What is SEO (search engine optimization)

There are millions of websites in existence and, as many will in all probability be for similar businesses to yours, it can be very hard to get noticed on the internet.

No matter how brilliant your site, it might only get a handful of visitors. However, one of the best and most reliable ways of ensuring you get the best level of traffic possible is by achieving a high ‘natural ranking’ in the results lists of search engines.

Paid for or ‘natural’ – which is better?

Of course, you could spend potentially large sums of money appearing in the paid for adverts you see on Google and other popular search engines.

But what we are talking about here are the unpaid for search results, known as ‘natural’ or ‘organic’, which are far more powerful for your business as people often distrust adverts and far less so natural results.

SEO techniques

If you have a new website, or existing website, it may have great information offering great services and products, and you may have submitted it to search engines like Google and Yahoo, but your site might be appearing way down in the results pages.

This is where search engine optimisation (SEO) comes in to its own. You have to show the search engines that your site deserves to appear close to, or indeed at the very top, of results when people are searching for the type of things your business offers.

There are a great number of SEO techniques used to do just that:

• Content: continuously changing your site’s content is important; making sure there are few broken or bad links, using smaller sized images which aren’t going to slow down the user experience, creating new content which is highly relevant to the main elements of what your business does, all help for example.
• Keywords: keywords are the words people type into search engines when they’re looking for something. Using certain keywords relevant to your business within content and background website page descriptions and information, and how you position these keywords, is vital. Search engines use ‘spiders’ to trawl sites and these spiders help index and rate pages depending on how keywords match up with those that users have input into the search engine in the first place.
• Links to your site: search engines also use link analyses as another way of rating a site, and therefore where it appears in results pages. So, returning to the Essex PVC window company example, if the search engine spiders note that lots of other sites related to PVC windows are linking to your site, such as review sites or listings sites, you should rank higher. The quality of the site linking to you is important; the higher it is ranked, the greater weight given to the link back to your site.

Why SEO is hugely cost-effective

When you think how much a company can spend on marketing its services and goods, from radio advertising to a full online campaign including video on YouTube and interactive adverts placed on highly trafficked sites, it becomes clear just how cost-effective SEO can be.

At a much lower cost, you can reach the same number, if not many more people, by putting in place the building blocks which could lead to your site being ranked number one in Google search when people look for the sorts of things your business offers (or at least much higher than it currently is!).

Someone might be looking for a local taxi firm, a pizza restaurant, a removals company or solicitors; whatever it is, they’ll nearly always start that search by looking online.

This could be described as ‘pull’ marketing, in which the customer comes to you because they have already made their mind up that they need your services and have made the first move.

‘Push’ marketing, such as telesales for example, is far less powerful, as anyone who’s ever had a call from someone offering to ‘clean up your pc’ will know! Likewise an advert placed in a local or national magazine or newspaper can be pointless if it’s badly placed or fails to hit the right tone.

SEO: powerful marketing at a low price

As a small business ourselves, we are always looking at the cost of the various marketing strategies we use and without doubt SEO is the cheapest and most cost effective way of marketing any business.

The largest negative for SEO is that when you start your campaign it will take several months to get a much better ranking but away from this small negative we believe that it is the best way of marketing any business online.

If you are interested in finding out more about SEO and how it could benefit your business please get in touch with us and one of our team will be happy to help.