What is SEO?
“Search engine optimisation” is the process of getting traffic from free organic editorial or natural listings on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing have such results and these webpages and their content and videos and local listings are shown and rang and are based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. There is the keyword “Relevant”
Google, which is the most popular search engine complete over 95% of the world’s Internet searches. Google use algorithms to determine where your page will rank based on the architecture vacating your social media ranking your trust in the community your authority in the community how much personalisation and you Web content.
Sounds easy – but it isn’t.
The factors control where your website ranks are many. It starts with quality content. When you are selling a product do you go beyond being only a brochure the same information can be found on hundreds of other sites?
Do you provide a reason for people to spend more than a few seconds reading your pages?
Offering something of substance to visitors anything unique anything different anything useful offers real value that they may not find elsewhere will be seen as relevant to search engine robots.
Keywords
One of the most important factors that we spend a lot of time on is keyword research. It might be obvious for instance that the most searched term is “storage in XYZ” in reality it could be something completely different: maybe furniture storage in XYZ might be a better search term.
Don’t assume that your own search criteria is the only search criteria by which to determine if your website is working. Often what is the obvious search term is hardly search by real customers – our job is to find out what the average customer is searching for and optimise your site for those keywords.
A good example is you might search for “law firm” I might search for “lawyer” both work, but one gets 80% more searches on the other. It is a science!
Websites are organic
Like the grass at the front of your house, websites die very fast if we don’t nurture them, update them and optimise them. They are not like Yellow Pages ads of the past, were could set and forget them.
Content is king!
Often we will ask clients to help us out with content especially news.
About 1% of the time we get an e-mail back that says, “No problems”
About 75% of the time we get an e-mail back that says, “We don’t have any news we don’t have anything to write about!”
About 20% of the time the e-mail says “our product is too boring no one wants to hear about my product”.
Well if your product is too boring that what people buy it? We understand that can be tough to come up with words especially when you spend all your time working in your business.
Funny things happen in your business sometimes: these can be a source of news stories. What about the good news in our industry, after all some businesses were not even affected by the GFC is that not a news story?
Link a news story about your business to a contemporary story on the news. Search engines like that as current news is the most relevant news.
Review the content of each one of your pages regularly and asked us to update it with new and fresh information. Whilst not a lot may change, you can often say the same thing a different way and again the search engines see change as relevant.
Just about everybody businesses are boring unless you are an atomic bomb salesman. We have industry conferences every year and will stand around for three or four days talking about our boring businesses.
Not a lot of your customers are interested in business but they are interested in products and what they can do for them and how they can use them and how they can save money by buying them.
That is the story to tell.
