Every business with a website wants more traffic and the best way to do this? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the best way to achieve this, as it improves organic (unpaid) search results, rather than managing a paid advertising campaign. Businesses should understand the basics of search engines, how SEO can drive traffic with long-term commitment and how to begin implementing it.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. SEO is a strong tool for improving your website so that when Google, or another search engine, sorts and displays results, your website pages show up for people looking for related information.
You can think of SEO as a funnel and your business website is at the bottom. At the top are people searching for answers, products, services or information related to your industry. Through a combination of content, keywords, website performance, user experience and authority-building, SEO helps direct those searchers towards your website.
As your potential clients move down the funnel, they become more familiar with your business and are more likely to enquire or make a purchase. To achieve this, businesses require long-term SEO is long-term with a whole intertwined network of factors that is helping give your company space online, through strategic planning, so that your potential clients can actually find you.
Organic vs Paid Online Marketing
Search engine advertisements (Google Ads) guarantee a placement at the top of a search results page, but paid search advertising requires a budget and stops all visibility when the ad spend runs out.
SEO, while taking longer to implement, creates organic results that do not require a budget and are sustained over time, meaning that businesses with strong SEO pay significantly less per lead than those relying primarily on paid advertising.
How Does Google Rank Websites?
Google is attempting to provide searchers with the most accurate response, which means that Google’s objective is to provide the best result for a search query. To reach that, its algorithms analyse hundreds of signals from different websites.
SEO is the process of understanding those signals and ensuring your website meets all of the signals so that Google understands the intent of each page on your website.
The Three Pillars: Relevance, Authority And Experience
Relevance, authority and experience are the three pillars at the core of SEO. This ensures that your website is clear, easy to access and offers quick speeds:
Relevance
Relevance is when the content on your website is aligned with what the user is searching for. For example, if a person is searching for an ‘SEO Specialist London’, relevant content would be a page that describes London SEO services. A relevant page would not be a homepage that says ‘Welcome to our website’.
Authority
Authority is the way Google determines how trustworthy and credible your website is. The main way authority is built is through backlinks and through high-quality content that is referenced and shared by other sites.
What Is E-E-A-T?
Google evaluates content through a framework called E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. This means Google favours content written by real people with genuine knowledge, on websites with a track record of publishing credible material. Generic, thin, or copied content consistently performs poorly under this framework. Specific, expert, well-sourced content consistently performs well.
5 Steps To Building A Better SEO Strategy
SEO strategies require planning and consistency, but with these five simple steps any business can begin implementing their SEO-strategy:
1. Keyword Research To Understand What Your Customers Are Searching For
Keyword research identifies the words and phrases customers use to find your offerings on Google. It is the primary component of a successful SEO strategy. After all, you cannot write content to fulfil a search if you do not know what people are searching for.
When beginning your keyword research you should List the questions, problems and products related to your business. Google Keyword Planner and the other tools (Ahrefs, Semrush and Ubersuggest). These tools are paid, but offer free, basic versions, are good for beginners to outline the search volume and assess the term’s keyword difficulty.
2. Technical SEO Updates
Technical SEO helps you ensure your website is discoverable by Google. Content marketing and decent keyword search efforts are wasted if your site has poor technical SEO. Test your site for page load speed, since site visitors and Google abandon slow sites.
Mobile searches are a Google ranking factor, so ensure your site looks good on mobile. Google should have a map of your site’s pages. To do this, submit an XML Sitemap in Google Search Console and be sure to delete any 404 broken links.
3. Create Strong Content
Content is the foundation for the majority of your SEO gains. With a solid technical foundation and an understanding of the keywords driving your traffic, you can use the content on each individual page of your site to rank for specific queries. Even when it is important to appease the search engine, rank-worthy content is built for the customer first.
4. Build Authority Through Links
Backlinks are links to your page housed on other websites. Google interprets backlinks as votes of confidence. When good and trusted websites house links to your content, it shows to Google that your site is trustworthy. In the most competitive search categories, backlinks resonate the most.
5. Track What Is Working
Measuring your efforts is the only way to know if you have gained returns from your SEO efforts. You need to focus your efforts on Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console. These two measuring tools will help you understand which pages are visited the most, your site’s ranking page’s clicked and the comparison of how your traffic has changed over time.
