What is SEO?

SEO, also known as search engine optimisation, is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to your website or web page. The goal is to increase your website’s visibility when people search for products or services related to your business in Google, Bing, and other search engines.

How do search engines work?

Search engines, like Google and Bing, use bots to crawl your website looking for a selection of different things. Whether that’s the size of your images, the amount of content on your pages, your use of keywords or how well optimised your website is, almost everything on your website is reviewed. When a search engine collects information about your website, it then indexes all of your pages, a bit like an online library.

Search engines then use algorithms to analyse all of those indexed pages, taking into account hundreds of different factors, including everything from backlinks to image sizes. Once the search engine determines if your website is trustable, optimised, and relevant it will rank you accordingly in search engines. SEO isn’t a short process. If you put in the time and effort, you’ll soon be able to reap the rewards.

Why SEO?

You might be asking yourself why SEO is so important? As a rule of thumb, if your website isn’t on the first page of a search engines results when a customer searches for you or a relevant query, they’re probably never going to find you.

According to Moz, the first page of Google captures 71% of search traffic clicks and has been reported to be as high as 92% in recent years.  Second-page results are far from a close second coming in at below 6% of all website clicks.

Customers conduct trillions of searches every year, often with a commercial end goal in mind. With greater visibility in search engines comes a great increase in traffic, as a result, more customers coming through your doors. Understanding more about what your customers want will aid you in providing them with the right content, keeping them on your website instead of your competitors.

Keyword research

As you know, search engines are pretty good at picking out content on your website. To boost your rankings even further you can harness the power of keyword research.

Keywords are quite literally what they say they are, they’re the key words or phrases that customers use to find your business. Knowing what your customers are searching for and understanding what content they’re looking to find will help you mould a clever keyword-driven SEO strategy. To better understand what your customers are searching for, you may need to do a little research. Using a keyword research tool to uncover popular keywords and their search volumes as well as discover what your competitors are ranking for, will help you decide which keywords are best to target.

Once you’ve got a bank of diverse keywords, you can use them across your website in places such as blogs, page titles and meta descriptions. This way, search engines will be able to read your website for these keywords and rank you for search queries for that term.

Website optimisation

Optimising your website is a great way to win over search engines. Ensuring that areas of your website such as your load speed, responsiveness, and image sizing are up to standard will secure you a top spot. Your core web vitals play a huge role in how search engines rank you; they won’t direct potential customers to a slow website that only works on desktop!

Blogging 

Simply uploading a blog to your website is a great way to build traction. Search engines love websites that have regularly uploaded, quality content. Build yourself a blogging strategy and think about what topics your customers will be searching for. To ensure your blog ranks as high as possible, make sure that your posts use plenty of keywords and include links to other pages of your site. The more authentic material and links you use, the more visibility you’ll gain online.

Link building

Backlinks are a fantastic way to acquire new customers in two completely separate ways! A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website. If you’ve ever won an award, been in an online article or been featured on a customer’s website, they’ve probably linked back to your business’s website. This not only gives you an opportunity to be featured elsewhere across the web for customers to find you, but search engines reward websites with credible links, boosting your website even higher!

Measure 

SEO is a long and continual practice, so it’s important to track whether your hard work is paying off. You’ll certainly want to look at some key metrics to determine the success of your SEO strategy. Metrics such as time on page, pages per visit and bounce rate will help give you an indication of whether your content is relevant to the right people. Conversion rate is also a great metric to look at, here you can track not only if someone came to your website but if your practices were enough to secure a sale or point of contact.

You’ll also want to look at some SEO specific metrics. These can usually be found by doing a quick site audit and is a great way to compare figures from when you started. We’d recommend taking a look at your domain authority, number of backlinks, organic traffic, and keywords. Keep a note of these metrics to see if any of them change as you progress through your SEO strategy.

SEO is an incredible way to increase your business’s visibility online. Make a head start today by following some of our best practices. Take a look at our blog on How To Optimise Your Website and cast your eyes over some of our top tips for bringing your website up to scratch.