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Search Engine Optimisation for Growing Businesses​
What exactly is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is, very simply, making your website into exactly what the search engines are looking for. SEO is NOT just about your rankings, it’s about the traffic and the business you receive through your website from search engines.
At Engage Web we approach search engine optimisation as a mixture between technical SEO work and content creation, with the emphasis being very heavily on the content side. While technical SEO is important, as there are some technical issues that can completely stop your website from ranking at all on search engines, it still only makes up around 10% of an overall SEO strategy.
The technical SEO work is what helps Google (and the other search engines) ACCESS your website, the content is what gives search engines a reason to actually RANK your website.
At Engage Web we work with our clients to ensure their websites are technically well-structured for SEO. We build a robust content strategy that aims to place them at the top of Google for hundreds and thousands of relevant searches, rather than just the five or six keywords many digital marketing companies like to focus on.
How is SEO measured?
There are many ways to measure the results of search engine optimisation. The most common, and least important, is with your search engine rankings. Where does your website rank in the search engines for different keywords?
What’s far more important than your rankings, is your search traffic. There’s no point ranking for something if nobody is searching for it!
The image shows the traffic generated to our website from a single blog post about tracing a fake Facebook profile. Over 180,000 page views during a six year period, from a single piece of content.
However… what’s more important than traffic, are the leads, enquiries and sales generated. How many phone calls does your business receive from your search engine optimisation campaign? How many enquiries? How many contact form submissions? How many downloads of your lead magnet? How many people added to your database? Results, real tangible business generated, is what REALLY matters.
That’s what Engage Web focuses on with your business when we work with you on your search engine optimisation.
Basic principles of Search Engine Optimisation
To understand SEO, it’s first important to understand how the search engines (and by which we mean mainly Google) finds and sorts their search results. As Google explains SEO here, it wants to return the most relevant results to a person’s search query – so that person will return and use Google again and again. Google gets its results from crawling the internet – which includes your website. When a person types in a search query, the results are listed by Google in order of relevance and quality. In order to appear higher in Google for a particular search, your website needs to be deemed relevant to the person’s search query and also to be considered a quality website.
That’s where search engine optimisation comes in.
Take a look at how we’ve helped businesses like yours, such as Home Style Carpets, Beacon Financial Training, Burleydam Garden Centre and Oil Store. You can see how they’ve grown in terms of rankings, traffic, leads and sales from working with Engage Web on their search engine optimisation.
Contact us to discuss your business
At Engage Web, we understand SEO, and even more importantly, we understand online business. We take an individual approach to each website, so you can rest assured your website’s specific needs are met. After all, if your website isn’t working with the search engines, then what is it really doing for you?
Ways we can help
Lots of different factors go into judging both relevance and quality. We help by making sure the search engines can find and recognise every word on your website. We can identify the words and phrases your potential customers are using to search for your business, service and products and we can emphasise those on your website. We do this in a number of ways:
Why is Search Engine Optimisation an Ongoing Process?
You could be forgiven for thinking that SEO is just something you ‘add’ to your website, as though it were a button you could click, or something to be sprinkled on. It doesn’t help when some web designers advertise their websites as ‘includes SEO’ – when they don’t. They can’t. They might be ‘designed with search engines in mind’, but there’s no way they can include SEO, as SEO is an ongoing process of research, technical work, content creation, testing, reviews and repeat.
To explain it fuller – we’ve put this SEO process flow together to show how SEO works for an ongoing, active SEO campaign.
Research your target client or customer. Who are they, what do they want, what problems do they have that you solve and how do you solve those problems. Only by knowing who you’re looking to attract, can you craft a search engine optimisation campaign that targets the right people.
What keywords (search terms) are your target client entering into Google? How competitive are those keywords, and what is the search volume for them? You need to know what search terms you should be focusing on, and that the right ‘search intent’ exists for those keywords.
What are your competitors doing? How much further along the journey are they than you are? What are they investing in their SEO?
You need to review the websites linking to your website, and those linking to your competitors. Do you have any toxic links that need removing because they’re hindering your rankings? Do your competitors have links you should have?
Now you have your target audience defined, and your keyword research completed, you can devise your content strategy to create the website content that will enhance your search engine rankings for what your target clients are searching for. It should also be content that helps convert your target clients into leads.
What needs improving on your website to aid the search engine optimisation campaign? Do you have technical issues, such as slow page speed, duplicate content, canonical pages, large images and a thousand more issues that could be negatively impacting your rankings?
Then Google moves the goal posts, as it does on a regular basis. Google updates its search parameters on average, a dozen times per day. Yes, per DAY. According to Search Engine Land, Google updated its search algorithm more than 5,000 times in 2021 alone*. You need to review every update, and test every change within your SEO.
* https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates
* https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates
Then, once you’ve been through this SEO cycle, you repeat. Go back to step one and look again at your target audience, and follow through the process once more… then again… and again. This is what makes the most successful websites as profitable as they are, and this is why search engine optimisation is an ongoing process.
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