Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is all about improving the ranking of your website in search. It’s the process of affecting the visibility of your website or a web page in the search engines’ unpaid listings – often referred to as ‘natural’, ‘organic’, or ‘earned’ results.
In simple terms, the higher the ranking, the more likely people are to find the website. SEO is an essential tool for your website’s success.
Its goal is to achieve better organic search results, which means your site appears in the results because of its content and not because you’ve paid for its placement. While achieving good SEO results can be difficult, many techniques can improve your site’s ranking, including keyword research, link building, and improving the website’s content.
SEO is all about enhancing your website with interesting, relevant and engaging content that builds trust, value and authority. The days of keyword-stuffing, content duplication and link manipulation are long gone. Instead, today’s search engines place greater value on quality content that’s relevant, easy to read, and from a trusted source.
The search engines need to learn to recognise, like and trust your website in the same way humans do. The right SEO metadata, combined with engaging content and an intuitive user journey, will help you achieve this.
High-quality earned backlinks can also help. If you can get those right, your website will be rewarded with higher ranking positions for the keywords that are most important to your business.
Here, we take a closer look at the importance of good Search Engine Optimisation and how you can achieve it.
Why is SEO important?
There are many reasons why SEO is vital for your website. Its main aim is to improve its visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) by increasing its domain authority and keyword rankings.
One of the most important aspects of SEO is choosing the right keywords.
These are words or phrases that people are likely to use when searching for information online. When people search for something online, they use keywords to find what they want. If you have a website and optimise it with keywords relevant to your business or industry, your site will show higher results when people are searching for things associated with what you do. This means more people will see – and hopefully visit – your website.
Another reason SEO is important is that it can help you increase your website’s domain authority. This is a metric that measures how trustworthy and credible a website is in the eyes of the search engines, based on its age, size, relevance and number of links from other websites.
The higher your domain authority, the more likely people are to trust your website. This means that you will be able to attract more visitors and customers.
And if you want your website to rank high in SERPs, you need to have high-quality content. That’s because Google, Bing and the other main search engines give higher rankings to websites that have relevant, well-written and keyword-rich content.
Quality content is also crucial for keeping people on your website. The longer someone stays on your site, the more likely they are to convert into a customer. And, of course, quality content is also essential for getting links from other websites, which is another factor that the search engines take into account when ranking sites.
What are the benefits of good SEO?
SEO is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. It helps to ensure that your website appears among the top results in search, which can help to generate more leads. SEO also helps improve the quality and relevance of your website’s content, which can also boost your visibility and brand awareness online.
First and foremost, good SEO can result in more organic traffic to your website. This means that people find the website through search engines without any paid advertising. Organic traffic is highly coveted because it is seen as more trustworthy than traffic from paid sources.
SEO is also an effective way to improve the return on investment of your digital marketing efforts. By ranking higher in SERPs, you can get more visitors to click through to your site, resulting in more conversions and sales.
What’s more, good SEO can help you attract the right type of customer – those who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. Online shoppers highly value organic search results. In fact, a recent study found that nearly 60% of web users start their shopping journey with a generic search engine query.
However, SEO is not a one-time investment. It requires ongoing effort and maintenance to remain effective.
You must continuously update your website content with relevant keywords and optimise your site for new search engine algorithms. Additionally, you must build links back to your site from other authoritative sites to improve your ranking.
How do I improve my website’s SEO?
SEO is an essential process for any business, as it can help drive traffic to your website and increase sales. It can target different kinds of search traffic, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines. There are many different aspects of SEO that can be improved, such as:
- Keyword research
- Content creation
- Link building
- Social media marketing
- Technical SEO
- User experience design
- Mobile optimisation
- Local SEO
For more information about the above points and why they are important, check out our free 21-Point Marketing Essentials checklist.
Having a good SEO strategy is essential when it comes to digital marketing. Without one, your website will not rank as high as it could in search, meaning you may miss out on potential customers.
A good SEO strategy should consider how people search for information online. For example, when people are looking for a product or service – let’s say local battery suppliers – they generally use specific keywords or phrases (such as ‘battery suppliers near me’) to find what they are looking for.
So, paying close attention to your search analytics and what phrases people are using to find your website is vital. However, knowing what these keywords are is only half the battle. The trick lies in using them to create relevant and engaging content that demonstrates to the search engines that you are a credible source of information about the subject of the search.
Coding your website correctly and ensuring the search engines index all your pages will also help. So, too, will publishing fresh, relevant content regularly and use social media and other digital channels to promote your website, products and services.
If you’re new to the world of SEO, or know what it is but don’t really know what you should be doing, then getting specialist support is essential.
Going it alone can do more harm than good if you don’t know what you’re doing, so leaving it to the experts will maximise your chances of success.
How can QBD help?
Search engine optimisation is a long-term strategy that takes time to implement.
Get it right, and your website will start building trust and authority with the search engines. Get it wrong, however, and it can be a long, hard slog to improve your visibility in search and get found by the right people.
When it comes to your digital marketing, there are many things you should leave to the experts. SEO is one of them. Without a good grasp of SEO’s fundamentals, you’ll need expert support.
That’s where QBD can help.
Our in-house team of SEO, digital marketing and content specialists can quickly identify any problems holding your website’s performance back and adversely affecting its search position.
We can audit your SEO metadata and keywords to ensure they are relevant to your business offering and reflected in your website’s content and calls to action. And we can also keep a close eye on what the competition is up to, so you can benchmark your results against similar organisations in your industry.
We’ve got many years’ experience in technical SEO and stay ahead of the latest trends. We can build your website’s authority to make it stand out from the crowd, get found for the right keywords and climb the search rankings.
To find out more about how we can help improve your website’s SEO, get in touch today.