OUR TECHNOLOGY
Working here truly is like being in an SEO playground!
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is our weapon of choice for all technical SEO work. This tool lets the team at A1 SEO Glasgow crawl your website in a way that mimics the way search engines like Google crawl your website. Using Screaming FroG allows us the team to quickly troubleshoot issues at scale and fully scope out projects.
Ahrefs
When it comes to link building, there is no real competition (in our humble opinion). Ahrefs allows the team at A1 SEO Glasgow to profile links at scale based on quality quickly. With this tool, we can also spy on competitors’ link building and outreach strategies and then reverse engineer them. Pretty cool, right?
SEMrush
SEMrush is the tool we use for keyword research. Ahrefs has a decent keyword research tool, but we prefer SEMrush’s Keyword Magic tool user interface. Honestly, we do a lot of switching about between the two. We also use SEMrush’s top-level site audit. Something we use before diving into Screaming Frog.
Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager, or GTM for short, allows us to keep all of your marketing scripts in one place. This means we won’t be annoying your development team and can quickly edit codes and deploy scripts with relative ease. GTM is also used for creating events and tracking conversion. This helps us demonstrate clear ROI across all SEO projects.
Accuranker
Accuranker allows us to track your ranks in near real-time. Most SEO’s use Ahrefs, SEMrush, or MOZ to track ranks. However, these tools are updated infrequently. Imagine you lost a key ranking and didn’t know about it for a few days? That’s why we use Accuranker. Their ranks update daily and are therefore more accurate.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the industry standard analytics package. Paired up with Google Tag Manager, we use Google Analytics to measure traffic, monitor conversions, and see what is working (and what isn’t) on your website. Data back our SEO campaigns. This means our campaigns are constantly evolving.
Whatconverts
WhatConverts is an enterprise conversion tracking suite. A1 SEO uses this to attribute phone calls to marketing channels (so we can justify ROI on SEO and PPC). It’s simple but genius – depending on the marketing channel, a different number is displayed that redirects at lightning speed to your actual number. Every time the tracking number is called, it counts a lead and assigns it to the correct channel.
Google Ads
Google Ads is used for PPC campaigns. It is an interface that is as simple or as complex as you want it to be. We run client campaigns on Google Ads and monitor profitability. We charge management fees to cover our time improving profitability through bid adjustments, landing page optimisations, and a whole host of optimisation factors.
Bing Ads
Bing Ads is a PPC platform for bidding on Bing with a smaller market reach and much less functionality. Bing Ads does remain slightly untapped as a lot of paid search professionals stick to Google Ads. Part of your budget should always go towards testing. We always recommend putting something into Bing Ads. The ROI might surprise you (in a good way)!
Why we don’t use Moz…
We never really got the whole MOZ hype. Going back 4 or 5 years, we were using this, and the MOZ blog is one of our go-to places for technical SEO questions. However, Ahrefs has a much larger backlink index. Accuranker is more, well, accurate, and everything else (plus a lot more!) can be done in SEMrush, which has an easier interface in our humble opinion.
Other Non-SEO Tools We Use
MailChimp
If you run a smaller business, chances are you will be using MailChimp. We love Mailchimp’s user interface and would recommend anyone building a mailing list to give it a try. There is no need for costly design bills, as you can create simple, beautiful emails. The platform is very user friendly.
Pardot
Pardot is an advanced (and costly) marketing automation tool that we have experience working with. Pardot allows you to automate common email marketing tasks alongside tracking customer behaviors. There are some key issues to address if using Google Analytics.
Facebook Ads
What marketer cannot use Facebook Ads? We’re not talking about boosting posts. We have extensive experience running targeting Facebook Ads campaigns within the funnel marketing framework. We do not offer Facebook Ads as a service but can happily advise.
Our Favourite Content Management Systems to work with
All content management systems are simple enough to work out. Granted, some require more costly development time than others, however, we work with anything. This being said, we do love working with the below. Remember, the CMS that you are using will have no effect on your SEO. However, how your CMS is set up will. For example, WordPress, whilst great, can really slow down your website with unnecessary code. On the other hand, working with WordPress and fixing other SEO issues is generally easier so will generally cost you less.
WordPress
WordPress is the CMS we work with most of the time. Being easy to use technical and on-page SEO projects take less time than other platforms. WordPress is perfect for small to medium businesses. Although not as flexible as other CMS, you can still create beautiful websites on WordPress.
Shopify
Shopify is a good CMS to get you started. Granted there are some restrictions, but Shopify out the box is fairly SEO friendly. With a few tweaks, we can push your eCommerce site up there with the best of them. Shopify is favoured by small businesses but does scale nicely.
Magento
Magento is inventory management on steroids; this platform has serious weight behind it. The scope of products, thus pages, that Magento can manage gives it a solid advantage over other eCommerce platforms. That’s why it’s favoured by medium to large to massive-scale operations alike.
Umbraco
Umbraco is highly customizable, secure and fast. Like seriously fast when compared to the baggage of redundant code that comes with WordPress. Larger organisations favour this CMS. However, as it is so customisable, technical and on-page, SEO projects do take longer.
Static HTML
In 2019 we started to see an increase in the number of static HTML websites. The performance benefits are obvious and it is great having that level of control. Just bear in mind that fixes to static HTML websites may take more time than CMS based websites.
Drupal
Drupal is a highly customizable and secure out the box. Similar to Umbraco, Drupal does not carry the same level of redundant code typically associated with WordPress websites. However, being more customisable means that SEO projects take slightly longer and cost a bit more.
Opencart
Once you get past the dodgy Russian user manuals, OpenCart is a powerful, scale friendly eCommerce platform. There are a lot of technical considerations that you must get right. We are one of the few agencies in the UK with extensive OpenCart experience.
Wix
We work on the odd WIX site that eventually moves over to WordPress. WIX is generally not the best for SEO, but some SEO consultants would be surprised. WIX has a slightly tarnished reputation, but since early 2018 they have made massive strides in SEO ease of use.
Trusted by Local Business
Over the years, we have had the privilege to help some of Glasgow’s most beloved brands grow their search presence. Below is a selection of some of those brands.
Testimonials
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