Too many businesses make the mistake of thinking that once they’ve created a website and launched it to the world, they should start getting more sales.
When a company realises that just launching a website sadly isn’t enough, they start to investigate how they’re going to get people to come to their shiny new site. After a little research, they should find out that there are essentially two methods – Paid and Organic traffic.
Paid traffic requires you to pay the likes of Google and Facebook for every click through to your website. Organic traffic is when a customer finds a business through a search engine like Google. The art of making a companies website appear in those search results is called Search Engine Optimisation, aka SEO. A well-managed search engine optimisation campaign will generate:
- More leads
- More calls
- More form fills
- and ultimately more SALES
By getting a companies website to appear to potential customers in the search engines, it will drive more people to them and get them “more” of what they want.SEO can have an ENORMOUS impact on the number of people visiting a website. check these stats from Moz:
- 90% of searchers only check the first page of results
- 75% of searchers only check the first 5 results
- 40% of traffic goes to the top-ranked page
This is why it is critically important that a business’s website can appear on the first page, and ideally the top 3 results for search terms that their ideal customers are typing into a search engine when they are looking for a product or service.
SEO can be a very technical process, however, in its essence, it is relatively easy to understand. In the simplest terms, SEO will generate more traffic for a website by helping it appear more prominently in search results.
The SEO Process
SEO campaigns can be broken down into several phases that all make up part of the process. The phases generally look something like this:
- Initial Audit
- Keyword Research
- OnPage Optimization
- Link Building
Here’s a summary of each phase of the SEO process:
Initial Audit
This involves a site analysis to give an overview of the current situation, what links are pointing to the site and how the site is optimised for SEO through its code and general structure.
There is also the potential that there may have been poor SEO work done in the past that is actually resulting in penalties to the site. These penalties can come from over optimisation, too many low-quality links pointing to the site, or duplicate content throughout the site. The audit will give the SEO company an idea of the amount of work involved and as a result the costs of improving the rankings of the site.
Keyword Research
Once the initial audit is complete we need to find keywords to target for our SEO campaign. Keywords are what people are typing into search engines to generate the results they are seeing. We need to know what the ideal customer is typing when they are looking for the business’s product or service. This process is generally broken into 2 sections:
1 – Easy WinsUse clever software to investigate what the website is already ranking for in positions 4-30 in the search results. This means that Google already likes the site for these keywords, but they are not yet in the coveted top 3 positions that generate most of the traffic! Boosting these keywords that are already ranking up the search results, and ideally to the top of page 1, will result in more traffic.
2 – Content Gap Analysis: The next step is to complete a Content Gap Analysis: this is looking for keywords that competitors are ranking for but the businesses site isn’t targeting yet. You can use these keywords to create new content for the site or to re-optimize existing content so that the search engine sees the business’s website is relevant for these new keywords that are already utilised in the industry.
OnPage Optimisation
(Dressing The Candidate)The next step is bringing the website up to an acceptable standard for Google. These optimisations will allow Google to easily see what the website contains and what the content is about. OnPage SEO optimisation is the process of optimising the content on each page on a site to include keywords and relevant content to tell search engines and readers what the page is about. This can include optimising title tags, URLs, meta-descriptions, H1s, images, content, and internal links. This work can be quite technical and involves changing the underlying code of the site to make it more acceptable to search engine robots when they scan the page.
Link Building
Links, also known as backlinks that point to a site are one of the most powerful elements that Google uses to rank websites. Links that point to a business’s website are like “votes” for it, the more votes you get the more likely you are to win! More backlinks help give the website greater weight to rank in the search engines. However, not all votes are equal: A link from a site with a greater authority like the economist or national newspapers carries more weight than a smaller blog.
Summary
These are the basics that you need to know about SEO. It can be a very technical process and there is no quick or easy way to win this game, but a campaign applied intelligently over time can bring significant results. Unlike Pay per click marketing where you are paying for every lead, an SEO campaign will continue to provide you results over time.
A well-executed SEO campaign run over 6 months to a year can place a website in the top position of Google search on a wide range of keywords ensuring that a businesses ideal customers are finding them whenever they search for something related to the business.
If you’d like to talk about how SEO can help your business, or you just want to know how you could improve your website’s Search Engine Optimisation complete your SEO audit for FREE here.