TL;DR

SEO has a dozen names these days, and not a day goes by when someone isn’t offering another acronym to describe a set of practices that sounds a lot like SEO. So whether you’re wondering how you get your brand mentioned by new LLM models, you’re hoping to feature in generative SERP features, or you’re still looking to nail down one of those precious blue links, the techniques that make for success in search have remained mostly unchanged for a decade – and they’re still delivering some of the best ROI in digital, compounding over time, saving money in ad spend, and securing businesses for years to come.

What we mean by optimisation

The ‘O’ (in the long and growing list of possible optimisations on offer for brands to choose from) refers to a set of techniques that aim to make a brand more discoverable online by better appealing to the various platforms that surface information to potential customers.

In reality, however a pitch deck describes it, those techniques will mostly remain unchanged (regardless of the letters that precede the ‘O’), because the optimisations being made are creating, arranging, structuring and controlling access to data in order to make it more accessible, more readable and more ‘attractive’ to the army of bots that constantly patrol the web. In short, it’s all about information retrieval. 

MMC Digital’s search engine optimisation service

Search has changed considerably over the last decade and a half, since MMC Digital’s founder started out in the world of digital marketing. Google introduced huge improvements to their algorithms aimed at combatting various manipulative techniques for improving rankings, they introduced machine learning into both their language parsing and ranking algorithms, they severely damaged their reputation by rushing out generative search into their results pages, and much more besides. However, just as the aims of SEO have remained the same, there have been a number of best practice techniques that have been the best way for brands to rank for a decade.

MMC Digital’s SEO services are the result of time served by both the founder and a growing number of trusted consultants that work with our clients. The experts that create and execute our SEO strategies have worked at some of the UK’s top agencies, with some of Europe’s most recognisable brands, and they know what works and what doesn’t – not through courses, not through process documentation (though they’ve written some of them), but through making mistakes, fixing those mistakes (and the mistakes of others), and ranking businesses over and over again in competitive verticals for years.

Our SEO service includes (in whole or in part – we’re flexible, so our clients get what they need, not what we want to sell):

Search has changed considerably over the last decade and a half, since MMC Digital’s founder started out in the world of digital marketing. Google introduced huge improvements to their algorithms aimed at combatting various manipulative techniques for improving rankings, they introduced machine learning into both their language parsing and ranking algorithms, they severely damaged their reputation by rushing out generative search into their results pages, and much more besides. However, just as the aims of SEO have remained the same, there have been a number of best practice techniques that have been the best way for brands to rank for a decade.

MMC Digital’s SEO services are the result of time served by both the founder and a growing number of trusted consultants that work with our clients. The experts that create and execute our SEO strategies have worked at some of the UK’s top agencies, with some of Europe’s most recognisable brands, and they know what works and what doesn’t – not through courses, not through process documentation (though they’ve written some of them), but through making mistakes, fixing those mistakes (and the mistakes of others), and ranking businesses over and over again in competitive verticals for years.

Our SEO service includes (in whole or in part – we’re flexible, so our clients get what they need, not what we want to sell):

• Technical SEO – this is the fundamentals, and we get into exactly what that means on the service page itself but, in short, it’s getting your page titles and meta descriptions right, it’s making sure your site’s crawlable, your content is discoverable and you’re ready and able to be indexed.
• Local SEO – if you have physical locations or you operate on a local level, then you need a local SEO strategy (unless you’re a global brand, but to get global, you need to start local) to make sure searchers in those areas know you’re there when they need you.
• Longtail targeting – especially important in modern SEO and, again, with the rise of LLMs, longtail targeting is about making sure that you have the information that people are looking for. This isn’t about trophy terms – most of those are non-commercial and overly competitive anyway – this is about making sure you’re there from the awareness and discovery stage of the buyer’s journey and ready to build trust and earn that conversion from the start.
• Technical audits – sometimes you just want a sense check. Whether that’s because you’ve been working hard to master your own SEO or you just want to find out exactly how big the task at hand really is. We’ll always tend to start with this as part of initial discovery – but we can also end here too, if that’s all you need.
• Log file analysis – it might seem like something lost to the depths of time, but the less information various platforms want to give you, the more useful log file analysis can be (not to mention the work Screaming Frog has put into its log file analyser – it’s a genuinely wonderful aspect of a fantastic tool if you need a recommendation).
• Content – AI has a place, it can do some things really well. It can’t sell your company as well as a good human writer can, and your competitors and your potential customers both know this. We work with some phenomenal writers, with skills and experience developed while working with everything from local start-ups to global brands – believe us, it’s not just the em dashes that everyone hates about AI content.
• Schema and structured data – things are looking slightly better for structured data implementation these days; most sites have org schema, maybe some location and service areas, but unless your schema connects to the web, your site is the jigsaw puzzle piece lost under the couch. Perfectly formed it may be, but it’ll forever remain unconnected to those lovely corner pieces.
• SEO consulting – whether you’re handling things inhouse and you need a little guidance without the expense of a full-time hire, or you just feel as though you’ve plateaued and you’re not sure how to get to the next level, we can offer consulting services and get as involved as you need, bringing extensive experience of what works for your vertical without a lengthy and expensive hiring process.

What can SEO do for your business?

Success in the SERPs is obviously at the core of most SEO, but the benefits of successful SEO go beyond improving your rankings, especially in the age of the LLM and what is being referred to as agentic AI, and can assist you with:

• Building awareness of and trust in your brand
• Improving customer interactions at key moments
• Building authority within your industry vertical (especially important in EEAT verticals)
• Making the most of your site’s traffic – good SEO improves conversion
• Improve profitability
• Improve revenue
• Expand to new areas and with new offerings

If you need help with your SEO, you can drop us an email, give us a call or use the contact form, for an initial discussion.