What is search engine optimisation and how can it benefit your business?
Want to know how SEO Works? There are many benefits of SEO, but to understand them, we first need to understand what SEO is. SEO or Search Engine Optimisation in short, is the process of creating content that makes it easy for a search engine to find. It involves optimising websites to improve their visibility and rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO involves using various techniques and strategies aimed at making a website more appealing to search engines, which will then drive organic traffic to the website. Organic traffic is non-paid for traffic.
Now that you understand the importance of SEO, you can see that using SEO is vital for the success of your website! You may have a stunning to look at a website, but without incorporating best SEO practices, it will be very difficult to get your website seen. Knowing how SEO works is a vital part of building a website, some would say the number 1 element. SEO not only gets your website seen, but when done correctly, gets it seen by the right people.
How can you optimise your website for search engines?
Create quality content
High quality, valuable and relevant content that is useful to the reader. Search engines use algorithms and metrics to determine the quality of content. Some common factors in determining the quality of content include relevance to search query, click through rate (CTR) and time spent on page, readability and the presence of multimedia elements like images and videos.
Keyword Optimisation
Identify and incorporate relevant keywords into your website content, pages, titles and meta descriptions, that will match user’s search queries. By using the right keywords, you can help direct your ideal customer to your website. You can use Google keyword planner for free or other paid SEO tools such as Semrush or Ubersuggest, to see how many times certain keywords or phrases have been searched for. Keyword optimisation is vital for the success of your website.
Identify your ideal customers ‘pain points’, to help you work out what they will be searching for. For example, if you have an online shop that sells shoes, just including the text ‘Men’s shoes’ in your product listing is too generic, using specific copy in your product listing will help get your content to right people. So instead write ‘Mens black leather lace up wide fit shoes’. This is much more specific and will help users who are looking for black shoes, lace up shoes, wide fit shoes etc. Keyword optimisation can be classed as what is known as On-Page-optimisation.
In addition to using keywords that are relevant to your business, products, or content, you should also take into account the keyword difficulty. If the keyword difficulty is high, this means that it will be more difficult for your business to rank using this particular keyword. Using keywords with low to medium difficulty will make it easier for your website to rank. It is also important to not overuse the same keywords, or you may be penalised by search engines for ‘Keyword Stuffing’.
User Experience
Enhance the overall user experience by making your website easy to navigate with quick loading times. It is also essential now for all websites to be mobile-friendly. Search engines prioritise delivering the best possible results to users. When a website has a positive user experience, it tends to have lower bounce rates and longer session durations, which are both factors that search engines consider when ranking websites. User experience can be classed as what is known as technical optimisation.
Hopefully after reading this, you realise the importance of knowing how SEO works, in order too get the most out of your website.
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FAQ’s
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of optimising your website to make it visible to search engines.
How can I create quality content?
Content should be crafted to answer a users questions or provide valuable information, relevant to your business or industry.
How can I enhance user experience on my website?
Make sure that your website is mobile friendly and that it loads quickly. You can help improve page load speeds by compressing your images and make sure they are web files.
Is it easy to do SEO yourself?
SEO is comprised of many different elements and can be complicated and time consuming, with constant monitoring and optimisations needed to keep your website performing well. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can cause more harm than good. Some SEO tools that experts use can also be very expensive and unaffordable for small businesses. It is recommended to work with a digital marketing agency, who can save you time and money and get you the best results.
