SEO can be a highly technical area of digital marketing, with plenty of specialist jargon that can make the whole thing feel a bit confusing! To help you get started on understanding the wide world of SEO, we’re going to run through SEO in simple terms including the types of SEO, the skills required to optimise a website, and why it is a crucial long term strategy key to the long term success of your business.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic directed to your website from search engines by improving rankings and visibility. SEO targets unpaid traffic, known as organic traffic; rather than direct traffic, paid social or referral traffic.
SEO is a medium to long-term strategy and is comprised of many different elements that all work toward delivering a positive user experience. This is achieved through an ongoing commitment to improve your website for your audience and search engines.
There are 3 main types of SEO that contribute to a well-rounded SEO strategy, and there are no shortcuts. In order to see the best results from your SEO work, time should be equally distributed across the following 3 areas:
As you might be able to guess, this refers to optimising on-page content across your website.
Before you begin on-page SEO, you should conduct thorough keyword research. This is the technique of inputting seed keywords into a tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner, or other keyword research tools, to generate a list of search terms that you may want to target. Once you have a list of keywords you wish to target, you can begin altering and adding new content in order to improve your rankings for them.
The first form of on-page SEO is content creation. This involves creating high quality content around a relevant topic to target specific keywords. Common forms of content creation include blogs, case studies and FAQ’s. They are particularly good for targeting appearances in Google’s rich results or for improving rankings for long-tail keywords.
Another is keyword optimisation. This involves making changes to existing elements and sections of your website to better suit your target keywords. This may include the meta description, meta title, header tags, anchor text or other existing page copy.
Helps improve trust, influence and connections with other relevant websites in your industry, primarily by link building strengthening your backlink profile.
Getting high-authority and relevant links to your site passes link and trust value. This makes your website look more trustworthy in the eyes of Google and will help you to achieve better rankings.
A link building strategy involves finding a range of opportunities including guest blogs, directories, sponsorships and broken links.
As well as looking for new opportunities, referring domains also need to be constantly monitored to make sure no low-quality websites are linking to you.
Finally, Technical SEO focuses on improving all non-content elements of your site.
Technical SEO specialists can use auditing tools such as Screaming Frog to find and fix errors with broken links, images, site speed, and structured data. This improves the site’s readability which makes it easier to crawl and better for users to navigate.
Since July 2021’s Core Web Vitals update, site speed, mobile-friendliness and user experience have become an increasingly important ranking factor. These elements can be monitored in Google Search Console and require the collaboration of technical SEO specialists and web developers to make sure no issues are encountered.
With organic search responsible for 53% of all site traffic according to Search Engine Land, neglecting it can easily lead to your business being left behind. The average SERP (Search Engine Results Page) is much more competitive than it was 10-15 years ago, marketers are constantly trying to be the first to react to the latest trends.
In order to create a strong SEO strategy, you require the collaboration of different marketers, designers and developers within your business.
Alternatively, SEO services can be outsourced to a specialist SEO team that is versatile and adaptable to help implement an SEO plan across multiple channels. Some of the key skill sets you need are:
We measure the success of an SEO campaign by monitoring the number of website visitors. In particular, those visiting the site through organic search (unpaid search results).
To understand the quality of these visitors to your website, we use user metrics such as; the number of pages per session, the average session duration and bounce rate, to understand how users engage with the content hosted on your website.
We track on-site user interactions you deem of value, known as goals and events. These are commonly in the form of contact form submissions, telephone and email clicks, sign-ups, etc. We’re able to measure the number of goal completions and the goal conversion rate to understand how the campaign is performing.
Understanding the quality of the leads you receive requires feedback from your Internal Communications team. We will often request feedback on the quality of the leads and review this in conjunction with the keywords your website ranks for in SERPs.
We monitor keywords that are relevant to your industry and organisation. We conducted in-depth keyword research and competitor keyword research at the start of our SEO campaign, to gain visibility and insights into the keywords users search for when acquiring your services. There is a positive correlation between how well keywords rank in search (i.e. in the top 10 search results), to the number of website visitors and goal completions.
Digital marketing agencies offer a wide range of SEO services to cover your specific needs. Here at Blue Frontier, we offer an array of digital marketing services covering all aspects of SEO, content writing and design:
Implementing a strong SEO strategy is vital to growing your business and reaching new audiences. And even if you reach the top, you should never stop optimising your website or else you risk being left behind by trend or algorithm changes.
For this reason, investing in SEO skills, be it in-house or via an agency, is never a bad idea. At Blue Frontier, we combine all of the above services into one big SEO package. If you wish to further discuss the importance of SEO, or if you want to know what we can do to increase organic traffic for your business, reach out to our friendly Digital Marketing Team today for a chat!
