What Is SEO
There has been so much written and said about SEO or Search Engine Optimisation over the years and yet, still very few people actually truly understand what it is, including a few newbie digital marketers.
What is SEO?
Perhaps it’s because of terminology used, or gobbly gook terms, words and phrases used such as Alt Attributes, Meta Tags, Anchor Text, Backlinks, DA Scores, Googlebot, Indexing, Deep Links, Snippets, H1’s, and more that most people don’t know what SEO actually is, and how it could help their website and business, brand, or company..
Here’s my attempt to uncomplicate and define SEO –
SEO can best be described as finding traffic-driving keywords that are aligned to what a business offers, and then utilising content, internal and external links, navigation, and design elements to help search engines find content, and rank your website higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Or simplified even further:
SEO is about matching up what consumers are searching for with relevant information on web pages, while using a range of other measures and activities to get higher up and found on Google results pages.
Make Sense?
WHY Your Business Website Needs SEO
And so it’s pretty self explanatory wouldn’t you agree as to why any business website needs SEO. Indeed, in 2024 you simply cannot afford to miss out on the opportunity particularly while most of your competitors are still asleep at the wheel.
However, for the sake of clarity and not missing anything, Iv’e listed out a few reasons that show Why you need to start SEO on your website, these include:
- FIND NEW CUSTOMERS AND REVENUE: To get your brand, business, services, products offered, directly in-front of people that are actively searching for these.
- GAIN INSTANT TRUST: Take advantage of Google’s endorsement of your brand through the high placement on the results page, ensuring people will trust your brand and reach out, contact you, call, book, leave their details, or purchase something.
- SELL TO A HOT AUDIENCE: To capitalise on matching a person’s need of “finding a solution to their problem” via your products or services at the best time when they are HOT, when they are seeking them out. (as opposed to broad “get their attention” marketing)
- LONG LASTING RESULTS: Creating SEO assets off site, and improvements, new information on your web pages are long-lasting, they will continue to provide traffic or prospects to your business over and over again.
- DON’T LOSE OUT TO COMPETITORS: There are sales, enquiries, bookings, signups, available that you can’t afford to lose to your competitors.
- LOCK DOWN DOMINANCE: Ranking high on SERPs takes time however the longer you dominate the harder it is for a competitor to push you down the list.
As I always say, it’s only effective while mainstream (or everybody else) aren’t doing it otherwise there is no edge. SEO is one of those activities that does take longer than other forms of advertising to bear results, however the good news is very few people know much about it, or how it should be set up and done, so this represents a real opportunity.
What are you waiting for?
Setting Up SEO On Your Website Pages
While I have tried to dummy down and simplify the definition of SEO, the fact of the matter is for SEO to be successful there are a number of things that must be considered and then done correctly. These include
- UNDERSTANDING OF YOUR BUSINESS: A thorough understanding of your business type, sector, services or products offered, objectives, and customers is absolutely essential.
- COMPETITOR ANALYSIS: Finding out how your best competitors are ranking and winning traffic and business is a great place to leverage from. Perhaps you will discover nobody in your area or sector is doing it well..
- RESEARCH & SELECT AVAILABLE TRAFFIC: Knowing how much traffic is available for keywords that are specifically related to what you offer is the bridge to get them to your pages. Selecting the best keywords is also important, mixing between broad and longtail for optimum results.
- AUDIT & ADJUST YOUR WEBSITE: An audit of your current website and pages will show what elements need tweaking, from content, information, code, page names and titles, internal links, the creation of new pages, and much more.
- CREATE A PLAN: Come up with a plan that takes all of the above into account including combining an off page strategy with backlinks from reputable aligned sites.
- IMPLEMENT, START, & MEASURE: Implement and execute the new plan, and then measure the results always to make sure it’s working as intended.
Why It’s Important To Measure SEO Results
Measuring marketing results is very important for a variety of reasons. According to a study by McKinsey & Company, an integrated analytics approach (measured) can increase the return on investment for marketing efforts by up to 20%.
While SEO is no doubt a slower burn and approach to get in front of target audiences, I can tell you that
- There are ways to accelerate results through keyword targeting
- The results or conversion to sales and revenue are always better (when set up is done correctly) due to suitability of traffic.
- Results are long lasting as opposed to advertising that STOPS when the money runs out or gets turned off.
However, SEO must still be measured with the goal being overtime the cost of new customer acquisition becoming lower due to an increase in traffic, leads, and conversions.
SEO results can be measured in a number of ways
I keep banging on about measurement of results and activities because I promise I have talked to people that had never received anything, no reports, no nothing for months and months on end.
This is not right for a number of reasons that include how do you know if something is working or not? how can you improve it?
Here are important elements that should be provided in a report in my opinion on a monthly basis.
- KEYWORD MOVEMENT: The targeted keywords should start to move up higher on the results pages, getting in front of more people the higher the move up. You should receive a report that shows this.
- TRAFFIC: Higher visitor numbers or ORGANIC TRAFFIC to the website is another example that shows SEO is working, landing pages in particular shows where the traffic is coming from.
- NEW ENQUIRIES, LEADS, SALES: The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase enquiries, leads, calls, bookings, sales revenue, or whatever the business objectives may be, and keep them coming in.
What Should You Look For In An SEO Agency
Firstly, can somebody do their own website SEO?
There are so many elements and skill sets needing to come together that most people would struggle to do their own SEO.
Moreover, SEO is simply not just setting up content on a website and then waiting to see what happens? I can assure nothing will happen. Instead, what is required is a range of activities on and off the website pages, from new content creation and optimisation, to improving the user experience and navigation, positioning of calls to actions, link building from reputable sites, guest blogging, bookmarking, press releasing, social media sharing, directory submissions, business listing, and much more.
That’s quite a list of activities, and to do all of these effectively requires skills and experience in Digital Marketing, Strategy, UX Design, Copyrighting, and Coding.
It would therefore be wise to find a digital agency with a team of experts that specialise in SEO.
How to know if an SEO Agency is Capable and Suitable
Success and Failure Leaves Clues:
You want to know if an SEO marketing agency is capable of assisting you, are suited, and experienced in your vertical business type.
You could ask some of the following questions that are self explanatory
- Do they have clients in a similar space to your business?
- To share with you some results of current clients (12 months to current) the proof is after all in the pudding.
- Do they have a team assembled across all needed skill sets.
- What is their approach? If their approach and setup is very light, where they spend no time researching competitors, keyword lists and traffic, or in analysing your website, this is bad and so you should move on.
- What do they charge, how many keywords will they work on monthly, 10 or 20 or more?
- What activities will they perform both on your website and then importantly off the pages (all of those activities I mentioned previously)
- Are they responsive to your calls, will they discuss results with you on a monthly basis?
In Summary:
Effective SEO requires a range of activities across your your web pages and then on other websites as for it to be successful. Unfortunately, there are people out there that claim to be experts, to have the secret sauce, a new faster way too do things that is guaranteed to get you results.
Iv’e been doing this for 26 years and I am here to tell you that there is no short cut way to cheat Google when it comes to SEO. Iv’e seen some people try their luck and then pay the ultimate price of being black listed completely off the platform.
What is required is research, planning, digital marketing experience, content and copyrighting skills, some design and coding experience, and finally hard work, with a consistent effort.
Roy Caccamo is the CEO and founder of Why Digital Agency
Guest Digital Marketing Lecturer at UTS Sydney Australia
26 years of Digital Marketing experience.
