What is SEO?
SEO is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on optimising a website to make it more visible in search engine results pages (i.e. in Google search results) with the goal of driving organic traffic to the website.
Why is SEO important?
Organic traffic is earned rather than paid for, but you still need to invest time and resources in SEO. Search engines have improved in identifying search queries which makes choosing the right keywords to drive traffic even more important.
Once an SEO strategy takes effect and visibility increases, a website will see growth. More visibility = more traffic = more potential customers = more potential revenue.
Why does SEO take time before you see the benefits?
SEO takes time, and search engine algorithms have become more advanced with an emphasis on delivering users relevant, and high-quality results based on their search query.
Whereas, when SEO began webpages would be inundated with your chosen keyword and pointing as many links as possible to it to see fast results. Deploying tactics like this is likely to be doing far more harm than good in the long term.
Why are keywords important?
You need the right keywords to drive valuable traffic to your website
However, choosing the right keywords can be difficult, especially if your business operates in a competitive niche. This emphasises the importance of keyword research. Any experienced SEO agency will use multiple tools to identify target keywords, assess how competitive they are, and make suggestions of which pages the target keywords should appear on.
Not all keywords are created equal. High volume, generic terms like ‘logo’ might seem like a good keyword if you design logos, realistically, it’s going to be very difficult to rank for a keyword like that, especially when you’re up against hundreds of other agencies and freelancers. ‘Bespoke brand packages’ might have a lower search volume, but it’s far more relevant to your offering.
What are SEO best practices?
In general, there are best practices to follow to give yourself the best chance of ranking well.
Quality content which contains your target keyword (and variations of it) and satisfies user intent is strongly correlated with better rankings.
Unfortunately, content alone won’t cut it. Backlinks (links that point from third-party domains back to your domain) are also an important ranking factor, but it’s the relevancy of the link and the domain it’s linking from that counts, rather than the number alone.
You must also consider on-page optimisation. This involves making your website search engine friendly by using optimised meta content (title tags, meta descriptions) heading tags, and images.
Finally, technical considerations. Your site must have good architecture, clear navigation, and internal linking – not just for search engines, but for users, too.