Spotlight On Digital Marketing - SEO

Through a series of articles in the coming weeks, I plan to lift the lid on what digital marketing is, explain some of the jargon, and demonstrate the importance of working on each aspect. Whilst we offer each of the services I will go on to explain, if you have the expertise and time in house, most of these can be carried out by someone dedicated to the task.

First on the agenda, is Organic On Site SEO. Breaking those terms down one by one is a good start. 

 * Organic can be defined as unpaid optimisation– i.e. the construct of the page, the images and the code behind each page are set up in a way that Google can read and prioritise according to its algorithms.

 * On-Site refers to work on the page and website itself rather than concentrating on external links into the site.

 * SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is the process in which a website is enhanced to appear as high as possible on Google and other search engines when specific words and terms are keyed in by users, relevant to each page.

Google produces pages according to authority rankings. What this means is that it takes the term that people have searched for, and looks for the most relevant and credible pages against that search term, and publishes them in order of most to least 'authoritative' or relevant.

Organic SEO is often misunderstood, and I’ll admit when I first started at Big Red Digital, I held a lot of the misconceptions around SEO. I thought it would be helpful to break down its key features, and also to manage expectations from the results you can get.

To ensure you rank highly on Google, there are many things that you can do to your website. There are too many to fully describe, and quite a lot are technical, but the main areas that you can address are outlined below.

Do Your Research! 

Don’t guess what terms people use to search for your product or service– use tools such as Google Search Console, and/or a Google Partner to help you research the specific ‘keywords’ that people actually use. Take these keywords and terms as the basis of the content for your page, and build any additional content around these to help boost your rankings. But don't be tempted to shoe-horn them in. Google understands synonyms and relative search terms, so make sure your content is naturally written, and engaging. 

Keep Up To Date

Google constantly updates its algorithms and adds new criteria to boost authority. Keep up to date with the guidelines and adapt your approach accordingly. 

HTML

HTML is the code that sits behind the website, and the way in which Google can read quickly what’s on your page. You can add headings, alt tags and meta data behind your content to help Google index it accurately. This can be done in the set up of each page, including any blog articles you write.

Content

Add relevant and engaging content onto your pages. Update these pages regularly and post often on a blog or a news section. This allows Google more information to process, or ‘index’, giving you more chance of matching the terms people are entering and returning higher in the results.

Don’t just limit this to text – add images, embed video, create documents that can be downloaded. All of these can help boost your organic search rankings. 

Over the lifetime of a website, organic traffic is ultimately the best traffic you can get onto your site – it costs less to attract, it generally stays on your site longer, and generally converts at a much higher conversion rate that any other source of traffic. Therefore as a long term strategy for a new website or an existing one that isn’t fully optimised, this is usually the first area of priority, and why I’ve chosen to address this element of digital marketing first. Over time, you will achieve the best ROI from organic SEO work.

One thing to note is that it will not necessarily produce instant results. A website should be a living element to a business, and as it grows, over time the work you have done will increase the authority it will have on Google. If you are looking for more instant results, you can look at pairing this work with a paid campaign or social media advertising, which I’ll cover in the next few weeks. 

If you feel that the above is too technical, or you simply don't have time to concentrate on SEO whilst running your business, contact me to discuss how we can support you.