Understanding SEO: simplified
In order to implement a good SEO strategy, it is helpful to understand some of the basics and how it can help your business grow.
Firstly, we need to know what is meant by ‘SEO’:
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of improving the quantity and quality of website traffic to a web page from search engines, it typically targets unpaid traffic or organic searches.
What does this mean?
For your site to rank in an organic search result, your website has to be crawled. This is when a search engine looks for new content to include in its index. When you search a term within a search engine, it compares the words or phrasing of your query to its index, searching for a matching result. Where your site or page ranks in these search results is determined by a few different ways.
Why use it?
SEO helps to improve your website’s visibility to people who are searching for products or services like yours, giving you higher-quality traffic. The higher a page appears in a search result, the more relevant it is deemed and therefore attracts the most traffic and clicks. Unique, engaging and relevant content is what search engines value and so having an SEO strategy in place means you can monitor and find gaps in where you need to improve.
SEO always changes over time as trends come and go, users change their behaviour and search engines change over time, therefore strategies need to also change in order to stay relevant.
To implement successful SEO strategies, you need to determine a few things:
1/ What are your business goals? – Are you aiming for conversions? If so, what is a conversion for your business? – is it a completed enquiry form, a telephone call, or an online purchase?
2/ How are you going to measure these? – To be successful and be able to adapt to your audience, you need measurable goals and KPIS. Use Google Analytics – put in place an attainable goal for the number of conversions and a long-term aim, but make sure to respond to changes to achieve these.
Once you have identified these you can start to create a plan on what your business is aiming for and what you need to change on your site to achieve your goals.
Places to start:
Keyword Research:
Arguably the most important part of SEO is your keyword research. It underpins all the rest of the work and strategy that you are going to implement.
When you’re completing keyword research you are looking for words, terms or phrases that users put into a search engine to find products, services or web pages such as yours. The key to getting the right words is relevancy and intent. By this, we mean that they have to be extremely specific to your business and can include locations if you are a local trading company.
For example, if you are a local cupcake maker operating in Cambridge a few keywords may be: cupcake maker Cambridge, local cupcake maker Cambridge, Cambridge cupcakes, cupcake baker Cambridge.
All of these have very high intent – someone is looking specifically for a cupcake baker in your area, so if your site was to appear in that search result then they are very likely to click on your site and complete a conversion. However, a term such as cupcake, or cupcake baker is much too broad. The intent behind these is not also clear, someone searching for ‘cupcake’ could be searching for an image or a product like a cupcake-scented candle, but it is not specific enough.
Once you have identified keywords that are highly relevant to you, you can optimise your content and offerings to better match what the user is looking for.
Optimise Your Webpages:
When you optimise your webpage, you are enabling search engines to better understand your content and potentially rank it higher due to relevancy to certain terms.
Your page titles (the title of the page as you would see it appear in the google search results) and meta descriptions (the text underneath your page title, describing and trying to encourage users to click) are very important as they are used by the search engine in order to generate the search results. They are also important to read accurately and logically as these are what the user sees in order to choose which to click on in the results page.
Within your page content (page copy) make sure that you do not keyword stuff. This is when you overuse the keyword terms in the hopes that it will improve your ranking, where it can have the opposite effect. When a page is crawled if there are alot of repeated terms or content, it can be identified as spam and therefore your site will rank very poorly.
Visibility
To encourage visibility, try to add links to your site, engage with your customers through good content and promote your site through social media. All of these will build rapport and trust with your business, as well as allowing the user to understand your ethos, promoting brand loyalty.
Your SEO results are attracted by what happens on your site, and by what other sites are saying about yours. Use backlinks (links from another website to yours) as this will help crawlers see your site as highly relevant and a good option to display to users as a result. However, the key to links is quality not quantity.
This is where off-site optimisation can help. The best way to do this is to create good content that confirms your site as a good quality resource which will attract visitors who will then share it across social media, increasing your reach.
As you can see SEO is a vital, often not understood part of marketing your site. It can have a massive impact on how many people will visit and ultimately invest in your products or services. Getting a strategy together and having the knowledge and skill to implement these changes can be difficult to do, so seeking help and asking questions is always advisable.
As a local Norwich SEO Agency KH Digital can help you put together a successful SEO strategy for your business. Get in touch today for a no obligation chat.
