so we’ve put that term in the URL itself.
Get In Touch Today: Book A Call With Our Team Today!
We'll make sure your website is optimised and bringing you the revenue you deserve.


Content
The content on your site is the fuel that powers your search engine traffic and rankings. It’s a key factor in SEO marketing that often gets overlooked by people who don’t believe in the power of the written word or come to it with preconceptions about long-form content and how it can convert into revenue.
At Embryo, we class ourselves as a content-first agency among other things. This means that we prioritise content above other marketing practices, this makes us different from the crowd, but we’ll explain why that makes us right in the next few sections.
On a fundamental level, the words on your website will help to persuade, engage, or excite people to buy your product or service. Without a sufficient amount of content, you’re not going to win over enough people with that as an internet marketing strategy.
Content marketing has many purposes, and as well as acting as a tool of persuasion to users, it’s the most proven way to organically rank for the core terms and phrases you want to rank on page one for.
Writing words on your site is how you show Google you know what you’re talking about and signal to them which of the competitive keywords you want that particular page to rank for. There are some instances where these goals of persuasion and organic rankings can be achieved by writing 300-500 words but in this day and age, long-form content is the passport to success.
The term ‘content’ covers a whole host of types, all of which have different benefits and features. The key for you reader is to decide where to spread your content investment. It depends on a thousand different factors – e.g. what your KPIs are, the intent behind your audience’s searches, and what keywords you want to target.


Types of Website Content:
-
Blogs: A very common type of content that can be leveraged by virtually every business in any industry. Blog writing allows you to write a lengthy answer on a topic to do with your business or a competitive term that your audience is regularly searching for the answer to. Blogs allow you to increase the total number of keywords you rank, and, as a key ranking factor, show to search engines that your website is active. Further, blogs give you a platform to link to important pages that you want traffic to go to.
-
Whitepapers: These standalone documents are great lead generators as you can put the paper behind a ‘paywall’ where users have to submit their email addresses to access it. Whitepapers can be about an upcoming event in your industry or a study that you’ve taken that provides people with new and interesting data. These documents can also set you apart as a thought leader in your industry.
-
Product/Service page: These pages are probably the most important on your site. The pages that showcase the products and/or services you sell need to be your main focus if actual content has been hard to come by in recent years. Within these pages, you should be looking to target one highly searched term and then within it mention several core terms that underpin it. Content on this page should look to answer every possible question about the keyword that you’re aiming to rank for. FAQ sections are perfect for these pages as they allow you to answer several related long-tail key terms/questions.
-
Case studies: What better way to showcase how brilliant you are than writing about how you helped a customer or client. Case studies are proof of your abilities to help people, and within them, you can provide stats, figures, and other data. Once written, whole case studies can be shared on social media or snippets can be broken up into smaller pieces of content.
-
Infographics: Not strictly ‘content’ per se, but infographics are like whitepapers in that they are great at lead generation and can be shared across social media. With the right image optimisation tool, these infographics can be found via Google images.


