SEO
purpose
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and in simple terms, relates to how visible a company is when their name, or a search term relative to the company, is searched for on the internet.
Adding SEO to your website helps drive more visitors to it, increasing your chances for more conversions which leads to more customers and more revenue.
OBJECTIVE
Search engines are designed to try to find the most relevant web content to match with a user’s search term (key word).
The aim of adding SEO to your website is to help search engines, such as Google, to:
- Find the information you publish on your website (web content)
- Rank your website against similar websites.
And to analyse all this information they use complex equations called search algorithms.
In order to help your site to rank better it is important that you understand how your customers search for products and services so that you can determine the best keywords for me to use on your site.
There are three main elements to pay attention to when conducting keyword research.
- Relevance – Google ranks content for relevance. This is where the concept of search intent comes in. Your content will only rank for a keyword if it meets the searchers’ needs. In addition, your content must be the best resource out there for the query. After all, why would Google rank your content higher if it provides less value than other content that exists on the web?
- Authority – Google will provide more weight to sources it deems authoritative. That means you must do all you can to become an authoritative source by enriching your site with helpful, information content and promoting that content to earn social signals and backlinks. If you’re not seen as authoritative in the space, or if a keyword’s SERPs are loaded with heavy sources you can’t compete with (like Forbes or The Mayo Clinic), you have a lower chance of ranking unless your content is exceptional.
- Volume – You may end up ranking on the first page for a specific keyword, but if no one ever searches for it, it will not result in traffic to your site. Kind of like setting up shop in a ghost town. Volume is measured by MSV (monthly search volume), which means the number of times the keyword is searched per month across all audiences.
To help you find the best keywords and phrases for your business you can use this website below.
To look at trending words and compare populartity if terms you can use this website below.
Process
SEO is quite a specialised area and there is no guarenteed way to rank as search engines decide which content is more relevant.
Search engines look for elements including title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links (also known as backlinks). Search engines also look at site structure and design, visitor behaviour, and other external, off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site should be in their SERPs.
There are experts you can hire who only work in SEO and have dedicated experience with helping companies determine their key words and phrases to help them rank on the first page of a search engine. I am not one of those people and for this reason I only include basic page SEO set up in all website packages which is based off of the information you provide me.
This includes:
- Meta Tags – snippets of text that describe a page’s content and are placed in the back end (not visible on the page itself). It is usually a few sentences that help tell search engines what a web page is about.
- Keywords –
these are words or phrases a customer uses when they do a search (e.g. a someone searching for a florist may use ‘flowers online’ and ‘where do I buy flowers online’ so matching the keywords used on your website with the words used by customers when they search for you is an important part of SEO.
SEO tips