Search Engine Optimization – Frequently Asked Questions

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of optimizing your website to improve your rankings on search engines (i.e. Google).

It also aims to appeal to more people who are using these search engines so they click on your website in the search results, and visit your website. By ranking in high positions on Google for your relevant search terms, you can get more unpaid clicks to your website. These unpaid clicks are called organic traffic.

What are keywords?

A keyword refers to the phrases that your potential customers are likely to type into Google to find businesses like yours.

The name is a little deceptive – keywords CAN be single words, but they are much more likely to be phrases. (The longer phrases are called ‘long-tail keywords’.)

The shorter the keyword (i.e. phrase), the more difficult it will be for your website to rank for it on Google because it is likely to be a more general term. It’s like trying to rank for the word ‘cars’. That keyword would have a LOT of competition, which makes it more difficult to rank for. You would have more success if you aimed to rank for more specific (i.e. longer) keywords like ‘second-hand luxury cars for sale’ as this keyword will have less competition.

It’s extremely important to choose the best keywords for your business and your website. Your SEO strategy is going to revolve around optimising for the keywords you choose. You must make sure that your website will answer the user’s intent when searching for your keywords, so they will click on your search result and visit your website.

Keywords are the foundation of any SEO campaign, and you can’t build a strong SEO strategy on a shaky foundation.

How does SEO work?

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing both your website, and various offsite factors, to boost your rankings on search engines.

If your website ranks highly in search engines, it is closer to the number one search result on Google. Higher rankings mean users will be more likely to find your website link, and click on it to visit your website.

For example: Google uses website crawlers to explore the web. When it finds your content, it ‘reads’ your page and indexes it so it’s ready for anyone who might search for your content. Google’s search algorithm determines the intent behind each search query (i.e. what the searcher is looking for). and it uses MANY factors to choose the best search results to display to the searcher.

SEO campaigns combine a lot of factors that all work together to boost your rankings:

  1. The first part of a SEO campaign is to determine what keywords you want your website pages to rank for.
  2. Once you have this keyword list, you must optimize your website for these keywords.
  3. You must also fix any issues on your website that might be negatively impacting your search rankings. These could include slow page speed, poor user experience, or broken website elements and links.
  4. Off-page SEO refers to all the elements that must be addressed that are not on your website. They can include link building, social media content, or reviews on other websites.

SEO works by incorporating different strategies that target search engine algorithms. Google, for example, uses over 200 factors to rank websites. SEO helps you target those different factors to the best of your ability and gives your site a better chance at ranking for keywords.

As you make changes to your SEO, you can track lots of different metrics to see if your changes are making a difference. These could include:

  • Web traffic
  • Search impressions (how many times your link is seen in search results)
  • Click throughs (from Google’s search results to your website)
  • Session time
  • Bounce rate
  • And many more!

Does my business need SEO?

Almost all businesses need SEO to thrive, because many purchasing journeys involve searching online for products and services.

If you have a website and you want to be found online, you must optimize your website for search engine algorithms.

Even if you main goal isn’t to rank on search engines (even though it probably should be), you can use SEO to create a useful, interactive website for your visitors, and to give them the best possible online experience of your website.

Does blogging help with SEO?

YES! A thousand times yes!!

Blogging is an excellent way to target non-commercial keywords and drive traffic to your site.

Once visitors have landed on your site, you can steer them towards your sales pages so you can convert a visitor to a lead or customer.

The more keywords you rank for, the more traffic your website will get, and the more sales you will make!

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are when other websites link back to your website.

If these are ‘follow’ links, this is a signal to Google that they should follow the link from the other website onto yours.

A link to your website is like a vote of confidence from the other website to yours, as if they are saying “this website here has great content so I will link to it and you should visit it too!”

If the site that links to you is in your niche (but obviously not your competition), and is a well-respected website with lots of traffic, their vote will count for a lot more than if a tiny website with almost no traffic that links to you.

The more backlinks you have to your site, the better your chances are of ranking higher in the search results BUT please be careful – thousands of rubbish backlinks to your website will do more harm than good! Backlinks are definitely a case of quality over quantity.

The process of generating backlinks is called link building.

If you have any more questions, please contact us or book a free Discovery Call to get started.

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