How to Write SEO Content: What You Need to Know
Writing SEO content is quite different to other forms of content. While you need to write for the user, it’s important to keep in mind who else will be scanning your wonderfully crafted content – search engine crawlers. So while your work needs to be beautifully written, witty, and engaging it also needs to adhere to set SEO practices to rank for relevant terms.
It’s a balancing act.
To write content for SEO you need to first understand what you’re writing in response to. Every Google search is a question, whether there’s a ‘?’ at the end or not. Two or three words on either side of a term can drastically change the intent of it and it’s up to you to plan and optimise your content to match it. You want to be the answer to the question, essentially.
Imagine a series of keywords to do with gearboxes. A quick search on Ahrefs shows:
-
‘reconditioned gearboxes’ (800)
-
‘how much are gearboxes’ (150)
-
‘gearbox specialist near me’ (2.1k)
It’s clear that all these examples have very different thoughts and intentions behind them. ‘reconditioned gearboxes’ is a keyword that suggests the person knows what one is, wants to purchase one, and is in a position to part with their money in a relatively short space of time. There’s no asking what it is or how it works – it’s very direct.
‘how much are gearboxes’ is an informational sort of query, it’s clear that this person is wanting to understand how much gearboxes are and understand what sorts of prices/quotes they should expect to receive as they continue their research. ‘gearbox specialist near me’ is a term that indicates the person asking this ‘question’ has a problem with their gearbox and is looking for someone nearby to help. It’s a commercial investigation, your goal is to rank for that term by leveraging the power of local SEO.
While all three examples have the main keyword ‘gearbox’ in them, they are incredibly different and require different answers.
Once you understand the intent behind the term you can begin to organise your work/response accordingly. Researching before you write is a key factor in SEO marketing and will help you develop an authoritative piece of content that people can trust. You must take a different approach with each keyword and work hard to catch the attention of the searcher, satisfy their intent, and give them what they want.
Internal and external linking are both fantastic ways of showing that you’ve thought about your structure and how to respond to the question, as is having the target keyword in the title and structuring your content to provide the answer in a high position on the page.
Structuring your content is another important part of SEO writing. Breaking your piece of work up with relevant H1, H2, and H3 tags can make it an easy place for people and spiders to crawl the page with ease. By having one H1 tag – your title – followed by H2 tags for the start of each section, you make it easy for users to find the answer they are looking for. Having a detailed outline allows you to write a more authoritative piece of content because you know beforehand which sub-topics and questions you’re going to cover. You avoid meandering and can join each section together nice and easy.
Content for SEO is also all about achieving something – unless it’s your thing, you’re not writing content for the pure love of it. You want to gain something from it. Broadly, people either want to increase the number of products or services they sell, increase the leads and enquiries or signups, or become validated in their industry. You may have your own and whatever they are they need to be kept in mind while you’re writing.


Long-Form Content Is the Key to Success, Here’s Why
Content is good, but long-form content is better. Writing truly long-form content on the pages that matter to your business is one of the more effective ways of showing Google how knowledgeable you are. Adopting a long-form approach gives you the best chance of ranking for more keywords, answering more questions, and proving that you’re more authoritative than your competitors.
Overall search visibility is one of the most KPIs in SEO because it tells you how visible you are for all the keywords you’re ranking for. The great thing about long-form content is that it helps your overall visibility by being so broad in scope that you naturally acquire more rankings for other keywords.
Generally, long-form content starts at around 700-1000 words and can be as long as you want it to be. At Embryo, we have pages that would equate to short stories – some of our content comfortably exceeds 25000+ words.
Long-form content is not meant to be stuffed with keywords or other Black Hat strategies. It is well-written and researched, and is intended to be read by the target audience to educate them on a topic.
With this type of SEO writing the length isn’t the point, it’s what you do with it that’s important. The point is that writing more allows you to explain topics in more detail. Content through search is all about context and by opting to write more than your competitors, you’re broadening the amount of context you can be searched for. You’re talking about a greater number of topics and linking them all together under one umbrella term.
We believe in this type of marketing so much that we underwent the largest study into online writing and its benefits. We analysed the search engine results page for over 24,000 different keywords and found that the average word count for position one was 2855. In other words, you need to be hitting that number as a minimum if you ever want to consider ranking in the top spot. Based on 24,774 keywords, here are the average word counts for each ranking position:
-
2855
-
2923
-
2683
-
2479
-
2422
-
2363
-
2267
-
2244
-
2230
-
2242
Sure, you could analyse more and more keywords but the point is that at least 2000 words are needed if you want to rank for a single keyword. It’s clear – long-form content is here to stay.
Ontology explained
Defined as “a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them” by the OED, Ontology is a rare term in SEO but it’s one we use regularly when talking to clients here at Embryo.
Ontology to us is the idea of including as many relevant words, phrases, and terms that individually don’t rank on their own, but are part of the lexicon around a key term that does rank, and is one that you want to be on page one for.
Essentially, you want to create a piece of content that is rich and relevant to what you’re writing, having thorough ontology will help you do that. By focusing on writing naturally, and knitting the keywords into sentences that are filled with those rank-less words, you’re naturally going to sound more authoritative.
Example:
Let’s take the England Football Team for our ontology example. Imagine you aren’t that familiar with football and are tasked with writing 1000 words about the Three Lions. Your work might look something like this:
“The England Football Team are the national team of England, play at Wembley Stadium and are managed by Gareth Southgate.”
A perfectly fine sentence, no doubt, but it’s not particularly in-depth. However, a more ontologically rich piece of content, from someone who has either researched the Three Lions or knows a lot about England, might say:
“The England Football Team is the national team of England and has won the World Cup once in 1966. They were then managed by Sir Alf Ramsey and Sir Geoff Hurst scored a hattrick in a 4-2 win against West Germany. Currently, the top scorer is Wayne Rooney with 53 goals. The team is now managed by Gareth Southgate and came closest to winning a tournament since 1966 in 2021 when they lost on penalties to Italy in the Euro 2020 final.”
You can see in the second example the sheer amount of additional information in there. The phrase “top scorer is Wayne Rooney” may not rank for anything but it is relevant to the overall piece. The same applies to “managed by Sir Alf Ramsey”, it is this added information, this ontology, that makes the difference in trust, authority, and relevance.
It's About Time Your Site Worked As Hard As You. Book A Call Today.
Your website should be more than just a fancy homepage, it should be making you money, Embryo can help with that.


