What is SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a variety of strategies you use to increase your website’s ranking on search engines such as Google, for specific keywords or phrases that your target market may be searching for. It’s divided into on-page SEO and off-page SEO; both are important. On-page SEO are tactics you use on your own website and off-page SEO is everything else, for example, having other sites link back to your website.
While the technical and strategic side of SEO can be complicated, the concept is simple. You are trying to move up in a search engine’s organic (free) rankings to drive qualified traffic to your website.
This article will explain who should use SEO, the benefits and ways that you can increase your chances of being found on Google.
SPOILER: The answer is yes, SEO IS definitely worth the investment.
Who Should Use SEO?
Anyone who needs more traffic to their website needs SEO. Service based businesses, e-commerce sites, local business sites and everything in between. While SEO is just one aspect of a balanced marketing strategy that builds awareness around your brand, even businesses that pay for rankings through Google Ads (PPC advertising) need SEO, as their competitors will soon overtake them as they run their own SEO campaigns.
What Are The Benefits of SEO?
While there are other ways to drive traffic to your site, SEO is a strategy which can produce long-term results. If we compare SEO with paid advertising such as PPC and banner ads, these may drive traffic while they run, but once you stop paying for ads, the traffic dries up.
SEO can bring you qualified traffic. If your website has a lot of content about vitamins and their benefits, you will get visitors who want to know which vitamins are good for xyz health. If you sell vitamins, you want to optimize your site for keywords like buy vitamins online, as well as having information about the best vitamins to buy for a specific health benefit. This way, you get traffic from people who want to buy online.
5 Ways To Get Your Website Found on Google
1. Content
Search engines love in depth, unique content. They want to return the most relevant, helpful results so make sure your content answers questions, provides helpful advice or entertains visitors. Use keywords in your content that people would use to find a site like yours and base your content around them.
An incredible tool you can use to find inspiration relative to what people are searching right now is https://answerthepublic.com/
2. Earn Backlinks
Backlinks are links pointing to your website from a relevant third-party website. They are similar to an endorsement as the person liking to your website is saying your website has additional information about a subject that they found useful and are willing to recommend to their readers. This helps build ‘Domain Authority’ which tells Google that your content is valuable.
You can also create link-worthy content like videos you can place on YouTube and your website and infographics you can promote on social media. These types of content, along with comprehensive how-to guides, are content people like to share by linking to it. Or another great way is to do guest blogs in order to get links from quality sites in your niche.
3. The User Experience
Google and other search engines rank sites that offer a good user experience. Google recently released a statement saying that their focus going forward will move heavily into ranking sites based on their usability. Your site should load quickly and adapt to the visitor’s device and screen size. It should answer relevant questions and provide value, be easy to navigate and be clear and concise. If your visitors are leaving right away, your site probably isn’t user-friendly. Search engines take note of how many people leave a site quickly, assuming the site does not meet visitor’s needs.
4. Review and Update Regularly
SEO is a long game. That means you need to be reporting, optimising and adding content on a regular basis. You will not be able to know what is and isn’t working without reviewing your analytics, and google will know if your content becomes stale and out-of-date. Without analytic reports, you are just shooting in the dark and hoping for the best. This includes tracking where your traffic is coming from, what you are ranking for, the demographics of your visitors, what they are looking at on your site and how long they are staying for. We can then use this data to leverage high-performing content.
5. Technical SEO
While the algorithm changes regularly, there are fundamental ways to track and optimise your site to have the best chance of getting found via organic search. This includes resolving technical errors which are hindering Google ‘crawlers’ to read your website such as the way your content is structured, how often and what keywords are used, heading tags and meta titles for each page. Use alt text with keywords to describe images and transcribe videos on your site. These allow search engines to understand content on your site. Search engines can’t see images or watch videos, so they rely on written text to understand them.
Driving traffic to your website will be integral in creating brand awareness and establishing authority to drive success of your business. With SEO, you can rise to the top of the SERPs and get more clicks than the sites further down in the search results. As you can see, SEO is an investment, either in money or your time, but its definitely worth it.
If you would like to talk SEO strategy and find out how we can help you with your organic search and digital marketing strategy, book a free consult call today.