Search Engine Optimisation and why you need it!

SEO is often thought of as a dark art - and yes to a certain point it is, but my personal opinion is it is just common sense! But with that sense comes a regular amount of neverending hard work.

The first objective for all SEO professionals is to get a business website on Page One of Google, then ideally in the top three positions…the first rule is no SEO Expert can or should guarantee that elusive No.1 position, but the harder part is keeping it there once it has been obtained!

I have been optimising websites for 16 years, and have always had an old school traditional method of gaining and maintaining ranking positions, but I won’t lie it has got harder and harder over the years. So here is my overview of what SEO entails and why you should be doing it well or using someone who does.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation is a method of on-page and off-page tactics to enable Google to “read” your website and rank it in importance to the key terms being used and the pages that are the most relevant. being shown.

What are the most common mistakes?

Seeing your website rank highly for a key term and thinking that you have done it!
But does that ranking bring you the right traffic and conversion rate?

Does that ranking serve the right page for the key term?
It is easy to see your pages rank, but if customers are all being sent to the Home Page, then you are losing their interest instantly. As users become savvier, they want to land on the right page for their search - and in turn, this brings you an instant conversion.

Creating beautiful image-led website pages with little content.
An aesthetic website is stunning and so nice to look at, but with little or no content Google will have no option but to ignore it. Google needs content to know it can sere your page to the users searching for you.
Using lots of images also makes your website slow, and users will bounce quickly when it does not load.

Why does your business need it?

As users become busier and Social Media becomes an increasingly crowded place, business owners should be using SEO as a priority!
EDIT: With the recent pandemic, people are now staying away from Social to keep themselves sane, and resorting to Google more and more to find products and services - will they find you over your competitors?

Regardless of where a customer is in their Sales Cycle, they will always seek that final verification from a business before they purchase or download something. The role of SEO is to ensure your website covers all those bases and is found for multiple keyterms and actions.

Providing pages that allow for a variety of user preferences, means you are aware of your target audience needs, providing all the lighter and more heavyweight content they need at each stage of their sales cycle as they move further through your website.

And don’t forget users all like to disseminate content in different ways - listening, reading, watching. They also like to receive it through various methods - RSS feed, email, social media post, etc - does your website allow them to choose?

What do you need to consider?

If you have an existing website, I would urge you to have an audit done, this checks it is serving the right content and Call To Actions to achieve your business objectives.

Secondly, it serves to ensure the key terms you should be going after for your target audience, which also defines what pages should be on your website and what content you should be writing about. Maybe your website was built a few years ago and been ignored since then.

An audit will also cover all the technical errors that may be happening and you are unaware of - slow page loads being the biggest enemy! Does your website render correctly, is the current SEO relevant and done in the right way and is it optimised for mobile.

If you are considering building a new website I would advise you to do the SEO work before you start the build - in relation to the above it ensures all the correct research is done beforehand and this delivers a strong wireframe, content plan for your pages and blog as well as ensuring those business objectives are met for your online sales and actions.

This may feel overwhelming, so if any of this raises some concerns, why not just talk it through with me and we can see how we can help you.