SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to a website through organic search engine results. It involves optimising website elements like content, structure, and on-page metadata (like titles and meta descriptions) to improve visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). Keywords play a crucial role, as they help align a site’s content with the queries people are searching for. Effective SEO strategies also involve building backlinks, enhancing site speed, and ensuring mobile-friendliness. The goal is to rank higher in SERPs, making a website more accessible to users and increasing its potential for traffic generation.

Crawling: Search engines use bots to crawl pages on the web, going from site to site, collecting information about those pages, and putting them in an index.

Indexing: After a page is crawled, it’s indexed, or stored in a database from where it can be retrieved. Here, algorithms analyse pages in the index, taking into account hundreds of ranking factors or signals, to determine the order pages should appear in the search results for a given query.

Ranking: Search algorithms are designed to deliver relevant, authoritative pages and provide users with an efficient search experience, ranking higher those pages that best answer user queries.

Increased traffic: Top positions on the search engine result pages receive a majority of the impressions and clicks, so ranking in these top positions can result in significant traffic increases.

ROI: SEO provides trackable and quantifiable results, regardless of whether you are an e-commerce or non-e-commerce site.

Cost-effectiveness: SEO is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies because it targets users who are actively looking for your products and services online.

Increased site usability: SEO simultaneously helps to make your website more navigable for users as well.

Brand awareness: Since top position rankings result in significant impressions, having your website in these top positions on the result pages translates to more exposure for your website.

On-Page SEO: This involves ensuring your website’s pages, titles, tags, content, and overall structure are optimised for your target keywords.

Off-Page SEO: This involves efforts taken outside of the website to improve its position in search rankings, such as link building from other sites.

Technical SEO: This focuses on improving the technical aspects of your website to increase the ranking of its pages in the search engines, including mobile-friendliness, fast loading times, and secure connections.

It depends: Typically, noticeable results from SEO efforts can start to appear within 3 to 6 months. However, SEO results grow over time, and the benefits you’re seeing at 12 months should generally be considerably greater than what you’re seeing at 6 months.

Depends on several factors: These include the size of your business, the extent of services you require, the competitiveness of your industry, and the geographical area you are targeting. Generally, small to midsize businesses should expect to spend £400 – £1,500 per month for effective SEO services. Whereas large businesses can spend in excess of £3000 per month