SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

SEO is important for organically ranking your website and getting more traffic.

But traffic alone doesn’t mean more business as the content, value and offers you provide to move people closer to purchase are critical.

To be effective, SEO involves both technical and content activities.

The technical elements are more about your website set up, navigation, page titles, descriptions and the code that communicates to Google and other search engines about what your site is about and what it provides to visitors.

The other aspect is about providing relevant, high quality, unique, shareable content and this should always be your focus.

It’s nice to know that after years of competitive behaviour on the internet and some spurious activities, what Google is rewarding is client value.

That is, well written, original, beneficial, applicable content.

6

This type of content will help you build a strong brand profile and help you optimise your sales funnel.

While great content is now favoured, in some markets the term ‘keyword stuffing’, among other practices, is still evident and getting sites ranked.

What else is important? Things called backlinks (the sites you link to and the external ones that link to your site), keywords (those terms people type into Google, Bing and Yahoo to find the things they’re looking for) and citations, where your business name and contact details appear on the web.

SEO, like marketing more broadly, is a long game, a marathon, not a sprint.

It’s important you have the initial foundations right and then keep working on it over time – adding new content that will be valuable to your customers and prospects and continuing to work on backlinks too.

Reviews and social media interactions are also important and need to be incorporated into the mix of ingredients you need to rank well in Google.

Local SEO is also now important and is also its own term, as distinct from general SEO.
There’s a new term springing up all the time in the online world and it’s more than a full-time job trying to keep up so no wonder business owners are finding it tough, and often confusing.

A Google My Business page is a separate component to your website that is important if you want rank locally, it’s what known as the Map Pack (image right).

Google isn’t the only place people are searching either so a Bing Places for Business page can be set up too.