Types of SEO Services
Optimising for search engines involves carrying out several different tasks and projects to ensure you meet your goals. As a result of this need, there are plenty of types of website optimisation services available for you to invest in.
These services all have different features and benefits. Crucially, they can work together to provide supercharged results. For instance, by leveraging the benefits of local SEO you can be found in your area for keywords that are being searched by potential customers that are nearby you. If you then combine that with SEO audits and Core Web Vitals (CWV) work you’ll be able to offer those people a lightning-fast website that is a joy for them to use. See how it works?
So, let’s take a look at just some types of SEO services that we offer at Embryo.


Understanding Intent: Why Do People Search?
Search intent is how we describe the ‘Why?’ behind a search query. Every time someone types something into a search engine, they are doing so for a reason. These reasons can be mundane or very serious – from searching for a funny GIF to looking for a specific insurance policy.
The intent behind a search gives us, the marketers, a lot of clues as to what they want to find by searching for that particular term. They could be looking for a particular product, want more information about something happening in their local area, or have a specific brand in mind that they wish to purchase from. There are millions of reasons why people search.
Understanding audience intent is vital if you want a successful SEO strategy. Google itself has put a great deal of emphasis on refocusing its algorithm to better serve search intent, which should give you some indication as to the importance of understanding the ‘Why?’ behind the query.
While the traditional ranking signals and markers – backlinks, keywords et al – matter, the fact is that if your page doesn’t satisfy the intent of the search, you’re never going to rank.
Before you begin writing your content that targets a particular keyword, break down the term and understand what it’s saying.
For instance, an example keyword such as “Quick Vegan Recipes” might not seem that interesting but, when broken down, there is a huge amount of intent behind that search.
-
“Quick” – The intent behind that is fairly obvious. They don’t want to be spending hours cooking, anything under 20/30 minutes should be your aim with your content/recipe.
-
“Vegan” – Creating your content cannot involve anything that involves an animal – be it meat, cheese, eggs, or other animal-based products.
-
“Recipes” – The user isn’t interested in ordering a vegan takeaway, they want something homecooked.
If a user searches for quick vegan recipes, lands on your site and your particular recipe takes 1 hour to cook, they’re simply going to leave your website until they find your competitor’s website which has a recipe that takes just 15 minutes! What they’ve done is understand the intent of the query.
To enhance that intent, be sure to create a great user experience. It doesn’t matter if your content is exactly what the user is after, if it’s horrible to read through on a phone, or is taking ages to load, they’ll go elsewhere. Make sure that your text size is big enough, ensure your content is split up with headings so that users can find their answers quickly, and don’t spam them with popups.
Types Of Intent


How To Create A Bulletproof SEO Strategy
SEO checklists tend to be fairly generic and not very helpful to the reader, there are a lot of basic things in there that don’t go beyond ‘do this, do that’. To create a bulletproof SEO strategy you need to always be thinking about the “Why?” behind whatever it is you’re doing. Further, everything must be aligned back to your overall KPI, sure great keyword rankings are important but if they don’t bring you new revenue or increased traffic, then what’s the point?


