Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a huge part of any business’s success strategy. If your business has a website, then it is undoubtedly part of yours too – and if not, then it should be.

You may have had a website built – but aren’t getting much quality traffic to it.

And if you’re not getting quality traffic (i.e. people on your website), then chances are, you’re not getting very many organic leads. 

The downside to poor SERPs performance in the long-term is that it will affect your business’s bottom line.

But the upside to getting SEO right is a more steady flow of evergreen organic search traffic to your website, more quality leads, and essentially, more jobs or bookings.

The foundations we put in place through SEO upgrade work, if done correctly, can have long-lasting positive effects for your business.

SEO is, to many, a vague form of dark arts at worst, and perhaps something they’ve heard of and understand a little, at best.

And to tell the truth, SEO does have a little of the unknown in there. There is no absolute guarantee that SEO work will yield positive results, or if they do, how much it will improve your ranking in SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

SEO marketing for business owners often occurs naturally: you write your webpages, and Google (or other search engines) either notice that users are engaging positively with your website, or that they aren’t finding the content they are looking for when they’re there.
 

 

What's involved with SEO?

There are two parts to optimising your website for search engines.

 

The first is ‘technical SEO.’ This involves looking at bits of code and other plugins on your website, and fixing anything that could be causing your site to perform poorly (in terms of load speed for example). It’s a job that can really only be done by a web developer, who has specialist knowledge about how to implement these changes in the proper way.

The second part to SERPs optimisation is ‘content SEO.’ This part can be done by a marketing professional with the right website CMS and SEO knowledge, without the need for a web developer’s input. It involves things like keyword research – finding out what relevant terms people are searching for online – and making sure that your webpages use the right ones in their headings, page title, meta description and image alt text. 

It might also involve creating or updating the blogs on your website with specific niche content, targeting these search terms. You might notice these on other websites’ blogs, ‘Nine ways to solve [xx] problem in your home’ for example – content which positions the business as a thought leader and targets relevant search terms.
 

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The importance of keyword research

The really important part here is the thorough keyword research. Without properly delving into keyword tools, and identifying which primary keywords and long-tail keywords should be targeted, then your webpages might not be hitting the mark when it comes to user intent. The search engines won’t recognise that your webpage is really relevant to users, and therefore it just won’t rank them very highly.

You might be searching for something your business does, on Google, and not seeing your website until page 5, 6 or 10. That’s really not uncommon, as with any business area, there is usually a lot of saturation. And much of the saturation comes from nationwide businesses who have stampeded over local business’s rankings, because of their higher budget for SEO strategy, and their elevated site score (search engines give your site a ‘score’ depending on a range of factors, including backlinks – and bigger companies tend to have done much more work on improving this).

I truly believe that if your business serves a specific local area (or areas), then it is possible to improve your ranking on Google or Bing.

When I refresh a website’s SEO, I follow a detailed, step-by-step checklist of actions. By doing this methodically, it gives your website the best possible chance of being reassessed by search engines, and ranking much higher.

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