Search engine optimisation or SEO is a must-do marketing tactic if you want your website to be found by online searchers looking for the type of information, products, or services you offer.
If you’ve got a business with a website online, you can leverage SEO to help drive more traffic, leads, sales, and profit for your business. SEO is a very effective way of putting your products or services in front of the people who are interested in making a purchase.
The better visibility your web pages have in search results, the more likely you are to attract prospective customers to your business. Think about the last time you used Google search to look for a specific product to buy. It’s likely you were satisfied with the results you got because you found a business online that had exactly what you were looking for.
Google and the other search engines have one main goal and that is to deliver the best possible search results to its end users.
The search engines use bots to scan or crawl pages on the web, going from site to site, collecting information about those pages and indexing them. Then the search engine algorithms analyse the page in an index, factoring in lots of ranking signals to determine the order pages should appear in the search results for a given query.
SEO is a fundamental aspect of digital marketing because every day, there are millions of searches conducted online. Most often, these searches are done by people who are looking for information about products and services.
There’s no getting around it. SEO is mandatory in today’s digitally-driven society. If you’d like to learn search engine optimisation, there are many free guides online that can help. For instance, this Guide to SEO by Search Engine Land can teach you the basics of SEO so you’ll be armed with the information needed to start your own campaign.
But before you start working on an SEO strategy, you should know that SEO takes time. There is much work to do like keyword research, link building, content creation & optimisation, social media marketing, digital PR, and more.
Many people who learn the basics of SEO don’t have any experience actually optimising websites. The success of your business shouldn’t be based on guesswork or experiments.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can damage your SEO rather than help it. For example, if you were to build the wrong types of links to your website, your site could receive a Google penalty wherein it’s removed from search results which would be hard to recover from.
If you don’t feel confident you have the knowledge and experience to do your own SEO work, hire an agency. Sure, it will cost money but in the long run, it will be worth it. A good SEO company will have the experience and know-how needed to keep your business competitive online.