What is SEO?
SEO covers a range of activities and is part of digital marketing. Search Engine Optimisation is about making sure potential customers can find you online. If someone types a relevant search phrase into that all-important search bar, you want to be the business that comes up ahead of your competitors.
What most clients tell us when they are considering investing in SEO and digital marketing is more leads and more and in order to achieve it in a way that achieves a good ROI you need to be looking to SEO. The key is to be found for those phrases that your potential customers are looking for, and lots of them. This isn’t a vanity exercise, it’s about end results and that usually means increasing leads and sales.
When SEO first made an appearance, the approach was very different. You simply chose a keyword, made sure you had that keyword on a page of your website and hey presto number one spot here we come! It’s not that easy anymore, in fact it’s a complex area that requires ongoing consistent work.
How does Search Engine Optimisation Work?
Research from an SEO point of view includes keyword research, competitor analysis, website analysis and research of the industry and its marketplace online. Research is key in any form of Search Engine Optimisation e.g.
You are an online shoe retailer. You want us to work really hard getting you found for yellow shoes. We spend all of our time working on that one phrase. You get to position 1 on Google, happy days, right? Wrong, no one is searching for yellow shoes, they all want red ones. In this scenario, not only have we wasted your budget working on the wrong thing, you will no doubt walk away and find another company to work with.
So, for us (and you) the key here is to partake in thorough research so that we have a good understanding of your business, what is important to you and what is important to your potential customers. This enables us to ensure we are spending our time working on the right things, so that ultimately you get the results you seek.
- Research
- Technical Elements
- On Page SEO
- Content
- Off Page SEO
- Analysis and Adjustment
How Long Does SEO Take?
Search Engine Optimisation is not a quick fix, sometimes the work we do can achieve results within a couple of weeks, but more often it takes months to really start reaping the rewards. If you think about it, what we are trying to do is convince the search engines that your website is a more valuable resource than anyone else’s for a particular topic, product or service. Type anything you like into Google for example and you will see hundreds of thousands, if not millions of results. So why should a page on your website appear first?
This takes effort and it’s not just a one-time deal. You need consistent work on an ongoing basis, you need to show that you have great information, that when people visit your website they stay and look around and that you are keeping everything up to date by making changes on a frequent basis. Including adding new content, images and video or tweaking and amending the content you already have.
So, a commitment to SEO is a medium term one and if you are looking for a cookie cutter solution then we likely won’t be right for you. It’s a constant cycle of work, review, amend, adjust, review again. It never stops and its forever changing. If you think about it, your competition, search engines, buyer behaviours and your own services or products don’t stand still. So, you can’t expect your website to just sit there and achieve the results you want.
On-Page SEO
There are two areas of Search Engine Optimisation, the things you do on your website itself and the things that you do elsewhere on the internet. These are some of the things that we look at when analysing your website.
- One of the first things we will look at is how technically capable your website is. This is because for you to rank well in the search engines, it needs to be fast and work well.
- User experience is also important, if when people get to your website, and they don’t hang around then you any rankings you have will soon start to drop.
- Looking behind the scenes includes things like meta data, schema, alt text etc. these are little signals that help the search engines understand what each page is about.
- Content is probably one of the most overlooked areas, providing your potential customers with the information they are seeking and consistently adding to and updating that content is key.
- Optimising the site includes a variety of techniques to try and persuade a search engine that your website is the one they should rank for a set of topics and / or phrases.
Off-Page Search Engine Optimisation
Off-Page optimisation really refers to a few areas:
- Links back to your website from other well regarded websites shows an element of trust. Loads of links from spammy directories will not help you. How they are linked, the pages they are linked to and the text they use are also important.
- Citations are mentions of your business across the internet, things like business pages, well thought of directory listing, maps listings and others help to add confidence to search engines that your business is a genuine resource.
- Social media platforms are incredibly valuable for some types of business and not so much for others. It can help to drive traffic, increase awareness and lead to sales (again depending on the type of business you have)
- Press releases published on various websites can be a valuable SEO tool, however again, where and how they appear makes a big difference to their worth.
Off-page SEO is one of the areas that has changed the most and it’s also one that we see people get wrong time and time again. If you don’t do it properly you can actually harm your ranking results. That said, done the right way it can have a real positive impact on lead generation and should form part of any Search Engine Optimisation efforts.
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