What is SEO?
SEO is the process of improving a website’s visibility on search engines. SEO stands for search engine optimisation.
Why is it important?
Right now, people who need your products, services or expertise are searching for them online. Bear in mind that these people don’t know you. They’ve never heard of your business.
The primary aim of SEO is to get your content in front of people who may otherwise be unreachable. Without Googling your business name, they should see you on their search engine results.
Now, we ought to say… On this page, we’re referring to search engines as Google because it’s the biggest. In July 2023, it held 92.8% of the market share worldwide.
How does SEO work?
Every time you enter a search term, Google’s algorithm sorts through hundreds of billions of pages to find the most useful, relevant results.
It then ranks them, displaying the most useful first. How does it determine usefulness?
The algorithm looks at the following:
- Meaning — The intent behind your search. What are you actually looking for?
- Relevance — Page content which provides the closest possible match to the search query.
- Content quality — It’s helpful, reliable, people-first content created to benefit people, not to gain search engine rankings.
- Usability — Is the page mobile-friendly? How quickly does it load?
- Context — Location, search settings and search history.
We’re going to take a whistle-stop tour of how SEO works in practice, on real-life websites.
How is it done? Robots and humans
Let’s start with two key facts about Google robots…
Firstly, they don’t rank websites. They rank pages. When optimised correctly, each one of your website pages is a separate landing page.
Secondly, they’re just robots. Your website may look gorgeous — but to them, it’s just text and links.
To scan and rank a web page, the robots need a number of clear signals. Here are 3 of them:
- On-page ranking signals such as keywords and optimised page titles. Without these, your website is invisible to them.
- Off-page ranking signals such as backlinks. Do other prominent websites refer to your content?
- Technical signals. The cleaner the website is technically, the easier it is to rank.
That’s what the robots need, but here’s the important point about SEO:
Humans need the same thing. It’s because we’re impatient, with notoriously short online attention spans. Here are those 3 ranking factors from a human’s point of view:
- On-page ranking signals deliver instant, top-of-page confirmation that we’ve found what we need. We don’t have to scroll down looking for it.
- Off-page ranking signals reassure us that the content is popular and worth our time. It’s not sitting alone on the internet like Billy No Mates.
- As for technical signals., would you stick around if a website took 6 seconds to load and was full of dead links? Probably not.
- Call Neil and Sonya on 01489 590092 or if you prefer to write, just hit the big button.
OK, let’s go through these in order.
On-page ranking signals
You’ve probably heard of keywords. You use them when you’re searching for something online.
To find the right keywords, think about the following:
- How your prospect describes your services, as opposed to how you describe them.
- Searcher intent.
When it comes to searcher intent, we’ll use the keyword `photography’ as an example. What does the searcher need? Photographic images? General subject research? It’s difficult to tell.
Now replace it with the keyword ‘photographer’ or, even better, `portrait photographer’. What’s the searcher intent? Well, they want someone to take their photograph.
That attention to detail also works with page titles. Let’s imagine you’re an IT company, and one of your pages is simply called `services’. That title doesn’t explain what your business is about.
Call it `IT services’ and your website instantly becomes easier to rank.
Off-page ranking signals
With backlinks, gone are the days when you could buy them in bulk from dodgy sites promising page 1 in a nanosecond.
Nowadays, quality beats quantity — and generating high-quality links is often about earning them.
Here are a few ways to do it:
- Organic links — Create such excellent content that other websites refer to it… without you having to ask.
- Guest Blogs — Give away unique, relevant articles to sites related to your industry. In exchange, you get a link in the author bio.
- Case Studies — If you’ve recently employed the services of a business, offer yourself as a case study for them.
- Directory listings — Although bear in mind, from Google’s viewpoint, some directories have more authority than others.
As you’ll have noticed, strategic link building isn’t a walk in the park. It takes creative thinking and a great deal of patience.
Technical signals
With SEO, your website’s technical set-up is as important as the page content.
If there are technical problems, Google finds it difficult to scan and rank the site. For your human visitor, technical problems lead to a rubbish user experience and they’ll leave the website
The most common technical problems are these:
- Page loading speed — According to research by Portent, conversion rates on sites which load in 1 second are 3 times higher than sites which load in 5 seconds.
- Broken linkss— also known as `404 page not found’. They prevent the robots from indexing your content.
- Complicated URLs — The simpler, the better. Google doesn’t like reading long strings of text in a URL.
- Duplicate content — It confuses the robots. At best, none of the content will be displayed. At worst, your entire website will be penalised.
And that’s the end of the whistlestop tour of SEO.
We haven’t covered everything. At the last count, there were more than 200 ranking signals and we didn’t have enough space to list all of them. Besides, you’d probably lose the will to live.
If you’d like more info (in plain English), call Neil and Sonya on 01489 590092. If you prefer to write, just hit the big button.
