What is SEO and why do businesses need it?
SEO is your websites best friend. Designed to help your business reach the right target audience, SEO techniques showcase your business and develop brand awareness by increasing your search rankings. Take a look at how it's done!
Previous blog post
What is SEO and why do businesses need it?
Websites are an undoubtably powerful tool for your company. Showcasing your products and services is an essential driver in generating business. But what good is your website if it’s not driving the right traffic? You may be thinking, why isn’t my website generating enough interest, or more importantly how do I reach my target audience?
This brings us to the wonderful world of SEO; a powerful marketing tool designed to help your business reach the right target audience by increasing your search rankings. This, in turn, will generate more website traffic, increase your number of new customers, and help you retain existing ones!
We’ve delved into the basics of SEO, including why it’s such a valuable tool to your business, and how it can be implemented within your marketing strategy. But firstly, what actually is SEO?
What is SEO, and why is it important?
If you have a website, you need to know about SEO. In this competitive market, search engine optimization (SEO) is an important practice within marketing. It involves a set of techniques and processes aimed to help showcase your business and develop brand awareness within the right audience.
SEO largely focuses on people’s searching behavior and allows us to gain a deeper understanding into what people’s queries are, what terms they are using and what type of content they’re pursuing. Understanding your audiences’ intent will allow you to implement an SEO strategy that makes your website highly accessible to your target audience.
Think of SEO as your websites best friend; SEO aims to drive traffic, and with more traffic, comes more interest; with more interest, comes long term customers! Here’s the benefits in more detail:
Improving visibility
When you use google, how often do you flick through the pages? If you’re like the 75% of us that don’t click past the first page, then I’d imagine it’s not a lot! This behaviour highlights just how crucial it is for a place on the first page, and why ranking highly in search engines is so important to your business. Implementing SEO practices will keep your company competitive, securing the top spots in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Generating the right traffic
In order to boost website performance and engagement, SEO will use tactics that that target the right audiences. increasing traffic to your website is only beneficial when its made up of highly relevant individuals. In turn, this should boost the number of potential leads and customers.
Improved brand awareness and user experience
Top quality SEO techniques will also outline a precise overview of your company, showcasing exactly what you’re about. When you create valuable content for your target audience, it enables potential customers to fully understand your business and how exactly you can help them, leading to an improved user experience.
Building credibility and trust
A well optimised website with regular content types, will showcase your business as authoritative, experts and even market leaders within the industry. If you include quality content with useful knowledge to your target audience, your website will be viewed as a useful tool of information, increasing trust and credibility for your business.
Important components of SEO marketing
Keywords
A huge focus within SEO is recognizing strong keywords that are highly relevant to your business. Once identified, these keywords should be employed throughout your website and it’s subsequent content. These include words, phrases or long-tail keywords that capture the essence and core of what you do, and the solution that you provide. If your web content is well optimised, it will allow searchers to easily reach your website.
In order to stay relevant, it’s important that your list of keywords are continually reviewed, monitored and updated when required. To make sure you are utilizing the right keywords, you need to have a good understanding of your audience and what they are searching for. Once you know this, you can generate a list of keywords to incorporate within your site content.
There are important considerations to take into account when searching for the best keywords to use. For example, keywords that are too vague, too popular (and therefore, competitive) or are declining in popularity, may not be the best keywords to include on your list.
TIP: It’s important to note that ‘keyword stuffing’ can have adverse effects for your website, so it’s essential that you do not overuse keywords in your content. Embed them where it feels natural to do so!
Content
Website content is designed to improve your websites search ranking, with the aim to keep you in the top three. In order to rank high, your content will need to be written and structured in an optimised way, this means using header tags, paragraphs, images and more in a clear, structured manner. Doing this allows Google and other search engines to index your site and determine its relevance to queries and position it in the SERPs accordingly.
To enhance your visibility and rankings, it’s important for all content to include your targeted keywords, which will in turn ensure that your content is relevant to your target audience.
As well as your main landing pages, your site should also house areas where new content can be added regularly. One main example is blogging. Implementing blogs into your content marketing strategy is a great way to build authority, credibility, increase relevance, and of course, boost your rankings. Blog content should be designed to cater to individual target personas in each stage of the buyers journey, in order to drive the right traffic to your website and then push them through the marketing funnel.
Other types of content such as ‘how to’ guides, testimonials, case studies, PDF brochures or infographics are also valuable in boosting your website SEO. As well as this, it’s important for all product pages to be optimised. The incorporation of internal and external links boost SEO by establishing a clear hierarchy on your website and building backlinks to other trusted websites.
TIP: It’s vital that your content is NOT duplicated from other pages on your site, or plagiarized from external websites, as this can have a detrimental effect on your search rankings.
SEO vs PPC
As well as SEO, there are other types of search engine marketing (SEM), including PPC. Unlike SEO, which relies solely on organic strategy, PPC exclusively incorporates paid ads on search engines to drive traffic to your website. Also known as pay-per-click ads, they’re a widely used and effective method that provides an opportunity for all businesses to be on the top of the search page with a certain amount of budget.
Although not a necessary element in your SEO practice, PPC can be effective when used in conjunction with SEO for an additional marketing boost.
SEO is a continuous process
It’s important to recognize SEO as a continuously evolving process. The google algorithm is constantly changing, with over 500 updates made every year! Therefore, it’s vital for your business to keep up by revisiting and amending your strategy on a regular basis.
Do you need help with your SEO marketing strategy? Get in touch with our team, and we’ll be happy to have a chat!
What Our Clients Say
Previous blog post
Related blog posts
Bang for your buck: why you should optimise your social media
It is undeniable that social media has completely shifted the online landscape and changed how humanity uses the internet, for better or for worse!
Benefits of Outsourcing your Sales and Marketing
Sales and Marketing outsourcing is when a business hands over some or all of its sales and marketing responsibilities to an external company.
Brief Guide to Email Marketing
Email marketing can be a cost-effective way of reaching your target audience. Below are some pointers to help you along the way when creating an email marketing campaign for your business.