02 Jun What is SEO?
SEO….So what is it ?
Search engine optimisation is about improving the relevancy of a website or web page to ensure it ranks within search engines for terms or phrases of the products or services related to your business.
Basically, very few of us, look beyond the 1st few results we get from a search engine. The better visibility your business has, the more likely you are likely to gain traffic and /or attract prospective customers.
In order to get much more targeted traffic driven to the page within your site, it’s absolutely key to ensure that the terms that you’re wanting your page to be found for , are related to the content that you’re writing about.
As the internet grows, (and it’s growing at a ludicrous rate ), SEO is becoming more and more important.
SEO and getting visibility in the natural listings within Google is a very cost effective way of marketing your content and your brand.
The internet has grown 234% over the past 10 years. It’s no surprise, more and more people are investing their time online.
Even whilst they’re watching TV , people are browsing the internet on what’s called multi device viewing.
How important is SEO for Small to medium business?
Well, it’s hugely important !
As we know, a large percentage of traffic enters these websites through search engines, so if you’re spending money creating content, it’s important that users find that content useful!
There’s no point having great big and expensive websites if they can’t be found.
How do Search engines work and how sophisticated are they these days?
To break it down, the internet is built from web pages connected to each other. And they are connected to each other via links. Whether they are internal links being one page to another or external links from one website to another.
Search engines have programs called ‘robots’ or ‘spiders’ (search engine robots or search engine spiders) that crawl these links and read the content contained within each web page.
These search engine spiders were, until recently, relatively basic. They cant see images and they cant see video, they cant hear podcasts, and some code they cant read. Google is obviously changing the game in this space with it’s latest phone and Google Lens technology but up until now they could only read basic HTML code , and text…..so content.
Now, how a search engine works and the way it displays it’s results, is based on an incredibly complex algorithm… This algorithm isn’t shared by search engines, each search engines algorithm is different but they all have the same fundamental elements to it.
A search engine results page, (which is commonly referred to as a SERP) is when someone types in a query into a search engine, and they get a series of results.
The results that appear at the very top and very bottom are the ‘Paid’ results. (PPC or Pay Per Click) and they are based on a bid management system.
The results displayed beneath the paid listings are displayed based on an algorithm that Gooogle and other search engines have developed over time, to ensure they are displaying the most relevant AND authoritative, web pages for your query.
There are 100’s of factors of how you can improve you SEO. We ‘ve divided them into the 4 R’s.
Reporting, Readability, Relevance, and Reliability.
Reporting relates to what is it you actually want.
Do you want your users to grow, do you want more people to see your videos? Or do you just want to get eyeballs on the page?
This is the first thing you want to figure out before you do SEO.
Secondly, Readibility, meaning, it needs to be plain text on a page, (it cant read video) You can improve your page titles, the websites descriptions, and how much copy there is on a page as its an essential thing because if you have nothing on that page, Google is not going to find it.
Then there’s relevance, which looks at the keyword research and how you apply keywords onto a site,
A keyword could be ‘recipes’ so you look at how you get your web page to rank for the word recipes and get your particular ‘recipe’ found .
It’s important to ‘talk ‘ your audience’s language and ‘match’ what your audience wants with the search engines and how they find it.
So, what are the best things to think about in order to raise the profile of a web page or website for search engines?
Well, we always start off with the Research. What are people actually searching for and are there any people actually searching for what you want to be found for?
Then making a connection of relevance by making your content as descriptive as possible, to make it attractive and easy to read.
You need to label up the page with as much useful and informative copy as possible, and then make sure it’s well linked from within the site.
What is a meta description?
Within meta data, there are 2 things that search engines look for at the moment. Which is meta keywords and meta description.
Meta keywords, used to be what people put a lot of effort into by loading their content with keywords and spamming their page.
And the meta description is what appears after you’ve typed in a search query into Google. The Title that appears in the search results, is the Meta description.
It’s about showcasing, very specific, user friendly, public facing , meta descriptions, which talk the audiences language.
What about Page Titles ? How important is the title for any type of content that is produced for the web?
Page Titles are one of the most important elements that the Search engines look at to determine what that page is relevant too.
Search engines read the page from left to right. And within a page title it will read up to about 70 characters, including spaces, and then it will stop and start reading the rest of the page, so you’ve got a limited amount of space of which to ensure, you use the right types of search phrases within it.
Best practice, dictates that you should prioritise your most competitive search terms, first, at the left, and then build out to the slightly less competitive. Competitiveness is usually determined by the search volume, ie Keywords with a higher search volume are usually the more competitive.
How important is Search and are reviews and testimonials, start making ground?
Search engines are more or less becoming a platform of integrating these recommendations, so SEO, will never really die, everyone will just have to evolve.
4-5 years ago, if you were to do a query into Google, you’d have a choice of 10 pages listed in the results,
Now there are maybe 20 -25 opportunities for a brand to get there, whether that’s by twitter results, Facebook results ,web pages, news items, videos, images, the paid search listings. By understanding how they all integrate and are incorporated into the search engine results for a particular query, you can then understand how to get that visibility.
So, where is the industry is going?
Internal training and understanding SEO is hugely important. We constantly spend our time reading, researching, testing, and measuring what is working and what isn’t.
Instead of trying to create content that you assume people want, we USE the tools that Google provides us to create content using the terms that people are actually searching for !….and then we optimise your page for those types of keywords.
These days, it’s all about being useful! Writing interesting and engaging content. If you do, you’ll find people will like it and then link to you. Your site will gain positioning and therefore traffic…and hopefully make your phone ring and in turn put money in the till!
Optimising your site’s content for Voice search and voice recognition software such as Google and Siri are also highly important.
Feel free to get in touch for a coffee or a chat!