What is SEO?

If you have started to delve into the realm of digital marketing, then it is more than likely that you have seen the acronym SEO being used left, right, and centre. If you are new to the game, then you won’t know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and you probably won’t know how it can be used to help you and your business find more potential new customers and help turn website clicks into paying orders.

Here at seoBusiness, we understand SEO and everything that comes with it. We’ve put together the ultimate guide to search engine optimisation so you understand everything you need to know to get your website to the top of those search engine rankings – and stay there!

How do search engines work?

If you want to truly understand how SEO works, then it is important that you have a basic understanding of how search engines work – they are an integral part after all! Search engines use crawlers (that are sometimes known as spiders or bots) to gather information from all across the internet. They use this information to populate their huge databases (or indexes). These crawlers will begin from a known web page and then follow links, bouncing from web page to web page.

Search engine’s success wholly depends on internet users being able to find results that are relevant to their needs. The more links a search engine finds pointing from a particular type of content to a particular resource, the more confident the search engine becomes that this web page is relevant to the user’s search query. The search engine then determines that this resource deserves to be ranked highly when people make those queries. It may sound a bit complicated, but it will become clearer when you see how SEO fits into the bigger picture!

The SEO Basics

So, now you know how search engines work – how can you optimise your web page to make search engines know your page is relevant to the questions that users are asking? SEO (or search engine optimisation) is the process where you can optimise a website’s technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so your website can become easily findable. In simple terms, you can push your website higher up in search engine result rankings to help gain more organic traffic. Let’s face it, when was the last time you scrolled past the first page of Google results? It hardly ever happens, which is why it is so important to get your website as high as possible on the list of search engine results.

The world of SEO is complex and constantly changing, but once you understand the basics even applying a small amount of SEO to your website can make a huge difference!

Key Stages of SEO

There are 5 main steps of SEO that you can implement to help improve your search engine ranking. These steps include:

1. Keyword research
2. Content creation
3. On-page SEO
4. Link building
5. Technical SEO

Keyword research

The power of keyword research lies in understanding your target audience and how they are searching for your products or services.

Keyword research will provide you with the data that you need to help you find out what people were searching for, how many people were searching for it, and in what format they searched.

Once you have answered these questions, you will have an initial list of possible keywords and domains to help you get additional ideas.

You can then split these into long-tail keywords, which are longer and more specific, and short-tail keywords, which are short and sweet. Short-tail keywords are more competitive, but using these to rank can be extremely beneficial and will give you more authority.

Content Creation

Next on the list is creating content for your website! It is recommended to create a webpage for each key phrase, and you can target just one or several keywords on each phrase. Make sure that you use keywords in your page title, your headings, and throughout the whole of your content. It is important to make the keywords fit into your content so that it sounds natural and isn’t too repetitive -you can’t simply stick random words anywhere and stuff your content with keywords!

To beat the current top search engine rankings, you need to create content that is a little bit different and better than what is currently out there. Your aim is to make the content stand out from the crowd!

On-page SEO

Now that you have your keyword list and you have your content, the next step is to implement the keywords into your site’s content. It is important to note that this is different to the content creation, and requires keywords to be used on-page, but not necessarily in the content. You will need to add keywords in title tags, alt attributes (image markups), URL structure and meta descriptions, as well as in the actual body content of your webpage. All of these combined should help to push your webpage up in the search engine result rankings.

Link Building

Not only will your website impact how Google and other search engines rank you, but factors outside your website will also be taken into consideration – and one of these factors is the number of sites and the quality of sites that link back to your pages. When you earn backlinks from high-authority sites, Google views your website and content as more useful and authoritative. This means that Google will have evidence that others trust and value your website and content, and you will end up ranking higher in the search engine results.

Technical SEO

Another area of SEO that is important to focus on is technical search engine optimisation, which simply refers to improving your website’s technical aspects so that Google can crawl and index it more effectively. Some technical factors that you need to pay attention to include:

• Site speed – Google uses page speed as a ranking factor, as a slow site makes for a poor user experience which will end up harming your overall rank.
• txt – you need to make sure that your robots.txt file is formatted correctly and specifies the right pages not to be crawled. An incorrect robots.txt file means that Google will not crawl the pages that you want to appear in the search engine results, or can end up crawling sensitive pages.
• Mobile-friendly page design – more than half of all internet traffic now comes from mobile devices, and because of this Google now uses a mobile-first approach to indexing sites (which simply means that it accesses the mobile version of your site rather than the desktop version.) To make your site responsive and mobile-friendly, you should consider using a web design company as this part can be tricky!

How to use SEO in digital marketing

Search engine optimisation is one of the most important parts of digital marketing, and if you are not utilising SEO, you might be missing out on huge opportunities to increase the visibility of your business online. Some of the benefits of using SEO in digital marketing include:

Improving your organic search ranking – If you optimise your website’s content, structure, and technical aspects, then you can help to improve your search engine result ranking. By having a higher search engine result ranking, you will generate more traffic and visibility to your website, which will ultimately lead to more sales and potential leads.

Boosting your authority and credibility online – SEO can help to boost the credibility and authority of your website as an online presence. The more credible your website is seen as by the crawlers, the higher your website will rank. This can help to boost brand reputation and engagement and will mean that customers will become repeat visitors to your website.

Gain organic website traffic – By improving the effectiveness of your SEO, you will be helping to improve your visibility on search engines and improve your rank position – in other words, you will be helping to drive traffic to your website. This traffic can then be converted into new followers, subscribers, and even paying customers.

Stand out from the crowd – SEO can help your website and business gain that all-important edge over your competition. If you can have more topical keywords, a greater website experience, and a better ranking on the search engine results, then customers are more likely to click your website first – they might not even get to your competitors!

Enhance user experience – By using SEO to optimise your website’s structure, content, and navigation you will be enhancing your user experience. Ensuring your website is easy to navigate and accessible is something important to search engines. By creating a good user experience, you can reduce your bounce rates, increase user engagement, and boost your conversions!

Maximise your ROI – SEO is one of the most cost-effective strategies in digital marketing and can generate a high ROI (return on investment). When done correctly, SEO provides your business with long-term benefits, and if you achieve a high search engine result ranking you will continue to receive leads from it. By driving more organic traffic to your website, you can ultimately contribute to your brand and business’s growth and reputation.

If you are looking to optimise your website to help improve your search engine result ranking, but don’t know where to start, then get in touch with our friendly team at seoBusiness today! We know that it can be overwhelming if you are new to digital marketing, and with all of the constant changes it can be a daunting task! We are here to take all of the hard work and hassle away, and we can use our experience, knowledge and resources to effectively optimise your website to help you gain higher ranks on search engine results. We offer a wide range of services to suit every budget, and we can help to implement strategies that are tailored to your specific goals. We are here to drive organic traffic, and ultimately increase conversions from your site’s visitors – all you need to do is sit back and enjoy the rewards!