8 Things It Needs
-
Original content across all pages.
-
Relevant internal and external links.
-
Great Core Web Vitals.
-
A website that is fit for mobile.
-
Easily navigable pages.
-
Relevant calls to action across the site.
-
A good balance of short and long-tail keywords.
-
Patience, SEO success takes time!
Book A Call Today And Let Our Team Turn Your Website Into One That Generates Profits.
Our marketing strategies are based around making you more revenue.
I Haven’t Got All Day! How Long Does SEO Take?
It can be tempting when looking to hire an SEO agency to find that one that offers quick wins, immediate results, and ‘guaranteed’ success. “Get ranking on page one in just a few weeks”, they’ll cry! They might even have a convincing argument but the truth is that SEO simply will not properly impact your business in weeks, it takes months.
At Embryo, we’ll be the first to tell you that SEO takes a fair amount of time for your business to feel the effects and benefits of ranking on search engine optimisations.
The length of time SEO takes also depends on the goals that you want to achieve from it and the fact that algorithms and search engines have become far, far cleverer. A few years ago, SEO agencies would’ve been able to provide their clients with ‘quick wins’ by dumping backlinks from useless websites and spamming their websites with keywords. They’d look fantastic to their clients but these wins would only last as long as Google didn’t update their algorithm, the moment they did, sites like that would suffer and digital marketing agencies wouldn’t look as brilliant as they once had.
Nowadays, Google and co recognise and reward hard work, authentic link building, and overall visibility. These practices take far longer but they are platforms from which long-term SEO performance can be founded. These things cannot be cheated anymore.
While it takes longer, businesses should take comfort from the fact that what you are doing is the proven method to success.


Why It Can Take So Long
The reasons why SEO takes so long are two-fold. Firstly the researching, planning, and creation phase take time. Keyword research and competitor analysis need to be done, and entire websites need to be built in some cases. To do this properly takes weeks and weeks – this is a good thing. You want your search engine optimisation planning work to be as thorough and detailed because when your site goes live you want it to have as big an impact as possible.
The second is the reason it takes so long is to do with what happens after your site, blog, or piece of content goes live. It has to be crawled, understood, indexed, and placed in a ranking position by search engines. The amount of content that goes live on the internet is astonishing which means your piece of content is, effectively, in a queue waiting to be looked at. Your rollout of content can be affected by many things, for instance, news websites get their pages indexed in minutes (for obvious reasons). Similarly, more important websites will take precedence over yours which can extend the amount of time your sites indexed.
Even after all that happens which can take a month or two, indexing doesn’t mean ranking. You can be indexed for a given keyword and be put on page 10! It’ll then take even longer for your page to move higher up the pages.
At Embryo, we generally say to clients that they can expect results from month 6 onwards. While there are exceptions, with some companies doing better than expected, the general trend is 6-12 months, even then ‘success’ (whatever that looks like) is dependent on a variety of factors such as:
-
Content quality.
-
The level of competition in your industry.
-
Current website architecture.
-
Geographical location.
-
The level of social activity.
-
Age and speed of the website.
SEO Never ‘Ends’
Optimising your site for search engines doesn’t stop once the site has gone live and you’re ranking for a keyword or two. Once you’ve reached your goal, it isn’t the time to stop – optimise, optimise, optimise!
Even if you’re ranking number one for a keyword, you have to continue to add fresh content and optimise the page to keep that spot. There are also thousands of other related terms and phrases that you’re going to want to rank for which will require work. Algorithms change all the time and to remain in a stable position you need to be in a position to react to them so you don’t suffer. Constant work – by your in-house team or an advanced SEO agency such as Embryo – needs to be carried out every time Google makes a change.
Tracking Success: The 7 KPIs That Will Determine Your Success Online
Success in the online world is entirely relevant to you and your business, it depends on dozens of factors such as:
-
The age of your business.
-
The industry you operate in.
-
The kinds of goods and services you sell.
-
The location of your business.
So before you carry out any work on your site you need to decide what key performance indicators (also known as KPIs) to track, value, and base future decisions off. It is vital to have these in place as it’ll allow you to judge your return on investment and determine whether it’s good or bad. It’ll help you measure your success and give greater clarity about how valuable your SEO has been.
With so many different indicators of performance to choose from, it can be tricky to decide which ones to value. Having done a few SEO campaigns in our time, we like to think we know a thing or two about KPIs, so to help you, we’ve outlined seven of the most important SEO key performance indicators that you should be tracking (among others).
Want To Outrank Your Competitors and Earn Their Business?
If the answers yes, book a free 30-minute call with our team today.


