SEO Explained: What's it all about?
If you need help to be found online and need website enquiries, a strong SEO strategy is essential for your business' online presence. But what is SEO? Whether you're new to it or refining existing strategies, this guide will provide the insights needed to understand how SEO can improve your website's rankings and attract quality traffic.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation, often referred to as SEO, is the strategic process of improving website visibility and attracting quality traffic through organic search results. Simply put, when potential customers and clients search online for products or services relevant to your business, you want your website to appear high in the search results.
To increase the likelihood of attracting quality traffic from search engines, SEO is required to optimise various aspects of your websites.
So, what are the different areas of SEO?
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO involves optimising your website's content and HTML source code to enhance your website's search visibility. This process ensures that search engines and users find the page relevant and valuable. Conducting on-page SEO required the following elements:
Content: Ensuring your website has relevant and helpful content will help your users find the information they need fast and potentially act. Search engines also favour helpful content and improve your chances of ranking higher in the search results, leading to increased quality traffic.
Keywords: Strategically placing primary and secondary keywords and search terms within the content, making your pages more relevant to search results.
Internal Links: Links to other relevant pages within your website to improve navigation and help distribute link equity. This enhances user experience and allows the search engines to crawl your website effectively.
Metadata: Optimised meta descriptions and title tags improve search engine visibility by providing clear and relevant information. This makes your pages more enticing to your target audience, which in turn contributes to improving your click-through rate.
Image Optimisation: Using descriptive file names and alt tags for images improves search engine indexing and accessibility. Optimising images also contributes to a better user experience and improves page loading.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is essential for laying a solid foundation for your website, making it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand your site, which ultimately leads to better rankings and more organic traffic.
Page Speed: Improving website load time to enhance user experience and search engine rankings will help to improve engagement time and increase search results.
Site Structure: Ensuring a logical, user-friendly structure enhances user experience. A clear structure helps search engines crawl and index your site more efficiently.
Sitemaps: Creating and Submitting XML sitemaps to search engines ensures all pages on your website are discovered and indexed.
Indexation: Make sure that search engines can index your pages. If your pages aren't indexed, they won't appear in the search results.
Structured Data: Implementing structured data on your websites helps search engines understand your content and enhance your search results, scoring a featured snippet at the top of the search page.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO involves activities outside your website to improve its search engine rankings. It focuses on building a website's authority and reputation through external factors such as:
Backlinks: Acquiring high-quality backlinks from reputable sites helps your site's authority and credibility.
Social media: Promoting content on social platforms to drive traffic and engagement increases your online presence. Having a thorough social media strategy in place indirectly influences your SEO by driving more traffic to your website.
Guest Blogging: Writing articles for other industry-relevant sites to gain exposure and backlinks. This not only supports your efforts to increase your website authority and search engine rankings but also allows you to get in front of new and relevant audiences.
How do search engines work?
To understand the basics of SEO, it's essential to know how search engines like Google and Bing operate. Once you publish your content, search engine crawlers begin to "crawl" your website, analysing your pages and storing them in a database called an index, a process known as indexing. After your site has been crawled, the algorithms analyse factors such as relevance, quality, and user experience to rank your pages. This determines where your content appears in search results, ultimately influencing your website's visibility and traffic.
Measuring your SEO efforts
Measuring the impact of your SEO efforts will allow you to acknowledge what works, what doesn't, and where improvement is required. Depending on your strategy, here are a few metrics and tools that can support gauging the success of your SEO strategy:
Keyword Rankings
Monitoring the position for your targeted keywords helps you gauge how well your website's content is performing in the search results.
You can use various tools to find this information, such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, and Google Search Console. Higher keyword rankings tend to increase visibility and traffic.
Organic Traffic
An increase in organic traffic implies that your SEO efforts are successfully driving more people to your website. To monitor the number of visitors to your website through organic search, you can use free tools such as Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Search Console.
If you've recently migrated to GA4 and are still getting to grips with the new version we created a guide to help you understand the difference between google analytics universal and GA4.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
A higher CTR indicates that your title tags and meta descriptions are relevant to users. To find the percentage of people who click through from search engines to your website, you can use webmaster tools such as Google Search Console and GA4 to provide you with these results.
Conversion Rate
High traffic is valuable, but conversions are what drive your revenue. Tracking conversion rates helps you measure the actual business impact of your SEO efforts. Having specific conversions tracking in Google Analytics will help you identify the percentage of visitors who complete a specific action, such as making a purchase or submitting a form on your website.
Page Speed
Faster page loading times improve user experience and can positively impact your search engine rankings. No user wants to wait a while for your pages to load. To find out how long it currently takes for your website to load, you can use tools such as PageSpeed Insights.
Backlink Profile
High-quality backlinks help improve your site's authority and can lead to better search rankings. Using tools such as SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs will allow you to run a backlink audit, presenting the quality and quantity of the backlinks pointing to your website. Having the ability to view this also gives you the opportunity to disavow any that are irrelevant or appear to be spam, as these can impact your website. It's important to note that Google significantly emphasises the quality of the backlink rather than the amount you have. If you have a high-quality backlink, Google will favour this over multiple low-quality backlinks.
Engagement Rate
High engagement rates indicate that visitors find your content valuable and relevant, leading to lower bounce rates and higher chances of conversions. Google Analytics provide this insight through average engagement time, engaged sessions per user and average engagement time per session.
Measuring the success of your SEO efforts consistently will allow you to make more informed, data-driven decisions to enhance your strategy. Understanding the basics of SEO is essential for any business looking to improve its online presence, attract organic traffic, and drive growth. It's important to note that SEO is an ongoing strategy that adapts over time to maintain and improve your results.
If you require any further information, our team of SEO experts is more than happy to discuss your current SEO strategy.
