When it comes to building a successful website and expanding your reach online, there are several things to put in place.
From having your site optimised for your chosen keywords to using the right social media platforms, there is so much that goes into creating a digital marketing strategy that delivers results.
Search Engine Optimisation – or SEO for short – is one of the essential elements.
Getting the right SEO in place will ensure your website ranks well in the search engines for the appropriate keywords, so people can find your site when they search for what you offer.
Here, we take a closer look at what SEO is, why it’s important, and how it can help you improve your website’s performance to reach a wider audience, attract more visitors and achieve better results.
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of improving your website’s ranking in the search engines so that it appears higher up in search results pages.
It’s all about building the site’s trust and authority with the major search engines – including Google, Bing and Yahoo.
When your website is optimised correctly, for keywords relevant to the products and services you offer, the search engines are more likely to recommend it to audiences using those search terms.
It follows that the higher your website appears in search rankings, the more visitors you’ll get and the more sales you can make.
Optimising your website is done, among other things, by analysing keywords, creating quality content that is relevant to search terms, and generating ‘backlinks’ from high-authority domains in your industry, sector or niche.
While there are many things you can do to improve your SEO – and the right approach will be determined by your strategic objectives – in general terms, some of the activities that should bring about quick wins include:
- Making sure your content has keywords your potential customers are searching for
- Using keywords relevant to your product, service or niche
- Keeping your website up to date and adding new content regularly
- Removing – or avoiding creating – duplicate content
- Adding ‘internal’ links to other pages on your site
- Optimising your images
- Getting citations (such as Yell, Google My Business and online business directories)
- Running a Google’s site speed test and implementing its recommendations
It’s important to remember that SEO is a specialist field. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can end up damaging your website’s performance.
While the above tips should, in most cases, improve your SEO, working with an SEO professional is the best way of ensuring your SEO strategy is the right one and the activities you undertake have a positive impact on your results.
What are the key elements of SEO?
SEO is an essential digital marketing tool. It’s probably a term you’ve heard many times before without actually knowing what it is or how it works.
Even if you have some knowledge of what SEO is, you may still not understand the different elements of the SEO process and how they work together to improve your website’s search performance.
Unfortunately, SEO is more of an art form than a science. There are some fundamental building blocks you need to get in place to pave the way for your SEO strategy’s success, but the activities required will vary from business to business and often need regularly tweaking to achieve the best results.
This is why it’s vital to work with an SEO specialist who will set and implement your initial strategy, monitor your data and analytics and adjust the approach accordingly. Here are some of the key basic elements your SEO work needs to cover:
Keywords
Keywords have always been an essential element of successful SEO. They are the words, terms and phrases that people use when searching for online content, products or services.
Research plays a crucial role in identifying the right keywords for your business.
Looking for keywords that have high search rates but low competition is the best place to start.
You should use a mix of short-tail and long-tail keywords on your website.
For example, if your business makes and sells pens, then ‘pens for sale’ would be a good short-tail keyword to target, while ‘where can I find pens for sale near me?’ might make a good long-tail keyword.
Once you’ve decided which keywords are most relevant to your business, you should use them to optimise all your page titles, URLs and blogs, as well as include them throughout your content. This will give the search engines the best chance of identifying exactly what each page of your website is about.
Content
Creating engaging, relevant, high-quality content holds the key to SEO success.
Websites are, for the most part, just words and pictures.
The trick with SEO is teaching the search engines how to recognise, like and trust your website in the same way humans do so that when people search for what you do, the search engines will know your website is a credible and trustworthy source of the information they’re looking for.
The right SEO metadata, combined with engaging content and an intuitive user journey, will help you achieve this.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO relates to optimisation activities that take place away from your website rather than on it.
‘Backlink’ building is the main off-page SEO technique. The search engines place great value on quality links to your website from trustworthy, credible external websites, which can help build your website’s overall domain authority. In general, the higher your domain authority, the more trusted your website is with the search engines.
Examples of backlinks include media articles linking to your site from news websites, external links from industry or trade bodies, and links to your website from credible social media posts.
Other off-page SEO tactics include citation building, content marketing and social media.
In short, it’s all about getting content published on external platforms other than your website to help both search engines and users gain an understanding of your site’s authority, built on trust and relevance.
Local SEO
Local SEO plays an increasingly important role in search, as more people than ever search using a mobile device.
In fact, around 60% of all searches are now performed on a mobile device, with nearly half of them having ‘local intent’ – that is, people searching for products, services and businesses in their local area.
Local SEO is all about optimising your business, products or services for location-specific search queries based on the user’s IP address or mobile GPS position.
It helps the search engines to determine and display the most relevant results when someone searches for local providers such as supermarkets, garages, dentists, car washes, or even digital marketing agencies.
Tools like ‘Google My Business’ are essential if you’re looking to build your local SEO.
Paid Search
While paid search – or search engine marketing – isn’t, strictly speaking, an SEO activity, it’s a quick and effective way of driving traffic to a new website or URL while you wait for your SEO work to kick in.
It gives businesses a quick and easy way to gain visibility with the search engines and encourage people to visit their website by ‘buying’ clickthroughs from paid adverts, rather than waiting for people to find the site organically.
Examples of paid search activities include Google Ads, Facebook or LinkedIn ads and pay-per-click.
Citations
Citations in online trade and business directories are a quick and easy way of building your website’s domain authority and local SEO.
Listing tools like SEMrush can help you edit all your crucial business information in one place and get consistent and correct data in the most trusted and authoritative directories at once. It can help get your business search-ready, with automatic distribution of information to all the major search providers, including Google, Bing, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and TomTom.
Domain authority
Building both domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) is a key objective of SEO.
In simple terms, DA and PA tell the search engines that your website and its individual pages contain content that is trustworthy, credible, high quality, relevant and valuable to readers.
The higher your DA and PA scores, the more authority your site has, which means the search engines will place it higher than those with lower authority scores when displaying search results.
While providing valuable, well-written, keyword-rich content will help improve your site authority, so, too, will getting links to your site from credible external sources, such as media outlets or industry leaders.
User experience
The usability of your site is another critical factor in SEO.
The search engines tend to view websites they think are seamless, intuitive and easy to navigate more favourably than those which are complex or difficult to use.
Things that can influence how the search engines view your site include mobile responsiveness, page load speed, navigation/link structure and codebase.
If there are issues with any of these, it could severely hamstring your overall SEO activities, making it all but impossible to achieve the results you’re looking for.
How can QBD help?
Getting your website found in search is hard.
Cutting through the noise so you can connect with more of your ideal customers is the big challenge.
To do so, your website needs to be present and visible in the major search engines to ensure that when people are searching for the solutions you offer, your business is among the first to come up.
Our expert team of SEO specialists will help you stand out and shine brightly in search, so you can reach and engage a bigger audience, convert more leads and, ultimately, increase your sales.
To find out more, get in touch today.