Understanding Google’s Algorithm: How to Track It, and Why
Underpinning everything that is done on Google, is its algorithm. It’s multiple algorithms, not just one, that decides when and where to index content on the web. The search algorithm is there to make sense of the billions and billions of web pages that are set live every single day – without it, the internet would be chaos.
The algorithms look at all the aforementioned ranking factors such as search query, speed of website, location, relevance and other things in a fraction of a second and provide the user with – nine times out of 10 – the right answer. These tools will also react in real-time to live events too so if a game in the World Cup is happening the SERP for those keywords will show you the score first, as opposed to the Wikipedia entry for it.
In this fast-paced world of content-hungry people, Google must constantly refine its algorithms and the way it scores content to keep up with changing intent and trends. As a result, it’s estimated that the search engine giant changes its algorithm around 150 times a year, which works out at around one every two days!
The algorithm is cloaked in secrecy and despite having a good inclining, there are only a few factors that we’re sure Google values, which are:
-
How fast your website loads. Page speed is so important to Google because fast websites mean users get their info quicker, thus improving their experience.
-
Your content has to be relevant to the keyword that it is attempting to rank for.
-
A well-designed website is always going to be preferred by search engines because they, again, provide the user with the best experience.
-
The quality of links that point back to your site is a good indicator of how authoritative your site is.
-
Having a website that looks as good on mobile as it does on a desktop is an important signal to Google.
-
Having SSL certification and thus an HTTPS Status is a good sign to Google that you have a secure website.
-
If you have high bounce rates and not many returning users, it’s a sign that your user engagement is low, amend this and you’ll find your favorability among Google increases.


Results in the Doldrums? Here’s How to Improve Your SEO Ranking
If you’re reading this guide and are panicking because your SEO rankings or website performance are nowhere near where you want them to be, don’t worry. Virtually everything in the world of search marketing is fixable, providing you have the patience and resources to make changes.
In a broad sense, improving your rankings starts by following the best practices we’ve spoken about regularly on this page. So, make sure you have unique, long-form content (that you’re updating and adding to regularly), and outreach to sites so that you can guest blog and have links pointing back to your site.
Further, remove any bloated code using an HTML cleaner to streamline your site and optimise your images so that they have titles and alt-text which are semantically relevant to the page on which it sits.
All those practices, plus many more, are all things you should regularly be doing to constantly improve your rankings and performance. These are very long-term things to implement though, if you want to immediately see an impact, here’s what you should do.
Check your XML Sitemap
Your XML sitemap describes how your site has been built in code form. Once you’ve downloaded it you can compare it to a regular sitemap and spot any errors or inconsistencies. These errors can include 303s and 404s, missing key pages, no indexed content and orphaned URLs – all of which can impact the fundamentals of your site.
Check that Google’s crawling your site
If Google isn’t crawling your site you’re invisible online so it is vital you know whether or not your site has been crawled by their spiders. You can use Search Console and click ‘Fetch as Google’ in the ‘Crawl’ section. Once you’ve put your main URL in there you can request that Google indexes your site.
Find out how many pages are being indexed vs how many you have
This step is super simple. Head to Google, type “site: {ENTER YOUR WEBSITE}” then view the number of results that are shown. This will tell you how many pages Google has indexed.
If you then view your website from the backend, you can see how many pages you have on your site. If the numbers are drastically different, you’ll be able to see whether or not you have a problem with duplicate pages.
Set goals on Google Analytics
In your Analytics, you can set and determine what goals you want to track. It could be when someone signs up for your newsletter, makes a reservation, or completes an online payment. Choose the goals that are relevant to you and you’ll be able to judge the value of your current SEO practices.
Got This Far? Then Speak To Our Team Today!
One 30 minute call will transform your business's online success.