About
ABOUT XLWEB
• XLWEB is based in Glasgow, Scotland and was formed in 2008.
• We are a small, specialist SEO agency offering online marketing services specific to search engines including:
o on and off page SEO
o technical website inspections
o algorithm and manual penalty removal
o backlink clean ups and disavows
o content generation
o pay per click advertising
• We pride ourselves on integrity, visibility (come and watch us work if you like) and availability (you can get us on the phone, email, Skype anytime).
• XLWEB have four staff.
• Founded by James McInally, the firm’s SEO strategist who has twenty years’ online marketing experience with fifteen of those as an SEO.
• James started his SEO and online marketing career in 1994, working in a university. He has been involved in research-based and applied SEO since 2000. Since leaving higher education marketing James has held senior marketing positions in both client-side and agency-side, as well as Head of Marketing for two of the UK’s largest private healthcare companies.
• In 2014, XLWEB was the most successful small business in terms of percentage growth in Glasgow according to RBS.
• All of our business has come from our own search rankings and word of mouth. XLWEB do not spend a penny on marketing ourselves.
• We have NEVER lost a client through poor SEO performance. In fact, we have only ever stopped working with clients when our job is done (if it’s purely strategic or technical), or if we are victims of our own success (by achieving as much as is possible through SEO).
• We NEVER undertake any work without backing up our strategy with data.
OUR CLIENTS
We have worked with a large variety of businesses and organisation, large and small, and have vast experience and knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work online.
Our clients target all sorts of industries in all sorts of locations, with varying technologies, resources, starting points, competitors but always similar objectives of increasing qualified traffic, changing rankings for meaningful terms, and ultimately achieving business goals (whatever they be but more often than not increasing sales/turnover/profit).
We have clients who are agencies SEO or digital agencies, who use us when their own team lack knowledge or experience. You could say we’re an SEO to SEOs.
We are adept at understanding not only search engines and how they work, but business and marketing in the wider sense.
All of our work has to be meaningful to the client. Any SEO can change rankings and increase traffic, but it’s the firms like XLWEB that gain important rankings and turn this traffic into leads, sales or conversions that count.
We never work with two clients in the same industry and never speak about other clients. The less the competition and Google know, the better.
We do offer references if required from current and former clients.
WHAT SEO IS
All of SEO is based on four factors: trust, relevance, links & content. By getting these elements right, we can send the signals out to Google that your site is the best possible option to return in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for any given term we want to go for.
In addition to the four factors mentioned above, the whole of Google web search is based on text. People search in text, and Google filters and ranks text on your site and competitor sites and matches up this with the four elements mentioned above to rank you. Most websites link to each other using text, Google crawls the text on the web and records it and uses this when we search using text - it's all about text. And very specific text, often one letter changes the whole of the results.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the practice of optimizing your website and includes the content, HTML source code (regardless of the technology that drives your site), your hosting (server), domain and anything else that is associated with your website. On-page SEO is important as we can optimise your site for your industry and send quality signals to Google in order to rank higher. On-page SEO is crucial and can significantly improve a website. It is also completely within our control.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO, refers to links and other external signals that influence our ranking in search engines, includes methods that we can use to raise the ranking of a website through promotional means, outside of the actual code or design of the site itself. Link building (that is, acquiring hyperlinks on other websites pointing to ours), social media signals, Google and Bing Map entries (local SEO) are all examples of off-page SEO.
Nothing changes rankings in search engines like acquiring good backlinks from other sites. Some SEOs and Google would have you believe the days of link building are gone - they most definitely are not. Obtaining good links and citations from other trusted websites brings your website trust. And the nature of the websites and the very text that is the link to us brings relevance. It is a case of simply obtaining links however we obtain them. Some links are obvious - we can see who links to competitors, so that's the first place to go and get them. It stands to reason that if we get links from websites that link to competitors our competitors, or from the top five website results for any search term aggregated, we will have all of their links combined and would go to the top of Google - pretty straightforward.
We can also obtain links from all manner of places in all manner of ways from related websites, partners, business directories, PR websites and manufacture them ourselves on social media and extended social media such as Blogger, Tumblr and Weebly etc.
This, I suppose, is where the heart of rankings is and the easiest and quickest way to changes rankings, obtain traffic and get enquiries - clever link building for very specific terms to simply dominate competition in the rankings.
OUR SEO
All good agencies will tell you exactly what to do and how to go about it without charging a penny up-front. In fact, see our SEO Blueprint below for a run-down of how to do an SEO campaign.
It’s then up to you whether you want to pay us to do it for you or do it in-house yourselves. We feel telling people exactly how we do SEO makes for a better relationship, rather than the don’t-quite-understand-what-our-SEO-is-doing feeling so many companies experience.
All websites are different. In SEO, each website has its own worth, value and trust with factors such as website age, number of inbound links, content in it different forms, server technology and keyword relevance among factors which affect its performance. Each website appears for its very own group of keywords and, therefore, every website has a unique SEO strategy.
SEO should always commence with an audit and benchmark in order to determine the starting point and worth of the website’s currently.
Once audited and a measurement benchmark have been done, then it’s on to business sector research, a clean up of the current website and any associated inbound links. SEO strategies are not fixed and emerge through time, with tactics and work reflecting this. There should be clear objectives in order to acknowledge performance, which feed back in to the strategy and day to day planning and implementation. More often than not, a good content strategy and acquisition of appropriate inbound links (ultimately, what SEO is) are two main tasks in any SEO strategy.
We pride ourselves on our no-nonsense, no flannel approach to SEO. We undertake our work with visibility and accountability to our clients, and NEVER undertake any SEO that could compromise our clients’ online value. XLWEB’s integrity and honesty are its core corporate values.
SEO Blueprint © XLWEB
The process for SEO is:
1. Audit
• Comprehensive technical audit of our website.
• Competitor and sector research.
• Keyword and SERPs (search engine results pages) research.
2. Benchmark
• A snapshot of various metrics as a starting point for measurement.
• Current keyword rankings
• Visitor types, traffic and flow
3. Clean
• Technical optimisation of code and content
• Off page clean, including removal, disavow or blocking of poor quality backlinks.
4. Devise & Deploy
• Plan overall strategy including content, link building and any other online marketing strategy (pay per click, social media etc.)
• Deploy low-hanging fruit tactics (quick gains)
• Start content strategy based on keyword research (if required)
o Current content evaluation and realignment
o New content, blogs, articles, media (videos, sound, infographics) if needed
• Start link building strategy (if required)
o Target competition links
o Manufacture links with own content (text, documents, media)
o Social Signal building
5. Evaluate
• Track rankings, traffic & links acquired
• Adjust, retarget and refocus if needed
This SEO Blueprint is XLWEB’s and we thought we’d share it with you. We formed it after years of SEO planning, strategy and deployment. It took us a while to get it down on paper in the ABCDE format (for easy digestion) after years of experience. Although the SEO implementation might change from client to client, this SEO Blueprint is our tried and tested SEO process.
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