The journey begins: from zero to, hopefully hero (a bona fide digital agency in Manchester).

Written by: Tom
Date: 6th October 2022

Here we are at the beginning of October 2022. I hope this blog will become a diary of the journey ahead, taking a brand new website, for a brand new project, built on a brand new domain with absolutely no history, authority or trust score, to somewhere near to if not the very top of Google’s search results for some valuable keyphrases. If that does happen, this blog will serve as a record of how that was done, how long it took and of course, any mistakes and lessons learnt along the way. I am currently at the very beginning of a degree in Digital Marketing on an apprenticeship scheme having started at a local digital marketing agency just 3 months ago, with no prior experience in the industry. I intend to put everything I learn to work here, to see how it all plays out in the real world, so here we go.

At this point, over the last week I have built a very basic, 1-page website as a holding page whilst I write the rest of the content and build the rest of the pages in my spare time. That one page is geared around the keyphrase “digital agency Manchester”. It’s just a starting point, I’ve decided to start by building backlinks on some free business directories and other free resources, like Google and social media.

Here is what we’ve done over the last few days:

Built a basic webpage using the keyphrase above throughout, just a couple of times. It features in a single H1 and H2 tagged headline and broken up, naturally throughout some body text. It’s in the page title too and the main pieces also spread across the meta description for the page.

Images have been suitably sized, compressed and named to include the keyphrase in the filename. Alt tags have then been added once uploaded. Alt tags are written sensibly to include the keyphrase in a descriptive sentence where possible.

Created and attached Google Analytics, Search Console and Google My Business accounts.

Claimed social profiles on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and provided the web address within those profiles hoping to get a backlink.

Signed up for free listings at FreeIndex, UK Small Business Directory and Cylex – the only free directories I can find at the moment.

Lastly, I managed to get a backlink on a friend’s page – it’s industry relevant and has a domain trust score of 23 himself, so we’ll see how all of this contributes from this point as an absolute standing start:

Given how slow the world of SEO is supposed to move, I imagine I won’t write any new posts for at least a month, if not longer, unless of course something significant happens in the meantime. Here we go…