What is Search Engine Optimisation Marketing?

Search engine optimisation can bring a number of benefits to your business if it is utilised and used correctly, the main benefit of search engine optimisation includes an increase in visibility, the main reason this is good for your website is because the more visibility your website has, the more people will click on your website which could then lead to people potentially buying your products and services.

If you’re reading this article, you may be wondering, “What is SEO, and what is Search Engine Optimisation Marketing?”

SEO, or Search Engine optimisation, is the process of optimising your website for search engines like Google or Bing in an attempt to create more website traffic. The goal of search engine optimisation marketing is to bump your webpage to the top of your engine of choice’s search results; this helps in creating an authoritative and trustworthy first impression of your site before the user visits and also ensures more people view your website overall.

How Does SEO Work?

Think about what you experience when you search for a query on Google. When you hit ‘search,’ you probably notice a few things about the top results. They tend to be more populated websites, with describing text that, most likely, contains part of your search verbatim.

As you continue to scroll, or maybe even click the second page of search results, you’ll notice that the links that are given start to become less and less relevant to your original query. This is SEO in action.

Pages are able to reach the top of search results by including top keywords and key phrases in both the website itself and the meta description. Those aren’t the only factors that contribute to SEO, though; Google and other search engines also take into consideration factors like the accessibility of your website, loading speed, headers, and ease of navigation. Pages that are better optimised for search engines in these ways, and contain lots of top keywords, will rank higher than sites that do not.

Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking Explained

While it may seem that search engines like Google can find any page on the web for you in fractions of a second, there’s actually quite a lot of work done by the engine in the background to make that possible.

The invisible processes that the engine goes through before your search can be broken down into three steps: crawling, indexing, and ranking.

Crawling is a process in which “crawlers,” a team of information-absorbing robots, search the web looking for new or updated content, strung together by hyperlinks and creating what we know as the “web.” Then, the robots process and store all of the valuable information they find in what is called an index.

After all of this, Google still needs to rank the sites that were catalogued by relevance. When you put in a new search query, the engine looks through its index and attempts to give you the best results. The higher a website appears in your search results, the more relevant Google believes it to be to what you have searched.

Benefits of SEO

There are a lot of benefits to optimising your website for Google, including reaching more customers, boosting your brand’s visibility and trustworthiness, and earning more money through online sales or web traffic. Here are some more in-depth reasons why SEO is a must-have for your business or organisation’s website.

Fosters Trust

One of the most obvious yet overlooked benefits of optimising your website is how it helps to foster trust between you and your client. When a user sees your website as the first result for their Google search, that tells your customer indirectly that Google trusts you and, by extension, your product. Customers expect search engines to filter all of the unimportant or low-quality websites away from them. This is why Google takes many aspects of your website into consideration when assessing your rank, not just the content you have on your page.

Increases Visibility

Being “number 2” isn’t ever the desired result, but in terms of SEO, second best can be next to worst. It’s estimated that only 25% of searchers check the second page of search results. That number is even lower for pages 3 and beyond. That means that if your website sits on page 2 or further of any relevant query, you’re not reaching at least 75%, but maybe more, of your possible visitors. By optimising your website, you’ll crawl up Google’s ranks and reach many more customers.

Track And Quantify Results

Since all of your SEO work is done online, it also comes with the virtue of being able to track and quantify all of the information taken in from your website’s visitation data. Every detail, from how many people visit each day, to which searches link back to you most often, is available to be analysed. All of this information can be used to uncover what makes or breaks your current advertising campaign and can inspire you to try new things regarding the way you market your business.

Common SEO Techniques

It can be difficult to know exactly what parts of your website affect your SEO or even know where to begin with improving them. Let’s list the different types of ways you can optimise your website for both Google and your average user.

Technical optimisation

Technical SEO refers to any optimisation done to the website itself and doesn’t include posting content. This could include optimising code for usability, speeding up your site’s loading times, and assuring that all important pages can be discovered by search engines.

On-page optimisation

On-page SEO also refers to optimisation done on the website itself and includes the category of Technical SEO as well. Aside from Technical SEO, On-page SEO refers mostly to the actual content of the page instead of the code and files associated with it. You can improve your on-page SEO by updating your meta descriptions, URL structures, title tags, and image alt tags. You can also try adding internal links (ones that link back to your own site), sitemaps, or relevant headers/subheaders.

Off-page Optimisation

Off-page SEO happens outside of your own site. Your off-page optimisation improves when credible and high-ranked outside sites are often linking back to your own. When Google sees that other websites are linking back to you often, this tells the algorithm that the content you post is trustworthy and something that other searchers will want to see. You can boost your off-page SEO by asking other pages to link back to your content or by using social media marketing. If your content is high-quality, it will be easier to naturally grow your off-page SEO.

How To Optimise For Google

Google is the largest search engine today, with over 90% of all total web searches going through its servers every day. Sites can be optimised for any search engine, including competitors like Bing and Yahoo, but for now, Google reigns supreme. Here are some ways to begin optimising your website for Google’s search engine.

Crawlability

Make sure all of your page’s resources are easily accessed by Google’s crawlers. Your site should be easy to navigate from both a human and a robot’s perspective. Simple ways to make sure your website is crawlable are to create an accurate sitemap, easy-to-access internal links, and make sure your robots.txt file is not blocking access to any of your page’s resources.

Keywords

Keywords are a very important but often abused factor in search engine optimisation. Find the search queries that will bring the most traffic to your site while avoiding spamming keywords or using redundant language. Think about what people who know a lot about your topic would search for, as opposed to someone who had just learned about it. You may need to use more sophisticated keywords or make confusing terminology more palatable for a novice.

Backlinks

Backlinks are links on other websites that direct back to your own. One of your biggest goals in SEO is to create lots of relationships between yourself and other pages and to collect as many valuable backlinks as possible. As is the case with keywords, though, it’s best to avoid spam and avoid backlinks from websites that are not credible, as this can hurt your SEO.

Accessibility

By making your site accessible to all types of users, you expand your audience further. Over 90% of people in the UK use the internet on smartphones or other mobile devices. In turn, if your site is not accessible to mobile users, Google can rank down your page in their search results. Other accessibility issues, like hard-to-read text, broken videos, and large, bloated images, can also slow your site down or make users want to click away.

Best SEO Tools

SEMRush

SEMrush is one of the most trusted tools on the market, allowing you to give yourself a greater understanding of how search terms are affecting your business. The software enables you to view search queries that link to your competitors, find backlinks, and embellish your ad campaigns.

Google Analytics/Google Search Console

Google Search Console is one of the most helpful SEO tools on the market, coming straight from the source of the engine. This program comes with all of the standard features of any SEO tool, along with the additional ability to improve your index status and help Google’s crawler index faster. You can even export the SEO data Google gives you and compare it to other sources.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a user-friendly SEO tool that is easy to use even without the help of technical experts. It starts at a frugal £81.89 a month for their “Lite” package, affordable for most small businesses. Along with being easy to use, Ahrefs offers data on 150 million keywords, making it perfect for anyone looking to scale their business.

Conclusion

It can be difficult to know where to get started with optimising your website, but these helpful tips and tools can help create long-lasting and meaningful traffic to your site that is necessary for growth. It’s important to realise, though, that SEO is an ongoing science. Every year you will need to reassess your needs and the needs of your site, but by making a long-term commitment to your SEO, you maximise the rewards you see from it.