SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the art of increasing web traffic by appearing as high as possible on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and is often referred to as the “natural”, “organic” or “earned” section of search engines, on sites such as Google.
Let’s face it…all businesses want more website traffic. Simply put; the more people you have visiting your website, the higher your chances of generating leads to your product or service. But getting to the top of page one on google requires dedication and hard work.
Unlike paid advertising on search engines, SEO does not strictly carry a fee. But if you don’t have the internal expertise to understand the ‘dark art’ of website optimisation, you’ll certainly need some support in building an SEO Strategy.
As part of the SEO Strategy, it’s important to understand the needs of your target audience and create personas. You’ll then need to conduct keyword research and consider the search terms that your competitors are targeting - to identify the gaps and opportunities. You’ll want to focus on both ‘informational’ keywords and ‘transactional’ keywords.
Once you have your list of keywords, you can start to implement your ‘on-page’ SEO using meta titles, descriptions, tags and other ‘white hat’ methods that will improve your ranking. It’s important to avoid ‘black hat’ methods, such as ‘keyword stuffing’.
‘Off-page’ SEO is also essential for attracting website traffic and is largely affected by the incoming links to your website. Your Content Marketing Strategy will help with ‘link building’.
Firstly, you’ll need to make sure that all website stakeholders understand the strategy and its desired effect. This includes all internal personnel as well as writers and editors representing the business externally, particularly those who are creating content on your behalf. You’ll also need to see how the strategy works using your current web CMS (content management system) to maximise the opportunities and work around the limitations.
The SEO Strategy and keyword research will continually evolve with insights and learnings. SEO is considered more of an art than a science, and will need to be tested over and over again. No one knows the exact algorithms that Google employs to rank websites, so it’s very often a guessing game. However, if something isn’t working, then keep testing to quickly find something else that will.
We work with businesses to create winning SEO strategies that result in increased web traffic and higher conversion rates. We create personnas, carry out keyword research and make sure that businesses can start implementing changes, and seeing results, straight away.
